Salem Poor

Salem Poor bought his freedom in 1769 from John Poor of Andover, Massachusetts, for twenty-seven pounds. Six years later he stood in the redoubt on Breed's Hill. Fourteen officers, including Colonel William Prescott, later petitioned the Massachusetts legislature to recognize that Poor had “behaved like an experienced officer” in the battle of June 17, 1775. The petition is in the record. A later story that he killed Major Pitcairn is not a fact this page will print as settled.

He served beyond that one afternoon — in the army's northern campaigns, including the work around Saratoga and the long years that followed a famous hill. Freedom purchased with money is not the same as freedom secured by a discharge paper, and Poor spent the rest of his life proving both.

He died in Boston in 1802, poor in the other sense. No contemporary portrait is known. The oil likeness on this page is a respectful later painting, not a face taken from life. The petition remains the documentary likeness: white officers asking the state to notice a Black soldier who had already noticed the enemy.

The Revolution's army was never only the men in the Copley paintings. Poor is here so that sentence has a name.