Enslaved by George Washington, This Man Escaped to Freedom—and Joined the British Army

Harry was one of more than a dozen enslaved people who fled Mount Vernon in response to Dunmore’s call to action. These individuals’ flight embodied a familiar sentiment. In 1774, with discontent fomenting in the Thirteen Colonies, Washington had expressed his fear that if the colonists didn’t assert their rights in the face of measures imposed by the British government, they’d be made into “tame and abject slaves, as the Blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.”

Infinitely less is known about Harry than the man who first purchased him before 1763. Born around 1740 in West Africa, Harry was among the estimated 12 million people kidnapped and sold into the trans-Atlantic slave trade between the 16th and 19th centuries. He survived the Middle Passage, a monthslong journey notorious for its crowded, unsanitary and cruel conditions, which were so horrific they killed an estimated 15 percent of those held in chains on slave ships.

After he was sold to Washington, Harry worked for the fittingly named Dismal Swamp Company, which counted his new enslaver as a major stakeholder. The business venture was a long-pursued, less-than-successful attempt to drain wetlands in Virginia and North Carolina, making the eponymous Great Dismal Swamp arable and, in turn, profitable.

By 1766, Washington had transferred Harry to Mount Vernon, where he worked as a house servant and looked after the estate’s horses. In 1771, he was reassigned to one of Mount Vernon’s plantations. “For Harry to be moved from skilled work, which was in some measure self-directed, to grueling plantation labor must have dismayed him sufficiently to precipitate his flight” on July 29 of that year, wrote historian Cassandra Pybus in a 2009 essay collection. Returned to Mount Vernon after just a few weeks, Harry had to wait another five years for an opportunity to escape.

Soon after fighting began in April 1775, the Continental Congress named Washington commander of the new Continental Army. In November, around the same time Dunmore issued his proclamation, Washington banned free Black and enslaved people from joining the Continental Army. But he quickly saw the need to reverse course. Black soldiers went on to fight in many major battles of the war, including the 1781 Siege of Yorktown that dealt a crushing blow to British forces.

“The message Harry extracted from all this heady revolutionary tumult was that if King George III was now the master’s enemy, then it was to the king’s men that he would entrust his aspirations for freedom,” writes Pybus in Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty.

Washington saw Dunmore’s call to action as a clear threat to the Patriots’ incipient revolution. On December 26, 1775, he wrote that if Dunmore “is not crushed before spring, he will become the most formidable enemy America has.” The general added, “His strength will increase as a snowball by rolling; and faster, if some expedient cannot be hit upon to convince the slaves and servants of the impotency of his designs.”

Reaching Dunmore’s ships was a treacherous proposition for the enslaved people who got word of his offer. Those caught could expect to receive severe punishments reserved for fugitives; even individuals who evaded patrols and navigated their way to Dunmore’s fleet faced a reasonable chance of dying during a gruesome smallpox outbreak that was decimating the ranks of the British troops.

Still, fugitives from slavery flocked to Dunmore by the hundreds. While precise records of these self-emancipated people’s movements are elusive, Pybus suggests Harry was one of three enslaved men who arrived from Mount Vernon on a small boat at night and offered themselves up to the British in July 1776. Harry soon joined the Ethiopian Regiment, a group of formerly enslaved soldiers whose uniforms bore the inscription “Liberty to Slaves.” The regiment was later folded into the Black Pioneers, a noncombat unit tasked with building fortifications, supplying troops and other military engineering tasks. Harry attained the rank of corporal, serving in New York before accompanying British troops to Charleston, South Carolina.

In 1779, Henry Clinton, then commander of the British Army in North America, built on Dunmore’s words with the more sweeping Philipsburg Proclamation, which offered “to every Negro who shall desert the Rebel standard, full security to follow within these lines, any occupation which he shall think proper.” Clinton’s declaration added an estimated 100,000 fugitives from slavery, including families escaping together, to the British rolls. The 1780 capture of Charleston alone enabled thousands of enslaved people from nearby Southern plantations to join the British.

But the tide of war was not going in Britain’s favor, which portended danger to those who had sought freedom behind its army’s lines. In 1781, when British forces suffered an irretrievable defeat at Yorktown, General Charles Cornwallis retreated north—a decision that spelled doom for the self-emancipated soldiers he left behind.

Harry was fortunate enough to be in the British bastion in Charleston when Yorktown fell. But that luck wouldn’t hold for long. In December 1782, British forces completed their evacuation of Charleston, bringing Harry with them as they fled to the safety of the British Empire. The mass departure was a harbinger of the much larger evacuation from New York that took the place the following year.

Signed on September 3, 1783, the Treaty of Paris officially brought the American Revolution to a close, cementing the United States’ status as an independent nation. It stipulated that British troops should withdraw as soon as possible without “carrying away any Negroes or other property of the American inhabitants.”

To George Washington, this “property” included the enslaved people who had escaped from Mount Vernon to join the British, among them Harry and a group of men and women who sought refuge on the British warship the Savage in 1781. But Guy Carleton, Washington’s British counterpart, who took over from Clinton in 1782, interpreted the words differently.

A summary of the commanders’ exchange, recorded in the midst of negotiations on May 6, 1783, captures this sleight of hand: Washington “expressed his surprise” when informed that Carleton intended to include fugitives from slavery in the pending withdrawal, as they were not “property at the time,” having previously been freed by the British. Delivering these individuals up for severe punishment would be “a dishonorable violation of the public faith pledged to the Negroes,” Carleton argued.

Though no record remains of Harry’s thoughts on this turn of events, Boston King, who was born into slavery and joined the British in South Carolina, later wrote in his memoirs of the “inexpressible anguish and terror” brought on by the victors—escapees’ former enslavers—coming north and “seizing upon their slaves in the streets of New York, or even dragging them out of their beds.” The prospect of being enslaved and punished anew was unfathomable after several years behind British lines. “For some days, we lost our appetite for food, and sleep departed from our eyes,” King wrote.

The stakes were high for all—and Harry had escaped from none other than the commander in chief of the now-victorious Continental Army.