@article{1478617,
      recid = {1478617},
      author = {Nash, Gary B, },
      title = {The Forgotten Fifth : African Americans in the Age of  Revolution /},
      pages = {1 online resource (249 p.)},
      abstract = {As the United States gained independence, a full fifth of  the country's population was African American. The  experiences of these men and women have been largely  ignored in the accounts of the colonies' glorious quest for  freedom. In this compact volume, Gary B. Nash reorients our  understanding of early America, and reveals the perilous  choices of the founding fathers that shaped the nation's  future. Nash tells of revolutionary fervor arousing a  struggle for freedom that spiraled into the largest slave  rebellion in American history, as blacks fled servitude to  fight for the British, who promised freedom in exchange for  military service. The Revolutionary Army never matched the  British offer, and most histories of the period have  ignored this remarkable story. The conventional wisdom says  that abolition was impossible in the fragile new republic.  Nash, however, argues that an unusual convergence of  factors immediately after the war created a unique  opportunity to dismantle slavery. The founding fathers'  failure to commit to freedom led to the waning of  abolitionism just as it had reached its peak. In the  opening decades of the nineteenth century, as Nash  demonstrates, their decision enabled the ideology of white  supremacy to take root, and with it the beginnings of an  irreparable national fissure. The moral failure of the  Revolution was paid for in the 1860s with the lives of the  600,000 Americans killed in the Civil War. The Forgotten  Fifth is a powerful story of the nation's multiple, and  painful, paths to freedom.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1478617},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674041349},
}