Black Refugees and the Legal Fiction of Military Manumission in the American Revolution

Black loyalists in the American Revolution were early crafters of modern international asylum. Using testimony and document-gathering, enslaved people within British lines transformed themselves from runaways into refugees with a right to evacuation from the United States. Rather than recipients of military manumission, most Black loyalists freed themselves by convincing officers that returning them to their enslavers jeopardized their lives. By communicating slavery’s violence in the language of political persecution and retribution, Black loyalists helped develop the concept of non-refoulement in international law. In negotiations over the Jay Treaty (1795), however, U.S. and British diplomats used a narrative of military manumission to silence the legal contradictions of Black self-emancipation and the power of Black refugee practices.