Last updated: August 11, 2021
Person
Asaba (Grosvenor)
Quick Facts
Significance:
Patriot of Color at the Battle of Bunker Hill
Place of Birth:
Pomfret, Connecticut(?)
The following is from the 2004 National Park Service study Patriots of Color researched and prepared by George Quintal:
‘At the Battle of Bunker Hill (actually Breed’s Hill) a slave of Lieutenant Thomas Grosvenor of Pomfret fought beside his owner against the British. This action was incorporated into the painting John Trumbull made of that battle.’I
In the 1790 Census of Pomfret, Thomas Grosvenor lists in his household one free non-white person and two slaves.II
The vital records of Pomfret mention a man named Asaba, a ‘negro,’ who had a son James Peter who was a slave in the Grosvenor household in 1794 at which time he was freed on his 25th birthday.III Asaba is most probably the slave who stood by his master at Bunker Hill and who was the free man of color living in the Grosvenor household in 1790.
Footnotes:
- White, David O. Connecticut’s Black Soldiers 1775-1783 (1973), 27. Many sources name this man as Peter Salem but there is no known linkage between the two men. Hoopes, Donelson. American Narrative Painting (1985), 36 states that the painting resides at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven (CT), in The Mabel Brady Garvan Collection: ‘The Battle of Bunker’s Hill, painted in London, records an event that Trumbull had watched through field glasses while with his regiment at Roxbury.’ The oil painting was memorialized in a stamp issued by the U.S. Post Office.
- United States Census, National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 29 (1790-1850). Index, Connecticut, Pomfret, 149.
- Schott, Nancy E. (Ed.) The Barbour Collection of Connecticut Town Vital Records (2000). 43 vol, 34:175.