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For enslaved Black Americans living through the Revolutionary War, freedom sometimes meant donning the red coat of the enemy. Such was the case for the Carolina Corps, a military unit comprising roughly 300 fugitives from slavery who took up arms for the British in exchange for emancipation. Created out of two predecessor units in December 1782, when the Patriots’ imminent victory prompted the British to evacuate Black soldiers from Charleston, South Carolina, the newly formed regiment served in the Caribbean, where it was tasked, ironically, with suppressing slave uprisings and keeping the peace in the British West Indies.
Gary Sellick, a historian who uncovered the corps’ story while writing his 2018 dissertation, argues that its members—the first Black soldiers in the British Army to receive pensions upon retirement, embark on a recruiting mission abroad and enlist in a West India Regiment—set a precedent for securing freedom from slavery through military service.
“These men changed the way the British military works, and no one knows about it,” he says. “They earned their freedom and then used that freedom to not only better their lives but to better an institution.”
“It all starts with those guys on a boat in Charleston,” Sellick adds, and it culminated in the Mutiny Act of 1807, which freed around 8,000 Black soldiers in the British Army, promising them the same pay and treatment as their white counterparts.
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So, why isn’t this all-Black fighting force more widely known today? Unfortunately, no firsthand accounts by members of the corps survive. As a result, the written record comes almost exclusively from the perspective of white men, particularly the British officers who led the regiment. Thanks to the efforts of Sellick and other historians, however, the long-overlooked achievements of this groundbreaking unit are finally receiving the recognition they deserve.
The Carolina Corps wasn’t the first Black military unit to serve the crown. During the Seven Years’ War, which spanned 1756 to 1763, the British recruited enslaved and free Black men from the colonies to fill their ranks. Beyond the Carolina Corps, Black soldiers served in such Revolutionary War units as Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment and the 29th Regiment of Foot. By the end of the revolution in September 1783, an estimated 20,000 fugitives from slavery had joined the Loyalist cause.
Enslaved Americans had good reason to side with the British over the Patriots. In late 1775, Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation guaranteeing freedom to Black fugitives who joined “His Majesty’s troops.” Thousands took the British up on this offer, bolstering the crown’s forces in the Southern colonies in the later years of the war.
In Charleston, Loyalists were desperate for skilled horsemen who could work as scouts and raiders, plundering Patriot homes for supplies. The Black Dragoons, an armed Black cavalry company led by white officer Benjamin Thompson, emerged to fill this need. It was a remarkably successful unit, and the Dragoons’ responsibilities quickly expanded. In 1782, they were tasked with apprehending Hessian deserters, earning a reward of two guineas for each one recovered, whether dead or alive. The soldiers also captured individuals enslaved by the Patriots, depriving the enemy of critical manpower.
“It is unknown whether the men of the Dragoons knew what would become of the slaves who they took to the British lines,” wrote Sellick in his dissertation. By this stage of the war, he added, the British had enough troops to defend Charleston, so “any newcomers [had to be] part of an ulterior plan by the British. Even so, … the Dragoons knew their best chance of survival rested on their usefulness for the British cause, and thus the raiding continued, whatever moral conflicts may have arisen within the unit.”
Another group of Black soldiers, the Black Pioneers, predated the Dragoons, originating at the start of the Southern Campaign in 1776. Under the command of white engineer James Moncrief, this provincial, or locally recruited, unit was tasked with fatigue duties, such as constructing fortifications and transporting supplies. But the men’s work on the front lines often placed them in harm’s way, as seen during the siege of Charleston in 1780.
The British Army amalgamated the Dragoons and the Pioneers into a single regiment, the Carolina Corps, upon their arrival in the Caribbean in December 1782. While most Black military units disbanded after the war, this little-known corps endured. Was the unit’s survival due to the men’s indispensable service as Loyalist laborers and cavalrymen? Did it stem from their bravery in combat against such enemies as the legendary “Swamp Fox,” Francis Marion? Perhaps it was a calculated choice to preserve white lives by sacrificing Black ones.
A definitive answer is unclear, but what remains certain is the soldiers’ undeniable valor. A striking example occurred on February 24, 1782, when the cavalrymen of the Dragoons confronted 500 South Carolina State Troops. Catching up to the enemy, the future Carolina Corps members pursued the Patriots “with great slaughter,” according to a contemporary newspaper report. Thompson was so impressed by the Dragoons’ service that he remarked, “They have all been used to fire and sword, and are brave to the last degree.”
