Monday, July 06, 2026
Sunday, July 05, 2026
Nearly a Million Investors Lost a Total of $3.8 Billion on Trump Crypto Coin
Nearly a Million Investors Lost a Total of $3.8 Billion on Trump Crypto Coin
"A report from a cryptocurrency analytics firm details how those who bought the Trump memecoin have fared, with most retail investors having lost money while sophisticated traders did better.
An up-to-date tally of Trump followers turned crypto investors is in. And for them, the overall results are remarkably bad.
Nearly 1 million people who bought President Trump’s memecoin have lost money through the end of June, according to a report by the cryptocurrency analytics firm Nansen. Their losses total $3.81 billion.
The analytics firm’s assessment was calculated this week after Mr. Trump signed an annual financial disclosure showing that he walked away with a $636 million payout on the same crypto bet, part of a haul of at least $2.2 billion from all of his business ventures in 2025.
The odds were always in his favor. Mr. Trump profited whether the price of his memecoin went up or down. He collected returns whenever anyone traded the tokens, as he repeatedly pushed his followers to do, using his Truth Social account to promote the coin.
Once a crypto skeptic, Mr. Trump embraced the profit-making opportunity of digital currencies in 2024, while he was running for president. He and his sons founded a crypto start-up called World Liberty Financial, which soon began selling a coin called $WLFI that has also declined sharply.
Three days before his inauguration, Mr. Trump unveiled a second Trump-branded investment — the $TRUMP memecoin, a type of novelty currency with little practical value.
“It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING!” Mr. Trump wrote on social media. “Join my very special Trump community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW!” But that turned out to be bad advice.
Most crypto transactions are publicly visible, recorded on a digital ledger called the blockchain. That allows analysts to trace purchases of digital coins from individual crypto accounts, known as wallets. Nansen’s data shows that, as of the end of June, 988,905 buyers of the $TRUMP memecoin have lost money, representing roughly two out of every three buyers.
Cumulatively, these 988,905 wallets have lost a total of $3.81 billion, including buyers who have held on to their stash and recorded paper losses, according to Nansen. The coin was trading at $1.76 as of Friday, down 97 percent from its peak price of $75.35.
Nicholas Pinto is among the losers. A frequent crypto trader who voted for Mr. Trump in 2024, Mr. Pinto said he invested a total of roughly $500,000 in the $TRUMP coin, and has now lost about half that investment.
“He is leveraging the power of being president to launch currencies, when he seems trustworthy in the public’s eye,” Mr. Pinto said in an interview. “It is kind of incredible. It is almost a legal scam.”
The White House this past week rejected any suggestion that Mr. Trump has cashed in at the expense of his followers. Since arriving at the White House, Mr. Trump and appointees have curtailed regulatory oversight of the industry, including policies related to memecoins.
“President Trump proudly made the United States the crypto capital of the world,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement to The New York Times after Mr. Trump’s annual report was made public on Tuesday. “All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people.”
A representative for the $TRUMP memecoin venture did not respond to a request for comment. David Wachsman, a spokesman for World Liberty, blamed the plummeting value of $WLFI on broader market conditions that have forced down the prices of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
“No one can control the markets,” he said. “World Liberty stands behind the governance token WLFI, which has had increasing utility in a growing ecosystem since day one.”
Mr. Trump was not the only winner on the $TRUMP coin. After it launched, its price surged from less than $1 to more than $70, creating a window of opportunity for sophisticated crypto traders to extract a big profit.
These advanced traders, often using automated programs to purchase digital currencies, know that memecoins often skyrocket quickly in value and then crash, as the early buyers sell their holdings to less sophisticated, slower-moving investors hoping to get in on the action.
A little under 500,000 crypto wallets have recorded profits from $TRUMP, totaling $4 billion, according to Nansen. But that figure “reflects a small number of early buyers capturing enormous gains while the broad retail majority absorbed the losses,” the report said.
