Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution Paperback - 2006

First line

On June 22, 1772, nearly a century before the slaves were freed in America, a British judge, with a single decision, brought about the conditions that would end slavery in England.

From the rear cover

This chilling history describes how a decision in the High Court of London in 1772 freeing a British slave so terrified the southern slaveholders that ironically they joined the American Revolution and the battle for freedom to ensure the preservation of slavery itself. Slave Nation offers a radically different view of the profound role that slavery played in the founding of the Republic through the creation of the Constitution.
?Not your typical history of the American Revolution. Rather than revel in the glorious outburst of liberty that is so often stressed to schoolchildren, civil rights lawyers Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen show that the preservation of plantation slavery played just as important a role.?
- Charles Ealy, Dallas Morning News
?A radical, well-informed and highly original reinterpretation of the place of slavery
in the American War of Independence.?
- David Brion Davis, Yale University
?A startling and necessary book, one of the most important publications on the topic of black history to appear this season.?
- Booklist, STARRED REVIEW
?Provocative?Their reassessment of the centrality of slavery during the period
is an intriguing one??
- Publishers Weekly
?The Blumrosens have uncovered powerful circumstantial evidence that a major trigger
of the American Revolution was something far more fundamental than such a relatively minor irritant as British taxation.?
- Theodore J. St. Antoine, Degan Professor Emeritus of Law, University of Michigan
?A fascinating, concise and compelling argument that has long been obscured in America: that our legendary Revolution was fought for the protection of slavery and that that tragicblunder led directly to the central tragedy of civil war over the rights of Blacks. In breathtakingly clear and succinct prose, the Blumrosens lead the reader through a historical and political minefield, judiciously and brilliantly. And we should thank them for it.?
- Barbara Chase-Riboud, Carl Sandburg Prize-winning poet and novelist