The American Revolution officially ended on September 3, 1783, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris. Along with the Civil War, the American Revolution is one of the most noteworthy events in American history. Generations of Americans have honored and commemorated the Revolution by erecting monuments to various peoples, places, and events. According to the Journal of the American Revolution, there are approximately 450 monuments, memorials, statues, and plaques to the American Revolution across the country. This reflects the significance of the event, but where are the stories of the Black soldiers who fought?

During the American Revolution, thousands of Black people fought on both sides of the conflict. But unlike their white counterparts, they were not just fighting for independence or to sustain British rule. At a time when the majority of Black Americans lived in bondage with their labor seeding the economy of the fledgling nation, many accepted to call to arms hoping for freedom from the despotism of chattel slavery.

Historians estimate that between 5,000 and 8,000 Black Americans participated in the Revolution on the Patriot side, and that upward of 20,000 served with the British. More than a few fought with bravery and great prowess, but their exploits have faded from our collective memory. There are many notable and exceptional Black American figures including Crispus Attucks, Peter Salem, and James Armistead Lafayette. Their crucial contributions to the conflict have often gone unnoticed or unacknowledged within the American narrative.

Despite the patriots’ rhetoric about liberty and justice for all, America’s war for independence did not herald widespread emancipation for countless enslaved persons. But for some, the Revolution’s promise of liberty became a reality. The story of Pvt. John Scott is a brilliant example of that reality.

Pvt. John Scott's Replacement Headstone
Daughters of the American Revolution - Turtle Creek Chapter

Pvt. John Scott was born 15 Aug 1760 and died 17 Dec 1847 in Maineville, Ohio. He served as a Private with Prince Edward Company, Virginia in 1778 and did a second tour in 1779. Pvt. Scott is listed in “Forgotten Patriots: African American and American Indian patriots in the Revolutionary War: a guide to service, sources and studies,” an extensive study published by Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). The Turtle Creek Chapter in Lebanon, Ohio was apprised of Pvt. Scott and his final resting place in 2019 and filed an application for a historic preservation grant to the DAR Historian General in August 2020. Approval was received in August 2021 and the Turtle Creek Chapter worked to replace the broken headstone of American Revolutionary War Patriot John Scott in the Maineville Cemetery in preparation for a Patriot insignia marker.

On May 21, 2022, my colleague and I were able to represent the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center at the Grave Marking Ceremony honoring Revolutionary War Patriot Pvt. John Scott. Scott served as a private in the 10th regiment of the Virginia Continental Line in Company F commanded by Colonel Thomas Posey. The regiment would fight in the Battle of Monmouth, the largest and longest one day battle of the Revolutionary War.

Picture of Novella Nimmo, Christopher Miller, and Gael T. Fischer (Regent with Turtle Creek Chapter, NSDAR) , May 21, 2022
Provided By Christopher Miller

“The suit was about more than Henrietta Wood alone. It was about what former slaves were owed for their enslavement, as well as about the real differences that restitution could make.”

In short, reparations mean making amends in the form of compensation to individuals who have been wronged. There are diverse types of reparations, but the most common use is in reference to right the wrong of the institution of slavery. There have been small victories in cases like Bruce’s Beach where the governor of California authorized the land to the descendants of a Black couple who were banished from Manhattan Beach in a racist attack in the early 20^th century. However, in the long history of reparations, enslaved people have rarely won cases against their enslavers. But a Black woman became one the few enslaved people who successfully sued for and won reparations – Henrietta Wood.

