Explain why these two groups held such fundamentally different views. Which group's view of the British was more legitimate?
White conceptions of enslavement by Britain: In the wake of the Stamp Act crisis, some Americans began to speak and write about a plot by British leaders to enslave them. In their view, the opposite of liberty was slavery, the condition of being under someone else’s control. A Maryland writer warned that if the colonies lost “the right of exemption from all taxes without their consent,” that loss would “deprive them of every privilege distinguishing freemen from slaves.” Slavery was a concept with which white Americans were very familiar, but they did not see it as something that should rightly apply to them. Whites’ concerns about enslavement by Britain escalated dramatically between 1765 and 1776, as the mother country resorted to increasingly desperate measures to control the colonies. Legitimacy of white colonial view: The opposite meanings of liberty and slavery were utterly clear to white Americans, but they did not use the term “slavery” in a very precise way, and they stopped short of applying similar logic to the half million black Americans held in bondage. In fact it was never Britain’s goal to enslave white American colonists in the way that those white colonists had enslaved black Africans. Black ideas about Britain as a source of freedom: African Americans all over the colonies began to associate England with freedom in 1775 when Lord Dunmore threatened to arm slaves to ward off attacks by colonists. Soon afterward, Dunmore issued an official proclamation promising freedom to defecting able-bodied slaves who would fight for the British. By December 1775, around 1,500 slaves in Virginia had fled to Lord Dunmore, who armed them and called them his “Ethiopian Regiment.” Camp disease quickly set in: dysentery, typhoid fever, and worst of all, smallpox. When Dunmore sailed for England in mid-1776, he took only 300 black survivors with him. But the association of freedom with the British authorities had been established, and throughout the war,