There were two other original sins, rarely mentioned, that drove the colonial ruling class to separate from their country and support a war for independence, writes Ace Thelin.
School children watch the story of enslaved people at the time of the American Revolution at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C., 2017. (GPA Photo Archive/Flickr/Tim Brown/CC BY-NC 2.0)
[Editor’s Note: There were myriad causes of the American Revolution: the Stamp Act, warrantless searches, standing British troops, and taxes without representatives in Parliament. This what American children are taught in school.
But there were two other causes that rarely get a hearing: a protectorate declared by Parliament to protect Native Americans and hinder Americans’ westward expansion, and fear that Britain might outlaw slavery upon which the white Southern economy and way of life depended.
There is scholarly evidence that a proclamation, a court case and Britain’s arming of slaves (which Jefferson alluded to in his first draft of the Declaration) portended a potential end of slavery . This article is about those two rarely heard about causes.]
By Ace Thelin
Special to Consortium News
It’s long past time Americans face the truth about the Founding Fathers. A critique that places events being celebrated on the Fourth of July in a much larger world historical narrative is urgently needed.
The power of empire is not only the power to control land, labor, armies and financial industries, but also to control minds.
The dominion of the U.S. Empire has turned history upside down. It has transformed some of the biggest criminals into heroes. A history that emphasizes the U.S. as an exemplar of democracy and human rights and holds the constitution as sacrosanct is a history that lies by omission and ignores some of the most important events in its story.
Historian Gerald Horne places the creation of the United States in a larger context in his seminal work, The Counter-Revolution of 1776- Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. He points out that while so many historical accounts of the American War for Independence begin in the 1770s or the decades preceding it, to understand the forces at play we must go back at least to the late 17th century and the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 in England.
Gerald Horne during a 2020 book talk. (Communist Party USA/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 3.0)
This revolution saw the ascendant merchant class overthrowing Catholic King James II and installing his daughter Mary and her Protestant Dutch husband, William III of Orange, whose country, the Netherlands, was facing the onslaught of an aggressive Catholic France under Louis XIV. A Bill of Rights, very similar to the U.S. Bill of Rights, was made law in a parliamentarian show of force, further diminishing the power of the king.
What is lesser known about the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 was the effect on the trade in African bodies. With the king and the Royal African Company losing control of the slave trade, it became unregulated and the venture capitalists, pirates and investor class profited from the emerging global economy, based on the most valuable “commodity” of all.
The “free trade” in Africans became, along with the genocide of the Native Americans, the two original sins and foundational crimes in the European conquest of the Western Hemisphere.
Not only were European investors stealing returns of up to 1700 percent on their capital, enslaved Africans working on plantations in the Caribbean made the European empires the most powerful in the world. Sugar, tobacco, alcohol, rice, indigo, cotton and coffee changed the appetites of Europe, and not for the better.
Centuries of Rebellion
“Leonard Parkinson, A Captain of the Maroons; taken from the Life” 1796 by Abraham Raimbach. (Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
Africans resisted slavery everywhere. And wherever the numbers of Africans enslaved greatly outnumbered the enslavers, the latter feared or faced the constant threat of revolution. British slavery in the Caribbean, on the islands of Jamaica, Antigua and Barbados was rife with continuous revolts against the European colonisers.
In Jamaica, escaped Africans known as Maroons successfully freed themselves from Spanish slavery and continued to wreak havoc on the English slave camps after the island fell to the English in 1655. By 1739 London was forced to make a treaty recognising Maroon sovereignty over sections of the island.
The mainland 13 colonies insisted that Africans were not to be armed, that there could be no advancement or upward mobility for the enslaved. This created a dilemma for the expanding British empire which was competing with the Spanish empire that had a long established practice of arming free and enslaved Africans.
The Spanish stronghold of St. Augustine in Florida was a sanctuary for Africans escaping from the English Carolinas. After converting to Catholicism and swearing allegiance to Spain, former slaves were sent northward on guerrilla raids against the fledgling plantations of the enemy. Arming the enslaved and subsequent refugees from English slavery helped Spain to hold the Florida frontier against British raids in 1728 and a major land and naval assault in 1740.
Seven Years War
The Capture of Havana, 1762, Taking the Town, 14 August, 1762. Painted 1775 Dominic Serres (Public Domain/Wikipedia)
The North American political map was radically altered in the 7 Years War (French and Indian War), when the British pushed back the French and Spanish. The French were forced out of the Ohio River valley and the Spanish lost the strategic city of Havana, Cuba, in 1762.
