The Wikipedia entry for the 2000 film “The Patriot,” starring Mel Gibson, says that the story takes place mainly in rural Berkeley County in South Carolina.

Near the beginning of the film, a British officer comes to the plantation of Benjamin Martin (Gibson’s character) and tells the field hands that if they fight for the British, they will be freed from slavery. One of the field hands, a black man, tells the officer that they are already free.

This neatly sidesteps the issue of American colonists fighting for freedom and yet owning slaves. The film is a work of fiction, and they are allowed to make things up. But how likely is it, really, that kind-hearted plantation owner Benjamin Martin would not have owned slaves?

In “Berkley” county, South Carolina, the 1790 US census (the very first US census) lists 209 free white men 16 years of age or older, 158 free white males under 16, and 331 free white females. There were only 60 “other” free people. And then there were 5170 slaves. The institutions of indentured servitude and slavery changed over several hundred years, as did the plantation system, but in 1790, it was fairly common for the only slaves to be non-white people. In nearby Virginia, at about that time, anyone freed from slavery was required to leave the colony. I think we can safely assume that all the slaves counted in the census were non-white people.

In 1790, there was a 1.1 percent chance that any given non-white person would be free. Maybe they all would have worked for Benjamin Martin. In fact, 87% of all people in Berkeley County, South Carolina were slaves. This is not just an economy where slavery is present; this is an economy that is completely dependent on the slavery of non-white people. Without the slavery of non-white people, Berkeley County, South Carolina in 1790 would not have existed.

Screenwriter Robert Rodat said that the character of Benjamin Martin was a composite figure based on several historical figures. These included Thomas Sumter (slaveholder), Daniel Morgan (slaveholder), Andrew Pickens (slaveholder), and Francis Marion (slaveholder). Why wouldn’t Benjamin Martin have owned slaves?

That scene could have omitted the bit of dialog where the British officer offers freedom to the supposedly enslaved field workers. But that bit of dialog was deliberately included. Why? I can’t answer that question.

There is another interesting character in the film, a black man named Occam, played by Jay Arlen Jones. At the start of the film, he is a slave, and his master signs him over to Benjamin Martin’s unit to fight in his place. In the film, the black soldier Occam is promised freedom after one year of service. He is fully integrated into the unit along with the white soldiers, fights alongside them, and serves until the end of the war. He is not given separate duties like digging ditches.

Here is an article from the US Army that talks about black soldiers in the Revolutionary War: https://www.army.mil/article/97705/black_soldiers_in_the_revolutionary_war. The article says that at the start of the war, George Washington was a vocal opponent of recruiting black men, free or enslaved, into the army. However, the royal governor of Virginia offered freedom to any slave who ran away and joined the British. Washington was desperate for men, and reluctantly agreed to accept black soldiers. Historians believe that about 10-15 percent of the revolutionary army was black men. With some exceptions, the black soldiers were fully integrated into the army at that time, fought alongside the white soldiers, and not placed in separate units or given separate tasks. Some performed heroically.

So, some parts of the Occam character are more or less historically accurate, and some are not. Slaves did fight instead of their masters. In reality, some black soldiers were given freedom after their service, and some were not. Some black soldiers returned to slavery after having fought for freedom for their white masters. In some cases, the signing bonus and pay of the black soldiers was given to their masters instead. There is no mention of a “one-year until freedom” contract; if that happened, it was not common.

In general, the treatment of black people depicted in the film, “The Patriot” show a white person’s fantasy of what it must have been like during the American Revolution. We would like to believe that there were plantations that paid wages for the labor of free men and women. We would like to believe that black slaves who fought in the war were given their freedom in return for their service. We know that George Washington, in his will, ordered that his wife’s slaves be freed after her death. In fact, it appears that Washington’s views towards slavery changed during his lifetime, and he was not always the man we would like to believe he was. White people would like to believe that, had we been alive at the time, we would have opposed the institution of slavery, and treated all people as equals. But given how prevalent slavery was, and the racist attitudes that were common at the time, that can’t possibly be true. It is therefore frightening to see how easily the film’s depiction of history is accepted today, almost without anyone noticing.