A regiment of Black and Native American men come together to fight for America’s freedom until it is won at Yorktown.
Now That Should Be A Movie.
Short Pitch
It is a War Drama
The tone is like Glory
It is like The Patriot meets Hidden Figures.
It follows dispossessed Native Americans and former African American slaves training to be soldiers
And strict disciplinarian officer Jeremiah Olney
As they train and become a unit that fights British tyranny and deals with American racism.
Problems arise when beloved commander Christopher Greene and several men of the regiment are killed at the Pine Bridge Massacre.
Now Olney oversees the regiment whose soldierly abilities he has doubted due to their former status as slaves.
Together they will become a fighting force that will gain America’s independence at Yorktown.
My unique approach would be showing how the common soldiers of the American Revolution, especially men of color, lived, fought, and died on the ground while statesmen waxed eloquent about liberty.
The idea came to me during the debate about kneeling for the National Anthem and I remembered that African American men fought and died for America even when slavery was still legal in the US.
A set piece would be Christopher Greene successfully defending black soldiers. One, Windsor Fry has been found guilty of theft and sentenced to the firing squad. Greene writes to George Washington that times have changed, and Washington grants Fry a full pardon. Greene also hires a lawyer to defend Prince Greene, who has shot an intruder, a white man, in the back of the head. Despite being found guilty of manslaughter, Prince is allowed to stay in the regiment. Greene’s actions influence Olney. After becoming colonel of the regiment, Olney defends a black soldier, Fortune Stoddard, from charges of manslaughter. He writes a letter to General Washington arguing that Stoddard had killed a white man in the line of duty and out of self-defense since the man had been starting a riot. Washington concurs and gives Stoddard a full pardon.
Another set piece would be the regiment celebrating victory on Redoubt #10 at Yorktown. Even though only a company from the regiment took part in the attack, I think poetic license could be taken and show African Americans, Native Americans, Spanish Americans, and poor white Americans celebrating as symbolic of the contributions that those demographics made to The American Revolution.
Target audiences would be history buffs, military historians, and war movie fans. I believe men between (13-20) and men and women (40-80) would want to see it in the theater.
Audiences would turn out due to the universal themes of brotherhood, patriotism, freedom, discipline, courage in the face of bigotry, and sacrifice.
Hello, today’s historical story I would like to pitch as a movie is the Story of the First Rhode Island Regiment During the American Revolution. Books I consulted for this post are From Slaves to Soldiers: The 1st Rhode Island Regiment in the American Revolution by Robert Geake, from Westholme Publishing, and Standing in Their Own Light: African American Patriots in the American Revolution by Judith L. Van Buskirk, from University of Oklahoma Press.
The First Rhode Island’s beginnings can be traced back to a militia begun by Nathanael Greene and James Mitchell Varnum before the start of the American Revolution. The regiment was officially organized on May 8, 1775, as part of Rhode Island’s Army of Observation in response to the Battle of Lexington and Concorde. The regiment was officially integrated from the state militia system, referred to as the Rhode Island Line, into the Continental Army in January 1776 and designated The First Rhode Island Regiment in February 1777. Nathanael Green’s cousin, Christopher “Kit” Greene, was placed at its head as colonel.
Greene and the First Rhode Island would prove their metal when they defended Fort Mercer during the Battle of Red Bank. The fort’s location on the Delaware River prevented the British from supplying their forces occupying Philadelphia. On October 22, 1777, when the enemy demanded the fort’s surrender, Greene, who had spent eight months as a prisoner of war after the disastrous Continental attack on Quebec in December 1775, said he would defend his position “til the last drop of blood.” When the numerically superior Hessian troops attacked, the Americans beat them back, inflicting heavy losses, in the only clear American victory of the Philadelphia Campaign. At least 36 free black men fought on the American side at the battle, including a bodyguard that Greene had selected to surround him. When Greene said, “With these brave fellows, this fort will be my tomb,” included among those fellows was a free man of color Richard Potter, only sixteen years old. William Cooper Nell, writing seventy years later in The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, said “The glory of the defense of Red Bank, which has been pronounced one of the most heroic actions of the war, belonged in reality to black men.”
The Continental Army eventually fell back to Valley Forge, where its ranks faced deterioration through disease and desertion. During that winter, Varnum proposed to General George Washington that a “battalion of Negros” could be easily raised in Rhode Island. There exists strong evidence that the recruitment of slaves into the army was already underway in the Ocean State. A British major wrote in his diary on June 30, 1777, that to raise men, the patriots were “promising masters a bounty of 180 dollars, and half their pay, and the Negroe (sic) gets the other half and the promise of freedom at the end of three years.” The same officer would also note that despite the English offering the black population of Rhode Island pay and provisions in exchange for service in the British army, “…very few of them have come in.” Washington approved Varnum’s plan, stating that the state’s governor should give all “assistance…in this business.”
