GUILDERLAND — Most Guilderland residents are familiar with the roadside historic marker noting the Aug. 11, 1777 Battle of the Normanskill — the only Revolutionary War battle to be fought in Albany County.

But, says Aaron Mair, himself a Guilderland resident, “What the historic marker doesn’t say and what locals don’t know, is that their ancestors’ freedoms were defended in part by African-American patriots who were part of the 1st Rhode Island Regiment.”

The blue and gold State Education Department marker was placed along Route 146 in 1954 and says simply that the Schenectady Militia with 40 Rhode Island Troops dispersed a large group of Tories in a skirmish north of the creek.

The late Guilderland town historian Arthur Gregg lobbied for the marker in his 1930s column in The Altamont Enterprise when he wrote, “Is not the definitely established location of this engagement worthy of an appropriate marker that it may no longer be called the ‘lost’ battle of the Revolution?”

More that three-quarters of a century later, Mair, with a passion for and knowledge of African-American military history, has found new significance in the battle.

Mair, whose wife, Elizabeth Floyd Mair, is an Enterprise reporter, describes how he made his discovery. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve driven along that stretch of road,” he said.

One day, when he was driving along Route 146, on his way to Sandy Gordon’s farm in Knox, he pulled over to take a close look at the marker.  “I had a sense of ‘this was meant to be,’” he recalled. Mair noted the mention of Rhode Island troops, which immediately piqued his interest.

He was raised in Peekskill, New York where the 1st Rhode Island continental line regiment was stationed. There, he learned about the heroism and death of the regiment’s leader, Colonel Christopher Greene, and of the black soldiers Greene led at the Battle of Pines Bridge in Yorktown Heights.

“A little light went off in my head,” Mair recalled. “The 1st Rhode Island rings special in my heart.”

Finding the link

Mair was eager to learn if the Rhode Island troops referenced on the marker were militiamen or continental soldiers. The militiamen were citizen soldiers, mostly farmers, who served with their fellow townsmen, sometimes for brief intervals, before returning to their homes. The continental soldiers were part of the new nation’s regular trained forces, the line regiments that did most of the fighting and served for long periods of time, often until they were captured or killed.

“A continental regular group went through drills and marching,” said Mair, describing them as professionals as opposed to the volunteers in the militias.

He consulted Old Hellebergh: Scenes From Early Guilderland, a book of Gregg’s columns published by The Altamont Enterprise in 1936 from hot-lead type saved from printing Gregg’s columns in the newspaper.

In his column on the Battle of the Normanskill, Gregg quoted from two sources that agreed on many aspects of the battle — Jeptha Simms in his History of Schoharie County and Border Wars of New York, published in 1845, sixty-eight years after the battle, based on an account from the son of Colonel Jacob Schermerhorn who had led the patriots in the battle, and on the minutes of the Schenectady Committee of Correspondence from August 1777.

Simms wrote that Schermerhorn “Proceeded to Normanskill with a body of Schenectady militia, and forty Rhode Island troops — in all about one hundred men — to root up a Tory gathering at that place. The expedition was very successful.”

Simms goes on to note the royalists that were killed or captured, and concludes that confidence was “again restored, where all was doubt and disaffection, without the loss of a single man on the part of the Americans.”

The minutes from the Schenectady committee report that information was received that “a number of Tories were coming to this Place to disarm the inhabitants. Jacob Schermerhorn went in search of them,” discovering they went to the house of “one Nicholas Van Patten. Whereupon resolved that Capt. Childs be acquainted therewith and requested to take a Party of the continental Troops under his command and endeavor to disperse them, which Sd. Capt. Childs agreed to.”

Gregg notes that the minutes put the battle two days earlier than Simms’s date of Aug. 13, 1777, and he sides with the minutes for authenticity. However, Gregg goes on to state that the “Rhode Island” troops mentioned by Simms may easily have been part of the “Continental Troops” referred to in the minutes.

That was the key that Mair was looking for.

“Lo and behold….I had chills,” he said of linking the local battle to what he described as “our country’s first multi-ethnic regiment.”

Storied history of black patriots

Mair went on to describe some of the history of the 1st Rhode Island Regiment. The Continental Army was the national army established by order of the Continental Congress to defend the 13 colonies and later the independent United States. Each colony had a quota of enlistments it was required to fill to support the Revolutionary War effort.

Rhode Island, a small colony, was, Mair said, one of the most tolerant. It “pressed at least 40 free African-American men and a number of Native Americans into its ranks to meet required troop strength,” he said.