Wood was born into slavery in Kentucky between 1818 and 1820 to the Moses Tousey family. As a youth, she was sold twice: to a merchant named Henry Forsyth in Louisville in 1834, where he treated Wood under extremely harsh conditions while causing physical, mental, and emotional abuse. To settle some debt, Forsyth sold Wood to a French immigrant named William Cirode sometime between 1835 and 1848 but moved to New Orleans with Wood as the housemaid after not feeling welcomed by other residents. After Cirode abandoned his family because of a number of failed business relationships, his wife Jane moved back to Louisville to generate income for the family by contracting Wood out for her domestic services. Mrs. Cirode moved Wood with her to Cincinnati as the city continued to expand. Mrs. Cirode went to an Ohio courthouse to declare Wood a free individual to avoid creditors trying to collect her husband’s debts. The court declared that Wood had been “manumitted by Jane M. Cirode of Ky. on the 15^th of April, 1848. As a result, Wood experienced a feeling of freedom by saying, “My mistress gave me my freedom…and my papers were recorded.” She called the several years she worked as a domestic as a free woman a “sweet taste of liberty.” Wood decided to fulfill that right to be free by looking at other places of employment. She found work at a boardinghouse run by Rebecca Boyd, because but noticed that the working conditions were the same as working for Mrs. Cirode. But her feeling of liberty was short-lived.

Amendment to Reply, April 10, 1876
National Archives at Chicago

Thinking she was going on a leisurely trip to Kentucky with Boyd, she was kidnapped and re-enslaved by a man named Zebulon Ward. Her kidnapping garnered attention from the media and abolitionists alike. Both Boyd and the driver were tried in a criminal case in Cincinnati based on this kidnapping, but they were cleared of any wrongdoing. There was an original case between Wood and Ward in Kentucky where it was to be determined if Ward had the legal right to purchase Wood even though Mrs. Cirode emancipated her in Ohio. Unfortunately, the courts favored Ward and Wood remained in jail. The case moved to Kentucky’s Court of Appeals, which agreed with the lower court that Wood was not free; Wood remained under Ward’s ownership.

Ward sold Wood to a cotton planter named Gerard Brandon who wanted to take advantage of the cotton boom in the South between 1820 and 1860. Wood’s experience in Mississippi was hard due to working in very harsh conditions picking cotton and watching other enslaved individuals get severely punished. During her time in Mississippi, she also gave birth to a son, Arthur, who was born into slavery. When Wood’s enslaver found out the Confederate forces had lost control of the Mississippi, he decided to move West and set up residence in Texas with several hundred enslaved individuals including her. Many of the enslaved endured a litany of unpleasant circumstances: family separation, severe punishment if they failed to comply, and walking long distances under miserable weather. The turning point for Wood was the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and when Major General Gordon Granger came to Galveston to announce that the enslaved individuals there in Texas were freed in 1865. After illegally selling Wood, Ward entered into the penitentiary industry as a keeper in Frankfort, Kentucky. He was successful in the business, in part by taking monetary advantage of the prison system and treating the inmates badly during his tenure.

Verdict, April 17, 1878
National Archives at Chicago

After enduring the harsh conditions in Texas, Wood was able to make her way back to Ohio with little money after the end of the Civil War. Meanwhile, Ward took a job with a penitentiary in Tennessee, but quickly ended his time there and moved back to Kentucky. On a trip to a city outside of Cincinnati in 1870, a local sheriff found him and informed him that a lawsuit had been brought against him by Henrietta Wood. The charges were that she had been abducted, re-enslaved, and then sold to a plantation owner in Mississippi before being taken to Texas even though she was legally free. With the assistance of a Kentucky lawyer named Harvey Myers, she sued Ward for $20,000 in damages ($500 for every year she estimated her labor to have been worth while she was held in slavery) and lost wages because of her illegal enslavement. After many roadblocks and obstacles in the case, a local Cincinnati newspaper published Wood’s story in 1876, attracting attention from the public. Eight years since the filing of the lawsuit, a jury finally heard the case. Unlike her previous lawsuit, Wood’s chances in court had improved significantly since the end of the Civil War due to the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the14^th Amendment, which granted national citizenship to former enslaved individuals. In 1878, Ms. Wood won her case and was awarded $2,500 – well below the original amount. Nevertheless, her victory was recorded as the largest US court-awarded type of reparations. The news of the case’s outcome spread throughout the country. Though the prosecution filed for a new trial because the payment was well below the amount Wood originally requested, the judge hearing the case deemed the claim immaterial and the $2,500 award stood. Ward followed through with the payment.

