Unsung Patriots: African-American Veterans of the Revolutionary War
by Jack Duggan

February 5, 2025

From a deposition by Lieutenant Colonel Elijah Vose of the 1st Massachusetts Regiment of the Continental Army given on behalf of the pension application of Private Fortune Howland of Sandwich.[1]

This is a story of remembrance, an account of the little known but notable military service of African Americans from Cape Cod and the Islands during the War for Independence. One of history’s tasks is to revisit underreported stories which in this case is to shine a light on these overlooked veterans, giving them the recognition they have earned as best the available, fragmentary evidence can reveal. We cannot see their long disappeared faces or hear the sound of their now silent voices, but we can begin to piece together their stories and try to give them meaning. The findings of this chapter are best described as a work in progress that, hopefully, other researchers will build on in the years to come. 

Black veterans returning to Cape Cod and the Islands from their military service must have brought with them a different outlook than the mindset they left home with when they went to war. Participating in the successful fight against the powerful British Empire had to have given a boost to their pride. Moreover, wearing a Continental Army uniform had bestowed on them a kind of “temporary immunity from much of the demeaning treatment of civilian life.” [2] They had served in racially integrated units, but now they were back where they had come from. Some were probably still slaves and all faced the discriminatory practices of a late 18th century society that marginalized their lives or enslaved their very existence. Returning to their hometowns afforded few, if any, of the opportunities for youthful expression and the camaraderie that military service provided.

The setting for military service

Black soldiers, enslaved and free men, served in New England colonial militias throughout the 18th century, and this held true when the Revolution began in 1775. Initially, the newly formed Continental Army dismissed soldiers of African descent, but George Washington in time allowed the enlistment of free men of color. Eventually, facing manpower shortages, he ended the Army ban on enlisting slaves.

Slaves in Massachusetts had access to the courts and some legal protections from harsh treatment by their enslavers. However, provincial law upheld bondage, and people of color faced the prejudices of the larger white community. So when war broke out in 1775 and fighting dragged on, opportunities arose for free and enslaved Black men to consider, if they had a choice, serving in the American military as a potential avenue to greater personal independence.

The motivations for African Americans to serve were considerable. Men could earn money serving as substitutes for others in the community. Financial inducements, such as enlistment bonuses and land grants, could be used to buy an enlistee’s freedom or the freedom of a family member. Others were inspired by the idealism of freedom from oppression. Still others could have been motivated by a sense of adventure. These motivations, however, had to be weighed against the risk of not surviving the war and the risk that their enslavers would not make good on promises of freedom when the war ended. 

 Incomplete records

African Americans from towns across Cape Cod and Islands served in the militia, the Continental Army or at sea during the Revolutionary War, but to date precious little has been gathered together about their lives before or after their service. 

Scholarly research about Massachusetts soldiers of color has achieved significant gains over time, but compiling a specific list of the number of African American veterans from the Cape & Islands is still an unfinished task because of incomplete or unavailable original data. Moreover, there is no firm answer to the question of how many African Americans overall served during the War for Independence, but reputable scholars estimate a range of 5000 to 10,000 Black men and teenagers joined the American cause on land and at sea across all thirteen colonies.

Almost 1200 African American veterans connected by birth, enlistment or residence to Massachusetts towns and counties served in the war, according to Maurice Barboza, a respected expert. This same scholar has compiled a list of seventy-one likely veterans from the Cape & Islands which provides a good starting point for follow-on research. [3]

A specific goal of this chapter is to create a baseline list of Black veterans from the Cape & Islands backed by original source material. The thirty veterans counted in this survey is a conservative number almost certain to grow with more research. The primary source used to identify this group of thirty is the multi volume publication Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War [4] which identifies the race of many African American enlistees by using eighteenth-century military record terms such as black, negro and
mulatto.[5]

Use of these descriptors, however, lacks consistency because orderly sergeants and clerks idiosyncratically applied what guidance they had for recording physical characteristics for complexion or race, if at all. Benjamin Quarles, the pioneering scholar on Black Revolutionary soldiers, estimated that not more than one third of the African Americans who served were racially identified in muster rolls, crew lists, and other key original documents.[6]

Researchers are also hampered by the fact that several years of records for well over half of the regiments on the Massachusetts Continental Line are incomplete or have not survived. 