Rhode Island was the ideal spot for what many termed an experiment in black military service. Not only did it have a large population of both free and enslaved Africans, but it also had a leading voice in abolition. The Society of Friends had been calling for a cessation of the “importing and keeping” of slaves as early as 1717. The first anti-slave trade resolution in history was passed at a Quaker meeting in Newport in 1760. In 1773, all Friends in the colony were ordered to free their slaves or face expulsion from the society. In 1774, the Rhode Island Assembly passed a bill prohibiting the importation of slaves to the colony. A later bill for the gradual emancipation of slaves was introduced but defeated. It should be no surprise that Nathanael Greene, who grew up a Quaker until he was “read out” for joining the military, supported the plan.
In February 1778, The Rhode Island Assembly issued An Act to Enlist Slaves, which proclaimed…
Every abled negro, mulatto or Indian man slave in this state may inlist (sic) into either of the said two battalions to serve during the continuance of the war with Great Britain; that every slave so inlisting (sic) shall be entitled to, and receive all the bounties, wages and encouragements allowed by the Continental Congress…that every slave inlisting (sic) shall, upon passing muster before Colonel Christopher Greene, be immediately discharged from the service of his master or mistress, and be absolutely FREE, as though he had never been incumbered with any kind of servitude or slavery.
Incredibly, the Act did not say slaves, many of whom had been born in Africa before being sold to slave traders, needed their masters’ permission to join. Some white men tried to discourage the black men from signing up, claiming they would be used as cannon fodder. However, these warnings did not stop the recruitment process. So many slaves signed up that the powerful slave lobby that remained in the colony pressured the assembly to end the act in June of 1778. Freemen and substitutes would continue to join throughout the war.
The official register of the 1st Rhode Island Regiment would list two hundred and twenty–five men, one hundred forty listed as “negro, mulatto, or mustee.” Many of the Native Americans who enlisted were from the Narragansett Nation. The Narragansetts had been resisting European colonization and enslavement since King Philip’s War in the late seventeenth century. They saw enlistment in the First Rhode Island as a tool of survival, to fight for freedom, empowerment, and hope for their children. Warrior pride in defending one’s community also played a role. When American Indian rights advocate Princess Redwing addressed a chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1940, she stated that the Narragansett taught their children to sing “from their souls and (to) ‘love the rocks and rills, thy woods, and templed hills,’ this is their own, their native land.” A second regiment of mostly white men, although it too counted Africans and Indians among its number, would also be raised.
The “Black Regiment,” as the First came to be known, would be tested less than six months after its organization at the siege of the British garrison at Newport on Aquidneck Island in August 1778. They were stationed at an abandoned British redoubt guarding the West Main Road. The siege was lifted when a storm damaged the French fleet that was supposed to coordinate with the patriot ground forces. The fleet limped away to Boston to lick its wounds. On August 28th, American General John Sullivan held a council of war and decided to retreat. The British, sensing an opportunity, attacked the American lines the next day. The British and Hessians drove the Americans back three miles. This meant that the Black Regiment had to hold their position to keep the enemy from sweeping the patriots off the island. Three times the Hessians charged their position, and three times were driven back. British ships sailed up Narragansett Bay and caught the patriots in a crossfire of artillery. Yet the Black Regiment only lost three killed, nine wounded, and eleven missing as they covered the successful evacuation of the American force from the island. This was despite being placed under a new commander, Major Samuel Ward after Sullivan moved Kit Greene to command a brigade on another part of the battlefield. When George Washington heard rumors disparaging the regiment, he replied that the fault lay with Major Ward being new to the command, not the men themselves. The Marquis de La Fayette said the action was one of the best fought of the war and both American General Sullivan and Hessian Captain Malsburg cited the action at the Regiment’s position as critical to the battle. Perhaps the action of the Black Regiment at The Battle of Rhode Island, as the engagement became known, was on Nathanael Greene’s mind when he unsuccessfully tried to convince the leaders of South Carolina to raise a regiment of freed slaves.
The British would abandon Newport on October 25, 1779, and “Kit” Greene would return to the regiment at his own request. The men of the First Rhode Island would spend the next couple of years patrolling the shoreline, building fascines and other forms of manual labor. They found humor in playing around with passwords. “Are you charged,” a sentry would ask. “Not yet,” would come the reply. They dealt with the same supply problems that irked the whole American army.
