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The Internal Enemy: Slavery And War In Virginia, 1772-1832 (2014)

by Alan Taylor(Favorite Author)

4.14 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

039334973X (ISBN13: 9780393349733)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

W. W. Norton & Company

review 1: Overall I enjoyed reading this book. I’m not sure that others interested in history for purely entertainment/leisure would find this a gripping read. Some parts of Taylor’s prose become extremely tedious as he dissects the generational inheritances of a plantation and the evolution of discipline and correction on that plantation (Corrottoman). Despite its title about 350 of 435 pages focus on the War of 1812, with an introductory and conclusion that brings in the period 1776-1812 and 1815-1832. He advances a fairly accessible argument that Virginians long feared that the enslaved presented an “internal enemy” that could, at any time, given their numerical superiority take up arms against a defunct militia system and overthrow the slavery regime. Because the Federa... morel government could not muster adequate national forces to defend slavery against British raiding during the War of 1812 many Virginian elites and pundits began advocating ultra-local, states-rights nationalism that expressed a profound distrust for the Union. The British strategy of liberating slaves, training them as Colonial Marines, and using them as guides and soldiers against Virginians prefigured how Union armies during the American Civil War would attack slavery and use freedmen to topple the Confederate regime.
review 2: This book could have been a bit dense, were it not for the fact that the author used the personal history of a specific family in Virginia to illustrate the points of the bigger picture. So that, plus the fact that the bigger picture seems to me to be a really important (and, to my knowledge, overlooked) part of the story of the early years of the US, makes it a book well worth reading. The story of the black slaves of Virginia and their role in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 is fascinating, and the author tells it well. I'd also recommend this book to people interested in the Civil War, as it illuminates the beginnings of the antipathy between the North and the South--basically, I finished the book astonished that the nation held together as long as it did before the fighting began. I'm so glad that new research is always being done, so that our understanding of the past deepens. less

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