Eric's Reviews > Tyrannicide: Forging an American Law of Slavery in Revolutionary South Carolina and Massachusetts

I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads.

Tyrannicide: Forging an American Law of Slavery in Revolutionary South Carolina and Massachusetts examines the legal decisions related to slaves and slave ownership in pre- and post-Revolution America by focusing on a specific event: the escape of 34 slaves on the ship Tyrannicide from South Carolina to Massachusetts. Author Emily Blanck deftly weaves portions of the slaves' narratives with historical facts and general trends in the colonies and creates an exhaustive work on North/South relations before the Civil War.

Blanck notes that the Tyrannicide affair forced colonial America to consider three questions about slavery, race, and the relationship of the colonies:

What role would slavery play in a society built on the Declaration of Independence?
How would white revolutionaries respond to the black freedom struggle during this period?
How could America secure its national unity when the states differed so deeply in their responses to the first two questions?

And Blanck provides the reader with a comprehensive examination of these questions, reviewing the historical, political, social, and even religious aspects of each and how different groups chose to answer. The easiest answer is that Massachusetts (aka, the North) supported the end of slavery and black freedom and that South Carolina (aka, the South) supported the concept of slaves as property with limited rights. But Blanck makes it clear that things were not so black-and-white and that there were many variations in how communities, versus states as a group, answered these questions. For example, in Massachusetts there was an early effort to end slavery, but because the businesses there did not benefit from the use of slaves as did the South and that most of the population did not want freed blacks in their communities.

What was most eye opening to me throughout the book - in addition to the lives of slaves, which Blanck does an excellent job of illuminating - is how tenuous and loose the early colonies were as a unified country. It becomes clear how any number of issues, including the slavery question, could have easily torn the early country apart and only through tireless work and compromise did the union come to exist. But those early tensions remained and you can see the kernels of the Civil War throughout this book. I would highly recommend it for anyone interested in learning about colonial America, slavery, early race relations, or American history.