Portraits of War

The Battle of Princeton (1782)
by James Peale

QUICK FACTS
  • Within nine months, the Americans exhaust their supply of gunpowder. Not able to manufacture it in sufficient quantities, they rely on imports — mainly from the Caribbean.
CONTENTS

     

British Commanders-in-Chief in North America

Continental Army Commander-in-Chief

Racial prejudice worked to perpetuate American slavery, even if it was not essential to sustain the institution. Slavery, serfdom, and peonage had existed elsewhere without racial connotations. Indeed, bondage had been so historically ubiquitous one might well ask why, by the 1760’s, it had come to trouble so many white Americans so much. The answer lies in part — and this part help explain why people like Mason did not act more aggressively on their concerns — in the reservations many whites felt about living alongside members of a supposedly inferior race, whether slave or free. The problem was inherent in American slavery, and emancipation, by undermining white control, would only make it worse.

Jeff Broadwater
George Mason: Forgotten Founder (2006)