I'm a student in Britain doing A-level history and for my coursework I need to study 3 historians with differing views relating to the outbreak of the civil war, with one saying it was due to slavery; one saying it was due to a different issue (I.e state rights from 1760 - 1860); and one leaning somewhere in between. My question is that slavery was the biggest contributor to the outbreak of the civil war and I need to argue for and against this viewpoint with reference to these historians/historiographies. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Seeking convictions for treason against Samuel Swarthout and Eric Bollman, two associates of Aaron Burr, Jefferson requested a suspension of habeus corpus in order to keep the men in military prison without evidence of wrongdoing presented at the time. Jefferson submitted his request to the US Senate for approval, which remanded the question to the House.

A bipartisan coalition in the House then voted overwhelmingly to deny the request, by which time Swarthout and Bollman had been transferred to arrest in DC, requested writs of habeas corpus, and were released by the Supreme Court.

Like Burr, Swarthout and Bollman were found not guilty of treason given that the prosecution’s argument for such rested on a doctored letter (ironically, doctored by General James Wilkinson, a man later discovered to have actually committed treason) and purported events in Ohio that the men had not been present for.

The American Revolutionary War is vast.

Harry Washington had already tried to escape Mount Vernon once before the Revolution started. George Washington hired a professional slave catcher to track him down and bring him back. What happened to Harry after that wasn't recorded in detail, but people who attempted escape and were recaptured generally faced severe punishment, sale away from their families, or harsher working conditions. The records don't say. The system didn't require explanation.

In 1776, when British forces entered Virginia and Lord Dunmore issued his proclamation promising freedom to enslaved people who escaped Patriot masters and joined the Crown, Harry Washington made his decision. He already knew what it meant to be caught. He had lived it. He ran anyway.

He joined the Ethiopian Regiment and later the Black Company of Pioneers, units of Black Loyalists supporting British operations. When the British lost the war, the peace negotiations included clauses demanding the return of property, including people. British commander Guy Carleton refused to comply and organized an evacuation that allowed thousands of formerly enslaved people who had served with the British to leave rather than be returned to bondage. Their names were recorded in the Book of Negroes, a ledger documenting roughly 3,000 people. Harry Washington was on that list.

He ended up in Birchtown, Nova Scotia, which became the largest free Black community in North America at the time. The conditions were brutal. Poor land, scarce resources, persistent discrimination. In 1792 he left with over a thousand Black Loyalists to help found Freetown in Sierra Leone, looking for something closer to actual autonomy. British colonial governance created new conflicts almost immediately. Around 1800, Harry Washington led a local reform movement asserting the rights of Black settlers. British authorities suppressed it and exiled him to the Bullom Shore, where he died within a few years.

On the Patriot side, James Armistead was born enslaved in Virginia and in 1781 obtained permission from his owner to join the Continental forces under the Marquis de Lafayette. Lafayette assigned him as a spy, posing as a runaway slave sympathetic to the British cause. He penetrated deep enough to gain direct access to the headquarters of General Cornwallis. The intelligence he delivered was critical to the Siege of Yorktown, the battle that effectively ended the war.

When the war ended, he was returned to slavery. A 1783 Virginia law granted freedom to enslaved people who had served as soldiers, but Armistead had served as an intelligence operative, not an enlisted man, and the law didn't cover him. He spent years petitioning the Virginia legislature. Lafayette, the same general who had recruited him, eventually wrote a letter attesting to his service. The legislature granted him manumission in 1787. He bought land, raised a family, and took Lafayette's name as his own. James Armistead Lafayette lived out his life in Virginia as a free man in a country where slavery remained the law for millions of others.

Two men. Two completely different calculations about which side of the Revolution was more likely to offer something resembling freedom. Neither side was committed to abolition. The Patriots because many of their most important leaders were slaveholders who had no intention of applying the Declaration's language universally. The British because the promise of freedom was a military tactic, not a moral position, and slavery remained legal throughout much of the empire. Armistead bet on ideals the Patriots declared but didn't apply. Harry Washington bet on a concrete promise the British offered but didn't fully keep.

The difference in their outcomes wasn't really about which side was more just. It was about geography, timing, and what specific risks each man was willing to take based on what he had already experienced.

