selves by some public acts and laws; and then give
them proper encouragement to labor or take arms
in the defense of the American cause, as they shall
choose. This would at once be doing them some
degree of justice and defeating our enemies in the
scheme they are prosecuting.”[1]
When Dunmore appealed to the slaves of Virginia at the beginning of the Revolution, the slave owners issued an almost plaintive counter appeal:
“Can it, then, be supposed that the Negroes will be better used by the English who have always encouraged and upheld this slavery than by their present masters who pity their condition; who wish, in general, to make it easy and comfortable as possible; and who would, were it in their power, or were they permitted, not only prevent any more Negroes from losing their freedom but restore it to such as have already unhappily lost it?”[2]
In the South, where Negroes for the most part were not received as soldiers, the losses of the slaveholders by defection among the slaves was tremendous. John Adams says that the Georgia delegates gave him “a melancholy account of the State of Georgia and South Carolina. They said
