The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Cardinal News has embarked on a three-year project to tell the little-known stories of Virginia’s role in the march to independence. This project is supported, in part, by a grant from the Virginia American Revolution 250 Commission. Find all our stories from this project on the Cardinal 250 page. You can sign up for our monthly newsletter:
Andrew Pebbles joined the Continental Army just in time to suffer through winter at Valley Forge. He saw combat regularly, including at Eutaw Springs in South Carolina. That fight wasn’t kind to him; he had his left thumb shot off, took another bullet in the shoulder and a bayonet to the gut. By some miracle, he survived.
The scant traces of Pebbles’ life that remain today reveal a man of simplicity and devotion. He was a Virginian who enlisted to fight under George Turbeville of Westmoreland County. Pebbles evidently didn’t possess outstanding intellect — an account characterizes him as “unlearned” — but what he lacked in brains he more than made up for in fortitude.
He also happened to be Black. More precisely, he was likely of mixed ancestry, as records classify him with a contemporary descriptor that was common, if a little grating to modern ears: mulatto.
Pebbles was one of more than 5,000 Americans of African descent who fought for the Patriot cause during the Revolutionary War. The contributions of rank-and-file Black Americans are something of a hidden history in the struggle for independence, but firsthand descriptions from the war and pension records confirm an undeniable truth. A sizable portion of the Continental Army and state militias were comprised of men of color.
Perhaps more remarkable than their service and sacrifice was their inclusion in the armed forces. By and large, men of color served in integrated units — marching, fighting and dying alongside white counterparts. When the guns of revolution fell silent in 1783, it would be more than a century-and-a-half — when American G.I.s shipped off to the Korean Peninsula — before the military would be integrated once again.
Many Colonial American policymakers were reluctant to allow the enlistment of Black men into the armed forces. Hard-and-fast boundaries stratified society, and race was an overarching category. Arming Black people, a large majority of whom were enslaved, was hard for many white Americans to stomach.
Gen. George Washington expressed a desire early in the war to bar Black men from enlisting, worried that the practice might encourage a slave revolt. He issued orders declaring that “Neither Negroes, Boys unable to bare [sic] Arms, nor old men,” were allowed to enlist. But the fog of war has a funny way of changing minds.
One issue was the need for manpower. American military leaders encountered personnel shortages because many soldiers left after their one-year term of enlistment — a duration that was eventually expanded to three.
There was also Dunmore’s Proclamation, a decree by Virginia’s royal governor in 1775 that promised freedom for enslaved Americans who agreed to fight for the British. Hundreds took up the offer, leaving their enslavers for a shot at freedom after a stint as a redcoat. Dunmore formed the Royal Ethiopian Regiment from Black enlistees, and while the unit was disbanded in 1776, many of its former members and other runaway slaves fought in Black Loyalist regiments. American military and political leaders became reluctant to cede that manpower advantage to the British.
And then there was the issue of compulsory military service in state militias, which some slaveowners were able to avoid by having enslaved men go in their place.
Hesitancy by white people to allow Black enlistment evaporated quickly. “A lot came down to expediency,” said Harvey Bakari, curator of Black history and culture for the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, which operates the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown. “The laws may say one thing, but when you see the British coming, you’re going to put arms in the hands of people who are going to defend your town and country.”
Black Americans’ motivations for taking up arms were complex, according to Bakari. Many of the free Black soldiers who fought on the American side were property and business owners, and they stood to lose lifelong investments by shirking their duty to the fledgling nation. Because many Black Americans were biracial, Bakari said, they had relatives among the white community and signed up to fight beside brothers and cousins. And for some free Black men of modest means, the prospect of steady pay offered for military service was too good to pass up. Black people had as much skin in the game as anyone else.
Sometimes the factors that drew Black Americans to the Patriot cause intersected with a right-time, right-place opportunity, allowing them to leave their mark on history as a civilian. Crispus Attucks, a Bostonian of mixed Native American and African ancestry, was among a group of Colonists who heckled British soldiers the night of March 5, 1770, drawing gunfire in response. Attucks is famously remembered as the first man to die in the American Revolution, even though armies didn’t engage in pitched battles until five years after the Boston Massacre.
