During the war for American independence, Rhode Island sent soldiers to major campaigns while enduring invasion and occupation at home, and African-Americans, Indians, and members of the sovereign Narragansett Indian Tribe made some of its most noteworthy contributions. Between 1775 and 1783, more than 750 of these men served in the Continental Army and state militia, and from the beginning of the war blacks and Indians fought alongside white soldiers in Rhode Island units. After the British seized Newport and occupied Aquidneck Island in December 1776, Rhode Island struggled to fill troop quotas, and in February 1778 the General Assembly opened enlistment to enslaved and free Negro, mulatto, and Indian men, promising freedom to enslaved recruits and compensation to their slaveholders. Nearly one hundred soldiers raised under that act formed the core of the re-formed 1st Rhode Island Regiment, whose white officers led a rank and file made up predominantly of blacks and Indians. On August 29, 1778, in the Battle of Rhode Island on the southern slope of Lehigh Hill, the regiment held a key position in the American right wing and repulsed three attacks by British and Hessian forces, earning praise from General John Sullivan. The wider campaign began after a British fleet occupied Newport harbor on December 7, 1776, making Aquidneck Island a major base. An American and French effort to retake it in August 1778 became the war’s first joint American-French operation, but a British fleet and a violent storm drove the French away for repairs, leaving Sullivan’s army to confront British defenses alone. After withdrawing from the siege of Newport, Sullivan formed his army on high ground north of the battlefield, where American forces turned back attacks from Quaker Hill, Turkey Hill, and Almy Hill, including the Hessian assault that nearly captured the redoubt held by the 1st Rhode Island Regiment before reinforcements forced a retreat. The battle ended inconclusively after more than four hundred casualties, and Sullivan withdrew to the mainland. After the British left Newport in October 1779, Rhode Island’s Continental troops joined campaigns in New York and New Jersey, and in 1781 the 1st and 2nd Rhode Island Regiments merged into the Rhode Island Regiment, which retained many black and Indian soldiers, suffered serious losses including Colonel Christopher Greene near Points Bridge in May 1781, fought at Yorktown under Lt. Colonel Jeremiah Olney, and disbanded at Saratoga on December 31, 1783.
