After failing to defeat the Continental Army in New England, New York,
New Jersey, and Pennsylvania during the first half of the Revolutionary
War, British generals decided to turn south, where they believed they
could win the war in a region more heavily populated by Loyalists. In
late 1778, a British expeditionary force sailed south from New York City
and captured Savannah, which became a British base of operations and
strategic hinge. To thwart the British, an international force gathered
around Savannah, including Americans, Poles, Germans, Irish,
and--significantly--a volunteer force of free Blacks from present-day
Haiti: the Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue. The Chasseurs
constituted the largest Black military unit in the American Revolution.
The soldiers were free men, the sons of French fathers, mostly sugar
plantation owners, and slave mothers in France's most prosperous
overseas colony. In the fall of 1779, this force joined the attack on
the British at Savannah in a series of frontal results. The French and
Americans were repulsed at great cost in lives, but the free Black
Haitians stood their ground--and, in a moment of high courage that has
never received its due, stymied a British counterattack that salvaged
the day for the Americans and French. A rock at Savannah on behalf of
the American Revolution, many of the Haitian survivors of the battle
went on to serve the cause of liberty in the Haitian Revolution and help
found the first Black republic in world history. This is their story.
