In the famous June 1772 Somerset case (Somerset v Lewis of 1772, 98 ER 499), the British court ruled that chattel slavery violated English common law. The application of Somerset to the thirteen British colonies would have meant an end to the slave machine that fed the coffers of the Yankee mercantile elite and fueled the wealth of New England (see below) while it created a wealthy landed aristocracy in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. The British judge responsible for the decision (William Murray Mansfield) became a special target of white colonists’ denunciation over the next four years.
The next landmark came in November 1775, when Lord Dunmore, the royal Governor of Virginia, offered to liberate and arm North American slaves to squash the anti-colonial rebellion under way since the Tea Act of 1773. With this action, Dunmore “entered a pre-existing maelstrom of [colonial] insecurity about slavery and London’s intentions” (Horne, 222). Across the future US South in the spring of 1775, elite colonists were consumed with fears of a slave insurrection allied with the British, Spanish, and/or Native Americans. “Lord Dunmore’s proclamation effectively barred any possibility of rebel reconciliation with London” (Horne, 234) as the colonists “now confronted Africans armed by London” (Horne, 237). The Somerset decision and Dunmore’s edict irrevocably joined London with Abolition in the minds of the white colonists. The latter provided the decisive white rallying point for what historian Thelma Wills Foote accurately called “a white settler revolt” and “the white American War for Independence” – fought in no small measure to preserve and expand black chattel slavery. Independence emerged from “the state of the mind of the rebels” who already by early 1775 “coming to believe that a London-African combine was mounting against them, leaving secession – a unilateral Declaration of Independence – as the only way out” (Horne, 227, emphasis added).
The colonists’ triumph over London “brought about the reassertion of slaveowner control over the enslaved black population in the new republic” (Foote, quoted in Horne, 244). The North American slave system tightened and expanded in subsequent years. The color line between white and black was drawn with harsher lines than ever before in the “land of liberty.” “there is a disjuncture between the supposed progressive and avant-guard import of 1776 and the worsening of conditions of Africans and the indigenous that followed upon the triumph of the rebels. Moreover, despite the alleged revolutionary and progressive impulse of 1776, the victors went on from there to crush indigenous politics, then moved overseas to do something similar in Hawaii, Cuba, and the Philippines, then unleashed its counter-revolutionary force in 20th-century Guatemala, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Angola, South Africa, Iran, Grenada, Nicaragua and other tortured sites too numerous to mention” (Horne, 248).
The “American paradox” (U.S. historian Edmund Morgan’s term), whereby “the Age of Liberty” was also “the Age of Slavery,” was not limited to colonial North America and the United States. As the historian Greg Grandin reminds us, “the paradox can be applied to all of the Americas, North and South…What was true for Richmond [Virginia] was no less true for Buenos Aires and Lima – that what many meant by freedom was the freedom to buy and sell black people as property” (Greg Grandin, Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, New York, 2014, emphasis added). But consider this: of the 10 to 16 million Africans who survived the brutal Middle Passage to the New World, two-thirds ended up in Brazil or the West Indies. But by 1860, approximately two thirds of all New World slaves lived in the US South. In the US alone among the new Western Hemisphere Republics of the 19th century, slavery flourished rather than faded – until its destruction in the Civil War. Part of the explanation for that disjuncture is the natural reproduction of slaves under the “paternalist” regime of the US South. Another aspect is the remarkable expansion of cotton slavery across the US South in the first half of the 19th century, intimately related to the early industrial revolution in England and Europe. A final piece is the white settlers’/slaveholders’ Counter-Revolution of 1776. The break-off slayed the specter of British Abolition and opened vast new swaths of land for genocidal theft from the continent’s original inhabitants and the deployment of new slave cash-crop production armies.
JULY 3, 2020 by PAUL STREET The Racist Counter-Revolution of 1776
This essay originally appeared six years ago on Telesur English as a review of Gerald Horne’s important book The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (New York, 2014). I offer it for re-publication and hopefully wider readership in the wake of the great 2020 George Floyd uprising, which has sparked a remarkable revisiting of the United States’ all-too living racist history.
