Sunday, July 05, 2026
Air Force Detains Officer Who Called for Trump’s Impeachment at Capitol - The New York Times
Air Force Detains Officer Who Called for Trump’s Impeachment at Capitol
(A necessary act of civil disobedience)
"Maj. Jason Watson, who was in uniform, was arrested during a protest that followed a news conference on Wednesday.
An active-duty officer was placed into Air Force custody after he was arrested in uniform on Wednesday after an event in which he called for the impeachment, conviction and removal of President Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
The U.S. Capitol Police arrested the officer, Maj. Jason Watson, who identified himself as an active-duty service member, on the Capitol steps.
He was attending a news conference organized by the Removal Coalition, a grass-roots activist group. Representative Al Green, Democrat of Texas, who has filed articles of impeachment against Mr. Trump at least six times, also attended the event.
During his speech, Major Watson, who said he was not a member of the Democratic Party, accused the president and vice president of violating both the Constitution and their oaths of office.
“Congress remains unconvinced of the urgency and necessity for them to honor their oath,” he said, “so we must persuade them, with our unrelenting, uncompromising civil resistance.”
Major Watson ended his speech, in which he criticized the Trump administration’s immigration policies as well as its actions in Venezuela and Iran, by calling on Americans “to peacefully exercise your First Amendment rights.”
After the news conference, he stood on the Capitol steps holding a sign with the words “Impeach,” “Convict” and “Remove” stacked one atop the other. Shortly afterward, he was arrested on suspicion of “crowding, obstructing and incommoding,” the U.S. Capitol Police said in a statement on Friday.
“It is generally against the law for the public to demonstrate on the House steps unless they are with a member of Congress,” the police said. The statement noted that Major Watson had been “escorted to the House steps by a member of Congress” and that after the member left, “our officers gave the man lawful orders to stop the illegal demonstration.”
Jessica Denson, the founder of the Removal Coalition, said in an interview on Friday that the D.C. attorney general’s office elected not to prosecute Major Watson for his protest, but that he was “taken directly into custody by the Air Force yesterday.”
“He is being detained in an Air Force base as we speak and is currently under a military gag order,” she said.
Christopher J. Mutimer, a lawyer for Major Watson, said it was a “beautiful irony” that an active-duty Air Force major in full uniform had been arrested on the steps of the Capitol just before the July 4 holiday.
“Major Watson took a courageous, nonviolent stand to defend the Constitution against an unlawful war in Iran only to be detained at the foot of our nation’s capitol,” Mr. Mutimer said in a phone interview.
Mr. Mutimer said his client has not been criminally charged but was under investigation for several violations of the Uniformed Code of Military Justice. Major Watson is currently at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling in Washington and is not allowed to leave the base, his lawyer said.
The Defense Department directed questions about the arrest to the Air Force, which did not respond to email or telephone inquiries.
Troy E. Meink, the Air Force secretary, said in a statement on social media on Thursday that he was “aware of recent reports involving an Air Force officer protesting at the United States Capitol.”
“I expect every Airman and Guardian to comply with all laws and policies governing personal conduct, political participation, and the wear of the uniform,” he said.
Service members are prohibited from using “contemptuous words” against the president, vice president, Congress and other top officials under Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which states that “any commissioned officer” who does so “shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.”
Military members are also banned from wearing their uniforms while participating in political activities, like rallies, according to the Department of Defense Standards of Conduct Office.
Ms. Denson said Major Watson reached out to her in February with the intention of making a statement that would “not fall flat and that had a major impact and did not make his sacrifice in vain to convey an explicit message of impeachment, conviction and removal from an active duty member.”
Working with Major Watson over several months, Ms. Denson said, she brought Mr. Green, a representative of Texas who recently lost a primary election, to sponsor the event because a sitting member of Congress must host a news conference that is held at the Capitol and that her group purposely hid the major’s involvement until Wednesday.
“We wanted to protect him and make sure that he was able to make that message and clearly get it out to the masses before he could be stopped,” she said.
In a video statement posted after Major Watson’s arrest, Mr. Green said he was at the Capitol “to witness a major in the United States military bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice.”
Mark Walker contributed reporting and Georgia Gee contributed research.
Aimee Ortiz covers breaking news and other topics for The Times."
Trump Administration Rolls Back Dozens of Gun Regulations
Trump Administration Rolls Back Dozens of Gun Regulations
“The Trump administration is rolling back over three dozen firearms regulations, including ending the gun show loophole and loosening oversight of private weapons transactions. Critics argue these changes weaken public safety, while proponents claim they restore regulations to pre-Biden levels. The administration’s approach has sparked debate over the balance between gun rights and public safety.
Critics say the administration is weakening public safety. Proponents say regulations would be where they were before President Joseph R. Biden took office.
The Trump administration is scrapping more than three dozen firearms regulations, abandoning a crackdown on illegal sales, restoring gun rights to some people with mental illness and loosening oversight of private weapons transactions.
The drastic retrenchment at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the federal agency responsible for enforcing the nation’s gun laws, was not entirely unexpected: President Trump campaigned as a champion of gun rights.
