In his 1852 speech, “What to the Slave is the 4th of July,” the former slave Frederick Douglass described the meaning and legacy of the nation’s founding. He characterized Independence Day as an American Passover and the Declaration of Independence as a sacred text, “the RING-BOLT to the chain of your nation’s destiny.” But white Americans had committed blasphemy against their founding principles.”Your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity,” Douglass told his mostly white audience.

For Douglass, the Founding Fathers and Framers of the Constitution believed slavery was a sin, and so the nation had regressed since its founding. He cited the antislavery sentiments of George Washington, and refused to charge the Framers with the nation’s present “baseness”: “It is a slander upon their memory.”While the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison echoed Southern statesmen in arguing that the Constitution was proslavery — in fact Garrison publicly burned the Constitution — Douglass called it a “GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT,” noting that its preamble secured “the blessings of liberty” and that the terms “slave” or “slavery” were absent from it. For Douglass (and Lincoln after him), the Declaration was the foundation of all subsequent laws and the basis for the Constitution. His speech was a carefully worded jeremiad, which sought to restore to his nation its founding ideals of freedom and equality.

The three books under review explore the problem of slavery in the Revolution and its legacies. Simon Schama, a British citizen and professor at Columbia University, is famous for writing narrative history that combines interpretative insights with high drama. “Rough Crossings” (Ecco, 475 pages, $29.95) focuses on the Revolution from the perspective of British humanitarians, notably Granville Sharp and John Clarkson, and North American blacks who fought for the British. Mr. Schama begins his story in London in 1765, with Sharp helping a slave gain his freedom. In the process he discovered that English soil was not free: slaves who were brought to England could legally remain slaves.Sharp sought confirmation in legal precedent for his conviction that “England was too pure an air for Slaves to breathe,” and in 1772 he successfully defended James Somerset against re-enslavement, a decision that effectively outlawed slavery in England.

The Somerset decision was the first of many instances of “British Freedom”: the belief that “the British monarchy” rather than America was “more likely to deliver Africans from slavery.” During the Revolution between 80,000 and 100,000 slaves (about one-fifth of the total slave population of the colonies) deserted their masters, many of them disappearing into nearby mountains or swamps. In response to proclamations by Lords Dunmore (of Virginia) and Clinton (of New York), which offered freedom to slaves of Patriot masters in return for military service, thousands of slaves fought with the British. In all, between 15,000 and 20,000 slaves of Patriot masters joined the British forces, in contrast to about 5,000 black Patriots, who believed that liberty would result from their service.

Ironies abounded throughout the conflict.In at least one instance — the battle of Monmouth in New Jersey — black Loyalists fought black Patriots. On both sides, the offer of freedom stemmed from military necessity rather than humanitarian impulse.Blacks represented a crucial source of power to both armies, for they constituted 20% of the total colonial population. They interpreted the war as an opportunity to obtain liberty. After joining one side or another, many slaves changed their names to signify their new identity: one black Loyalist (with whom Mr. Schama begins his prologue) became “British Freedom,” while black Patriots called themselves Jeffery Liberty, Pomp Liberty, or Dick Freedom.

To a limited extent Britain fulfilled its promise of freedom to black Loyalists. About 9,000 blacks left the new United States with the British.The largest group of black Loyalists settled in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick among white Loyalist refugees. But they did not find their promised freedom. Whites owned the best land, and most of the blacks ended up working as tenant farmers or sharecroppers in conditions that resembled indentured servitude. In 1792 about 1,200 discontented Nova Scotian and New Brunswick blacks emigrated to Sierra Leone. The colony prospered under John Clarkson, who served as colonial governor for a year. But after Clarkson returned to England in 1793, his successors (who were also white) became increasingly authoritarian, and the community began to fragment.Within a few years blacks were in open rebellion against the Sierra Leone Company and British notions of freedom there.

Mr. Schama is not the first writer to tell this story. But no one before him has told it with such flair for detail and adventure, though occasionally his digressions slow down his narrative. Throughout he stresses that “it was the royal, rather than the republican, road that seemed to offer a surer chance of liberty.” And he suggests that American blacks viewed the British as “the most racially broadminded among nations and empires.”This is one reason why, instead of ending his story with discontented blacks rebelling against the British at Sierra Leone, he includes as a final chapter a chronicle of various “British Freedoms,” such as West Indian Emancipation, and a statement by the American black radical David Walker describing the English as the blacks’ “best friends.” Mr. Schama’s story ends with Frederick Douglass, who received his freedom from British sympathizers in 1846 and favorably compared British attitudes toward blacks with those of Americans.”It really had been England that had redeemed” Douglass, Mr. Schama writes; for Douglass, “the promise of British freedom had been fulfilled.”