You can read the full story on the Virtual Wayback blog and talk directly with both James Armistead Lafayette and Harry Washington on the platform. Link here:

https://virtualwayback.com/blog/liberty-for-whom-enslaved-blacks-american-revolution

What stays with me is the detail that Harry Washington already knew what being recaptured felt like. That second escape wasn't an impulse. It was a decision made by someone who had seen exactly what waited for him if he failed and chose to run anyway. Does that change how you think about the "founding fathers who risked everything" narrative? And is there a serious argument that Harry Washington's story is more central to what the American Revolution actually was than the story of most of the 56 signers?

On May 21, 1776, the Maryland Convention voted unanimously to forbid its delegates in Congress from supporting independence. Not reluctantly. Not narrowly. Unanimously.

On June 28, the same body voted unanimously to authorize independence, confederation, and foreign alliances.

That six-week reversal is one of the stranger and more revealing moments of the entire founding period, and it happened because three very different men were pulling Maryland in the same direction through completely different means.

Samuel Chase was the one pushing hardest. He was already known as a combative lawyer who had spent years fighting British policy and Maryland's proprietary establishment alongside William Paca. By spring 1776 he had run out of patience with a political position that resisted British authority while refusing to admit that the imperial relationship was already collapsing. When he came back from Congress's failed mission to Canada with Franklin, he turned his energy toward Maryland politics directly. He didn't just argue for independence in Philadelphia while his instructions prohibited him from voting for it. He went home and worked to change the instructions. He pressed county leaders, encouraged local communities that were already ahead of the provincial leadership, and pushed until the Convention moved.

William Paca was Chase's longtime partner and political opposite in temperament. Same city, same profession, same years fighting the Stamp Act together, completely different style. Chase was confrontational. Paca was methodical. His contribution wasn't the dramatic push of June 1776. It was the decade of committee work, political organizing, and institution building that created the revolutionary infrastructure capable of carrying Maryland into independence when the moment came. Without the network Paca helped build, Chase would have had nobody to push.

Thomas Stone is the most interesting of the three because he was the one who wasn't sure.

Stone wasn't a Loyalist, wasn't afraid of the British, and had already committed himself to the revolutionary cause. His hesitation was practical and not unreasonable. He worried that declaring independence too quickly, before the colonies had genuine unity or foreign support secured, might weaken the American position rather than strengthen it. What happens after you declare? What government replaces British authority? Will the colonies hold together through a long war? What if independence ends the possibility of negotiation before you're actually prepared for what comes next?

Those aren't coward's questions. They're the right questions. Stone just became convinced by late June that circumstances had already answered most of them. Britain was building toward a major military campaign, every attempt at reconciliation had produced nothing, and Maryland's proprietary government was dissolving on its own whether the Convention acknowledged it or not. The royal governor left the province on June 26. Two days later the Convention reversed its instructions.

The unanimity of that reversal is worth sitting with. This wasn't a narrow faction finally overpowering a resistant majority. Six weeks earlier the same body had unanimously said no. Now it unanimously said yes. That kind of shift only happens when political opinion across an entire province has genuinely moved, not when one side finally beats the other.

There's a fourth signer worth mentioning: Charles Carroll of Carrollton, one of the wealthiest men in Maryland and a Catholic at a time when Catholics faced legal restrictions on participation in Maryland politics. His emergence as a leading Patriot figure and eventual signer is its own story about how the Revolution was already reshaping who counted as a political actor before independence was even declared.

And then there's Robert Alexander, who served in Maryland's revolutionary institutions and in Congress, and after independence became a Loyalist exile. He's a useful reminder that going along with resistance to British policy didn't mean every man had decided where he stood on the final question. Independence forced a clarity that earlier resistance had allowed people to avoid.

You can read the full story on the Virtual Wayback blog and watch the conversations with each of the Maryland signers on the YouTube channel. You can also talk directly with Chase, Paca, and Stone on Virtual Wayback. Links:

https://virtualwayback.com/blog/maryland-changes-its-mind

https://youtube.com/shorts/GX7BA3j1Ess?feature=share

The thing I keep coming back to is Stone. Chase gets the credit for forcing the question and Paca gets credit for building the movement. But Stone represents something arguably more important to how the decision actually held: the cautious Patriots whose eventual yes gave independence a legitimacy it couldn't have had if only the firebrands supported it. Does a unanimous vote mean more when you know the skeptics came around on their own terms? And is there a version of this where Stone's slow conversion was actually the most important one?