====== American Revolution - Enslaved Peoples Viewpoint ======

The enslaved peoples viewpoint holds that the [[american-revolution|American Revolution]] was, for the hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans and African Americans in Britain's North American colonies, a profoundly ambiguous or actively harmful event - one that entrenched and expanded the institution of slavery rather than fulfilling its stated ideals of liberty. Holders of this viewpoint argue that the Revolution's outcome foreclosed possibilities for emancipation that British imperial authority might have opened, consolidated planter-class power in the new republic, and produced a constitutional order that protected slavery for generations. This perspective is associated with historians of slavery, descendants of the enslaved, and scholars working in African American history.

===== Core Arguments =====

**The British offered a more credible path to freedom.** Proponents of this viewpoint point to Lord Dunmore's Proclamation of November 1775, in which Virginia's royal governor promised freedom to enslaved people who escaped Patriot masters and joined British forces. Thousands did so. Advocates argue this was not merely a military tactic but a real, if imperfect, offer - and that enslaved people recognized it as such. The Crown, lacking the same structural dependency on plantation slavery as the colonial gentry, had material incentives the Patriots lacked to undermine the institution.

**The Revolution was partly a slaveholders' rebellion.** This viewpoint holds that among the Revolution's causes was colonial resistance to perceived or anticipated British interference with slavery. Advocates cite the Somerset v. Stewart decision (1772), in which Lord Mansfield ruled that slavery had no basis in English common law and could not be enforced in England, as a signal to colonial planters that British legal trends threatened their labor system. On this reading, independence was partly a defensive move by an enslaved-labor aristocracy.

**The new republic constitutionally secured slavery.** Holders of this view emphasize that the Constitution of 1787 included the Three-Fifths Compromise, the slave trade protection clause (Article I, Section 9), and the fugitive slave clause - provisions that would have been unnecessary and unlikely under continued British rule. The Revolution did not merely fail to end slavery; it gave slavery a constitutional foundation that required a civil war to dislodge.

**The ideological legacy was weaponized against the enslaved.** Proponents argue that the Revolution's rhetoric of liberty and natural rights, rather than undermining slavery, was used selectively - producing a cognitive dissonance that allowed enslavers to articulate universal freedom while expanding bondage. The ideological gap between Founding rhetoric and Founding practice was not accidental friction but structural hypocrisy that the enslaved were uniquely positioned to name.

**Enslaved people acted as political agents.** This viewpoint insists that the enslaved were not passive objects of the Revolution but active participants who assessed their options and made consequential choices. Roughly 80,000 to 100,000 enslaved people fled, fought, or otherwise resisted during the Revolutionary period. Many who sided with the British did so as a rational calculation about which power was more likely to offer freedom - a judgment this viewpoint holds was substantially correct.

===== Historical Development =====

The enslaved peoples viewpoint has roots in the testimony and narrative of formerly enslaved people themselves, but it gained systematic scholarly articulation in the twentieth century. W.E.B. Du Bois's early work situated black Americans as actors rather than subjects in American historical development. Benjamin Quarles's //The Negro in the American Revolution// (1961) was a landmark study documenting the choices enslaved people made during the conflict and taking their political reasoning seriously.

The viewpoint gained renewed energy in the late twentieth century as historians of slavery - influenced by social history's turn toward ordinary and subaltern experience - began reconstructing the Revolution from below. Sylvia Frey's //Water from the Rock// (1991) provided detailed analysis of black resistance in the southern theater. Simon Schama's //Rough Crossings// (2006) traced the fate of black loyalists who left with the British, many of whom settled in Sierra Leone.

The 1619 Project, launched by //The New York Times// in 2019, brought a version of this viewpoint to mass public attention, arguing that 1619 - the year the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia - rather than 1776 should be understood as a founding moment of American history, and that slavery's defense was among the Revolution's animating causes. The project generated substantial scholarly debate about specific historical claims while sharpening public awareness of the viewpoint's core arguments.

===== Notable Proponents =====

**W.E.B. Du Bois** (1868-1963) - Historian, sociologist, and co-founder of the NAACP whose work consistently framed American history through the experience of black Americans and challenged celebratory narratives of the Founding.

**Benjamin Quarles** (1904-1996) - Historian whose //The Negro in the American Revolution// established the scholarly framework for analyzing enslaved and free black people as conscious political actors during the conflict.

**Sylvia Frey** - Historian of the colonial South whose //Water from the Rock// provided extensive documentation of black resistance, loyalty choices, and the Revolution's consequences for the enslaved.

**Simon Schama** - British historian whose //Rough Crossings// reconstructed the experience of black loyalists who chose the British side and emigrated after Patriot victory.

**Woody Holton** - Historian who has argued in //Forced Founders// (1999) and subsequent work that enslaved people's resistance and the threat of British-induced emancipation were significant drivers of planter-class radicalism toward independence.

**Nikole Hannah-Jones** - Journalist whose 1619 Project argued that slavery's protection was a founding motive and that black Americans' struggles are central to the American story; recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.

===== Internal Debates =====

Holders of this viewpoint disagree on several questions without abandoning its core claims.

**Was British freedom genuine or tactical?** Some proponents emphasize that Dunmore's Proclamation and similar offers were primarily military stratagems and that the Crown had no principled commitment to abolition. Others argue that the sincerity of British motives matters less than the real freedom many black loyalists obtained, and that enslaved people were right to take the offer on its practical terms.

**How central was slavery to the Revolution's causes?** Scholars differ on the weight to assign slavery's defense among Revolutionary motivations. Some, like Hannah-Jones, argue it was primary. Others treat it as one significant factor among several without assigning it causal priority.

**The Somerset decision's significance.** Historians debate whether Somerset actually threatened colonial slavery legally or whether its scope was narrower than colonists feared. The question bears on whether planter alarm about British legal trends was a rational calculation or an overreaction.

**Periodization and the 1619 framework.** Some scholars sympathetic to this viewpoint have criticized the 1619 Project's specific historical claims - particularly the assertion that protecting slavery was a primary cause of the Revolution - as overstated, while affirming its broader project of centering black experience. The exchange between Hannah-Jones and historians including Sean Wilentz and Gordon Wood illustrates internal tension about the relationship between advocacy and historical precision.

===== Related Pages =====

  * [[american-revolution|American Revolution]] - Main Topic
  * [[american-revolution-patriot-viewpoint|Patriot Viewpoint]]
  * [[american-revolution-loyalist-viewpoint|Loyalist Viewpoint]]
  * [[american-revolution-history|American Revolution - History]]
  * [[american-revolution-debate|American Revolution - Debate]]
  * [[slavery-american-founding-debate|Slavery and the American Founding - Debate]]
  * [[1619-project-debate|1619 Project - Debate]]

===== Footnotes =====

  - Quarles, Benjamin. //The Negro in the American Revolution//. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961.
  - Frey, Sylvia R. //Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age//. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
  - Schama, Simon. //Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution//. New York: Ecco, 2006.
  - Holton, Woody. //Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia//. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
  - Dunmore's Proclamation (1775), reprinted in //American Archives//, Series 4, Vol. 3, Peter Force, ed.
  - Somerset v. Stewart, 98 ER 499 (King's Bench, 1772).
  - Hannah-Jones, Nikole, et al. //The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story//. New York: One World, 2021.
  - Wilentz, Sean. "American Slavery and 'the Relentless Unforeseen.'" //The New York Review of Books//, November 19, 2019.
  - Du Bois, W.E.B. //Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880//. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935. (For broader methodological framework.)
  - Pybus, Cassandra. //Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty//. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006.