What did Quarles believe was the impact of the Dunmore Proclamation of November 1775?
In Quarles’s view, the Dunmore Proclamation provided a new pathway to potential freedom for enslaved people. He first discusses the various ways bondspeople pursued freedom before the Revolution, including lawsuits, self-purchase, and flight. Quarles does this in order to help us understand how the war expanded the limited avenues to freedom. Dunmore’s Proclamation and later the Philipsburg Proclamation were essential in that expansion. Enslaved people were emboldened to resist, flee, and actively support the British war effort. Notably, Quarles’s point was that Black desires for liberty existed prior, but these decrees changed the calculous for many captives.
Why did Black men join either the American or British militaries during the American Revolution, according to Quarles?
Opportunity and expediency were often the greatest factors influencing these decisions. In the words of Quarles, “In so far as he had freedom of choice, he was likely to join the side that made him the quickest and best offer in terms of those ‘unalienable rights’ of which Mr. Jefferson had spoken. Whoever invoked the image of liberty, be he American or British, could count on a ready response from [Black people.]” The fight was for their own liberty more than either side of the war. Even Black men who joined the American military at the behest of their enslavers oftentimes fought with the hope of gaining freedom through their military service. With that said, Quarles is also careful to note that we cannot discount patriotic sentiment on an individual basis. He explains this, for example, in attempting to discern the motivations of Crispus Attucks, a man of at least partial African descent murdered by British troops at the Boston Massacre, whom many historians regard as the first casualty of the Revolutionary War. We may never fully know Attucks’s motivations, but it is possible that he felt true allegiance to the Patriot cause in addition to a personal desire for equality. But again Quarles underscores that Black motivations for joining either side of the war, to the extent they could choose, remained largely contingent on which side presented the most expedient opportunity to gain freedom for themselves and loved ones. This could prove a difficult calculus with seismic ramifications for the lives of Black people during the war.
