This is not a very good review.

Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1961, with a new forward by Thad W. Tate and a new introduction by Gary B. Nash, 1996)

Benjamin Quarles published this groundbreaking study in 1960 and yet it still remains the singular monograph on the subject of blacks in the American Revolution. This reviewer cannot begin to understand why. In both Quarles’ strengths and shortcomings are starting points for fruitful and imaginative interpretations of the African American experience.

Quarles stated boldly in the preface “The Negro’s role in the Revolution can best be understood by realizing that his major loyalty was not to a place nor to a people, but to a principle. Insofar as he had freedom of choice, he was likely to join the side that made him the quickest and best offer in terms of those ‘unalienable rights’ of which Mr. Jefferson had spoken.” (xxvii) With regard to the white actors, Quarles maintains this tension between idealism and pragmatism throughout the book. Both Whig and British authorities began the conflict with deep disregard for blacks in any form: neither considered them, nor wanted them, as participants. Yet manpower shortages on both sides forced them to reconsider their unprincipled stands as within a few years they each began to enlist black soldiers and hire black laborers in their camps. Thousands of blacks ultimately became engaged in the great struggle at different levels of participation. 

Of interest is the different approach to the enlistment or hiring of enslaved blacks in the Northern and Southern colonies. The New England states, of course, more readily adopted the use of black soldiers, sailors, and laborers and entered the new nation largely having ended the institution within their borders. While Virginia occasionally wavered, South Carolina and Georgia held firm against the use of blacks in the ranks and generally disapproved of their use as laborers as well. One can find in their decisions a frightening adherence to the institution—so much that they might have risked subjugation to the British rather than budge on racial bondage—based almost strictly on fear of insurrection and a commitment to inability of whites and blacks to live peacefully together. Here are two of the three pillars of malignant racial theory (less the positive good argument) firmly entrenched in the South in the late Eighteenth Century.

Quarles knows that evidence of black motivation—collective or individual—is scant and therefore relies on the deliberations and accounting of white generals and lawmakers and the noted exploits of blacks themselves. For the inherent inability to divine a collective motivation, we still gain much from reading the thicket of action. Namely, that blacks were far more than passive field chattel, but possessed various occupations and various measures of freedom all up and down the seaboard. And the opportunities to exercise a variety of options regarding action in the war proved many. And in total, Quarles presents untold numbers of enslaved blacks, free blacks, loyalist owners, Whig owners, decisions to stay at hand, decisions to flee, action, reaction, freedom achieved, and freedom denied. It was twisted geometry and might be confusing except that the author’s conclusion of the opportunism of freedom makes very much sense.

This definition of blacks in the American Revolution is based largely around wartime military service, or blacks driven to the army or navy. In Sylvia Frey’s Water from the Rock (Princeton, 1991) the author notes that British military invasion triggered a wide range of reactions from blacks that were alternately drawn toward the armies in search of freedom or repelled toward fringe communities away from the British. Quarles, for instance, does not mention the existence of refugee communities formed in the swamps and backcountry of the South. Frey further notes that Southern masters during this period turned quickly to a religious treatment of the master/slave relationship that shaped the way whites behaved when the tensions of war fell upon them (much earlier than previously thought). Frey’s work is about the advent of paternalism and a separate black culture, and Quarles’ is about the black experience in the Revolution. He has done well and I look forward to more.