TC: All the themes of your previous work are here in this book, obviously. And you’ve synthesized an enormous amount of other scholarship that has uncovered this “hidden history” over the last half-century or so. Was there any moment while you were working on this book when your earlier understanding of the American Revolution was challenged, or when you had to reassess something significant?
WH: Yes. My work on Liberty is Sweet culminated my extended reconsideration of my depiction of the British-Black relationship in my first book, Forced Founders, which came out in 1999. I always knew that Virginia Governor Dunmore’s emancipation proclamation only applied to African Americans who were enslaved by Whigs, but I still slipped into depicting the British as liberators. Other scholars’ work, along with my own Liberty is Sweet research, compelled me to see Britain as an anything-but-perfect ally, whether to African Americans, Indigenous people, white Loyalists, or others. The source that really drove that home for me was a description of the aftermath of the failed British attempt on Charleston, South Carolina in 1779. Hundreds of African Americans had joined the British Army and served it well, but when officers realized they did not have enough space in the open boats that carried them back to their base in Savannah, Georgia, they abandoned their African American allies to the fury of their once-and-future enslavers. When some of the desperate Blacks swam out after the British boats and tried to cling to the gunwales, officers used their sabers to chop off their fingers.
I am more convinced than ever that during 1775, African Americans’ eventually-successful overtures to Governor Dunmore infuriated white Southerners, pushing many over the edge into supporting independence. While promoting Liberty is Sweet, I tweeted out seventy-six documents supporting that claim. But as I moved from Forced Founders, which focused on Virginia, to trying to see the whole chessboard, I discovered that by war’s end, about as many African Americans gained their freedom by fighting for the Whigs in the North as did so by serving the British in the South. And the northern abolition laws, criminally gradual though most of them were, would eventually free more African Americans than the British governors and generals had.
Yet we must never forget that a much larger number of enslaved Americans suffered from one of the war’s long-term effects: the removal of Native Americans from what became known as the Cotton Belt, which led to about a million Upper South African Americans being sold south, with many never seeing their parents, spouses, and kids again. And that leads to another reconsideration that my Liberty is Sweet research forced on me. I documented several cases where African Americans decided the fate of battles. But if scholars exploring Black people’s agency weigh all of their losses and gains, they might agree with my grim current summation, that it sometimes seems like African Americans (as well as Indigenous people) of the founding era had the power to influence everyone’s fate but their own.