In 1824 the Marquis de Lafayette halted his triumphal procession in Richmond to embrace an older Black man in the crowd. That man was James Armistead Lafayette, an enslaved Virginian taught to read and write who volunteered for the Patriot cause under Lafayette rather than accept the British offer in Dunmore’s Proclamation. This deep dive explores the calculated choice he made and the espionage that followed.

Posing as a runaway, James served as a guide in Benedict Arnold’s camp and then as a courier for Cornwallis, overhearing plans and smuggling written reports that helped set up the siege of Yorktown. Afterward Virginia’s manumission law excluded him because he had not carried a firearm, and only Lafayette’s 1784 testimonial helped secure his freedom in 1787. The episode also examines his later life as a landowner, pensioner, and, unsettlingly, an enslaver himself.

• Why literacy became James’s most powerful weapon
• The risks behind refusing Dunmore’s offer of freedom
• Spying inside the camps of Benedict Arnold and Lord Cornwallis
• The firearm technicality that denied him emancipation
• The paradox of a freed spy who later owned enslaved people