The Black Presence at the Battle of Bennington

It will probably come as a surprise to most Vermonters that one of the 30 men killed at the Battle of Bennington, a member of Seth Warner’s Continental regiment of Green Mountain Boys, was black. His name was Sipp Ives, and he was recruited into Warner’s ranks from the town of New Providence in the northern Berkshires in 1777, the year of the Battle. Nor was he the only patriot of African descent who played a role in the fighting and its aftermath.

Military records in combination with early town histories furnish the primary sources for this presentation. Original discoveries, notably in the unpublished work of historian Lion G. Miles, to which he has given me access, in combination with scholarship old and new, from William C. Nell’s Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855) to more recent studies of the role of African Americans in the Revolutionary War and the early history of Vermont, paint a more diverse picture of Vermont’s iconic battle and its Green Mountain Boys than that depicted in most histories – an exception being the mural “Prisoners Taken at the Battle of Bennington” by Leroy Williams (1938) in the Bennington Museum, which depicts a black youth on horseback triumphantly leading tied-up Tories on the Bennington town green.

This presentation is also concerned with historical memory and how it is preserved and constructed. Images of pension records, muster rolls, and maps, as well as works of art, will be shown to illustrate the talk. A version of this talk was presented at the Bennington Museum on Feb. 2, 2019. An abbreviated version of the Sipp Ives story was published in VT Digger in 2019.

Special Arrangements

Projector and Screen

Available in correctional facilities.

Special Arrangements

Projector with connector for Mac laptop

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Questions?

Contact Jacob Pelletier at jpelletier@vermonthumanities.org.