The limbo at this time was the most major instance of overt racism the men would encounter during their service. For the most part, they faced the same punishments for infractions as white soldiers. When George Washington extended a pardon for deserters who turned themselves in by a certain date, the soldiers of the First Rhode Island were included.
An example of military discipline regarding the Black Regiment is Winsor Fry. He would be court-martialed for theft and desertion. Washington, who had to approve court-martial decisions, found irregularities and ordered a retrial. This one, taking into consideration his record of thievery, found Fry guilty and sentenced him to the firing squad. He escaped in May 1780 and was not caught until October. Greene wrote to Washington that times had changed, and an example had been made. Washington concurred and granted Fry a “full and free pardon.” Fry would serve his country for nearly eight years. When he put in for a pension, both a white judge and one of his former captains would support his case successfully.
Another example would be Prince Greene, who shot an intruder, a white man, in the back of the head. Christopher Greene hired a lawyer friend, David Howell, to defend Greene. The court-martial found him not guilty of murder, but manslaughter. While branded with a “M” on his hand, he rejoined the regiment and lived to a ripe old age, a free man.
In September 1780, the Regiment enlisted thirty-five more Afro-Americans and twenty-eight Native Americans. Some recruits were teenagers, including one as young as fourteen. In January 1781, the regiment was integrated with the Second Rhode Island and designated the Rhode Island Regiment. Records show that only a handful of men of color deserted. Those who did, mainly slaves, can be found on the muster rolls of regiments in the adjacent states of Massachusetts or Connecticut. The majority would stay the full five years. In Benjamin Quarles’s book, The Negro in the American Revolution, he explains that not only did the smaller African community in New England contribute more soldiers than any other community, but their desertion rates were also low because they had less to which to desert. White desertions in the Rhode Island regiment were also low.
In early 1781, this amalgamation of poor whites, farm boys, free blacks, indigenous men, slaves, and indentured servants would be dispatched to The Hudson Valley. There they would patrol what historians have termed the Neutral Zone, the Bronx, and Westchester County which served as a buffer between the British in New York and the Americans in the lower Hudson Highlands. The area could be described as The Wild West, in which roving bands, mostly Loyalist militias, branded “cowboys” or “renegades,” would forage and raid at will. The Rhode Islanders’ assignment was to keep the Loyalists from crossing the Croton River. Their encampment at Pine Bridge became known as “Rhode Island Village.”
On the morning of May 14th, 1781, a group of two hundred forty Loyalists under the command of Colonel James Delancey attacked the encampment, taking the outpost totally by surprise. Perhaps tipped off by women allowed to pass between the lines, they knew that Greene had a habit of withdrawing his pickets at sunup. They burst into the house where Greene was living. He was mortally wounded, but only after all the black soldiers guarding him were cut down. The Loyalists dragged him from the house, and, after they had drawn and quartered him, dumped his body in the woods. His second in command, Captain Ebenezer Flagg, who had been with the regiment since the Act to Enlist Slaves, was shot in the head while he was still in his bed. The American dead were described as “inhumanly murdered, mangled, and cut to pieces.” Most of the twenty-two men killed that morning were black. Some of the wounded were almost left for dead, as in the case of Prince Robinson, a saber gash stretching from his forehead to his nose. He would have bled to death if a white soldier had not found him. Of the twenty-two men captured, the majority were Caucasian. Only three, including fifer Ichabod Northup and drummer Prince Jenckes, were black.
In a film, this would be the disaster towards the end of Act Two. The rise of desertion would be the crisis. The climax would be the regiment being rebuilt, with Jeremiah Olney as the new commander. More on him later. Act Three would begin with the regiment being the first to march for Virginia for what would be the decisive battle at Yorktown.
A scene at the Siege of Yorktown would vindicate the decision of the black and Indian men to throw in their lot with the Americans. The British base had been overrun by escaped slaves, especially men that the redcoats had put to work on the fortifications. However, by the time the siege began, rations were running low, and smallpox was starting to spread. The British, in a scene reminiscent of the Siege of Alesia by Julius Caesar in 52 BC, responded by forcing the slaves out of the town. American soldiers recorded in their diaries and letters meeting a steady stream of sickly and dying black people from Yorktown, as well as finding their bodies in the woods.
On October 14, Washington gave the Rhode Islanders the order to attack one of the remaining enemy redoubts, Number Ten. Joining them would be two New Jersey and two New York regiments. General Lafayette and Colonel Alexander Hamilton would be in command. The French, who would record good impressions of the men of color at the siege, would attack the other redoubt, Number Nine. One of Jeremiah Olney’s relatives, Captain Stephen Olney, who had been with the regiment since its inception, delivering Greene’s message of defiance at Red Bank, was to lead the storming party.
