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In February of 1778, with George Washington’s army starving and Rhode Island unable to fill its own regiments, the Rhode Island General Assembly passed a law few people outside of dedicated historians have ever heard of. Any enslaved man who enlisted in the state’s Continental battalions would be immediately freed. Nearly ninety men took that offer in the following four months, joining free Black men and dozens of Narragansett soldiers to form what became one of the most effective fighting units in the Continental Army – the 1st Rhode Island Regiment.
But the law that created this opportunity was never an act of abolitionist conviction. Slaveowners were compensated in cash for every man who enlisted, and the program itself was repealed within sixteen weeks once political opposition mounted. The freedom offered was real, but it was also transactional – purchased by the state, not granted out of principle.
The Black Regiment: Service and Sacrifice
The men who enlisted before the law closed went on to serve with distinction through the rest of the war, including the pivotal 1781 assault on British lines at Yorktown. By the war’s end in 1783, they had fulfilled every condition of the bargain that had freed them. The regiment earned the nickname the Black Regiment – one of the few Continental Army units composed largely of Black and Indigenous soldiers, and by most accounts one of the toughest.
What followed was a slower, quieter story. In 1785, Rhode Island passed a law shifting financial responsibility for destitute Black veterans from the state onto individual towns. No federal pension mechanism existed for veterans in need until 1818, and none covering all veterans regardless of need until 1832 – meaning a twenty-year-old who enlisted in 1778 would be nearly seventy-five before any law fully addressed what he was owed.
The Pension System and Who It Failed
By the 1830s, the outcomes for these aging veterans varied sharply. Cato Greene, backed by a written attestation from his former commanding officer, had his Revolutionary War pension claim approved. Jehu Grant, who had separately escaped enslavement in Narragansett in 1777 to serve as a wagoner, was denied – first on the grounds that his labor didn’t constitute soldiering, and later, more specifically, because his service had been performed while he was a fugitive from his enslaver.
The very act that made him eligible for freedom became the legal justification for denying him the reward for it. Grant died in 1840, blind and in poverty, having never received a pension.
In the same decade, fellow regiment veteran Guy Watson of South Kingstown was publicly honored at Fourth of July parades – a reminder that the system’s failures were not uniform, but deeply inconsistent, with outcomes often depending on who was still alive to vouch for a man’s service.
An Accounting That Was Never Closed
More than two hundred fifty years later, descendants of these soldiers continue working toward fuller public recognition of the regiment’s history. There is pending legislation to award the 1st Rhode Island Regiment a Congressional Gold Medal – a sign that the accounting this story describes was never formally closed. It simply stopped being anyone’s assigned responsibility to finish.
Sources: Rhode Island General Assembly legislative records; National Archives Revolutionary War pension files; Robert A. Geake, From Slaves to Soldiers: The 1st Rhode Island Regiment in the American Revolution; Journal of the American Revolution.
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