The Regiment That Fought for Someone Else's Freedom

The 1st Rhode Island Regiment was formed out of desperation. By early 1778, Rhode Island could not fill its Continental Army quota with white volunteers. The state legislature voted to allow enslaved men to enlist, promising them freedom in exchange for military service. Their owners would be compensated by the state. It was a transaction as much as an emancipation — but the men who signed up were not abstractions. They were people choosing the uncertainty of combat over the certainty of bondage.

Colonel Christopher Greene commanded the regiment. At the Battle of Rhode Island on August 29, 1778, his men held the right flank of the American line near Portsmouth. Hessian troops — professional German soldiers fighting under British contract — launched repeated assaults against the position. The 1st Rhode Island held. Contemporary accounts describe the fighting as fierce and the regiment's discipline as exceptional.

The irony was inescapable and largely uncommented upon at the time. Men who were legally property were fighting to secure the independence of a nation founded on the principle that all men are created equal. The contradiction did not trouble most white Americans in 1778. It troubled the men in the regiment, who understood exactly what they were doing and what they were owed.

The regiment served through the rest of the war. Colonel Greene was killed in a Loyalist ambush in 1781. Many of the Black soldiers who survived the war found that the freedom they had been promised was unevenly honored. Some were recognized; others were forgotten. The regiment's story is not a simple tale of heroism rewarded. It is a story about who gets to fight for liberty and whether the nation will remember what they did.