"How American slavery engendered a new political vocabulary used on both sides of the Atlantic How is it, Samuel Johnson famously asked on the eve of the Revolution, that Americans could so vociferously demand freedom for themselves while so conspicuously continuing to deny it to those they held in slavery? With Seeking the High Ground, Matthew Mason helps answer that piercing question. As he shows, the language of slavery and freedom had long suffused Anglo-American political debates in the eighteenth century, with the Revolution emerging as one particularly hyperdramatic act during which combatants on both sides of the war of words connected the idea of slavery to the headline issues of the day. Mason details how Patriots and Loyalists alike deployed the rhetoric of slavery in their debates about all the crucial questions of the day, including republicanism, taxation and representation, and-by claiming the moral high ground-the nature of the Revolutionary War itself. These debates left complex rhetorical and political legacies for those seeking to abolish and defend slavery in both the new US and the remaining British Empire"-- Provided by publisher."In "Seeking the High Ground," Matthew Mason examines how both the British and the Americans weaponized slavery as a political issue leading up to and during the American Revolution. As he details, preexisting antislavery or proslavery commitments led some Britons and Americans to approach the imperial crisis as an opportunity to raise awareness and support for their position. More importantly, however, Patriots and Loyalists who initially did not seem to have thought much about slavery and race found rhetoric and policies in that genre to be useful to winning core debates on issues such as republicanism, taxation, and representation-and, by claiming the moral high ground, the war itself"-- Provided by publisher.