In the view of critics and even some A.T.F. veterans, the agency, in closely mirroring the demands made by gun owners and manufacturers to lighten their regulatory burden, is enacting changes at the expense of public safety. The moves, they worry, come as the bureau has already been weakened, with hundreds of its officials diverted to immigration enforcement.
Proponents of the changes point out that some of the reversals would return regulations to what they were only a few years ago, before President Joseph R. Biden took office. After a series of deadly mass shootings, Mr. Biden signed into law gun control measures, ending nearly three decades of gridlock over whether and how to regulate firearms.
The divisiveness illustrates the complicated landscape for gun policy.
“With the Biden regulations that we got and put in place, we advanced the ball,” said Kris Brown, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, one of the country’s biggest gun control organizations.
But the Trump administration’s approach “takes us back 100 years,” she said. “It’s really decimating A.T.F.’s ability to regulate this industry.”
A White House official said the administration’s policies reflected Mr. Trump’s commitment to ensuring that Americans could exercise their Second Amendment rights, accusing the Biden administration of bypassing Congress and using the regulatory process to restrict gun rights.
Mark Oliva, a spokesman for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms industry’s trade association, said the changes were meant to clarify gun regulations.
“We want clarity to know how we’re going to be able to conduct business,” he said, “to be able to produce and to be able to sell firearms in accordance with the laws and regulations that govern our industry.”
Already, the administration has done away with major policies, including a zero-tolerance approach toward gun dealers who repeatedly broke the law. The more than three dozen rules that it has moved to eliminate would raise the legal threshold for revoking a dealer’s license; extend gun rights to buyers who had faced restrictions because of mental illness or inability to manage their own finances; and end extra scrutiny of stabilizing braces, gun accessories that have been used in mass shootings to lethal effect.
The administration is now targeting gun regulations that Democrats have passed at the state and local levels. It has challenged bans on semiautomatic rifles in Colorado, the District of Columbia and Virginia. On Wednesday, it sued California for its restrictions on the sale of Glock and Glock-style handguns, and Virginia for limits on the sale of semiautomatic rifles, hours after both laws went into effect.
Since his first run for office, Mr. Trump has positioned himself as an ardent supporter of gun rights. In the run-up to the 2024 election, he vowed to be “the best friend gun owners have ever had in the White House.” Days after being inaugurated, he signed an executive order instructing the attorney general to scrutinize what he described as “ongoing infringements of the Second Amendment rights of our citizens.”
By May 2025, the A.T.F. had overturned its “zero-tolerance” policy, which had empowered its inspectors to revoke the licenses of federal gun dealers who were known to have broken the law. Pam Bondi, then the attorney general, said it had “unfairly targeted law-abiding gun owners and created an undue burden.” The policy increased the chances that dealers who had falsified business records, skipped background checks or otherwise sold guns to people prohibited from owning them would face consequences. The agency ultimately revoked more than 600 licenses. But critics say that the new standards seriously curb the agency’s ability to do so.
It is a part of a broader bid across government to enact changes in line with the president’s directive. The Veterans Affairs Department in February removed the requirement that veterans who require a fiduciary to manage their benefits be prohibited from buying firearms, and veterans who were previously reported to the F.B.I. were being removed from its list. The Health and Human Services Department slashed funding for research into gun violence prevention. The U.S. Postal Service has proposed allowing people to ship handguns in the mail, upending a nearly century-old law.
In realigning the Justice Department’s priorities to bolster Mr. Trump’s agenda, the agency said in December that it would balance defending the right to own a gun with ensuring the public’s safety.
But when the A.T.F. announced in April nearly three dozen changes, the administration’s own analyses acknowledged the pitfalls to public safety.
The A.T.F.’s director, Rob Cekada, defended the agency’s approach. In a statement, he said that it reflected an effort to be as explicit as possible about “the full range of costs and benefits, including even remote scenarios.”
“This was an honest attempt to fully and transparently inform the public and is exactly the kind of analysis the comment period exists to test,” he said.
In unveiling more changes on Friday, including eliminating fingerprinting requirements for certain firearms applications, Mr. Cekada again asserted that the agency was committed to public safety, pointing to a news release that heralded how its shift in priorities had led to the seizure of nearly 50,000 firearms and the handling of nearly 950,000 gun trace requests. Still, the data is far from a complete picture because it does not reflect all the policies the Trump administration has rolled back and because many of its proposals have yet to go into effect.
Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, in announcing the proposals in April, said that the moves struck a careful balance between the interests of the gun industry and gun owners, as well as public safety. “For too long, regulations were written without any real understanding of how firearms businesses operate, how lawful gun owners actually handle their firearms or what truly improves public safety,” he said.
One proposed change allowing more people with a history of mental illness to have a gun would mean that the public safety risk could range from minimal to considerably greater, “up to and including potential mass casualty events,”according to a cost analysis by the agency. For instance, people involuntarily committed to a mental health institution would still be barred from owning a gun, whereas those who voluntarily enter those facilities would not. The rule also seeks to extend the Veterans Affairs Department’s policy to ensure that all Americans unable to manage their financial affairs, not just veterans, are not automatically prohibited from buying a gun.
In the analysis of another proposal, seeking to undo a Biden-era rule intensifying scrutiny of the use of stabilizing braces, the agency acknowledged that the gun accessory to create “dangerous, easily concealed weapons would pose an increased public safety problem.”