While fought largely to secure the English colonies, the results of the war would have unintended consequences for the British Empire. With the Catholic empires of France and Spain setback, emboldened settler colonists would double down on the slave economy, just as the British Empire was becoming more dependent on using Africans in the military.
In the 1762 attack on Havana, the British used “a combined force of 4,000 Redcoats, a regiment of five hundred free Negroes and two thousand enslaved Africans from Jamaica.”
These two forces: the expansion of slavery in British North American colonies in the mid-18th century and the increased military use and upward mobility of Africans in Britain’s growing global empire would create contrasting visions for how mainland settler colonists and London regarded exploiting Africans.
Somerset’s Case & the Slaveholders’ Revolt of 1776
The British system of enslaving Africans was shaken to the core in a pivotal judicial case in June 1772. Stolen from Africa in 1749, James Somerset was bought in Virginia by Charles Steuart and later enslaved in Boston, before being shipped to England. With a history of fleeing, Somerset was in England where his master was seeking to sell him. Found shackled aboard a ship on the Thames, abolitionists rallied to his cause in what came to be known as Somerset’s Case.
It was Magistrate Lord Mansfield, of Scottish origin, who freed Somerset, ruling that slavery could not exist in England. The ruling did not abolish slavery in Britain’s colonies but it was seen as a move in that direction by colonial elites who interpreted the case as London siding with the enslaved over the slaveholder.
Widely discussed throughout the colonies, this ruling amplified the schism between the colonies and London, with the British Empire moving away from slavery and the colonial separatists moving toward an independent, republican slavocracy to defend, maintain and preserve slavery long into the future.
All Men Are Created Equal?
When Father-of-Slaves (Thomas Jefferson) wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the war against the British had just begun. The colonial ruling class separatists needed an army to defeat the British Empire.
The Declaration of Independence famously stated 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.” In his initial draft of the declaration, Jefferson attacked George III for the transatlantic slave trade, but did not condemn the institution of slavery. There was a burgeoning internal slave market in North America.
Jefferson also complained in the deleted section of the first draft that George III was inciting slaves in America to turn on their masters. He wrote:
“He is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another.”
Charles Willson Peale’s portrait of Jefferson, painted while he was secretary of state, hangs in the U.S. State Department building. (State Department/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
Father-Of-Slaves was attempting to solidify a white identity that would transcend the class, religious, ethnic and national conflicts of Europe. Somehow when settlers crossed the Atlantic they magically became White and were welcomed into the project of enslaving Africans and conquering indigenous lands. Jefferson had six children with his “property,” Sally Hemings and enslaved over 600 human beings in his lifetime.
The 27th and last grievance issued to King George III in the Declaration states,
“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.(sic)”
This last grievance in the declaration reveals the two original sins that drove the colonial ruling class to separate from their country and support a ruling class war for independence. A war that would establish a white supremacist, patriarchal, expansionist government that could unify feuding European identities.
Ned Blackhawk, in his 2023 book The Rediscovery of America, connects the formation of whiteness to the theft of indigenous land and enslavement of Africans:
“Indigenous dispossession facilitated the growth of white male democracy and African American slavery. Each grew from the same trunk of expansion while also sowing the seeds of American disunion. Indeed, many of the nation’s longest-standing racial inequalities remain rooted in this half century of racial formation, one in which American lawmakers struggled to establish legible distinctions between ‘red,’ ‘white,’ and ‘black,’ people. That struggle became ideological. It became social. It became political, and it eventually became legal.”
Lord Dunmore’s Emancipation Proclamation
In 1775, months after the battles of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts triggered the American War for Independence, the British issued their version of the Emancipation Proclamation. In November 1775, Lord John Dunmore, British Colonial governor of Virginia, promised “freedom” to any enslaved person in exchange for joining the British army.
Virginians and all slavers were shocked, Destroyer of Villages (George Washington) called Lord Dunmore “that arch-traitor to the rights of humanity.” The British were moving to end slavery — as President Abraham Lincoln would do nearly a century later — in order to save the union.
A copy of Dunmore’s Proclamation from November 1775. (Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
For men whose power stemmed directly from slavery, men like Washington, Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe, the threat of losing the humans they enslaved and thus their power, was a decisive factor in their decision to go to war.
Edward Rutledge, who would become governor of South Carolina, said that Dunmore’s Proclamation, more than anything else, would “work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the colonies.”
So what exactly did Jefferson mean by “endeavoured 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?”
