Attucks was one of the five people killed in the Boston Massacre in 1770 and is considered the first American casualty for the cause of independence. The effects of the war were more dramatic in the South. Tens of thousands of slaves escaped to British lines throughout the South, causing dramatic losses to slaveholders and disrupting cultivation and harvesting of crops. For instance, South Carolina was estimated to have lost about 25,000 slaves to flight, migration, or death which amounted to a third of its slave population. From 1770 to 1790, the black proportion of the population (mostly slaves) in South Carolina dropped from 60.5 percent to 43.8 percent, and from 45.2 percent to 36.1 percent in Georgia. During the war, the British commanders attempted to weaken the Patriots by issuing proclamations of freedom to their slaves. In the November 1775 document known as Dunmore's Proclamation Virginia royal governor, Lord Dunmore recruited black men into the British forces with the promise of freedom, protection for their families, and land grants. Some men responded and briefly formed the British Ethiopian Regiment. Historian David Brion Davis explains the difficulties with a policy of wholesale arming of the slaves: Davis underscores the British dilemma: "Britain, when confronted by the rebellious American colonists, hoped to exploit their fear of slave revolts while also reassuring the large number of slave-holding Loyalists and wealthy Caribbean planters and merchants that their slave property would be secure". The Americans, however, accused the British of encouraging slave revolts, with the issue becoming one of the 27 colonial grievances. The existence of slavery in the American colonies had attracted criticism from both sides of the Atlantic as many could not reconcile the existence of the institution with the egalitarian ideals espoused by leaders of the Revolution. British writer Samuel Johnson wrote "how is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of the Negroes?" in a text opposing the grievances of the colonists. Referring to this contradiction, English abolitionist Thomas Day wrote in a 1776 letter that African American writer Lemuel Haynes expressed similar viewpoints in his essay Liberty Further Extended where he wrote that "Liberty is Equally as pre[c]ious to a Black man, as it is to a white one". Thomas Jefferson unsuccessfully attempted to include a section in the Declaration of Independence which asserted that King George III had "forced" the slave trade onto the