The agency is also proposing a higher bar to revoke a federal gun dealer’s license, instead requiring evidence that the dealer knew that it was violating the law. The agency said in its analysis that it expected the number of federal firearms licenses it revoked to drop “considerably” both under the new rule and “shifting enforcement priorities.”
Another rule would end the so-called gun show loophole, which required background checks for gun shows and certain private sales as a way to crack down on straw purchasers, or people who illegally buy guns on behalf of another.
Critics warned of the potential consequences. The rapid changes under the Trump administration flew in the face of its vow to be tough on crime, they said, crediting the Biden-era measures for helping to bring down the murder rate after coronavirus pandemic highs, though experts have suggested that a number of factors could have contributed to the drop.
“These guns are going to start to percolate back out into the community over the next couple of years,” said Marianna Mitchem, a former A.T.F. official who now advises Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit advocacy group founded by Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York.
She added, “I sadly expect that we will see an increase in violent crime.”
Even as the proposals have yet to take effect, some supporters of gun rights are pushing for the regulations to be loosened even further.
Erich Pratt, the senior vice president of Gun Owners of America, one of the country’s largest gun advocacy groups, said it was not enough to simply revert to regulatory standards on the books before the Biden administration.
His group, for instance, opposes the Justice Department’s approach to a 2022 rule directing federal licensed gun dealers to hold on to records indefinitely, reducing the amount of time that gun dealers have to keep records of sales. It has argued that the administration should eliminate the requirement altogether.
“The A.T.F. proposals are a mixed bag,” he said, adding, “Gun owners would expect better from our Republican Justice Department.”
Aishvarya Kavi works in the Washington bureau of The Times, helping to cover a variety of political and national news.“
At Trump’s Direction, Federal Agencies Are Abandoning Discrimination Cases
At Trump’s Direction, Federal Agencies Are Abandoning Discrimination Cases
“Under President Trump, federal agencies have abandoned discrimination cases based on disparate impact, a legal theory established to combat policies that disproportionately affect minority groups. This shift, driven by a push against “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies, has resulted in a significant decrease in civil rights enforcement across various departments. While disparate impact remains codified in law, the Trump administration’s directive has led to a decline in investigations and lawsuits addressing hidden discrimination.
President Trump has tried to scale back anti-discrimination regulations that date back decades. Federal agencies have heeded his call.
When Kenni Miller started as a shift manager in his local Sheetz convenience store in Altoona, Pa., he felt something that he rarely had as a Black man in the workplace.
He felt trusted. He felt appreciated.
When he was fired a few weeks later, in the summer of 2020 after a background check, Mr. Miller, then 27, was devastated. A nonviolent, felony drug conviction from his teenage years had never caused him to be denied a job before. And he already proved he could do the work.
“I was well spoken,” Mr. Miller told The New York Times in an interview. “They had me running the cash register, talking to people, all the customers. I’m doing these things, learning the whole store, so I’m equipped for the job. That’s not the issue here, right?”
In 2024, Mr. Miller was part of a class-action lawsuit against Sheetz filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging that the company’s criminal background checks disproportionately screened out applicants of color.
But soon after President Trump took office, the E.E.O.C. abruptly dropped the case.
The agency cited an executive order by Mr. Trump that directed federal agencies to “deprioritize” cases like Mr. Miller’s, in which companies are scrutinized not for intentional discrimination, but for having policies that have an unintentional, “disparate impact” on minority applicants.
The result has been an abandonment of civil rights cases across the federal government, in departments including education, housing, trade, justice and the E.E.O.C. There is no public accounting of exactly how many cases have been closed, but legal advocates describe a generational void in civil rights enforcement.
“It is absolutely widespread, and it is absolutely devastating,” said Dariely Rodriguez, chief counsel at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “We know a lot of time with discrimination, there’s rarely a smoking gun. A lot of people don’t know that they’re being subjected to discrimination. We need our federal agencies to look into that hidden discrimination.”
For Mr. Trump, the directive against disparate impact litigation is part of a broader push to eradicate “diversity, equity and inclusion” — a catchall term increasingly used to describe policies that benefit anyone who is not white and male — from every part of American life.
He and other opponents of the cases argue that employers should not be penalized for the mere implication of discrimination, usually shown through statistics. Instead, they say, the focus should be directed at explicit and intentional discrimination.
Nick Ruffner, a spokesman for Sheetz, declined to comment on the E.E.O.C’s decision to dismiss its lawsuit. But he said in a statement, “Sheetz does not tolerate discrimination of any kind,” and the company wanted “to reaffirm our commitment to fairness, inclusivity, and treating every team member and customer with respect.”
The impact of the decision to abandon discrimination cases has been felt acutely by those who have turned to the E.E.O.C., the nation’s top enforcer of workplace discrimination laws.
Under its new chair, Andrea Lucas, the agency has aggressively prioritized Mr. Trump’s goals, such as pursuing cases of white men who believe they have been discriminated against.
The agency declined to comment on specific lawsuits. But in a statement, Ms. Lucas said “rooting out race and sex discrimination has always been central to the E.E.O.C.’s mission.”
The test of disparate impact liability was established in 1971 and has been the legal theory crucial to enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned racial discrimination by employers and other institutions.
