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Revolution's unintended blow to slavery
The war sends people running
The war and the dislocation around it sent more people running away. Heavy fighting in the South during the second half of the war added to the upheaval. People nobody expected to seize on natural rights ideology seized on it anyway and began carrying it forward.
Unintended consequences
Unintended things followed. Black abolitionists appeared. Black evangelical churches began to take shape in the war's immediate aftermath, creating a specifically African-American ritual and physical space. Maroon communities formed along the border with Florida and became part of the people now called the Seminole.
Emancipation and exile
African-American communities grew in Canada and on the west coast of Africa, first in Sierra Leone and later in Liberia. Emancipations came in the North. The system of enslavement survived and persisted, but a bomb had gone off inside it.
How did the war give rise to Black churches?
Evangelical Baptist and Methodist preachers welcomed enslaved congregants in the South before and during the war, and some Black preachers began leading their own congregations. The Silver Bluff church on the Savannah River in South Carolina is among the earliest Black Baptist congregations on record. David George, who preached there, left with the British and later founded churches in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone.
Where did Black Loyalists go after the war?
Britain evacuated thousands of Black Loyalists from New York, Charleston, and Savannah in 1782 and 1783. The Book of Negroes, a British register of those leaving New York, names roughly 3,000 people bound for Nova Scotia. Harsh conditions and broken land promises there led about 1,200 of them to sail for Sierra Leone in 1792. They settled at Freetown.
How did northern states end slavery?
Pennsylvania passed the first gradual abolition law in 1780. It freed no one at once, but children born to enslaved mothers became free once they reached adulthood. Vermont's 1777 constitution banned slavery for adults outright, and Massachusetts courts in the early 1780s read their state constitution as incompatible with slavery. New York passed a gradual law in 1799, and New Jersey followed in 1804.
Why did Maroon communities form near Florida?
Spain, which held Florida, issued an edict in 1693 offering freedom to fugitives from the English colonies who converted to Catholicism. Escapees from Georgia and the Carolinas made their way south for generations afterward. Some joined or lived alongside Native communities in the region. Fort Mose, founded in 1738 near St. Augustine, is recognized as the first legally sanctioned free Black town in what became the United States.
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