Peter Salem and the Times that Tried Men's Souls

Before the battles, before the musket fire and the names etched into stone, before the word “hero” would be invoked by townspeople who had long forgotten him, Peter Salem belonged to another man.

Re-enactor. Photo by Kenneth Bohrer at American Revolution Photos

He had been born into a world in which ownership—ownership of men—was not aberration but order, and he had been owned, first by Jeremiah Belknap of Framingham, then sold to Lawson Buckminster. That was the nature of power in colonial Massachusetts—quiet, unquestioned, written into property law, into church rolls, into the habits of men who called themselves free but kept others in bondage. Peter Salem’s world was made of these realities. And if there was a promise in the air—liberty, independence—it was not a promise made to him.

And yet.

In the spring of 1775, something began to shift. Buckminster freed him. Not out of principle, but because the war—just beginning then, just gathering speed in whispers and gunpowder—required bodies. The colonies needed men who could carry a musket, men who could march, men who could die. And Peter Salem, who had once belonged to another, who had walked the world with no legal identity, became—by necessity, not invitation—a soldier.

Black American soldiers were not segregated from white soldiers. This would not happen again until the Korean War, around 175 years later. Photo by Ken Bohrer at American Revolution Photos.

He was at Lexington and Concord. He was there at the origin point, when the Revolution, still a rumor, became a fact. He fought in the skirmishes that would ignite an empire.

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library. "Brave colored artilleryman" New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed April 25, 2025. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-a122-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

But it was at Breed’s Hill—what history would come to call Bunker Hill—that Peter Salem would make himself known.

June 17, 1775. The American positions atop the hill were crude—trenches scraped into the dirt, a redoubt made of brush and earth. They were outgunned. They were outmanned. The British came in columns, rows of red and brass, the very image of imperial order. Among them rode Major John Pitcairn—an officer of standing, a man of reputation, who had fired the opening shots of the war at Lexington and come now, to Charlestown, to crush what he called rebellion.

And in that moment—amid the smoke, the panic, the shouting—Peter Salem saw him.

Major Pitcairn shouted, “The day is ours!” and the hill erupted again in fire. But in the brief second before the line broke, Peter Salem raised his musket, took careful aim, and pulled the trigger.

Pitcairn fell.

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library. "Peter Salem shoots Major Pitcairn at Bunker Hill" New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed April 25, 2025. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-a121-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

And in that act—in that single shot—something shifted. The myth of the war as a white man’s revolution began to crack. Because Peter Salem had not just fought. He had killed one of the British Empire’s most decorated officers in the heart of one of its most symbolic battles. And if that act was, at first, downplayed or erased—if Salem’s name appeared nowhere in the first reports, if his face was painted into the corner of John Trumbull’s canvas but left unnamed—that didn’t change what had happened.

Painted by John Trumbull in 1786, General Joseph Warren is depicted in the foreground. In the center-right midground, Major John Pitcairn is depicted dying in the arms of his son. Peter Salem, who is credited for mortally wounding Pitcairn, is in the right foreground of the frame. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Peter Salem had altered the battle. He had altered perception. He had forced a reckoning, however small, with the fact that the fight for American independence had Black hands on the trigger.

And he did not stop there.

Re-enactors. Photo by Ken Bohrer at American Revolution Photos

After Bunker Hill, Salem enlisted again, and again. He served in the 4th Continental Regiment, and later in the 6th Massachusetts. He was there at Saratoga—the turning point. He was there at Monmouth—one of the bloodiest confrontations of the war, fought under an unforgiving sun. He was there at Stony Point—storming British fortifications in the dark, under orders to use only bayonets, no musket fire, to take the position by stealth and force. He was in every major theater of the war’s northern campaign, not as symbol but as soldier.

And then the war ended.

Photo care of Minute Man Museum, Boston and Nick Johnson

And the system that had used him, needed him, depended on his strength and his silence—forgot him.

A rare document bearing Peter Salem’s mark, this promissory note from 1783 offers a glimpse into his life post-war. It underscores the challenges faced by Black veterans in the young republic.

There was no pension. No land. No plaque. He married, but the marriage didn’t last. He worked as a basket weaver. He lived in obscurity. And when he died, in 1816, he died in a poorhouse.

Buried in an unmarked grave.

Because in America, power not only commands—it remembers, selectively. And Peter Salem was a man whose service had been required, but whose recognition had not.

Only in 1882—sixty-six years after his death—did Framingham place a monument. Granite. Heavy. Impersonal. A gesture that said: yes, this happened.

Photograph of Peter Salem’s gravestone, Old Burying Ground, Framingham, Massachusetts. Photograph.

But it said so with the belatedness that characterizes so much of American remembrance.

Peter Salem’s life was not one of myth. It was one of grit, of marching, of heat and hunger and smoke and noise, of a musket held steady in the hands of a man who had once been considered property. And it is in that life—in the power he carved out of a world built to exclude him—that we see not just the Revolution, but the country it made, and the men it forgot.

Plaque at Old Burying Ground Cemetery, Framingham, MA.

Sources

Bailey, Sarah Loring. Historical Sketches of Andover, Massachusetts. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1880.

Barry, William. History of Framingham, Massachusetts. Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1847.

Clark, Jonas. The Fate of Blood-Thirsty Oppressors and God’s Tender Care of His Distressed People. A Sermon, Preached at Lexington, April 19, 1776.

Coburn, Frank. The Battle on Lexington Common, April 19, 1775. Lexington: Frank Coburn, 1921.

Davis, John. An Oration, Pronounced at Worcester, (Mass.) on the Fortieth Anniversary of American Independence. Worcester: William Manning, 1816.

Garrison, William Lloyd. The Loyalty and Devotion of Colored Americans in the Revolution and War of 1812. Boston: R. F. Wallcut, 1861.

Headley, J. T. The Chaplains and Clergy of the Revolution. New York: Charles Scribner, 1864.

Lanning, Michael. Defenders of Liberty: African Americans in the Revolutionary War. New York: Kensington Publishing, 2000.

Livermore, George. An Historical Research Respecting the Opinions of the Founders of the Republic on Negroes as Slaves, as Citizens, and as Soldiers. Boston: John Wilson and Son, 1862.

Loring, James Spear. The Hundred Boston Orators Appointed by the Municipal Authorities and Other Public Bodies from 1770 to 1852. Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1853.

Nell, William. The Colored Patriots of the Revolutionary War. Boston: Robert F. Wallcut, 1855.

Parkinson, Robert G. Thirteen Clocks: How Race United the Colonies and Made the Declaration of Independence. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021.

Phinney, Elias. History of the Battle at Lexington, On the Morning of the 19th April, 1775. Boston: Phelps and Farnham, 1825.

Quarles, Benjamin. The Negro in the American Revolution. Williamsburg. The University of North Carolina Press, 1961.

Stewart, Nikita. “Why Can’t We Teach This.” The New York Times, August 18, 2019.

Swett, Samuel. Historical and Topographical Sketch of Bunker Hill Battle. Boston: Samuel Avery, 1818.

Washburn, Emory. Historical Sketches of the Town of Leicester, Massachusetts. Boston: John Wilson and Son, 1860.

Weiss, John. The Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green, 1863.

Wilson, Joseph. Black Phalanx: A History of the Negro Soldiers of the United States. Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1890.

---