The Proclamation Line of 1763
The War for Independence 1775-1783, may have been a war against the British empire but make no mistake, it was also a war against First Nations and the result of the war was an ominous sign for the future of both enslaved Africans and the stewards of Turtle Island.
The British had drawn a political line, The Proclamation of 1763, along the crest of the Appalachians: a political boundary that marked the border of the British Empire in colonial North America. The proclamation came after the French and Indian War 1756-1763, that ended with the French defeated and forced to cede all land claims east of the Mississippi to the British.
While the proclamation upset white settlers living on native lands who wanted the support of the government to help steal more land from the natives, it also upset the most passionate and successful land speculators and master thieves such as Destroyer of Villages (Washington) and Father of Slaves (Jefferson). Between 1747 and 1799 Washington surveyed over 200 tracts of land and held title to more than 65,000 acres in 37 different locations.
Preemptive War
As the War of Independence approached, the settler colonists and slaveholders knew that whatever side native nations chose to support would play an important role in determining the outcome of the war.
The most powerful native confederation of the time was the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Iroquois). Among these, the Seneca followed the Mohawks in joining the British. The Cayuga, Tuscarora, and Onondaga nations remained neutral and only the Christianised Oneidas sided with the separatist settlers.
In response, Conotocaurius or Destroyer of Villages (the name given Washington by the Haudenosaunee) wrote instructions to Major General John Sullivan to make a preemptive attack on the Haudenosaunee,
“to lay waste all the settlements around … that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed … Our future security will be in their inability to injure us … and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire them.”
General Sullivan replied,
“The Indians shall see that there is malice enough in our hearts to destroy everything that contributes to their support.”
During the war for Independence the “Americans” would burn over 50 Haudenosaunee villages to the ground and if that weren’t enough, Destroyer of Villages added, “it will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.” They burned the corn and other crops just before a severe winter, leaving many to die from cold and starvation.
The American separatists would go on to destroy over 100 Cherokee towns and many other native villages. This was, in all likelihood left out of the history books you read in school. Under the leadership of Destroyer of Villages, this first war for “American Independence” was a war against natives and a way of life that honored the land.
This same land conquered by the separatists would become the only source of revenue for the new government as defined in their first constitution: the Articles of Confederation.
Forming a More Perfect Union?
Washington the Farmer at Mount Vernon, an 1851 portrait by Junius Brutus Stearns. (Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
The reality of U.S. colonial expansion and empire building reveals the true motivations that fueled the machinery of power behind the Constitution and why it is so important to understand what the Constitution was designed to do.
The Constitutional Convention was held in the aftermath of a rebellion in Massachusetts that challenged the tenuous control colonial elites held over the impoverished population. Shay’s Rebellion demonstrated the intensity of long-running class conflicts. Named after Daniel Shays, a veteran of the War for Independence, the uprising was a struggle of farmers for their land, against a Massachusetts oligarchy, that was forcing them into debt and off their land.
Shay’s Rebellion was a movement comprised of hundreds of farmers and working class whites in western Massachusetts, unifying and marching on courthouses demanding an end to high property taxes. This working class rebellion put a fright into the colonial ruling class. Virginian elite and their allies moved to seize power and frame the new Constitution to their liking.
Monument marking the location of the final Shays’s Rebellion battle in Sheffield, Massachusetts. (John Bessa/Wikimedia Commons/ Public Domain)
In the summer of 1787, colonial rulers held a secret convention in Philadelphia to amend the Articles of Confederation. What they left with was a document that guaranteed slavery, and the racism to justify it would remain part of the United States for the foreseeable future.
The 3/5 clause of the constitution — determining the number of representatives per state — granted that the total number of people counted in a state would include 3/5ths of the total number of enslaved Africans. The 3/5ths “compromise” was a power grab that gave the southern states majority control of the central government.
The electoral college, based on the very same lopsided pro-slavery representation, ensured that the presidency would be in the hands of the enslavers. Four of the first five presidents were Virginian slave masters. They all served two terms. They ruled for 32 of the first 36 years of the Empire. They conquered, plundered and aggressively expanded the Republic-Empire from the East Coast and declared in 1820, with the Monroe Doctrine, that all of the Western Hemisphere was under the dominion of the U.S., not to be interfered with by European powers.
The U.S. Constitution written in Philadelphia, in 1787, was a Virginian and Southern slave plantation owners’ coup. By wedding slavery to power, the constitution rewarded and incentivized the enslavement of Africans. This first slavocracy was imposed by those who profited from the free market of African bodies and guaranteed that slavery would define the new nation enforced by the collaboration of a pan European white identity.