In addition, military records rarely, if ever, document whether African American soldiers and sailors were enslaved or free men. It is likely that enslaved men made up the bulk of Massachusetts’ African American soldiers simply because, at the time of the Revolution, there were more African American slaves in Massachusetts than there were free Black men.[7]

 Men without surnames

Four African American veterans identified in the Soldiers & Sailors volumes had no surnames included on their records. Use of only given names is a certain indicator of enslavement.

• “Cato” from Falmouth was an eighteen-year-old cook on a American privateer in 1780.

• “Jack” from Sandwich was sixteen years old when he signed up for a six-month enlistment in the Continental Army in 1780 and probably served in the area around West Point, New York. 

• “Jeffery” was a Sandwich militiaman whose unit was sent to Rhode Island in October 1778 to reinforce the Continental Army facing British forces at Newport.

• “Ezra” of Yarmouth enlisted in the spring of 1777 for a three-year term in Colonel Gamaliel Bradford’s Massachusetts Continental Army regiment. He was sometimes recorded on muster rolls as Ezra Negrow. Bradford’s regiment was composed largely of men from Plymouth and Barnstable counties. A muster roll shows that Ezra was assigned to a company that included other Yarmouth men. 

Beginning to demystify “Ezra” 

A few indicators outside of military records have begun to narrow down the search for Ezra’s identity. The clue closest to home involves Yarmouth militia Captain Joshua Gray and his possible ownership of a slave named Ezra. In three letters written by Gray in early 1776 to his wife Mary while Gray’s company was part of the American force besieging Boston, he mentions the need for Ezra, who is obviously part of the Gray household, to “due his duty,” and for Gray’s wife to make Ezra “stand in fear of you.” It is possible that this Ezra is an indentured servant, but it is more likely that he was a “servant for life,” a New England colonial euphemism for enslavement of Blacks and Native Americans.  

A second clue, this one from 1760 Truro, Massachusetts church records, notes a “negro servant to Ebenezer Dyer” named Violet whose son, Ezra, would have been of military age in 1777 at the time “Ezra Negrow” of Yarmouth enlisted in the Continental Army. Other church records indicate that by 1766 Violet had been sold to a Mr. Avery of Truro, which raises the question of the whereabouts of her three children, Nellie, Ezra, and Peggy? Were they sold too, and to whom?

We were soldiers once

Twenty-four of the Cape and Islands veterans served in Continental Line units as privates for varying lengths of time, ranging from six-month men to soldiers who served for three years or the duration of the war. Michael Pease of Nantucket earned the Badge of Distinction award with two stripes that General George Washington created for men who faithfully served for more than six years.[9] Jabez Jolley of Barnstable and James Remmon of Falmouth were prisoners of war fortunate enough to be exchanged for British captives held by the American army.

• Where ages were given in military documents, the African-American enlistees ranged in years from fifteen to their early thirties, but the majority were teenagers when they joined the Army.

• Heights for this group, where given, varied with the shortest soldier coming in at 5’1” and the tallest at 5’10”. According to academic studies, the average height of a Continental Army soldier was 5’8” which was two to three inches taller than the average British soldier. 

• Extrapolating from the histories of Army regiments in which Cape and Islands veterans served, we can surmise that they were at the battles of Saratoga, Monmouth, King’s Bridge, and Yorktown, and during the Defense of Philadelphia. At least nine suffered the hardship of the 1777-1778 Valley Forge encampment, including Providence Disco and Ezra “Negrow” who perished.

• A handful of veterans served in state or county militia units, but they were outliers, suggesting that Black enlistees preferred service in the Continental Army perhaps because such duty offered enlistment and land bounties as well as the ability to travel about the colonies, a freedom usually denied to slaves.

None of this group held a rank above private, but military records show that several had specialized skills. Jabez Jolley was a drummer, an important role charged with communicating commands on the battlefield. Santee Prince was assigned to an artillery company as a matross, that is a gunner’s assistant, who loaded and fired cannons and mortars. Job Tobias served in a sappers and miners regiment (i.e., think combat engineers). And Jesse Caesar served in an artificers unit where he apparently employed his civilian skills as a boatwright and a tailor.  

