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Quarter Miles Travel With Annita

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The Adventure begins when you reach into your pocket. Each U.S. Mint Commemorative Quarter design tells a unique story. Each quarter is filled with pride, from hometown heroes to iconic landmarks; wildlife and nature to music and culture. Reach into your pocket and let Quarter Miles Travel take it from there, we’ll turn that quarter into an adventure.

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July 13, 2026

Episode 52: Joe and The Alamo – Little Known Stories

<h2 style="text-align: center;">Joe and The Alamo – Little Known Stories</h2> <h3 style="text-align: center;">The Last Man Standing Joe the Battle of The Alamo, and the testimony that became history</h3> <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-81817 aligncenter" src="https://www.travelwithannita.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/1f0e0d8d-fc47-4f9e-afbe-d9e0fd8afc71-800x640.jpeg" alt="" width="800" height="640" /> There were many stories on the wagon trail. To understand what Joe did, you first have to understand what he wasn’t supposed to do at all. He wasn’t a soldier. Nobody swore him in. Nobody handed him a rank. He was, in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of the man who owned him, property, a twenty-year-old enslaved man named Joe, body servant to a twenty-six-year-old lieutenant colonel named William Barret Travis. Joe pressed his master’s clothes. Saddled his horse. Drove his carriage into town. That was the job. That was supposed to be the whole of his story.Here on Quarter Miles Travel – Well say his name and we tell his story. In December of 1835, Travis was ordered to the Texas frontier, to a small town built around a crumbling Spanish mission, San Antonio de Béxar. He brought Joe with him. Not as a companion. As equipment – as property. They arrived on February 5th, 1836. Within three weeks, everything about that place would become permanent carved into American memory for two hundred years. The mission was called the Alamo. On February 23rd, Mexican forces under General Antonio López de Santa Anna poured into San Antonio far faster than the Texans expected. Santa Anna raised a blood-red flag over the bell tower of San Fernando Church, a message with only one meaning: no mercy, no quarter, no surrender terms. Travis answered with a single cannon shot. For the next thirteen days, roughly two hundred men, Travis, Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, and the volunteers who’d gathered behind the Alamo’s crumbling walls, held out against a force that outnumbered them many times over. And for thirteen days, Joe was there too.He didn’t get a say in whether to stay and fight or to run. He shared every hour of it anyway, the cold, the hunger, the exhaustion, the slow realization that the reinforcements everyone hoped for weren’t coming. Historians will tell you plainly: an enslaved man’s presence during a siege like this wasn’t unusual for the era. What’s unusual, what’s remarkable is that we know what Joe experienced at all. Because almost nobody in that position ever got to speak afterward. Joe did. Before dawn on March 6th, 1836, the assault came. By Joe’s own later account, he was asleep in the same room as Travis when the alarm went up. Travis grabbed his rifle and his sword. He shouted for Joe to follow him. They ran together to the north wall. Travis called out to his men, one last order to stand and fight. He fired his weapon. Almost in the same instant, he was shot and fell inside the compound. Joe watched his master go down. And then he did the only thing that gave him any chance at all, he pulled back into one of the interior buildings and kept firing from cover as the walls came apart around him. The battle by this point wasn’t a battle in any organized sense anymore. It was hand to hand. Rifle butts, knives, bayonets. Men fighting for their own lives with whatever was in their hands. When Mexican soldiers finally broke all the way through, they moved building to building. And they called out, demanding that any Black men inside reveal themselves. Joe stepped out. Even so, in the chaos, a soldier struck him with a pistol and drove a bayonet toward him before a Mexican officer intervened and stopped it. <img decoding="async" class=" wp-image-81819 alignleft" src="https://www.travelwithannita.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/18ed9dd1-8bd6-40d8-8479-11b73e75325d-800x640.jpeg" alt="" width="295" height="236" />He was one of only a small handful of people left alive inside those walls.The only adult male defender to survive. Joe was taken into Béxar as a captive. He watched a formal review of the Mexican army, a display, really, meant to communicate total victory. And then he was brought before Santa Anna himself. Joe apparently spoke some Spanish. So Santa Anna questioned him directly, about the size of the Texan forces, about Sam Houston’s army, about what was left to stand between the Mexican military and the rest of Texas. He was also asked to help identify the bodies of Travis and Bowie among the Alamo’s dead. Then, for reasons historians still debate, he was released. Think about the position he was in. A prisoner. Interrogated by the general who’d just ordered the deaths of everyone he’d spent thirteen days beside. No protection. No guarantee that walking out of that room meant walking out alive. And somehow, it was Joe, not a Texan officer, not a diplomat, who became one of the only living sources of truth about what had actually happened inside the Alamo. Joe made his way to Gonzales, traveling alongside Susanna Dickinson wife of a fallen Alamo defender, and her infant daughter. Together they delivered the news to Sam Houston and the gathering Texan forces there: the Alamo had fallen. Everyone inside was dead. It was the first confirmation Texas had. Houston, realizing Santa Anna’s army was still advancing, ordered Gonzales burned and its people evacuated east, the beginning of what Texans still call the