Editor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment. The man who would come to be called Harry Washington was born near the Gambia River, in West Africa, around 1740. As a young man, he was sold into slavery and endured the horrors of the Middle Passage. In Virginia, he was purchased by a neighbor of George Washington, who then bought the young man in 1763 for 40 pounds. After working to drain the colony’s Great Dismal Swamp—one of George Washington’s many land ventures—he was sent to Mount Vernon to care for the horses.Then came war. With General Washington in Massachusetts leading the Continental Army, Harry Washington, like thousands of other enslaved people, abandoned the plantation, risking torture and imprisonment, to join the British cause. In exchange for his freedom, he enlisted in what was known as the Ethiopian Regiment.Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, had created a base to oppose the rebels near the port of Norfolk in the summer of 1775. Encouraged by the large numbers of enslaved people who sought sanctuary behind British lines, he published the British empire’s first emancipation proclamation in November, granting liberty to any person in bondage, owned by Patriots, who would take up arms for King George III. These recruits—Harry Washington among them—formed the empire’s first Black regiment. Together with Dunmore, they launched what would amount to the biggest slave insurrection in the nation’s history until the Civil War. Their uniforms bore the motto “Liberty for Slaves”—a tart retort to the “Liberty or Death” slogan favored by Patriots.The prospect of freed Black men armed and trained by the British terrified white Patriots. George Washington, who had been a close friend of the royal governor before the war, now referred to him as “that Arch Traitor to the Rights of humanity.” He worried that Dunmore and his multiracial army (which also included regiments of British redcoats and white Loyalists) were fast becoming his own men’s “most formidable Enemy.” The Continental Congress made it the first mission of the U.S. Navy to crush Dunmore’s troops, and later sent General Charles Lee—second only to Washington in rank—to defeat them. Both campaigns failed.In May 1776, as the representatives in Philadelphia remained divided over whether to declare independence, the Virginia delegation—convinced that Dunmore’s alliance with Black Americans made negotiation with Britain impossible—broke the deadlock, unanimously urging separation from the mother country. Within months, a combination of Patriot artillery, smallpox, typhus, and drought forced Dunmore and his surviving soldiers and their families to retreat from Virginia to New York City. There, Harry Washington and others joined the successful British invasion of the city and were absorbed into the Black Pioneers, a military construction unit founded by British General Henry Clinton. Washington then went on to serve in an artillery unit in Charleston, South Carolina.By the war’s end, some 20,000 Black Americans had served as active members of the British military—about three times as many as had fought as Patriots—and many tens of thousands more had fled plantations to support the King’s cause by cooking, cleaning, and caring for livestock.Their motives for allying with the British, then the world’s foremost slave traffickers, were clear: Emancipation was not on the Continental Congress agenda. “Slaves are devils,” one Virginia Patriot wrote, “and to make them otherwise than slaves will be to set devils free.” For their part, British leaders like Dunmore did not necessarily oppose slavery or consider those in bondage to be their equal, but many were willing to back mass liberation as a tool to crush the rebellion. The unlikely alliances they forged set in motion a series of events that would, in time, help undermine the foundations of slavery on both sides of the Atlantic.Dunmore had made his decree without approval from London, but it was never repudiated. This encouraged General Clinton to issue his own in 1779, though he declined to arm Black men. That same year, the British commandant of New York, David Jones, proclaimed, “All Negroes that fly from the Enemy’s Country are Free—No person whatever can claim a right to them.” Not every British military leader agreed: When British General Lord Cornwallis invaded the South, he refused to consider freeing Black allies, much less arming them. Nevertheless, thousands volunteered to assist in the fight against their owners.In 1775, Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, published the British empire’s first emancipation proclamation. (Wikimedia)The British loss at Yorktown in 1781 was a catastrophe for the many Black Americans who now found themselves facing the prospect of being forced back into slavery. Some 10,000 scattered across four continents. They built the largest North American settlement of emancipated people, in Canada; melted into German city-states; eked out a precarious living on the streets of London; endured the brutality of Australia’s convict colony; and established the first home in Africa for people freed from bondage.The story of the Black Loyalists and their postwar diaspora highlights an irony long ignored: Thousands of those with the biggest stake in securing liberty ultimately had to flee a country founded on the premise that all are created equal.Almost as soon as Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown, marking the end of major military operations, victorious white Americans sought to recover what