The War They Eventually Won?: Death, Liberty, and the (African) American Way

Several years ago, when I signed an agreement to write a biography of the eighteenth-century black church founder Richard Allen, my press sent back a contract with a new title. Instead of "Black Founder," the book would be called "Founding Brother." Further inquiry revealed that the change was an honest mistake, flowing in part from an editorial assistant's unconscious (but well-meaning) imagination—the pious Allen reimagined as a 1960s-style black nationalist, outside of the mainstream and deeply critical of American culture. Yet the press's hope that someone would write a "black version" of Joseph Ellis's best-selling saga of Revolutionary-era white patriots, Founding Brothers, also explained the title change. Was it possible, an editor asked, to depict black revolutionaries as cocreators of a democratic America?¹

That question illuminated a problem haunting post–Civil Rights African American historiography. Until quite recently, few scholars have attempted to write a grand narrative of early black life that tilted toward the heroic, emphasizing instead blacks' alienation and autonomy from the mainstream. For the inevitable story of early African American history was slavery's massive growth in the United States. As Ira Berlin observed in his monumental Generations of Captivity, people of color witnessed nothing less than a "second Middle Passage" between the Revolution and the Civil War.² Even free blacks were maroons on the edges of American slave society.

Such dire and all-too-accurate pronouncements have done nothing to slow the proliferation of work on white founders, of course, who still shine in the eyes of the American public. Perhaps for that reason, a steady stream of recent work has attempted to put black revolutionaries back in the public eye, often emphasizing their ill-fated but heroic lives. Gary Nash's The Forgotten Fifth, a series of interconnected essays on black revolutionaries based on his Nathaniel Huggins' lectures at Harvard, was told with a dramatic flair, while James Horton's and Lois Horton's In Hope of Liberty (tracing Northern black life from the colonial period through the Civil War) has been optioned several times in Hollywood. And Annette Gordon-Reed's Pulitzer-Prize winning epic, The Hemingses of Monticello, redefines the meaning of an American founding family in ways that could easily be made into an HBO mini-series.³

Now comes Douglas Egerton's Death or Liberty, a brilliant synthesis of African American struggles for freedom between 1763 and 1800. Based on Egerton's mastery of an incredible range of scholarly and popular work, from African-descended people rising throughout Atlantic society to white policy makers debating the merits of black freedom claims in the new United States, the book sparkles with insight. The author of several well-regarded studies of slave rebels and black life in the Atlantic world, Egerton knows this era of black protest as well as anybody. With Death or Liberty, he stakes a claim to preeminence in the ever-growing field of emancipation studies. It is an impressive accomplishment. But coming as it does on the heels of Barack Obama's presidential election, its publication also raises key questions about the ultimate consequences of black struggles for justice in the Revolutionary era.

Though occasionally looking beyond its timeframe, the book focuses tightly on black life at the close of the eighteenth century. Egerton makes no mention of it, but Death or Liberty seems like an ideal launch for a series of similar volumes on discrete eras in African American history—a parallel to Oxford's successful series on key time-periods in American history. In the Bible (Leviticus 25), Jubilee, or slave liberation and the clearing of debts, was measured in five-decade cycles. Egerton shows that a seemingly nontraditional chronology of black life—one not wedded to the Civil War and civil rights eras as the essential dividing lines of black history—illuminates with precision myriad complex themes, from the diverse...