Runaway Scrape. Joe kept moving. He arrived at Washington-on-the-Brazos around March 20th, the exact place where, just days earlier, delegates had signed Texas’s declaration of independence. Now those same men crowded around a twenty-year-old enslaved man to hear, in his own words, how their friends had died. A Texas official named William Fairfax Gray was in that room. He wrote in his diary that evening, describing Joe as composed, careful, and his word, modest in how he told it. Gray’s diary entry became one of the very first written records of the battle. And it was built almost entirely on what Joe said. This is the part worth sitting with. ,,,,,,The version of the Alamo that got passed down, the one in the textbooks, the movies, the folklore, that version exists because a young enslaved man walked into a room full of powerful white men four days after his master’s death and told them the truth, carefully and clearly, while still legally considered someone’s property. Joe didn’t just witness history. Joe *authored* it. Here’s where the story turns. Despite everything, despite being celebrated for weeks as the last man standing, despite giving Texas its founding legend in his own voice, Joe received no freedom. No pension. No formal thanks from the government he’d just helped bring into existence. He was returned to the Travis estate. Just property again, now under a new name on a new ledger, the estate’s executor, a man named John Rice Jones. He waited exactly one year. On April 21st, 1837, the anniversary of the battle that finally won Texas its independence, Joe escaped. Two stolen horses, an unnamed companion, and whatever nerve it takes to run twice: once from a battlefield, once from the country he’d helped build. A reward notice ran in the newspaper for three months. Then it just…stopped. Most historians read that the way it sounds: Joe made it. What happened after is contested, a little heartbreaking in how little of it survives. Some records suggest he reached Alabama and told the rest of the Travis family how William died. Some say he was seen in Austin, or San Antonio, decades later, an old man with an extraordinary story nobody thought to fully write down while he could still tell it. And then, without ceremony, without a marked grave anyone has ever confirmed, Joe disappears from the record completely. So why build an entire episode, an entire stretch of road, around one man’s testimony? Because the Alamo isn’t just a battle. It’s one of the most repeated, most mythologized stories in American history. And for generations, the person most responsible for how we know that story got reduced to a single line in the footnotes: *”Travis’s slave, Joe, also survived.” That’s not an account of a man. That’s an erasure wearing the shape of one sentence. Understanding Joe’s role means understanding two things at once, and holding them together without letting either one cancel out the other. First, his testimony has real, lasting historical weight. Diaries, government records, and the earliest published accounts of the Alamo’s fall all trace back through what Joe told officials in those first days. Without him, we would know dramatically less about how Travis died, how the final assault unfolded, and what those last hours inside the walls actually looked like. Second, none of that mattered enough, in 1836, to grant him his freedom. Both of those things are true. Texas history was built, in part, on the memory and the voice of a man history refused to fully credit or free. That’s the whole of what we’re chasing out here, mile after mile. Not the version of the story that fits neatly on a monument. The whole version. The one that makes you stop the car, get out, and stand quietly on ground that’s still asking to be understood correctly. Next time you hear someone say “Remember the Alamo” ……remember that the reason we can remember it accurately at all …..is because one young man survived long enough, and was brave enough, to say what he saw out loud. His name was Joe. This has been Quarter Miles Travel. **”We say his name, and we tell his story.”** <div id="attachment_81826" style="width: 712px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-81826" decoding="async" class="wp-image-81826 size-full" src="https://www.travelwithannita.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/images.jpeg" alt="" width="702" height="437" srcset="https://www.travelwithannita.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/images.jpeg 702w, https://www.travelwithannita.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/images-480x299.jpeg 480w" sizes="(min-width: 0px) and (max-width: 480px) 480px, (min-width: 481px) 702px, 100vw" />Sketch of how the Alamo would have looked after battle</div> <div id="attachment_81827" style="width: 810px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-81827" decoding="async" class="wp-image-81827 size-large" src="https://www.travelwithannita.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/MTAW-alamo-William-W-Brown.jpg-800x450.webp" alt="" width="800" height="450" />Sketch of Joe’s impression</div> The Alamo today <img decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-81820 aligncenter" src="https://www.travelwithannita.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_3313-800x600.jpeg" alt="" width="800" height="600" /> <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-81821 aligncenter" src="https://www.travelwithannita.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_3310-600x800.jpeg" alt="" width="600" height="800" /> <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-81825 aligncenter" src="https://www.travelwithannita.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/IMG_3717-600x800.jpeg" alt="" width="600" height="800" />

July 11, 2026

American Cowboys: The Real Story

