Black Freedom in 1776

One of the breakout stories of 2026 is one scholars have been developing for a long time: the Black loyalists in Virginia and elsewhere who chose the potential for freedom with the British over what the American patriots offered. Adam McNeil, a recent PhD and a postdoctoral fellow at the G Carter Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, about to be a new Assistant Professor of History at Notre Dame, wrote a prize-winning dissertation on enslaved women in the revolutionary moment: “Contested liberty: Fugitive women & the shadow of re-enslavement and displacement in revolutionary Virginia.”

In his presentation for the JCB series The Revolution Is News, he shared with us information about the effects of Dunmore’s Proclamation, about the kinds of decisions enslaved women made as they contemplated running for freedom, and their experiences of revolution.

Some of Adam’s work can be read at Colonial Williamsburg, where he wrote about Judith Jackson from Norfolk, and on the African American Intellectual History Society where he wrote for their blog Black Perspectives about “Black Patriotism and Black Death in the Aftermath of the American Revolution.”

It was a great conversation, and we hope you’ll watch and keep your eye for more of Adam’s work.