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  • The African American Experience in the American Revolution
  • Jim Piecuch (bio)
Alan Gilbert. Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. xiii + 369 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $17.50
Judith L. Van Buskirk. Standing in Their Own Light: African American Patriots in the American Revolution. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. xiv + 297 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95

The past decade has seen a rejuvenation of interest in the study of African Americans in the American Revolution. Alan Gilbert and Judith L. Van Buskirk continue this trend, offering important new perspectives on the topic in their complementary works. While Gilbert's Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence covers American and British attitudes toward black people and the experiences of African Americans who fought for and against independence, Van Buskirk's Standing in Their Own Light: African American Patriots in the American Revolution focuses on black soldiers who served in the Revolutionary forces, although she acknowledges that the British offered African Americans an alternative that, especially in the southern states, was more attractive than anything offered by the revolutionaries.

Van Buskirk fills a major gap in the literature on black Americans' participation in the Revolution. Most studies have devoted the bulk of their attention to African Americans who sought freedom with the British, a topic where sources are more available due in part to the facts that a far larger number of black people opted to stake their futures with the royal army and navy instead of the rebels, that British officials kept better records than did the Americans, and that after winning freedom many former slaves wrote narratives of their wartime experiences, often with the encouragement and assistance of abolitionists in Britain. Van Buskirk notes the lack of sources on the subject of African Americans who fought for the United States, yet manages to produce an excellent account by delving into the pension applications of Revolutionary veterans, carefully sifting to identify black soldiers. She acknowledges that the applications were recorded by white court clerks, which shaped not only [End Page 349] the veterans' statements (for example, no black applicants referred to racist treatment) but were also filtered by the clerks themselves, who may have chosen to rephrase or omit portions of the veterans' testimony. Nevertheless, Van Buskirk's skillful analysis of these documents supplemented by the more familiar accounts of white revolutionaries provides the best study to date on black soldiers' service on behalf of American independence.

Before examining African Americans' military service, Van Buskirk briefly reviews the nature of prewar slavery in four colonial regions: South Carolina, Virginia, the Middle Colonies, and Massachusetts. She observes that slaves were held in low regard everywhere, but that southern slavery was particularly harsh. This section is followed by an account of Crispus Attucks, likely a former slave of mixed race who was among the leaders of the protests that resulted in the 1770 Boston Massacre. He was killed in that tumult, and thus became the first black man to die in the colonial struggle with Britain. Van Buskirk goes on to discuss the opportunities presented to black people when war began in 1775. Beginning on the very first day of the conflict, some African Americans took up arms against the British in Massachusetts, while later in the year Virginia's royal governor, Lord Dunmore, offered freedom to rebel-owned slaves who would fight for the king.

Those African Americans who had taken part in the fighting at Lexington and Concord and remained with the force besieging the British in Boston were transformed from local militiamen into regular soldiers when Congress assumed control of the troops and they became George Washington's Continental Army. This transition created a dilemma for Washington, Congress, and the state governments regarding the service of African Americans because many southern delegates in Congress opposed the idea of arming black men, seeing such an action as a potential threat to the institution of slavery. After much debate, the result was grudging permission for black soldiers already in the army to be allowed to reenlist. Van Buskirk notes that the...

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