Race, Gender and the Revolution's Unfinished Promise
On a spring day in 1776, the Mohawk leader Joseph Brant walked into George Romney's studio at 32 Cavendish Square in London and sat for his portrait. Romney painted him wearing a blend of Mohawk and European dress -- a silver gorget from George III around his neck, a pipe tomahawk in his hand, his expression steady and unreadable. The portrait became one of the most reproduced images of the Revolutionary era. But the man in the chair was not there for art. He was there because the American Revolution had forced him across an ocean to negotiate for the survival of his people, and he already suspected that no matter which side won, the Haudenosaunee would lose.
That suspicion captures something essential about the Revolution's relationship with liberty. The war that produced the Declaration of Independence and its promise that "all men are created equal" was also a war that shattered Indigenous nations, sustained chattel slavery and silenced women's political voices. The story of who was included in "all men" -- and who was not -- is written into sites across Britain that most visitors walk past without a second glance. These places tell a different history of the Revolution: not the familiar narrative of patriots and redcoats, but the story of those who tested its ideals and found them wanting.
Brant -- his Mohawk name was Thayendanegea -- arrived in London in late 1775 with a specific mission. He needed to secure British commitments to protect Haudenosaunee lands in exchange for the Six Nations' military support against the American rebels. The stakes were existential. Colonial settlers had been pushing into Mohawk territory for years, and the Revolution threatened to remove the last check on their expansion.
London received him as a celebrity. He met George III at St. James's Palace and dined with the Prince of Wales. James Boswell interviewed him for the London Magazine in July 1776. He was initiated into the Third Degree of Freemasonry at Falcon Lodge near Leicester Square. And he sat for Romney on March 29 and April 4, 1776, at the painter's Cavendish Square studio -- the same weeks that the Continental Congress was debating independence across the Atlantic.
Brant's diplomatic mission succeeded. The Six Nations alliance with Britain held through the war, producing brutal frontier warfare that devastated communities on all sides. But the success was hollow. When the Treaty of Paris ended the war in 1783, Britain ceded Haudenosaunee territory to the United States without consulting its Native allies. The people Brant had fought to protect were handed to the very nation they had fought against. Romney's portrait, now in the National Gallery of Canada, captures a man navigating between two worlds. Neither would keep its promises.
Three years before Brant sat for Romney, another visitor from the colonies arrived in London on a different kind of mission. In June 1773, Phillis Wheatley -- an enslaved Black woman from Boston -- stepped off a ship and into the city that would publish the book no one in America would touch.
Wheatley had been writing poetry since she was a teenager, producing work sophisticated enough to attract attention from Boston's literary establishment. But that same establishment refused to believe an enslaved African woman could have written the poems. No American publisher would risk printing them. So her owner's connections arranged for publication in London, where Archibald Bell's bookshop at 8 Aldgate would bring Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral into the world that September -- the first book published by an African American woman.
The frontispiece identified her as "a Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley, of Boston." That careful phrasing -- servant, not slave -- gestured at the contradictions Wheatley embodied. She was a literary sensation and a piece of property. Her talent was undeniable and her humanity, in the eyes of the law, conditional. London's leading abolitionists welcomed her. Granville Sharp accompanied her to the Tower of London. Benjamin Franklin met with her. The Countess of Huntingdon, whose name appeared on the frontispiece as patron, gave her introduction to aristocratic circles.
Wheatley was called home by the illness of her mistress, Susanna Wheatley, before she could meet the king. She was freed shortly after her return to Boston -- possibly under pressure from her English admirers, who found it awkward to celebrate a poet they knew to be in chains. In 1775, she sent a poem to George Washington. He responded with appreciation and invited her to visit his headquarters. The general fighting for liberty welcomed the formerly enslaved poet. He did not free his own enslaved workers.
Today, a Nubian Jak Community Trust blue plaque unveiled on July 16, 2019, marks the approximate site of Bell's bookshop on Aldgate High Street. It commemorates the moment a Black woman's voice broke through -- not in the nation that claimed to stand for freedom, but in the capital of the empire it was rebelling against.