The detachment marched silently until they were within two hundred yards of the fort. Then they waited while pioneers hacked away with axes at abates and other obstacles the British had placed in their way. Then eight men led the charge with drawn swords. The rest, with fixed bayonets, followed, without firing a shot, according to Washington. The British met the charge with musket fire, wounding Captain Olney as he climbed through the palisades. Olney was also stabbed in his thigh and abdomen by bayonets. But despite his wounds, the Rhode Islanders and their fellow Americans had captured Redoubt Number Ten When British General Charles Cornwallis awoke to see that the Redoubt had fallen, he realized that it was time to discuss surrender terms with the Americans. On October 19th, the British capitulated, ending the last major land battle of the American Revolution.
The scene of American soldiers – white, black, Indian – storming and then standing together in victory on Redoubt Ten would be the Climax and Wrap Up of Act Three as the action descends in a movie. It is a movie with which the First Rhode Island deserves to be honored.
Unfortunately, none of the rank and file of the regiment left any letters or diaries. What we know about them can be gleaned from pension applications and their commanders’ reports and official letters. We know about Fry and Greene from documents related to their court-martials. Three members of the regiment, Caesar Updike, Richard Dick Rhodes, and Henry Matthews would receive the Honorary Badge of Distinction. A screenwriter would have to take creative license to create characters and give voice to the foot soldiers.
One historical figure who does have what can be termed a character arch is Jeremiah Onley. He goes from having a poor view of men of color in the ranks to being their advocate. Some critics may disparage this narrative as the “White Savior” Or “Converted Racist” trope. But here is the thing about tropes: sometimes they are overused because they are common. Common to our humanity.
At about twenty-five minutes into the movie, as the regiment is formed, his reports point out the shortcomings and poor training of the Africans and Indians, believing that filling the ranks by enlisting slaves imposed “…improper persons on us for soldiers.” However, from his actions throughout the movie, it appears that his views are motivated by codes of military discipline instead of outright racism. In the opening scene of the movie, The Battle of Red Bank, we see him strike the flat of his sword over the heads of soldiers who fire over the parapet without aiming. Then, throughout Act Two, “Kit” Greene would influence in changing his views. In December 1781, he defended a black soldier, Fortune Stoddard, from charges of manslaughter by a civil court, in a vane like that of Greene’s defense of Prince Greene and Fry. He wrote a letter to General Washington arguing that Stoddard had killed a white man, James Cunningham, in the line of duty. Cunningham was starting a riot in the soldiers’ quarters and was killed out of self-defense. Washington concurred and interceded with the secretary of war that Stoddard’s imprisonment be ended. Stoddard returned to Newport where he lived out his days a free man. A film would probably move this incident up before Yorktown, but Onley defending a man who he once thought could not be a good soldier would also make a nice final resolution in the film’s closing moments.
Years later, when the African and Native American men began applying for pensions, Onley would come to their aid, giving nothing but praise for them in his letters to government officials. In his disbandment order, he said, these “brave officers and men [I] have had the honor to command…their valor and good conduct displayed on every occasion when called upon to face the enemy in the field and of their prompt obedience to order and discipline through every stage of service.”
I believe a movie about the First Rhode Island could open up more opportunities for the role of African Americans in the American Revolution to be told. From Crispus Attucks, the first man killed during the Boston Massacre, to Prince Estabrook at Lexington and Concord, to Salem Poor and Peter Salem at Bunker Hill, to the black sailors who rowed Washington across the Delaware, to Jack Sisson, who took part in the raid on Newport to capture British general Richard Prescott. To Agrippa Hull, aide and medical assistant who inspired the Polish Engineer Tadeusz Kościuszko to become an abolitionist, to Oscar Marion, who rode with the Swamp Fox, to Esaias Bowman, John Brody and Andrew Ferguson at King’s Mountain, and James Armistead Lafayette, who served as a double agent during the Yorktown Campaign, African American men played a ubiquitous and integral role in securing America’s freedom during the Revolution. Every colony had a battalion of black men in their line, with an estimated 20% of the Rhode Island Line being men of color. It is believed that nearly eight thousand men of color served in the American armies and aboard naval and privateer vessels. A Hessian officer noted regarding the Continental Army, “You never see a regiment in which there are not negroes.” It is possible that the last thing the British spy John Andre saw on this earth was a battalion of African American men.
