Unlike the Continental Army, the Navy recruited both free and enslaved blacks from the very start of the Revolutionary War ... were more inclined to serve on privateers than in Pennsylvania ...

A number of free black men from the North fought on the American side of the Revolutionary war ... as a powder boy on the Royal Louis, a privateer commissioned by Pennsylvania.

"Authorizing privateers, pirates essentially ... it was "fairly common at the time of the American Revolution, and we have to ...