Though Wood’s case was the largest, it was not unique. A free person was able to win “freedom suits” granted they involved the following: Plaintiffs alleged that they had been legally freed in a southern state like Kentucky by an owner in a will or by some other act of manumission, only to be held in slavery by another party; and plaintiffs who claimed to be free outside of Kentucky, only to be brought to the state and re-enslaved. While they won their cases, they were rarely paid restitution due to a law allowing defendants to choose not to pay.

Following the trial, Wood settled in Chicago, where she worked as a laundress. Her son worked various jobs including as a Pullman Porter. Feeling that he should be doing something more fulfilling, he enrolled in law school and became an attorney. It was reported that Wood used the money from her lawsuit to help her son buy a house and fund his legal education. While the restitution was a big victory for Wood, her former enslaver Zebulon Ward told a different version of the story. He made dismissive comments like Wood being the “last negro he paid for” instead of telling the whole truth about the judgment.

Henrietta Wood died in Chicago in 1912 and has inspired crusades for reparations in the generations that followed. This story brings up the complex idea of reparations as it continues to be discussed in today’s conversations. This story also informs subjects like the harmful legacies of slavery and white supremacy in American history.

Photo: Tony Webster

Is there an enduring legacy 19th century white abolitionists offer for white anti-racism today? In recent months, I have revisited the life and writings of Angelina Grimké, the white Southern abolitionist and advocate for women’s rights. I am researching the differences among anti-slavery positions, differences that often get glossed over when “anti-slavery” is remembered only as a single position in opposition to slavery.

Returning to figures such as Angelina Grimké is tricky.  If the outcome is just a reassertion of standard interpretations of the triumph of white heroes over the power of “bad white people,” then we white folks haven’t really challenged ourselves in sufficiently meaningful ways. To access the full meaning of her legacy, I start from the belief that Grimké’s and my time have too much in common. The abolition of slavery did not open onto a wide expanse for the unfurling of Black freedom but rather to a condition that Canadian scholar Rinaldo Walcott poignantly names “the long emancipation.” Walcott’s work is not simply an argument about how slow progress is, but how devastating and unrelenting white domination continues to be. What does emancipation even mean when Black lives do not yet matter? In far too many ways, the ethical stakes and charge of the current moment resemble that of Grimké's time.

Learning from the Limits of White Anti-Slavery

While the terminology of anti-racism and structural racism are contemporary, their underlying meanings are not. And this is where Angelina Grimké stands out amongst her white anti-slavery peers. Over the course of her life, she came to understand that the moral argument against slavery had implications far beyond the abolition of slavery. That is, the moral argument against the system that converted “man into a thing” was also an argument for Black humanity. This more expansive understanding meant that Grimké also was against racial prejudice and the white superiority that rationalized it -- both of which were prominent in anti-slavery organizations. For example, historians including Shirley Yee and Manisha Sinha illuminate how racism within organized anti-slavery organizations treated Black abolitionists as “secondary,” maintaining separate seating areas and prohibiting them from speaking. 

Image from National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum

Moreover, over-emphasis placed on white leadership and organizations today repeats the side-lining of the free and enslaved African Americans who have always been on the frontline of freedom, forging their survival and communities in the face of unrelenting white prejudice and violence far beyond the border of the Mason-Dixon line. And yet, the names of only a few Black abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman are well-known or taught in schools, while the lives and contributions of Frances E.W. Harper, Elizabeth Freeman, Sarah Parker Redmond, Grace Douglass, Charlotte Forten (who married into the Grimké family) among others, are far less known. Returning to Grimké, thus, is a reminder of the reality that anti-slavery was not anti-racist by design: this should prompt a continued reckoning with how “good white people” harbor and reproduce the very systems we declare opposition to. 

