Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age

by Sylvia R. Frey

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691006260
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	01/31/1993
Edition description:	REPRINT
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

Editorial Reviews

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

Black readiness to rebel changed the context of Southern life in the American Revolution and turned the war in the South into a war about slavery, Frey shows. Tracking the directions and dynamics of the change, she follows the currents of a persistent black liberation movement that proved central to the Revolutionary struggle in the South and pivotal for the slave system and the larger society from the 1760s to the 1800s. Frey emphasizes African American initiatives and responses that fostered what she sees as a dual transformation in law and religion, giving shape to Southern evangelical Christianity and the hegemony of the slaveholding class. Frey's broad research, skillful syn thesis, sensitivity, and insight fill her work with a subtle power that demands reading by anyone seriously interested in blacks, American religion, the South, or the Revolutionary era. Highly recommended . -- Thomas J. Davis, Univ. at Buffalo, N.Y.

Library Journal

"Frey's broad research, skillful synthesis, sensitivity, and insight fill her work with a subtle power . . . [and] demands reading by anyone seriously interested in blacks, American religion, the South, or the Revolutionary era."—Library Journal

"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

From the Publisher