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Gregory E. O’Malley, The Escapes of David George: An Odyssey of Slavery, Freedom, and the American Revolution (St. Martin’s Press, 2026)
In this anniversary year of American independence, the problem of slavery introduces a minor chord into our national celebrations. The United States proclaimed that all men are created equal, but it also permitted the enslavement of millions of people. Gregory O’Malley’s The Escapes of David George brilliantly evokes the founding’s moral tensions by reconstructing the amazing life of the runaway slave and Baptist preacher.
George’s improbable escapes took him away from the Virginia plantation where he was born into slavery, to stopovers in Native American villages, and then to a South Carolina plantation where he heard the gospel of salvation through Christ. Around 1773, George became the pastor of the Silver Bluff Baptist Church, likely the oldest enduring African American–pastored congregation.
Then, during the Revolutionary War, he escaped again, going to British-occupied Savannah and Charleston before evacuating to Nova Scotia at the war’s end. He became one of Nova Scotia’s key evangelical pastors before leaving one more time, resettling in Sierra Leone in West Africa.
O’Malley has little direct source material with which to reconstruct George’s extraordinary story, but he makes the most of what exists to depict slavery’s grim realities in the Atlantic world. However, O’Malley might have done more to understand George not just as a former slave escaping bondage’s shadow but also as a sinner saved by God’s grace. The sources suggest this was how George primarily viewed himself.
Edited by Yuval Levin, Adam J. White, and John Yoo, Slavery, Equality, and the American Revolution (AEI Press, 2025)
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has produced a terrific series of thematic volumes about the American founding in anticipation of the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. One of these collections is Slavery, Equality, and the American Revolution. Available in print and for free online, this book features five essays by scholars of law and politics, all considering the relationship of America’s founding documents to slavery.
As AEI’s Yuval Levin notes, the dilemma regarding slavery and America dates back to the founding itself. Jefferson initially included a critical section on the slave trade in the Declaration, but the Continental Congress removed it from the final version.
Likewise, the Constitutional Convention debated several clauses related to slavery, including the notorious three-fifths clause, which counted each slave as three-fifths of a person for the sake of representation. Many people today misunderstand this clause. It was designed primarily not to denigrate enslaved people but to give more political power to slaveholders in Congress and the Electoral College.
The first two essays in Slavery, Equality, and the American Revolution deal with the founding period. The other three discuss interpretations of the founding by Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Both men embraced the Declaration as the “charter of our liberties,” as Lincoln put it. The Constitution made concessions to the ugly realities of chattel slavery, but the Declaration was an aspirational document (albeit one written by a slaveholder) envisioning an American future without slavery.
David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford University Press, 2006)
Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World
Oxford University Press, USA
464 pages
The late David Brion Davis wrote several classic books on slavery in the Age of Revolutions, including Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. This ambitious synthesis ranges from the ancient advent of slavery to its abolition in the British Empire and United States.
The claim that slavery was inhuman is conventional. But to Davis it is an especially apt term for New World slavery because of the way slave traders and enslavers dehumanized people and treated them—economically, legally, and personally—as if they were animals.
New World chattel slavery became especially harsh because it linked racist views to an unfettered market that demanded cheap and unlimited sugar, cotton, and other plantation crops, regardless of the cost to the enslaved.
Davis observes that European and American culture moved from virtual silence on the immorality of slavery as of 1775 to its abolition in most of Europe and the Americas by 1865. Explaining this change is not simple.
Some have argued that vast economic shifts undermined the profitability of slave-grown staples and paved the way for emancipation. Others contend that the idealization of free labor in the 1800s made slavery intolerable, even in the eyes of many white laborers who otherwise had little sympathy for others.
Davis recognizes such explanations, but he can’t escape the conclusion that without Christian reformers, including evangelicals such as England’s William Wilberforce, abolition simply would not have happened. The fall of New World slavery, then, resulted from “a major transformation in moral perception,” a transformation few would have predicted in 1775.
Thomas S. Kidd is research professor of church history at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
