Yet in making the argument against Britain’s tyranny, one of the colonists’ favorite rhetorical devices was to claim that they were the slaves—to Britain. “One need not delve far into the literature of the Revolution to find out that, of all words, the one that persistently, most contentiously, and most flexibly drove the era’s rhetorical engine was slavery,” writes Peter A. Dorsey, a scholar of literature of the American Revolution, in Common Bondage.