The memecoin was only one of several crypto ventures that reeled in profits for Mr. Trump and his allies.
Mr. Trump’s total profits from World Liberty reached $799 million last year, according to his financial disclosure, including hundreds of millions from the United Arab Emirates, which secretly moved in early 2025 to buy nearly half the company. A Trump business entity also collected a 75 percent cut of sales of $WLFI, after the deduction of certain expenses, guaranteeing that Mr. Trump would profit, even if the coin’s price ultimately crashed.
The losses on World Liberty’s coin are more complicated to track. Initially, the company sold the coin directly to investors, at prices of either $0.015 or $0.05, according to Nansen.
Anyone who bought the coin at $0.05 has made a slight profit, Nansen found. But $WLFI did not become widely available until September, when it started trading on secondary markets, known as exchanges.
Those transactions are not all publicly traceable. Of the 26,663 wallets that Nansen tracked, 85 percent have recorded a loss. The total losses amount to $83 million, compared to $23 million in profits.
But that is likely just a tiny cut of the overall losses — as the others buyers purchased the coins on exchanges whose data is not publicly visible. Today, World Liberty’s coin trades at $0.057, down 82 percent since September.
Despite the cratering prices, Mr. Trump has faced few consequences from his ventures, because federal regulators have largely abandoned crypto enforcement.
Stephen Gillers, a New York University law and legal ethics professor, said he would not be surprised if Mr. Trump and his partners eventually face a class-action lawsuit from followers who lost money — even though the Securities and Exchange Commission announced in February 2025 that it will no longer scrutinize memecoin deals.
The $TRUMP memecoin site had warned buyers that they should not see the token as an investment vehicle. “Trump Memes are intended to function as an expression of support for, and engagement with, the ideals and beliefs embodied by the symbol ‘$TRUMP’ and the associated artwork, and are not intended to be, or to be the subject of, an investment opportunity,” the website says.
But Mr. Gillers said that this disclosure is likely not enough to curb future legal challenges, even if they have to wait until after Mr. Trump leaves office.
“Trump back when he was a real estate developer boasted that he plays ‘to people’s fantasies,’” Mr. Gillers said. “Here he seems to have encouraged supporters to invest with the expectation they could anticipate riches — even as he himself was cashing out.”
Eric Lipton is a Times investigative reporter, who digs into a broad range of topics from Pentagon spending to toxic chemicals."
Trump Administration Rolls Back Dozens of Gun Regulations
Trump Administration Rolls Back Dozens of Gun Regulations
“The Trump administration is rolling back over three dozen firearms regulations, including ending the gun show loophole and loosening oversight of private weapons transactions. Critics argue these changes weaken public safety, while proponents claim they restore regulations to pre-Biden levels. The administration’s approach has sparked debate over the balance between gun rights and public safety.
Critics say the administration is weakening public safety. Proponents say regulations would be where they were before President Joseph R. Biden took office.
The Trump administration is scrapping more than three dozen firearms regulations, abandoning a crackdown on illegal sales, restoring gun rights to some people with mental illness and loosening oversight of private weapons transactions.
The drastic retrenchment at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the federal agency responsible for enforcing the nation’s gun laws, was not entirely unexpected: President Trump campaigned as a champion of gun rights.
In the view of critics and even some A.T.F. veterans, the agency, in closely mirroring the demands made by gun owners and manufacturers to lighten their regulatory burden, is enacting changes at the expense of public safety. The moves, they worry, come as the bureau has already been weakened, with hundreds of its officials diverted to immigration enforcement.
Proponents of the changes point out that some of the reversals would return regulations to what they were only a few years ago, before President Joseph R. Biden took office. After a series of deadly mass shootings, Mr. Biden signed into law gun control measures, ending nearly three decades of gridlock over whether and how to regulate firearms.
The divisiveness illustrates the complicated landscape for gun policy.
“With the Biden regulations that we got and put in place, we advanced the ball,” said Kris Brown, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, one of the country’s biggest gun control organizations.
