Smoke drifts across a hilltop redoubt above Boston Harbor, packed earth and wooden stakes thrown up in a single night. Behind the parapet a soldier waits with the rest, musket in hand, watching red lines climb the slope below. Less than a year ago this man was enslaved. Now he is free, for exactly one reason, so that he can stand in this line.
It is 1775.
The soldier in that redoubt does not just wait for the war to free him. Freedom comes to him in 1774, granted by the man who owned him for one purpose, to let him enlist among the town’s elite militia companies, his liberty tied directly to his willingness to fight.
This freedman does not just serve behind the lines. Framingham’s militia carries him to Lexington and Concord on the opening day of the war, and weeks later he stands in the redoubt at Bunker Hill as British regulars press the American position three times.
One enlistment is not enough for him. Again and again he reenlists, fighting at Saratoga and Stony Point, until he has given the Continental Army nearly five years of his life.
The musket in his hands is not just one more in the line that day at Bunker Hill. Several who stood near him later said it was his shot that brought down British Major John Pitcairn as the third assault reached the wall, a claim repeated for generations though no single record can settle whose bullet it truly was.
The Spark of Liberty in his story was a musket handed to a man one year removed from slavery, and the trust that he would use it well.
Nearly five years of service went to a country that had freed him only far enough to let him fight for it, and when the war ended he went home to a cabin and a trade, no pension waiting, his name remembered only because a handful of witnesses insisted it should be.
Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”
Born enslaved around 1750 in Framingham, Massachusetts, he was freed in 1774 so that he could enlist as a Minuteman, and he fought at Lexington and Concord in April of 1775 before standing at Bunker Hill two months later. Reenlisting through 1780, he served at Saratoga and Stony Point, nearly five years under arms in all. After the war he married Katy Benson in 1783 and settled near Leicester, Massachusetts, working as a cane weaver. Death came on August 16, 1816, in poverty and apparently without a pension, and the town buried him in Framingham’s old burying ground, raising a monument to him more than sixty years later.
His name was Peter Salem.
Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon
A new Sparks of Liberty short read is here. What the Candle Witnessed tells the story of the enslaved boy who taught himself to read and, by candlelight in the summer of 1776, read the anti-slavery passage that Congress struck from the Declaration of Independence. Read it now on Amazon.
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