Black Victual Warriors and Hunger Creation

This chapter looks at how enslaved peoples and self-liberated men and women used food to shape the Revolutionary War in ways that failed to address their own hunger. In November of 1775, before the colonies declared independence, Virginia governor Lord Dunmore issued a proclamation that offered freedom to slaves of rebel masters, setting the stage for an exodus of thousands of self-liberated men and women from colonists' homes and plantations to British lines. Dunmore's Proclamation was also responsible for changing white colonists' and British officers' ideas about hunger prevention and just war. Dunmore's Proclamation affected white colonists and Britons less than it did free black folks, enslaved people, and former bondpeople. People of African descent played various roles in the conflict. Dunmore's offer turned some men into victual warriors capable of creating and preventing white hunger. Throughout the war, self-liberated men and women did not enjoy the luxury of worrying about their own appetites—and sometimes, hunger seemed immaterial. But their experiences created the knowledge that would later become necessary to institutionalize a food system that granted black colonists the political authority to fight hunger.