Whatever the ultimate impact of Dunmore’s proclamation, Larson supplies ample evidence that northerners and southerners had teamed up for revolutionary action well before it was issued. He explores the American response to a series of oppressive acts, from the early 1760s onward, that placed heavy burdens on the colonists, who chafed under the prospect of making payments to England without having political representation there. Here Larson treads on familiar territory, but his solid scholarship adds fresh background for the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, and others. Every new law issued by the British fanned American outrage, first in the North and increasingly in the South. Larson demonstrates that the closing of Boston’s port to commercial traffic in 1774—not Dunmore’s emancipation proclamation a year later—was the most important factor that prompted formerly lukewarm southerners to join the North in the break with England. In September and October 1774, representatives from twelve colonies convened in Philadelphia at the First Continental Congress, which created an American army, navy, and currency while calling for a boycott of British goods. “By this point,” Larson writes,
the non-slaveholding delegates from Massachusetts had forged alliances with slaveholding ones from Virginia—particularly the Adamses and the Lees—with liberty for the colonies taking precedence over all else.”
Larson quotes many patriot leaders who compared themselves to people enslaved by the British. During the crisis over British taxation Samuel Adams asked, “Is it not High Time for the People of this Country explicitly to declare, whether they will be Freemen or Slaves?” Washington insisted that the English were “endeavoring by every piece of Art & despotism to fix the Shackles of Slavry upon us,” seeking to make colonists “as tame, & abject Slaves, as the Blacks we rule over with such arbitrary Sway.”
The slavery theme provided a dramatic buildup to Patrick Henry’s declaration about liberty and death in his speech at the Second Virginia Convention in March 1775:
There is no retreat, but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged. Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston!…Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains, and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!—I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Such statements are inspiring but ironic, given that Henry and several other leading patriots were enslavers. Half a century ago the historian Edmund Morgan identified “the American paradox”—the inconsistency of leaders of the American Revolution who fought for their own liberty while denying it to enslaved Blacks. Larson reveals details about the Founders that show their reliance on slavery: for instance, the complicated measures that Jefferson and Washington took while attending political conventions in antislavery Philadelphia to ensure that their enslaved servants were with them.