Punching Back: Enslaved Resistance to Soldiers’ Predation during the American Revolution

Continental soldiers violated enslaved people’s quarters during the American Revolution, but enslaved people punched back. Continental soldiers frequently beat enslaved people in their efforts to press them for camp labor and seize their provisions. Army records, from orderly books to officers’ correspondence, likewise reveal that soldiers sexually assaulted enslaved women and even pirated enslaved children. Yet, these same military records show that Black women and men physically resisted soldiers’ predation. Though historians understandably center Black loyalism and marronage in their studies of enslaved politics in the Revolutionary Era, enslaved people’s wartime self-defense constituted a third form of mass resistance. Analyzing the arrival of the Continental Army on Southern plantations as moments of racial terror, this paper recontextualizes Black politics in the Revolutionary Era as not only a search for political freedom but bodily freedom.