But the Trump administration’s approach “takes us back 100 years,” she said. “It’s really decimating A.T.F.’s ability to regulate this industry.”
A White House official said the administration’s policies reflected Mr. Trump’s commitment to ensuring that Americans could exercise their Second Amendment rights, accusing the Biden administration of bypassing Congress and using the regulatory process to restrict gun rights.
Mark Oliva, a spokesman for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms industry’s trade association, said the changes were meant to clarify gun regulations.
“We want clarity to know how we’re going to be able to conduct business,” he said, “to be able to produce and to be able to sell firearms in accordance with the laws and regulations that govern our industry.”
Already, the administration has done away with major policies, including a zero-tolerance approach toward gun dealers who repeatedly broke the law. The more than three dozen rules that it has moved to eliminate would raise the legal threshold for revoking a dealer’s license; extend gun rights to buyers who had faced restrictions because of mental illness or inability to manage their own finances; and end extra scrutiny of stabilizing braces, gun accessories that have been used in mass shootings to lethal effect.
The administration is now targeting gun regulations that Democrats have passed at the state and local levels. It has challenged bans on semiautomatic rifles in Colorado, the District of Columbia and Virginia. On Wednesday, it sued California for its restrictions on the sale of Glock and Glock-style handguns, and Virginia for limits on the sale of semiautomatic rifles, hours after both laws went into effect.
Since his first run for office, Mr. Trump has positioned himself as an ardent supporter of gun rights. In the run-up to the 2024 election, he vowed to be “the best friend gun owners have ever had in the White House.” Days after being inaugurated, he signed an executive order instructing the attorney general to scrutinize what he described as “ongoing infringements of the Second Amendment rights of our citizens.”
By May 2025, the A.T.F. had overturned its “zero-tolerance” policy, which had empowered its inspectors to revoke the licenses of federal gun dealers who were known to have broken the law. Pam Bondi, then the attorney general, said it had “unfairly targeted law-abiding gun owners and created an undue burden.” The policy increased the chances that dealers who had falsified business records, skipped background checks or otherwise sold guns to people prohibited from owning them would face consequences. The agency ultimately revoked more than 600 licenses. But critics say that the new standards seriously curb the agency’s ability to do so.
It is a part of a broader bid across government to enact changes in line with the president’s directive. The Veterans Affairs Department in February removed the requirement that veterans who require a fiduciary to manage their benefits be prohibited from buying firearms, and veterans who were previously reported to the F.B.I. were being removed from its list. The Health and Human Services Department slashed funding for research into gun violence prevention. The U.S. Postal Service has proposed allowing people to ship handguns in the mail, upending a nearly century-old law.
In realigning the Justice Department’s priorities to bolster Mr. Trump’s agenda, the agency said in December that it would balance defending the right to own a gun with ensuring the public’s safety.
But when the A.T.F. announced in April nearly three dozen changes, the administration’s own analyses acknowledged the pitfalls to public safety.
The A.T.F.’s director, Rob Cekada, defended the agency’s approach. In a statement, he said that it reflected an effort to be as explicit as possible about “the full range of costs and benefits, including even remote scenarios.”
“This was an honest attempt to fully and transparently inform the public and is exactly the kind of analysis the comment period exists to test,” he said.
In unveiling more changes on Friday, including eliminating fingerprinting requirements for certain firearms applications, Mr. Cekada again asserted that the agency was committed to public safety, pointing to a news release that heralded how its shift in priorities had led to the seizure of nearly 50,000 firearms and the handling of nearly 950,000 gun trace requests. Still, the data is far from a complete picture because it does not reflect all the policies the Trump administration has rolled back and because many of its proposals have yet to go into effect.
Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, in announcing the proposals in April, said that the moves struck a careful balance between the interests of the gun industry and gun owners, as well as public safety. “For too long, regulations were written without any real understanding of how firearms businesses operate, how lawful gun owners actually handle their firearms or what truly improves public safety,” he said.
