Book Review

Scholars have always seen revolutionary ideology as a powerful stimulus for the movement to end slavery in the northern states immediately following the Revolution. Inevitably they cite James Otis's The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764) as a sort of Ur text of Patriot indignation at the enslavement of Africans. In Slavery, Propaganda, and the American Revolution, Patricia Bradley argues that most patriot propagandists did not support, and in fact avoided, the antislavery cause. Their use of the slavery metaphor to suggest how the British regarded Americans was powerful only insofar as the image of actual slaves—African-descended enslaved people—could serve as a model showing the level to which white colonists could be reduced unless they exercised vigilance and virtue in resisting British domination.

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Bradley shows how the Patriot press capitalized on the representation of slaves in colonial newspapers—mostly in sensational accounts of crime and conspiracy, advertisements for purchase and sale, and notices of runaways—to define slaves as dangerous, disloyal, and unfit for freedom. She suggests that the Patriot press also distorted the role of blacks in important events such as the Boston Massacre, misrepresented the 1772 Somerset case for propagandistic purposes, and manipulated racial imagery in accounts of the Dunmore proclamation.

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