How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes? –Samuel Johnson, 1775
Also, many cities and towns had published preceding “Declarations of Indepndence” “Never before in history had people asserted the right of revolution — not just to overthrow a specific government that no longer met the needs of the people, but as a general principle for the relationship between the rulers and the ruled: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.–That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government…”
“The Moral Equal of Our Founding Fathers”
On March 8, 1985, the right-wing United States President Ronald Reagan spoke in glowing historical terms about the Contras, the murderous counter-revolutionary force funded, trained, and equipped by the US to overthrow the popular Sandinista revolution and government in Nicaragua. “They are our brothers, these freedom-fighters,” Reagan told the Conservative Political Action Conference, “and we owe them our help. They are the moral equal of our Founding Fathers,” Reagan added, “and the brave men and women of the French Resistance.”
Reagan’s comments irked liberal and left-liberal US opponents of Reagan’s Central American policy. That policy involved the US providing training and funneling money, weapons, and other supplies to right-wing death squads across the region. The death toll was staggering: more than 70,000 political killings in El Salvador, more than 100,000 in Guatemala, and more than 30,000 murdered in the US proxy “contra war” on Nicaragua.
“He Has Excited Domestic Insurrection Among Us”
It was absurd, of course, for Reagan to identify the Third World-fascist Contras with the anti-fascist French resistance. But what most rankled many US liberals and progressives was the belief that Reagan had badly maligned the United States’ purportedly noble Founders by associating them with reactionary terrorists doing the CIA and White House’s illegal and dirty work in Central America.
This liberal/left indignation was historically naïve. Reagan was (unwittingly) on to something when he linked the bloody and noxious Contras to the rich and powerful white North Americans (the “Founding Fathers”) who led the early US republic’s break-off from Britain. Forget for a moment that popular democracy even for whites was the Founders’ worst nightmare and that they crafted a government designed to make sure that the common people, those with little or no property, could not exercise any real power (for details, see Paul Street, “Democracy Incapacitated,” Z Magazine, July/August 2014, 28-30). Recalling that slavery was the main source of capital accumulation and proto-national wealth in late colonial British North America, look at this curious, rarely noted line in the Declaration of Independence’s (DOI’s) list of grievances against King George: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.” Here the “royal brute” was accused of advancing social upheaval from the bottom up (“domestic insurrection”) in the New World – an instructive complaint, symptomatic of the “American Revolution’s” counter-revolutionary nature.
Rebellious Slaves and the Balance of Terror
The reference to North America’s indigenous people as pitiless barbarians who slaughtered without distinction was vicious slander. More than misrepresenting Indian culture and warfare, it anticipated Orwell by projecting onto Native Americans the genocidal practices the white North American settlers repeatedly used against the indigenes they ruthlessly murdered again and again
But go deeper. The reactionary reality of the DOI emerges more clearly when you realize what many of the leading North American colonists hoped to do with the land they wanted to seize from Jefferson’s “merciless Indian savages.” As the prolific historian Gerald Horne suggests in his recent book The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (New York, 2014), the (seemingly minor) line in the DOI quoted above reflects a central, fundamentally counter-revolutionary motivation behind the fateful decision to break off from England: a sense that the slave system on which North American fortunes depended could not survive except through secession from the British Empire.
As Horne shows, the expansion of a largely slave-based colonial economy across the New World during the 17th and 18th centuries had caused a serious problem for England, Spain, and France. Slaves came to outnumber Europeans in the colonial world. Africans in the Americas took notice of their demographic preponderance and recurrently revolted against their masters, forcing Old World authorities to invest ever-rising resources in repression. The colonizers tried to lure and (mainly through impressment) force enough Europeans to the colonies to sustain a balance of racial power and terror that would suppress slave rebellion. They failed.
To make matters worse from the Europeans’ perspective, Africans in the New World were empowered by increasing rivalry between the colonial empires. Great conflicts in Europe developed between the colonizers: The War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) and the Seven Years War (1756-1763). These wars became global affairs in which colonial holdings switched hands between the great powers. They could not be waged in the Caribbean and South America without giving weapons to Blacks, and Black soldiers had to be freed if they were going to bear arms in European wars.
