I represent the unnamed man of color who died at the Queen’s Redoubt on May 8, 1781. From Robert Farmar‘s journal of the siege of Pensacola for that day: “About 9 o’clock a.m. a shell from the enemy’s front battery was thrown in at the door of the Magazine at the Advanced Redoubt (as the men were receiving powder) which blew it up and killed 40 seamen belonging to H.M. Ships the Mentor and the Port Royal and 45 men of the Pennsylvania Loyalists were killed by the same explosion.” This disaster was the final nail in the coffin of Pensacola’s defenses against the Spanish, and Gen. Campbell raised the white flag that very day. Farmar doesn’t mention me, but Gen. Campbell wrote a letter in which he noted that “one negro” had been killed. There were dozens – if not hundreds – of enslaved Black people in the redoubts and at Ft. George during the siege of Pensacola. We worked on fortifications and even took up arms, but the majority of us were there because our enslavers “volunteered” us. I was probably buried in Pensacola in a grave that was unmarked then and remains so to this day.
Sources: 11, 28