One widely cited example of disparate impact has been the Jim Crow-era literacy tests that some states created as a condition to vote. The tests did not ask about race and so seemed neutral on their face. But they disproportionately prevented Black people from voting because they had long been forced out of schools.
Amalea Smirniotopoulos, senior policy counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which successfully argued the first disparate impact case at the Supreme Court, said the legal theory is a recognition of the remnants of state-sanctioned discrimination.
“We didn’t just want to take down the ‘Whites only’ signs,” Ms. Smirniotopoulos said. “Fundamentally, the civil rights movement was fighting for the ability for people to actually get living wage jobs, and housing, access to mortgages, and all of the things that actually make for an equal society.”
The measure was codified by Congress in 1991, and upheld by the Supreme Court as recently as 2015. Because disparate impact remains codified in law — which the president cannot erase unilaterally — Mr. Trump could only demand that agencies stop making the cases a priority.
The agencies have taken heed.
The Education Department, which has severely drawn back its civil rights investigations, stopped pursuing disparate impact investigations in areas like school discipline.
The Department of Housing withdrew guidance for how the agency would assess disparate impact in enforcing fair housing laws, including redlining, and began dropping housing discrimination cases from its docket. In one instance, a public housing authority found to have favored white applicants withdrew a settlement two days after its offer, citing Mr. Trump’s order, according to an investigation by ProPublica.
The Federal Trade Commission dismissed its claims of discrimination it had brought against three Texas car dealerships for discriminating against Black and Latino consumers in charging more for add-ons.
The Department of Justice also dropped several high-profile cases predicated on disparate impact theory, including several lawsuits against police and fire departments whose hiring policies and exams were found to be discriminatory. It also recently terminated the first-ever environmental justice settlement in which Alabama officials were supposed to provide septic tanks to Black residents. The Trump administration called the plan “illegal D.E.I.” and scrapped the deal. The agency also issued a rule that eliminated disparate impact from its enforcement of Title VI.
And the Office of Management and Budget, which sets policy for the entire federal government, proposed a sweeping new regulation that prohibits the use of federal funds to “promote or support theories of disparate-impact liability” for all agencies.
The rule could ban federal funding for studies, litigation or other activities predicated on the idea that certain policies and practices could disproportionately harm certain groups — which could affect everything from the study of maternal mortality disparities at the Department of Health and Human Services to grant-funded organizations that tackle issues like housing.
Filling in the gaps are legal advocacy groups that are trying to keep cases going. Mr. Miller, with the help of a team of private attorneys, decided to become a named plaintiff in the Sheetz case, to take the place of the E.E.O.C. in the lawsuit.
“What the administration or folks who support dropping disparate impact say is that they want people to be judged by their merits,” said Pooja Shethji, a lawyer at Outten & Golden LLP, one of the lawyers representing Mr. Miller, “and that’s exactly what Mr. Miller wants — to be judged by the work, and his qualifications.”
The request is still pending before a judge, and a ruling could come down any day.
Mr. Miller said he has found a new job, but the shame he felt walking down the road with his nametag after he’d been abruptly let go still weighs on him. He said he felt compelled to stand up for Black men in America, who are often overlooked and over-incarcerated.
The E.E.O.C. found that Sheetz background check resulted in 14.5 percent of Black job applicants being denied employment, while 13 percent of Native American applicants and 13.5 percent of multiracial candidates were screened out. The denial rate for white applicants was less than 8 percent.
“The average me doesn’t come back from a situation like that,” Mr. Miller said. “I want to be the one who speaks up for this situation — which is life after having a job — and make sure jobs are held accountable.”
‘Keep Up With the Boys’
While Mr. Trump’s order specifically took aim at race-based cases, it has broad consequences for other groups, including women, L.G.B.T.Q. people and people with disabilities.
When Leah Cross started training for a new job as an Amazon delivery driver, her female colleagues gave her a piece of advice that they said would “help her keep up with the boys.”
She should purchase a “Shewee,” they told her, the camping device used by women to urinate in the woods, or in otherwise remote areas. It would help her meet her delivery quotas and avoid being punished for straying from her route for a bathroom break — a predicament her male colleagues rarely found themselves in because they could easily urinate in bottles.
Ms. Cross felt up to the challenge. When she landed a job at the world’s biggest online retail giant in August 2022, she felt like she had made it.
“Getting a leg into that industry, I saw it as, like, working for Google,” Ms. Cross recalled in an interview. “I know it’s not amazing, but I was just kind of like, ‘Hey, I’m part of something.’”
But by the end of her four-month stint she felt she was part of a humiliating trend. Like her female colleagues, she was relieving herself in her delivery van several times a day. She had received phone calls from her manager when he was notified that she deviated from her route, often to find a bathroom to use sanitary products. In November 2022, she was fired for “failure to perform.”
Ms. Cross was among three former Amazon workers who filed a grievance against Amazon in 2023, alleging the company violated wage laws by introducing strict delivery quotas and monitoring drivers with GPS tracking and surveillance cameras that alerted supervisors if a driver went off route for a bathroom break.
Ms. Cross went further, also filing a discrimination charge with the E.E.O.C. that year, alleging that women suffered disproportionately from Amazon’s strict policies because women could not urinate in bottles as easily as men and are more likely to need access to bathrooms to take care of menstruation needs.
