Brothers in Liberty

After failing to defeat the Continental Army in New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania during the first half of the Revolutionary War, British generals decided to turn south, where they believed they could win the war in a region more heavily populated by Loyalists. In late 1778, a British expeditionary force sailed south from New York City and captured Savannah, which became a British base of operations and strategic hinge. To thwart the British, an international force gathered around Savannah, including Americans, Poles, Germans, Irish, and—significantly—a volunteer force of free Blacks from present-day Haiti: the Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue.

The Chasseurs constituted the largest Black military unit in the American Revolution. The soldiers were free men, the sons of French fathers, mostly sugar plantation owners, and slave mothers in France’s most prosperous overseas colony. In the fall of 1779, this force joined the attack on the British at Savannah in a series of frontal results. The French and Americans were repulsed at great cost in lives, but the free Black Haitians stood their ground—and, in a moment of high courage that has never received its due, stymied a British counterattack that salvaged the day for the Americans and French.

A rock at Savannah on behalf of the American Revolution, many of the Haitian survivors of the battle went on to serve the cause of liberty in the Haitian Revolution and help found the first Black republic in world history. This is their story.