As tensions began to increase be­ tween Americans and the British over the Quebec Act, the Proclamation of 1763, and the Intolerable Acts, passed from 1763 to 1776, so did the desire of many Americans to be free from England. The Revolutionary spirit soon took hold of many colonists. Like many white citizens, free blacks and slaves were also filled with the revolutionary spirit. 

Literate blacks studied Thomas Paine, Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, and the other political philosophers of the time. Those blacks who could not read were told of their ideas by literate blacks. As a result, when the British began to impose the Coercive Acts on Boston, black Bostonians were as outraged as white Bostonians. One such outraged black was Crispus At­ tucks, who in 1770 became the first American to die in what has become known as the Boston Massacre. Attucks was a leader of a group of protesters who spoke out against British soldiers being in Boston. 

The group was fired on by the British, and Attucks and several others were shot and killed. This event was one of the major events that led to the American Revolution. When the Revolutionary War broke out in 1775, blacks were among the first to join the Continental Army. They found, how­ ever, that there was widespread opposition, in both the North and South, to black participation in the war. For this reason, the Continental Congress prohibited blacks from serving in the army. This ruling stood until late 1775, when Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia and a Loyalist, offered to emancipate any slave who was willing to join the British Army in order to quell the Revolution. This action prompted the Continental Congress to reverse itself and allow at least free blacks to serve. 

These blacks fought bravely and valiantly throughout the Revolutionary War. During the war over 5,000 free blacks served in the Conti­ mental Army, and an equal number of runaway slaves and free blacks in the British Army.