<h2 class="text-text-100 mt-3 -mb-1 text-[1.375rem] font-bold"></h2> <h2 class="text-text-100 mt-3 -mb-1 text-[1.125rem] font-bold" style="text-align: center;"><img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class=" wp-image-81752 aligncenter" src="https://www.travelwithannita.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/a0472c3d-5413-42f3-b9bc-88bf47748b0f-600x800.png" alt="" width="480" height="640" /></h2> <h2 class="text-text-100 mt-3 -mb-1 text-[1.125rem] font-bold" style="text-align: center;">American Cowboys: The Real Story</h2> <h4 class="text-text-100 mt-3 -mb-1 text-[1.125rem] font-bold">SEGMENT ONE: THE AMERICAN COWBOY</h4> Hello, hello and welcome aboard Travel with Annita. I am so glad you’re riding with me today — because today we are going somewhere I have wanted to take you for a long time. We are going West. Not just geographically west, but historically west. We are going to the heart of one of the most powerful, most misunderstood, and most genuinely American stories ever told. We are talking about the American cowboy. Now, when I say “cowboy,” I want you to set aside for a moment everything Hollywood ever showed you. Set aside John Wayne. Set aside the rhinestone shirts and the singing cowboy. Set aside the lone white man on a white horse riding into the sunset. Because the real story — the actual, documented, fascinating history of the American cowboy — is so much bigger, so much richer, and so much more diverse than any movie ever captured. And today, we are going to tell it right. Let’s start at the very beginning — and I mean the very beginning. Before there was ever an American cowboy, there was a vaquero. Say that word with me — vaquero. It comes from the Spanish word vaca, meaning cow, and it described a skilled horseman who managed cattle across the open range. The vaqueros were Mexican. They were indigenous. They were mestizo — a mix of Spanish and Native ancestry — and they were doing this work in Texas, in California, in what would become the American Southwest, a full century before the famous cattle drives that most of us associate with cowboy history even began. Think about that for a moment. A century before. When the Spanish established missions in Texas in the early 1700s, they weren’t just building churches — they were building ranching operations. By 1721, there were nearly 5,000 head of cattle in the San Antonio River Valley alone, tended by vaqueros who had developed their craft into something extraordinary. By the early 1800s, California missions were operating herds that averaged 40,000 cattle each. This was an enormous, sophisticated cattle industry — and it was entirely run by people whose names Hollywood never put on a movie poster. And here is something important: every single tool we associate with the American cowboy came directly from the vaquero. The saddle with the raised horn for roping — Mexican. The lasso — that’s the vaquero’s reata. The chaps protecting a rider’s legs — from the Spanish chaparajos. The corral, the rodeo, the bronco, the rancho — all Spanish words, adopted wholesale by Anglo settlers who learned this craft by watching, by working alongside, and eventually by hiring the people who had been doing it for generations. By the 1870s, those tools and those techniques had become so common across Texas that everyone called them simply “American” — and the vaqueros who invented them got quietly written out of the story. Now. The moment that changed everything — that turned the cowboy from a regional ranch worker into a genuine American icon — was the Civil War. And specifically, what happened right after it. When Confederate Texas men left to fight, the people left behind tended those ranching operations. They were largely enslaved African Americans and vaqueros from Mexico. They kept those ranches going. And when the war ended, when emancipation came, those ranches sat in the middle of an astonishing situation: millions of longhorn cattle had roamed wild across Texas during the war years, largely unbranded and unclaimed. At the same time, the expanding railroad network was pushing north into Kansas and Missouri, and the cities of the North and East were desperately hungry for beef. So you had cattle. You had markets. And you had a distance of five hundred miles or more between them. And the solution — the human solution — was the cowboy. Between 1865 and roughly 1895, an estimated ten million Texas longhorns were driven north along famous routes like the Chisholm Trail, the Goodnight-Loving Trail, and the Western Trail. These cattle drives became the defining image of the American West. A trail crew typically included a trail boss, eight to twelve cowboys, a cook — who was arguably the most important person on the entire drive — and a wrangler managing the extra horses. They covered ten to fifteen miles a day. They crossed rivers with thousands of panicking cattle. They rode through lightning storms with no shelter. They worked in dust so thick you couldn’t see the rider in front of you. It was hard, physical, unglamorous work — and it built the cattle industry that fed a nation. But here is the most important thing to understand about that era: those trail crews were not the all-white crews Hollywood showed you. They were Mexican vaqueros. They were Native American riders, particularly through Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma — men who knew that land better than any trail boss on earth. They were formerly enslaved Black men who had learned to ride and rope and read cattle under the cruelest conditions imaginable, and who carried those skills into freedom and onto the trails. The American cowboy was, from the very beginning, a diverse workforce. A mixed crew. A collection of people from different backgrounds who shared one thing: they could do the work. That era ended as quickly as it began. By the mid-1890s, three things had killed the long cattle drive. Railroads pushed deeper into Texas, eliminating the need to drive cattle hundreds of miles north. Barbed wire — invented in 1874 — allowed farmers to fence off the open range that cattle drives depended on. And a disease called Texas Fever, spread by longhorn cattle, caused surrounding states to close their borders to Texas herds. Within a generation, the working cowboy’s golden age was over. But here is the remarkable thing. The