Editor’s note: This commentary is by Phil Holland of Shaftsbury. Holland is the author of “A Guide to the Battle of Bennington and the Bennington Monument.”
“I’ll remember after the Battle of Bennington seeing a black man on the ground who was mortally wounded; this black man was enlisted by Captain Angel.” So declared former militia captain Daniel Brown of Lanesborough, Massachusetts, in a Revolutionary War pension deposition in 1837; the memory of the dying black soldier had stayed with him for 70 years. When Lion Miles deciphered the faint ink of Brown’s declaration, he looked up the men that Capt. Abiathar Angel had recruited into Col. Seth Warner’s continental regiment – known as the Green Mountain Boys – prior to the battle.
Five men are listed as having been recruited from Angel’s own town of New Providence (now Cheshire) in the northern Berkshires on a muster roll from the summer of 1777, but only one of them, Sipp Ives, is named on two other documents as having been killed at the battle. The mortally wounded black man seen by Capt. Brown must have been Ives. He was among 30 Patriots who died at the battle.
We could have guessed that Sipp Ives was black on the basis of his name alone. Sipp is short for Scipio Africanus, a Roman general whose name was common among black men in the 18th century. “Sipp” survives, slightly altered, as the first syllable of “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah,” adapted by Walt Disney from an old minstrel song.
Beyond Sipp Ives’ name and the date and place of his enlistment and death, we know little of him with certainty. We don’t know whether he was free or enslaved, for example, or how he came to be in the Berkshires. There was no Ives family in New Providence. He might have enlisted as a substitute for his master. A German officer traveling through western Massachusetts in 1777 remarked that a slave “could take the field in his master’s place; hence you never see a regiment in which there are not negroes, and there are well-built, strong, husky fellows among them.” If enslaved, Sipp Ives would have been promised his freedom at the end of his three-year term of continental service.
More than 5,000 blacks, some of them already free, joined the Patriot cause during the war for independence. Not long after war broke out in 1775, however, George Washington opposed the enlistment of “negroes,” though free blacks had already fought bravely at Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill. The general soon changed his mind in the face of the urgent need for men and the competing British offer to grant immediate freedom to slaves who would join the king’s forces. More than 20,000 enslaved African-Americans, including Washington’s own Harry Washington, escaped to British lines, chiefly in the Southern colonies. Some black Patriots served as body servants to generals and other officers, like Washington’s manservant Billy Lee and Agrippa Hull of Stockbridge, a free black who was the right-hand man of Tadeusz Kosciuszko. Some served in other essential capacities; some bore arms and fought alongside whites in battle. The Continental Army was as integrated as American forces would get until the Korean War.
We know that Col. Warner’s men – Sipp Ives very likely among them – were at Fort Ticonderoga when the garrison evacuated under British pressure during the night of July 5, 1777; that they then fought a valiant but losing rear-guard action at Hubbardton, Vermont, two days later; and that they were assigned to patrol the area above Manchester in the month following, as British Gen. John Burgoyne’s forces headed south with the aim of cutting the rebellious colonies in two.
On Aug. 11, Burgoyne dispatched a mostly German force on a raid to seize supplies from the Continental storehouse at Bennington. He was unaware that 700 New Hampshire militiamen under Gen. John Stark had just arrived in town. When the advancing British column was detected on Aug. 14, word went out to Warner’s men in Manchester as well as to militia units in Vermont and Massachusetts to come to Bennington without delay. In all probability, Sipp Ives was among those who marched from Manchester in rain and mud till midnight on Aug. 15. The following morning they passed through Bennington to dry their muskets and pick up ammunition.
When they arrived on the battlefield, what we now call the first engagement had just ended, with Stark’s forces victorious. But at the very moment, 650 German reinforcements with two six-pound cannons were driving Patriots before them two miles west of the scene of the first fighting. The Germans were just about to outflank Stark’s scattered troops and perhaps carry the day when, along with a newly arrived contingent of militia from Massachusetts under Maj. John Rand, Warner’s Green Mountain Boys, burst onto the scene and turned the German flanks. The fighting became desperate; Stark’s forces rallied. As darkness fell, the Germans fled, soundly defeated. Burgoyne’s advance stalled; Patriot morale soared.
Nine days after the battle, the German surgeon Julius Wasmus, taken prisoner at Bennington and then under guard at Stockbridge, recorded in his journal that “1,000 riflemen came through here today who, together with many savages and blacks, were going to Gen. Gates’ army.” Less than two months later, Burgoyne surrendered to Gates at Saratoga.
It was during the action that decided the Battle of Bennington that Sipp Ives must have been mortally wounded. He died the following day and was probably buried on the battlefield. At age 90, Capt. Brown remembered him. Now we can too.