A spokeswoman for Amazon declined to comment on Ms. Cross’s complaint. The company has maintained that workers are allowed to take bathroom breaks, and that its delivery app shows where public bathrooms are.
“You don’t see a lot of females to look up to when you’re starting this position, because it takes a lot for females to meet these working conditions,” Ms. Cross said.
In December, 2024, the E.E.O.C. contacted Ms. Cross, stating that it was “very interested in moving forward with Ms. Cross’s case.”
“I kind of accepted at that time that there wasn’t a whole lot that I could do based on my standing, and financial background,” Ms. Cross said. “But I saw hope.”
But last fall, the agency notified Ms. Cross that it would no longer be investigating her case, citing Mr. Trump’s directive. Ms. Cross, with the backing of three legal advocacy groups unsuccessfully sued the EEOC last year over its withdrawal from disparate impact cases. A judge dismissed her case.
The case illuminated the difficult path ahead for many Americans, particularly for those who don’t have the resources to take on big companies and for whom the federal government has been their only recourse.
And civil rights attorneys say that because of the administration’s attacks on D.E.I., it is getting harder to find people willing to be the face and name of private lawsuits.
“It takes a lot of bravery in this moment,” Ms. Smirniotopoulos said, “considering what it means to have the president and the federal government saying that discrimination doesn’t exist.”
Erica L. Green is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
Niko Gallogly is a Times reporter, covering business for the DealBook newsletter.“
Saturday, July 04, 2026
These Black Soldiers Fought for the British During the American Revolution in Exchange for Freedom From Slavery
“The Carolina Corps achieved emancipation through military service, paving the way for future fighters in the British Empire to do the same
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 proclamationguaranteeing 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.“
The Black Loyalists
The Black Loyalists
“Thousands of African Americans fought for the British—then fled the United States to avoid a return to enslavement.
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. That same year, the British commandant of New York, David Jones, proclaimed, “All Negroes that fly from the Enemy’s Country are Free—No person whatever can claim a right to them.” Not every British military leader agreed: When British General Lord Cornwallis invaded the South, he refused to consider freeing Black allies, much less arming them. Nevertheless, thousands volunteered to assist in the fight against their owners.
The British loss at Yorktown in 1781 was a catastrophe for the many Black Americans who now found themselves facing the prospect of being forced back into slavery. Some 10,000 scattered across four continents. They built the largest North American settlement of emancipated people, in Canada; melted into German city-states; eked out a precarious living on the streets of London; endured the brutality of Australia’s convict colony; and established the first home in Africa for people freed from bondage.
The story of the Black Loyalists and their postwar diaspora highlights an irony long ignored: Thousands of those with the biggest stake in securing liberty ultimately had to flee a country founded on the premise that all are created equal.
Almost as soon as Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown, marking the end of major military operations, victorious white Americans sought to recover what they considered their stolen property. Washington retrieved seven people who had fled Mount Vernon. Thomas Jefferson recovered five people, some of whom he later sold at auction. Virginia Governor Benjamin Harrison fruitlessly sought the return of Emanuel, “a good Barber”; Tabb, “a good cook”; John, “a house carpinter”; Gloucester, “a good Ship Carpenter and caulker”; Charles, “a house carpenter and Saw miller”; Dennis, a “very artful. Brush maker”; and Nedd, “an exceeding fine sailor but a great Rogue.”
Cornwallis looked the other way when a few favored Black Loyalists boarded the Royal Navy warship Bonetta for transport to New York, which was still under British control. Other officers went further, evacuating large numbers of Black Americans, despite bitter protests by Patriot slave owners. During the British withdrawal from Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston in 1782, about 10,000 Black Americans sailed away. Scanty records make it difficult to determine their identities, their destinations, or even how many had been freed during the conflict. Some likely remained the property of white Loyalists who fled the young nation after their defeat. At least 3,000 Black Americans arrived in British-controlled St. Augustine, “and more are daily coming,” the governor of East Florida wrote. Others landed in Jamaica or the Bahamas, where many were trapped in bondage on pineapple and sugar plantations (slavery was still legal in much of the British empire). A British investigation found that a few unscrupulous officers had sold free people into bondage, though the authorities forbade the practice.
At least 400 refugees reached England, where slavery was not legal but life was difficult nonetheless. A Quaker may have been referring to them when he observed in 1785 “the almost naked and miserable negro, prostrate at many a corner” in London. At least one Black American, John Caesar, was found guilty of theft and sent on the first fleet of ships bearing convicts to Australia, where he became a legendary figure who refused to bow to his jailers.
Several dozen Black Americans, mostly young men who had served as drummers in mercenary Hessian units, made their way to Germany as free men. Their fates are difficult to track. One “prospered, married well, and had the gracious Landgrave himself”—a nobleman—“as a sponsor at his child’s baptism,” a historian writes. When another died in the city of Kassel, his corpse was dissected in the town’s anatomy theater, “proving to the astonished witnesses that under the black skin he was just like a white man.”
By late 1782, New York was the sole American port still under British control. George Washington’s army was encamped about 60 miles north on the Hudson River as Harry Washington and thousands of his fellow Black Loyalists crowded into tenements and refugee camps across the city. Whether they would be surrendered to the victorious Patriots and returned to slavery or find freedom in some distant land remained uncertain.