cowboy didn’t disappear when the work ended. He became something even more powerful. He became a symbol. Dime novels romanticized him. Wild West shows turned his work into spectacle. Buffalo Bill Cody took a theatrical version of cowboy life all the way to Europe — before the King and Queen of England — and made the American cowboy a global icon. And then Hollywood took over, and for the next century, the American cowboy became the single most powerful image of American identity in the world. That image stood for something. It stood for self-reliance — the idea that one person, on horseback, in open country, could make their own way in the world. It stood for moral clarity — the hero who knew right from wrong and acted on it, no matter the cost. It stood for a relationship with the land that urban, industrial America was rapidly losing but desperately wanted to hold onto. The cowboy became the way America told itself the story of who it was: tough, independent, honest, free. The power of that symbol has never faded. In our own time, the television series Yellowstone sent a shockwave through American popular culture by telling a contemporary cowboy story — a ranching family fighting to hold their land, their traditions, their way of life — and audiences couldn’t get enough. Western wear has surged in popularity to levels not seen since the 1980s. Searches for cowboy boots and Stetson hats increased by 67% in a single year. The cowboy is having a moment in 2026 that would have surprised no one who understood how deep this symbol runs in the American soul. Because here is the truth: the cowboy is not just a historical figure. He is not just a fashion trend. He is the way America has always processed its own story — the frontier, the open land, the individual against the wilderness, the crew working together across difference to get the cattle to market. It is a story about work. About endurance. About people who came from vastly different places and built something together on the open range. And we have only begun to tell it. Because when we come back after the break, we are going to go deeper into that story — and we are going to meet the men whose names were left off the movie poster, whose faces were left out of the films, but whose hands built one quarter of the entire cattle industry that made the American West. We are going to talk about the Black cowboys. And I have a special treat for you — after a brief introduction, you are going to hear directly from historian and professor Ronald Davis, who has spent years documenting this history and giving it the recognition it has always deserved. Stay with me. We’ll be right back. <h4 class="text-text-100 mt-3 -mb-1 text-[1.125rem] font-bold">SEGMENT TWO: THE BLACK COWBOYS</h4> <hr class="border-border-200 border-t-0.5 my-3 mx-1.5" /> Welcome back to Travel with Annita. Before the break, I told you that the American cowboy was always more diverse than Hollywood showed us. I told you the cattle drives were built by vaqueros, by Native American riders, and by Black cowboys who made up a full quarter of the workforce on those famous trails. Now I want to spend a few minutes with you on that last part — because the story of the Black cowboy is not a footnote to American cowboy history. It is where American cowboy history begins. Before the Civil War. Before emancipation. Before the Chisholm Trail was ever blazed. There were Black men on horseback in Texas, riding herd on thousands of cattle. They were enslaved. Their labor was stolen. Their expertise was not their own to claim. But the knowledge they built — the horsemanship, the roping, the cattle reading, the understanding of the open range — that belonged to them. No one could enslave a man’s skill. And those skills would shape the entire cattle economy of the American West. In the early 1850s, with one third of Texas’s population comprising enslaved people, African Americans were the majority of cowboys in Texas. Not a notable minority. The majority. They worked alongside vaqueros from Mexico in the Gulf Coast brush country, catching and tending wild cattle, breaking horses as young as ten or eleven years old, developing expertise that Anglo ranchers depended on entirely. The plantation economy of the South needed cotton. The ranch economy of Texas needed Black cowboys. And it got them — by force, by bondage, by theft of their labor and their freedom. And then emancipation came. And those men — skilled, experienced, knowledgeable — had a choice that most freed Black Americans in the South did not have. They could ride. They could rope. They could go West. And many of them did. They joined the cattle drives. They became indispensable. They became legendary — though history would spend the next century pretending otherwise. Their story is the American story. Their story is the Western story. It is a story of expertise earned under the worst conditions imaginable, carried into freedom, and used to build one of the most iconic industries in American history. And I am honored — I am genuinely honored — to bring you a conversation with the man who can tell that story better than anyone I know. Professor Ronald Davis, historian, scholar, and a passionate defender of the truth about who built the American West. Dr. Ronald W. Davis, II — welcome to Travel with Annita. The floor is yours. Interested in reading Nat Love’s book? <a href="https://amzn.to/4vrXS5V">The Life and Adventures of Nat Love</a> (Affiliate link)

July 3, 2026

Episode 49: American Revolution Patriots In The Shadows

