In the ensuing Revolution, blacks fought on both the British and the
rebel side; but much more common in the confusion of the times was flight.
Herbert Aptheker has estimated that 80,000 to 100,000 blacks took the
opportunity to flee. John Hope Franklin quotes Thomas Jefferson as saying
that “in 1778 alone more than 30,000 Virginia slaves ran away.” Franklin
adds that David Ramsay, a contemporary South Carolinian historian,
“asserted that between 1775 and 1783 his state lost at least 25,000
Negroes.” Neighboring Georgia, upon joining the Continental Association
in January 1775, declared slavery to be an
unnatural practice... founded in injustice and cruelty, and highly dan-
gerous to our liberty (as well as our lives) debasing part of our fellow
creatures below men, and corrupting the virtue and morals of the rest,
and is laying the basis of that liberty we contend for... upon a very
wrong foundation.The blacks certainly agreed with this sentiment. As many as 11,000 of the
15,000 held as slaves in Georgia used the outbreak of war as a chance to
run for freedom.
It is evident that—like the Indians, to whom I turn next—blacks were
repelled by the American colonists, disregarded what they knew of the
colonists’ ringing pronouncements on liberty, and thought their own best
hope lay with the British. Their actions on the eve of the Revolution cer-
tainly make clear that, despite the tragedy of their early residence in
America, “This celestial spark [of liberty was] not extinguished in the
bosom of the slave.”
Blacks in America 185