Negro Comrades of the Crown
African Americans and the British Empire Fight the U.S. before Emancipation
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7309230 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rachel Hope Cleves (0000-0001-6132-4664, University of Victoria, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2013 |
| Volume | 99 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 1235-1235 |
| Publication date | 2013-02-15 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jas554 |
| OpenAlex | W2315389693 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
In Negro Comrades of the Crown, Gerald Horne offers a fantastically researched update of the history of American slave resistance set within the context of the United States and the world. In line with studies of American reactions to Caribbean emancipation—including books by Edward Bartlett Rugemer (The Problem of Emancipation, 2008), Matthew J. Clavin (Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War, 2009), and Ashli White (Encountering Revolution, 2010)—Horne explores the effect of Anglo-American relations on the emancipatory aspirations of black people from the American Revolution to the Civil War. Throughout those eighty years, he asserts, Americans of African descent repeatedly allied with Great Britain and against the United States to fight for their freedom, hence earning a reputation as comrades of the Crown. Horne makes a forceful argument for the broad extent of slave resistance within the United States prior to the Civil War. In an early footnote he goes so far as to claim that Herbert Aptheker “underestimated” the extent of this rebellious spirit in his classic 1943 account (American Negro Slave Revolts), thus rejecting Eugene Genovese's argument in From Rebellion to Revolution (1979) that Aptheker “exaggerated” slave rebelliousness (a truism within slave historiography ever since) (p. 220n40). Instead, Horne insists that the postrevolutionary years witnessed “probably the most profoundly militant and sustained resistance of the enslaved since Europeans had invaded the continent” (p. 1). Do not let the “probably” fool you; there is nothing conditional about Horne's argument
Ancient history · Argument (complex analysis · Context (archaeology · Economic history · Emancipation · Empire · Historiography · Political science · Politics · Resistance (ecology · Spanish Civil War · Australian History and Society · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society
| Citations per year | 0.22 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2017 - 2024 (8) |
| Highly cited | No |