Were minorities (Blacks, native Indians) forced to fight in the continental army or was it a personal choice and if so, why did they want to fight for their enslavers?
The Continental Army was falling apart in 1777, after the militiamen who answered the call in 1775 and 1776 decided they had had enough of army life, thank you very much. George Washington implored the Continental Congress to take action to find more soldiers, by conscription if necessary. In February 1778, the Congress passed a resolution asking the states to fill up their quotas “by drafts from their militias, or in any other way that shall be effectual.”
And you know what, it worked, more or less. The orders were passed down from the Congress to the state governors and legislatures to the counties, where the militia units were based. If the county didn’t get enough volunteers, it could draft men from the militia pool, who were generally yeoman farmers and other men of some substance. They, in turn, could hire a substitute if they didn’t want to go. It’s estimated that a whopping 40 percent of the men who served during the draft regime were substitutes.
Some men volunteered as a way to avoid being drafted, and others signed up for whatever pay the Congress promised, plus bounties (in money or land) offered by their states in the interest of filling their quotas. (These exact same patterns reappeared eighty years later in the Civil War.)
The army that resulted was of, shall we say, lower socioeconomic status than the “embattled farmers” of 1775–76. As historian Charles Royster put it, the army of 1778–1779 consisted of “mainly unmarried sons of farmers, farm laborers, servants, apprentices, slaves, and mechanics.” Since the militia in the slavery states certainly did not include slaves among its members, it seems that slaves were put forth as substitutes for their owners. Free blacks were also eligible to join of their own accord, and some did.
The presence of African Americans in Patriot units was apparently quite evident. An anonymous Hessian officer was quoted as early as 1777 in a German publication:
“The Negro can take the field instead of his master; and, therefore, no regiment is to be seen in which there are not negroes in abundance, and among them there are able-bodied, strong and brave fellows.”
(“Briefwechsel,” IV, 365, published by August Ludwig Schlözer.)
Most served alongside whites in integrated regiments. The First Rhode Island Regiment, however, consisted of 197 black enlisted men (one of whom is pictured above) with white officers. The black men were slaves given their freedom upon enlisting, with compensation paid to their owners.
African-Americans were generally not subject to the draft. Towards the end of the war in 1781, however, Maryland subjected free blacks and mulattoes (but not slaves) to the draft. It isn’t known how many were actually taken into the service as a result.
It is believed that ultimately around 5,000 enslaved men and free blacks served under arms in the Continental Army and navy, including a surprising number in battalions from the slave states. Probably very few of them were drafted. Some slaves probably served as substitutes under the impression that this would earn them their freedom. In some cases, the owners did not share that view and attempted to reassert their ownership when the slaves were demobilized. This was considered so manifestly unfair that the Virginia legislature passed an Act of Emancipation declaring that any former slave who had served would be free.
As for Native Americans or Indians, they were also not in the militia population, since the colonial militias (particularly in New England) were originally formed largely to fight the Indians. By the 1770s, few Indians were living in the counties that were sufficiently organized to have militia formations. They had been pushed back to the frontier. There were exceptions. Indians in western Massachusetts formed the Stockbridge Militia to fight alongside the whites. On the frontier, tribes such as the Oneida formed an alliance with the rebels and helped fight the British. But they served in their own formations, not in the Continental Army.
The Continental Army was still well below the intended strength, ill-equipped, not properly fed, and intermittently paid, but with training, money, and muskets provided by foreign sources (Thank you, Von Steuben! Thank you, France and Spain!) it marched and fought well enough to bring the war to a successful resolution.