AMERICAN REVOLUTION

The Negro in the American Revolution by Benjamin Quarles

The Negro in the American Revolution by Benjamin Quarles

The Negro's important role in the Revolutionary War stemmed from the inescapable fact that both sides needed black manpower. And both sides offered the Negro his freedom as a reward. This valuable book gives us an extraordinary sense of reality of the Revolutionary times and affords us glimpses of all the levels of America's society.

The Negro in the American Revolution underscores the fact that Professor Quarles is one of the most able historians currently writing about the Negro in the American past.

--Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography

Exhaustive and painstaking research went into the making of this monograph. . . . [Professor Quarles'] synthesis is characterized throughout by restrained judgment and a high degree of objectivity.

--The Annals

One of the major virtues of Quarles' book is that it does not confine itself merely to [its] principal theme of Negroes as revolutionaries, but deals also with the Negroes who served with the British (mostly as laborers and a few as spies) and with those who were "carried off" at the end of the war. . . .

--New England Quarterly

In the Revolutionary war the American Negro was a participant and a symbol. He was active on the battlefronts and behind the lines; in his expectations and in the gains he registered during the war, he personified the goal of that freedom in whose name the struggle was waged. 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. ...