they considered their stolen property. Washington retrieved seven people who had fled Mount Vernon. Thomas Jefferson recovered five people, some of whom he later sold at auction. Virginia Governor Benjamin Harrison fruitlessly sought the return of Emanuel, “a good Barber”; Tabb, “a good cook”; John, “a house carpinter”; Gloucester, “a good Ship Carpenter and caulker”; Charles, “a house carpenter and Saw miller”; Dennis, a “very artful. Brush maker”; and Nedd, “an exceeding fine sailor but a great Rogue.”Cornwallis looked the other way when a few favored Black Loyalists boarded the Royal Navy warship Bonetta for transport to New York, which was still under British control. Other officers went further, evacuating large numbers of Black Americans, despite bitter protests by Patriot slave owners. During the British withdrawal from Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston in 1782, about 10,000 Black Americans sailed away. Scanty records make it difficult to determine their identities, their destinations, or even how many had been freed during the conflict. Some likely remained the property of white Loyalists who fled the young nation after their defeat. At least 3,000 Black Americans arrived in British-controlled St. Augustine, “and more are daily coming,” the governor of East Florida wrote. Others landed in Jamaica or the Bahamas, where many were trapped in bondage on pineapple and sugar plantations (slavery was still legal in much of the British empire). A British investigation found that a few unscrupulous officers had sold free people into bondage, though the authorities forbade the practice.At least 400 refugees reached England, where slavery was not legal but life was difficult nonetheless. A Quaker may have been referring to them when he observed in 1785 “the almost naked and miserable negro, prostrate at many a corner” in London. At least one Black American, John Caesar, was found guilty of theft and sent on the first fleet of ships bearing convicts to Australia, where he became a legendary figure who refused to bow to his jailers.Several dozen Black Americans, mostly young men who had served as drummers in mercenary Hessian units, made their way to Germany as free men. Their fates are difficult to track. One “prospered, married well, and had the gracious Landgrave himself”—a nobleman—“as a sponsor at his child’s baptism,” a historian writes. When another died in the city of Kassel, his corpse was dissected in the town’s anatomy theater, “proving to the astonished witnesses that under the black skin he was just like a white man.”By late 1782, New York was the sole American port still under British control. George Washington’s army was encamped about 60 miles north on the Hudson River as Harry Washington and thousands of his fellow Black Loyalists crowded into tenements and refugee camps across the city. Whether they would be surrendered to the victorious Patriots and returned to slavery or find freedom in some distant land remained uncertain.On November 30, 1782, American and British negotiators were in the final hours of completing a peace treaty in the drawing room of a Paris mansion when Henry Laurens, a wealthy South Carolinian planter, appeared at the door. Laurens had been captured in 1780 while crossing the Atlantic and imprisoned in the Tower of London. A year after being exchanged for Cornwallis, he arrived in Paris. Laurens was aghast when he learned that the Americans—Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and John Adams—were poised to sign a document that made no provision for the recovery of the men and women the Patriots had held in bondage.“Mr. Laurens said there ought to be a stipulation, that the British troops should carry off no Negroes, or other American property,” Adams wrote in his diary. “We all agreed. Mr. Oswald”—Richard Oswald, the lead British negotiator—“consented.” That consent was no surprise, given that Laurens had served as a slave-purchasing agent for Oswald, a Scottish merchant who had built a fortune as a major slave trader and plantation owner. Adams noted that the treaty was then “signed sealed, and delivered, and we all went … to dine with Dr. Franklin.”Word of the last-minute addition arrived in North America in early 1783. On April 15, the Continental Congress ordered General Washington to arrange for “the delivery of all Negroes and other property of the inhabitants of the United States in possession of the British forces.” Harrison, the governor of Virginia, made a personal plea to the general. “I observe by a clause in the articles we are to have our negroes again,” he wrote. “I have thirty missing, many of which I understand are dead, but there are still some that are very valuable.” He promised to cover the cost of their return to his plantations, insisting that “my well being depends on their being recovered.”By then, rumors were spreading that the commander in chief of the British forces, Sir Guy Carleton, would override the treaty by evacuating Black Americans. Panicked enslavers decided to act. On April 28, George Washington asked a New York–based merchant to locate and return some 20 enslaved people who had escaped Mount Vernon during the war, including Harry Washington. Boston King, a freed South Carolinian then living in the city, recalled in his 1798 memoir that “we saw our masters coming from Virginia, North Carolina, and other parts, and seizing upon their slaves in the streets of New York.” Such seizures, although likely limited by the presence of British troops, terrified Black Loyalists.George