Perhaps Nell’s most valuable weapon in his antislavery arsenal was history. Although he frequently wrote articles for the Liberator and other activist newspapers, Nell’s magnum opus was The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855). A product of Nell’s painstaking research in government archives, newspapers, and graveyards and his interviews with survivors of the Revolutionary War and their descendants, this compendium gathered every available scrap of information on African American involvement on the patriot side of the Revolution. The immediate motivation for this research was the Massachusetts legislature’s refusal to erect a monument to Crispus Attucks, the runaway slave shot by the British in the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770. Today, Attucks is widely regarded as the first American casualty of the Revolution; in the mid-nineteenth century, before Nell’s publications, he had been all but forgotten.
Posted on: Tue, 16 Dec 2014 17:35:12 +0000
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