By the mid-18th century, as intra-European warfare further eroded the profitability of colonial enterprises, the colonial powers were looking for ways to accommodate their Black populations. In the Caribbean, Blacks were incorporated into colonial regimes. European rivalry had given rise to a new class of free Blacks Africans eager and equipped to fight in well-ordered military units against slavery and its remnants wherever they could be found. Hard-line resident British planters in Barbados shut down their operations and moved to North America, where the white/black ratio was less threatening.
The Path to Slaveholder Secession
White North American slave-owners and northern merchants who profited from the lucrative slave economy owners were not pleased with these developments. They experienced numerous slave revolts even in their part of the British Empire. Examples included major Black rebellions in Manhattan (1712, 1741) and South Carolina (the Stono Uprising, a mass 1739 uprising that included the massacre of dozens of settlers) – only the best-known incidents. White North American colonists across the 18th century reported numerous incidents of slaves poisoning their masters, plotting insurrections, taking over ships, and setting fires. “Black insurrectionists” were commonly said to be in league with the hated imperial rivals France and Spain. Horne notes that “one historian has observed as early as the 1760s that ‘every white person in the eastern counties [of Virginia] knew of a free person that had been killed by a slave’ [and that]…‘individual whites had nightmares about waking up amid slaves or feeling the first spasms of a stomach contorted by poison’” (Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776, p. 237). Between 1756 and 1763, the white settlers of North America “endured a remarkable spate of slave plots driven by the flux brought by the Seven Years War” (Horne, 237).
The settlement of that war played a pivotal role putting the US colonist-Founders on the road to secession (“Independence”). After its victory over France – following a war in which “London made extensive use of armed Africans” in the New World (Horne, 187) – the British government decreed a limit to the colonists’ territorial expansion on the North American mainland. The royal Proclamation of 1763 conflicted with the colonists’ insatiable lust for fertile land to plant and harvest cash crops with Black slaves – land inhabited by Jefferson’s “merciless Indian Savages.” Had the settlers been forced to remain within England’s confines, they feared, Black population growth would generate a “Caribbean” situation in North America. Their dread of black rebellion was enhanced by the constant influx into North America of black slaves infected with the “Caribbean virus” (resistance) – this thanks to the liberalization and dramatic expansion of the global slave trade in the 18th century.
There followed two further great steps on the path to the North American slaveholders’ secession – to American Independence. In the famous June 1772 Somerset case (Somerset v Lewis of 1772, 98 ER 499), the British court ruled that chattel slavery violated English common law. The application of Somerset to the thirteen British colonies would have meant an end to the slave machine that fed the coffers of the Yankee mercantile elite and fueled the wealth of New England (see below) while it created a wealthy landed aristocracy in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. The British judge responsible for the decision (William Murray Mansfield) became a special target of white colonists’ denunciation over the next four years.
The next landmark came in November 1775, when Lord Dunmore, the royal Governor of Virginia, offered to liberate and arm North American slaves to squash the anti-colonial rebellion under way since the Tea Act of 1773. With this action, Dunmore “entered a pre-existing maelstrom of [colonial] insecurity about slavery and London’s intentions” (Horne, 222). Across the future US South in the spring of 1775, elite colonists were consumed with fears of a slave insurrection allied with the British, Spanish, and/or Native Americans. “Lord Dunmore’s proclamation effectively barred any possibility of rebel reconciliation with London” (Horne, 234) as the colonists “now confronted Africans armed by London” (Horne, 237).
The Somerset decision and Dunmore’s edict irrevocably joined London with Abolition in the minds of the white colonists. The latter provided the decisive white rallying point for what historian Thelma Wills Foote accurately called “a white settler revolt” and “the white American War for Independence” – fought in no small measure to preserve and expand black chattel slavery. Independence emerged from “the state of the mind of the rebels” who already by early 1775 “coming to believe that a London-African combine was mounting against them, leaving secession – a unilateral Declaration of Independence – as the only way out” (Horne, 227, emphasis added). Two months before Dunmore issued his proclamation, rebels in South Carolina hung and cremated a free black man, Thomas Jeremiah, for saying that if England sent troops to repress the colonists he would join with the British gendarmes. Over the objections of South Carolina’s royal colonial governor, Jeremiah was tried and found guilty of “exciting the Negroes to an insurrection” (Horne, 226). “Even before the Dunmore proclamation,” Horne shows, “colonists were up in arms in light of alleged attempts by the crown to incite the Africans against them.”
