AUTHOR’S NOTE

If this were the fantasy novel it so much resembles, there would be a third volume. In that book, Octavian, Pro Bono, and Nsia would come forth from their place of hiding; they would orchestrate the desperate clash of these two great nations and engineer the toppling of both governments. There would be gargantuan, cleansing battles, and in their wake, our heroes would found a new realm. All people would be free, shackles would fall from every wrist, and bounty would return to the land.

But of course, this is not what happened. Instead, slavery persisted in this country for another four generations. And a full century after the general emancipation, nearly two hundred years after the Revolution, federal legislation finally ensured legal equality for black and white.

Though the characters are, for the most part, either fabrications or composites, the major events recorded in this novel are real. As an example, the disastrous performance of Lieutenant-General Burgoyne’s satirical squib The Blockade of Boston was indeed interrupted by news of a canny Patriot attack on Charlestown, exactly as described, though the episode actually happened a few months later than I have set it. On the other hand, the tragic expedition of Lord Dunmore’s Royal Ethiopian Regiment occurred very much as it is depicted here. In that instance, I tried to cleave closely to the actual time-line of events. My aim was to see the event from a point of view neglected in the extant sources, a process which of course required speculation as well as the combination of facts and stories usually found in isolation. In the interests of filling in the blanks, I attempted to weave together the military history with tales of escape recorded in the early nineteenth century, with legends of Africa and the Great Dismal Swamp told at the time, and with minutiæ about plantation dress, the employment of tortoises, and reports of the effects of slavery, such as the surprising statistic that roughly one in twenty fugitive slaves was reported as having a stutter, the traumatic effect of servitude and punishment. I wanted to combine these elements to imagine this expedition in its early glory and its later defeat.

It has been estimated that some eight hundred African American men joined the ranks of Lord Dunmore’s Royal Ethiopian Regiment, though thousands more, male and female, fled their masters in the midst of Revolutionary chaos. Of the eight hundred who finally reached his fleet and enlisted, an estimated two hundred survived the campaign. Most of those who died succumbed to disease, especially smallpox, which ravaged the African American troops.

Lord Dunmore continued, throughout the rest of the war, to agitate for permission to command an army of freed slaves against the rebels. Even after the final defeat of the British at Yorktown, Dunmore hoped that the tide might still be turned by a more vigorous pursuit of the methods he had implemented in Virginia. As we know, his lobbying came to nothing. He was later made governor of the Bahamas, a post in which he demonstrated exactly the same incompetence and petulance that had made his stint as an embattled governor of Virginia such an abject failure. Eventually, he returned to England. His daughter secretly married one of George III’s sons, which enraged the king and lost Dunmore’s family considerable favor. Dunmore died in the early years of the nineteenth century.

And what of Octavian? What would have happened to him in the years that followed?

At the end of this volume, he flees to one of the so-called “maroon communities” hidden in the great wilderness expanses of the New World. Following the Revolution, there were many of these outlaw villages, most of them concentrated in the swamps of the South. In the early years of the Republic, the majority were found out and raided, the inhabitants hunted down, killed in battle, imprisoned, or executed. We may hope that we do not hear of Octavian’s secret home because it was never discovered.

Others who fought with the Royal Ethiopians continued to fight on the side of the British. When the British finally abandoned their colonies, they took thousands of African Americans with them. Those who were free generally settled in Nova Scotia; many of these, finding the place inhospitable, eventually returned to Africa, where the English government established a repatriation colony in Sierra Leone.

What of the African Americans who fought for the Patriot cause, as Octavian did earlier? There were three exclusively African American units on the Continental side during the conflict: the First Rhode Island Regiment, the Bucks of America, and the Black Brigade of Saint Domingue. Most of the black soldiers in the American forces, however, served side by side with their white brothers-in-arms. Some were decorated for their service to the budding nation, and many were freed. Others remained enslaved.

On the one hand, black freemen in American regiments enjoyed the same pay, the same food, and the same conditions as their white counterparts—the most racially integrated fighting force in the United States until the time of the Korean War. On the other hand, well into the nineteenth century we find African American veterans embroiled in legal battles over their service, their freedom, and their promised pensions. On the American side, as on the British side, policies regarding slavery were more a product of strategy than humanitarian concern. The Americans went so far as to offer slaves as a premium to white men who enlisted in the army toward the end of the war. Thomas JeVerson ratified a bill that granted three hundred acres and a healthy male slave to any Virginian who joined the army and fought for the duration. South Carolina enacted a similar measure. General Thomas Sumter instituted a graduated system of distributing slaves among his oYcers: Majors received three adults, lieutenant colonels were entitled to three adults and a child, and so on.

The question of which side—the British or the American—offered more to the slave is a complicated one. While, on balance, the British approach to African American allies was generally more consistent, it is clear that neither army’s policies were actuated by any concern other than military expediency. The decision to emancipate slaves or leave them in bondage was not based on abstract principles but on strategic interests.

It is startling, perhaps, to consider that the continuance of slavery was so thoroughly interwoven with the politics of freedom. In the course of my research for this book, I have come to believe that the American Republic would not have survived its early years—would not have made it through the War of 1812—if it had not been fueled and funded by two profound acts of ethnic violence: the establishment of slavery and the annexation of Native American land, both of which practices played a major part in the inception and conduct of the Revolution. The freedom—economic, social, and intellectual—enjoyed by the vocal and literate elite of the early Republic would have been impossible if it had not been for the enslavement, displacement, and destruction of others.

As I conducted my research, I watched, appalled, as the term liberty proliferated so many meanings that, in the end, it had none: It meant at once the right to declare independence from the Crown and the right to adhere to the Crown; to some, freedom to own slaves, and to others, freedom from slavery. Cast back and forth in relentless cannonades, it became evacuate of meaning.

And thus one of the great paradoxes I encountered while writing: Liberty was at once a quality so abstract as to be insubstantial—and yet so real in its manifestations that it was worth dying for. It is real every time we enjoy the right to a fair trial, judged by a jury of our peers; it is real every time we discuss our government in a newspaper column, a school report, or a historical novel without fear of reprisal, raps on the door in the dead of night. It is a desperately vital reality, worthy of the wars that have been fought for it.

Yes, our Revolutionary forefathers espoused a vexed and even contradictory view of liberty. But it is easy to condemn the dead for their mistakes. Hindsight is cheap, and the dead can’t argue. It is harder to examine our own actions and to ask what abuses we commit, what conspicuous cruelties we allow to aVord our luxuries, which of our deeds will be condemned by our children’s children when they look back upon us. We, too, are making decisions. We, too, have our hypocrisies, our systems of shame.

On April 19, in the year 1975, my parents woke me up at four in the morning. They took me down to the river and put me in the canoe. I have only the faintest memory of this. My father and mother paddled us down the Concord River to the Old North Bridge, where, in the rushes, we saw some red-winged blackbirds and the president of the United States. President Gerald Ford was standing on the Old North Bridge, delivering a bicentennial address.

On the one bank was a hill where, exactly two hundred years before I arrived there—down almost to the minute—the men of my town, ordinary citizens, men like my father, had come over the rise and had marched toward the river to engage in battle with the most powerful army in the world.

That time, those people, were not mythic; they had once been real, though now historical—just as the year 1975, the year I bobbed on the waters ten feet below the pants of the president of the United States, is now not real, but historical.

History is not a pageant arrayed for our delectation.

We are all always gathered there. We have come to the riverside to fight or to flee. We are gathered at the river, upon those shores, and the water is always moving, and the president of the United States always gesticulates silently above us, his image on the water. Nothing will cease. Nothing will stop. We ourselves are history.

The moment is always now.