The Declaration of Independence may be the most widely celebrated document in all of U.S. history. The quotes that most people know — that “all men are created equal” with rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” — are regularly cited as proof that the United States was built on a cornerstone of freedom and justice for all. And the founding fairy tales that infect countless textbooks, museums, and monuments paint the American Revolution as a righteous struggle of colonists in eastern seaports to unshackle themselves from British tyranny. But the culminating grievance of the Declaration tells another story. It takes aim at Black and Native Americans, defending the entrenchment of slavery and settler colonialism in the new United States.
The final grievance says of the British Crown: “He has excited domestic insurrections among us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” Here, in accusing King George III of inciting enslaved and Indigenous people to rise up against colonists, the Declaration’s signers condemned Black and Native Americans’ freedom and sovereignty. The so-called liberty championed in the Declaration rested on what sociologist Eve L. Ewing describes as the “original sins” of bondage, displacement, and genocide — “cornerstones that irrevocably shaped the social fabric of this nation.”
We created this mixer activity, “Beyond Loyalists and Patriots: Black and Native Americans Fight for Their Freedom in the U.S. War of Independence,” to help students examine these causes and varied impacts of the American Revolution on voices often stifled or erased from its commemorations. For most people, neutrality in the U.S. War of Independence was not an option, and they joined the side that seemed more likely to improve their lives. In the lesson, students surface choices and outcomes navigated by an array of Black and Indigenous people in the Revolutionary period. Through conversation, they explore what freedom meant to those excluded from it at the U.S. founding.
Roles for this lesson include:
- Alexander McGillivray (Hoboi-Hili-Miko), Muscogee Creek
- Boston King
- Buckongahelas, Delaware/Lenape
- Deborah Squash
- Elizabeth (Mum Bett) Freeman
- Hokolesqua (Cornstalk), Shawnee
- James Armistead (Lafayette)
- James Forten
- John Marrant
- Konwatsi’tsiaienni (Molly/Mary Brant) & Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant), Mohawk
- Lemuel Haynes
- Nanye’hi (Nancy Ward), Cherokee
- Nonhelema, Shawnee
- Onitositah (Old Tassel, or Corn Tassel), Cherokee
- Paul Cuffe, Wampanoag
- Peggy Gwynn
- Phillis Wheatley
- Tyonajanegen (Two Kettles Together), Oneida
- White Eyes (Koquethagechton), Delaware/Lenape
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Sample Roles (excerpted)
Lemuel Haynes was born in 1753 in West Hartford, Connecticut. His mother was white; his father was Black. Haynes was abandoned by his parents as an infant, and he grew up an indentured servant to Deacon David Rose, a farmer in Granville, Massachusetts. Haynes attended school and church, where he joined the Calvinist branch of Christianity.
At age 21, Haynes was released from indentured servitude and built a home of his own in Granville. He joined the local militia. When the Revolutionary War erupted in 1775, Haynes took up arms for the Thirteen Colonies. After the British and Continental armies clashed at Lexington and Concord, they fought in Boston.
Haynes fought for the patriot cause. But he also said that the ideals claimed by the Founders in the Declaration of Independence — of all men’s equality and rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — would ring hollow as long as slavery continued.
In 1776, Haynes wrote the essay, “Liberty Further Extended” in response to the Declaration. He insisted that Black people too “may justly challenge, and [have] an undeniable right” to freedom. Therefore, “the practice of slave-keeping, which so much abounds in this land is illicit.”
The arguments Haynes expressed would ripple through the abolitionist movement of the 1800s. “Liberty Further Extended” was not published in Haynes’ lifetime, but he spoke and wrote extensively in the era of the U.S. founding. Time and again, he weaved together his religious beliefs with the Revolution’s ideals. In essays, letters, and sermons, Haynes argued that the founding ideals of the United States contradicted slavery. He observed that enslavement was a sin the Founders had preserved while claiming liberty for themselves.
Konwatsi’tsiaienni (Molly/Mary Brant) was born in 1736, and her brother, Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant), was born in 1743 in present-day Ohio. Both were leaders of the Mohawk, one of six nations that made up the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy.
At age 15, Thayendanegea fought with the British in the French and Indian War. He was awarded a silver medal for his service. The Mohawk allied with the British in the Revolutionary War. Throughout, Konwatsi’tsiaienni and Thayendanegea believed defeating the patriots was the best option for protecting Haudenosaunee lands. They urged the Haudenosaunee Confederacy to fight with Britain against the United States. One British official wrote to a colleague, “One word from her goes farther. . . than a thousand from any white man without exception.”
In late 1775, Thayendanegea traveled to England. He met with King George III to secure promises to protect Mohawk land and interests in exchange for wartime support. In a letter to a British official, he noted,
It is very hard when we have let the King’s subjects have so much land for so little value, they should want to cheat us of the small spots we have left for our women and children to live on. We are tired out in making complaints and getting no redress. We therefore hope that the Superintendent may have it in his power to procure us justice. Britain promised the Haudenosaunee land in Quebec, Canada, in exchange for their allyship in the war.
Upon his return in June 1776, Thayendanegea fought alongside the British and urged the nations in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy to join him. Some declined because they felt that either neutrality or allying with the United States would give them a better chance at survival.
After Britain lost the war, Konwatsi’tsiaienni moved to Kingston, Ontario, in Canada. There she was granted land and a pension for her service to the Crown. Thayendanegea was also granted a large tract of land near the Grand River in Ontario and a pension, in 1784. He moved there with fellow Mohawks and settlers, to whom he leased land.
For the next 10 years, Thayendanegea worked to form the Western Confederacy. This confederacy was a group of Haudenosaunee and western Indigenous peoples united to block U.S. expansion westward.
Konwatsi’tsiaienni died in 1796, and Thayendanegea died in 1807.
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