Of Virginia’s total population of 747,610 people counted in the 1790 census, 292,627 were enslaved. There were more enslaved Africans in Virginia than the total population of people in states such as Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, Kentucky, South Carolina and Georgia.
By 1860, on the eve of the Civil War the number of enslaved humans in Virginia was 550,000. This number is misleading however, for Virginia benefited from the end of the legal foreign slave trade in 1808, as written and planned in the constitution.
Virginia became the domestic breeding ground for exporting slaves to the deep south, where they would also count in the census for the slave states. Frighteningly, the “founding fathers” designed a document in which they could literally rape and breed their way to increased political power.
The transformation necessary to create a system that works for everyone will never be achieved as long as Americans believe the U.S. was founded by visionaries with high ideals. For far too long have Americans accepted the lies and celebrated a fantasy.
Ace Thelin is a teacher, writer, historian and gardener who lives in Forest Knolls, California.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Identity Politics is the exact opposite of “All People Are Created Equal”. This is why the modern Democrats hate Mister Jefferson with such a passion. A place where all people are created equal is the opposite of a place where all people have their Identity assigned at birth. The Dems want to have a fight over how the Identities are ranked. Revolutionary notions of equality have no place in a politics where the goal is to push one Identity to a higher level than another Identity. Identity Politics is a fight for power and which group holds it, and the exact opposite from the revolutionary notion that everyone is equal.
Modern Democrats are the party of the rich and their military. They cover this with Identity Politics to put some leftish lipstick on the very right-wing pig of the rich and the military. None of this has any room for revolutionary notions like all people are in fact equal. The modern Dems love their Met Gala and Bezos’ Venice wedding, and have no use for a person who would be telling the homeless people outside that they are just as good as the elites inside because they are in fact equal. Modern Dems are very class-based, and glorify the rich, and have no real use for poor people. They cover this with the leftish lipstick that says they care about some Identities.
But of course, they don’t say this directly. The very old rule with Dems is to watch what they actually do, and pay no attention to what they say as cover. The Dems won’t attack Mr. Jefferson directly for saying that all people are equal, but they of course do attack.
Mr. Jefferson as you call him NEVER said “all people are created equal”. He explicitly stated that All Men are created equal, meaning all WHITE MEN. No mention of all people anywhere.
Quit being so obtuse.
Related: “Alamo Heroes Died for Freedom to Own Slaves” hxxps://medium.com/@idember/alamo-heroes-died-for-freedom-to-own-slaves-6b191b9f634c
Has anybody here read these 3 books??? “The Emperor Wears No Clothes” by Jack Herer, Edwin Black’s “Internal Combustion”. which both are true history books and “The Hydrogen Economy” which all 3 are 35 years old telling us, where we were and where we must go to save our Mother Earth with 1/2 humanity within a single decade.
The next war of independence was the great Haitian slave revolt! The US did not assist at all.
The Spanish American wars of indepence, of Bolivar, San Martin, O’Higgins, et al., were also anti-slavery. Again, they got no help from the USA!
For two centuries the US has been punishing Haiti for its successful slave revolt — to set an example.
A disturbing article that calls for reflection and introspection but perhaps explains why we are the way we are and always have been. Unlike the romans who cared little for being considered “unfair” and basked in the glory of their power, we have a deep rooted hypocritical need based on Judeo-Christian fallacies to be considered, at least by ourselves, as moral and ethical while we continue to violate the principles we claim to honor. Thus today, we can abhor Nazi atrocities while supporting the same sins in Israel. A sobering thought but perhaps one that can lead us to a better world.
To all believers of this BS: The Declaration of Independence famously stated 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.
This was, if at all, applicable to the white supremacy WASP slave owner society of those days of the capitalist revolution against British Royalty. An ideological smoke screen for the war of indepence from British kingdom rule. The colonial settler slave owners wanted all the loot for themselves. To begin with, in reality not all men are created equal, not even among the white supremacist colonial settlers. Some were created with much more capital than others, and thus colonial life was unfair from the start, let alone based on equality. So the Declaration starts with BS and has been BS ever since. Blacks and colored are still being treated as slaves at the mercy of capital investors in the USA, the low wage working slaves I may call them. USA, the land of the free and brave, what BS. The USA ruling class should hang their heads in shame every fourth of July rather than brag about their pursuit of happiness, which is no more than the worship of the dollar. So sad!
The key question to ask is, “Who financed William of Orange?” It was one Francisco Lopes Suasso that financed the so called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. Suasso, was a jewish banker who loaned William of Orange a significant sum of money to fund his military expedition.
