fer in terms of those 'unalienable rights' of
which Mr. Jefferson had spoken. Whoever
invoked the image of liberty, be he Ameri-
can or British, could count on a ready re-
sponse from the blacks." It was loyalty "to a
principle" that the Pennsylvania artist Sam-
uel Jennings was inspired to delineate in his
symbol-laden, antislavery painting of 1792,
Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences, which
still hangs on a wall of Benjamin Franklin's
Library Company of Philadelphia. A family
of slaves "pays homage," as Jennings wrote,
to the goddess of liberty, at whose feet lies a
broken chain, "an Emblem of her aversion
to slavery," while in the background a black
man strums a banjo as his brothers and sis-
ters sing and dance around a liberty pole
crowned with laurel [ fig. 1 ].

Nell tells an apt story to illustrate this
loyalty to principle: "Seymour Burr was a
stave in Connecticut. . . . Though treated
with much favor by his master, his heart
yearned for liberty, and he seized an occa-
sion to induce several of his fellow slaves to
escape in a boat, intending to join the Brit-
ish, that they might become freemen; but
being pursued by their owners, armed with
the instruments of death, they were com-
pelled to surrender." Burr's master "asked
what inducement he could have for leaving
him. Burr replied, that he wanted his liberty.
His owner finally proposed, that if he would
give him the bounty money, he might join
the American army, and at the end of the
war be his own man. Burr, willing to make
any sacrifice for his liberty, consented, and
served faithfully during the campaign, at-
tached to the Seventh Regiment. . . . He
was present at the siege of Fort Catskill, and
endured much suffering from starvation and
cold."

For slaves, especially in the south, the
choice was clear. The moral logic and natu-
ral right of linking two ideas -- freedom for
whites and freedom for blacks -- was in the
air in South Carolina as early as the Stamp
Act agitation of the 1760s. In Charleston,
as the white Sons of Liberty unfurled a Brit-
ish flag in the streets with the revolutionary
word emblazoned across it, and the crowds
cried "Liberty Liberty and stamp'd paper,"
the wealthy merchant and former slave
trader Henry Laurens recorded that a "Pecu-
liar incident, revealing in what dread the
citizens lived among the black savages . . .
was furnish'd . . . by some negroes who,
apparently in thoughtless imitation, began
to cry 'Liberty.' " Thus Thomas Peters, a
slave in Virginia, accepted Lord Dunmore's
promise of freedom, joined the British
army, sailed with the king's fleet to Nova
Scotia at the end of the war, and ultimately
returned to Africa to play a part as a found-
ing father of Sierra Leone.

That for blacks the revolution was in-
complete would be clear enough at an early
stage. "Haven't I heard your Fourth-of-July
speeches?" asks George Harris in Uncle Tom's
Cabin. "Don't you tell us all once a year,
that governments derive their just power
from the consent of the governed? Can't a
fellow think, that hears such things?" It was
the same point that Frederick Douglass
made to a white audience in Rochester nine
years before the outbreak of the Civil War:
"This Fourth of July is yours, not mine."

For some readers long nourished -- or
starved -- on a stale textbook version of a
revolution that pictured a few million
whites split into patriots and Tories while
half a million slaves toiled quietly and loy-
ally in the fields, the sheer existence of a
black revolutionary generation, on and off
the field of battle, may come as news from a
buried past. Since that fateful day in the
summer of 1619 when twenty kidnapped
Africans dragged their feet onto American
soil, the nation's slaves had never rested in
their chains. Emerging now from the forced
anonymity of a century and a half of bond-

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