African Americans in the Revolutionary War

In the American Revolution, gaining freedom was the strongest motive for black slaves who joined the Patriot or British armies. The free black may have been drafted or enlisted at his own volition. Nash says that they enlisted more often than did whites.

Additional motives for those who joined the rebel American forces could have been a desire for adventure, belief in the goals of the Revolution, or the possibility of receiving a bounty. Bounties were both monetary payments and the chance to be given freedom; they were promised to those who joined either side of the war. Free blacks in the North and South fought on both sides of the Revolution; slaves were recruited to weaken those masters who supported the opposing cause.

Nash reports that most blacks fought on the patriot side; recent research concludes there were about 9000 black Patriot soldiers, counting the Continental Army and Navy, and state militia units, as well as privateers, wagoneers in the Army, servants to officers, and spies. Ray Raphael notes that while thousands joined the Loyalists, many more, free and slave, sided with the Patriots.

Crispus Attucks, shot dead by British soldiers in the Boston Massacre in 1770, is an iconic martyr to Patriots.

Prior to the revolution, many free African Americans supported the anti-British cause, most famously Crispus Attucks, believed to be the first person killed at the Boston Massacre. At the time of the American Revolution, some blacks had already been enlisted as Minutemen. Both free and enslaved Africans had served in private militias, especially in the North, defending their villages against attacks by Native Americans. In March 1775, the Continental Congress assigned units of the Massachusetts militia as Minutemen. They were under orders to become activated if the British troops in Boston took the offensive. Peter Salem, who had been freed by his owner to join the Framingham militia, was one of the blacks in the militiary. He served for seven years. In the Revolutionary War, slave owners often let their slaves enlist in the war with promises of freedom, but many were put back into slavery after the conclusion of the war.

...
Wikipedia