| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

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. xxiv, 284 pp. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-3194-7.)

Eva Sheppard Wolf's Race and Liberty in the New Nation is an excellent example of how material and symbolic forces may be integrated into a convincing and comprehensive whole. The work is bound to appeal to a wide array of readers from multiple disciplines. Wolf's general subject, emancipation efforts from the nation's founding to the volatile world of 1830s Virginia, is not new terrain for students of the early republic, but her use of deeds of manumission, and petitions for slavery, emancipation, and colonization, and other archival evidence provides a solid basis for advancing new insights and fresh perspectives. Wolf establishes early the process through which slavery became racialized, hence juxtaposed with white conceptions of liberty. Enslavement became immutably identified with the black "race" and thus cemented the identification of liberty with whiteness. Interestingly, that identification was intensified at precisely the moment when those lines were becoming blurred by the slowly growing presence of freed blacks in Virginia.

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