1st Rhode Island Regiment
Continental Army regiment
The 1st Rhode Island Regiment (also known as Varnum's Regiment, the 9th Continental Regiment, the Black Regiment, the Rhode Island Regiment, and Olney's Battalion) was a regiment in the Continental Army raised in Rhode Island during the American Revolutionary War (1775–83). It was one of the few units in the Continental Army to serve through the entire war, from the siege of Boston to the disbanding of the Continental Army on November 3, 1783.
The unit underwent several reorganizations and name changes, like most regiments of the Continental Army. It became known as the "Black Regiment" because it was composed mostly of Black enlistees. However, there were also some Indigenous people. Some regard it as the first Black military unit because most of the enlistees after 1778 were non-white.
Regimental history
Varnum's Regiment (1775)
The 1st Rhode Island was initially formed by the Colonial government before being taken into the Continental Army. The revolutionary Rhode Island Assembly authorized the regiment on May 6, 1775, as part of the Rhode Island Army of Observation. The regiment was organized on May 8, 1775, under Colonel James Mitchell Varnum and was therefore often known as "Varnum's Regiment." It originally consisted of eight companies of volunteers from Kent and Kings Counties.
Varnum marched the regiment to Roxbury, Massachusetts in June 1775, where it took part in the siege of Boston as part of the Army of Observation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4596590. VIAF identifies the subject as 157254279. The Library of Congress control number is n93053390. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1775, 1783 and 1778.
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This entry incorporates text from “1st Rhode Island Regiment” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.