One proposed change allowing more people with a history of mental illness to have a gun would mean that the public safety risk could range from minimal to considerably greater, “up to and including potential mass casualty events,”according to a cost analysis by the agency. For instance, people involuntarily committed to a mental health institution would still be barred from owning a gun, whereas those who voluntarily enter those facilities would not. The rule also seeks to extend the Veterans Affairs Department’s policy to ensure that all Americans unable to manage their financial affairs, not just veterans, are not automatically prohibited from buying a gun.
In the analysis of another proposal, seeking to undo a Biden-era rule intensifying scrutiny of the use of stabilizing braces, the agency acknowledged that the gun accessory to create “dangerous, easily concealed weapons would pose an increased public safety problem.”
The agency is also proposing a higher bar to revoke a federal gun dealer’s license, instead requiring evidence that the dealer knew that it was violating the law. The agency said in its analysis that it expected the number of federal firearms licenses it revoked to drop “considerably” both under the new rule and “shifting enforcement priorities.”
Another rule would end the so-called gun show loophole, which required background checks for gun shows and certain private sales as a way to crack down on straw purchasers, or people who illegally buy guns on behalf of another.
Critics warned of the potential consequences. The rapid changes under the Trump administration flew in the face of its vow to be tough on crime, they said, crediting the Biden-era measures for helping to bring down the murder rate after coronavirus pandemic highs, though experts have suggested that a number of factors could have contributed to the drop.
“These guns are going to start to percolate back out into the community over the next couple of years,” said Marianna Mitchem, a former A.T.F. official who now advises Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit advocacy group founded by Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York.
She added, “I sadly expect that we will see an increase in violent crime.”
Even as the proposals have yet to take effect, some supporters of gun rights are pushing for the regulations to be loosened even further.
Erich Pratt, the senior vice president of Gun Owners of America, one of the country’s largest gun advocacy groups, said it was not enough to simply revert to regulatory standards on the books before the Biden administration.
His group, for instance, opposes the Justice Department’s approach to a 2022 rule directing federal licensed gun dealers to hold on to records indefinitely, reducing the amount of time that gun dealers have to keep records of sales. It has argued that the administration should eliminate the requirement altogether.
“The A.T.F. proposals are a mixed bag,” he said, adding, “Gun owners would expect better from our Republican Justice Department.”
Aishvarya Kavi works in the Washington bureau of The Times, helping to cover a variety of political and national news.“
At Trump’s Direction, Federal Agencies Are Abandoning Discrimination Cases
At Trump’s Direction, Federal Agencies Are Abandoning Discrimination Cases
“Under President Trump, federal agencies have abandoned discrimination cases based on disparate impact, a legal theory established to combat policies that disproportionately affect minority groups. This shift, driven by a push against “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies, has resulted in a significant decrease in civil rights enforcement across various departments. While disparate impact remains codified in law, the Trump administration’s directive has led to a decline in investigations and lawsuits addressing hidden discrimination.
President Trump has tried to scale back anti-discrimination regulations that date back decades. Federal agencies have heeded his call.
When Kenni Miller started as a shift manager in his local Sheetz convenience store in Altoona, Pa., he felt something that he rarely had as a Black man in the workplace.
He felt trusted. He felt appreciated.
When he was fired a few weeks later, in the summer of 2020 after a background check, Mr. Miller, then 27, was devastated. A nonviolent, felony drug conviction from his teenage years had never caused him to be denied a job before. And he already proved he could do the work.
“I was well spoken,” Mr. Miller told The New York Times in an interview. “They had me running the cash register, talking to people, all the customers. I’m doing these things, learning the whole store, so I’m equipped for the job. That’s not the issue here, right?”
In 2024, Mr. Miller was part of a class-action lawsuit against Sheetz filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging that the company’s criminal background checks disproportionately screened out applicants of color.
But soon after President Trump took office, the E.E.O.C. abruptly dropped the case.
