Far more enslaved people joined the British than fought for the Patriots

Evidence

White colonists lived in constant fear of insurrections by the enslaved living among them, and with reason: the years leading up to the Revolution were defined by the frequent plotting and carrying out of revolts by enslaved people in the mainland and across the Caribbean. As tensions rose between the Crown and the colonists, the British exploited colonists’ concerns about their “internal enemy,” and the enslaved shrewdly exploited the fight between white colonists and their British rulers. The enslaved had but one loyalty: their freedom. And they used the conflict to organize and conspire against the colonists as early as 1774, running away to join British troops and presenting themselves at British forts. Over the course of the war, thousands of enslaved people would join the British—far outnumbering those who joined the Patriot cause. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 94

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s case study on the Revolutionary-War-cause dispute — this is a core contested empirical claim about which side enslaved liberty aligned with.