PBS follows Harry Washington, James Lafayette, Elizabeth Freeman and Abraham Skipwith. Their choices reveal what securing freedom demanded during and after the American Revolution.
Harry Washington escaped from George Washington’s plantation to join the British. James Lafayette, also enslaved in Virginia, spied for the side Washington led. Both sought freedom in a war that spoke of equal rights without guaranteeing those rights to them. Their paths frame the question at the heart of Declarations: Black Americans and the Revolutionary War: what could independence mean to people who remained enslaved?
Produced by VPM for PBS and directed by Stacey L. Holman, the documentary pairs their stories with those of Elizabeth Freeman and Abraham Peyton Skipwith. These four people are not treated as supporting characters in the founders’ story. Each acted on the narrow, unequal openings created by the conflict: escape, intelligence work, a lawsuit or the means to buy freedom. They did not all reach the same outcome, and the end of the war did not settle their claims.
Some images are reconstructions, not visual records from the eighteenth century. They began as portraits painted by artist Hudson Campbell and were animated with artificial intelligence tools; a rough black border distinguishes them in the film.
Harry Washington crossed to the British lines
In 1775, Lord Dunmore, Virginia’s royal governor, promised freedom to people enslaved by rebels who joined British forces. The offer had limits: it sought soldiers for the Crown, rather than an end to slavery. Harry Washington, enslaved by George Washington at Mount Vernon, used the opportunity to escape and serve on the British side.
His story continues after Britain’s defeat. In 1783 he left New York for Nova Scotia with other Black refugees. He later traveled to Sierra Leone, where taxes imposed by the colonial administration again put the rights he had risked his life for in dispute. The film follows him into a protest over those taxes: leaving slavery did not guarantee security or self-government.
James Lafayette aided Yorktown but remained enslaved
James, then known as James Armistead, worked as a spy for the Marquis de Lafayette, an ally of the American forces. He gained the confidence of British officers and passed information to the other side during the Virginia campaign. The documentary connects his intelligence to the operation that ended with the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781.
After the war, James returned to enslavement. Virginia’s provision for emancipation based on military service did not cover him because he had served as a spy, not a soldier. The Marquis de Lafayette supported his petition, and the legislature granted his freedom, effective in 1787. The delay between the value of his work and recognition of his own liberty is one of the film’s sharpest contrasts.
Elizabeth Freeman took equality to court
In Massachusetts, the woman known as Mum Bett was enslaved in the household of John and Hannah Ashley. With the help of lawyer Theodore Sedgwick, she and another enslaved person, Brom, sued John Ashley in 1781. Their argument drew on the new state constitution, which declared that people were born free and equal. The jury ruled for both plaintiffs. Bett took the name Elizabeth Freeman.
Her victory did not, by itself, abolish slavery in Massachusetts. Together with the later Quock Walker cases, it helped establish that slavery could not stand under the state constitution. The film shows how the language of equality gained legal force when people denied its protection demanded that it apply to them, too.
Abraham Skipwith made freedom into an inheritance
Abraham Peyton Skipwith could read and write and had worked as a clerk for a merchant who enslaved him. In 1785 he petitioned Virginia’s legislature for the freedom that man had promised him. The petition was not enough: in 1789 Skipwith paid for his emancipation. He later bought land in Richmond and left a house and other property to his family. He also bought the freedom of his wife and a granddaughter, though not all of his children.
That combination of achievement and constraint shapes the documentary’s ending. Skipwith’s house, displaced during highway construction in the twentieth century, helps researchers and Jackson Ward residents recover a history often left out of accounts of the founders. The four lives show that freedom did not arrive through a declaration alone. People had to pursue it through specific choices, and it could still remain incomplete for their families and the next generation.