Washington, meanwhile, demanded a meeting with Carleton. He aimed to fix a date for the British withdrawal and insisted that the British return the Patriots’ enslaved property. Carleton responded that the American’s demand was “inconsistent with prior Engagements binding the National Honor, which must be kept with all colours.” Citing the Dunmore and Clinton proclamations, he explained that the Black Loyalists were already free. He would not allow them to be returned to bondage and subjected to severe punishment or perhaps even execution by their former owners.Washington ended the meeting abruptly. That night, in a letter to his British adversary, he warned that he was prepared to “take any measures which may be deemed expedient, to prevent the future carrying away of any Negroes.” The implication was that the Continental Army was prepared to march into New York City to recover people whom they considered Patriot property. Carleton stood firm, responding that as a British official, he had no right “to prevent their going to any part of the world they thought proper,” and adding archly that any “breach of the public faith towards people of any complection” reflected poorly on the new nation.Writing to Franklin in Paris, Elias Boudinot, the Confederation Congress president, said that the British move “has irritated the Citizens of America to an alarming Degree.” Members of Virginia’s assembly, which was made up mostly of slave-owning planters, recommended halting the release of British prisoners until Carleton reversed course. In Philadelphia, James Madison decried the British general’s decision as “a shameful evasion.” There was even discussion of reactivating the Continental Army, as Washington had hinted in his letter to Carleton. But Congress decided not to challenge the British, fearing, as one member put it, that “a renewal of hostilities might be the consequence.” Amid much grumbling, the idea was shelved.American enslavers hoped that King George would force Carleton’s compliance with the treaty provision, but the monarch gave the general’s interpretation his enthusiastic approval. The British secretary of state concluded that it was “certainly an act of justice due to them”—Black Loyalists—“from us.” An internal British-government memo accused Washington of acting in the matter “with all the Grossness and Ferocity of a Captain of Banditti.”Black Loyalists were grateful to learn that Carleton was not planning to leave them at the mercy of the Patriots. In the summer of 1783, they lined up outside Fraunces Tavern to request permission to leave New York. When their turn came, the men and women stood before a panel of British officers in the tavern’s Long Room—the same room where, a few months later, General Washington would give his farewell address to officers following the British evacuation of the city and the war’s official conclusion.At the end of July, Harry Washington and Boston King, along with his wife, Violet, boarded L’Abondance, a French cargo ship that had been captured by the British. Along with 3,000 others, they had received certificates of freedom signed by Brigadier General Samuel Birch, granting them permission “to go to Nova Scotia, or wherever else.” They would not allow themselves to be enslaved again.In a clearing carved out of dense forest in southwestern Nova Scotia, a striking modern building of glass and steel houses the Black Loyalist Heritage Centre. The museum commemorates what once was the largest free Black community outside Africa, made up of displaced Americans. Most of their descendants long ago moved away, but a restored church and school remain, along with battered house foundations hidden in thick foliage.The 410 passengers on L’Abondance landed nearby, at the port of Shelburne. The Indigenous Mi’kmaq had long lived there, but British officials were eager to repopulate an area that was sparsely settled after the eviction of Acadians—descendants of French colonizers—in the 1750s. Lured by promises of free land, copious provisions, and no taxes, white American Loyalists were flocking to the site, and many brought their human chattel, who would remain enslaved in their new home.The emancipated Black refugees, who also were promised British support, immediately encountered indifference from the authorities and outright hostility from the white Americans. Most were denied sufficient land and supplies; they were forced to seek menial work for low wages, which angered unemployed white residents. Less than a year after the Black refugees arrived, in July 1784, a mob attacked and destroyed nearly two dozen of their homes on Shelburne’s outskirts. “Some thousands of people assembled with clubs and drove the Negroes out of the town,” one Nova Scotian reported. Only the arrival of British troops halted the brutality. Many displaced residents retreated to a Black settlement across the harbor, called Birchtown after the man who had certified their freedom. But interminable winters, inadequate rations, and continued white wrath made survival an ongoing struggle.On Nova Scotia’s west coast, in the town of Annapolis Royal, Thomas Peters encountered similarly desperate conditions. Peters, who was born in Africa, had been enslaved in North Carolina. He had made his way to New York in 1776 and joined the Black Pioneers. With his wife, Sally, and their two children, Peters took part in the exodus to Nova Scotia in 1783, and soon emerged as the leader of his community’s 200 Black Loyalists, scraping by as a millwright while awaiting his promised acreage.In 1790, still