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Slavery Propaganda, and the American Revolution. By Patricia Bradley. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. xxiv, 184 pp. $40.00, ISBN 1-57806-052-4.)
Scholars have always seen revolutionary ideology as a powerful stimulus for the movement to end slavery in the northern states immediately following the Revolution. Inevitably they cite James Otis's The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764) as a sort of Ur text of Patriot indignation at the enslavement of Africans. In Slavery, Propaganda, and the American Revolution, Patricia Bradley argues that most patriot propagandists did not support, and in fact avoided, the antislavery cause. Their use of the slavery metaphor to suggest how the British regarded Americans was powerful only insofar as the image of actual slaves--African-descended enslaved people-could serve as a model showing the level to...