Southern states refused to arm enslaved people even under existential military threat.

Evidence

During the first few years of the war, the colonies banned Black people from joining the Continental Army. The pressure of a series of British victories and the ongoing and worsening reluctance of white men to enlist finally compelled a number of states in the North to offer freedom to their enslaved men in exchange for military service. But the Southern states, with vastly greater populations of enslaved people, were not so moved. Virginia agreed that free Black people could join the army, but the last thing they wanted was to give weapons to all those enslaved Black men they were holding against their will. Even when faced with overwhelming British force, the Southern states resisted arming enslaved people. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 781

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s case-study framing: the colony-arming-enslaved dispute parallels the Revolutionary-War-cause disagreement and the Wilentz letter controversy over how to date the founding.