Six served aboard privateers where they would have earned a seaman’s share of prize money for any enemy vessels that their ships captured.

Telling their stories

So far, only limited granular information has surfaced about the lives of these veterans, but careful scrutiny of military records as well as chasing interesting-looking research clues have produced enough reliable particulars to start filling gaps in a few of their stories. The following narratives begin to chip away at the anonymity and biases accorded Black veterans who returned to the communities where they lived and worked, but were not fully part of despite growing support in Massachusetts for a nationwide abolitionist movement.

James Remmon, whose military record shows two separate Continental Army enlistments for the towns of Falmouth and Sandwich, served about five years between 1777 and 1782. His first enlistment was in a regiment that saw action at the Saratoga and Monmouth battles, and he endured the brutal winter of 1777-1778 at Valley Forge. 

These experiences were memorable enough, but a more unforgettable trial came during his second enlistment, when he was a prisoner of war for nine months.

• While his regiment was stationed in New York’s Hudson River Valley, James was “taken prisoner October 17th 1781 at Croton River,” most probably by a notorious Loyalist militia unit that plagued the no-man’s land area of Westchester County separating American and British forces. The record of his release is terse, simply stating that Remmon was “reported exchanged June 20, 1782,” leaving us to ponder what he endured during his captivity, which likely occurred in the infamous British military prison system in the New York City area.

Isaac Wickham stands out among the group of Cape & Islands veterans because of what we know about his service achievements and his life after the War from military records, Isaac’s fifteen page pension application file and primary documents from the Plantation of Mashpee. Wickham's first service came in the state militia in the fall of 1777 when he was a young teenager whose unit was briefly sent to Rhode Island to reinforce Continental troops. Then, as a 16-year-old in 1779, he served the first of two Continental Army enlistments that began and ended in the Hudson River Valley of New York. 

In 1781 during his second enlistment, Isaac was transferred to Major General Lafayette’s Light Infantry Division,[10] which during that spring and summer led British General Charles Lord Cornwallis on a chase around central and eastern Virginia, always staying just out of reach of the superior British force. In August, Cornwallis, tiring of the pursuit, made for camp in Portsmouth, Virginia and then made his fateful move to the Yorktown peninsula.  General Washington, along with his French allies, seized the opportunity to trap the British army, and secured the surrender that effectively ended the war. And Isaac Wickham was there, declaring in his pension application that he “was at the capture of Cornwallis.” 

Wickham received an honorable discharge at the conclusion of the war at Newburgh near West Point.

• Army records in 1780 described Isaac as an eighteen-year-old “mulatto” with black hair, standing 5’3’ tall. He had grown two inches since his height was recorded as a sixteen-year-old enlistee.

• Wickham’s 1818 pension file gives us a rare glimpse of the post-war life of a then 57-year-old veteran who stated that he is “now in reduced circumstance in life and stands in need of the assistance of his country for support.”  We learn that he was a “farmer” from Barnstable living with his 42-year-old wife in a one-story house measuring 10’ by 14’. Isaac owned a cow and a pig. His house was furnished with “four old chairs, one iron pot, one dish kettle, one small table, one tea kettle, one spider,[11] one chest.” He had some small debts and owned no land.

Sometime after the war Wickham married and started a family in Mashpee. It was here that Isaac became a participant in a local movement to win greater self government from the overbearing white overseers of the Mashpee Plantation.[12] An intriguing anecdote from his pension file also reflects Isaac’s determination to assert his rights when he stood firm in demanding the enlistment land bounty that he was granted but never received. In 1820 Wickham seized the opportunity provided by the pension application process to put on the record that he had appointed a Plymouth County attorney to pursue his unrealized bounty claim with the Secretary of War. That lawyer was Zabdiel Sampson, a sitting US Congressman, which leaves us to ponder how it came about that Isaac was represented by a prominent politician. More investigative work remains to determine if Wickham or his heirs were successful in acquiring the land bounty. 

Peter and Silas Boston, two brothers from a Nantucket family with deep roots in the island’s Black community, served as seamen in the crew of the Massachusetts Navy brig Hazard, which took part in the ill-fated Penobscot Expedition in the summer of 1779. The largest American naval task force of the war suffered a humiliating defeat, experiencing hundreds of casualties and the loss of some forty warships and support vessels that were scuttled or burned along the upper Penobscot River in Maine to prevent the ships from falling into British hands.

