Reviewed by James J. Allegro | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.3

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Reviewed by James J. Allegro | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

James J. Allegro, College of William and Mary

Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty. By Cassandra Pybus. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2006. 303 pages. $26.95 (cloth).
Looking back over his career, Gary B. Nash counted among his "greatest satisfactions" the privilege to have participated in the movement to "construct a more democratically conceived American history." A history, he reminded readers in The Forgotten Fifth, whose goal it was not to "destabilize" or fragment existing narratives but "rather to bring attention to those forgotten Americans who have inarguably been part of constructing our society and our nation."¹ Chief among those forgotten Americans moved to the center stage of history in the past several generations have been African slaves. The work of recovering the slave experience—its origins, contours, and development—numbers among the most important accomplishments of American historical study in the past century.	1
Of particular importance has been the effort to recover slaves' persistent struggles for freedom and equality. For slaves, as Herbert Aptheker, Benjamin Quarles, Sylvia Frey, and others have shown, it presented an opportunity to attain these rights, whether or not some whites were willing to grant them, through uprisings, enlistments, testimonials, legislative petitions, and court cases. For whites, as Ira Berlin reminds us in his foreword to Epic Journeys of Freedom, the revolutionary era gave rise to a paradox of rhetorical commitment to universal equality and a practice of limiting privileges to a small part of the population. For Cassandra Pybus the revolutionary era presents an opportunity of a different sort; that is, the chance to recover some of the specific experiences of individual slaves as they "struggled tenaciously to make the rhetoric of liberty a reality in their own lives" (xvii). In her new work, Pybus constructs a series of intricately drawn "'biographies' of flight" (xi) that encapsulate the lives of more than thirty men and women as they fled their homes to join the British in the hopes of forging new lives abroad. These stories are woven together into a single narrative that brings fleeing slaves from Virginia and the Carolinas to New York, Nova Scotia, and London and eventually to distant colonies in Sierra Leone in West Africa and New South Wales in Australia.	. . .

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