Given his emphasis on “British freedom,” Mr. Schama cannot explain why Douglass did not stay in England and why he interpreted the Declaration (and the Constitution by the 1850s) as sacred texts.Nor does Mr. Schama’s perspective explain how the Revolution and the ideals that came out of it led directly to the abolition of slavery in the Northern states; the exclusion of slavery from the Northwest territories; the voluntary manumission of 20,000 slaves by their masters by 1800; and the genuine antislavery sentiments of most of the nation’s Founders, who hoped for a very gradual and congenial end to the evil without uprooting the social order.After reading “Rough Crossings,” one would be shocked to discover that the first African American history, published in 1855 by the black abolitionist William Cooper Nell, was devoted not to black Loyalists but to “The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution.”

Mr. Schama ends his book imagining Frederick Douglass communing at a memorial to Granville Sharp at Westminster Abbey. The final lines of the memorial, and of Mr. Schama’s book, state: “READER, IF ON PERUSING THIS TRIBUTE TO A PRIVATE INDIVIDUAL, THOU SHOULDST BE DISPOSED TO SUSPECT IT AS PARTIAL OR CENSURE IT AS DIFFUSE, KNOW THAT IT IS NOT PANEGYRIC BUT HISTORY.” Mr. Schama is being coy, for as he no doubt knows, these lines also richly encapsulate his book: He wants his readers to know that his tribute to Sharp, and British freedom, is history.

François Furstenberg, a young scholar at the University of Montreal, describes the intertwined legacies of the Revolution, slavery, and Washington in “In the Name of the Father” (The Penguin Press, 335 pages, $27.95). He focuses on the ways in which popular writings from the Revolution through the antebellum era promoted nationalist ideals that viewed slavery as consistent with democracy. Such “civic texts” as Washington’s Farewell Address, his will that emancipated his slaves (which was frequently published), and Mason Locke Weems’s biography of Washington had the effect of transforming Washington into the “Father of his Country” who presided over family, slaves, and nation, uniting Americans around a common “father.” These popular writings celebrate Washington’s willingness to relinquish power, affirming republican virtue. And they show him leading his country in a war for liberty against a stronger foe, which symbolized Americans’ willingness to fight for their freedom. These same popular writings (Mr. Furstenberg’s selection is rather limited) also characterized slaves as unwilling to risk their lives fighting for their freedom.In the myth making of the early Republic, slaves refused citizenship and chose to live as slaves.

This is an intriguing thesis that helps to explain why white writers excluded black Patriots and Loyalists from histories of the Revolution. But Mr. Furstenberg downplays the counter-tradition of abolitionists, who circulated millions of petitions, pamphlets, and other printed documents. They not only demanded universal freedom, but also made it clear that fulfilling national ideals meant uprooting the existing social order. Black and white abolitionists turned the legacy of the Revolution into a social revolution rather than a war for independence led by white elites. William Cooper Nell’s “Colored Patriots of the American Revolution” is one example of this counter-tradition, as is David Walker’s militant and apocalyptic “Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World” (1829) and Frederick Douglass’s speeches and autobiographies. Nell, Walker, Douglass, and numerous other writers treated the legacies of Washington and the Revolution as a black declaration of independence.They demanded an immediate end to slavery, and envisioned a sharp break from the sins of the past. In their minds, civil law was indistinguishable from God’s law. And since all humans were equal in the eyes of God, freedom need not depend upon heroic acts of resistance: Everyone deserved it.

Messrs. Schama and Furstenberg both express a debt to David Brion Davis, the pre-eminent scholar of slavery and abolition. An emeritus professor at Yale University, Mr. Davis has mentored three generations of scholars (including this reviewer) and his work is “the starting point for any consideration of the painful paradoxes of slavery”in Western culture, to quote Mr. Schama.”Inhuman Bondage” (Oxford University Press, 440 pages, $30) is a stunning achievement, breathtaking in scale and scope and written in a magisterial hand. While its central focus is the rise and fall of slavery in America, one of its main themes is that one can only understand American slavery by placing it in the much larger contexts of Western culture and the rise and fall of slavery in the New World.Abolitionists knew this; they wrote the first histories of slavery and antislavery. Southern slave-owners were also quite familiar with the history of slavery; many took comfort in reading Aristotle, who articulated a theory of the natural slave that would be endorsed by virtually every subsequent slave society. But Mr. Davis is rare among scholars in writing about slavery from such broad historical and comparative contexts.

