Note (in a note) — Chapter XXIV

[378] Bancroft's History of the United States, Vol. VII., Chap. xxv., p. 276.

"The offer of freedom to the negroes came very oddly from the representative of the nation which had sold them to their present masters, and of the King who had been displeased with the colony for its desire to tolerate that inhuman traffic no longer; and it was but a sad resource for a commercial metropolis, to keep a hold on its colony by letting loose slaves against its own colonists."—Ib., p. 276.

"Dunmore's menace to raise the standard of a servile insurrection and set the slaves upon their masters, with British arms in their hands, filled the South with horror and alarm. Besides, the retreat of the British troops from Concord raised the belief that the American forces were invincible; and the spirit of resistance had grown so strong, that some of the Burgesses appeared in the uniform of the recently instituted provincial troops, wearing a hunting shirt of coarse linen over their clothes, and a woodman's axe by their sides."—Ib., pp. 384, 385.