Titus (November 1775)

On November 8th, 1775, an enslaved man named Titus seized his opportunity for freedom. He escaped from John Corlis’s farm in Shrewsbury, Monmouth County, New Jersey, just one day after Virginia’s Royal Governor, Lord Dunmore, issued a proclamation offering liberty to enslaved people willing to join the British cause. Dunmore declared that “all indentured Servants, Negroes, or others (appertaining to Rebels)” would be freed if they bore arms for the Crown.[1]

John Corlis’s runaway notice described Titus as about twenty-one years old, nearly six feet tall, and “not very black”, a detail that may suggest mixed ancestry. Corlis also warned that Titus “may probably change his name.”[2] Titus’s self-emancipation was not a mere flight from a cruel master; it was also an early act of the American Revolution’s freedom struggle. And Corlis was right. In this struggle, Titus would not only obtain a new identity, but also a new name: Colonel Tye.

Titus’s escape took place in the midst of a wave of self-emancipations across North America during the 1770s. The 1772 Somerset decision in England, which ruled that slavery lacked firm grounding in English law, was widely interpreted by enslaved people in the colonies as a hopeful signal. Then, when war broke out in 1775, thousands of enslaved people fled to British lines seeking the freedom Patriot enslavers denied them.[3]  Titus, perhaps, began to be uneasy. Though Corlis was a Quaker, and Quakers had become increasingly committed to manumission of all enslaved people, the man had nonetheless refused to free him. With news of Lord Dunmore’s impending proclamation already circulating among enslaved communities, spreading via sailors, messengers, and informal communications networks, Titus might have concluded by late 1775 that Corlis had no intention of ever granting him liberty.  Likely spurred both by the injustices he faced and the Crown’s promise of emancipation, Titus chose to “self-emancipate.”[4] One scholar has even suggested there is reason to believe Titus “literally threw down his hoe” upon hearing Dunmore’s proclamation, leaving Corlis’s farm almost immediately.[5]

After slipping off the Corlis farm, Titus apparently made his way south toward the British lines, joining the 2,000 enslaved people who fled to Virginia to join Dunmore’s forces.[6] Changing his name to Tye, he enlisted in Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment, a British provincial corps of formerly enslaved Black volunteers fighting under the motto “Liberty to Slaves”. At this point, it is hard to track his movements. As one historian has noted, Tye “vanished from the sight of history” for nearly two years before reappearing around 1778 as a skilled guerrilla fighter.[7] The only surviving hint about these missing years is a brief contemporary remark that provides a vague association with Dunmore.[8]

Although the British army did not formally commission Black officers, they granted honorary titles to distinguish them.[9]  The British tradition of giving informal or honorary military titles to Black soldiers originated among the forces stationed in the Caribbean.[10] This practice explains how Tye, although never formally commissioned, came to be widely known as “Colonel Tye” among Loyalists and fellow soldiers. Within a few years, stories of his exploits would spread through New Jersey and beyond, earning Tye respect from Loyalists, British officers and fellow Black soldiers.

Tye’s first recorded military actions occurred in June 1778 at the Battle of Monmouth in his home state of New Jersey, where he captured a Patriot militia captain and immediately gained a daunting reputation.[11] Leading a small band of Black and white Loyalists, he launched a series of raids throughout Monmouth County.[12] In July 1779, he led a strike on Shrewsbury, seizing livestock, supplies, and several Patriot prisoners, before retreating across the backroads he knew well.[13] Tye’s knowledge of the landscape allowed him to attack Patriot estates, disrupt supply lines, and earn substantial bounties from British commanders, who paid his men for successful missions in gold guineas.[14] By the winter of 1779-1780, Tye emerged as the leading figure of the Black Brigade, an elite guerrilla unit operating alongside the Queen’s Rangers to defend British-held New York and gather provisions.

Tye’s campaign reached its height in the summer of 1780. On the ninth of June, he led a raid capturing Captain Barnes Smock and several members of the Monmouth County militia. Additional raids followed throughout June, during which Tye’s men plundered patriot homes. Throughout this period, the Black Brigade suffered almost no casualties while consistently undermining local Patriot authority.[15]

In September 1780, Colonel Tye took charge of his final raid. Along with a mixed force of Black Brigade fighters and white Loyalists set out to capture Captain Joshua Huddy, a Patriot militia captain who had long harassed Loyalists.[16] On the morning of September 1, 1780, Tye’s raiders surrounded Huddy’s house in Colts Neck, New Jersey.[17] Huddy fended off Tye’s band for two hours with musket fire. Unable to take the house, the Loyalists set it on fire and forced Huddy to surrender.

During this battle, Colonel Tye was shot in the wrist by a musket ball.[18] At first, the wound seemed minor, but within a few days, it became infected. Sepsis set in, which likely led to tetanus, or lockjaw, a dreaded complication in the eighteenth century.[19] Tye’s condition worsened rapidly, and muscle spasms immobilized the guerrilla leader. In September of 1780 this severe infection led to Colonel Tye’s death. The man was about twenty-seven years old.[20] In the brief span between 1775 and 1780, Tye had transformed himself from an enslaved farm laborer into one of the most feared and highly effective Loyalist commanders in the region.  While Colonel Tye had been born into slavery, he had taken full advantage of the revolutionary moment to seize liberty, and he died a free man.