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Nash's book is very good and I'd recommend it highly. It is very unclear how many blacks actually did gain freedom in Virginia by trying to take advantage of Lord Dunsmore's and fleeing to Virginia lines One of the old CP writers (Aptheker, I think it was) argued that many of them actually wound up getting resold. After all, our complaint about the Virginia slaveholders is essentially that they continued to reflect official British assumptions about race, so there'd be nothing suprising about such double-dealing. To the north--and, actually, across the colonies generally--matters were mixed. By the close of the Revolution, a vast portion of the Continental Army was black...something like a quarter of the army, I think. This was vastly higher than among the British, obviously. Those black revolutionary soldiers did not, I think, make a choice from ignorance. It should be noted that the first government ever established in English-speaking America that did not accept the legal existence of slavery was clearly a Continental achievement...what became the fourteenth state, the future Vermont...off in the so-called New Hampshire Grants. This is not to say that those blacks who did fight with the British failed to contribute a great deal. After the war, they were probably more readily accepted than the white Tories. And, of course, the magnificent Prince Hall was among them...a founding father of black freemasonry and one of the most articulate advocates of independent black organization in the period. This was because blacks did not want to define themselves by the issues that had divided the whites. ML ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