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As the Dragoons’ and the Pioneers’ reputation within the British military grew, so too did the threat they posed to the Patriots.
Between 5,000 and 8,000 men of African descent fought in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. But white colonists’ aversion to arming enslaved people prevented many Black Americans from joining the Patriot cause. Fear over slave revolts was especially palpable in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Local plantation owner Charles Cotesworth Pinckney expressed this anxiety in writing, claiming that the Dragoons were “daily committing the most horrible depredations and murders in the defenseless parts of our country.” That sentiment appeared poised to intensify as the war drew to a close.
On December 14, 1782, the British began their long-awaited evacuation of Charleston, ending a grueling, 31-month occupation. As British forces and their allies crowded Gadsden’s Wharf on the city’s eastern peninsula, thousands of people enslaved by retreating Loyalists scrambled for space aboard a fleet of 130 ships. They were packed in the ships’ holds in filthy conditions reminiscent of their initial arrival in North America, their prospects of freedom largely unchanged by the war.
Amid this chaotic scene, another group of African descendants stood on the top deck of the HMS Symmetry with fresh air on their faces and a vastly different future ahead. The soon-to-be members of the Carolina Corps, comprising 240 Pioneers and 70 Dragoons, watched as Charleston, the port of entry for an estimated 40 percent of all enslaved people trafficked to North America, faded from view.
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“It’s desperation at that stage,” says Sellick. “[These soldiers] know that if they stay and get caught, they’re going to be hanged. That moment on that boat, it had to be pure relief. For the first time in their lives, these men are choosing their master”: in this case, the British military.
Where the military wanted to take the men, however, wasn’t up for debate. And so these 300 formerly enslaved soldiers ended up on the humid island of St. Lucia in the sugar-producing British West Indies, where they served as a peacetime unit tasked with an exceptionally difficult job.
In a region beset by slave rebellions, the former fugitives of the Carolina Corps were assigned to capture “maroons” (escapees from slavery who established free societies of their own) and put down uprisings in British colonies, including Grenada, Barbados and St. Vincent. As Edward Mathew, commander of the British forces in the Windward Islands, wrote in a 1791 letter discovered by Sellick, the corps was “particularly formidable” to local Indigenous people and the enslaved. Its members were “much better qualified than Europeans for the fatiguing duty of searching out the fugitives,” Mathew claimed. Yet even within this grim paradox of fugitive turned slave catcher, the soldiers managed to leverage their newfound agency to their advantage.
The white populations of the British Caribbean relied heavily on the corps for protection, both against external threats and internal uprisings. This reliance placed the men in a complex and fluid social position. “They had already proven they were militarily valuable,” says David Lambert, a historian at the University of Warwick in England, and the British military regarded them as free soldiers and British subjects.
But the colonial island governments struggled to define the corps’ status. The soldiers weren’t enslaved, but they weren’t white either, and they didn’t fit neatly into the plantation societies. Their background, steeped in the unique culture of the Gullah Geechee (a term now used to refer to the descendants of individuals enslaved on the coasts of South Carolina and some other Southern states), contrasted with the more recently enslaved people of the British West Indies, who hailed from diverse African nations.
By “performing Britishness,” as Sellick calls it, the corps leveraged its distinct military function and social standing to assert its members’ rights and demand respect. This was evident in various ways, both minor and significant. For example, while their living quarters were segregated at their garrison headquarters on Grenada, Black soldiers still fraternized with white ones, especially in taverns.
The men of the corps also fought for timely pay after repeated delays in receiving their wages. In 1785, Mathew wrote to the military paymaster in London, demanding that the corps be paid “with the same regularity as any other in His Majesty’s service”—phrasing that implied the soldiers themselves had initiated this petition for fair treatment.
Perhaps the most striking example of the corps’ unique position, one that unsettled many of the island’s planter class, was its legal representation. The same year that the men demanded timely wages, Mathew reported on a court-martial involving a corps member serving in Grenada. Though Black residents of British colonies in the Caribbean were typically governed by slave codes designed to subjugate them and support white supremacy, the British Army refused to subject the man to these harsh measures. Instead, the Black soldier was tried in a military court, receiving the same legal treatment as four white soldiers court-martialed alongside him.
