THE BLACK LOYALISTS

Thousands of African Americans fought for the British-then fled the United States to avoid a return to enslavement.

- BY ANDREW LAWLER | ILLUSTRATION BY PAUL SPELLA

The man who would come to be called Harry Washington was born near the Gambia River, in West Africa, around 1740. As a young man, he was sold into slavery and endured the horrors of the Middle Passage. In Virginia, he was purchased by a neighbor of George Washington, who then bought the young man in 1763 for 40 pounds. After working to drain the colony's Great Dismal Swamp—one of George Washington's many land ventures—he was sent to Mount Vernon to care for the horses.

Then came war. With General Washington in Massachusetts leading the Continental Army, Harry Washington, like thousands of other enslaved people, abandoned the plantation, risking torture and imprisonment, to join the British cause. In exchange for his freedom, he enlisted in what was known as the Ethiopian Regiment.

Virginia's royal governor, Lord Dunmore, had created a base to oppose the rebels near the port of Norfolk in the summer of 1775. Encouraged by the large numbers of enslaved people who sought sanctuary behind British lines, he published the British empire's first emancipation proclamation in November, granting liberty to any person in bondage, owned by Patriots, who would take up arms for King George III. These recruits—Harry Washington among them—formed the empire's first Black regiment. Together with Dunmore, they launched what would amount to the biggest slave insurrection in the nation's history until the Civil War. Their uniforms bore the motto "Liberty for Slaves"—a tart retort to the "Liberty or Death" slogan favored by Patriots.