When Dunmore issued his edict, there was no turning back from white independence, leading Horne to properly describe Lord Dunmore with irony as a leading US “Founding Father.”
It is hardly surprising that North American slaves identified the cause of Freedom with London, not the rebels. Tens of thousands of those slaves and many free blacks naturally “joined the redcoats” (Horne, 246).
Exceptional White Triumph in North America
The colonists’ triumph over London “brought about the reassertion of slaveowner control over the enslaved black population in the new republic” (Foote, quoted in Horne, 244). The North American slave system tightened and expanded in subsequent years. The color line between white and black was drawn with harsher lines than ever before in the “land of liberty.” Horne reflects on immediate and long-term consequences that does not jibe very well (to say the least) with the dominant national sense (shared even by many left historians) of the American Revolution as a democratic, forward-leaning development:
“there is a disjuncture between the supposed progressive and avant-guard import of 1776 and the worsening of conditions of Africans and the indigenous that followed upon the triumph of the rebels. Moreover, despite the alleged revolutionary and progressive impulse of 1776, the victors went on from there to crush indigenous politics, then moved overseas to do something similar in Hawaii, Cuba, and the Philippines, then unleashed its counter-revolutionary force in 20th-century Guatemala, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Angola, South Africa, Iran, Grenada, Nicaragua and other tortured sites too numerous to mention” (Horne, 248).
The white North American settlers’ counter-revolution was a great slavery success – at least until the Civil War, when another white secession and military necessity compelled Abraham Lincoln to follow in Lord Dunmore’s footsteps by liberating and arming black slaves.
The “American paradox” (U.S. historian Edmund Morgan’s term), whereby “the Age of Liberty” was also “the Age of Slavery,” was not limited to colonial North America and the United States. As the historian Greg Grandin reminds us, “the paradox can be applied to all of the Americas, North and South…What was true for Richmond [Virginia] was no less true for Buenos Aires and Lima – that what many meant by freedom was the freedom to buy and sell black people as property” (Greg Grandin, Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, New York, 2014, emphasis added). But consider this: of the 10 to 16 million Africans who survived the brutal Middle Passage to the New World, two-thirds ended up in Brazil or the West Indies. But by 1860, approximately two thirds of all New World slaves lived in the US South. In the US alone among the new Western Hemisphere Republics of the 19th century, slavery flourished rather than faded – until its destruction in the Civil War. Part of the explanation for that disjuncture is the natural reproduction of slaves under the “paternalist” regime of the US South. Another aspect is the remarkable expansion of cotton slavery across the US South in the first half of the 19th century, intimately related to the early industrial revolution in England and Europe. A final piece is the white settlers’/slaveholders’ Counter-Revolution of 1776. The break-off slayed the specter of British Abolition and opened vast new swaths of land for genocidal theft from the continent’s original inhabitants and the deployment of new slave cash-crop production armies.
Northern Investment in Slavery
It wasn’t just the slave-owners of the southern North American colonies and early U.S. who had a strong vested interest in the survival and expansion of slavery. “Freedom”-loving New England, in many ways the spiritual and ideological cradle of Independence, was thoroughly embroiled in the system of black bondage. As the historian Lorenzo Greene noted 46 years ago, slavery “formed the very basis of the economic life of New England; about it revolved, and on it, depended, most of her other industries.” Grandin elaborates on the New England economy at the end of the 18th century:
“The expansion of slave labor in the South and into the West was still years away, but slavery as it then existed in the southern states was already an important source of northern profit, as was the already exploding slave trade in the Caribbean and South America. Banks capitalized the slave trade and insurance companies underwrote it. Covering slave voyages helped start Rhode Island’s insurance industry, while in Connecticut some of the first policies written by Aetna were on slaves’ lives. In turn, profits made from loans and insurance policies were plowed into other northern businesses. Fathers who made ‘made their fortunes outfitting ships for distant voyages’ left their money to sons who ‘built factories, chartered banks, incorporated canal and railroad enterprises, invested in government securities, and speculated in new financial instruments’….The use of slave labor in the North was ending [by the late 1790s], but throughout New England there were merchant families and port towns – Salem, Newport, Providence, Portsmouth, and New London among them – that thrived on the [slave] trade. Many of the millions of gallons of rum distilled annually in Massachusetts and Rhode Island were used to obtain slaves, who were then brought to West Indies and traded for sugar and molasses, which were boiled to make more rum to be used to acquire more slaves. Other New Englanders benefited more indirectly, building the slave ships, weaving the ‘negro cloth’ and cobbling the shoes to dress slaves, or catching and salting the fish used to feed them in the southern states and Caribbean islands (Grandin, Empire of Necessity, 79-80)
“Our Revolution…Alarmed at One Common Danger”
Ronald Reagan is hardly the only US president to have been fond of wrapping his administration in the supposedly glorious legacy of the US Founders and their “American revolution.” Barack Obama’s first Inaugural Address asked Americans to remember how “In the year of America’s birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people: ‘Let it be told to the future world … that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive…that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].”
