From Publishers Weekly
Two law professors make slavery the motor driving the Revolutionary period in this provocative if not always convincing study. Southern colonists, they contend, feared that British court rulings against slavery in the motherland and newly assertive British claims of legislative supremacy over the colonies meant that Britain would restrict or abolish slavery in America; they therefore took the lead in pushing for outright independence and demanded assurances from Northern colonies that slavery would be protected in the new nation. Slavery also dominated the Constitutional Convention, which only succeeded, the authors argue, because of an informal grand compromise giving the South the three-fifths clause (counting slaves toward a state's House representation) in exchange for the Northwest Ordinance banning slavery north of the Ohio River--and implicitly permitting it to the south. Blaming spotty records and backroom deal making, the authors often build their case on speculation, circumstantial evidence and interpretations of Revolutionary slogans about "liberty" and "property" as veiled references to slavery; they must often argue around documentary evidence showing Revolutionary leaders' preoccupation with other controversies that did not break down along North-South fault lines. Their reassessment of the centrality of slavery during the period is an intriguing one, but many historians will remain skeptical. Agent, Ronald Goldfarb. (Feb.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* In a startling and necessary book, one of the most important publications on the topic of black history to appear this season, the authors, both law professors with backgrounds in civil rights, chart a bold course through the history of the revolutionary period in American history and arrive at nontraditional but effectively expressed and well-defended conclusions. Their basic premise is that slavery cast its shadow over the founding of the republic, not simply the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention. The Blumrosens peer further back than that convocation in Philadelphia, convened to revise the union of former colonies, and discover within the early provenance of the movement toward revolution--the movement toward one united nation free and independent, that is--the southern colonies' fear that Britain would outlaw slavery and the northern colonies' acceptance of the continuation of slavery where it previously existed. Although this work is not for the casual reader, the serious student of history will come away informed and challenged. See also Steven M. Wise's Though the Heavens May Fall (p.936) for another historical account of the issue of slavery within the British Empire. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Booklist, February 1, 2005 (starred)
Startling and necessary book, one of the most important publications on the topic of black history to appear this season.

Book Description
This carefully documented, chilling history presents a radically different view of the profound role that slavery played in the founding of the republic, from the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution through the creation of the Constitution. The book begins with a novel explanation about the impact slavery had on the founding of the republic. In 1772, a judge sitting in the High Court in London declared slavery "so odious" that it could not exist as common law and set the conditions which would consequently result in the freedom of the 15,000 slaves living in England at that time. This decision eventually reached America and terrified the predominantly southern slaveholders because America was then a collection of British colonies and as such were subject to British law, and they feared that this decision would cause the emancipation of the slaves here. Thus, to ensure the preservation of slavery, the southern states joined the northern colonies in their fight for "freedom" and their rebellion against England. This decision was codified in the First Continental Congress in 1774 when John Adams promised southern leaders the support of their right to maintain slavery and drafted a Declaration of Colonial Independence from Parliament. What follows is a fascinating account of the role slavery played in the drawing of the United States Constitution. It was only in the end, when the northern states threatened to walk out over the issue of slavery, that the southern states agreed to the prohibition of slavery north of the Ohio River, embodied in the Northwest Ordinance which created the largest slave-free area in the world. This would eventually give birth to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which codified Benjamin Franklin's affirmative action plan. Features an introduction by Congresswoman Elanor Holmes Norton, and an in requiem poem by Barbara Chase-Riboud.

About the Author
Alfred Blumrosen is the Thomas A. Cowan Professor of Law at Rutgers University in New Jersey, specializing in Labor and Employment law, with a long history in enforcement of Civil Rights. The late Ruth Blumrosen was an adjunct professor of Law at Rutgers Law School and also has a history in Civil Rights compliance.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Alfred W. and Ruth G. Blumrosen's forthcoming book, Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution, is a radical, well-informed, and highly original reinterpretation of the place of slavery in the American War of Independence. This study deserves close attention and critical examination by all historians of the American Revolution and New World Slavery.￯﾿ﾽ--David Brion Davis, Sterling Professor of History, Emeritus, Yale University, and Director of Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Aboliti.

SYNOPSIS

This carefully documented, chilling history presents a radically different view of the profound role that slavery played in the founding of the republic, from the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution through the creation of the Constitution. The book begins with a novel explanation about the impact slavery had on the founding of the republic. In 1772, a judge sitting in the High Court in London declared slavery "so odious" that it could not exist as common law and set the conditions which would consequently result in the freedom of the 15,000 slaves living in England at that time.

This decision eventually reached America and terrified the predominantly southern slaveholders because America was then a collection of British colonies and as such were subject to British law, and they feared that this decision would cause the emancipation of the slaves here. Thus, to ensure the preservation of slavery, the southern states joined the northern colonies in their fight for "freedom" and their rebellion against England.

This decision was codified in the First Continental Congress in 1774 when John Adams promised southern leaders the support of their right to maintain slavery and drafted a Declaration of Colonial Independence from Parliament. What follows is a fascinating account of the role slavery played in the drawing of the United States Constitution. It was only in the end, when the northern states threatened to walk out over the issue of slavery, that the southern states agreed to the prohibition of slavery north of the Ohio River, which resulted in what we now know as the Northwest Ordinance. This would eventually give birth to ten new states, half slave states and half free.