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The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832. By Alan Taylor. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013. Pp. 605. Cloth, $35.00.)
Reviewed by Douglas R. Egerton
Having previously characterized the War of 1812 along the Canadian border and the northern frontier as a "civil war,"1 prolific historian Alan Taylor here shifts his gaze southward and chronicles a different kind of internal conflict. Although this thick volume spans sixty years of slavery, race relations, and servile insurrection in Virginia, at its core is a detailed account of the British invasion of the Chesapeake in 1813 and its aftermath. For decades, nervous Virginia planters had regarded the black Americans who worked their fields and cooked their dinners to be a potential "internal enemy," and as soon as British warships arrived in the bay, bondpeople who had been patiently biding their time abandoned their masters. As Taylor explains in this richly documented, elegantly written account-and as with all of Taylor's stout tomes, The Internal Enemy is a remarkably quick read-the sheer number of black refugees forced the British to recognize their claims for freedom, even as the inability of Washington to stop their flight and protect the interests of slaveholders led postwar Virginia masters to identify with reactionary southern voices.
Taylor makes it clear that the British were reluctant emancipators, and by keeping the focus on black southerners, he demonstrates that enslaved Virginians essentially forged the policy of wartime liberation by fleeing in ever-growing numbers. Initially, the British welcomed only a handful of black men as guides and ships' pilots, but as entire families flocked to British lines by the hundreds, white officers quickly...