For this writer at least, it was disturbing to hear the nation’s first black president citing the white War for Independence as an example of how “we” Americans united against “one common danger.” The new republic’s snows and soils and forests and tobacco, rice, and cotton fields had long been stained with the blood and tears of Native Americans and black slaves. Many North American slaves, free blacks, and indigenous people found and acted on good reasons to favor the British over the colonists in the war between England and the rising new racist and settler-imperialist slave state. England, after all, had put some limits on the pace at which the North Americans could steal the land the ruin the lives of the nation’s original inhabitants and turn western frontiers into sites for the ruthless exploitation of enslaved blacks. The British promised freedom to slaves who turned against their masters during the imperial settlers’ war of national slavery liberation. Sadly, the fate and struggle of the early republic’s black and red victims foretold the future struggles of Asians, Latin Americans, and Middle Easterners caught on the wrong side of the United States’ “freedom”-loving guns, alliances, and doctrines as the “infant empire” grew to toxic and deadly maturity and lethal senility.
Paul Street’s latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014)
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Would Slavery Have Ended Earlier If The British Had Won?
By Keith Brooks, www.blackagendareport.com July 4, 2020 | EDUCATE! Note: This article was first published on July 7, 2017.
By the evidence of their actions, most Blacks wanted the British to defeat their white settler masters. Most Native Americans, too. The British had prohibited settlement west of the Appalachian mountains, and showed some signs of moving towards abolition of slavery. “While 5000 mainly free black people from northern colonies joined with the colonists’ fight for independence, tens of thousands more enslaved black people joined with the British.”
I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America, if I could have conceived that thereby I was founding a land of slavery.” — Marquis de Lafayette, French military leader who was instrumental in enlisting French support for the colonists in the American War of Independence.
Historians have long grappled with the contradiction of a revolution under the banner of “all men are created equal” being largely led by slave owners. Once free of England, the U.S. grew over the next 89 years to be the largest slave-owning republic in history.
But the July 4th 1776 Declaration of Independence (DI) was in itself a revolutionary document. Never before in history had people asserted the right of revolution — not just to overthrow a specific government that no longer met the needs of the people, but as a general principle for the relationship between the rulers and the ruled: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.–That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government…”
And yes, “all men are created equal” excluded women, black people and the indigenous populations of the continent, and was written by slave-owner Thomas Jefferson with all his personal hypocrisies. But the words themselves have been used many times since to challenge racism and other forms of domination and inequality. Both the 1789 French Revolution and the 1804 Haitian revolution — the only successful slave revolt in human history — drew inspiration from this clarion call. In 1829 black abolitionist David Walker threw the words of the DI back in the face of the slave republic: “See your declarations Americans!!! Do you understand your own language?” The 1848 Seneca Falls women’s rights convention issued a Declaration of Sentiments proclaiming that “We hold these truths to be self evident that all men and women are created equal.” Vietnam used these very words in declaring independence from France in 1946. And as ML King stated in his 1963 I have a Dream Speech, it was “A promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
“See Your Declarations Americans!!! Do You Understand Your Own Language?”
