Given the half-century of scholarship addressing the relationship of African Americans to the American Revolution, from Benjamin Quarles through Sidney and Emma Kaplan, Sylvia Frey, and Duncan Macleod, one would think a general history like Death or Liberty was redundant. Yet this is a skillful, necessary book, synthesizing the newer understanding that African Americans were largely excluded, indeed excluded themselves, from the American Revolutionary process. Recent studies – including Simon Schama's Rough Crossings, Gary Nash's The Forgotten Fifth, Christopher L. Brown's Moral Capital, Woody Holton's Forced Founders, and Cassandra Pybus's Epic Journeys of Freedom – demonstrate that, in Egerton's words, “a majority of African Americans ultimately cast their lot with the British” (13), underlining Nash's point that the largest slave emancipation prior to the 1860s came when slaves flocked to the Union Jack.

Egerton does considerably more than assemble the old and new evidence of Black Loyalism and compare it against those instances where Black Patriots played a significant role, notably in the Rhode Island and Connecticut units of the Continental Line. He pays equal attention to the Revolution's inner world of lived experience, exemplified by Washington, who extended an invitation to the slave poet Phillis Wheatly to visit him following her published panegyric, but pursued his own escaped slaves assiduously.

The most substantive issue is the extent to which Death or Liberty focusses on the post-Revolutionary era, documenting the emergence of organized free black communities in the north, and the peripatetic wanderings of Black Loyalists in Canada, England, and Africa. Although broadening the Revolution to encompass “the last four decades of the eighteenth century” (12) allows Egerton considerable narrative freedom and scope, it also blurs the distinctions between four distinct periods: the initial stage of colonial dissent during and after the Great War of Empire in the 1760s, when slavery was hardly considered; the period of Revolutionary violence and dual power in 1770–81, when slavery was kept off the table at southern insistence, while black people emerged as a third force between the Patriots and their imperial foes; the Revolutionary settlement of the 1780s, including the codification of a North–South divide via the Northwest Ordinance; and finally the 1790s, which saw major debates over slavery's extension to the West, just as Saint-Domingue's rebellion put black republicanism on the table. African Americans played specific, very contingent roles in each of these periods. To blend them together suggests a single narrative, whether Whiggish or declensionist.

It is not that a broad temporal focus is inherently mistaken, or that Egerton should have stopped in 1783, 1789, or even 1791–93, when Congress passed the militia and fugitive slave acts that first articulated the United States as a “white man's country.” His decision to end his narrative in 1800 is defensible, although making its end point the suppression of Gabriel's conspiracy in Virginia seems odd, given Jefferson's election that year on the basis of the “federal ratio” counting slaves for the purposes of electoral representation. But recognizing the specific breaks in this era, such as the departure of British troops in 1783 accompanied by thousands of freed slaves, or the ratification of a Constitution protecting slavery, would have strengthened his book.

Egerton's problem, which all scholars addressing black people's relation to the Revolution must confront, is the question of when the Revolution betrayed its promises that “all men are created equal.” This is no simple matter; ever since Quarles brought black people back into the Revolutionary narrative, historians have evinced a profound confusion. Some, like Gordon Wood, continue to assert that the question need not be asked, since black people were outside of, and irrelevant to, the republican body politic. Others, like Holton, see their presence as crucial in the South, where British hopes for defeating the Americans rested on slave defections. Egerton refuses to commit, and one can see why, given the extreme pluralism of Revolutionary ideology and practice across the thirteen colonial statelets. He shows how an explicitly pro-slavery politics surged in the lower South as early as the mid-1780s, led by men like Robert Goodloe Harper and William Loughton Smith, and refers at another point to “the counter-revolution of the 1780s” (247). Later, however, he states that it is impossible to specify the Thermidorean moment, only that “perhaps” it came “when white Patriots utterly and completely crushed any remaining hopes that the first republic in the Americas would actually put into practice the belief that its inhabitants were ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights’” (271). Here is where a more emphatic periodization might have helped. Yet one would still have to recognize that the most ardent emancipationists, such as those Massachusetts judges and jurymen who enacted the American version of Somerset v. Stuart in the early 1780s, felt no evident difficulty in forging a constitutional state in league with slaveholding elites just a few years later. Any definitive conclusions about “the black presence in the American Revolution” may be impossible, other than that they began as they would remain for two hundred years: a destabilizing element inside the republic, challenging the possibility of any imagined community.