Originally named First Colored Baptist Church and located in Savannah, Georgia, First African Baptist Church traces its roots to December 1777 and is officially designated the oldest African American church in the United States.  The roots of the black Baptist tradition can be traced to three men: George Leile, David George, and Andrew Bryan.  Ordained May 20, 1775, George Leile is recognized as the first ordained black Baptist pastor in Georgia. He converted to Christianity in 1773.

It is believed that the first black Baptist congregation was formed in 1773 in Silver Bluff, South Carolina on the Galphin Plantation, 14 miles northwest of Savannah, Georgia, through the efforts of Rev. Wait Palmer (white founder of the First Baptist Church of Stonington, Connecticut) and George Leile.  Galphin allowed his enslaved population to worship under the leadership of his slave, David George, in an empty barn on the plantation.  David George was baptized and trained under the tutelage of Leile, who was evangelizing up and down the Savannah River between present-day Augusta and Savannah, Georgia.  Under George's leadership, the congregation’s number gradually increased to more than 30. In 1778, when their Patriot master abandoned the plantation under British advance, the whole Silver Bluff group fled to British lines in Savannah.

Peter Salem was born a slave to Jeremiah Belknap at Framingham, Massachusetts about 1750.  Belknap sold Salem to Lawson Buckminister some time before the Revolutionary War.  Buckminister allowed Salem to enlist in the Massachusetts Minutemen.  According to one story, his master freed him upon his enlistment.  Another account states that Peter changed his name to Salem when he was freed.  Some have attempted to link Peter’s last name with the Arabic “Saleem” (one who is peaceful); however there is no concrete evidence that this is the case.

Salem served at Concord, Saratoga and Stony Point.  He is traditionally given credit for the slaying of British Major Pitcairn at Bunker Hill.  Pitcairn had ordered the colonists to surrender.  Salem shot him in answer.  In the ensuing confusion, the Americans were able to take the field.  Pitcairn died of his wounds.  The gun attributed to Salem’s deed is part of the museum collection at Bunker Hill.

African American patriot Salem Poor of Andover, Massachusetts fought with distinction in the American Revolution. He purchased his freedom in 1769 for 27 pounds (about one year’s salary).  Soon after, he married a freedwoman named Nancy by whom he had a son.  In May of 1775 Poor enlisted in the Continental Army and distinguished himself at the Battle of Bunker Hill (Charlestown) where he was sent to assist in the building of fortifications.  Six months later, white veterans petitioned the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to recognize Poor’s exemplary service at the Battle of Charlestown, citing that he had ”behaved like an experienced officer.”   His comrades stated that in Poor “centers a brave and gallant soldier.”  “To set forth particulars of his conduct would be tedious.” Of the thousands of American soldiers at Bunker Hill no other was given such recognition.

Born in West Africa, Prince Mortimer was captured by slave traders as a young boy. After enduring a brutal passage to the Americas, he arrived in Connecticut around 1730.  In the late 1750s he was sold in Middletown, Connecticut to Philip Mortimer, who trained him to work as a spinner of ropes.  Alternately dubbed “Guinea” and “Prince Negro,” Prince in time became a valuable senior spinner in Mortimer’s prosperous ropework.  During the American Revolution Prince served various officers and was sent on errands by George Washington.  

Although many Connecticut slaves were freed after their Revolutionary service, Prince was not.  His sufferings as a slave were compounded by yaws, a painful tropical disease similar to leprosy that caused cartilage to deteriorate and left terrible scars.  He would have been freed upon Philip Mortimer’s death in 1794 had not Mortimer’s son-in-law, George Starr, contested and succeeded in overturning Mortimer’s will. In December 1811, at the age of 87, Prince was accused of poisoning his new master, Captain George Starr, and was sentenced to life in prison.  His fellow slave, Jack Mortimer, also was accused.

This historic proclamation, dated November 7, 1775 and issued from on board a British warship lying off Norfolk, Virginia, by royal governor and Scottish aristocrat John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, offered the first large-scale emancipation of slave and servant labor in the history of colonial British America. It grew out of Dunmore’s efforts to counter an impending attack on his capital of Williamsburg by patriot militia in the spring of 1775, when he several times threatened to free and arm slaves to defend the cause of royal government.  By the time he retreated offshore he was already gathering slaves seeking refuge; his November proclamation commanding Virginians to support the crown or be judged traitors now formally offered freedom to all slaves and indentured servants belonging to rebels and able to bear arms for the crown. Within weeks, several hundred slaves, many with their families, had joined him. They enlisted in what Dunmore christened his “Ethiopian Regiment” and formed the bulk of the royal troops that first defeated patriot forces but then fell victim to disease and attack, evacuating the Chesapeake Region for New York by August 1776.

Henry Washington, slave, loyalist, and colonizer, was born in Africa, perhaps in the Senegambia. Transported as a slave to America, he was bought by George Washington in 1763 to work on a project for draining the Great Dismal Swamp.  By 1766, he was living at Mount Vernon, caring for Washington’s horses.  Briefly a runaway in 1771, he fled again in 1776 to join royal Virginia governor Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment of freed slaves.