waiting, Peters, then 52, sailed to London to put forward the grievances of his people. Any Black man traveling alone by ship risked re-enslavement by a rapacious crew, but Peters arrived safely with his petition, and through the abolitionist Granville Sharp was able to get it to British government officials.Sharp had spearheaded a 1787 effort to create a Province of Freedom on the West African coast, recruiting members of London’s poor Black community. More than 400 settlers, including freed Black Americans, had landed in St. George’s Bay, about 500 miles south of the Gambia River, to found Granville Town. But conflict with local peoples, most of whom had recently converted to Islam and resented the Christian invaders, soon led to the settlement’s dissolution.Sharp and his fellow abolitionists Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce were now attempting an approach that offered commercial as well as moral benefits, wooing investors with the promise that a West African colony of free Black people would prove of “great national importance to the Manufactories, and other Trading Interests of this Kingdom.” Shortly after Peters’s arrival, they had overcome fierce opposition from slave interests to create the Sierra Leone Company. Although they’d had little success enlisting settlers for this new venture, Peters was excited to hear of their plans, and his enthusiasm reinvigorated the stalled project.He returned to Nova Scotia with the task of persuading Black Loyalists to once again relocate, this time across the Atlantic. Thomas Clarkson’s younger brother, John, a naval officer in his 20s, accompanied Peters as the company representative. While Peters went to the province’s west coast, Clarkson sailed down the east coast to drum up recruits in Birchtown. He was shocked to find the people there “kept in the most abject state of servitude.”On a rainy late-October day in 1791, hundreds of people crammed into the Methodist chapel to question Clarkson. They knew of the disaster that had befallen Granville Town; they wanted assurances of land, provisions, and no annual rent in their prospective new home. Clarkson sympathized. “People will not consider how often they have been deceived and how suspicious they are in consequence,” he wrote, “and how necessary it is to be open and candid with them.” This time, he insisted, would be different.Some of the Black Loyalists remained unconvinced. Stephen Blucke, a former Black Pioneers officer and a leading citizen of Birchtown, denounced the plan and predicted “utter annihilation.” Still, 514 of the town’s residents signed up within three days, with more expected to join; Peters gathered 132 others.In December, Harry Washington, Boston and Violet King, and hundreds of others gathered in Halifax to prepare to emigrate. Clarkson, not Peters, would lead the voyage. The Nova Scotia governor, who had given his blessing to the venture, called Clarkson “a fit person, to have the charge of the said Free Blacks.”On January 15, 1792, 1,196 passengers, each with a document guaranteeing their right to a plot of land in Africa, boarded 15 ships and set sail.The settlers, a mix of ardent Baptists and Methodists, came ashore in Sierra Leone in March 1792 singing “The Year the Jubilee Is Come.” Harry Washington and Thomas Peters were some of only a handful of passengers who had seen Africa before. Most had parents and grandparents born in North America. The historian Ira Berlin has written that these newcomers brought to West Africa a peculiarly American brand of “evangelical Christianity, commercial capitalism, and political republicanism.” They called their coastal settlement Freetown.John Clarkson’s sketch of the 15 ships that sailed from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone in 1792 (The New York Historical)Less than 20 miles upstream stood the notorious British slave-trading fort on Bunce Island, which remained in operation. The colonists also had to navigate relations with the Indigenous peoples in the area, much as their predecessors in Granville Town had. But the primary tensions were between the Black settlers and their managers, an eight-person governing council of white men. John Clarkson, who had been named governor, had only a single vote. But although Clarkson had limited power, Peters was excluded from governance altogether. Within weeks, with supplies dwindling and no land allotted, the colonists chafed under “the obnoxious arrogance of their rulers,” according to Anna Maria Falconbridge, who was married to the colony’s surgeon and wrote the first history of the settlement.On Easter Sunday, a month after landing, Peters confronted John Clarkson with a petition outlining the settlers’ grievances. Perceiving this as a direct challenge to his authority, Clarkson ordered the town’s bell rung and declared publicly that “one or other of us would be hanged upon that tree” before the dispute was settled. The assembled crowd, spooked by this sudden ultimatum, declined to back Peters, who stalked away in disgust.Peters’s sudden death two months later, likely from malaria, removed the biggest challenge to Clarkson’s rule. But on the day he died, the settlers presented the governor with two petitions, including one insisting that Black men serve as peace officers. “We can have rules and Regulations among ourselves,” they argued, while still honoring British law. Clarkson negotiated a compromise, but he was locked in his own disputes with company directors in London, who demanded immediate financial returns. He sailed for Britain at the end of 