Liberty for Whom?

The soldiers came and the soldiers went, and through it all we worked. We hauled water and split wood and cleaned hearths and cooked food, for the Hessians first and then for the Americans, and the work was the same regardless of which army claimed the town.

When the Hessians arrived in December, they took over the houses and they took what they pleased. They did not ask. They pointed at what they wanted — a ham, a blanket, a chair for firewood — and we brought it. The officers were quartered in the fine houses along King Street, and their servants — men in uniforms who were as far from their homes as I was from any place I might call my own — cooked their meals and tended their horses. We were invisible to them, or nearly so. A Black woman carrying a basket of laundry through a town full of foreign soldiers attracted no notice. We moved through the occupation like shadows.

I heard the battle from the kitchen. The sound of cannons shook the walls and rattled the pots hanging from the ceiling beams. The firing came from every direction, and there was nowhere to go that was safe. I pressed myself against the wall of the kitchen and waited. The fighting moved through the streets like a storm, and then it was over.

When the shooting stopped, the American soldiers filled the town. They were ragged and hungry, many of them barefoot despite the snow. They called out to each other in triumph, whooping and laughing with the relief of men who had expected to die and had not. They were fighting for liberty. I heard the word on their lips, in their songs, in the speeches their officers made. Liberty. Freedom. The rights of man.

I wondered whose liberty they meant. I was not free. I was not consulted about this war, not asked to choose sides, not promised anything by either army. The men who wrote the Declaration of Independence owned people like me. The general who led the attack on Trenton owned people like me. The soldiers who celebrated their victory in the streets of Trenton would go home to towns where people like me were bought and sold.

I do not say this to diminish what they did. The Battle of Trenton mattered. The survival of the army mattered. The cause of independence mattered, even if its promise was not kept for everyone. But the story of Trenton is incomplete without the people who were there but are not remembered — the enslaved women and men who cooked the food, carried the water, cleaned the blood from the floors, and watched the soldiers celebrate a freedom that did not include them.

New Jersey would not begin to end slavery until 1804, and even then the process was gradual and grudging. The last enslaved people in the state were not freed until 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment made the question moot. The Revolution's promise of liberty took nearly a century to reach the people who needed it most.

I was in Trenton when the battle was fought. I was there when the Hessians surrendered and when the Americans cheered. I was there, and I was not free. That is also part of this story.