On November 30, 1782, American and British negotiators were in the final hours of completing a peace treaty in the drawing room of a Paris mansion when Henry Laurens, a wealthy South Carolinian planter, appeared at the door. Laurens had been captured in 1780 while crossing the Atlantic and imprisoned in the Tower of London. A year after being exchanged for Cornwallis, he arrived in Paris. Laurens was aghast when he learned that the Americans—Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and John Adams—were poised to sign a document that made no provision for the recovery of the men and women the Patriots had held in bondage.
“Mr. Laurens said there ought to be a stipulation, that the British troops should carry off no Negroes, or other American property,” Adams wrote in his diary. “We all agreed. Mr. Oswald”—Richard Oswald, the lead British negotiator—“consented.” That consent was no surprise, given that Laurens had served as a slave-purchasing agent for Oswald, a Scottish merchant who had built a fortune as a major slave trader and plantation owner. Adams noted that the treaty was then “signed sealed, and delivered, and we all went … to dine with Dr. Franklin.”
Word of the last-minute addition arrived in North America in early 1783. On April 15, the Continental Congress ordered General Washington to arrange for “the delivery of all Negroes and other property of the inhabitants of the United States in possession of the British forces.” Harrison, the governor of Virginia, made a personal plea to the general. “I observe by a clause in the articles we are to have our negroes again,” he wrote. “I have thirty missing, many of which I understand are dead, but there are still some that are very valuable.” He promised to cover the cost of their return to his plantations, insisting that “my well being depends on their being recovered.”
By then, rumors were spreading that the commander in chief of the British forces, Sir Guy Carleton, would override the treaty by evacuating Black Americans. Panicked enslavers decided to act. On April 28, George Washington asked a New York–based merchant to locate and return some 20 enslaved people who had escaped Mount Vernon during the war, including Harry Washington. Boston King, a freed South Carolinian then living in the city, recalled in his 1798 memoir that “we saw our masters coming from Virginia, North Carolina, and other parts, and seizing upon their slaves in the streets of New York.” Such seizures, although likely limited by the presence of British troops, terrified Black Loyalists.
George Washington, meanwhile, demanded a meeting with Carleton. He aimed to fix a date for the British withdrawal and insisted that the British return the Patriots’ enslaved property. Carleton responded that the American’s demand was “inconsistent with prior Engagements binding the National Honor, which must be kept with all colours.” Citing the Dunmore and Clinton proclamations, he explained that the Black Loyalists were already free. He would not allow them to be returned to bondage and subjected to severe punishment or perhaps even execution by their former owners.
Washington ended the meeting abruptly. That night, in a letter to his British adversary, he warned that he was prepared to “take any measures which may be deemed expedient, to prevent the future carrying away of any Negroes.” The implication was that the Continental Army was prepared to march into New York City to recover people whom they considered Patriot property. Carleton stood firm, responding that as a British official, he had no right “to prevent their going to any part of the world they thought proper,” and adding archly that any “breach of the public faith towards people of any complection” reflected poorly on the new nation.
Writing to Franklin in Paris, Elias Boudinot, the Confederation Congress president, said that the British move “has irritated the Citizens of America to an alarming Degree.” Members of Virginia’s assembly, which was made up mostly of slave-owning planters, recommended halting the release of British prisoners until Carleton reversed course. In Philadelphia, James Madison decried the British general’s decision as “a shameful evasion.” There was even discussion of reactivating the Continental Army, as Washington had hinted in his letter to Carleton. But Congress decided not to challenge the British, fearing, as one member put it, that “a renewal of hostilities might be the consequence.” Amid much grumbling, the idea was shelved.
American enslavers hoped that King George would force Carleton’s compliance with the treaty provision, but the monarch gave the general’s interpretation his enthusiastic approval. The British secretary of state concluded that it was “certainly an act of justice due to them”—Black Loyalists—“from us.” An internal British-government memo accused Washington of acting in the matter “with all the Grossness and Ferocity of a Captain of Banditti.”
Black Loyalists were grateful to learn that Carleton was not planning to leave them at the mercy of the Patriots. In the summer of 1783, they lined up outside Fraunces Tavern to request permission to leave New York. When their turn came, the men and women stood before a panel of British officers in the tavern’s Long Room—the same room where, a few months later, General Washington would give his farewell address to officers following the British evacuation of the city and the war’s official conclusion.
At the end of July, Harry Washington and Boston King, along with his wife, Violet, boarded L’Abondance, a French cargo ship that had been captured by the British. Along with 3,000 others, they had received certificates of freedom signed by Brigadier General Samuel Birch, granting them permission “to go to Nova Scotia, or wherever else.” They would not allow themselves to be enslaved again.
In a clearing carved out of dense forest in southwestern Nova Scotia, a striking modern building of glass and steel houses the Black Loyalist Heritage Centre. The museum commemorates what once was the largest free Black community outside Africa, made up of displaced Americans. Most of their descendants long ago moved away, but a restored church and school remain, along with battered house foundations hidden in thick foliage.
