The Continental Army was the most integrated military the U.S. would see until 1960 and beyond.

A reasoned and informative rebuttal from The Brits Slander A Hero of the Revolution, Francis Marion by Wolf Howling.

Three things no one should ever trust: a wooden nickel; our historic temperature record, and history as rewritten by left-wing British historians. So it is with the Daily Mail in their commentary yesterday on a 2000 film, The Patriot, which they cite for being one of the most historically inaccurate films ever made. According to the Mail:

The Patriot follows the life and times of an American colonist who fights in the American Revolutionary War against the British during the 18th century.

By his own admission, the scriptwriter was at pains to say that protagonist Benjamin Martin was a composite figure based on the life of four real-life figures from the war.

However that doesn’t stop the blockbuster movie, directed by Roland Emmerich, from being littered with historical inaccuracies, such as British forces being portrayed as evil and bloodthirsty psychopaths.

The most controversial scene sees said-British sadists rounding up a village of crying women and children and locking them in a church, which they then raze to the ground.

Martin is shown as a family man in the film, but one of the men his character is based on, Francis Marion, was a savage individual who killed Cherokee Indians for sport and raped his female slaves.

Some moviegoers also pointed out the film’s general ignorance of slavery, which was a prominent part of American life during the period, with the black slaves featured in the movie shown as happy-go-lucky individuals.

Black filmmaker Spike Lee said of the film: ‘For three hours The Patriot dodged around, skirted about or completely ignored slavery. The Patriot is pure, blatant American Hollywood propaganda.’

Let’s try to unpack this scurrilous and grossly inaccurate little blurb from the Mail.

Which he then proceeds to do with some competency.

Here is one item which I don't think I knew.

And it is still more complex, for during the Revolution, perhaps less than half the slaves and black freemen ran off to the British. To the contrary, many blacks supported the Revolution, what with its language of freedom. The Continental Army was the most integrated military the U.S. would see until 1960 and beyond. By the time of Yorktown in 1781, fully twenty percent of the Continental Army was black, and most of those troops were part of integrated units. Most of these blacks were free men who volunteered to serve their country, but many were slaves serving upon a promise of earning their freedom for their service. So a sizable portion of the black population supported the Patriot cause.