What the Hessian officer saw at Saratoga…

An officer of the Hessian mercenaries hired to fight for the British Empire described the Continental Army fighting for independence at the Battle of Saratoga: "No regiment is to be seen in which there are not Negroes in abundance and among them there are able-bodied, strong and brave fellows."

A soldier only sees a small part of the army they fight for. Observers in the opposing army have a panoramic view. This is the panoramic view that we need, looking back through the centuries at our own historic origins. There was not one regiment which did not have American soldiers of visible African ancestry. Soldiers, plural, in abundance. Not entire regiments -- every regiment had some, serving alongside soldiers of English, Irish, Scottish, German, Dutch, French, and occasionally even Spanish ancestry, and of course, several nations whose ancestors had lived here before any of the above showed up. That was the army that won the independence of the United States of America.

Of course the Hessian officer did not see the entire American army. He saw the army fighting at Saratoga -- the first battle where an entire British Army surrendered to Continental forces. There were undoubtedly some regiments in the army in New Jersey, commanded directly by George Washington, that were entirely "white." But far from all.

There were relatively few men of African descent fighting Lord Cornwallis in South Carolina and Georgia. Patriotism in neither state extended to freeing and arming enslaved men. Almost all those of African descent in these states were slaves. But there were regiments from North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and even a few sent south from the Massachusetts Line and other states, that had a representative mix of the American population in their ranks.

There are no photographs of the revolutionary armies -- and the paintings done twenty, fify, one hundred years later are missing the "abundance" of "strong, able-bodied" American soldiers with darker complexions. The artists may not even have had a clue that an accurate painting would include them.

Racial assumptions were sharply challenged by fighting for liberty, rejecting the "chains of slavery" offered by a British monarch, inspired by a proclamation that "all men are created equal." But a more virulent white supremacy reasserted itself, in 1784, in 1802, in 1809, in 1819, in 1834 and 1835, in 1850 and 1861. Losing ground in "a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure," it came back to dominate both law and the writing of history 1896-1946.

The image posted here is suitably fuzzy and vague -- you can't really tell one way or the other. Hopefully we will have better paintings as we move into celebrating the 250th Anniversary of American independence. We need panoramic images that comprehensively present all those who brought the most powerful empire to concede. No less an army and navy could have enabled the United States of America to "assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them."