"This is a book about...how African Americans in the rural South conducted politics and engaged in political struggle as slaves and as freed people, about how they constituted themselves as political actors in a society that tried to refuse them that part, and thus about how they gave powerful direction to America's revolutionary experience of disunion, emancipation, and nation-building." Prologue, pg. 1

"To speak of the slaves' politics may seem a contradiction in terms, for the slaves had no standing in the official arenas of either civil or political society...And yet the slaves did express and act according to their individual wills, fashion collective norms and aspirations, contest the authority of their owners on many fronts, build institutions to mobilize their resources and sensibilities, produce leaders who wielded significant influence, and, in ways we have still to appreciate fully, press on the official arenas of politics at...