Although Africans and African Americans have been left out of most accounts of the Revolutionary years, this book pieces together their emerging path toward freedom. From Britain came the Great Awakening, the advent of evangelism in America, which would provide slaves with hope for future freedom. In 1775, black emancipation commenced in Chesapeake Bay with Lord Dunmore's proclamation and the resulting fleet, which attracted blacks, creating the first mass emancipation of slaves in British colonial history. At the end of the War for Independence, the British evacuations of loyal subjects from 1782 to 1785 were the turning point in the Emancipation Revolution. A majority of free and enslaved blacks would remain where the Royal Navy transports landed them in Jamaica, the Bahamas, Nova Scotia, or Britain. Blacks' love of freedom is concluded with the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire. AUTHOR: Theodore Corbett is a scholar of the American Revolutionary War, an interest which grew during a career in teaching at several universities. He has published the award-winning No Turning Point, The Saratoga Campaign in Perspective and two community studies of the war, Revolutionary New Castle and Revolutionary Chestertown. Most recently he has added to Pen and Sword Maritime, with A Maritime History of the American Revolutionary War. His research has taken him to the Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, the Archives Centre, Maritime Museum of Liverpool and the New York Historical Society as a Gilder Lehrman Fellow. He resides on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. 35 b/w illustrations
