ABSTRACT
“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” So asked the English lexicographer Samuel Johnson at the height of the imperial crisis. Johnson directly addressed the contradiction at the heart of the American Revolution. When the American revolutionaries committed themselves to independence and republicanism premised on an assertion of equal rights, they did so despite the fact that one-fifth of the American population was enslaved and denied the legal and political rights for which the rebels fought. Some Americans argued that the right to hold human beings as property was among the rights for which they fought, as the November 1775 petition from Patriots in Halifax Virginia suggests (document 1). The Revolution and the War of Independence presented African-American slaves with opportunities to win their liberty. In many cases, particularly in the South, the British presented slaves with the best chance of attaining freedom. Early in the war Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, offered freedom to the slaves of rebels who fled their masters, like those in Halifax County, and supported the British war effort (document 2). This set a precedent which the British often followed during the war; many slaves associated the British with freedom.
