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Military service has been traditionally offered as a demonstration of patriotism and of the obligation to return such favors with the benefits of citizenship. Although the abolitionists were right to affirm the sacrifices of a veritable segment of the African American community, more people of African descent actually fought on the side of the British army. It is likely for this reason that many of the subsequent episodes of enslaved people’s repression came to fruition. Unlike other “Loyalists,” a sizable segment of those who fought for the British, and most importantly their descendants, remained to incur the wrath of the victorious American rebels.

==='''The History of British Abolitionism'''===

It is useful to begin to understand this context by briefly reviewing the history of British abolitionism. The moral fervor around the brutality and horrors of the Middle Passage led to a movement by abolitionists in the eighteenth century to outlaw the Atlantic Slave Trade. These exposes were based upon both religious and economic arguments, but perhaps most of all they were part of a liberal natural rights logic that asserted humans were born with certain inalienable rights. Enslavement, inasmuch as it was crystallized by the treatment of human beings as property, was an incursion of this very logic. As the contradictions sharpened, those who had invested much political and economic capital into the system began to withdraw their support at varying levels.

'This was the context that gave rise to Somerset v. Stewart, where an enslaved African that had been transported to the English mainland had sued for his freedom based on English common law. Lord Mansfield, the judge who decided the case, had been influenced by the arguments of the abolitionists, and eventually awarded freedom to the plaintiff, James Somerset. This decision sent shockwaves throughout the British Empire—especially the American colonies. But it signaled to the enslaved that the British could serve as a vehicle to remove the thumb of their enslavers, much like the Spanish had done during the eighteenth century. <ref> Cedric Robinson, ''Black Movements in America'' (New York: Routledge, 1997), 14-29; Gerald Horne, ''The Counterrevolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States'' (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 209-19. </ref>

==='''The Impact of ''Somerset'''''===

According to historian Gerald Horne who has continued the arduous process of rewriting this history, Somerset signaled to the colonists that the British may not provide the same level of support to the institution of enslavement and westward territorial expansion. The Seven Years War was the opening salvo in the conflict that dealt prominently with these two concerns. Not only was it ominous that it appeared that the British would push a proto-abolitionist policy where the enslaved were concerned, there were also concerns that they might be eventually be armed as had been done in other parts of the empire. These rumblings would impact the ways that the colonists articulated their grievances with Great Britain. As Horne points out, they had been increasingly attracted to the North American mainland because of its relative security from kinds of revolts that had been taking place in the Caribbean throughout the eighteenth century. The rumors from Britain were thus a step too far. <ref> Horne, ''The Counterrevolution of 1776'', 161-208. </ref>

==='''Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation'''===