Moreover, Sephardic jewish weapons contractors, like Solomon de Medina, Isaac Pereira, and Moses Machado, supplied William’s army. This financial backing, along with other factors, contributed to the success of the Glorious Revolution. The rest is history as they say
coming to the root of who was pulling the strings and for what purpose in the glorious revolution aka capitalist revolution against monarchy first on the Island, then in the French Revolution, then in Russia against the Tsar monarchy, all dressed up as a revolution for freedom, democracy, equality, brotherhood and all that jazz, and the dumbed down masses always ready to do the dirty work for the newly to be established capitalist rulers. True history is like a can of worms once opened up to the glaring light for all to see who want to see! It certainly is not what we are told to believe being taught a school!
And it is incumbent, via our questing pursuit of truth as much as it can be established within the affairs of humanity, that in this moment we pursue facts as never before. With the advent of AI and the many sleights-of-hand already available to the proficient via computer graphics, words can and will be put in our mouths as a matter of convenience in facilitating the desires of the Technate. The chipping of our brains via implants/injectables is a whole ‘nother basket of snakes. . . .
Books are already being ‘burned,’ if not just discarded. Definitions of words are now fluid, some legitimately accommodated, many not, in pursuit of *perfection* of ‘The Narrative.’ For this reason old dictionaries are a treasure as AI ‘knowledge’ displaces that which we have known and for centuries accepted society-wide as the standard(s) by which we conduct so many facets of society and civilization. Having seen the corruption of masterworks of literature under the guise of neo-values of this past decade, especially under the transgressions of the legionaires of Biden-think (Woke-DEI,) the warning flags are a’ fluttering in a stiff breeze. The Trumpian version portends its own version of excess, be the reasons reactionary or quasi-‘principled.’
And at the end of the day, who can say the Duopoly is not actually just putting us all on while the squabbles intensify?
Putting us all on the grill, that is.
“The Counter-Revolution of 1776”, and WSWS’s devastating review of the book, is what actually made me stop taking Gerald Horne seriously. The book is full of inaccuracies and outright falsifications in an attempt to rewrite history for his narrative. A historian who has to distort history to sell a theory is just an ideologue. Rather than write an enormous critique of my own, I recommend people simply read their review. Recommended reading before one blindly accepts this narrative that the American Revolution was all about protecting slavery:
hxxps://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/18/horn-m18.html
The author’s argument makes a lot more sense than the fairytales we’ve had drummed into our heads our whole lives. It’s amazing how US Americans freak out when their internalized historical narratives are challenged.
I don’t think anyone can reasonably argue that the history laid out in this article still influences the decisions made today by those who sell their souls to achieve political and economic power. We are the same country today that we were then with superior technology.
that is the sad truth, for all but the super rich rulers and exploiters of resources horrific, continuing same as only with more sophisticated propaganda and brainwashing, all in the name of WASP, giving us our daily increasingly heavy doses of deceitful brain washing from the cradle to the grave!
Just because the official version of American history is a fairy tale, that does not mean I have to accept any fairy tale as being equally valid.
If we were the same country we were then, then the future would look much brighter than today’s darkness. Those were people who were willing to challenge tyrants and fight for freedom. And, of course, the other part of American history that can not be mentioned is that the northerners then went on to take the notion of “all people are equal” into the Abolitionist movement which built a 3rd party that overthrew the Duopoly and elected a morality-based 3rd party to both the White House and power in Congress.
And I’m talking about real people doing these things. People who suffered through George Washington losing every battle until the end, and who signed up in large numbers as volunteers to end slavery in 1861. I find it quite interesting that of the history books mentioned in these comments, Prof. Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” does not come up. Zinn’s style was to collect the writings and memories of ordinary people.
If the America that could stand up to tyrants and challenge the 2-party system to eliminate slavery was still around, then we might still stand a chance.
Absolutely agree. Jefferson twice tried to pass laws ending slavery, once in Virginia and once in the Articles of Confederation. It was a different time, with radically different context. The founders certainly had high ideals, and it is a wonder that we came to have the Constitutional republic we have. Jeferson thought the Constitution should be revised with each generation to match the changing mores and needs that would arise with the passage of time. The revolution was decidedly not about slavery, although it would be disingenuous to claim that it had nothing to do with the decisions of some colonies, notably South Carolina and Georgia, to enter the Confederation. One should read the founders to get the best sense of their opinions and motives. Otherwise one gets a skewed view of the uprising and we are encouraged to judge the founding generation by the standards of the modern age, where, even now, some of our population can be unmoved by genocide, ethnic cleansing and unabashed racism. The Constitution was a creation of its time but, for all that, a miracle. Would that our time had the caliber of men and women that were there at the founding.
