by Allan Appel The New Haven independent
A Revolutionary War soldier named Jordan Freeman emerged from his grave Thursday night to drop by the New Haven Free Public Library’s Ives Main Branch. He was not there to return a book; he was on an even more critical mission.
In his tri-corner hat, light white shirt, beige breeches made of homespun, stockings, and straight shoes without buckles, Freeman — AKA Kevin Johnson, an historian with the Connecticut State Library in Hartford — bore a pike (well, actually, for safety reasons, a ten-foot 1940s transom window-opener).
Johnson was at the downtown library to give his 201st performance reenacting the life of Freeman, who died fighting the British in the grisly battle of Fort Griswold in New London on Sept. 5, 1781.
Although it was the last battle of the war, at least in the northern colonies, before the final victory at Yorktown, it was a brutal one and underscored the real meaning of the final words of the Declaration of Independence in which signers pledged their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.”
Facing a large, outnumbering force of British troops led by no less than New Haven’s own Benedict Arnold, the Alamo-like refusal of the Americans under Colonel William Ledyard to give up led to, in effect, a massacre of the American forces even after they surrendered.
Discharge paper for an African American Revolutionary War veteran.
And among the dead, who were originally thrown in a mass grave, was Jordan Freeman, who was a body servant to Ledyard.
As Johnson emphasized, as a freeman — that is, not a formally enlisted soldier — he didn’t have to be there at Fort Griswold, and yet there he was, very much like Crispus Attucks, the African American dockworker who was the first of five people killed in the March 5, 1770 face-off with British soldiers, known as the Boston Massacre. Attucks is widely considered the first patriot killed by a British bullet in the Revolutionary War and its run-up.
Like Freeman, he chose to be there.
When you think of the risky war that resulted in our independence and the role of Black people in it, Johnson urged New Haveners on Thursday to think of the heroic lives of people like Freeman, Attucks, and the enlisted soldiers — more than 5,000 strong who fought on the patriot side for freedom, the national variety and their own.
“We Blacks feel this is the time to seek our freedom,” Johnson/Freeman declared as he dropped into the Revolutionary times, and then he raced through the complex history of the era — from Blacks’ service in the French and Indian War; how many sought and accepted the freedom the British offered if they enlisted into the ranks of the Red Coats; and how, on the patriot side, Blacks as soldiers were also eventually embraced, but not in the beginning trusted to bear arms.
Johnson’s spirited reenactment unfolded in the community room of the Ives Main Branch and was one of the more than 30 (and growing) events the New Haven Free Public Library (NHFPL) has programmed among all the branches this year — it’s called Rooted in Place: 250 Years Through New Haven’s Lens — to celebrate the national semiquincentennial.
Following a chronological scenario from the French and Indian War and with the repeated refrain “ready, aim, fire,” to illustrate the Colonial battle experience, Johnson’s reenactment didn’t shy away from the complex moral challenge the war posed for African Americans. How, for example, the British campaign to recruit Black people included slogans like “fight against your masters,” and what the consequences would be if you chose not to.
Namely, “those who did not go to the British were told that if they were caught, they would be whipped or hanged.”
Of the 5,000 enlisted formally in the militias and units of the Continental Army, about 500 were from Connecticut and served “as privates, as cooks, and musicians,” he said.
Johnson: “How was my dying? Was it okay? The deaths are emotional moments for me.”
“Now it’s September 6, 1781,” Johnson said, dropping again into the character of Freeman, “and Colonel Ledyard commands. But our 150 militia are up against 800 British regulars. Ready, aim, fire! The musket smoke is everywhere.
“And suddenly they’re losing. Colonel Ledyard is killed. I hear the cries of the men. I find a pike,” Freeman/Johnson calls out, and he thrusts and thrusts upward. Then, “I’m hit, I die,” and he falls to the ground.
A dramatic moment later, Johnson rose and engagingly asked the audience, “How was my dying? Was it okay? The deaths are emotional moments for me,” he said. “It moves me each time.”
In an animated discussion with audience members afterwards, Johnson explained how in his work at the state library the stories of African American soldiers “gripped me.”
Starting with the work of the first researchers — such as Colored Patriots of the American Revolution by William C. Nell, published in 1855 — Johnson dug deeper, visited locales of battles, studied monuments for clues, and has tried to track down descendants and burial places to uncover more facts and to enrich his presentations.
Freeman was not the first African American soldier whose life he has inhabited. Over the last 20 years Johnson has also portrayed the Civil War Pvt. William Webb of Company F of the storied Twenty-Ninth Connecticut (Colored) Regiment over 600 times, he said.
Local historian Frank Mitchell — whose movie Unsung Heroes, a history of jazz in New Haven and across America that will be screened at the library on April 29 — asked Johnson how a Civil War veteran’s sense of freedom, or the search for it, differed from Freeman’s.
As slavery was abolished in Connecticut (the last of the New England States to do so) in 1848, Webb was technically free. He enlisted, Johnson said, into the Twenty-Ninth to save the Union, without which victory that legal freedom would not have persisted.
In the Revolutionary War period, Johnson speculated Freeman embodied his “master’s” Ledyard’s values, but he didn’t need to enlist as he was the colonel’s servant. “He was already free,” Johnson said. There are records documenting that Freeman was paid for his services, and other records, after the war, where he is involved in law suits.
“They’re both freedom-seekers, but different weights, different magnitudes.”
And also different complexities. For example, in the case of Freeman, his wife, whom the records call “Miss Lilly,” is the servant of a woman named Mary Prentis. When Prentis died, Johnson explained, “she [that is, Ms. Lilly] is willed to another enslaver of her choice! And after Jordan dies, she escapes.”
Johnson paused, dramatically, looking at his audience to see if the oxymoron settled in: An enslaver of her choice!
Johnson said he is booked to bring Freeman to life for 16 more performances this semquincentennial year at schools, prisons, and other venues. “Don’t let anybody tell you,” he concluded, “other than that Blacks have always been trying to navigate their way to freedom. We’ve been a Navigating People, down to today.”
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