historycircus

One of the biggest challenges to political unity faced by the revolutionaries was alligning the interests of the plantocracy in the south with the commerce men of the north - it was a political division we are familiar with in terms of antebellum and Civil War America, but the division was there before the revolution. Washington, in fact, was picked as head of the continental army not because he was a brilliant tactician (his participation in the French and Indian War was maked by defeat and mediocrity), but because he was a Virginian. It was a symbolic appointment designed to allign the south with the north - it was fortunate Washington had learned a few things since the disasterous campaigns of the mid-1750s.

There was no way that delegates from Virginia, Maryland, or the Carolinas would have deferred to a black man; it simply could not have happened - especially after Lord Dunmore's disasterous proposal to grant freedom to slaves who sided with the king and fought with the British army. Until that point, the South seemed resigned to sit and wait, but after Dunmore's proclamation, the South went eagerly to war.