The 410 passengers on L’Abondance landed nearby, at the port of Shelburne. The Indigenous Mi’kmaq had long lived there, but British officials were eager to repopulate an area that was sparsely settled after the eviction of Acadians—descendants of French colonizers—in the 1750s. Lured by promises of free land, copious provisions, and no taxes, white American Loyalists were flocking to the site, and many brought their human chattel, who would remain enslaved in their new home.
The emancipated Black refugees, who also were promised British support, immediately encountered indifference from the authorities and outright hostility from the white Americans. Most were denied sufficient land and supplies; they were forced to seek menial work for low wages, which angered unemployed white residents. Less than a year after the Black refugees arrived, in July 1784, a mob attacked and destroyed nearly two dozen of their homes on Shelburne’s outskirts. “Some thousands of people assembled with clubs and drove the Negroes out of the town,” one Nova Scotian reported. Only the arrival of British troops halted the brutality. Many displaced residents retreated to a Black settlement across the harbor, called Birchtown after the man who had certified their freedom. But interminable winters, inadequate rations, and continued white wrath made survival an ongoing struggle.
On Nova Scotia’s west coast, in the town of Annapolis Royal, Thomas Petersencountered similarly desperate conditions. Peters, who was born in Africa, had been enslaved in North Carolina. He had made his way to New York in 1776 and joined the Black Pioneers. With his wife, Sally, and their two children, Peters took part in the exodus to Nova Scotia in 1783, and soon emerged as the leader of his community’s 200 Black Loyalists, scraping by as a millwright while awaiting his promised acreage.
In 1790, still waiting, Peters, then 52, sailed to London to put forward the grievances of his people. Any Black man traveling alone by ship risked re-enslavement by a rapacious crew, but Peters arrived safely with his petition, and through the abolitionist Granville Sharp was able to get it to British government officials.
Sharp had spearheaded a 1787 effort to create a Province of Freedom on the West African coast, recruiting members of London’s poor Black community. More than 400 settlers, including freed Black Americans, had landed in St. George’s Bay, about 500 miles south of the Gambia River, to found Granville Town. But conflict with local peoples, most of whom had recently converted to Islam and resented the Christian invaders, soon led to the settlement’s dissolution.
Sharp and his fellow abolitionists Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce were now attempting an approach that offered commercial as well as moral benefits, wooing investors with the promise that a West African colony of free Black people would prove of “great national importance to the Manufactories, and other Trading Interests of this Kingdom.” Shortly after Peters’s arrival, they had overcome fierce opposition from slave interests to create the Sierra Leone Company. Although they’d had little success enlisting settlers for this new venture, Peters was excited to hear of their plans, and his enthusiasm reinvigorated the stalled project.
He returned to Nova Scotia with the task of persuading Black Loyalists to once again relocate, this time across the Atlantic. Thomas Clarkson’s younger brother, John, a naval officer in his 20s, accompanied Peters as the company representative. While Peters went to the province’s west coast, Clarkson sailed down the east coast to drum up recruits in Birchtown. He was shocked to find the people there “kept in the most abject state of servitude.”
On a rainy late-October day in 1791, hundreds of people crammed into the Methodist chapel to question Clarkson. They knew of the disaster that had befallen Granville Town; they wanted assurances of land, provisions, and no annual rent in their prospective new home. Clarkson sympathized. “People will not consider how often they have been deceived and how suspicious they are in consequence,” he wrote, “and how necessary it is to be open and candid with them.” This time, he insisted, would be different.
Some of the Black Loyalists remained unconvinced. Stephen Blucke, a former Black Pioneers officer and a leading citizen of Birchtown, denounced the plan and predicted “utter annihilation.” Still, 514 of the town’s residents signed up within three days, with more expected to join; Peters gathered 132 others.
In December, Harry Washington, Boston and Violet King, and hundreds of others gathered in Halifax to prepare to emigrate. Clarkson, not Peters, would lead the voyage. The Nova Scotia governor, who had given his blessing to the venture, called Clarkson “a fit person, to have the charge of the said Free Blacks.”
On January 15, 1792, 1,196 passengers, each with a document guaranteeing their right to a plot of land in Africa, boarded 15 ships and set sail.
The settlers, a mix of ardent Baptists and Methodists, came ashore in Sierra Leone in March 1792 singing “The Year the Jubilee Is Come.” Harry Washington and Thomas Peters were some of only a handful of passengers who had seen Africa before. Most had parents and grandparents born in North America. The historian Ira Berlin has written that these newcomers brought to West Africa a peculiarly American brand of “evangelical Christianity, commercial capitalism, and political republicanism.” They called their coastal settlement Freetown.
Less than 20 miles upstream stood the notorious British slave-trading fort on Bunce Island, which remained in operation. The colonists also had to navigate relations with the Indigenous peoples in the area, much as their predecessors in Granville Town had. But the primary tensions were between the Black settlers and their managers, an eight-person governing council of white men. John Clarkson, who had been named governor, had only a single vote. But although Clarkson had limited power, Peters was excluded from governance altogether. Within weeks, with supplies dwindling and no land allotted, the colonists chafed under “the obnoxious arrogance of their rulers,” according to Anna Maria Falconbridge, who was married to the colony’s surgeon and wrote the first history of the settlement.
