Set against the backdrop of the American Revolution and its aftermath, the text tells of the epic struggle for freedom by thousands of slaves who believed that their future as free men and women was bound up with staying British, not becoming American The decision to offer liberty to slaves who defected to the British side began in military strategy, but it unleashed a great mass movement of Afro-Americans who clung to the sentimental notion of British freedom even when they knew that the emancipators were very far from being saints in the matter of slavery