The Hidden Origins of the American Revolution

The 250th anniversary celebration of the American Revolution is about to get underway in Lexington and Concord, the towns just outside Boston where British redcoats first clashed with colonial rebels. But just a day later and hundreds of miles south, a more complicated and perhaps more consequential clash occurred between the royal governor of Virginia and leading revolutionaries like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Patrick Henry. Those, though less well known, led to a British emancipation proclamation, which, like Abraham Lincoln’s later edict, though fourscore and eight years earlier, promised to arm enslaved people in exchange for their liberty.Even if you think you know the American Revolution, you likely do not know this angle to the story, and definitely not in the kind of rich detail offered in a new book by Andrew Lawler called A Perfect Frenzy: A Royal Governor, His Black Allies, and the Crisis That Spurred the American Revolution. For this episode of Think Back, I spoke with Andrew about Dunmore, a figure either missing or badly mischaracterized in most books about the American Revolution, as well as larger questions about the meaning of the Revolution. Get full access to Think Back at www.thinkbackpod.com/subscribe