IN 1756 the people of Virginia
lived in fear. A year earlier General Edward Braddock had marched
against the French and Indians on the colony's western frontier.
Braddock had been overwhelmed, and now Virginians faced inva-
sion. The Reverend Samuel Davies summoned them to battle, lest
"Indian savages and French Papists, infamous all the World over for
Treachery and Tyranny, should rule Protestants and Britons with a
Rod of iron." Virginians, Davies was sure, would never give up their
freedom. "Can you bear the Thought," he asked them, "that Slavery
should clank her Chain in this Land of Liberty?" ¹ British troops
turned back the French, and Virginia was spared enslavement to
papists and savages. Yet in that "Land of Liberty" even as Davies
spoke, two-fifths of all the people were in fact already enslaved, un-
der the iron rule of masters who were "Protestants and Britons."

Twenty years later the people of Virginia were again in peril.
The mother country, having saved them from the French, now her-
self threatened to reduce them to slavery through the devious
method of Parliamentary taxation. With the other English colonies
in America they sprang to arms, to determine, as Edmund Pendle-
ton put it, "whether we shall be slaves." ² George Washington, who
had helped to fight off enslavement to papists, prepared to fight
again and grieved that "the once happy and peaceful plains of Amer-
ica are either to be drenched with Blood, or inhabited by Slaves." It
was, he thought, a sad alternative. But, he asked, "Can a virtuous

-3-