Americans are taught to see the birth of our country as a gift to the world, even when its original defects are acknowledged. The DI along with the Constitution are pillars of American exceptionalism — the belief that the U.S. is superior and unique from all others, holding the promise of an “Asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty” in the words of Thomas Paine in Common Sense. Historian Gary Nash has made a case that upon winning independence, the conditions for at least the gradual abolition of slavery throughout the 13 colonies were present but lacked political leadership. “One of the lessons of history is that in cases where a fundamental change has been accomplished against heavy odds, inspired leadership has been critically important,” and “Washington, Jefferson, and Madison were strategically positioned to take the lead on the slavery issue. All three professed a hatred of slavery and a fervent desire to see it ended in their own time.” (The Forgotten Fifth, 91, 95.)
For all their lofty rhetoric none of them lifted a finger to bring that about. Perhaps though a different question might be asked: what if the British had won, had defeated the colonists’ bid to break from the mother country? Is it possible that the cause of freedom and the ideals of the DI would have been paradoxically better served by that outcome?
England’s Victory Over France Leads To The American War For Independence
It was, ironically, England’s victory over France for control of the North American continent in the seven years’ war (1756-1763) that laid the basis for their North American colonies to revolt just 13 years later. As the war with France ended, the British 1763 Proclamation prohibited white settlement west of the Appalachian mountains in an attempt at detente with Native Americans — bringing England into conflict with colonists wanting to expand westward. More serious still were the series of taxes England imposed on the colonies to pay off its large war debt: the 1765 Stamp Act, the 1767-1770 Townshend Acts, and the 1773 Tea Acts, among others. As colonial leaders mounted increasingly militant resistance to these measures, so too did British repression ramp up.
And while “No taxation without representation” and opposition to British tyranny are the two most commonly cited causes propelling the colonists’ drive for independence, recent scholarship (Slave Nation by Ruth and Alfred Blumrosen, Gerald Horne’s The Counter-Revolution of 1776, and Alan Gilbert’s Black Patriots and Loyalists in particular) has revealed a heretofore unacknowledged third major motivating force — the preservation and protection of slavery itself. In 1772, the highest British court ruled in the Somerset decision that slave owners had no legal claims to ownership of other humans in England itself, declaring slavery to be “odious.” Somerset eliminated any possibility of a de jure defense of slavery in England, further reinforced at the time by Parliament refusing a request by British slave owners to pass such a law. While Somerset did not apply to England’s colonies, it was taken by southern colonists as a potential threat to their slave power. Their fear was further reinforced by the 1766 Declaratory Act, which made explicit England’s final say over any laws made in the colonies, and the “Repugnancy” clause in each colony’s charter. Somerset added fuel to the growing fires uniting the colonies against England in a fight for independence.
“Seeing the Revolutionary War through the eyes of enslaved blacks turns its meaning upside down” — Simon Schama, Rough Crossings
Among the list of grievances in the DI is the rarely scrutinized “He [referring to the king] has excited domestic insurrections amongst us.” This grievance was motivated by Virginia Royal Governor Lord Dunmore’s November 1775 proclamation stating that any person held as a slave by a colonist in rebellion against England would become free by joining the British forces in subduing the revolt. While 5000 mainly free black people from northern colonies joined with the colonists’ fight for independence, few of our school books teach that tens of thousands more enslaved black people joined with the British, with an even greater number taking advantage of the war to escape the colonies altogether by running to Canada or Florida. They saw they had a better shot at “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” with the British–than with their colonial slave masters.
To further put these numbers in perspective, the total population of the 13 colonies at the time was 2.5 million, of whom 500,000 were slaves and indentured servants. While there is some debate about the exact numbers, Peter Kolchin in American Slavery points to the “Sharp decline between 1770 and 1790 in the proportion of the population made up of blacks (almost all of whom were slaves) from 60.5% to 43.8% in South Carolina and from 45.2% to 36.1% in Georgia” (73). Other commonly cited figures from historians estimate 25,000 slaves escaped from South Carolina, 30,000 from Virginia, and 5,000 from Georgia. Gilbert in Black Patriots and Loyalists says “Estimates range between twenty thousand and one hundred thousand… if one adds in the thousands of not yet organized blacks who trailed… the major British forces… the number takes on dimensions accurately called ‘gigantic'(xii).