<h2 style="text-align: center;">American Revolution Patriots In The Shadows</h2> <div id="attachment_81472" style="width: 403px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-81472" fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="wp-image-81472" src="https://www.travelwithannita.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Unknown-1.jpeg" alt="" width="393" height="393" />Photo courtesy of U.S. Mint</div>   July 10th, 1777. Middle of the night. A small rowboat slips through British-controlled waters off the coast of Rhode Island. Forty men are packed into a handful of boats, oars wrapped in cloth to muffle the sound. Their target: a British general, asleep in a farmhouse a mile inland from his own troops. They land. They creep to the door. And when it doesn’t open fast enough, a man named Jack Sisson puts his own head down and rams it through. No shots fired. No alarm raised. British General Richard Prescott is dragged out of bed in his nightshirt and rowed back across enemy lines as a prisoner of war. Jack Sisson was an enslaved man from Rhode Island. And if you’ve never heard his name before; you’re not alone. Because for two hundred and fifty years, stories like his have been sitting in pension files and church records and old muster rolls, waiting for someone to go looking. I’m Annita Thomas, and this is Patriots in the Shadows, the story of the thousands of Black soldiers, sailors, spies, and guerrilla fighters who fought in the American Revolution. On both sides. In every colony. And in almost every major battle you learned about in school, even if nobody mentioned they were there. Let’s get into it. Before we even get to the war itself, we have to go back five years earlier to March 5th, 1770. Boston. A crowd is gathered outside the Custom House, taunting a group of British soldiers. Tensions have been simmering for months. And then, someone gives the order or maybe no one does, historians still argue about it, and the soldiers open fire into the crowd. The first man to die is Crispus Attucks. A dockworker, part African, part Native American, and by most accounts, right at the front of that crowd. He becomes the first casualty of what history will call the Boston Massacre, five years before a single shot of the actual war is fired. Fast forward to April 19th, 1775. Lexington Green. The war has officially begun. Among the colonial militia standing on that field is a man named Prince Estabrook, enslaved but permitted to serve. When the British volley hits the line, Estabrook goes down wounded. One of the very first men, of any race, hurt in the Revolutionary War. There were other Black militiamen at Concord that same day. We don’t have most of their names. That’s going to be a theme in this episode, and it’s worth sitting with for a second. The men who are remembered are often remembered by accident: a wound, a pension claim, an officer who happened to write something down. For every Crispus Attucks, there were probably a dozen men whose entire service is just… gone. Two months after Lexington, you get Bunker Hill, one of the bloodiest battles of the entire war. And this is where the historical record actually gets a little better, because so many officers on both sides wrote detailed accounts afterward. At least three dozen Black soldiers fought at Bunker Hill. Three dozen. Let that sink in for a second, next time someone shows you a painting of that battle with an all-white cast. Peter Salem, a man who’d been freed by his enslaver specifically so he could enlist, is credited with firing the shot that killed British Major John Pitcairn. This is the same officer who, weeks earlier at Lexington, had given the order to fire on the militia. Salem didn’t stop there either. he went on to fight at Saratoga and Monmouth. Then there’s Salem Poor. Also formerly enslaved. Poor fought so effectively at Bunker Hill, he’s credited with killing a British lieutenant colonel. that fourteen American officers, after the battle, signed a joint petition to the Massachusetts legislature. Fourteen officers, vouching for one soldier. They called him, and I’m going to read this because it’s worth hearing exactly as written: “a brave and gallant soldier” who “behaved like an experienced officer.” That document still exists. It’s one of the only formal, individual battlefield commendations we have for a Black soldier in the entire war. And there’s Barzillai Lew, six-foot-tall free Black cooper from Massachusetts, who served as a fifer and drummer. Story goes, during the actual fighting, Lew kept morale up by playing “Yankee Doodle” on his fife while the battle raged around him. He’d go on to serve at Fort Ticonderoga and was present at Saratoga when British General Burgoyne surrendered. His powder horn is still sitting in a museum in Chicago today. And here’s a fun fact, in 1943, Duke Ellington wrote a piece of music in his honor, after learning his story from his own high school teacher. Cuff Whittemore fought so bravely that day, he was allowed to keep a sword he’d captured off a British officer. Titus Coburn, Alexander Ames, Blaney Grusha, Cato Howe, Seymour Burr, all there too. All in the fight. Most of them known to us today only because somebody, somewhere, wrote their name down on a piece of paper that survived two hundred and fifty years. Now let’s go back to Jack Sisson – the guy who broke down a door with his own skull. Sisson served in what became known as the First Rhode Island Regiment, nicknamed, at the time, the “Black Regiment.” It was formed in 1778, when Rhode Island, desperate for troops, started allowing enslaved men to enlist in exchange for their freedom. This regiment fought at the Battle of Rhode Island later that year, and, this is the part that gets me every time, they were part of the actual assault that took British redoubts nine and ten at Yorktown in 1781. That’s the battle that ended the war. There’s an account from a French officer who observed them and said they were some of the most sharply dressed, precisely drilled troops he’d ever seen. And there’s a moment, May 1781, when their commander, Colonel Christopher Greene, is caught in a surprise attack. And according to one early historian, the British swords only reached him after cutting through the bodies of the Black soldiers who had surrounded him to protect him. Every single one of them died defending their commander. That’s the unit Jack Sisson came out of. And his own operation — the Prescott capture — happened a full year before the regiment was even officially formed. He was already doing the work. Let’s talk about espionage for a second, because this is where some of the