The man who would come to be called Harry Washington was born near the Gambia River, in West Africa, around 1740. As a young man, he was sold into slavery and endured the horrors of the Middle Passage. In Virginia, he was purchased by a neighbor of George Washington, who then bought the young man in 1763 for 40 pounds. After working to drain the colony’s Great Dismal Swamp—one of George Washington’s many land ventures—he was sent to Mount Vernon to care for the horses.

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Then came war. With General Washington in Massachusetts leading the Continental Army, Harry Washington, like thousands of other enslaved people, abandoned the plantation, risking torture and imprisonment, to join the British cause. In exchange for his freedom, he enlisted in what was known as the Ethiopian Regiment.

Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, had created a base to oppose the rebels near the port of Norfolk in the summer of 1775. Encouraged by the large numbers of enslaved people who sought sanctuary behind British lines, he published the British empire’s first emancipation proclamation in November, granting liberty to any person in bondage, owned by Patriots, who would take up arms for King George III. These recruits—Harry Washington among them—formed the empire’s first Black regiment. Together with Dunmore, they launched what would amount to the biggest slave insurrection in the nation’s history until the Civil War. Their uniforms bore the motto “Liberty for Slaves”—a tart retort to the “Liberty or Death” slogan favored by Patriots.

The prospect of freed Black men armed and trained by the British terrified white Patriots. George Washington, who had been a close friend of the royal governor before the war, now referred to him as “that Arch Traitor to the Rights of humanity.” He worried that Dunmore and his multiracial army (which also included regiments of British redcoats and white Loyalists) were fast becoming his own men’s “most formidable Enemy.” The Continental Congress made it the first mission of the U.S. Navy to crush Dunmore’s troops, and later sent General Charles Lee—second only to Washington in rank—to defeat them. Both campaigns failed.

In May 1776, as the representatives in Philadelphia remained divided over whether to declare independence, the Virginia delegation—convinced that Dunmore’s alliance with Black Americans made negotiation with Britain impossible—broke the deadlock, unanimously urging separation from the mother country. Within months, a combination of Patriot artillery, smallpox, typhus, and drought forced Dunmore and his surviving soldiers and their families to retreat from Virginia to New York City. There, Harry Washington and others joined the successful British invasion of the city and were absorbed into the Black Pioneers, a military construction unit founded by British General Henry Clinton. Washington then went on to serve in an artillery unit in Charleston, South Carolina.

By the war’s end, some 20,000 Black Americans had served as active members of the British military—about three times as many as had fought as Patriots—and many tens of thousands more had fled plantations to support the King’s cause by cooking, cleaning, and caring for livestock.

Their motives for allying with the British, then the world’s foremost slave traffickers, were clear: Emancipation was not on the Continental Congress agenda. “Slaves are devils,” one Virginia Patriot wrote, “and to make them otherwise than slaves will be to set devils free.” For their part, British leaders like Dunmore did not necessarily oppose slavery or consider those in bondage to be their equal, but many were willing to back mass liberation as a tool to crush the rebellion. The unlikely alliances they forged set in motion a series of events that would, in time, help undermine the foundations of slavery on both sides of the Atlantic.

Dunmore had made his decree without approval from London, but it was never repudiated. This encouraged General Clinton to issue his own in 1779, though he declined to arm Black men.