The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832

The Internal Enemy follows the enslaved population of Tidewater Virginia across six decades, from the years just before independence to the early 1830s, with its real weight falling on the War of 1812. Alan Taylor traces how the British navy's wartime presence in the Chesapeake Bay opened an opportunity that thousands of enslaved Virginians seized: escape toward British ships and lines that offered freedom to anyone who reached them. Taylor's title names the fear this produced in white Virginia. Slaveholders who prided themselves on paternal control over their human property discovered, as war brought British warships within sight of their own plantations, that the people they held in bondage were watching the conflict as closely as they were, and for opposite reasons.

Taylor builds the book from the same close archival method that shaped his earlier Virginia histories, following individual enslaved people, slaveholding families and colonial officials through court records, plantation papers and wartime correspondence rather than treating slavery as background to the war. He extends the story past 1815, showing how the memory of wartime escape stayed alive on both sides of the color line for another two decades, feeding white anxiety about future uprisings and continuing to shape how enslaved Virginians understood their own possibilities.

Reading the book means encountering the War of 1812, usually remembered for Baltimore and New Orleans, from inside a plantation household where the war's real stakes were freedom itself. Taylor's prose is dense with documentation but built for a general reader, and it suits anyone who wants to see how the era's wars and the era's slavery were never separate stories.