Gerald Horne - The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America

THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION OF 1776

Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America

Gerald Horne

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London

www.nyupress.org

2014 by New York University

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Horne, Gerald.

The counter-revolution of 1776 : slave resistance and the origins of the United States of America / Gerald Horne.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4798-9340-9 (hardback)

1. Antislavery movementsUnited StatesHistory18th century. 2. United StatesHistoryRevolution, 1775-1783Social aspects. 3. SlaveryUnited StatesHistory18th century. 4. African AmericansHistoryTo 1863. I. Title.

E446.H83 2014

973.31dc23 2013043412

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It was January 2012 and I was ecstaticand with good reason.

I had been working on the book at hand for some time and had traveled extensively. However, building renovations had prevented my access to the New York Historical Society in Manhattan until my tardy arrival in early 2012. However, as it turns out, my wait was rewarded amply when I encountered the richly informative Daniel Parish, Jr. Slavery Transcripts, which cover extensively colonial slavery in North Americaand beyond.

For it is the argument of this book that slavery permeated colonial North America, underpinning the pre-1776 economy, in terms of not only agriculture but insurance, banking, shipbuilding, and the like. Yet the enslaved resisted fiercely, as we will see, and did so quite often, at times with the aid of competing colonial powers, notably Spain and, to an extent, France. Their resistance helped to drive settlers from the Caribbean to the mainland, particularly in the years leading up to 1776. The sprawling land mass of the mainlandversus the limited land mass of the Caribbeanallowed European empires to more easily bump into one another, for example, on the Georgia-Florida border, causing sparks to fly.

The crucial turning point for North Americaand arguably, the British Empire as a wholeemerged in 1688 with the so-called Glorious Revolution, which, inter alia, caused the monarchy to retreat and led to the ascendancy of a rising class of merchants. This, in turn, to the detriment of the Royal African Company. These entrepreneurs descended maniacally upon Africa, igniting a quantum leap in the slave trade which at once developed immensely the economy of the Americasand, likewise, engendered ever more angry resistance from the enslaved, causing ever more anxious settlers to migrate to the mainland. The year 1688, with its simultaneous launching of vast economic transformationparticularly in North Americaand a riotous instability driven by enslavement, is the hinge moment in the creation of what is now routinely referred to today as modernity.

As the economy developed on the mainland, thoughts of independency grew accordinglyalong with slave resistance. The latter was manifested most dramatically in Manhattan in 1712 and 1741 and South Carolina in 1739. It is an error to view the history of colonial British North America as simply pre-U.S. history in a teleological manner. It is likewise useful to integrate events in the Caribbean into our contemplation of the mainland. Though Londons provinces in the Americas may not have been wholly unitary, it remains true that North Americans had been trained to regard the southern mainland colonies as part of an extended Caribbean region that was a primary source of wealth. Put simply, London realized that massive slave uprisings in Jamaica and Antigua, most particularly, could portend the collapse of the Caribbean colonial project as a whole, as Africans strained to assert themselves forcefully, if not rule altogether: such rebelliousness made London more susceptible to sweet reasonand, ultimately, abolitionas it considered the further expenditure of blood and treasure that could have gone to bolster British India or territories elsewhere. At the same time, slave rebelliousness caused settlersparticularly on the mainlandto dig in their heels, hastening the split between province and metropolis.

This slave resistance was aided immeasurably not only by the indigenous but also, as noted, by competing colonial powers. As London jousted with Madrid in the Americas, both came to rely upon armed Africans, and this crucial factor, along with the substantial resources that had to be expended in order to maintain a slave system, inexorably helped to spur a nascent abolitionist movement. Increasingly, the development of the economy on the mainlandincluding the ability to engage in mutually profitable trade arrangements with French settlers in Hispaniolaalong with apprehension about the presumed anti-slavery tendencies of the British Crown, evidenced by the notorious edict of Lord Dunmore in November 1775 in Virginia, helped to push the colonists into open revolt by 4 July 1776.

Though it may be hard to imagine at this late date, my conclusion in this book is that many Africans had different plans for the destiny of colonial North America that decidedly did not include a starring role by the now famed Founding Fathers and their predecessors but, instead, contemplated a polity led by themselves in league with the indigenous and, perhaps, a compliant European power. As such, the ongoing persecution of descendants of mainland enslaved Africans isin parta continuing expression of what tends to befall those who are defeated in bloody warfare: often they are subjected to a heinous collective punishment.

In essence, 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, and contemplating them may shed light onat leastwhy Africans suffered so grievously in the aftermath of the founding of the republic: strikingly, as London was moving toward abolition, the republic was supplanting the British isles as the kingpin of the global slave trade.

Hence, this book diverges sharply from the consensus view of the origins of the post-1776 republica view which has united a stunningly diverse array of scholars.deficit of trust between Africans and Europeans. Portraying the Africans as bit players supporting a revolt in 1776 dominated by Europeansas the uplifting narrative tends to donot only distorts and caricatures the historical record but also obscures a trust deficit that may still be of relevance today.

Hence, 1688 gave rise to a cousins war in the Americas in the face of perpetual sedition and liquidation plots from this rambunctious labor force. However, this was an exceedingly elongated process that took decades to lurch toward a sort of justice in 1865 (or, perhaps, 1888a precise two centuries after the tumult in Londonwith abolition in Brazil).

To the extent that 1776 led to the resultant U.S., which came to captain the African Slave Tradeas London moved in an opposing direction toward a revolutionary abolition of this form of propertythe much-celebrated revolt of the North American settlers can fairly be said to have eventuated as a counter-revolution of slavery.