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America was formed on the basis of freedom for all. One new bit of information that I learned from reading Davis’ Inhuman Bondage was that the “white colonists rose in revolt against what they perceived as British effort to ‘enslave’ them” (144). This being said, there is a double standard in how the revolutionaries perceived their oppression and how they oppressed their own slaves. How it is that men who so desperately wanted to be free were able to “own” another human being as property? Isn’t that what the whole point of what the revolution was about, so that Great Britain could not “own” the colonists anymore? As our classmate brought to our attention in “Freedom at Last?” how could we as a new nation base our constitution on freedom for all men, when slavery still existed and was such a large part of the economy? All of these questions are ones that I would have loved to ask to out forefathers and revolutionaries.
During the revolution, slaves were often entrusted with weapons and enlisted to fight. Or, slaves would manage to escape during the wartime and were enlisted to fight against their previous owners. Some owners who enlisted their own knew that their slaves would not want to fight for their owners freedom when they in turn would not get their own. Some owners went as far as promising their slaves their freedom if they chose to fight for their masters’.
I thought Davis did an excellent job in depicting how slaves were treated and their feelings during the Revolutionary War. I was surprised but enlightened at the fact that the revolution, based on the idea of freedom for all, was not in fact “freedom for all”.