Interviewees:
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Elizabeth Chew
- CEO, South Carolina Historical Society
South Carolina was the only colony where enslaved Black people made up a majority of the population, and Patriot leaders feared the Revolution would inspire flight, sabotage, or rebellion. The British promised freedom to any enslaved person of a Patriot who reached their lines, and as many as 5,000 formerly enslaved people left with the British when they evacuated Charleston in 1782. The most fully documented life among them is Boston King, who escaped to British lines, sailed to New York, and was eventually resettled in Nova Scotia, and later Sierra Leone. He became a Methodist minister and wrote an autobiography that is one of the era’s essential Black Loyalist sources.