Four months before Wheatley arrived in London, a ruling had been delivered that would reverberate through the Revolution and beyond. In June 1772, William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield and Lord Chief Justice of England, handed down his decision in Somerset v. Stewart. James Somerset, an enslaved man brought to England from the colonies, could not be forcibly removed from the country and returned to slavery.
The ruling was narrower than legend suggests -- it did not abolish slavery in England outright. But its effect was profound. Enslaved people in England understood that the law would not sanction their forced deportation. And American slaveholders understood something else entirely: that British courts might one day extend the principle further. Some historians argue that Somerset helped push slaveholding colonists toward independence, reasoning that breaking with Britain would insulate American slavery from metropolitan interference.
Mansfield delivered this ruling from Kenwood House, his country retreat on Hampstead Heath, where Robert Adam was redesigning the interiors during the very years the judge was reshaping the law on human bondage. But the most remarkable detail about Kenwood is not its architecture. It is the fact that Mansfield was raising Dido Elizabeth Belle under its roof.
Dido was Mansfield's great-niece, born around 1761 to an enslaved African woman and Captain Sir John Lindsay of the Royal Navy. She occupied a position unique in 18th-century England -- raised as a gentlewoman in one of the country's grandest houses, yet unable to fully share the social privileges of her white cousin, Lady Elizabeth Murray. A celebrated double portrait of the two young women, attributed to David Martin and now hanging at Scone Palace in Scotland, has become an icon of Black British history. Whether Mansfield's experience raising Dido influenced his judicial thinking about slavery remains debated. What is not debated is that the man who ruled on the boundaries of human freedom went home each evening to a household that embodied its contradictions.
Mansfield's Bloomsbury Square townhouse tells the rest of the story. On the evening of June 6, 1780, during the Gordon Riots -- the worst civil disturbance in London's history -- a mob broke in, smashed the furniture and set the building ablaze. The fire destroyed Mansfield's extraordinary private legal library, one of the finest in England, including irreplaceable manuscripts and judicial notes accumulated over decades. Mansfield and his wife barely escaped through a back entrance.
The Gordon Riots were ostensibly anti-Catholic, but they drew energy from frustrations tied to the American war. Britain was in its sixth year of a conflict going badly. France had entered in 1778, Spain in 1779. War taxes, impressment and food prices fueled rage. The attack on Mansfield targeted the man associated with the judicial authority sustaining an imperial project that was visibly failing. Some 285 people died in the riots, and more than 20,000 troops were deployed to restore order.
While Mansfield shaped the law from the bench, two Black writers in London were doing something arguably more radical: they were shaping public opinion from lived experience.
Ignatius Sancho ran a grocery shop on Charles Street in Westminster -- today's King Charles Street, where a heritage plaque marks the approximate location. Born around 1729 on a slave ship crossing the Atlantic, orphaned by the time he reached England as an infant, Sancho rose from servitude to become a composer, a man of letters and, in 1774, the first documented Black British voter. He exercised that right again in 1780, casting his ballot in a general election held in the thick of the American war. He died weeks later, on Dec. 14, 1780.
Sancho's Letters, published posthumously in 1782, contained some of the sharpest contemporary commentary on the Revolution's moral contradictions. In a 1778 letter, he wrote about the war's "Grand object" of liberty being undermined by those who practiced "the abominable traffic" in human beings. He expressed sympathy for the colonists' grievances about parliamentary overreach while condemning the rank hypocrisy of slaveholding patriots. His correspondence with the novelist Laurence Sterne influenced Sterne's anti-slavery passages in Tristram Shandy. Thomas Gainsborough painted his portrait, now in the National Gallery of Canada -- giving visual permanence to a man who might otherwise have been erased from the record.
Olaudah Equiano, whose plaque stands at 73 Riding House Street in Fitzrovia, carried the argument even further. Born around 1745 in southeastern Nigeria, kidnapped into slavery as a child, Equiano endured the Middle Passage, served a Royal Navy officer and a Quaker merchant in the Caribbean, and purchased his own freedom in 1766. He settled in London and in 1789 published The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano -- a bestselling autobiography that gave British readers a first-person account of enslavement and resistance.
