DEATH OR LIBERTY

This history of slavery at the end of the colonial era proves to be a story of roads not taken.

One such road, suggests Egerton (History/LeMoyne Coll.; Rebels, Reformers, and Revolutionaries, 2002, etc.), was occasioned by the removal of the capital of Virginia from Williamsburg inland up the James River to Richmond. With that move, a large population of African-Americans shifted “into the fresher lands of the Piedmont,” establishing an economy that, perhaps ironically, helped keep them in slavery as westward movement “slowly spread unfree labor across much of the state.” Many of the coastal slaves had already freed themselves, in a fashion, by accepting the British colonial governor’s offer of freedom in exchange for service in the royal forces against the revolutionaries. Many of those men, along with women and children, left the newborn United States for Canada and, later, for England. Slavery remained a problem in Virginia precisely because so much of the population—nearly 40 percent—was in bondage, and because so much of the remaining populace agreed with a minister there who said, around 1760, “to live in Virginia without slaves is morally impossible.” Elsewhere the colonials were not so certain. In New England, for example, one of the first men to die in the revolutionary cause was an African-American man named Crispus Attucks, though less neatly than the enshrined histories would have it. (Suffice it to say that alcohol was involved.) Against the worries of Virginians, including George Washington—whose slave William Lee figures prominently in this book—the Continental Army finally enlisted African-American men, some 10,000 of whom eventually served. Egerton portrays soldiers, early civil-rights leaders and abolitionists, insurrectionists and ordinary men and women, implicating African-Americans at every point of the revolution and its counterrevolution.

In a culturally literate world, all Americans would know the story of Quok Walker. Egerton provides it, and much more.