Race and Revolution is a trenchant study of the revolutionary generation s early efforts to right the apparent contradiction of slavery and of their ultimate compromises that not only left the institution intact but provided it with the protection of a vastly strengthened government after 1788. Race and Revolution describes the free black community s response to this failure of the revolution s promise its vigorous and articulate pleas for justice and the community s successes in building its own African-American institutions within the hostile environment of early nineteenth-century America.