To read “Inhuman Bondage” is to realize that the present hype about a “global economy” is far from a phenomenon of the past 50 years. The Atlantic slave trade “foreshadowed certain features of our modern global economy,” with Europeans raising money through investment bankers in order to ship Africans to North and South America for enormous profit. To dramatize the global nature of American slavery, Mr. Davis begins his story with the well-known account of the Amistad revolt, which was not only a major political and cultural event in America, but a diplomatic tightrope involving Cuba, Spain, Sierra Leone, and England. The story then jumps back to ancient Greek and Roman slavery, which was not racially based but greatly influenced Americans, whether in founding a democracy in a slave society, or in their familiarity with Aesop, a slave from the 6th century B.C.E. who told stories about animals. From here Mr. Davis’ story proceeds more or less chronologically, with each chapter focusing on a central theme that relates to slavery in America.

The best way to understand the structure of the book is to imagine the narrator as a “hemispheric traveler” who can traverse time as well as space. By the time you get to the American Revolution, you understand the long history of racial prejudice and its relationship to slavery. And you appreciate that the forced migration of Africans to New World colonies emerged out of a caldron of desires — greed and the pleasures of sugar, tobacco, alcohol, and caffeine — as well as racial prejudice and many unforeseen events.The first products to be mass-produced and consumed came from the New World; and the people who grew, refined, distilled, and packaged them created syncretic cultures that combined African customs with their new environment.

One of the many delights of reading “Inhuman Bondage” is the element of surprise. Most histories are limited to one or two perspectives, which means that early on, the argument is clear, and the rest of the book builds upon a central idea, with few if any counter-examples. But “Inhuman Bondage”is the historical analog to a novel by Herman Melville or Henry James: it is filled with ironies and contradictions, contingencies and ambiguities, and the continuous interplay of social forces such as economics with ideas like religious belief. It is as though Mr. Davis has followed James’s injunction to the novelist and historian: “Try to be like one of the people on whom nothing is lost.” Hence a narrator who traverses four continents and almost 20 centuries in order to illuminate American slavery, while maintaining an elegant and surprising sense of narrative. Through this approach, Mr. Davis emphasizes the moral rewards of grappling with the past in all its complexities.

This broader perspective of “Inhuman Bondage” highlights among other things the newness of antislavery thought on the eve of the Revolution, a point that Messrs. Schama and Furstenberg do not emphasize. While virtually everyone today believes that slavery is evil, few people did so before the Revolution. In 1760 “slavery was legal and almost unquestioned throughout the New World,”Mr. Davis notes.Slavery was a bit like pollution today, an unavoidable outgrowth of civilization and a fact of life, which can be controlled but not eliminated.The Bible, theologians, and ministers defended slavery in one way or another.Even slaves could not envision universal emancipation prior to the second half of the 18th century. They wanted freedom, but only for themselves, and did not question the institution of slavery, as revealed by slave rebels throughout Western culture — from Spartacus and the Zanj rebels in North Africa to maroons in the Caribbean — who enslaved others in their quest for freedom.

Mr. Davis’ broader perspective also reveals how truly revolutionary the language of the Declaration was — far more than the Founders had intended. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison believed that slavery was wrong, but owned slaves and envisioned emancipation in some distant future. The defenders of slavery were conservatives: they sought to conserve an institution that was central to western culture. But blacks, indentured servants, plebian whites, and feminists interpreted the opening lines of the Declaration as “a belief in individual freedom and inalienable rights.” These sacred words told them that “the very idea of slavery is a fiction or a fraud, since liberty and equality are fundamental rights that no one can legitimately lose.” They prompted Nat Turner and John Brown to plan slave rebellions on July 4. They inspired the first women’s rights convention. And they convinced Frederick Douglass to return home from England and devote his life to American freedom, even though he felt more comfortable among the British and admired their humanitarian achievements.

Mr. Stauffer is chair of the History of American Civilization at Harvard University and the author of “Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race,” available from Harvard University Press.