The Liberty of Loyalty during the American Revolution: Black Loyalism in the Book of Negroes

FAIN: FT-269888-20

Kacy Dowd Tillman
University of Tampa (Tampa, FL 33606-1450)

Research and writing of an article on “The Book of Negroes,” a Revolutionary War manuscript that documents Black loyalists to the British cause held at the British National Archives as part of the British Headquarters Papers, 1774–1783.

For Black loyalists during the American Revolution, loyalty meant liberty. Responding to British Proclamations that promised freedom in exchange for fealty to the Crown, three thousand Black loyalists left New York in 1783 to start new lives elsewhere at the end of the American Revolution. Their long-overlooked stories are preserved in a little-known text called “The Book of Negroes.” The few historians who have discussed this book have treated it as little more than a ledger, but I argue that it is one of the earliest and largest collections of circumatlantic Black authorship, if we just know how to interpret it. This NEH grant would support the development of a peer-reviewed article concerning Black loyalist writing as it is represented in “The Book of Negroes.” Specifically, it would fund archival research at the National Archives in Kew (UK) to access the British Headquarters Papers, 1774–1783, a collection that contains “The Book of Negroes” and its ancillary documents.

Associated Products

The Limits and Liberty of Loyalty: Black Loyalism in the Book of Negroes (Article)
Title: The Limits and Liberty of Loyalty: Black Loyalism in the Book of Negroes
Author: Kacy Dowd Tillman
Abstract: This article concerns the limits and liberty of loyalism in the Book of Negroes, which was a book of ledgers and petitions created during the American Revolution to track Black bodies. The article argues that this text was a source of agency as well as surveillance for Black loyalists attempting to claim citizenship during the war, and it provides a methodology of approach for reading this text and others like it. This article has no journal title or URL because the research for it is on hold while I await Covid travel restrictions to lift so that I can finish my research at the National Archives outside of London. I was instructed to upload the preliminary article here as proof of progress. I will submit it to a journal after I visit the archive in June 2022 and will upload the final version at that time.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://www.dropbox.com/s/pn265wzqy96ym3u/Book%20of%20Negroes%20Article%202022%20EAS.docx?dl=0
Primary URL Description: This is the link to the article.
Format: Journal

The Limits and Liberty of Loyalism (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: The Limits and Liberty of Loyalism
Author: Kacy Dowd Tillman
Abstract: How do we remember the American Revolution? Many of the ways in which memory is preserved is predicated on privilege. Loyalty oaths, which officially declared whether someone was a loyalist or a patriot, were only (initially) administered to white, property-owning men. State assemblies invited neither women nor free black nor formerly enslaved people to participate in such discussions. Even the British, who offered Black Americans freedom in exchange for their loyalty, did so mostly to encourage the collapse of the Southern economy, so dependent upon slave labor. Thus, finding Black-authored Revolutionary-era texts is complicated by archives that privileged white statesmen over black writers and speakers who were denied a voice during the war. Work that has been done on blackness during the American Revolution has focused largely on recovery or slave rebellions. Phillis Wheatley excepted, scholarship about black-authored texts during the war remains woefully thin. This panel attempts to address that scholarly ellipsis. It synthesizes recent research about early American Black print culture with recovery work done on Black loyalists and rebel writers to suggest new ways in which we might understand Blackness and Black-authored texts during this period. Particularly, it offers methodologies through which we might read Black poetry; sentimental fiction; muster rolls; legal documents; transatlantic letters and diaries; white-authored petitions quoting Black writers; and migration passes. In so doing, this panel hopes to provoke a conversation about the whitewashing of the American Revolution while offering other lenses through which we might read diversity into our nation’s founding narrative.
Date: 3/6/2021
Primary URL: https://event.sea2021.exordo.com/presentation/10/remembering-black-writers-of-the-american-revolution
Primary URL Description: This is a link to the panel presented at the Society of Early Americanists Conference.
Conference Name: Society of Early Americanists

The Limits and Liberty of Loyalism Keynote Presentation (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: The Limits and Liberty of Loyalism Keynote Presentation
Abstract: This was a keynote presentation for the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era. It outlined the limits and liberty of adopting a loyalist perspective during the war for women and Black loyalist.
Author: Kacy Dowd Tillman
Date: 2/18/2021
Location: Zoom
Primary URL: https://ageofrevolutions.com/2021/02/05/register-for-the-consortium-on-the-revolutionary-era-1750-1850/
Primary URL Description: This is a link to the program.
Secondary URL: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1ewkbmrneixxw3q/The%20Limits%20%26%20Liberty%20of%20Loyalism.pptx?dl=0
Secondary URL Description: This is a link to the keynote presentation.

---