The Slaving State: Confiscation, Public Labor, and the Black Experience of the American Revolution 

Patriot leaders set Black labor against Black freedom during the Revolutionary War. Whether forcing recaptured Black loyalists to labor in the Continental Army’s quartermaster department or sending recaptured maroons to state iron works, patriot military and civil officials embedded slave governance directly into the war effort. At the same time, as state confiscation commissioners and war boards seized and bought enslaved people for public works, they created a class of enslaved people almost totally unknown in the thirteen colonies: the “public negro.” Recognizing the extent of public slavery during the war recontextualizes Black loyalists as full-fledged political refugees who fled not just their individual enslavers but the tyranny of U.S. institutions.