John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, formed what he termed “Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment” in the fall of 1775 from the several hundred slaves who escaped their servitude to join him, as he fled Williamsburg to organize a small army of loyalists and British soldiers on the coast near Norfolk.  In November, Dunmore published a proclamation promising freedom to servants and slaves able to bear arms, and enough joined him to make up half of the force that first routed the Virginia militia at Kemp’s Landing and then, in December, suffered a devastating defeat at Great Bridge on the Elizabeth River.  By then, Dunmore reported to London, that nearly three hundred men of the Ethiopian Regiment were clad in uniforms embroidered with the provocative words “liberty to slaves.” Patriot writers reacted with fear and fury to the threat posed by this first systematic freeing and arming of the South’s black labor force.

In the months that followed, the Regiment served in the evacuation of Norfolk and in marine service around the Chesapeake. Two shore camps had to be abandoned after smallpox and other diseases took a heavy toll. In August, Dunmore took his depleted force to New York, where the Regiment was disbanded.  Many of its survivors remained in British service. Among them were Henry Washington and Thomas Peters, who served in Pioneer units through the war and then found free lives in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone.

Prince Whipple fought at the battles of Saratoga and in Delaware during the War for Independence.  He was also one of twenty enslaved men who petitioned the New Hampshire legislature for freedom in 1779.  His owner, General William Whipple, was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and an aide to General George Washington.  Although Whipple has been identified by some as the African American figure in the familiar painting of Washington crossing the Delaware River, it is doubtful he was present on Christmas Eve, 1776.

From the late seventeenth century onwards, a few American colonists, mostly Quakers, had expressed their moral opposition to the spread of black slavery throughout British America.  It was not until the coming of the Revolution, however, that the first concerted protests arose, first against the continued importation of slaves and then against slavery itself, as contrary to the liberties and natural rights for which the war was being fought.  Some New England states adopted immediate emancipation: Vermont’s 1777 constitution explicitly outlawed slavery and in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, a series of judicial interpretations during the 1780s declared the institution in violation of the bills of rights contained in their new state constitutions.  Elsewhere in the northern states, a policy of gradual emancipation was adopted, in Pennsylvania in 1780 and Rhode Island and Connecticut in 1784, but not until 1799 and 1804 in New York and New Jersey. This legislation provided for those born into slavery after the act to be freed at a certain age (21 in Pennsylvania and 28 in New York), so that masters would still receive the bulk of their slaves’ working lives as compensation for their ultimate loss of “property.” Slavery was excluded from the territories north and west of the Ohio River.  Still further north, British Canada harbored several thousand former slaves freed by British forces during the revolutionary war.

Crispus Attucks was born in Framingham, Massachusetts in 1723. Unusually tall for the era at six feet, two inches, Attucks was the son of an African American man and an American Indian woman.  It is believed that he was the slave reported by the Boston Gazette, on October 2, 1750 who escaped from his master, William Brown, at the age of 27. Apparently, Attucks had a passion for freedom for himself and for the colonies to decide their own destiny. Perhaps this motivated him to march the streets of Boston advocating America’s independence from England. His activities gave him a place in history as the first among “five martyrs” who fell during the night of the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770.

The tale of the Boston Massacre has been told innumerable times. The citizens of Boston had been feeling harassed by the British “red coats.” The time came when “[a] group of citizens, apparently led by a tall robust man with a dark face appeared on the scene.” This man was Crispus Attucks, the first American to fall in the American Revolution, who paid with his life for confronting the British soldiers.

Fraunces Tavern at 54 Pearl Street, New York City, played an important role during the American Revolution.  Originally built in 1719 as a home to a New York colonial leader, it was sold to Samuel Fraunces (1722-95), a merchant of French-West Indian ancestry in 1762.  Fraunces converted the home into the “Queen’s Head Tavern.”   Fraunces was popular with New York City’s elite and many patronized his tavern.  In 1768, these patrons established the first New York Chamber of Commerce at Fraunces Tavern.  

In 1765, Fraunces Tavern’s prominence in the American Revolution grew after a British captain tried to unload tea into New York City.  The captain was later forced to issue a public apology at Fraunces Tavern.  By 1774, the Sons of Liberty and other organizations often used the tavern to mobilize support for the Revolution.  In 1775, when the patriots commandeered the British cannons at Manhattan and fired upon some British soldiers, the British returned fire and sent a cannonball through the tavern’s roof.     

John Chavis, early 19th Century minister and teacher, was born on October 18, 1763.  His place of birth is debated by historians.  Some scholars think that Chavis hailed from the West Indies.  Others believe that he was born in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, or that he was born in North Carolina.  Available records document that Chavis was a free African American who probably worked for Halifax, Virginia attorney James Milner beginning in 1773.   It is likely that Chavis utilized the books in Milner’s extensive law library to educate himself.  