highest-stakes stories in the whole war come from. James Armistead, later known as James Armistead Lafayette, was enslaved in Virginia. With his enslaver’s permission, he volunteered to go behind British lines, posing as a runaway. He gained the trust of British officers, including, briefly, Benedict Arnold himself, and started feeding them false information, while secretly reporting real troop movements back to the Marquis de Lafayette. His intelligence was critical in trapping Cornwallis at Yorktown. Lafayette personally wrote testimony afterward praising Armistead’s service, and Armistead used that document decades later to petition for his own freedom. Which tells you something pretty stark about what “freedom” actually meant after the war. Even the men who helped win it had to go argue their case with paperwork. Saul Matthews, another enslaved Virginian, also served as a spy for the Continental Army, and he’s one of the rare cases where freedom came fast and direct. The Virginia legislature freed him by formal legislative act, specifically citing his wartime service. Okay. Here’s where the story gets more complicated. Because not every Black soldier fought for American independence. And honestly? A lot of them had a pretty compelling reason not to. In November 1775, Lord Dunmore, the British royal governor of Virginia, made an offer: any enslaved man owned by a Patriot who was willing to fight for the Crown would be freed. Later, in 1779, the British expanded that offer even further. And tens of thousands of enslaved people took them up on it. Historians estimate around 20,000 African Americans sided with the British over the course of the war roughly double the number who fought for the Patriots. The most famous of them might be Colonel Tye. Born Titus Cornelius, enslaved in New Jersey, he escaped to British lines after Dunmore’s proclamation and became – by pretty much every account – the most feared Black military commander of the entire war, on either side. He led a mixed-race guerrilla unit called the Black Brigade, raiding Patriot militias across New Jersey and New York, and at his peak, he commanded around 800 men. He died in 1780 from an infected wound. But for a few years there, Colonel Tye was one of the most effective military leaders in the entire conflict, and almost nobody talks about him. Harry Washington, and yes, that’s the same last name for a reason, was enslaved by George Washington himself, at Mount Vernon. He escaped in 1776, joined Dunmore’s forces, and served as a Black Loyalist for the rest of the war, including at the siege of Yorktown. Which means Harry Washington was standing on a battlefield, fighting against the army led by the man who used to own him. Boston King, another Black Loyalist, actually left us something rare: a written first-hand account of his own experience. After the war, along with thousands of other Black Loyalists, he was evacuated to Nova Scotia, and later resettled in the new British colony of Sierra Leone. The Southern colonies tell their own version of this story — and it’s shaped heavily by the fact that states like Georgia initially banned enslaved men from militia service completely. Austin Dabney became Georgia’s most celebrated Black Patriot soldier almost by accident. He was sent to fight as a substitute for his enslaver, which, ironically, was the only legal way for an enslaved man to serve in Georgia at the time. He fought as an artilleryman and was badly wounded at the Battle of Kettle Creek in 1779. His service was so distinguished that afterward, he was formally freed, given a federal pension, and became the only Black Patriot in Georgia known to receive a state land grant. But here’s the darker footnote: because Georgia pushed the burden of service onto enslaved substitutes, we know there were more men like Dabney, sent to fight in place of their enslavers whose names were simply never recorded. We’ll never fully know how many. Virginia’s records are a little richer, thanks to surviving pension files. Reuben Bird enlisted at sixteen years old in the Virginia Regiment of Dragoons, but because he was free and Black, his own regiment wouldn’t let him fight directly, so he served in support roles instead. James Carter enlisted twice, once as a garrison guard, and then again as an artillery private, fighting at the Battle of Camden and the siege of Yorktown. And one Virginia brigade, under General Peter Muhlenberg, ended up nearly 8 percent Black, one of the most racially integrated units in the entire Continental Army. William Flora was hailed as a hero at the Battle of Great Bridge in December 1775, one of the first major Patriot victories of the whole war. Fifteen documented Black Patriots fought at the Battle of Cowpens in 1781. And Spencer Bolton fought under Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox” in the South Carolina swamps. I want to close out the individual stories with one that always gets me: James Forten. Forten was just fourteen years old when he joined the crew of a Philadelphia privateer. He was captured by the British and spent months as a prisoner aboard the HMS Jersey, a notorious prison ship where thousands of American captives died from disease and starvation. Fourteen years old. On a death ship. He survived. He came home to Philadelphia. And he went on to build one of the city’s most successful sailmaking businesses, becoming a major abolitionist and philanthropist for the rest of his life. Of everyone we’ve talked about today, Forten might be the closest thing we have to a story where the postwar chapter actually matches the promise of the war itself. Most veterans didn’t get that chapter. And, yes, these soldiers are veterans. So here’s the hard part. Here’s the part where the story doesn’t wrap up neatly. For all of this: Bunker Hill, Yorktown, Saratoga, the spies, the raids, the prison ships, most of these men did not get what they were promised. Loyalist veterans, like Harry Washington and Boston King, did get their freedom. But it came with exile – Nova Scotia, and for a lot of them, eventually Sierra Leone. Patriot