The agency cited an executive order by Mr. Trump that directed federal agencies to “deprioritize” cases like Mr. Miller’s, in which companies are scrutinized not for intentional discrimination, but for having policies that have an unintentional, “disparate impact” on minority applicants.
The result has been an abandonment of civil rights cases across the federal government, in departments including education, housing, trade, justice and the E.E.O.C. There is no public accounting of exactly how many cases have been closed, but legal advocates describe a generational void in civil rights enforcement.
“It is absolutely widespread, and it is absolutely devastating,” said Dariely Rodriguez, chief counsel at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “We know a lot of time with discrimination, there’s rarely a smoking gun. A lot of people don’t know that they’re being subjected to discrimination. We need our federal agencies to look into that hidden discrimination.”
For Mr. Trump, the directive against disparate impact litigation is part of a broader push to eradicate “diversity, equity and inclusion” — a catchall term increasingly used to describe policies that benefit anyone who is not white and male — from every part of American life.
He and other opponents of the cases argue that employers should not be penalized for the mere implication of discrimination, usually shown through statistics. Instead, they say, the focus should be directed at explicit and intentional discrimination.
Nick Ruffner, a spokesman for Sheetz, declined to comment on the E.E.O.C’s decision to dismiss its lawsuit. But he said in a statement, “Sheetz does not tolerate discrimination of any kind,” and the company wanted “to reaffirm our commitment to fairness, inclusivity, and treating every team member and customer with respect.”
The impact of the decision to abandon discrimination cases has been felt acutely by those who have turned to the E.E.O.C., the nation’s top enforcer of workplace discrimination laws.
Under its new chair, Andrea Lucas, the agency has aggressively prioritized Mr. Trump’s goals, such as pursuing cases of white men who believe they have been discriminated against.
The agency declined to comment on specific lawsuits. But in a statement, Ms. Lucas said “rooting out race and sex discrimination has always been central to the E.E.O.C.’s mission.”
The test of disparate impact liability was established in 1971 and has been the legal theory crucial to enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned racial discrimination by employers and other institutions.
One widely cited example of disparate impact has been the Jim Crow-era literacy tests that some states created as a condition to vote. The tests did not ask about race and so seemed neutral on their face. But they disproportionately prevented Black people from voting because they had long been forced out of schools.
Amalea Smirniotopoulos, senior policy counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which successfully argued the first disparate impact case at the Supreme Court, said the legal theory is a recognition of the remnants of state-sanctioned discrimination.
“We didn’t just want to take down the ‘Whites only’ signs,” Ms. Smirniotopoulos said. “Fundamentally, the civil rights movement was fighting for the ability for people to actually get living wage jobs, and housing, access to mortgages, and all of the things that actually make for an equal society.”
The measure was codified by Congress in 1991, and upheld by the Supreme Court as recently as 2015. Because disparate impact remains codified in law — which the president cannot erase unilaterally — Mr. Trump could only demand that agencies stop making the cases a priority.
The agencies have taken heed.
The Education Department, which has severely drawn back its civil rights investigations, stopped pursuing disparate impact investigations in areas like school discipline.
The Department of Housing withdrew guidance for how the agency would assess disparate impact in enforcing fair housing laws, including redlining, and began dropping housing discrimination cases from its docket. In one instance, a public housing authority found to have favored white applicants withdrew a settlement two days after its offer, citing Mr. Trump’s order, according to an investigation by ProPublica.
The Federal Trade Commission dismissed its claims of discrimination it had brought against three Texas car dealerships for discriminating against Black and Latino consumers in charging more for add-ons.
The Department of Justice also dropped several high-profile cases predicated on disparate impact theory, including several lawsuits against police and fire departments whose hiring policies and exams were found to be discriminatory. It also recently terminated the first-ever environmental justice settlement in which Alabama officials were supposed to provide septic tanks to Black residents. The Trump administration called the plan “illegal D.E.I.” and scrapped the deal. The agency also issued a rule that eliminated disparate impact from its enforcement of Title VI.
