In the aftermath of the American revolution thousands of former slaves who had sided with the forces of George III retreated with the British at war's end when the king's troops evacuated the Thirteen Colonies. They have been missing ever since form the political history of the American Revolution. This paper examines the odyssey of these former slaves as they crisscrossed the British Atlantic world-from New York, to Nova Scotia, to London, to Sierra Leone-fighting through their various transatlantic movements to master the transition from legal chattel to fully human (from the objects of the natural rights of others to the acknowledged possessors of those rights themselves). Though the life stories of these black migrants unwound outside the new United States, the struggles of these erstwhile black Virginians, Carolinians, and others remained, in important ways, fundamentally American. The story of the American Revolution and the rise of American democracy is greatly enriched when both movements' black refugees are closely accounted for.