Both brothers reportedly applied for military pensions, but research has only located Peter Boston’s file.[13]
We are fortunate that the lengthy file survived because it provides rich, first-person details about Peter’s service at sea, as well as insights into how Boston was viewed by fellow Nantucketers, Black and white, who gave depositions on his behalf.

During at least four cruises between 1778 and 1781, Peter saw duty far from home in the Eastern Atlantic and in the West Indies aboard privateers and ships of the Connecticut and Massachusetts navies. His vessels captured prizes and engaged in battle with armed British merchantmen. Nantucketer Brown Coffin, who shipped out with Boston on the Hazard, declared that Peter “was as good a seaman as anyone onboard. The officers were satisfied with him and he was always ready at a call.” 

Boston and Coffin were among those unlucky souls from the Penobscot Expedition who found themselves cast ashore in the Maine woods, forced to find their way back home on their own. In his pension deposition, Peter relates that he and some of his stranded shipmates fell in with “friendly Indians” who were going to help “conduct us to Boston. We found out that they did not know the way and [we]undertook to pursue our own course and we finally arrived at Boston."

Several other depositions in the pension file from men who had known Peter for 50-60 years clearly show that his character had earned the respect of white Nantucketers. Perhaps even some friendships might have existed, but trying to read between the lines of pension declarations can be a tricky business in an era when racial biases were commonplace. 

• Benjamin Bunker, a prominent Nantucket silversmith and the Hazard armorer, said Boston had been his apprentice in the mid-1770s and went on to praise Peter’s character “founded upon an acquaintance during more than a half century. I fully believe any statement which he makes.”[14]

• Nantucket Probate Judge Isaac Coffin, who was “acquainted with Boston for more than fifty years,” said “his veracity is unquestionable and whatever statements he makes may be relied upon.”

•  Peter’s pension file also contained an 1834 letter of support from Massachusetts Congressman John Reed, who was well known in Barnstable County for helping Revolutionary veterans navigate the cumbersome bureaucracy of the Washington Pension Office. Reed said he knew Boston well and that he was “an honest upright good man.”

When Peter died in 1837, probate records indicated that after the war he was a “mariner” who left a modest estate, including a small house, to his wife Rhoda Jolly, the half-sister of Jabez Jolley, another Black veteran. Rhoda’s widow’s pension benefit application was supported by depositions from multiple Nantucketers.

Fortune Howland had the distinction of serving in both Rhode Island and Massachusetts regiments beginning when he was about seventeen years old, according to military and pension application records. Howland, who was born in Tiverton, RI, first surfaces in 1779 muster rolls as a private in Captain Christopher Dyer’s Company in the “Battalion of Rhode Island Forces in the Service of the United States” where he enlisted for a term of one year.[15]  These troops were probably charged with keeping a watch on the British garrison still occupying the city of Newport and Aquidneck Island. In June of that year one of those muster rolls shows that Fortune and several of his fellow soldiers were temporarily on duty in Dighton, Massachusetts not far from the Rhode Island border.

When his Rhode Island enlistment ended in the spring of 1780, it did not take Fortune long to find another military billet. This time he relocated from Rhode Island to join the 1st Massachusetts Continental Line Regiment in July 1780 with a declared residence of Sandwich, Massachusetts.[16] His enlistment commitment of “during the war” meant he was in it to the end whenever that occurred and, for Fortune, that came in June 1783 when he received his honorable discharge at West Point NY. In his pension application he made no claim to be in a major battle but his regiment probably skirmished with British or New York Loyalist troops in the no-man’s land of Westchester County separating the American and British armies.

We do not know much about Howland’s life outside of what has been revealed in military and pension documents. For instance, there was no indication of his status as a free or enslaved man when he signed up with the Rhode Island state regiment. But enough indirect data has emerged to engage in some informed speculation about his personal circumstances. A colonial census in 1774 showed that about 5% of Tiverton’s total population was Black.[17] Fortune’s surname Howland was a common white surname in Tiverton.  If Fortune  was enslaved, he could have served that one year with the state troops as a substitute “in his master’s stead” or for another person in return for his freedom.

