Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age

The era of the American Revolution was one of violent and unpredictable social, economic, and political change, and the dislocations of the period were most severely felt in the South. Sylvia Frey contends that the military struggle there involved a triangle--two sets of white belligerents and approximately 400,000 slaves. She reveals the dialectical relationships between slave resistance and Britain's Southern Strategy and between slave resistance and the white independence movement among Southerners, and shows how how these relationships transformed religion, law, and the economy during the postwar years. "What were the feelings of the several hundred thousand blacks in the thirteen colonies at the time of the American Revolution? Some surprising answers emerge from this pioneering history."--The Washington Post Book World "Frey's broad research, skillful synthesis, sensitivity, and insight fill her work with a subtle power . . . demands reading by anyone seriously interested in blacks, American religion, the South, or the Revolutionary era."--Library Journal