ABSTRACT
The American Revolution was a social and economic upheaval of cataclysmic proportions. Its disruptive and destructive effects were more profoundly felt in the South than anywhere else in the country. Long before the British tendered their help, blacks began defecting to them in the mistaken belief that the British view of slavery was substantially different from that of most Virginia planters. In their erratic progress back and forth through the low country British armies commanded by Benedict Arnold, William Phillips, and Charles Cornwallis, second Earl Cornwallis, wreaked economic havoc along the lower James and York rivers and on the shores of the Chesapeake and Potomac. With no army to oppose it, this small British force seized and destroyed much of the state's resources and carried away a vast amount of booty: flour, leather, war material of every description including brigantine's, sloops, and schooners loaded with goods of a great value.