1792, promising to advocate for the settlers.In London, however, the company refused to abide by the pledges Clarkson had made in Nova Scotia. He was dismissed, never to return to Freetown. Still, Black settlers continued to send him letters in subsequent years requesting his intervention on their behalf—a tragic testament to the trust they placed in him long after he had moved on, as well as a sign of their mounting desperation.The council in Sierra Leone, meanwhile, ignored the pleas for land by Black settlers, who continued to fight for their dignity. “We have not the Education which White Men have,” a 1793 petition stated, “yet we have feeling the same as other human beings.” That summer, the settlers Cato Perkins and Isaac Anderson, veterans of Dunmore’s regiment, sailed to London to present the complaint to the company directors, asking for “nothing but what you Promised us.” The directors refused to consider the petition.Freetown’s Black settlers eventually organized their own legal system and elected an assembly; the white overseers refused to recognize it. And so, in 1800, the heads of 150 families, likely representing about half the settlement’s homes, met to announce that their law system would soon go into effect, essentially declaring independence from the white-controlled government. One of them was Harry Washington. When the colony’s marshal attempted to arrest the faction’s leaders, Washington retreated to the outskirts of town with 40 or so others.The British quickly put down the uprising and captured the rebels. Thirty-one men were tried for “open and unprovoked rebellion.” Two were hanged. Others, including Washington, were banished to the far shore of the Sierra Leone River. Washington was named the head of this group, but the paper trail ends there. His final fate is unknown.The Sierra Leone Company did not survive the turmoil, and the British government took over Sierra Leone in 1808, a year after Parliament outlawed the slave trade. The new governor was appalled to find a colony of “runaway slaves” filled with “absurd enthusiasm” in their religion and “wild notions of liberty” in their politics. They displayed, he added, “everything that is vile in the American.”Relations between the British rulers and Black settlers remained tense. After 1819, the Royal Navy used Freetown as a base for its anti-slaving campaign, a relocation center for those intercepted on slave ships, and, soon after, the capital of British West Africa. Occasional rebellions were brutally suppressed. Only in 1961 did Sierra Leone’s Black population gain independence.Today, citizens in Sierra Leone and Nova Scotia continue to honor their Black American roots, but elsewhere the diaspora that followed the American Revolution has been largely forgotten. It ought not to be; the unlikely alliance between British military leaders and enslaved Americans, in fact, helped plant the seeds for broader emancipation.Individuals like Washington and Peters demonstrated that those who had been enslaved were as willing to fight and die for the British empire as any other redcoat, chipping away at entrenched notions of racial inferiority. And in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, they boldly demanded equal justice, representation in government, and a measure of prosperity. After imposing its 1807 ban on the slave trade, Britain abolished slavery throughout the empire in 1833.In the young United States, enslavers did not soon forget what they saw as Britain’s theft of their property. But American abolitionists such as John Quincy Adams would come to view Britain’s wartime proclamations as important legal precedents in their own struggle to end lifetime servitude.A Massachusetts lawyer named Benjamin Butler had also studied the British documents. When the Civil War began in 1861, he was made commander of Fort Monroe, near Norfolk, which remained in Union hands. Shortly after Butler arrived, three enslaved men who had been ordered to dig trenches for the Confederates sought refuge at the fort; General Butler declared them spoils of war and refused to hand them over to the enemy. “Out of this incident seems to have grown one of the most sudden and important revolutions in popular thought which took place during the whole war,” wrote two of President Abraham Lincoln’s secretaries.Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts privately lobbied Lincoln to emancipate and arm Black Americans, but the president feared this move would incur a court challenge from white northerners. Sumner, however, insisted that the edicts made by British leaders like Dunmore during the Revolution provided the necessary legal cover.This argument eventually persuaded Lincoln. His famous 1863 Emancipation Proclamation was, like those made some nine decades before, tentative and conditional. This time, however, it sounded the death knell for the American institution of slavery.“Hats and bonnets were in the air, and we have three cheers for Abraham Lincoln,” Frederick Douglass wrote after witnessing a reading of the decree in New York City. “And three cheers for about everybody else.” Those cheers should sound for Black Patriots who fought for American independence, as well as for exiled Black Loyalists like Harry Washington, who helped pave the way for a nation more willing to uphold its most vaunted ideal.Support for this article was provided by the British Library’s Eccles Institute for the Americas and Oceania Philip Davies Fellowship. It appears in the November 2025 print edition with the headline “The Black Loyalists.”