Black soldiers stand beside British
Originally written by Peter Fay for the Jamestown Press December 24, 2025
Editor’s note: This is the second and final part of Peter Fay’s “Burning of Jamestown” article. Part 1 appeared in the Dec. 18 edition.
The Rev. Ezra Stiles recorded a curious observation when the British navy burned houses in Jamestown 250 years ago. He wrote that the landing force included “200 marines, sailors and negroes at the East Ferry.”
In fact, all American sources mentioned the participation of African-Americans in Capt. James Wallace’s raid and burning of Jamestown: Providence and Newport newspapers, journal entries and letters of rebel commanders. Yet none of the British naval logs or loyalist accounts mentioned the inclusion of African-Americans among their party.
For a century, African-American and Native American sailors participated in Newport’s maritime trades and privateering, but never in aiding their enemies. One sailor reported to rebel authorities in 1776 that these men were not ad hoc auxiliaries but regulars: “Wallace has about thirty negroes … who are entered and receive pay.” They appear to have been largely free, wage-earning men rather than enslaved laborers, and they aided the British by choice.
A week after the burning, Gen. Nathanael Greene wrote to Samuel Ward in the Continental Congress expressing alarm that “Col. Joseph Wanton’s Negroes piloted Wallace’s crew about the Island and pointed out the Houses to burn. He deserves to be taken up as much as any Tory upon the Continent.”
Greene’s spies in Newport likely warned him that Wanton used African-Americans in his employ or control to help identify rebel supporters.
Wanton was a wealthy Newport merchant, shipowner, slave trader and committed loyalist. Stiles recorded that he once counted eight of Wanton’s ships afloat in Newport harbor. Wanton also had deep roots in Jamestown, owning a 144-acre farm north of Weeden Lane, part of Dutch Island and all of Gould Island. Through his businesses he commanded a large workforce of Black and Native
American seamen and laborers on local wharves and farms, whom he made available to the British navy. Their individual identities are unknown, though British records do note one Jamestown farm laborer named Lancaster, described as being “owned by Col. Wanton.”
What most alarmed Greene was not simply Black allegiance to the British, but the strategic value of their local knowledge, which enabled them to identify rebel households. He may also have sensed the vulnerability this exposed. Almost all rebels, like loyalists, were themselves slaveowners. African-American participation in the raid thus carried added significance, occurring only weeks after Lord Dunmore’s November 1775 proclamation promising freedom to rebel-owned slaves who fled their masters and joined British forces.
Many African-Americans residing in Jamestown were still enslaved at the time of the raid. For them, the burning may have demonstrated a tangible path to freedom through British protection – one that deeply alarmed rebel leaders. Greene warned fellow revolutionaries of the “mischief” Dunmore’s policy might bring to “the Grand Cause” of independence.
A week after the raid, the rebel aligned Providence Gazette reprinted a southern call for Dunmore to be “publicly tried and hanged, as the most atrocious criminal that ever appeared in America.” British promises of freedom threatened the rebel cause; at least until a comparable prospect was offered two years later through the 1st Rhode Island Regiment, which enlisted freed slaves.
Greene’s nemesis, Wallace, by contrast, praised Dunmore for having “declared all the Negroes belonging to Rebels Free,” noting that his armed Royal Ethiopian Regiment grew to “two thousand strong … and that numbers join him every day.” By the end of the war, between 20,000 and 40,000 slaves fled to British lines in pursuit of freedom.
Some of those refugees were from Jamestown. Jenny Toney, a 52-year-old “worn out” Black woman “formerly the property of Daniel Underwood,” boarded a British ship with 14-year-old Judy Weeden to Nova Scotia and settled on land granted by the British.
Jamestown’s burning was not an inexplicable atrocity but a calculated episode in a brutal civil war. It arose from a rebel pre-dawn attack on a British party requisitioning livestock and escalated into reprisals consistent with patterns already seen across the New England coast. Each party acted according to its interests: imperial authorities sought to sustain control of an unstable empire; farmers aligned themselves with imperial commerce to their advantage; and Black sailors sided with British promises of freedom against rebels who, at that moment, offered only continued bondage.
It would be another two years before rebel forces, unable to recruit enough white soldiers to meet Gen. George Washington’s quotas, authorized the purchase of enslaved Black soldiers from their owners in exchange for military service, founding the Rhode Island Black Regiment.
