During the American Revolutionary War, Harry Washington escaped from slavery in Virginia and served as a corporal in the Black Pioneers attached to a British artillery unit.
In 1792 the couple were among more than 1,000 freedmen chosen [1] to migrate to Sierra Leone, West Africa, where the British had established a new colony of people of African descent.
[3] He had been working in the stables at Mount Vernon, caring for Washington's horses, when he fled again in 1776 to join the Virginia Ethiopian Regiment, made up of escaped slaves and established by Royal Governor Lord Dunmore during the American Revolutionary War.
At the end of the American Revolution, Washington was one of about 3,000 Black Loyalists evacuated from New York by the British and resettled in Nova Scotia.
When Sir Guy Carleton's officials included him on the list for evacuation in the "Register of Negroes", Washington gave his age as forty-three and said he had fled Mount Vernon in 1776.
[6] Under General Carleton's policy, Harry Washington took a British ship to Nova Scotia (as did two other former Mount Vernon slaves, a man and a woman).
In the trials that followed the defeat of the rebellion, Washington was among the rebels sentenced to banishment to Bullom Shore, a flat but fertile area north of the new colony where Lungi Airport is located today.