Reviewed by James Sidbury | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 65.3

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Reviewed by James Sidbury | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 65.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner's Rebellion. By Eva Sheppard Wolf. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. 308 pages. $45.00 (cloth).
Reviewed by James Sidbury, University of Texas, Austin
Eva Sheppard Wolf interrogates classic questions about race and slavery in the American Revolution and the early Republic by examining the discussions about and practice of manumission and the discourses surrounding free black people in Virginia. Wolf opts against a polemical tone, but her analysis takes clear if gentle aim at the claims of a number of historians—most recently and forcefully Gary B. Nash in The Forgotten Fifth—that the American Revolution stimulated a powerful movement that threatened slavery in the new state and the union of which it was a part.¹ Wolf finds white Virginians' engagement with antislavery to have been at best ambivalent among every group but the Quakers, and she notes that slavery's supporters rarely became slavery's defenders during the revolutionary era precisely because they perceived threats to the institution to be too weak to require serious response.	1
Wolf 's story of manumission in Virginia during and after the American Revolution is less one of slavery imperiled than one of racial difference reinforced. Wolf does not deny that antislavery impulses affected white Virginians during the Revolution. She discusses the Quakers' rejection of slaveholding and their agitation for liberalized manumission laws during the Revolution, the more fleeting but still important critique of slavery that emerged out of Baptist and Methodist churches during the 1770s and 1780s, and the much weaker if better known flirtations with emancipatory schemes produced by Virginia's self-consciously "enlightened" political elites. The political coalition produced by these three groups was powerful enough to contribute to real and important victories in the new state's legislature, including prohibiting the importation of slaves in 1778 and granting slave owners the right to manumit their slaves without individual statutory approval in 1782. Wolf 's legislative history of the 1782 law shows, in fact, that antislavery forces gained power over the course of the Revolution, so that the bill that became law in 1782 was more favorable to black freedom than one that had stalled in earlier sessions. There was, then, a growing if ambiguous movement of evangelical Christians and enlightened politicians that favored either limitations on slavery or a smoother pathway to black freedom during the 1770s and 1780s. Why shouldn't we understand this trend, then, as a real threat to Virginia slavery?	2
Wolf 's answer emerges out of her painstaking study of the practice of manumission in eight representative Virginia counties. She discerns a fundamental shift in manumission that occurred around the mid-1790s. From 1782 until the 1790s, "a small number of antislavery manumitters rejected the morality of holding black people" (39) by freeing all of their slaves. In one of the counties that Wolf studies—Accomack on Virginia's Eastern Shore—a few wealthy and influential opponents of slavery emerged out of a strong Quaker presence and an antislavery Methodist congregation to produce "a true culture of manumission" (61). In the rest of the counties that Wolf examines, manumitters remained marginal figures, and slavery flourished without significant challenge during manumission's first phase. Then, from the mid-1790s until 1806, when Virginia's legislature passed a law effectively curtailing manumission, masters in Wolf 's counties freed their slaves in ways that she finds much more instrumental: "owners began to understand that the possibility of freedom could serve as a carrot to hold out to slaves in order to motivate them to work" (39). Since "more slaves were freed from the mid-1790s to 1806 than in the previous decade, the majority of manumissions in Virginia appear not to have been a function of antislavery sentiment" (44). The two and a half decades during which Virginia's legislature cracked open the door to black freedom did not, by Wolf 's reckoning, constitute even a minor challenge to slavery in the state. Instead, what was important about "Virginia's experiment with manumission ... was the way that Virginia's slaveowners learned to use emancipation as a way to control slaves" (83).	. . .

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