Equiano seized on the fundamental contradiction at the Revolution's heart. The Declaration claimed all men were created equal, yet American society sustained chattel slavery. The Revolution furnished abolitionists with a potent rhetorical weapon, and Equiano's Narrative carried that argument to a broad readership on both sides of the Atlantic. Nine editions appeared during his lifetime, contributing directly to the shift in British public opinion that produced the Slave Trade Act of 1807.
Together, Sancho and Equiano did what no white pamphleteer could: they spoke about liberty from the perspective of people to whom it had been denied, giving their observations a moral authority that abstract philosophy could not match.
The most cynical test of the Revolution's promise of liberty came not from a philosopher or a poet but from a Scottish aristocrat in Virginia. John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, was the last Royal Governor of Virginia. On Nov. 7, 1775, from aboard a Royal Navy ship in the Chesapeake, he issued a proclamation offering freedom to enslaved people and indentured servants belonging to rebel owners who were willing and able to bear arms for the Crown.
It was a calculated military measure, not a moral awakening. Dunmore himself held enslaved people and did not free them. But the proclamation exposed the Revolution's deepest contradiction with devastating clarity. Approximately 800 to 1,000 enslaved people escaped to British lines in response, forming "Lord Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment" and wearing uniforms bearing the motto "Liberty to Slaves." The irony was ferocious: enslaved people had to fight for the king to gain the freedom that the rebels claimed as a universal right.
Many who responded died of disease, particularly a devastating smallpox outbreak at Dunmore's base on Gwynn's Island in 1776. Dunmore eventually returned to Scotland, where his family estate at Dunmore Park near Falkirk features one of the country's most extraordinary architectural curiosities -- a 14-metre stone garden building shaped like a giant pineapple, its dome added in 1777 during the very years of the war. The Pineapple, now owned by the National Trust for Scotland, stands as an eccentric monument from an era that asked who was entitled to the liberty everyone claimed to be fighting for.
The broader consequences of Dunmore's Proclamation and similar British offers of freedom played out in London itself. Thousands of Black Loyalists who had fought for or served the Crown were evacuated after the British defeat -- many to Nova Scotia, others to London. British promises of land and compensation went largely unfulfilled. By the mid-1780s, an estimated 1,000 or more Black Loyalists lived in London in extreme poverty.
In January 1786, the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor formed, meeting at Batson's Coffee House on Cornhill, opposite the Royal Exchange. The committee raised approximately 890 pounds and distributed daily relief. Equiano served briefly as commissary for provisions before being dismissed after raising concerns about mismanagement. The committee proposed resettlement in Sierra Leone, and in April 1787, approximately 441 people departed London for a settlement that became the precursor to the later colony.
The Black Loyalists' story exposes the gap between the Revolution's rhetoric and its reality. The British offered freedom as a war strategy, not from conviction. The Americans fought for liberty while holding people in bondage. And those who took the only path to freedom available to them -- fighting for the Crown -- found themselves abandoned on the streets of the empire's capital.
The Revolution's exclusions were not only racial. The war that produced ringing declarations about the rights of man had remarkably little to say about the rights of women. But two women on opposite sides of the Atlantic used the Revolution's own language to begin prying that door open.
Catharine Macaulay was the most prominent female historian in 18th-century Britain. Her eight-volume History of England from the Accession of James I to That of the Brunswick Line, published between 1763 and 1783, was a republican interpretation of the English Civil War that championed parliamentary sovereignty, individual liberty and resistance to tyranny. American colonists immediately recognized that her arguments applied to their situation. The work was widely read in the colonies. She corresponded with George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Mercy Otis Warren -- the American historian who was her transatlantic intellectual counterpart.
Macaulay's residence at Alfred House in Bath during the early 1770s became a salon for radical political discussion at a critical moment in the imperial crisis. Bath in the 1770s was not merely a resort but a place where politicians, intellectuals and colonial administrators mingled during the social season. Macaulay used it to advance political views and entertain visitors sympathetic to the American cause. In 1784, she visited the United States and stayed with Washington at Mount Vernon for 10 days -- an extraordinary mark of respect for a foreign intellectual. Washington wrote to her in 1790 expressing "great esteem" and inviting her views on the new Constitution.
