eived the attention of several writers. Yet not one of them has
made a scientific presentation of the facts which they have discovered.
These historians have failed to consider the bearing of the status of the
free Negro during the colonial period, the meaning of the Revolution to the
Negro, and what the service of the Negro soldiers first enlisted effected
in changing the attitude of the people toward the blacks throughout the
original thirteen colonies.

To a person who has lived in the nineteenth or twentieth century it would
seem incredible that Negroes, the majority of whom were then slaves, should
have been allowed to fight in the Continental Army. The layman here may
forget that during the eighteenth century slavery was a patriarchal
institution rather than the economic plantation system as it developed
after the multiplication of mechanical appliances, which brought about the
world-wide industrial revolution. During the eighteenth century a number of
slaves brought closely into contact with their masters were gradually
enlightened and later emancipated. Such freedmen, in the absence of any
laws to the contrary, exercised political rights,[1] among which was that
of bearing arms. Negroes served not only in the American Revolution, but in
every war of consequence during the colonial period. There were masters who
sent slaves to the front to do menial labor and to fight in the places of
their owners. Then there were slaves who, finding it easier to take
occasional chances with bullets than to bear the lash, ran away from their
masters and served as privateers or enlisted as freemen.[2] The newspapers
of the colonial period often mentioned these facts in their advertisements
of fugitive slaves. In 1760 a master had considerable difficulty with a
slave who escaped from New England into New Jersey, where he said he would
enlist in the provincial service.[3] Advertising for his mulatto servant,
who was brought up in Rhode Island, James Richardson of Stonington said
that the fugitive had served as a soldier the previous summer.[4] A few
free Negroes found their way into the colonial militia along with white
soldiers. This passed, of course, not without some opposition, as in the
case of Massachusetts. In 1656 that colony excluded Negroes and Indians
from the militia, and according to Governor Bradstreet's report to the
Board of Trade in 1680 and subsequent action taken by that colony in 1775
and 1776, it adhered to this p