The Escapes of David George: An Odyssey of Slavery, Freedom, and the American Revolution

Historian O’Malley (Final Passages) offers a spellbinding saga of one man’s long and wandering search for freedom in Revolutionary-era America. David George left behind one of the earliest known first-person testimonies of escaping slavery. It was transcribed by British officials during the Revolution, and O’Malley attempts to fill in the brief but stupendous account’s many blanks. In 1762, 19-year-old George escaped from a Virginia plantation and headed southwest toward the Creek Nation. His odyssey led him thousands of miles and found him in and out of captivity—first held by the Muscogee, and then enslaved again by a rich Irish landowner. He ended up on a South Carolina plantation, where he married and became a preacher, building a congregation that was “likely the world’s first Black Baptist church,” before the Revolution provided him and his family a path to freedom by escaping to the British lines. Postwar, he settled in Nova Scotia, before tension with white neighbors led him to join a resettlement colony in Sierra Leone. In tracing George’s repeated enslavement and escapes, O’Malley argues that the institutional nature of colonial slavery made every new person a Black colonial encountered “not just a single master oppressing them but a whole society, a system,” all blurred together as “faceless oppressors: They.” It’s an astonishing tale of endurance in a harshly reimagined early America. (Feb.)