Their Untold Stories

Before dawn on April 19, 1775, Captain Samuel Sprague of Stoneham mustered a group of militiamen beside the church and headed for Lexington. They arrived in time to fire on British redcoats as they retreated from Concord. Two came home with bullet holes in their hats. The Revolutionary War had begun.

Two months later, on June 17, Captain Sprague led another company of men into battle at Bunker Hill. This time the company included three black men, free and slave, from Stoneham and one from Reading. Another three from Stoneham served in other regiments. They were six of 124 men listed in a remarkable book by George Quintal, Jr. It’s titled Patriots of Color: A Peculiar Beauty and Merit, African Americans and Native Americans at Battle Road and Bunker Hill. Here are the six from Stoneham.

Cato Green, “a slave belonging to Dea[con] Green,” enlisted on May 30 as a private in Captain Spague’s company. He was 23. Stationed in Cambridge and Chelsea, he received his “bounty coat or the equivalent in money.” (Bounty coats were winter coats given to the soldiers as “bounty” for enlisting.) Cato most likely gained his freedom after serving. In the marriage records of 1782 we find a Cato Green, “free negro,” who married Peggy Inches, also free, of Boston .

Pomp Green, a second Stoneham soldier for whom there is little information, enlisted on the same day under Captain Sprague, as did Jack Green, age 33. Owned by Captain David Green of Reading, Jack had a connection to the Greens of Stoneham. In 1768 he had filed intentions to marry Cloe, owned by Deacon Green, mentioned above.

Jack (Thare) Briant was the third from Stoneham to serve under Sprague. Already 40 years old when he enlisted, Jack Thare was “a servant of Joseph Briant.” In 1761 Jack had, with his owner’s consent, married Mary Oliver, “a free mulatto of Lincoln.” There is no record of children.

Whereas Cato Green appears to have gained his freedom for his service, Jack Thare did not. At the end of January, 1776, Jack completed his eight-month term and disappeared. A few weeks later, his owner, Joseph Briant, posted an ad for a runaway slave. It reads:

March 14, 1776--Ran away from the subscriber, on the 24th of February, a Negro fellow, named Jack . . . has lost his upper teeth, had on when he went away, a blue coat, with large white buttons. Whoever will take up said Negro, and convey him to the subscriber in Stoneham, shall have three dollars reward. –Joseph Briant, Jr.

I could find no record of Jack Thare after this. It appears he took his own freedom, in other words he self-emancipated.

Three other Stoneham men fought at Bunker Hill, all of them free blacks. They included Titus Potamia, 57, and his son, Job, 28. Titus, listed as a “black sutler,” or provisioner, may have earned his freedom as a young man serving in the French and Indian wars. Also serving at Bunker Hill was Isaiah Barjonah, 21, the son of Simon Barjonah, a Stoneham shoemaker and his wife, Hannah.

I’ll include one other Stoneham patriot who didn’t fight at Bunker Hill, but fought in Western Massachusetts, New Jersey and along the Hudson River. His name was Sharper Freeman, a name he must have taken to signify his new identity. In 1780, when he enlisted, he was 38. After the war he settled in Reading and, unlike many who faced post-war poverty, Freeman made a living as a farmer.

If you go to Laurel Hill Cemetery in Reading, you can find his gravestone. On it is this inscription: "Kidnapped in Africa when about 16 years of age and enslaved. He was a soldier in our army of the Revolution for which he received his freedom and a pension. He died January 1, 1822 aged about 80 years.”

As we put the past into perspective, we remember the words of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who in 1855 wrote:

“In considering the services of the Colored Patriots of the Revolution, we are to reflect upon them as far more magnanimous, because rendered to a nation which did not acknowledge them as citizens and equals, and in whose interests and prosperity they had less at stake. It was not for their own land they fought, not even for a land which had adopted them, but for a land which had enslaved them…. Bravery, under such circumstances, has a peculiar beauty and merit.”

© Ben Jacques