veterans had it worse in some ways. A few, like Austin Dabney, got land and pensions. Most came home to find their promised freedom delayed, denied, or tangled up in decades of legal petitioning. And then in 1792, just nine years after the war ended, Congress passed a law formally banning African Americans from military service. A policy that stuck around for generations. When pension programs finally opened up in 1818, and again in 1832, a lot of these men were already dead. Their widows spent years fighting to prove their husbands’ service even happened. Here’s a number that I think says it all. Black soldiers made up roughly 4 percent of Patriot manpower. But on average, they served four and a half years each, that’s eight times longer than the average white soldier’s term. Which means, in terms of actual time spent fighting and supporting this war, their contribution was closer to a quarter of the entire Patriot war effort. Four percent of the people. A quarter of the effort. And, for most of them, a fraction of the reward. So…..Crispus Attucks, falling in a Boston street five years before the war even started. James Forten, surviving a prison ship as a teenager. Peter Salem, firing the shot that killed the officer from Lexington. Colonel Tye, leading raids against the very army Salem was fighting for. Jack Sisson, breaking down a general’s door with his own head. Two sides. One war. And a version of American history that’s been sitting in the footnotes for two hundred and fifty years, waiting for someone to read it out loud. That’s the story. Or….most of it, anyway. There are dozens more names in the show notes for this episode if you want to go deeper, soldiers we didn’t have time to get into today, but whose service is just as real, just as documented, and just as worth remembering. Thanks for listening … until next time! The story of Black soldiers in the American Revolution is not a single story at all. It is Crispus Attucks falling in a Boston street five years before the war began, and James Forten surviving a British prison ship as a teenager. It is Peter Salem firing the shot that killed a British officer at Bunker Hill, and Colonel Tye leading raids against the very army Salem fought for. It is Jack Sisson breaking down a general’s door with his own skull, and Reuben Bird, barred from combat because of his race, serving anyway. Their war was fought on both sides of a line that history has often flattened into a single narrative, and their reward, more often than not, was a freedom that arrived late, incomplete, or not at all. What remains consistent across every name recovered from the margins of muster rolls and pension files is this: the American Revolution was never fought by white colonists alone, and its full history cannot be told without them. Below in this appendix are names of many brave soldiers who stepped forward to fight for freedom. These veterans deserve recognition and honor for their service. Appendix: Quick-Reference Summary Listed alphabetically for easy reference. Alexander Ames — Fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775, one of roughly three dozen Black soldiers present at the battle. Austin Dabney — Enslaved artilleryman who fought as a substitute for his enslaver in the Georgia militia; severely wounded at the Battle of Kettle Creek (1779) and later emancipated, pensioned, and granted state land, the only Black Patriot in Georgia known to receive one. Barzillai Lew — Free Black fifer and drummer who fought at Bunker Hill and later at Fort Ticonderoga and Saratoga; a French and Indian War veteran and skilled musician whose powder horn survives in a Chicago museum. Bazabeel Norman — Documented Black Patriot soldier known primarily through Revolutionary War muster and pension records. Blaney Grusha — Fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775 alongside fellow Black soldiers. Boston King — Formerly enslaved Black Loyalist who escaped to British lines, later wrote a firsthand narrative of his wartime experience, and resettled in Nova Scotia and then Sierra Leone. Caesar Robbins — Documented Black Patriot soldier known primarily through Revolutionary War muster and pension records. Caesar Tarrant — Served as a naval pilot for the Virginia State Navy, guiding ships through dangerous coastal waters during the war. Cato Howe — Fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775. Cato Mead — Documented Black Patriot soldier known primarily through Revolutionary War muster and pension records. Col. Louis Cook (Joseph Louis Cook) — Son of a Black father and Native American mother; served as a colonel in the Continental Army and fought at both Quebec and Saratoga, one of the highest-ranking Black or Indigenous officers of the war. Colonel Tye (Titus Cornelius) — Formerly enslaved New Jerseyan who escaped to British lines and became the most feared Black guerrilla commander of the war, leading raids across New Jersey and New York with his mixed-race Black Brigade until his death in 1780. Crispus Attucks — Killed during the 1770 Boston Massacre, five years before the war formally began; remembered as an early martyr and the conflict’s first casualty. Cuff Whittemore — Cited for bravery at Bunker Hill and permitted to keep a sword he captured from a British officer. Cyfax Brown — Enslaved man who fought in the Prince Edward County, Virginia militia alongside fellow Black soldiers Isaac Brown and George Kendall. Dick Pointer — Helped defend Fort Donnally (in present-day West Virginia) against a Native American and Loyalist attack in 1778. Edom London — 33-year-old enslaved Massachusetts man who fought under Col. Thomas Marshall’s Continental Regiment and was present at Saratoga. Edward “Ned” Hector — Free Black teamster and bombardier in Proctor’s Third Pennsylvania Artillery, responsible for keeping Continental artillery supplied through key campaigns. Fleet (Fleetus) Hull — Served in Colonel William Shepard’s 4th Massachusetts Regiment and is officially documented among the Black soldiers present at Saratoga. Fortune Conant — Enlisted soldier who witnessed both the