Out of a total population of 2.5 million at the time of the Declaration of Independence, black Americans numbered about half a million, or 20%. Most were enslaved, but at least 30,000 were free men and women.

Slavery is always and everywhere an unconscionable stain, an egregious error, a monstrous outrage, a horrible sin. Every human possesses a natural right to be his own master, so long as he does not deny that same right to others.

Most people take that principle for granted today, but it wasn’t the governing rule anywhere for most of world history. Only a small percentage of all the people who have lived on this planet were truly free; most were either outright slaves or they were serfs or subjects who lived in constant fear of tyrants. For thousands of years, freedom was the exception, if it existed at all. It is mostly a recent development of the last two or three centuries.

The world progressed from acceptance and ubiquity of chattel slavery in the 18th century to near-universal abolition in the 19th. That is one of the most remarkable transformations in history. The spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the sacrifices of millions of people of all colors helped mightily to accomplish that metamorphosis. America is not exceptional because we had slavery, but rather, because of the lengths to which we ultimately went to get rid of it.

Whether free or slave, did black Americans play a role in the fight for liberty during the American Revolutionary era? Yes indeed, they did. It’s a story that didn’t earn much attention in history books until recent decades. When I was in school in the 1950s and 1960s, I think I heard of just one of them, Crispus Attucks, a black sailor who was the first person killed by British soldiers in the March 1770 Boston Massacre.

Black people were to be found among both patriots and loyalists, depending in large part on which side seemed more likely to advance their prospects for freedom. Joining up with the British was as much a toss of the dice as embracing the American cause, for Britain at the time was the largest slave-trading nation on the globe. London wouldn’t abolish the transatlantic slave trade until 1807, and it didn’t free slaves within all of its colonies until 1834.

Slavery in the northeastern American Colonies,........

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