Tales of Two Colonies

Sometimes the smallest of tales tell very large stories. Two black Americans, one an enslaved boy from Lexington, Massachusetts, and the other, a freed slave of undetermined age who piloted ships into Charleston harbor, faced hard choices as the American Revolution approached. The boy, Peter, served several tours with his state militia. When he enrolled in the Massachusetts Thirteenth Regiment in late 1779 he was but sixteen years old, yet already a veteran. This time he was promised his freedom, and Peter marched toward Yorktown under the new name of Peter Sharon. By that date, Thomas Jeremiah, the black pilot, had been dead for four years. Accused of plotting with the city's slaves to rise up before assisting the British navy, Jeremiah was hanged and his remains burned. Sharon survived the war and lived to see slavery's end in Massachusetts, while Jeremiah's fate served as a grim reminder that Carolina's white minority fought only for their own liberty while planning to deny it to their state's black majority.

Three slim books tell these two fascinating stories, or at least as much of the stories as the limited documentation allows these sagas to be restored to life. Joyce Lee Malcolm, a historian and professor of law, writes of Peter's service; and William R. Ryan and J. William Harris offer similar accounts of Thomas Jeremiah's life and brutal execution. At 160 and 165 pages, Ryan and Harris, respectively, have crafted somewhat comparable studies, at least in length, if not in conclusions; Harris includes a brief afterword that examines how earlier scholars have treated Jeremiah's death, while Ryan's study ends with a lengthy appendix of several dozen documents and letters about the affair, which makes the volume a natural for classroom use. No letter or statement from Peter's pen survives, and much about Jeremiah's early life and family is equally unattainable, and so to a large degree, all three volumes—as Ryan's title suggests—focus instead on the turbulent worlds of Peter and Jeremiah.

Born to enslaved parents in 1763, Peter endured a strange childhood even by the uncharacteristic standards of slaves in Massachusetts, a colony that was only 3 percent black. Peter's parents, Peggy and Jupiter, belonged to different masters. That was common enough, but what complicated matters was that Peter had a twin sister, named Peggy after her mother. Although the law gave all of the elder Peggy's offspring to her master, the two whites decided to resolve the issue by each claiming one child. Peggy's master allowed her to keep her daughter; but Jupiter's master, the Deacon Joshua Brooks, had little interest in a noisy baby boy. At the atypically young age of just nineteen months, the "neagro servant boy named Peter" was sold for four pounds to Josiah and Elizabeth Nelson, a childless couple in search of both service and a family (p. 5). Since the Nelsons attended the same Congregational Church in Lexington as did Jupiter and Peggy, Peter's parents were able to see their son each Sunday. Otherwise, the child resided in the Nelsons' simple home.

When fighting commenced, both Jupiter and Nelson saw action. As the British marched on Lexington and Concord, Nelson helped to spread the alarm and was even briefly captured and beaten by British forces. With Brooks' permission, Jupiter enlisted in the state militia in the spring of 1777; in exchange for a three-year term, Jupiter received his freedom and adopted the surname of Free. Military...