Among them were 30 of Thomas Jefferson’s slaves, 20 of George Washington’s, and good ole “Give me liberty or give me death” Patrick Henry also lost his slave Ralph Henry to the Brits. It was the first mass emancipation in American history. Evidently “domestic insurrection” was legitimate when led by slave owners against England but not when enslaved people rose up for their freedom–against the rebelling slave owners!
Before There Was Harriet Tubman There Was Colonel Tye
Crispus Attucks is often hailed as the first martyr of the American revolution, a free black man killed defying British authority in the 1770 Boston Massacre. But few have heard of Titus, who just 5 years later was among those thousands of slaves who escaped to the British lines. He became known as Colonel Tye for his military prowess in leading black and white guerrilla fighters in numerous raids throughout Monmouth County, New Jersey, taking reprisals against slave owners, freeing their slaves, destroying their weaponry and creating an atmosphere of fear among the rebel colonists–and hope among their slaves. Other black regiments under the British fought with ribbons emblazoned across their chests saying “Liberty to Slaves.”
One might compare Col. Tye to Attucks but if Attucks is a hero, what does that make Tye, who freed hundreds of slaves? Perhaps a more apt comparison is with Harriet Tubman, who escaped slavery in 1849 and returned to the south numerous times to also free hundreds of her brothers and sisters held in bondage.
So What If The British Had Won?
At no point though did the British declare the end of slavery to be a war goal; it was always just a military tactic. But if the Brits had won, as they came close to doing, it might have set off a series of events that went well beyond their control. Would England have been able to restore slavery in the 13 colonies in the face of certain anti-slavery resistance by the tens of thousands of now free ex-slaves, joined by growing anti-slavery forces in the northern colonies? As Gilbert puts it, “Class and race forged ties of solidarity in opposition to both the slave holders and the colonial elites.” (10) Another sure ally would have been the abolitionist movement in England, which had been further emboldened by the 1772 Somerset decision. And if England had to abolish slavery in the 13 colonies, would that not have led to a wave of emancipations throughout the Caribbean and Latin America?
And just what was the cost of the victorious independence struggle to the black population? To the indigenous populations who were described in that same DI grievance as “The merciless Indian Savages”? Might it have been better for the cause of freedom if the colonists lost? And if the colonists had lost, wouldn’t the ideals of the DI have carried just as much if not more weight?
“The price of freedom from England was bondage for African slaves in America. America would be a slave nation.” — Eleanor Holmes Norton, introduction to Slave Nation.
We do know, however, the cost of the colonists’ victory: once independence was won, while the northern states gradually abolished slavery, slavery BOOMED in the south. The first federal census in 1790 counted 700,000 slaves. By 1810, 2 years after the end of the slave trade, there were 1.2 million slaves, a 70% increase. England ended slavery in all its colonies in 1833, when there were 2 million enslaved people in the U.S. Slavery in the U.S. continued for another 33 years, during which time the slave population doubled to 4 million human beings. The U.S abolished slavery in 1865; only Cuba and Brazil ended slavery at a later date. And the colonists’ victory also further opened the gates to the attempted genocide of the indigenous peoples over the next 125 years.
The foregoing is not meant to romanticize and project England as some kind of abolitionist savior had they kept control of the colonies. Dunmore himself was a slave owner. England was the center of the international slave trade. Despite losing the 13 colonies, England maintained its position as the most powerful and rapacious empire in the world till the mid-20th century. As England did away with chattel slavery, it replaced it with the capitalist wage slavery of the industrial revolution. It used food as a weapon to starve the Irish, conquered and colonized large swaths of Asia, Africa and the Pacific.
“The U.S abolished slavery in 1865; only Cuba and Brazil ended slavery at a later date.”
We often see the outcomes of history as predetermined, as inevitabilities, and think there were no other outcomes possible. We look back 240 years later and for most it seems unquestionable that the American revolution was good for the world, a step, perhaps somewhat tortured, towards progress and freedom. But for historian Gerald Horne, “Simply because Euro-American colonists prevailed in their establishing of the U.S., it should not be assumed that this result was inevitable. History points to other possibilities… I do not view the creation of the republic as a great leap forward for humanity” (Counter-Revolution of 1776, ix).
