Alan Taylor's The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 represents a formidable new interpretation of the culture and politics of slavery and race in the Chesapeake Bay region from the revolution to the 1830s. Taylor weaves a rich tapestry: a thickly descriptive detailing of events down to the local and particular level, but always attentive to broader cultural and sociopolitical trends in the region, nation, and Atlantic world.

The Internal Enemy focuses on slave runaways during the War of 1812, but situates that story and the War itself within the larger framework of the “social complexities of slavery” to the 1830s (4). For Taylor, 1812–1815 functions as a fulcrum of change. The war ultimately generated two new trends, both devastating to African American hopes: a states' rights response regarding slavery that saw westward expansion of the institution as the key to security, and the rise of a racialized nationalism (10).

Taylor deftly manages this impressive undertaking over the course of twelve chapters. The first three chapters detail the African American experience during the Revolution; the new nation's struggle with slavery, debt, geographic expansion, and commercialization; and also the impact of those knotty issues on the lives of the enslaved. The final nine chapters cover the War years and the period from 1815 to 1832.

Taylor argues that the six most important changes were inheritance law reform, opening up of western lands, commercialization, rapid expansion of the interstate slave trade, significant increase in slave hiring, and the commodification of the enslaved (52). For the Chesapeake's enslaved, those changes had a distinctly negative impact: a general worsening of material conditions, great internal movement, destruction of families, and a general inability to sustain stable slave households (52). Ultimately, the rise of a paternalist understanding of slavery—“the velvet glove”—was part of a purposeful retreat from Revolutionary rhetoric regarding freedom, and part of an intentional effort to make slavery more efficient and profitable (102).

Therefore, by the early nineteenth century, racialized language had emerged explicitly linking freedom and citizenship only to whites (108). British coastal depredations in the Chesapeake—especially a concerted effort to get slaves to run away and assist the British—came to represent the War's lasting impact upon the United States. White American memory about the war posited that the British had conspired with Indians and blacks to destroy the white republic (345).

Taylor never loses sight of the local and particular, and remains insistently sensitive to the African American experience. For example, his detailing of Virginia planter Joseph C. Cabell's efforts at Corotoman captures the early national period's dedication to rationalization and efficiency vividly, but also convincingly demonstrates how detrimental those efforts were to slaves (229). Taylor's examination of runaway patterns and slave behavior during the War also reveals “the bigger story”: free and enslaved Afro-Virginians “claimed and reworked Euro-American culture to their own ends … seeking equality … slaves claimed the dominant culture's markers of respectability for themselves” (257).

By 1814, the War was not going well. Thousands of slaves had run away to the British, many had assisted the British, and former runaways began taking up arms for the British against their former masters. Some people in Virginia argued for enlisting black troops, but whites would quickly be captured on the horns of a dilemma of their own making. They had long since come to think that Afro-Virginians were too cowardly to fight, but also represented an internal enemy that, if armed, would destroy white society (324). Predictably, the attempt to arm blacks against the British went nowhere.

The War's impact upon the white imagination would grow in the decades after the cessation of hostilities. First “British use of black troops during the war became multiplied to monstrous proportions in the American imagination” (247). However, that fevered remembrance became the foundational impulse for a new racialized nationalism as “American leaders justified expansion and white supremacy as defensive measures needed to protect [white] freedom from a British plot to deploy savages and maroons against the republic” (247).

After the Missouri Compromise, that new nationalism would change once again, as the defense of slavery and its expansion provided a “far tighter bond for southern leaders than antislavery did for the more numerous northern congressmen” (409). Thus, a pattern that in some ways predated the Revolution—periods of security and laxity regarding race and slavery followed by moments of panic and alarm—became the norm in slave states. That pattern controlled the internal enemy and allowed Southerners, “when in their own interest … [to] belatedly acknowledge what they usually denied: the ability, piety, and morality of their slaves” (433). Alan Taylor's fine book should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand better the complicated relationship of freedom and slavery, and the African American role in shaping the contours of that relationship, in the early Republic.