Justene Hill Edwards

Mm-hmm.

Sure, there were conversations among politicians and delegates in Virginia about the future of slavery.

Would there be manumission laws?

What were the mechanisms by which an enslaver could emancipate an enslaved person?

But there was always the ever-present threat of

of what would happen if we had a free population alongside a slave population in a slave state.

Jefferson talked quite a bit about that.

Madison talked about that as in enslavers.

And so they decided to go the route of kind of being more entrenched in

in slavery because they saw it as being so economically profitable.

And honestly, men like Jefferson were kind of struggling with how to disentangle themselves from their real investments, both economic and personal, in slavery as an institution.

Well, I think the revolutionary period is kind of the perfect example of the strategies that the enslaved used, right?

They would fight for either side.

And if we're talking about fighting, we're talking about kind of armed rebellions and insurrections.

And so there are kind of various moments in the colonial period, even through the revolution, where we have the enslaved kind of taking up arms and fighting for their own emancipation.

We see this in South Carolina in 1739.

We see this in New York in 1741.

And so there are these moments.

The enslaved also fled.

I mean, choosing to escape and take your own freedom in your own hands was a massive form of rebellion.