Loyalist (American Revolution)

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Article

Blucke, Stephen  

Graham Russell Hodges

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

Born free in Barbados, Stephen Blucke moved to New York City sometime before 1770. There Blucke married Margaret Coventry, who was his elder by nine years. She claimed to have purchased her own freedom in 1769, from Mrs. Coventry's family in New York City, as well as that of a six-year-old girl, Isabel Gibbons, who was probably her daughter. Blucke joined the Church of England, which gave him some prominence in the black community of New York City and in rural New Jersey. He chose to remain loyal to the English cause at the outbreak of the American Revolution and gained a patron in Stephen Skinner, a wealthy Loyalist. Stephen Blucke became a commander of the Black Pioneers, an informal black military organization that provided logistical support to the British army.

On 31 July 1783 Stephen Blucke and his family left New York City on HMS Peggy ...

Article

Colonel Tye  

Graham Russell Hodges

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

The son of unknown parents, Titus Corlies was born on the farm of John Corlies, a Quaker farmer and slave owner in Shrewsbury, New Jersey. John Corlies resisted the determination of Quakers to free members' slaves. When elders of the Shrewsbury Meeting visited Corlies at his farm in 1775, he angrily refused to manumit his slaves. Titus Corlies, then about twenty years old, was listening carefully.

After Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, made his famous proclamation offering freedom to enslaved blacks who joined the British forces, Titus fled. John Corlies described the self-emancipated fugitive as “not very black near 6 feet high, had on a grey homespun coat, brown breeches, blue and white stockings”; he also noted that Titus took along a quantity of clothes. The fugitive slave perhaps joined Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment when it arrived at Staten Island, New York, in December 1776 Little ...

Article

King, Boston  

Jeremy Rich

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

antislavery activist and a pioneering African American settler in Sierra Leone, was born around 1760 to a slave family on a plantation located not far from Charleston, then the capital of the British colony of South Carolina. His father was born in Africa.

He worked as child as a domestic servant but then at the age of nine was reassigned to prepare cattle hide At the age of twelve King joined the growing evangelical fervor of the First Great Awakening movement promoting a personal and emotional tie to Jesus Christ and became a fervent Protestant Christian King s life as a young man was full of suffering as he worked as an artisan in Charleston He was assigned to watch over his master s tools and was regularly beaten by his owner During the American Revolution King s master chose to move King to an inland location out of fear ...

Article

King, Boston  

Joanna Brooks

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

Born into slavery near Charleston, South Carolina, Boston King followed his parents into labor on the plantation. His father was a native-born African, kidnapped and sold into slavery as a child; his mother was a healer who learned herbal medicine from local American Indians. At the age of sixteen, King was bound as an apprentice to a carpenter, who subjected him to cruel beatings. King fled his master when the British captured the city of Charleston during the American Revolutionary War, and he won his freedom by taking refuge behind British lines.

Many thousands of enslaved African Americans like Boston King gained freedom by joining the Loyalist forces during the Revolutionary War. British colonial and military officials promised freedom to black defectors twice during the war—with the Dunmore Proclamation of November 1775 and the Philipsburg Proclamation of General Henry Clinton in June 1779 in the hope of encouraging ...

Article

Peters, Thomas  

Jeremy Rich

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

leader of African-American settlement in Sierra Leone, was born sometime around 1738. Some sources contend Peters was born in a Yoruba-speaking community in what later became Nigeria, but the lack of documentation makes identifying his origins extremely difficult. These same accounts contended he came from a wealthy family, but that he was captured by rivals and sold to Europeans. It is clear that he was brought to Louisiana by French slave traders around 1760 aboard the ship Henri IV. Since French ships purchased slaves from Senegal to Congo and Madagascar, his background is unknown. Peters managed repeatedly to escape different slave masters in the 1760s and early 1770s Later accounts claimed Peters was branded whipped and tortured for his rebelliousness At some point a wealthy slave owner named William Campbell purchased Peters and put his new acquisition to work at a mill in Wilmington North Carolina ...

Article

Washington, Harry  

William J. Harris

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

Revolutionary-era runaway slave, British Loyalist, and early settler in Sierra Leone, is believed to have been born in the Senegambia region of Africa. George Washington, then a colonel in the army of the British Empire, purchased Harry in 1763, along with Nan (believed to have been his wife) and four other slaves as a part of Washington's Great Dismal Swamp plan. According to this plan, Washington and five other planters would each provide five slaves to form a workforce to drain sixty square miles of the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and establish a rice plantation. By 1766 Washington had moved both Harry and Nan to work on his Mount Vernon Plantation in Virginia.

In 1771 Washington sent Harry to work on the construction of a mill approximately three miles from the Mansion House Clearly not content with his lot as a slave Harry made his first ...