Silas Royal (1740s–1826), originally known as Silas Varnum and sometimes written as Ryal Varnum, was an enslaved person and black patriot in the Revolutionary War. Though bought as an infant slave for the Varnum family, he was eventually set free and fought in the Continental Army and as an American privateer.
A member of the 1st Rhode Island Regiment
Black Patriots were African Americans who sided with the colonists who opposed British rule during the American Revolution. The term Black Patriots includes, but is not limited to, the 5,000 or more African Americans who served in the Continental Army and Patriot militias during the American Revolutionary War.
Speculative 19th-century portrait of Crispus Attucks, the black American Patriot martyr of the 1770 Boston Massacre
A 19th-century lithograph variation of Paul Revere's famous engraving of the Boston Massacre. Produced before the American Civil War, this image emphasized Crispus Attucks in the center. He became an important symbol to abolitionists of sacrifice and black freedom. (By John Bufford after William L. Champey, circa 1856)
This depiction of the 1781 Battle of Cowpens showed an unnamed Patriot black soldier, possibly a slave, on the far left firing his pistol, saving the life of Colonel William Washington, mounted on a white horse in the center; from an 1845 painting by William Ranney