The American revolution was not just a war for independence from England. It was also a battle for freedom against the very leaders of that rebellion by hundreds of thousands of enslaved black people, a class struggle of poor white tenant farmers in many cases also against that same white colonial elite, and a fight for survival of the indigenous populations. But the colonists’ unlikely victory was to lead to the creation of the largest slave nation in history, the near genocide of the indigenous populations and a continent-wide expansion gained by invading and taking over half of Mexico. The U.S. went on to become an empire unparalleled in history, its wealth origins rooted largely in slave labor. The struggles for equality and justice for all that the DI promised continues of course, a task that remains undone, ML King’s promissory note unfulfilled to this day.
The late Chinese Premier Chou en Lai was once asked his assessment as to whether the French revolution was a step forward in history. His response was, “It’s too soon to tell”. Was the founding of the United States a step forward in history? Or is it still too soon to tell?
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Faced Off With The National Guard In The Hours Before Trump’s Speech.
The Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that the Black Hills — where Mount Rushmore resides — was unlawfully taken from the Sioux people.
A group of mainly Native American protesters blocked the road leading up to Mount Rushmore for three hours before President Donald Trump gave a speech at the national monument Friday night.
When they refused to disband, the protesters faced off with the South Dakota National Guard, which shot close-range shells at their feet and sprayed some protesters with pepper spray, according to the Sioux Falls Argus Leader.
By 7 p.m., 15 protesters who refused to leave the road had been arrested.
Trump went on to give a divisive speech at Mount Rushmore, saying the country was under siege by “far-left” fascists waging “a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children.”
The Black Hills, where Mount Rushmore is located, is a sacred area for local Native Americans, and a contested space.
The Supreme Court in 1980 ruled that the United States had illegally taken the land from the Sioux tribe in a deal brokered in 1873. The Mount Rushmore carvings were completed in 1941.
Jeff Ostler, a historian at the University of Oregon, told ABC News that the federal government had offered the Sioux people a settlement of $1 billion for taking the land. The tribe has refused, saying they will only accept their land back.
Some of the protesters on Friday held signs reading “Protect SoDak’s First People,” “You Are On Stolen Land,” and “Dismantle White Supremacy,” according to the Associated Press.
Hehakaho Waste, a spiritual elder with the Oglala Sioux tribe, told the AP: “The president needs to open his eyes. We’re people, too, and it was our land first.”
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By Richard Rohr, July 5, 2020
The word change normally refers to new beginnings. But the mystery of transformation more often happens not when something new begins, but when something old falls apart. The pain of something old falling apart—chaos—invites the soul to listen at a deeper level, and sometimes forces the soul to go to a new place. Most of us would never go to new places in any other way. The mystics use many words to describe this chaos: fire, dark night, death, emptiness, abandonment, trial, the Evil One. Whatever it is, it does not feel good and it does not feel like God.
We will normally do anything to keep the old thing from falling apart, yet this is when we need patience and guidance, and the freedom to let go instead of tightening our controls and certitudes. Perhaps Jesus is describing just this phenomenon when he says, “It is a narrow gate and a hard road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matthew 7:14). Not accidentally, he mentions this narrow road right after teaching the Golden Rule. He knows how much letting go it takes to “treat others as you would like them to treat you” (Matthew 7:12).
While change can force a transformation, spiritual transformation always includes a disconcerting reorientation. It can either help people to find new meaning or it can force people to close down and slowly turn bitter. The difference is determined precisely by the quality of our inner life, our practices, and our spirituality. Change happens, but transformation is always a process of letting go, living in the confusing, shadowy space for a while. Eventually, we are spit up on a new and unexpected shore. You can see why Jonah in the belly of the whale is such an important symbol for many Jews and Christians.
In moments of insecurity and crisis, shoulds and oughts don’t really help. They just increase the shame, guilt, pressure, and likelihood of backsliding into unhealthy patterns. It’s the deep yeses that carry us through to the other side. It’s that deeper something we are strongly for—such as equality and dignity for all—that allows us to wait it out. It’s someone in whom we absolutely believe and to whom we commit. In plain language, love wins out over guilt any day.
