Kacy Kim Tillman
University of Tampa (Tampa, FL 33606-1490)
FT-269888-20
Summer Stipends
Research Programs
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[Grant products]
Totals:
$6,000 (approved)
$6,000 (awarded)
Grant period:
6/1/2020 – 7/31/2020
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The Liberty of Loyalty during the American Revolution: Black Loyalism in the Book of Negroes
Research and writing of an article on “The Book
of Negroes,” a Revolutionary War manuscript that documents Black loyalists to
the British cause held at the British National Archives as part of the British
Headquarters Papers, 1774–1783.
For Black loyalists during the American
Revolution, loyalty meant liberty. Responding to British Proclamations that
promised freedom in exchange for fealty to the Crown, three thousand Black
loyalists left New York in 1783 to start new lives elsewhere at the end of the
American Revolution. Their long-overlooked stories are preserved in a
little-known text called “The Book of Negroes.” The few historians who have
discussed this book have treated it as little more than a ledger, but I argue
that it is one of the earliest and largest collections of circumatlantic Black
authorship, if we just know how to interpret it. This NEH grant would support
the development of a peer-reviewed article concerning Black loyalist writing as
it is represented in “The Book of Negroes.” Specifically, it would fund
archival research at the National Archives in Kew (UK) to access the British
Headquarters Papers, 1774–1783, a collection that contains “The Book of Negroes”
and its ancillary documents.
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