The Escapes of David George - by Gregory E O'Malley (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

By a prize-winning historian: The dramatic story of a Black man's relentless search for freedom in Revolutionary-era America

When most Americans think of slavery, they do not picture the colonial or revolutionary eras. Yet, in fact, one of six inhabitants of the thirteen original colonies was enslaved. The Escapes of David George: an Odyssey of Slavery, Freedom, and the American Revolution reveals a remarkable, untold experience of the American revolutionary period--a Black man's quest for the freedom espoused by our Founders, but denied him and other enslaved people.

In 1762, at the age of 19, David George escaped from a plantation in Virginia. Running southwest by night, fording rivers and crossing borders, he embarked on a decades-long journey in and out of captivity that spanned multiple colonies and thousands of miles. George lived among White, Black, Creek, and Natchez settlements, fled to the British Army for the promise of liberty, founded what might have been the first Black Baptist church, helped to hack a settlement for refugees out of the Nova Scotia wilderness, and died as a leader of an experimental anti-slavery community in Sierra Leone.

Piecing together archival records and David George's own brief account of his life--the earliest written testimony by a fugitive enslaved person in North America--Gregory O'Malley presents a thrilling narrative and a unique perspective on our nation's origins, principles, and contradictions.

Review Quotes

"Gregory E. O'Malley's The Escapes of David George is a gripping, novelistic study of the remarkable man whose life forces all of us to reexamine the realities of colonial slavery and the conflicted legacies of the American Revolution." --Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

"Where, on earth, could a Black man in eighteenth-century British America go to be free? As the multiple flights of David George show, the answer was not always clear, but George never abandoned the search. With his award-winning ability to narrate histories of slavery that move between the local and the global, the individual and the community, the material and the spiritual, Gregory O'Malley is an expert guide through David George's Atlantic world and its reverberations today." --W. Caleb McDaniel, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Sweet Taste of Liberty

"If you read only one book on the American Revolution--this should be it. Gregory O'Malley's riveting history reframes the concepts of liberty and freedom in ways that are profoundly important as we mark the 250th anniversary of the War for American Independence. The life of David George is the perfect gateway into all that freedom did and did not mean. O'Malley's exquisitely researched and written history of George's life is transformative. A true and compelling odyssey indeed." --Jennifer L. Morgan, New York University

"By turns tragic, picaresque, and inspiring, The Escapes of David George illuminates the daunting chains of American slavery and the resolve of courageous people to break them. Greg O'Malley deftly explores the interplay of freedom and slavery in a time of revolution." --Alan Taylor, author of American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1760-1804

About the Author