James Lafayette was an enslaved man in New Kent County, Va., who spied for Americans at the Siege of Yorktown by infiltrating British lines. After the war, Marquis de Lafayette — no relation to James Lafayette — said that his intelligence was “industriously collected and faithfully delivered.” (See our previous story on James Lafayette.)
There were countless other people of color who contributed to American independence in ways both subtle and conspicuous. Among the 6,500 people listed on the Daughters of the American Revolution’s online database, “Patriots of Color,” was Abraham Brown, a free Black man of Charles City County, Va., who furnished supplies to American forces, and an enslaved man known only as Ben who labored at the state-run shipyards on Virginia’s Chickahominy and Pamunkey rivers.
Thousands more Black Americans enlisted in organized armed forces — the Continental Army and Navy, state militias and navies (11 of the 13 Colonies had their own naval fleet).
Black soldiers and sailors mirrored the range of devotion of their comrades-in-arms of other races. Many exhibited courage and skill. Among them was William “Billy” Flora, hero of the Battle of Great Bridge in Chesapeake, Va. While on sentry duty, Flora, a private in the Virginia Militia, held off a platoon British soldiers with musket fire while he was concealed only behind a pile of shingles.
Others found military life to be a drag. The DAR’s database contains scores of men listed as deserters.
Segregation in Colonial America was well established and rigid, not only in the institution of slavery, but also through laws that barred Black people from citizenship and all its privileges. But when it came to the military, the societal norms that kept Blacks and whites separate largely didn’t apply.
Foreign military officers referred to the American military as “speckled,” said Bakari, owing to the diverse racial makeup of its troops. 
Washington’s army and state militias would have contained many men of every imaginable hue, according to historian John U. Rees, author of “They Were Good Soldiers: African-Americans Serving in the Continental Army, 1775-1783.” Examine paintings of American soldiers in the war and almost none of them contain a Black face. That’s not accurate history, according to Rees. “It was not a white monolith,” he said.
And while there were restrictions on the positions Black soldiers could hold — there are no records indicating they served as officers — they nevertheless marched, fought, slept and labored in fully integrated units.
One military unit that started off segregated was a Rhode Island regiment formed after the Colony’s assembly allowed enslaved and free Black men, along with Native Americans, to enlist, promising freedom as a reward for those who served. The regiment, which numbered more than 200 men, was led by white officers. But the racial segregation in that unit was short-lived; white recruits replaced the losses of men of color, and reorganization merged the Black companies with whites in the final years of the war.
Today a small cadre of reenactors carry the torch of Rhode Island’s so-called “Black Regiment.” In April, a couple members of the group hosted a two-day living history program at the Yorktown Battlefield, scene of Gen. Charles Cornwallis’ 1781 surrender and part of Colonial National Historical Park. The reenactors demonstrated camp life, drilling and music from the Revolution — facets that Black soldiers would have known just as well as any other soldier.
Park program manager Sandra Tennyson said that the event was one way that National Park Service staff of the battlefield ensure that “we share with visitors accurate and relevant stories about the people who founded this country and about the origins of the nation.”
Altogether, Black soldiers made up approximately 7% of all soldiers serving in the Continental Army, according to Rees. While single digits might seem small at face value, it was nevertheless an outsized effort given the small population of free Black people at the time — about 2.4% of the American population. If gathered together, the enslaved soldiers fighting for the American cause could have formed two full regiments on their own, Rees said.
The armed forces of the fledgling United States, and the people of diverse racial origins who lived in its orbit, was, perhaps, the original melting pot, more so than the stratified and segregated society around it. Black soldiers were an important component of that.
“Their presence, along with Native American soldiers and women of all colors serving in support roles, ensured that the Continental Army formed a true representation of the new country’s population,” Rees said.