And the Office of Management and Budget, which sets policy for the entire federal government, proposed a sweeping new regulation that prohibits the use of federal funds to “promote or support theories of disparate-impact liability” for all agencies.
The rule could ban federal funding for studies, litigation or other activities predicated on the idea that certain policies and practices could disproportionately harm certain groups — which could affect everything from the study of maternal mortality disparities at the Department of Health and Human Services to grant-funded organizations that tackle issues like housing.
Filling in the gaps are legal advocacy groups that are trying to keep cases going. Mr. Miller, with the help of a team of private attorneys, decided to become a named plaintiff in the Sheetz case, to take the place of the E.E.O.C. in the lawsuit.
“What the administration or folks who support dropping disparate impact say is that they want people to be judged by their merits,” said Pooja Shethji, a lawyer at Outten & Golden LLP, one of the lawyers representing Mr. Miller, “and that’s exactly what Mr. Miller wants — to be judged by the work, and his qualifications.”
The request is still pending before a judge, and a ruling could come down any day.
Mr. Miller said he has found a new job, but the shame he felt walking down the road with his nametag after he’d been abruptly let go still weighs on him. He said he felt compelled to stand up for Black men in America, who are often overlooked and over-incarcerated.
The E.E.O.C. found that Sheetz background check resulted in 14.5 percent of Black job applicants being denied employment, while 13 percent of Native American applicants and 13.5 percent of multiracial candidates were screened out. The denial rate for white applicants was less than 8 percent.
“The average me doesn’t come back from a situation like that,” Mr. Miller said. “I want to be the one who speaks up for this situation — which is life after having a job — and make sure jobs are held accountable.”
‘Keep Up With the Boys’
While Mr. Trump’s order specifically took aim at race-based cases, it has broad consequences for other groups, including women, L.G.B.T.Q. people and people with disabilities.
When Leah Cross started training for a new job as an Amazon delivery driver, her female colleagues gave her a piece of advice that they said would “help her keep up with the boys.”
She should purchase a “Shewee,” they told her, the camping device used by women to urinate in the woods, or in otherwise remote areas. It would help her meet her delivery quotas and avoid being punished for straying from her route for a bathroom break — a predicament her male colleagues rarely found themselves in because they could easily urinate in bottles.
Ms. Cross felt up to the challenge. When she landed a job at the world’s biggest online retail giant in August 2022, she felt like she had made it.
“Getting a leg into that industry, I saw it as, like, working for Google,” Ms. Cross recalled in an interview. “I know it’s not amazing, but I was just kind of like, ‘Hey, I’m part of something.’”
But by the end of her four-month stint she felt she was part of a humiliating trend. Like her female colleagues, she was relieving herself in her delivery van several times a day. She had received phone calls from her manager when he was notified that she deviated from her route, often to find a bathroom to use sanitary products. In November 2022, she was fired for “failure to perform.”
Ms. Cross was among three former Amazon workers who filed a grievance against Amazon in 2023, alleging the company violated wage laws by introducing strict delivery quotas and monitoring drivers with GPS tracking and surveillance cameras that alerted supervisors if a driver went off route for a bathroom break.
Ms. Cross went further, also filing a discrimination charge with the E.E.O.C. that year, alleging that women suffered disproportionately from Amazon’s strict policies because women could not urinate in bottles as easily as men and are more likely to need access to bathrooms to take care of menstruation needs.
A spokeswoman for Amazon declined to comment on Ms. Cross’s complaint. The company has maintained that workers are allowed to take bathroom breaks, and that its delivery app shows where public bathrooms are.
“You don’t see a lot of females to look up to when you’re starting this position, because it takes a lot for females to meet these working conditions,” Ms. Cross said.
In December, 2024, the E.E.O.C. contacted Ms. Cross, stating that it was “very interested in moving forward with Ms. Cross’s case.”
