What You Might Have Missed: The Story of the Black Loyalists, Parts I–III
— and What Comes Next
Imaged: Photo by American Recolutionary era Black Soldier Re-enactor, Photographer Ken Bohrer at American Revolution Photos.
Freedom was never given. It was named, negotiated, revoked, resisted—and rewritten in the margins.
Over the past three weeks, I’ve traced the arc of the Black Loyalists: men and women who crossed lines—military, political, moral—in pursuit of something this world had no stable word for. In Part I, they enter the record: fugitives turned soldiers, their names inked into the Book of Negroes, a document born of war and of necessity. Not quite freedom, but proof of survival.
In Part II, they move through the chaos of New York in 1783, where victory for one side meant betrayal for the other. Slaveholders arrived with claims. The British hesitated. The Americans demanded. And Guy Carleton, for once, refused. The ledger was upheld. The ships departed.
In Part III, they arrive—on the rocky edges of Nova Scotia, in Shelburne, in Birchtown. What they find is not settlement, but containment. Land in name only. Timber withheld. Labor conscripted. Riots erupt. Courts fail them. The loyalists who had fought for empire are repaid with proximity, not inclusion.
“With no nails, few tools, and promises still drifting like fog over the harbor, the Black settlers built what they could: dugouts covered with timber scraps, huts of wattle and daub, cone-shaped shelters tied with birch bark. Their knowledge of building came not from books or blueprints but from plantation quarters and military trenching—adapted now, poorly, to northern latitudes they had never known.
And yet they endured. They built communities, not because they were welcomed, but because they refused to vanish. And then, a decade later, they began to leave again.
Next week’s final chapter follows that second exodus.
The Revolution of Departure:
When no flag would protect them, they carried their own.
It is the story of Thomas Peters and John Clarkson. Of petitions carried across oceans. Of betrayal not once, but repeatedly—by Americans, by Loyalists, by empire. It is the story of the founding of Freetown, not as a utopia, but as an act of refusal. They left not in retreat, but in defiance—toward Sierra Leone, and toward a freedom they would no longer ask for, only build.
Catch up on:
→Part I: A Record Written in Ink and Sacrifice
→ Part II: No Certainty But The Sea
→ Coming Thursday: The Revolution of Departure
If you’ve already read them, read them again. These are not monuments. They are evidence. The Black Loyalists had fought for one revolution, only to begin another—not one that promised liberty, but one that demanded it. Their story is a lesson written in struggle: that inequality is not an accident, and freedom is not a gift.
As always, thanks so much for subscribing and supporting this newsletter. It is appreciated.
—D. Elisabeth Glassco
Selected Sources on the Black Soldier in the American Revolution
General Histories of Black Participation in the Revolution
Foner, Philip. Blacks in the American Revolution. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976.
Kaplan, Sidney, and Emma Nogrady Kaplan. The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989.
Nash, Gary B. The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Taylor, Alan. The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013.
Fischer, David Hackett. African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022. Chapter 5, before 1860.
Black Patriots and Continental Army Participation
Hartgrove, W. B. “The Negro Soldier in the American Revolution.” Journal of Negro History 1, no. 2 (1916): 110–131.
Jackson, Luther P. “Virginia Negro Soldiers and Seamen in the American Revolution.” Journal of Negro History 27, no. 3 (1942): 247–287.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.2307/2715325
Lanning, Michael. African Americans in the Revolutionary War. New York: Kensington Publishing, 2000.
Van Buskirk, Judith L. Standing in Their Own Light: African American Patriots in the American Revolution. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017.
Lanning, Michael Lee. “African Americans and the American Revolution.” In The Routledge Handbook of the History of Race and the American Military, 45–54. New York: Routledge, 2016.
Black Loyalists and Exile
Livermore, George. An Historical Research Respecting the Opinions of the Founders of the Republic on Negroes as Slaves, as Citizens, and as Soldiers. Boston: Privately published, 1862.
https://www.loc.gov/item/23016220/
Audio:
LibriVox. An Historical Research Respecting the Opinions of the Founders of the Republic. Public domain audiobook.
Gilbert, Alan. Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Hodges, Graham Russell Gao, and Alan Edward Brown, eds. The Book of Negroes: African Americans in Exile After the American Revolution. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021.
Slavery, Race, and the Revolutionary Order
MacLeod, Duncan J. Slavery, Race and the American Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974.
Quarles, Benjamin. The Negro in the American Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961.
Schama, Simon. Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution. New York: Random House, 2006.
Parkinson, Robert G. The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
Regional and Comparative Studies
Piecuch, Jim. Three Peoples, One King: Loyalists, Indians, and Slaves in the Revolutionary South, 1775–1782. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008.
Tise, Larry E., and Jeffrey J. Crow. The Southern Experience in the American Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
Pargas, Damian Alan, ed. Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018.
Resistance and Black Political Thought
Frey, Sylvia R. Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.