Reviews

Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence by Alan Gilbert

mmarques's review against another edition

challenging informative slow-paced

4.0

This book revealed aspects of the American Revolution that I was unfamiliar with. The first part of the book dealt with the revolution and blacks who fought on both sides. The second part dealt with the aftermath, as black soldiers and their families struggled for their promised freedom. 

bob_muller's review against another edition

4.0

This is an incredibly deeply researched book that provides a great understanding of how blacks reacted to the American Revolution. Most books have focused on the blacks that served with Washington's armies; Gilbert does that (a complete description of Laurens' efforts to get South Carolina to free and enlist blacks against the British, for example) but his focus is really on the Loyalist participation, involving many thousands of blacks fleeing slavery and the American political inability to deal with it. Although the rhetoric is Marxist, the facts are extensive and well documented; you don't need to adopt Gilbert's "two revolutions" argument to understand the basic nature of black participation on both sides, and on their own side. I do wish there were more tables and fewer pages and paragraphs of counts of people doing things, it makes the book less readable, as does some of the fulsome language, but the research speaks for itself.