Wartime pensions became widely available in 1818 and Howland quickly applied. By this time he was residing off Cape in Rochester, Massachusetts. His application was initially rejected but that decision was soon reversed when two prominent Massachusetts citizens intervened on his behalf. Congressman Zabdiel Sampson’s name appears on several documents in Fortune’s pension file. Most important, Lieutenant Colonel Elijah Vose provided a sworn deposition that Fortune had served in the Continental Army’s 1st Massachusetts Regiment, describing him as “a good faithful soldier.”[18]  It is uncommon to encounter a pension deposition from a high ranking officer. It is rarer still to see an officer living at a distance from an applicant providing testimony on behalf of an Army private. Something that we have not yet learned kept Howland’s character in Vose’s mind almost forty years after their service together. 

After the war Fortune continued a peripatetic lifestyle, although he seems to have maintained a connection to Sandwich. Various civilian and military records show that he moved about southeastern Massachusetts living in Barnstable, Bristol and Plymouth counties and perhaps was employed during some of that that time as a mariner.[19]

• Howland married twice. In November 1783 Fortune married a Native American woman named Anna Nummuck in Plymouth. And he married again in July 1796, this time in Sandwich, to Thankful Jeffrey, a Native American woman from Middleborough. When Howland applied for his wartime pension, the record showed he was married to Thankful and that they had at least one child, a daughter named Dorcas who was then thirteen years old and “quite sickly”. The 1820 US census showed the Howlands still married and living in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. 

Fortune Howland died in Fairhaven circa 1821. Court probate records show he was a poor man, who owned no property and had few personal goods. His widow received less than ten dollars from his estate after expenses were deducted. Two of those expense items were $3.50 for a coffin and $1.00 for a grave site. Ongoing research has not yet identified the cemetery where Fortune was laid to rest, but hopefully that will occur some day when he can be honored for his service in the War of Independence. 

Jabez Jolley, a young Black man from Barnstable, must have seen it all during his years in the Continental Army, according to military records, land bounty files, and tracking the whereabouts of the regiments in which he served.

Before Jolley appears in Army records, however, we first see his name on a February 11, 1777 list of American and British prisoners being exchanged at Newport, Rhode Island. The list states he is a “seaman,” an occupation echoed in later Army files where it is noted that he had been a “sailor and farmer” in civilian life. The prisoner exchange document does not name his vessel nor how and where he was taken captive, but Jabez was most likely a crewman on an American privateer. 

In May 1777, just a few months after his exchange, Jolley enlisted for three years in Colonel Bradford’s Regiment of the Continental Army, a unit which included many men from Barnstable County. The regiment saw action at Saratoga and Monmouth and endured the 1777-1778 winter camp at Valley Forge. Jabez served as a private, but when he turns up next he has re-enlisted for the duration of the war in Lieutenant Colonel John Brooks’s Regiment where he was promoted to the position of company drummer, a role he held until the end of the war.[20] Jolley’s drummer status earned the pay of a corporal making him, at least unofficially, the highest ranking member of this group of Black Cape & Islands veterans. 

During his second enlistment, Jolley’s regiment was stationed in the Hudson River Valley, north of the British stronghold in New York City, where the unit mostly saw typical garrison duty. The monotony, however, was broken for Jabez and a sergeant from his company in May 1781 when they were assigned to Colonel Alexander Scammell’s newly-formed Light Infantry Regiment, which engaged in the heated Battle of King’s Bridge, NY on July 3, 1781, suffering six killed and 34 wounded. In late August, the regiment was on the march from New Jersey as the vanguard of Washington’s army heading to southern Virginia and its date with destiny at Yorktown. Jolley’s regiment reached the head of Chesapeake Bay by early September and then, moving by ship, arrived late in the month near Williamsburg to join the siege of Cornwallis’s army. 

At Yorktown, Scammell’s troops were assigned to General Lafayette’s Light Infantry Division. They were in the thick of the fight, including at the end when the regiment participated in the capture of one of the two British redoubts defending Yorktown, leading directly to Cornwallis’s surrender on October 17th. Drummer Jolley would have had a front-row seat for the action and also would have witnessed the elaborate surrender ceremony when British soldiers laid down their arms in what turned out to be the last major battle of the War for Independence. 