In the 1790s, after about a decade of loyal service, many members of the corps were physically exhausted by the demands of their duties. Mathew, their steadfast advocate, petitioned for the soldiers’ right to receive retirement pensions. He referred to the men as “invalids” and proposed creating an “invalid establishment” of funds to ensure economic fairness for the soldiers in their later years. The veterans would officially receive pensions beginning in 1793.
The corps’ push for additional benefits coincided with a harsh realization for the British Army: For white men, service in the West Indies was viewed as a death sentence due to the high risk of disease. The growing appeal of jobs created by the Industrial Revolution back in Britain further strained military recruitment. In this context, the corps garnered attention as a successful prototype for maintaining military control in the West Indies, offering a model for how the British could staff their forces moving forward. “The importance of this contingent … was recognized all over the West Indies,” wrote historian Roger Norman Buckley in Slaves in Red Coats: The British West India Regiments, 1795-1815.
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To fill the corps’ ranks in 1791, Mathew sent men from the unit to Nova Scotia, where they sought enlistees in Birchtown, an independent Black community founded in 1783 by veterans of the Black Pioneers. Though overall interest was low, the party managed to recruit 16 men.
Just as these gains were being made, Britain faced a new military crisis. In 1793, French revolutionaries executed their king, Louis XVI, and his wife, Marie Antoinette, unleashing a wave of political instability that threatened the whole of Europe. Soon at war with France, Britain found its military dangerously unprepared, with just 40,000 troops scattered across three continents. In the British West Indies, officials decided that Black recruits were the only viable solution to defend the colonies against the French, who occupied numerous neighboring territories in the Caribbean. The Carolina Corps served as “proof of concept,” Lambert says, paving the way for the establishment of 12 West India Regiments.
The corps’ few remaining members became part of the newly established First West India Regiment. To fill the rest of the ranks, the military instructed island governments to contribute enslaved men. “They say, ‘What we should do is … go to British slaveholders in Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua, and say we’ll buy your fittest, strongest men,’” Lambert explains. But this plan had two major drawbacks: Most enslavers had no desire to arm their enslaved people, and the British Army wasn’t offering enough money to offset the cost of the lost labor on colonial plantations. Though the government tried to recruit free Black people living in the British West Indies, these individuals had little incentive to risk their life for the crown.
Ultimately, the British decided to acquire manpower directly from slave traders. Between 1795 and 1807, Britain bought an estimated 13,400 soldiers for its West India Regiments, making the country the largest single buyer of enslaved people during that period, according to the National Army Museum, and “one of the major promoters of the wretched trade,” wrote Buckley. Indeed, Buckley argued, the practice delayed the abolition of slavery in Britain and its colonies.
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Despite attempts by colonial governments to subject the West India Regiments to slave codes, the effacing nature of military service granted these men a form of implied freedom. The debate over how to classify the West India Regiments—whether as British subjects and soldiers or as enslaved men—continued until 1807. That year, abolitionist pressure, fear of uprisings by soldiers concerned about disbandment and a potential return to slavery, and evolving views on Black soldiers led to the passage of the Mutiny Act. This legislation declared that all of the Black troops in the king’s service would be free, marking one of the largest single acts of manumission “in pre-emancipation society in the Caribbean,” according to Buckley. Following these landmark changes, the newly enfranchised Black soldiers were granted the same enlistment bounty and equal pay as their white counterparts. Britain declared the slave trade illegal in May 1807, though lawmakers only granted full freedom to enslaved people in the British colonies in 1838.
Sellick argues that by their very existence and their efforts to advocate for improved rights, the men of the corps played a crucial role in shaping a new era of interracial relations within the British Army. Still, evolution did not ensure equality. British forces remained segregated during World War I, and Black soldiers, including the West India Regiments, were notably excluded from the Allied victory parades in London in 1919. During World War II, the 600,000 Black service members recruited to serve on the British side earned one-third of their white counterparts’ salaries. These soldiers’ stories are just as deserving of recognition as the members of the Carolina Corps—individuals who had to carve out a place for themselves in a system that was never designed to include them.
“It’s criminal that no one knows about these men,” says Sellick. “They were there at a critical moment, making a tremendous impact—one that far exceeded the sum of their parts.”
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