Revolutionary liberty rhetoric invited enslaved people to rise up against their owners

Evidence

“Give me liberty or give me death!” We heard that a slave owner named Patrick Henry said that in a speech he give to the other toubab. I laugh for two reasons. For one, he don’t know what he say to be invitation for his own slaves to rise up against him. They feel yoked by they Mother England like we yoked by her colonies. If they break the chains, they showing how we can break our own. And there is at least as many of us as there is them. Only guns make it uneven. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 414

Categorization

• XREF: Directly engages the chapter’s contested claim about the Revolutionary War: enslaved people read the colonists’ liberty rhetoric as an invitation to their own emancipation — the crux of the reader’s case study.