Jabez received his Army discharge on June 8th, 1783 and then disappears from history, save for two cryptic references in early 1830s land bounty claim documents involving the heirs of several Cape Cod veterans of color including Jolley.  In 1831 Isaac Wickham, a fellow soldier who declared he was well acquainted with Jolley, testified that he had heard from others that Jabez had “died soon after the war.” Wickham, however, went on to add that he lived “a considerable distance” from Jolley and had no direct knowledge of his death or its circumstances.”[21]  The second reference to Jolley’s life after the war surfaced in a puzzling passing remark in 1832 by Reuben Baldwin, a Sandwich lawyer, who told a Barnstable court that Jolley was “from the north shore of this cape” and then went on to declare that “said Jabez, being a drummer, was prevailed upon to accompany the French Army and Fleet to France and has not been heard from since.”

What kind of a tale about a Black expatriate from Cape Cod lies beneath the lawyer’s baffling comment about Jolley’s migration to France?  Did Jabez envision a better life there? Who “prevailed upon” him to make that decision? Does his experience as a battle-tested military drummer suggest that Jolley was recruited to join the French army? Was he a slave who decided to escape his subjugation after his Continental service ended? The odds are long that something will turn up to help determine what happened after Jolley left America’s shores. 

Epilogue

An end to slavery in Massachusetts began in 1780 with the ratification of the state’s new Constitution, which declared, “All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights.” Those words led to two court cases brought by slaves in the early 1780s that resulted in judgments which effectively ended slavery in the state. 

But those rulings did not lead to a separate Massachusetts law abruptly ending enslavement as a legal practice. Instead, as word of the court decisions slowly spread and slaves began to assert their right to freedom, enslavement in the state faded away until in 1790 the Federal Census recorded no slaves in Massachusetts. The service of soldiers of color who fought to secure the independence of their new country probably contributed to the end of slavery in Massachusetts, but societal biases, economic inequality, and segregation outlived legal lifetime bondage despite the noteworthy service of these Black Patriots.

Footnotes:

[1] Fortune Howland’s pension file (S. 32861). Lt. Colonel Vose’s deposition was given in a Norfolk County Court on May 3, 1819. 

[2] For a closer look at the lives of African Americans who joined the Revolutionary cause, see Judith Van Buskirk’s intensely researched, well written study on that subject. Professor Van Buskirk’s book draws heavily on the Revolutionary War pension files of five hundred Black veterans. Judith L. Van Buskirk, Standing in Their Own Light: African American Patriots in the American Revolution, University of Oklahoma Press. 2017 

[3] Maurice Barboza is the founder and CEO of the National Mall Liberty Memorial Fund which has delved deeply into African American Revolutionary War history across the thirteen colonies. See Patriots and Their Hometowns – National Liberty Memorial 
https://libertyfunddc.com/community-support-3 . See also Sean Gonslaves, African-American Revolutionary War Heroes, Cape Cod Times, July 3, 2011, https://www.capecodtimes.com/story/news/2011/07/03/gonsalves-african-american-soldiers-revolutionary/49979477007/

[4] Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War; A compilation from the Archives…Prepared and published by the Secretary of the Commonwealth in accordance with Chapter 100, Resolves of 1891… Boston; Wright & Potter Printing Co, State Printers; 1896 - 1908. The series comprises seventeen volumes of about 1000 pages each. 

[5] In addition to using the Continental Army’s racial descriptors found in the Soldiers and Sailors volumes, I have occasionally relied on a nomenclature methodology used by historians to help identify soldiers of color by examining given and surnames names of classical origin (e.g. Cato, Pompey, Scipio) or location (e.g. Boston, Providence, London) imposed by 18th century slave owners. It is not a foolproof methodology but it is a useful research tool that bears fruit for the persistent. 

[6] Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961). Quarles’s study has become a landmark achievement about Black Revolutionary history. A more recent work with updated information about Black soldiers and sailors is Eric G. Grundset, (Ed.), Forgotten Patriots: African American and American Indian Patriots in the Revolutionary War (Washington DC: National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, 2008).

[7] A 1776 Massachusetts census shows that Nantucket (2.9% - 133 individuals) and Dukes (2.0% - 59 individuals) counties had the highest percentage African American populations for the Cape and Islands.  Barnstable County’s African American population was 171 people (1.1% of the total county population). The census did not differentiate between enslaved or free people of color. 

