He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Seeking the High Ground: Slavery and Political Conflict in the British Atlantic World, with the following results:
On page 99 of Seeking the High Ground, fortuitously enough, readers will find the opening of a new chapter in the book, chapter 5, entitled “Humanity.” “The concept of humanity played a central role in both the imperial crisis and the Revolutionary War,” the chapter begins. After defining that ideal for 18th-century Anglophone thinkers, I note that “humanity’s most politicized manifestations in the imperial crisis and war included ideals connected to civilization, moderation, and the proper locus of sovereignty throughout these conflicts, and to military discipline during the war. To lay successful claim to it was to be safely within all the right categories in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic, including proper religiosity as well as the cult of sensibility.” The rest of this chapter explores how the politics of slavery connected to all these angles for humanity as both Patriots and Loyalists, and their respective British allies, sought to lay claim to this virtue for their cause.Learn more about Seeking the High Ground at the University of Virginia Press website.
As such, the Page 99 Test works uncannily well as an indication of the kind of things I’m arguing in this book. For the five chapters of it dedicated to the American Revolution, I try to show how debaters on both sides connected slavery to the moral (and thus political) high ground for which they contended. They did so in complicated ways linked to the multiple facets of those ideals that constituted the high ground.
This is my contribution to the debate over slavery’s relationship with the causes and consequences of the American Revolution. Some historians argue that the traditional explanations of the American Revolution, centering on issues and taxation and representation with their accompanying high-sounding ideals, do not capture the way in which the defense of slavery and white supremacy drove the Patriot movement. And as such, these historians argue, the Revolution strengthened American slavery. Their opponents argue that we should take the traditional explanations, and the stated idealistic motives of the Patriots, seriously, and that the rise of antislavery was the really notable impact of the Revolution. I argue that it is better to see how slavery naturally and pervasively connected to those traditional issues and ideals. And I contend that for that reason, the Revolution had both specific antislavery and specific proslavery consequences for both the new United States and the remaining British Empire. So in short, the Page 99 Test works very well in my case.
--Marshal Zeringue
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