1774 Census of the Inhabitants of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, showing 11 people enslaved by Hezekiah Babcock. 1774 Census of the Inhabitants of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.
Caesar Babcock (b. ~1758- 1836) was a young Black man enslaved by Hezekiah Babcock of Hopkinton, Rhode Island, who also enslaved 10 other people of African descent. He was likely kidnapped in western Africa as a child or teenager and brought to North America along with around 400,000 other captives over the course of the 18th century. Enslaved people made up a substantial proportion of the populations not just of southern colonies but also of urban centers in the north. In 1775, Newporters enslaved approximately one in ten of the city’s total population – or 1,000 Black and Indigenous men, women, and children. This proportion was typical – in Providence one in twelve inhabitants were enslaved, and in New York the ratio approached one in seven during the imperial crisis. Enslaved people built, outfitted, and loaded ships, waited tables, tailored clothing, dressed hair, cooked meals, and groomed livestock. Although Caesar’s occupation is unknown, enslaved labor fueled Newport’s commercial success.
Because of how widespread the institution was throughout the colonies, metaphors of slavery also undergirded many of the Patriot and Loyalist arguments during the imperial crisis. For the Patriots, British taxation and the authoritarian turn of the Empire was meant to impose on them the same harsh conditions they imposed on the people they enslaved. At the same time, many Loyalists decried the hypocrisy of those who proclaimed universal equality and the natural natural rights of man while themselves denying that equality and those rights to increasingly large numbers of people. Such debates filled thousands of pages in the pamphlets, newspaper articles, and books that Newporters voraciously consumed and discussed during the 1760s and 1770s. Caesar, as an enslaved individual in the midst of this debate, would have been acutely aware of the impact its resolution would have on his future.
Legislation for the 1st Rhode Island Regmiment, 1778. “It is further Voted and Resolved, that every Slave, so enlisting, shall, upon his passing Muster before Col. Christopher Greene… be absolutely FREE.” Rhode Island State Archives.
When war broke out and the military mobilization came, Hezekiah Babcock sent Caesar to serve in the Hopkinton contingent of the militia as his substitute. While all colonists over the age of sixteen were required to serve in the local militia when called upon, those who could afford it could send a substitute – either someone hired or bound to them by indenture or enslavement – to serve in their stead. To entice Caesar to serve faithfully, he may even have been offered his freedom, as the Babcocks manumitted him at some point after the war. Still, he remained enslaved throughout the Revolution, as did many in Rhode Island’s revolutionary armed forces.
With Hopkinton’s contingent of the Rhode Island militia, after Lexington and Concord, Babcock joined the Siege of Boston alongside 20,000 militiamen from across New England and as far south as Virginia. Their ranks included hundreds of free and enslaved Blacks, some of whom served with distinction against British forces. General George Washington – who himself held more than 300 people in slavery — attempted to expel those of African descent from the newly-formed Continental Army soon after he took command in July of 1775, but was forced to reverse course only months later when faced with dwindling enlistment. All told, as many as 8,000 Black people fought in the Continental Army between 1775 and 1783, and thousands more served like Caesar Babcock in state militaries.
This map summarizes and combines the many different paths by which captives left Africa and reached the Americas between 1501–1867. Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Yale University Press.
Caesar Babcock later recalled that his militia unit saw action “when Wallace menaced Newport & burned some houses at Jamestown.” The latter incident lines up with the events of December 10, 1775, when 200 British marines landed at Jamestown to seize food and naval supplies, and a force of around fifty Rhode Island marched to oppose them. The brief skirmish that followed left one colonist and eight British soldiers wounded and a British officer killed. Perhaps in retaliation, the marines burned both ferries on Conanicut Island as they retreated to their ships, looting and torching many of Jamestown’s houses along the way. Although unable to prevent the British flotilla from bombarding towns along Narragansett Bay, Babcock and his fellow militiamen – both free and enslaved – patrolled the coastline to defend against raids by British marines seeking provisions and plunder.
While Caesar and his fellow militiamen defended the coast against British assault, the blockade effectively shut down what had been a thriving trade in human beings centered in Newport. Although Rhode Island accounted for only 4,000 (10%) of those trafficked in British North America during the 18th Century, the colony’s merchants had an outsize role in the trade. Rhode Islanders sponsored or undertook more than 1,000 slaving voyages, accounting for approximately 100,000 people, or ¼ of the total number of African captives forced into slavery in the colonies.
Newport merchants who engaged in the transatlantic slave trade sponsored ships that traded alcohol, gold and manufactured goods for captives in West Africa, transported them to the Caribbean, and sold them into plantation slavery. The captains then took on cargos of sugar, timber, tobacco, or other products of slave economies and sold them to New England manufacturers, who produced the rum and many of the manufactured luxuries that fueled the trade in the first place. Wallace’s blockade, however, put an end to this lucrative enterprise, which in turn contributed to the city’s overall commercial decline.
1st Rhode Island Regiment Roll Book, 1781-1783. Rhode Island State Archives
The coming of the Revolution forced enslaved people like Caesar Babcock to choose sides alongside their white enslavers, as both revolutionary and British forces sought their allegiance. While Babcock fought – unwillingly — in the revolutionary cause, many people of African descent who fought in the revolution joined the King’s army, hoping to gain their freedom through service to the crown. In November 1775, the British governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, proclaimed that any enslaved people who fled Patriot enslavers and served in his forces would gain their freedom after the war. Perhaps 300 fled to Dunmore, who formed them into a corps he called “Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment.” Over the next several years, thousands of enslaved people fled to British lines across the colonies, and in 1779 British general Sir Henry Clinton made this policy official in a proclamation given at Philipsburg, New York. As many as 20,000 enslaved people fled behind British lines during the Revolutionary War, and many did achieve their freedom, even if the Patriot victory forced them to start new lives in Canada, England, and West Africa.
Although most revolutionary leaders balked at granting freedom to the enslaved people who formed the backbone of North America’s economy, Black soldiers served in both state and Continental armed forces throughout the war. In 1778, the state of Rhode Island offered compensation to enslavers and freedom to enslaved people who volunteered to serve for three years, and the 1st Rhode Island Continental Regiment became known as “the Black Regiment.” Continental Colonel John Laurens, an aide to General Washington and son of one of South Carolina’s most prominent planters, even contemplated a plan to raise a full corps by offering his state’s enslaved population their freedom in exchange for service. Members of South Carolina’s enslaver elite quickly quashed the idea. Other free and enslaved Blacks like Caesar Babcock fought alongside white soldiers in local militia forces. Still, the institution of slavery continued unabated even after the founders of the United States proclaimed equality for all.