And not just men, but women of African descent as well. There’s Mammy Kate, who won her freedom after spiriting her master out of British custody by placing him in a laundry basket that she balanced on her head. There is the remarkable Phillis Wheatley, who, despite the trauma of the Atlantic Slave Trade, wrote so many brilliant poems that she had to go to court to prove she was the author. And won! Her poetry influenced the Founding Fathers, including on George Washington’s decision to allow free men of color and slaves into the Continental ranks. It is not a coincidence that many “Firsts” of African American women winning in courts and legal circles coincided with the Revolutionary Period.
It is true that more, perhaps twenty thousand, men of color served the British during the Revolution. Most notable examples would be Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment, formed in Virginia in 1777, and disbanded the following year, and the loyalist partisan leader “Colonel Tye” Titus Cornelius, who waged effective guerrilla warfare in New Jersey. However, the British enlistment of slaves and free men of color was driven by military opportunism rather than enlightened humanitarianism. Many blacks who sided with the British faced the same problems after the war as they did before and, in some cases, such as at Yorktown, abandonment. The men who sided with the American Patriots side with the movement that sparked the abolitionist movement and inspired revolutions and revolutionaries around the world, such as Simón Bolívar in Latin America and Toussaint Louverture in Haiti. For siding with a just cause instead of jumping at personal opportunities offered by the enemies of liberty is why the First Rhode Island and other African American heroes of the War for Independence should be honored with a movie
(Warning: Political Commentary) I also believe that a film acknowledging and honoring the role of African Americans in the Revolution is needed to help create a better dialogue. Some demigods wish to divide us by claiming that African American history is separate from American history. They claim that Black Americans were not truly free until 150 years after the Revolution ended. That grand sweeping statement not only ignores the 150 years of steps accomplishments and contributions of African Americans to the American story, but also the spark started by the American Revolution. They assert that the Fourth of July is “the white man’s Independence Day,” and Juneteenth, which began in Texas as a localized celebration of a white Union officer stepping off a ship in Galveston, is “ours.” Their rhetoric is used to justify methods of protest, such as kneeling for the National Anthem or burning the flag of the United States, that not only infuriate the people they are trying to reach but take the focus off the injustices they are protesting.
I’m sorry, but Colin Kaepernick is not a role model. When he realized that the conversation had moved from police brutality and claims of systemic racism and instead put the spotlight on his kneeling, he should have found another method of protest. Instead, he drove his heels in deeper. When he used false evidence to call for the pardon of convicted cop killers, an action that even liberal media pundits called him out on for spreading fake news. Ironically, the thought process that caused Mr. Kaepernick choose to his method of protest fits in with the agenda of white racists, who would love nothing more than to erase African American contributions from the public’s conscience. Perhaps if he followed the example of the First Rhode Island, he could have been more successful in opening up a dialogue regarding social issues.
And no, these are not the musings of a white boy. In the early 19th century, as the industrialization of the cotton and textile industries, populist politicians seeking to secure the voter base of landless and disenfranchised whites, the development of Darwinian evolution, and the “sciences” of Craniometry and Phrenology gave ammunition to imperialists in Europe and racist whites in America to encroach upon and deprive people of color of their rights, African American activists and their allies appealed to the spirit of the American Revolution—namely, the contributions of black men during that time. In response to plans to deport and colonize African Americans, activists asked if they would forsake “the tombs and flee to an unknown land? No!” When Pennsylvania was rewriting its constitution during the 1830s and considering disenfranchising black male voters, a pamphlet was published that included a reference to the First Rhode Island. “No braver men met the enemy in battle,” proclaimed the pamphlet. “In the war of the revolution, these people helped to fight your battles by land and sea…shed their blood in the snows of New Jersey…and faced British bayonets in the most desperate hour of the Revolution.” (For a full study of the rhetoric of the American Revolution in African American activism, see the final two chapters of Standing In Their Own Light by Buskirk)
Sadly, this rhetoric was not always successful. Even today, H. R. 4505 and H. R. 363, efforts to have the First Rhode Island awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, “in recognition of their dedicated service during the Revolutionary War,” have died in Congress. Yet, it lays a better foundation for engaging on social issues regarding African Americans than a broad condemnation of America. Celebrities and sports figures who have never faced the heat of battle in their country’s defense would do well to follow the example of The First Rhode Island and their compatriots. For, if African American men have always played an important part in securing and defending America’s rights and liberties, then they deserve to be afforded the rights and liberties of Americans.
To honor the contribution that African Americans made during the American Revolution and to open a better dialogue about current issues facing our society, is why I believe that the story of the First Rhode Island Regiment should be a movie.
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