In 1778, while still a teenager, Chavis entered the Virginia Fifth Regiment and fought in the Revolutionary War.  He served in the Fifth Regiment for three years.  In the 1780s Chavis earned his living as a tutor and while working in this capacity he married Sarah Frances Anderson.  Although an excellent teacher, Chavis’ own intellectual capacity was not satisfied.  He soon moved his family to New Jersey to enter a tutorial program with John Witherspoon, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.  In 1792, at the age of 29, Chavis was accepted into the College of New Jerseys’ Theological School; later renamed Princeton University.   

James Armistead [Lafayette] was an African American spy during the American Revolution. Born in Virginia as a slave to William Armistead in 1760, he volunteered to join the army in 1781. After gaining the consent of his owner, Armistead was stationed to serve under the Marquis de Lafayette, the commander of French forces allied with the American Continental Army.  Lafayette employed Armistead as a spy.  While working for Lafayette he successfully infiltrated British General Charles Cornwallis's headquarters posing as a runaway slave hired by the British to spy on the Americans.

While pretending to be a British spy, Armistead gained the confidence of General Benedict Arnold and General Cornwallis. Arnold was so convinced of Armistead's pose as a runaway slave that he used him to guide British troops through local roads. Armistead often traveled between camps, spying on British officers, who spoke openly about their strategies in front of him. Armistead documented this information in written reports, delivered them to other American spies, and then return to General Cornwallis's camp.

Born in 1753 as Titus, ‘Tye’ was one of four slaves owned by Quaker John Corlies from Shrewsbury, Monmouth County, New Jersey. In November 1775, when Titus was 22 years old, Lord John Murray Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation that not only declared martial law, but also offered freedom to those slaves who would join the royal forces. Titus along with 300 other escaped slaves fled to join the British, assuming the adopted name of Tye and joining the Royal Ethiopian Regiment. Here he quickly found respect and saw his first action at the Battle of Monmouth on June 28, 1778, during which he captured a rebel militia captain.

The Black Loyalists were the approximately 3,000 African American supporters of the British during the American Revolution who were repatriated to British Canada at the end of the conflict.   Most settled in Nova Scotia and established what would be for decades, the largest concentration of black residents in Canada and what was at the time the largest settlement of free blacks outside Africa.

The Black Loyalists who fought for Great Britain believed they were fighting not only for their own freedom, but for the ultimate abolition of slavery in North America. The British commitment to the these loyalists began when Virginia's Royal Governor, Lord Dunmore, issued a proclamation promising freedom to all Virginia slaves who supported the British and the white Loyalist allies.  

Born in Africa and enslaved in America, Thomas Peters is best known for his influence in settling Canadian blacks in the African colony of Sierra Leone. The earliest documentation of Peters’ life is as a 38-year-old slave in North Carolina.  When the Revolutionary War began in 1775, Peters escaped to British-occupied territory.

In 1776 Peters joined an all black regiment in the British Army called the Black Pioneers. During his service there, he was promoted to the rank of sergeant. When the Revolutionary War ended the Black Pioneers were among the thousands of Loyalists transported by the British Navy to the north shore of Nova Scotia and then on to New Brunswick. Peters soon became the recognized leader of the New Brunswick and Nova Scotia black communities, representing their concerns to provincial authorities.

In the process, he met abolitionist Granville Sharp, who had developed a plan to create a settlement of free blacks in Africa. He saw in the plight of the Canadian loyalists the opportunity to recruit additional settlers for his African colony.  Sharp immediately offered Peters and his Nova Scotian followers a new promised land in the “Province of Freedom” Sierra Leone.

Boston King, one of the pioneer settlers of Sierra Leone, was born enslaved on the Richard Waring plantation near Charleston, South Carolina around 1760. Through the age of 16, King was trained as a house servant before being sent to apprentice as a carpenter in Charleston. In 1780, when British troops occupied Charleston during the American Revolution, King fled to the British garrison and gained his freedom.  King was first a servant to British officers but like many black male Loyalists he joined the British Army. He worked mostly as a carpenter but on one occasion he carried an important dispatch through enemy lines, which saved 250 British soldiers at Nelson’s Ferry, South Carolina. Later, as a crewmember on a British warship, King participated in the capture of a rebel ship in Chesapeake Bay.

King was himself later captured and re-enslaved by the American navy but managed to escape as the war drew to a close.  Sometime in 1781 he married Violet, another runaway from Wilmington, North Carolina, and they both moved to British-occupied New York where he again worked as a servant.  

Charles Lewis was a sailor and soldier during the American Revolutionary War.  Lewis was born sometime around 1760 in Spotsylvania County, Virginia on Bel Aire, the Lewis Family Plantation owned by John Lewis. John and a free mulatto woman, Josephine Lewis, were the parents of Charles and his younger brother, Ambrose.  Lewis and his brother were born free but their mother was indentured to John Lewis. 

On April 15, 1776, Charles Lewis and his brother entered into the naval service of Virginia when they served on board the Galley Page, a warship commanded by Captain James Markham.  On March 20, 1778, they entered the Naval Service of the United States when they joined the crew of the USS Dragon commanded by Captain Eleazor Callender.