British surrender at Saratoga and the later surrender at Yorktown. Fortune Freeman — Enlisted alongside Fortune Conant and witnessed both Saratoga and Yorktown. George Kendall — Fought in the Prince Edward County, Virginia militia alongside Cyfax Brown and Isaac Brown. George Middleton — Served in a Massachusetts regiment and became a prominent leader of Boston’s free Black community after the war. Harry Washington — Enslaved by George Washington at Mount Vernon before escaping to join Lord Dunmore’s forces; served as a Black Loyalist through the siege of Yorktown. Isaac Brown — Fought in the Prince Edward County, Virginia militia alongside Cyfax Brown and George Kendall. Jack Sisson — Enslaved Rhode Islander who served as boat pilot for the 1777 raid that captured British General Richard Prescott, reportedly breaking down the general’s door himself; later served in the 1st Rhode Island Regiment. James Armistead Lafayette — Enslaved Virginian who posed as a runaway to infiltrate British General Cornwallis’s camp as a double agent, feeding false information to the British while relaying critical intelligence that helped trap Cornwallis at Yorktown. James Carter — Enlisted twice, serving as a garrison guard and later as an artillery private in the 2nd Virginia Regiment; fought at the Battle of Camden and the siege of Yorktown. James Forten — Teenage privateer captured and held aboard the British prison ship HMS Jersey; survived to become a successful Philadelphia sailmaker and a leading postwar abolitionist and philanthropist. James Robinson — Documented Black Patriot soldier known primarily through Revolutionary War muster and pension records. Jehu Grant — Documented Black Patriot soldier known primarily through Revolutionary War pension records. Jim Capers — Free Black South Carolinian who served as Drum Major in the 4th South Carolina Regiment. Jude Hall — Formerly enslaved New Hampshire man who secured his freedom through service at Bunker Hill, Ticonderoga, and Saratoga. Lambert Latham — Died a hero’s death defending Fort Griswold, Connecticut, in 1781. Lemuel Haynes — Served briefly as a Massachusetts minuteman before becoming one of the first Black ministers ordained in the United States. Nero Hawley — Documented Black Patriot soldier known primarily through Revolutionary War muster and pension records. Oliver Cromwell — Free Black soldier in the 2nd New Jersey Regiment who took part in the crossing of the Delaware, several major campaigns, and the siege of Yorktown. Peleg Nott — Documented Black Patriot soldier known primarily through Revolutionary War muster and pension records. Peter Salem — Formerly enslaved militiaman credited with firing the shot that killed British Major John Pitcairn at Bunker Hill; also served at Saratoga and Monmouth. Prince Estabrook — Enslaved militiaman wounded at the Battle of Lexington on April 19, 1775, among the first men of any race wounded in the Revolutionary War. Prince Whipple — Enslaved man who crossed the Delaware alongside George Washington and was present at Yorktown, later advocating for his own freedom. Primus Hall — Served in a Massachusetts regiment and became a prominent figure in Boston’s postwar free Black community. Reuben Bird — Enlisted at sixteen in the Virginia Regiment of Dragoons; barred from direct combat due to his status as a free Black man, he served in support roles throughout the war. Salem Poor — Formerly enslaved soldier whose heroism at Bunker Hill — including killing British Lieutenant Colonel James Abercrombie — earned a rare formal commendation signed by fourteen American officers; also fought at Saratoga. Saul Matthews — Enslaved Virginian who served as a spy for the Continental Army and was freed by direct act of the Virginia legislature in recognition of his service. Seymour Burr — Fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775. Shadrach Battles — Fought under George Washington’s command, alongside his brother William Noel Battles; son of Thomas Cottrell. Silas Royal — Documented Black Patriot soldier known primarily through Revolutionary War muster and pension records. Spencer Bolton — Fought under Patriot guerrilla commander Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox,” in South Carolina. Thomas Cottrell — Father of soldiers William Noel Battles and Shadrach Battles, who both fought under Washington. Titus Coburn — Fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775. Toby Gilmore — One of the longest-serving Black veterans of the Revolutionary War period. Wentworth Cheswell — New Hampshire schoolmaster who rode to warn colonial militias of British troop movements, in a ride historians have compared to Paul Revere’s; later became New Hampshire’s first archaeologist. William Flora — Free Black soldier in the 2nd Virginia Regiment hailed as a hero of the Battle of Great Bridge in December 1775, one of the first major Patriot victories in Virginia. William Noel Battles — Fought under George Washington’s command alongside his brother Shadrach Battles; son of Thomas Cottrell. The 1st Rhode Island Regiment (“Black Regiment”) — A Continental Army regiment composed primarily of formerly enslaved and free Black soldiers; fought at the Battle of Rhode Island (1778) and in the decisive assault on British redoubts at Yorktown (1781). The Black Pioneers — An organized British Loyalist unit of Black soldiers who served as scouts, laborers, and combat troops throughout the Southern colonies. Virginia State Navy sailors — Up to 150 Black men served as sailors aboard Virginia state naval vessels and privateer ships during the war. <img decoding="async" class=" wp-image-81473 aligncenter" src="https://www.travelwithannita.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/images-2.jpeg" alt="" width="394" height="394" srcset="https://www.travelwithannita.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/images-2.jpeg 250w, https://www.travelwithannita.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/images-2-150x150.jpeg 150w" sizes="(max-width: 394px) 100vw, 394px" />

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