In September 1774, with the first rumblings of war in the Boston area, restive enslaved men began to barter their freedom for service to the cause. In a September 22 letter to her husband, Abigail Adams, a fierce opponent of slavery, said, “It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.”[6] Yet at the war’s conclusion, George Washington worked feverishly to return all Blacks who had fought on either side to their pre-war owners.[7] And even after the Civil War, at the 1876 Centennial Celebration of the Revolution in Philadelphia, not a single speaker acknowledged the contributions of Black Americans in winning the war and helping to establish a free America.[8] When the artists of the Revolution tried to capture the drama of the war, both its glory and its horrors, they also unwittingly told the story of the unheralded Blacks who served in it.
Among the major artists of the American Revolution, four stand out: John Trumbull, Charles Willson Peale, John Singleton Copley, and Gilbert Stuart. Their work was influenced by Benjamin West, an American expatriate painter of great talent who lived in London and served as royal court painter for King George III. He revolutionized history paintings, being the first to aggrandize contemporary events, rather than mythological, biblical, or ancient times—the original focus of historical paintings—and to clothe the figures in contemporary dress.[9] When urged by Sir Joshua Reynolds and others to paint the figures for The Death of General Wolfe, 1770, in togas, he refused, saying “the same truth that guides the pen of the historian should govern the pencil of the artist.”[10] Although he maintained a strong allegiance to the United States, he understandably was reticent to paint events that glorified the American side.
As mentor to Trumbull and Stuart, West indirectly shaped the visual history of the Revolution. Although often regarded as the greatest artist of the Founding period, Stuart’s emphasis was portraiture; the story of the Revolution and the African Americans who participated in it is told in the historical paintings of Trumbull, Peale, and Copley, as well as several other artists less identified with the Revolution who, nevertheless, produced compelling paintings depicting events of the war.