“I kind of accepted at that time that there wasn’t a whole lot that I could do based on my standing, and financial background,” Ms. Cross said. “But I saw hope.”
But last fall, the agency notified Ms. Cross that it would no longer be investigating her case, citing Mr. Trump’s directive. Ms. Cross, with the backing of three legal advocacy groups unsuccessfully sued the EEOC last year over its withdrawal from disparate impact cases. A judge dismissed her case.
The case illuminated the difficult path ahead for many Americans, particularly for those who don’t have the resources to take on big companies and for whom the federal government has been their only recourse.
And civil rights attorneys say that because of the administration’s attacks on D.E.I., it is getting harder to find people willing to be the face and name of private lawsuits.
“It takes a lot of bravery in this moment,” Ms. Smirniotopoulos said, “considering what it means to have the president and the federal government saying that discrimination doesn’t exist.”
Erica L. Green is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
Niko Gallogly is a Times reporter, covering business for the DealBook newsletter.“
Saturday, July 04, 2026
These Black Soldiers Fought for the British During the American Revolution in Exchange for Freedom From Slavery
“The Carolina Corps achieved emancipation through military service, paving the way for future fighters in the British Empire to do the same
For enslaved Black Americans living through the Revolutionary War, freedom sometimes meant donning the red coat of the enemy. Such was the case for the Carolina Corps, a military unit comprising roughly 300 fugitives from slavery who took up arms for the British in exchange for emancipation. Created out of two predecessor units in December 1782, when the Patriots’ imminent victory prompted the British to evacuate Black soldiers from Charleston, South Carolina, the newly formed regiment served in the Caribbean, where it was tasked, ironically, with suppressing slave uprisings and keeping the peace in the British West Indies.
Gary Sellick, a historian who uncovered the corps’ story while writing his 2018 dissertation, argues that its members—the first Black soldiers in the British Army to receive pensions upon retirement, embark on a recruiting mission abroad and enlist in a West India Regiment—set a precedent for securing freedom from slavery through military service.
“These men changed the way the British military works, and no one knows about it,” he says. “They earned their freedom and then used that freedom to not only better their lives but to better an institution.”
“It all starts with those guys on a boat in Charleston,” Sellick adds, and it culminated in the Mutiny Act of 1807, which freed around 8,000 Black soldiers in the British Army, promising them the same pay and treatment as their white counterparts.
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So, why isn’t this all-Black fighting force more widely known today? Unfortunately, no firsthand accounts by members of the corps survive. As a result, the written record comes almost exclusively from the perspective of white men, particularly the British officers who led the regiment. Thanks to the efforts of Sellick and other historians, however, the long-overlooked achievements of this groundbreaking unit are finally receiving the recognition they deserve.
The Carolina Corps wasn’t the first Black military unit to serve the crown. During the Seven Years’ War, which spanned 1756 to 1763, the British recruited enslaved and free Black men from the colonies to fill their ranks. Beyond the Carolina Corps, Black soldiers served in such Revolutionary War units as Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment and the 29th Regiment of Foot. By the end of the revolution in September 1783, an estimated 20,000 fugitives from slavery had joined the Loyalist cause.
Enslaved Americans had good reason to side with the British over the Patriots. In late 1775, Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, issued a proclamationguaranteeing freedom to Black fugitives who joined “His Majesty’s troops.” Thousands took the British up on this offer, bolstering the crown’s forces in the Southern colonies in the later years of the war.
In Charleston, Loyalists were desperate for skilled horsemen who could work as scouts and raiders, plundering Patriot homes for supplies. The Black Dragoons, an armed Black cavalry company led by white officer Benjamin Thompson, emerged to fill this need. It was a remarkably successful unit, and the Dragoons’ responsibilities quickly expanded. In 1782, they were tasked with apprehending Hessian deserters, earning a reward of two guineas for each one recovered, whether dead or alive. The soldiers also captured individuals enslaved by the Patriots, depriving the enemy of critical manpower.
The Ethiopian Regiment“
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