Yet Macaulay's story also illustrates the limits the Revolution placed on women. Her 1778 marriage to William Graham, a man 26 years her junior, scandalized polite society in ways that never happened to her male counterparts who married younger women. She lost patronage, was lampooned by satirists and saw former admirers distance themselves. Her intellectual contributions went underrecognized for generations.
It was at Newington Green, the oldest surviving Nonconformist chapel in London, that the threads connecting American independence and women's rights came together most clearly. Richard Price, the Welsh Dissenting minister who served the congregation there, had published his Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty in February 1776 -- a pamphlet defending the American cause that sold roughly 60,000 copies in its first year and earned the thanks of the Continental Congress. Price argued that all civil government derived its authority from the consent of the governed. The logic was universal, even if its application was not.
In the 1780s, a young woman named Mary Wollstonecraft established a school near the Green and attended Price's sermons. His ideas on liberty and rational inquiry influenced her developing feminism. Macaulay's Letters on Education, published in 1790, pushed Wollstonecraft further. In 1792, she published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman -- the foundational text of modern feminism, built on intellectual scaffolding that the American Revolution had helped construct. A statue of Wollstonecraft was unveiled near Newington Green in 2020, placing her in the landscape where the ideas that shaped her took root.
The chapel at Newington Green sits at the intersection of multiple strands of 18th-century radicalism: religious dissent, political reform, American independence and the early stirrings of women's rights. It is a small, modest building with box pews and a gallery evoking the Dissenting meeting-house tradition. It continues to hold regular services. Price's blue plaque is on the wall. The place does not look like a crucible of revolution. It was.
The American Revolution loosed a set of ideas about human freedom that its authors could not control. The Declaration's assertion that all men were created equal was meant, in 1776, to justify the political independence of propertied white men from a distant Parliament. But the words traveled further than their authors intended.
Phillis Wheatley heard them and wrote poetry that shamed a slaveholding republic into acknowledging her genius. Ignatius Sancho heard them and used his letters to expose the hypocrisy of patriots who traded in human beings. Olaudah Equiano heard them and built a case for abolition that helped end the British slave trade. Catharine Macaulay heard them and provided the intellectual framework that American revolutionaries used to justify their rebellion -- then watched as the new republic excluded women from the freedoms she had helped defend. Joseph Brant heard them and understood, with devastating clarity, that the liberty being fought over was built on land taken from his people. And the men and women who fled to Dunmore's lines heard them and took the only path to freedom the Revolution actually offered -- fighting against it.
These stories are written into the landscape of Britain in places visitors can still find. The Runnymede meadow where Magna Carta was sealed in 1215 -- the constitutional bedrock on which colonial lawyers built their case for independence -- is a short drive from London. The American Bar Association Memorial there, dedicated in 1957, acknowledges that the American legal tradition begins on English soil. But Magna Carta's promise of liberty under law took centuries to extend beyond the barons who demanded it. The Revolution's promise has followed the same long arc.
At Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath, you can stand in the Robert Adam library where Mansfield worked and then walk through rooms where Dido Belle was raised -- a living contradiction to the categories the law tried to impose. On Aldgate High Street, a blue plaque marks the spot where an enslaved woman's poetry was published because her own country would not do it. In Westminster, a plaque on a government building remembers a man born on a slave ship who became a voter, a writer and one of the sharpest critics of a revolution fought in the name of freedom. At Newington Green, a chapel that shaped the case for American independence also planted the seeds of modern feminism. And in the Scottish countryside, a stone pineapple rises above the estate of the man who offered enslaved people their freedom as a military tactic -- a monument to an era that could not reconcile its ideals with its practices.
The Revolution's promise was never finished. It was handed forward, incomplete, to every generation that followed. The diverse voices that tested it in the 18th century -- the poet, the diplomat, the shopkeeper, the historian, the formerly enslaved author, the men and women who fled to British lines -- are still asking the same question: Does "all men are created equal" mean what it says? The places on this trail do not answer that question. They hold it open.