On Easter Sunday, a month after landing, Peters confronted John Clarkson with a petition outlining the settlers’ grievances. Perceiving this as a direct challenge to his authority, Clarkson ordered the town’s bell rung and declared publicly that “one or other of us would be hanged upon that tree” before the dispute was settled. The assembled crowd, spooked by this sudden ultimatum, declined to back Peters, who stalked away in disgust.
Peters’s sudden death two months later, likely from malaria, removed the biggest challenge to Clarkson’s rule. But on the day he died, the settlers presented the governor with two petitions, including one insisting that Black men serve as peace officers. “We can have rules and Regulations among ourselves,” they argued, while still honoring British law. Clarkson negotiated a compromise, but he was locked in his own disputes with company directors in London, who demanded immediate financial returns. He sailed for Britain at the end of 1792, promising to advocate for the settlers.
In London, however, the company refused to abide by the pledges Clarkson had made in Nova Scotia. He was dismissed, never to return to Freetown. Still, Black settlers continued to send him letters in subsequent years requesting his intervention on their behalf—a tragic testament to the trust they placed in him long after he had moved on, as well as a sign of their mounting desperation.
The council in Sierra Leone, meanwhile, ignored the pleas for land by Black settlers, who continued to fight for their dignity. “We have not the Education which White Men have,” a 1793 petition stated, “yet we have feeling the same as other human beings.” That summer, the settlers Cato Perkins and Isaac Anderson, veterans of Dunmore’s regiment, sailed to London to present the complaint to the company directors, asking for “nothing but what you Promised us.” The directors refused to consider the petition.
Freetown’s Black settlers eventually organized their own legal system and elected an assembly; the white overseers refused to recognize it. And so, in 1800, the heads of 150 families, likely representing about half the settlement’s homes, met to announce that their law system would soon go into effect, essentially declaring independence from the white-controlled government. One of them was Harry Washington. When the colony’s marshal attempted to arrest the faction’s leaders, Washington retreated to the outskirts of town with 40 or so others.
The British quickly put down the uprising and captured the rebels. Thirty-one men were tried for “open and unprovoked rebellion.” Two were hanged. Others, including Washington, were banished to the far shore of the Sierra Leone River. Washington was named the head of this group, but the paper trail ends there. His final fate is unknown.
The Sierra Leone Company did not survive the turmoil, and the British government took over Sierra Leone in 1808, a year after Parliament outlawed the slave trade. The new governor was appalled to find a colony of “runaway slaves” filled with “absurd enthusiasm” in their religion and “wild notions of liberty” in their politics. They displayed, he added, “everything that is vile in the American.”
Relations between the British rulers and Black settlers remained tense. After 1819, the Royal Navy used Freetown as a base for its anti-slaving campaign, a relocation center for those intercepted on slave ships, and, soon after, the capital of British West Africa. Occasional rebellions were brutally suppressed. Only in 1961 did Sierra Leone’s Black population gain independence.
Today, citizens in Sierra Leone and Nova Scotia continue to honor their Black American roots, but elsewhere the diaspora that followed the American Revolution has been largely forgotten. It ought not to be; the unlikely alliance between British military leaders and enslaved Americans, in fact, helped plant the seeds for broader emancipation.
Individuals like Washington and Peters demonstrated that those who had been enslaved were as willing to fight and die for the British empire as any other redcoat, chipping away at entrenched notions of racial inferiority. And in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, they boldly demanded equal justice, representation in government, and a measure of prosperity. After imposing its 1807 ban on the slave trade, Britain abolished slavery throughout the empire in 1833.
In the young United States, enslavers did not soon forget what they saw as Britain’s theft of their property. But American abolitionists such as John Quincy Adams would come to view Britain’s wartime proclamations as important legal precedents in their own struggle to end lifetime servitude.
A Massachusetts lawyer named Benjamin Butler had also studied the British documents. When the Civil War began in 1861, he was made commander of Fort Monroe, near Norfolk, which remained in Union hands. Shortly after Butler arrived, three enslaved men who had been ordered to dig trenches for the Confederates sought refuge at the fort; General Butler declared them spoils of war and refused to hand them over to the enemy. “Out of this incident seems to have grown one of the most sudden and important revolutions in popular thought which took place during the whole war,” wrote two of President Abraham Lincoln’s secretaries.
Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts privately lobbied Lincoln to emancipate and arm Black Americans, but the president feared this move would incur a court challenge from white northerners. Sumner, however, insisted that the edicts made by British leaders like Dunmore during the Revolution provided the necessary legal cover.
This argument eventually persuaded Lincoln. His famous 1863 Emancipation Proclamation was, like those made some nine decades before, tentative and conditional. This time, however, it sounded the death knell for the American institution of slavery.
“Hats and bonnets were in the air, and we have three cheers for Abraham Lincoln,” Frederick Douglass wrote after witnessing a reading of the decree in New York City. “And three cheers for about everybody else.” Those cheers should sound for Black Patriots who fought for American independence, as well as for exiled Black Loyalists like Harry Washington, who helped pave the way for a nation more willing to uphold its most vaunted ideal.
Support for this article was provided by the British Library’s Eccles Institute for the Americas and Oceania Philip Davies Fellowship. It appears in the November 2025 print edition with the headline “The Black Loyalists.”
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