Yes, I’m the sort who when told during the Pandemic that I might need to isolate at home for while, I went to go get a big, thick history book. I ended up reading the Oxford University volume of American history that covered the Revolutionary period. Interesting to read the point of view from across the pond.
One interesting point made in that history was that before the Revolution, the various colonies had very little to do with each other. Each colony was focused on trade with the imperial center, and its relations and politics concerning that. There was coastal trade of course, but there was no real “America” at that time. During the English’s Endless Wars with France, there was in the western hemisphere the “French and Indian War”. At that time, a few of the colonial governments had the idea that perhaps we should get together and meet and talk, but there were only a few colonies interested so the idea fell through.
In this era, there were debates in each colony about what to do, and slavery would have been a part of that in the slave-powered, mercantilist-colony economies of the South. But, while modern Americans love to talk endlessly about America, back at this time, America was a brand new idea. Thus, any attempts to put modern thinking about some mythical “America” is going to hit the rocks that these people thought of themselves as a Carolinian or a Georgian or a New Yorker and not as Americans. The Centuries of American BS of politicians talking about “America” and “the American people” were still in the future.
Thanks for the reference to the review, which as you say is absolutely devastating.
it was all about protection of private property and profit making for the WASP capitalist colonial slave holders, therefore it was not a war of independence but a capitalist revolution of the newly rich against feudal European monarchy..if you cannot see that you are just another pitiful victim of the US dumb down education system, I am sorry to say! Incidentally, the law is always about protection of private property, forget about morality or human rights..a law professor was saying at my attendance of Law Lecture 101 at the University of Heidelberg in the 1970s, and I am 75 years old enough to have experienced the truth of that statement often enough in my daily life! Hence the well known saying all evil for the poor comes from money = private property!
When I entered the link you gave in my browser, I get the following message: “Safari cannot open the page because the address is invalid.” I’m glad to learn that the American rebellion, in which some of my ancestors fought, was not ALL about preserving slavery in the British colonies. Jefferson was a hypocrite? Sure, I can believe it. Most of us are. But he did some good things too, as did Washington, Madison, Monroe, Adams, et. al. More good things than I’ve ever done, and more, I bet, than you’ve done too.
The article does not say it was all about slavery. Clearly there were myriad causes: Stamp Act, warrantless searches, standing British troops, taxes without representatives in Parliament, a protectorate declared to protect Native Americans, and a proclamation, a court case and the arming of slaves (which Jefferson alluded to in his first draft of the Declaration) that potended a potential end of slavery.
Tediously unpersuasive. No memnon of TJ and GW horrendous quote,s slavers as 4 of 5 presidents. At tend, author accuses Horne of being a communist.
Isn’t the problem with this argument that nearly no contemporary documents by Washington, Jefferson, etc, support the idea that the Revolution was to preserve slavery? Britain ending slavery in the Caribbean could have been a motivation, but we don’t know. So that’s unlike Texas seceding from Mexico in order to preserve slavery.
The author cites two reasons, not just moves in Britain towards abolishing slavery but also the proclamation that would prohibit territorial expansion at the expense of Native Americans. And he cites circumstantial evidence that slaveholders like Washington were upset by Dunmore’s proclamation to free slaves in Washington’s Virginia if they joined the British army by calling Dunmore an “arch-traitor to the rights of humanity.”
That first sentence isn’t something I’m disputing, hence I didn’t bring it up.
The World Socialist Website did an extended taken down of Horne’s slavery claims years ago.
You can read it here:
wsws dot org/en/articles/2021/03/18/horn-m18.html
Without reading the entirety of Horne’s source material, something I and most won’t do, it is of course impossible to disprove absolutely, what you admit is a circumstantial case, but the the linked article does a very good job.
Horne is espousing at a minimum a gross simplification of the Revolution. If Washington, Jefferson, etc really wanted to fight a major war over keeping slaves, then there’d be significant documentation to that effect.
Clearly there were myriad causes of the Revolution: Stamp Act, warrantless searches, standing British troops, taxes without representatives in Parliament, a protectorate declared to protect Native Americans, and the evidence that a proclamation, a court case and the arming of slaves (which Jefferson alluded to in his first draft of the Declaration) potended a potential end of slavery.