PROVIDENCE — Jason Roomes did not learn that his ancestors had fought in the American Revolution until he was in his 40s. His father may have never known. By the time Roomes found records of his family’s history tucked away in a dozen town halls, his father had been dead for decades.
The story is not unusual for descendants of the First Rhode Island Regiment, an infantry of Black, Indigenous, and white soldiers and one of the few regiments that fought for nearly the entire Revolutionary War. The Continental Army promised freedom to any enslaved man willing to fight. It also paid slave owners for the “inconvenience” of sending their “property” into battle.
More than 250 years later, the men who took that deal have yet to be fully remembered as part of America’s Revolutionary history.
“Go around Rhode Island, look at the names, all these different statues, monuments, roads, and bridges with these slave owners’ names,” Roomes said. “There’s none of these Black soldiers who did their part — slaves were brought down to enlist because the owner didn’t want to go or didn’t want to send his son. Or he brought them down to make some money because they were paying them for the soldier.”
A town historian for North Kingstown had included a chapter about Roomes’s family in one his books. Three Roomes brothers — Cato, Pero, and Caesar — were enslaved by British loyalist George Rome: Caesar, who is believed to have died of smallpox, earned his freedom by fighting with the First Rhode Island Regiment; Cato served in the navy and it was believed Pero was in a militia unit.
Researching his genealogy inspired Roomes to become a Black war reenactor. He now teaches the history of the First Rhode Island Regiment at public events.
“I’m proud of my heritage, but I’m also disappointed about how we don’t teach this,” he said.
George Washington took command of the Continental Army on July 3, 1775, and was surprised to find so many people of color already in the ranks. Colonies had been enlisting Blacks as substitutes for whites, or to fill units that didn’t have enough soldiers.
Washington — a slave owner himself — banned the recruitment of people of African descent. But the ban was brief: Between 1775 and 1776, the Continental Army lost 3,000 soldiers who were taken prisoner, according to Rhode Island historian Robert Geake, author of “From Slaves to Soldiers: The 1st Rhode Island Regiment in the American Revolution.” A British proclamation offered freedom to enslaved people who crossed over to the British side.
Washington lifted his ban in January 1776.
“He realized that they needed to enlist Blacks and swell the ranks of the army,” Geake said.
A few years later, Rhode Island passed the Slave Enlistment Act of 1778, which legalized the enlistment of “every able-bodied Negro, Mulatto, or Indian Man Slave, in this State.”
“It is further Voted and Resolved, that every Slave, so enlisting, shall, upon his passing Muster before Col. Christopher Greene, be immediately discharged from the Service of his Master or Mistress; and be absolutely FREE, as though he had never been encumbered with any Kind of Servitude or Slavery,” the act read.
“The promise was kept in the sense that they were given their freedom, but they certainly had a hardscrabble life after the war,” said Geake. "They were paid in food and sometimes shoes and other things like that, but it was such a difficult life that they often had to work at three or four farms, or several odd jobs a week, just to make ends meet.”
Some gave their pension and enlistment bounties to their former owners in repayment for their freedom.
Indigenous soldiers enlisting in the First Rhode Island Regiment were trying to preserve tribal sovereignty. A century prior to the Revolution, Native Americans in Rhode Island were involved in King Philip’s War, a battle to break Indigenous power in the Northeast region and create New England, according to Lorén Spears.
The executive director of the Tomaquag Museum, an Indigenous museum in Exeter, R.I., Spears said Black and Native American men were enlisted during a turning point in the Revolution, when the colonies were struggling with troop shortages.
“There’s a lot of conquest and colonization that has taken place, and land dispossession, forced labor that’s taking place, and poverty,” she said. “There are still Indigenous communities, including the Narragansett, which I’m a citizen of, that are fighting for their sovereignty and rights. We are still fighting back against the dispossession that’s taking place.”
The First Rhode Island Regiment was composed of approximately 225 soldiers (about 140 Blacks and 85 Indigenous men), many of whom joined in the hope of gaining freedom for themselves and future generations, Spears said.
Journals and battlefield accounts show that the First Rhode Island Regiment fought proudly through eight years of hardship that inflicted mental and physical suffering.
In a letter to the Rhode Island couple who once owned him, written with the help of a medical aide, one freed soldier named Thomas Nichols said service in the war was “disagreeable to his mind” and “destructive to my health.”
At the Battle of Rhode Island in August 1778, the First Rhode Island Regiment fought back at least three attacks of Germans fighting for the crown to guard retreating American forces. Three years later, the regiment lost 14 men during a surprise attack at Pine’s Bridge, N.Y., while unsuccessfully trying to protect Colonel Christopher Greene. And on the night of Oct. 14, 1781, the regiment joined 400 infantrymen in a bayonet assault of Redoubts 10 and 9 that broke the British defensive perimeter at Yorktown in Virginia, trapping British forces and leading to their surrender.
The Pine’s Bridge monument in Yorktown, by sculptor Jay Warren of Oregon, pays tribute to the members of the First Rhode Island Regiment who died defending the Pines Bridge crossing of the Croton River. It shows Greene, an African American, and a Native American man, “all doomed to perish in the brief and desperate battle,” according to the Yorktown officials.
Brad Fay, program director for the Washington-Rochambeau Revolutionary Route Association, which commemorates the 680-mile route Continental soldiers marched from Newport to Yorktown, said the Yorktown monument, and other sites along the trail, are reminders of the regiment’s sacrifice.
“It’s not a coincidence, or by chance, that people don’t know these stories,” Fay said. “I didn’t realize so many people of color were involved in our founding [until] four or five years ago. We ought to be able to tell their stories, as well as Washington and Hamilton, and other bold-faced names.”
The National Park Service honored the First Rhode Island Regiment by commissioning a portrait by artist Don Troiani called “Brave Men as Ever Fought,” which shows modern actors dressed as Black Revolutionary soldiers. The painting hangs at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia.
Funding is underway for a monument in Trenton, N.J., according to Fay, where the regiment spent much of its service. It is also the home of one of the country’s largest groups of First Rhode Island Regiment reenactors.
“Black people were involved in the building and shaping of this nation,” said Kevin Chapman, secretary of the nonprofit 6th Regiment United States Colored Troops that includes the First Rhode Island Regiment reenactors.
Rhode Island has recognized individual families of Rhode Island Regiment soldiers, but a congressional bill sponsored by US Representative Gabe Amo of Rhode Island would award a single Congressional Gold Medal to the First Rhode Island Regiment, collectively, for their service in the Revolutionary War.
“We fought for better or worse in the Revolutionary War, and all others to make America the wonderful nation that it is,” Amo said. “The First Rhode Island Regiment had to play an important role that all Black troops played through history of proving that they are willing to fight. And they certainly did.”
“They are a shining example of our willingness to sacrifice and serve this nation.”
Carlos Muñoz can be reached at carlos.munoz@globe.com. Follow him @ReadCarlos and on Instagram @Carlosbrknews.