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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.