“Later, thanks to their fighting ability, conduct during the war, and demands by General Greene, George Washington would drop his objections to having free African Americans formally serve as a stand-alone unit,” Mair related. “The 1st Rhode Island Regiment was our emerging nation’s first acknowledged African American — though it was mixed and integrated — regiment.

That some founding fathers saw African Americans as property was “an outrage to New Englanders,” said Mair. He cited the death of Crispus Attucks, an African American among those shot by British solders in 1770 in the Boston Massacre; the massacre inspired Paul Revere’s engraving, inciting anti-British sentiment.

In New England, Mair said, many saw the Revolutionary War “as an opportunity to spread freedom to all men.” The thinking was, “If a slave can defend liberty and die, then all of us can.”

The 1st Rhode Island Regiment, Mair said, was made up of a number of slave owners who had their slaves with them, free men, and Native Americans. In 1778, Rhode Island started enlisting slaves in the 1st Rhode Island Regiment, with the Rhode Island Assembly voting on Feb. 14 of that year to allow “every able-bodied negro, mulatto, or Indian man slave” that wanted to, to enlist. The assembly’s resolution went on, “Every slave enlisting shall, upon his passing muster before colonel Christopher Greene, be immediately discharged from the service of his master or mistress, and be absolutely free.” The slaves’ owners were to be paid their market value.

At the end of the war, Mair said, many of the contracts guaranteeing freedom to the black men who fought were not honored. “The land was wealth,” said Mair. “They were shortchanged,” he said of the black soldiers who weren’t given war bounties like their white counterparts. “That is the tragedy and part of why blacks being in the American Revolution was swept under the rug.”

Mair said contemporary accounts written by French and German soldiers fighting in America show they were impressed with the “multi-ethnic troops” they saw and took it as a sign of equality in the burgeoning nation, something that Mair believes helped to inspire the French Revolution.

But he also said, “It was just a patina.” In other words, the surface appearance of equality was not real. “Many of the white men would serve 30 days and go home,” he said, referring to the volunteer militiamen, service that still qualified them for benefits after the war.

On the other hand, Mair said, “Many of the Native Americans and blacks served until death.” Others weren’t paid or weren’t given the freedom they were promised at the end of the war.

“Had blacks been given war bounties, they would have been among the well-heeled today,” said Mair.

After the 1778 resolution, two-thirds of the 1st Rhode Island Regiment, Mair said, was then made up of African Americans or Native Americans and it became known as the “Black Regiment.”

He believes the history is important to note as many Americans think of black heroism in battle as starting with the Civil War.

Mair named three “really special” groups of blacks fighting in the Revolutionary War: the Bucks of America, an all-black company from Massachusetts that John Hancock presented with a flag, depicting a bounding buck near a pine tree, toward the close of the Revolution; a mercenary group that fought at the Siege of Savannah, with soldiers brought in by France from Haiti, who later fought in the Haitian revolution; and the 1st Rhode Island Regiment.

Mair said that many first-person accounts, written by soldiers on both sides, show “how effective and critical they were.”

He went on, “Our country without the 1st Rhode Island would be different. In my opinion, we’d probably be British.”

“What’s beautiful is it’s Guilderland history”

As far as the importance of the Battle of the Normanskill, Mair said, “If nothing was done, the Battle of Saratoga would have been quite different.”

That agrees with the assessment provided by Gregg who in the 1930s quoted, at length, A. C. Flick, then the New York State historian: “This brief encounter might be passed over lightly by one not familiar with conditions in Albany at the time, but it brought about results of the greatest importance.”

Flick writes of how the British general, John Burgoyne was advancing down from Canada towards Albany. “Many families had fled and terror was in the heart of every patriot, for did the British gain the old Dutch city, independence was lost. The patriots were hemmed in on every side….

“Burgoyne was successful in sending Tory aids to all parts of the colony of New York, where they stirred up the royalists and brought wavering patriots to the British side. Exaggerated reports of the success and rapid approach of the three expeditions of the British were spread and all too unhappily believed.”

After news that the “concentration of the Tory band on the Normanskill” had been dispersed “and that the principal Tories were imprisoned, there was great rejoicing,” Flick wrote. The victory on the Normanskill, he said, was followed by the successful defense of Fort Stanwix, the halting of the British at Kingston, and then the victory at Saratoga.

“The lost battle of the Revolution,” Flick concludes, “became the turning point in rallying the spirits of the patriots.”

For Mair, the meaning is more personal.

“What makes me proud is, here on the outskirts of Albany, soldiers from the 1st Regiment of Rhode Island were sent to dispatch Tories at a critical point in time,” said Mair. “What’s beautiful is it’s Guilderland history.”