The Man Who Stood at the General’s Elbow

The camp is a scatter of log huts on a frozen hillside, smoke rising thin from crude chimneys. A young man moves between them, a dispatch case under his arm, boots crusted with snow. He is free, born free, and he has chosen this cold and this danger over the safety of staying home.

It is 1777.

He does not just enlist at eighteen. He signs on from Stockbridge, Massachusetts, committing to serve for three years or the duration of the war, a free Black man volunteering for a fight that is not yet certain to end slavery for anyone.

He does not just serve out his term and go home. He remains for six years and two months, longer than most soldiers of either color, standing through the winter at Valley Forge, the surrender at Saratoga, and the field at Monmouth.

He does not just carry messages for one general. For more than four years he serves at the elbow of Tadeusz Kosciuszko, the Polish engineer building the young army’s fortifications, and the two men’s friendship outlasts the war on both sides of the ocean.

He does not just leave the army empty-handed. He is discharged at West Point in 1783 with papers signed by George Washington himself, papers he prizes so highly he is slow even to send them off to secure his pension.

His Spark of Liberty was land, a name, and a discharge paper signed by the commander of the army he served.

He came home from six years of war to a country that still enslaved most people who looked like him, and he answered it by becoming one of the most substantial Black landowners in his county, marrying a woman he helped free, and turning his sharp mind into the kind of quiet local wisdom neighbors sought out for the rest of his long life.

Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”

Born free on March 7, 1759, in Northampton, Massachusetts, he lost his father as a small child and was sent around age six to live with a free Black family in Stockbridge, a town shared by Mahican, Wappinger, and Mohawk neighbors alongside a handful of white and Black families. He enlisted in 1777, serving as an orderly to Generals John Paterson and then Kosciuszko through Valley Forge, Saratoga, Monmouth, and the southern campaigns, before his 1783 discharge at West Point. He returned to Stockbridge, worked in the household of the lawyer who had argued to end slavery in Massachusetts, purchased roughly eighty acres of land, and married a woman named Jane Darby, whose own freedom he helped secure. He became known locally for his wit and his plain talk on matters of race and religion, and he lived to be Stockbridge’s last surviving veteran of the Revolution, dying on May 21, 1848, at the age of eighty-nine.

His name was Agrippa Hull.

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.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H6VJQW4G

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