Grimké spoke directly to this reality in her well-known epistle “An Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States” (1837) where she disquiets the complacency of white folks placated by their opposition to slavery from the distance of the North. She saw not the difference but the deep connections between the North and South:

The interests of the North, you must know, my friends, are very closely combined with those of the South. The Northern merchants and manufacturers are making their fortunes out of the produce of slave labour, the grocer is selling your rice and sugar; how then can these men bear a testimony against slavery without condemning themselves?”

Grimké grasped how racial capitalism widely benefited all of white society; she was equally concerned with reaching white audiences in the “nominally free” states as in the unfree South. Moreover, this awareness was linked to the realization that the North was no haven for free Blacks. Looking back to white abolitionists today, the enduring legacy lies more in the differences among them than in their “unified” opposition to slavery.

Thus, Grimké’s legacy resides not only in her individual views, but in how she related to Black abolitionists and their broader cause for dignity. For instance, Sarah Mapps Douglass was an important influence on Angelina Grimké, including her views on colonization -- the idea that free Blacks should emigrate to Africa to build a new permanent home. Through their letters and friendship, Grimké awakened to the racism that was prominent amongst white abolitionists in their anti-slavery and religious organizations. While the issue of colonization divided abolitionists Black and white, over time it became associated with racist whites (pro and anti-slavery alike) who did not want to live alongside free Blacks. Grimké listened to and was moved by Black abolitionists who decried the rampant anti-Black prejudice in the North. In a letter to Catherine Beecher she wrote:

“It is because I love the colored Americans that I want them to stay in this country; and in order to make it a happy home to them, I am trying to talk down, and write down, and live down this horrible prejudice.”  

Grimké’s friendship with Sarah Mapps Douglass is a legacy white anti-racists can draw from because it illuminates why it is paramount that white anti-racism follow the leadership and knowledge of those most affected by racism. We can and should applaud Grimké for the deep personal reflections that led to her anti-slavery convictions, but we should not mistake that self-reflection as the totality of the work of anti-racism. Ultimately, anti-racism is not about the feelings and needs of white folks even as we need to take responsibility for our role in perpetuating structural and interpersonal racism. Grimké started from that personal place, the daughter of a South Carolina slaver, and allowed it to grow out past the horizon of her personal views and experiences.

Art by Kaitlynn Radloff Justseeds

Finally, in looking for an enduring legacy in the life and relations of Angelina Grimké, she reminds us white folks that anti-racism by necessity is not easy or popular; if it were, white domination would not persist and persevere so easily. Having wrested herself from Southern culture and her heritage, Grimké was well aware of the sacrifices that anti-slavery required. She famously wrote in a letter to William Lloyd Garrison on the event of the violent pro-slavery riot in Boston in 1835 that she believed anti-slavery “is a cause worth dying for.”  The work of anti-racism has always meant grasping that racism is literally a life or death issue for people of color. White domination creates an existential crisis for Black, Indigenous and people of color. The dismantling of that is not easy. As Grimké experienced in her life, anti-racism is not popular, it runs against the grain, strains relationships, ruffles feathers; it has to come at a cost. For white folks, there is no dismantling of racism without giving something up and the first thing we need to give up is whiteness and white privilege. Writing in her recent book We Want To Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom, Dr. Bettina Love explains that for white folks to be anti-racist, “means you are ready to lose something, you are ready to let go of your privilege, you are ready to be in solidarity with dark people by recognizing your Whiteness in dark spaces, recognizing how it can take up space if unchecked, using your Whiteness in White spaces to advocate for and with dark people.” 

Angela Davis wrote in her classic text Women, Race & Class that the Grimké sisters, more than any other white women in the campaign against slavery, understood that “women could never achieve their freedom independently of Black people.” It appears that the protests against police brutality over the spring and summer of 2020 shook more white Americans awake, but being awakened (or “woke”) is not a state of being but rather a constant struggle. If there is an enduring legacy to claim from white abolitionists like Grimké, it is not a single view but a life lived in struggle in the long emancipation.