African American Participation Further Reading The Coloured Corps

Many African-Americans in the U.S. also participated in the war effort by helping fortifying cities that were deemed possible targets for British invasion. The most notable incident of such an event occurred after the British occupation of Washington prompted more than 2500 free Blacks to work for days in order to fortify the city of Philadelphia. Along with Louisiana’s two regiments of “Free Men of Color”, General Andrew Jackson employed a number of African-American men from the South’s extensive slave population in repulsing the British invasion in late 1814. When he declared a state of martial law in New Orleans in mid-December of that year, Jackson “invited” a number of the local plantation owners to volunteer their slaves to build defenses for the city. As many as nine hundred Blacks dug a large trench and constructed a massive earthen barricade that became the backbone of Jackson’s defense at the Rodriguez Canal. It appears that in the weeks leading up to his arrival in New Orleans, Jackson was in such need of men that he appealed to slaves in the neighbouring states to enlist, in return for their freedom. James Roberts was one man who responded to Andrew Jackson’s call for volunteers in the fall of 1814. He was a slave who soon found himself enlisted in the Tennessee militia. Roberts fought in New Orleans and claimed that as many as fifty Blacks were killed during the battle, a fact that was omitted from Jackson’s official report. In the end, Jackson did not grant these men the freedom he had promised them. Of this betrayal Roberts wrote, “Such monstrous deception and villainy could not, of course, be allowed to disgrace the pages of history, and blacken the character of a man who wanted the applause and approbation of his country.”