A British royal governor, not Abraham Lincoln, was the first person to offer enslaved Americans freedom--in return for battling revolutionaries. Enslaved Africans fled from the plantations of patriot planters during the American Revolution under protection of the British. In 1775, Americans responded to the call for liberty, taking up arms against their oppressors and fighting the first major battles of the Revolution south of New York. Hundreds of these soldiers, however, were Black men fighting for, rather than against, King George III.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Reportedly wearing sashes that declared "Liberty for Slaves," members of the "Etheopian Regiment"---Etheopian being a synonym for Black---charged into combat against their former masters, determined to win their freedom. They were drawn to the cause by the continent's first emancipation proclamation, a document predating President Abraham Lincoln's famous edict by nearly a century.