[8] Valley Forge took its toll on the American army, with many soldiers dying of disease and malnutrition. Twelve Yarmouth men, including Ezra, died during that hard winter and are most likely buried in anonymous graves near military hospitals in the small towns that surrounded the camp. 

[9] On August 7, 1782, George Washington created two military badges to honor the service of his troops. The first Badge of Distinction was to be “conferred on the veteran non-commissioned officers and soldiers of the army who have served more than three years with bravery, fidelity and good conduct,” and would consist of “a narrow piece of white cloth of an angular form…to be fixed to the left arm on the uniform Coat.” Non-commissioned officers and soldiers worthy of honor who served more than six years were “to be distinguished by two pieces of cloth set in parallel to each other in a similar form.”

[10] Most Continental Army enlistees served in regular infantry regiments. As the war dragged on, however, General Washington, recognizing the need for more mobile units, ordered each regiment to create an elite light infantry company made up of younger, more fit and battle-tested men with the stamina to deploy rapidly in combat situations. 

[11] A “spider” is a long handled frying pan with three legs used around the fire to catch drippings from roasting meats and to sauté vegetables. The long handle provided some space between the fire and cook.

[12] Biographic profile. Wickham, Isaac , 1761 - 1842.  Native Northeast Portal,  https://nativenortheastportal.com/node/10737

[13] The 67-page pension application file (# W3650) for Peter and Rhoda Boston can be found at Ancestry.com. The file is yet another example of a documentary source that exceeds the summary records in the classic Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War volumes, a circumstance that particularly applies to naval service where original records are far more scarce than Continental Army and militia enlistments. 

[14] In November 1832, Peter Boston gave a deposition supporting Bunker’s pension application testifying to his naval service and good character, which suggests Bunker was comfortable accepting the help of a Black compatriot from the Hazard. Boston’s deposition was certified by a Nantucket Justice of the Peace who cited Peter as “a man of irreproachable character.”

[15] These were Rhode Island state troops formed solely for local defensive purposes and not to be confused with the Continental Army’s more well known 1st Rhode Island Regiment which was largely composed of soldiers of color. State troops were probably younger, better trained and equipped soldiers than the town militiamen that were called into service during the war. Howland’s enlistment ran from April 1779 through March 1780. 

[16] According to an in-depth study of Revolutionary War soldiers of color, crossing state lines to enlist in the Continental Army was particularly common and not all that difficult in terms of distance in the northeast. Source: Forgotten Patriots - African American and American Indian Patriots in the Revolutionary War; A Guide to Service, Sources and Studies; Eric G. Grundset, Editor and Project Manager; 2008; National Society Daughters of the American Revolution. Pages ii - iii. 

[17] Tiverton Historical Society. http://www.tivertonhistorical.org/tiverton-stories/tiverton-census-history/ . The census did not distinguish between free and enslaved blacks.   

[18] Fortune Howland’s Revolutionary War pension and land bounty application file (S. 32861 and BL Wt 849-100) can be found in the FOLD3 database. Colonel Joseph Vose was the regiment’s leader. Elijah served as his older brother’s deputy commander. In addition to securing his pension, Howland was awarded a land bounty of 100 acres for his Army enlistment.

[19] Howland may also have served briefly in a light artillery company during the War of 1812, earning a 160 acre land grant in Illinois. Military records, however, are incomplete, making this service only a possibility at this stage of research. The enlistment ran from October 1814 to March 1815 in Boston with Captain Robert Bell’s company. An alternate explanation for this service is that the “Fortune Howland” in the record could have been his son. Source: ancestry.com and FOLD3 databases.

[20] Muster rolls from 1782 reveal that Jolley and James Remmon served together in Captain Rufus Lincoln’s Company, Lieutenant Colonel Brooks’ Regiment. An earlier September 10, 1778 muster roll from Captain John Russell’s Company, Colonel Bradford’s Regiment, shows that Jolley was one of at least four Black soldiers in the unit.  

[21] Isaac Wickham’s Barnstable Court deposition occurred on December 10, 1831 in a bounty claim hearing for Job Tobias. The document can be found on ancestry.com in Tobias’s military papers.