Water From the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age.

Nelson, Paul David

In this important book, Sylvia Frey discusses the role of slavery in the Revolutionary War and the period of American history to about 1825. She notes that historians of this era long have recognized the importance of slavery. At the same time, however, they have not emphasized "the vital role played by slaves in the entire series of events that made up the great drama," for they have seen slaves as passive agents being acted upon by whites. After extensive research in British military records, Frey concludes that "slave resistance was far more extensive than had hitherto been recognized" (p. 3) and that this aspect of history has been largely neglected. Focusing on this resistance, she concludes that the Revolutionary War in America's Southern provinces, rather than being merely a struggle between colonists and Englishmen, was a three-sided affair between black slaves, white Americans, and the British, with each faction playing an independent and important role. She also concludes that republican political theory and Christian religious belief played huge, crucial roles in the thinking of African-Americans as they struggled against slavery during this time.

Frey notes that when the Revolution began, many slaves in the South took advantage of the situation to declare their freedom. They appealed to the British to guarantee their liberty, even though they realized that Britain was itself deeply involved in the slave trade, and large numbers of slaves fled to the "protection" of British armies. Also, some of them escaped to remote places to form maroon colonies, while others fomented full-scale rebellion. British generals, however, although sorely tempted to take advantage of African-American manpower to fight the rebellion, finally could not bring themselves to utilize slave resistance for suppressing the colonists, and American slavery thus remained intact when the war ended.

Southern white Americans, who had successfully concluded a struggle to establish their "natural" right to liberty, spent the next thirty or forty years working out new justifications for holding slaves in bondage. Their major innovation was to detach Southern evangelism from the national movement and thereby reject the growing Northern evangelical emphasis upon antislavery preaching and political action against the institution. They substituted instead a self-serving moralism that justified slavery, although they did at the same time insist that slaves be treated in a more humane and "Christian" manner. Southern slaveholders quickly and gratefully adopted this watered-down version of Christianity as the undergirding legal, religious, and educational basis of their slave-owner civilization. Hence, says Frey, "the chains of slavery" after the 1820s were riveted "more tightly than ever before" on African-Americans, and "the political power of the slaveholding class" was even more firmly consolidated than it had been before the Revolution (pp. 327-328).

Despite this ironical outcome of the American Revolution (which supposedly had sought to establish human freedom and rights), black Southerners did not revert completely to their former state of lassitude. They continued into the next decades to resist slavery in the name of the liberation rhetoric of the Revolution and the individual dignity taught by Christianity. They also became culturally assertive, particularly in their religious practices. Although white slave-owners in time came to realize that this movement was dangerous and thus attempted to quash it, "[b]y then Afro-Christianity had a distinct and rooted life" that could not be destroyed (p. 328). Hence, Christian religious practice in the end became the slaves' most potent weapon against slavery, for powerful black spokespersons turned white religious rhetoric upon the masters and insisted that slaves must be given moral and human equality if not political and economic.

Frey's research is impressive, and she writes well. All in all, her arguments are persuasive, and her work evinces a high level of sophistication and skill. Her history of slave resistance and community in the era of the American Revolution will be the standard work on these subjects for many years to come.

PAUL DAVID NELSON Berea College