"[2] In reply
the Virginia press warned the negroes against British perfidy; and the
revolutionary government, while announcing the penalties for servile
revolt, promised freedom to such as would promptly desert the British
standard. Some hundreds of negroes appear to have joined Dunmore, but they
did not save him from being driven away.[3]
[Footnote 2: _American Archives_, Force ed., fourth series, III, 1385.]
[Footnote 3: _Ibid_., III, 1387; IV, 84, 85; V, 160, 162.]
When several years afterward military operations were transferred to the
extreme South, where the whites were few and the blacks many, the problem
of negro enlistments became at once more pressing and more delicate. Henry
Laurens of South Carolina proposed to General Washington in March, 1779,
the enrollment of three thousand blacks in the Southern department.
Hamilton warmly endorsed the project, and Washington and Madison more
guardedly. Congress recommended it to the states concerned, and pledged
itself to reimburse the masters and to set the slaves free with a payment
of fifty dollars to each of these at the end of the war. Eventually Colonel
John Laurens, the son of Henry, went South as an enthusiastic emissary of
the scheme, only to meet rebuff and failure.
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