Harry was one of more than a dozen enslaved people who fled Mount Vernon in response to Dunmore’s call to action. These individuals’ flight embodied a familiar sentiment. In 1774, with discontent fomenting in the Thirteen Colonies, Washington had expressed his fear that if the colonists didn’t assert their rights in the face of measures imposed by the British government, they’d be made into “tame and abject slaves, as the Blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.”
Infinitely less is known about Harry than the man who first purchased him before 1763. Born around 1740 in West Africa, Harry was among the estimated 12 million people kidnapped and sold into the trans-Atlantic slave trade between the 16th and 19th centuries. He survived the Middle Passage, a monthslong journey notorious for its crowded, unsanitary and cruel conditions, which were so horrific they killed an estimated 15 percent of those held in chains on slave ships.
After he was sold to Washington, Harry worked for the fittingly named Dismal Swamp Company, which counted his new enslaver as a major stakeholder. The business venture was a long-pursued, less-than-successful attempt to drain wetlands in Virginia and North Carolina, making the eponymous Great Dismal Swamp arable and, in turn, profitable.
By 1766, Washington had transferred Harry to Mount Vernon, where he worked as a house servant and looked after the estate’s horses. In 1771, he was reassigned to one of Mount Vernon’s plantations. “For Harry to be moved from skilled work, which was in some measure self-directed, to grueling plantation labor must have dismayed him sufficiently to precipitate his flight” on July 29 of that year, wrote historian Cassandra Pybus in a 2009 essay collection. Returned to Mount Vernon after just a few weeks, Harry had to wait another five years for an opportunity to escape.
Soon after fighting began in April 1775, the Continental Congress named Washington commander of the new Continental Army. In November, around the same time Dunmore issued his proclamation, Washington banned free Black and enslaved people from joining the Continental Army. But he quickly saw the need to reverse course. Black soldiers went on to fight in many major battles of the war, including the 1781 Siege of Yorktown that dealt a crushing blow to British forces.
“The message Harry extracted from all this heady revolutionary tumult was that if King George III was now the master’s enemy, then it was to the king’s men that he would entrust his aspirations for freedom,” writes Pybus in Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty.