Freeing and Enlisting Enslaved Men in South Carolina after Yorktown — Refused Again
After General Cornwallis surrendered the largest remaining British army in North America at Yorktown, Virginia, 19 October 1781, King George's troops still held Wilmington, North Carolina, Charleston, South Carolina, and Savanna, Georgia.
Two years earlier, Colonel John Laurens had proposed freeing 3000 enslaved men in South Carolina to expand the ranks of the Continental armies, in response to Great Britain's "southern strategy" for crushing American independence. He had been angrily turned down. Lacking that reinforcement, the relatively weak American armies had been defeated and pushed on the defensive.
In December 1781, Laurens again proposed "a well-chosen corps of black levies" to expand the armies commanded by General Nathanael Greene, who endorsed the plan.
Greene bluntly asserted that South Carolina and Georgia would never have been overrun by British armies and Loyalist auxiliaries if Laurens's earlier proposal had been accepted.
Greene had complete confidence that Americans of African descent would make good soldiers -- he had seen quite a few in action in the northern theater. He added that South Carolina "has it not in its power to give sufficient reinforcement without incorporating them."
The Continental Congress urged the South Carolina legislature to raise two battalions -- a smaller number. Meeting the usual resistance, Laurens proposed that 2500 troops could be recruited from confiscated Loyalist estates -- leaving slave owners who supported independence without any loss.
State legislator Aedenus Burke bluntly informed Laurens that the state's planters believed (even at this early date) that northerners secretly hoped for a general emancipation after the war, which would be speeded up by enlisting slaves as soldiers with promises of freedom.
This gave northern political elites more credit than they deserved.
New York, Pennsylvania, and even Massachusetts, were just beginning to grapple with the implications of their revolution for ownership of slaves. But it was probably true that the price of speedily wrapping up the slaughter in South Carolina would have put slavery in the course of ultimate extinction.
Another year of bitter fighting in South Carolina followed Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown. Roughly half the landowning population remained loyal to the King of Great Britain.
Georgia, like South Carolina, angrily refused. But South Carolina legislators, in February 1782, offered to assign 400 slaves confiscated from Loyalist estates as wagoners tree cutters, and servants for officers. Greene insisted that men assigned be clothed at public expense. He also required that these men be "allowed the same wages granted by Congress to the Soldiers of the Continental army. He foresaw that "unless the Negroes have an interest in their servitude... they will be of little benefit and by no means to be depended on."
After another year of fighting, with Greene's army half-naked, underfed, undersupplied, often without boots, and local militia slow to respond, the British evacuated Charleston 14 December 1782. According to a Pennsylvania officer's diary, even then the bedraggled army of liberation "experienced a most shameful neglect by the public" refusing firewood and provisions to the soldiers entering the city.
Further reading, see Friends of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson, Tadeusz Kosciuszko and Agrippa Hull.