The Counter-Revolution of 1776¶
Metadata¶
- Author: Gerald Horne
- ASIN: B00J8DOMIG
- ISBN: 1479893404
- Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00J8DOMIG
- Kindle link
Highlights¶
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. — location: 57 ^ref-51533
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. — location: 59 ^ref-35977
notorious edict of Lord Dunmore in November 1775 in Virginia, helped to push the colonists into open revolt by 4 July 1776. — location: 70 ^ref-22717
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. — location: 71 ^ref-34051
strikingly, as London was moving toward abolition, the republic was supplanting the British isles as the kingpin of the global slave trade. — location: 78 ^ref-27352
I do not view the creation of the republic as a great leap forward for humanity—though I concede readily that it improved the lives of a countless number of Europeans. — location: 81 ^ref-52531
as 4 July 1776 approached, Africans had been involved steadily in the poisoning and murdering and immolating of settlers, creating (at least) a yawning deficit of trust between Africans and Europeans. — location: 84 ^ref-40902
Defenders of the so-called Confederate States of America were far from bonkers when they argued passionately that their revolt was consistent with the animating and driving spirit of 1776.13 — location: 101 ^ref-49918
slavery was both a boost for nascent capitalism and ultimately a fetter on its productive force. — location: 105 ^ref-35066
their triumph forged a conflation of anti-monarchism, and republicanism—and Africans standing in the way of the two—in a manner that virtually guaranteed that the path ahead would be exceedingly rocky for those who became U.S. Negroes, then African Americans. — location: 130 ^ref-14623
“Africans here and abroad unite and fight in league with a powerful foreign ally.” Such a conclusion inferentially suggests a design flaw at the heart of the republic—Africans being excluded and persecuted not by accident but purposively—that compels this sizeable class of citizens to disregard republican sovereignty in pursuit of justice. — location: 136 ^ref-23945
as a putative descendant of mainland Africans who had fought the formation of a slaveholding republic, then a Jim Crow regime, I was continuing to incur a penalty as a result, this time in the form of having to walk part of the way to my next destination. — location: 151 ^ref-6845
that this ostensibly anti-slavery ruling “will occasion a greater ferment in America (particularly in the islands) than the Stamp Act itself,” — location: 169 ^ref-27957
the uniting of Europeans from varying ethnicities under the umbrella of “whiteness” broadened immeasurably the anti-London project, with a handsome payoff delivered to many of the anti-colonial participants in the form of land that once was controlled by the indigenous, often stocked with enslaved Africans—not to mention a modicum of civil rights denied to those who were not defined as “white.” — location: 214 ^ref-7493
the founders of the republic have been hailed and lionized by left, right, and center for—in effect—creating the first apartheid state. — location: 217 ^ref-35803
The “Puritan colonies,” says Greene, “were the greatest slave-trading communities in America. From Boston, Salem and Charlestowne in Massachusetts; from Newport, Providence and Bristol in Rhode Island; and from New London and Hartford” — location: 259 ^ref-23336
in the fifteen years prior to 1698, slavers transported close to fifty-five hundred enslaved Africans to the North American mainland, and in the fifteen years after, the figure increased dramatically to more than fifteen thousand. The heralded reforms flowing in the aftermath of 1688 were as important to slave-trade escalation as the reforms of 1832 were to slave emancipation. — location: 279 ^ref-44558
This enormous influx of Africans laid the foundation for the concomitant growth of capitalism. The advent of this system has been seen widely and schematically as a leap forward from the strictures of feudalism and, therefore, a great leap forward for humanity as a whole. — location: 283 ^ref-44952
the immense profit and productivity (and devastation) that accompanied “free trade”—but this time in Africans. — location: 287 ^ref-9992
The enormous influx of Africans—and the settlers’ intoxication with the wealth they produced—meant that more “whites” had to be attracted to the continent to countervail the ferocity of the fettered labor force, and ultimately, an expanded set of rights for these European migrants, along with land seized from the indigenous, was critical in enticing them. — location: 297 ^ref-63315
politics virtually preordained that various island factions would seek the support of Africans—notably as their numbers escalated in the 18th century. — location: 335 ^ref-26505
The presumed unreliability of the Irish and Scots facilitated London’s increased reliance on African soldiers and sailors. — location: 353 ^ref-46269
in 1768 that Bostonians were treated to the sight of Afro-Caribbean drummers of the 29th Regiment actually punishing their fellow “white” soldiers. In the heart of Boston Commons, these Negroes whipped about ten alleged miscreants for various misdeeds. — location: 354 ^ref-21343
London felt compelled to rely upon Negro soldiers and sailors, as the colonists came to rely upon Negro slaves: this was becoming an unbridgeable chasm. The Crown—the sovereign in both London and the colonies—had created a highly combustible political volcano. — location: 366 ^ref-26136
Ultimately, the mainland model based on “racial” privilege overwhelmed the London model based on “ethnic” privilege. London’s “ethnic” approach implicitly—at times explicitly—sacrificed the interests of Irish and Scots and Welsh (and even the English of certain class backgrounds) and made up for the shortfall by seeking to attract Africans to the banner, a policy propelled not least by competition with Madrid. — location: 371 ^ref-24437
such a policy could only alienate mainland settlers, driving them toward a unilateral declaration of independence on 4 July 1776. — location: 375 ^ref-22798
the term “white”—the vector of a potently rising identity politics still operative centuries later—only began to supplant “Christian” and “free” as favored designations in the 1690s, — location: 378 ^ref-43058
the privilege of “whiteness” was based heavily upon the increased presence of Africans, but since mainlanders were coming to suspect that London would deploy the Negroes against them—or, at least, had a more expansive view of their deployment than settlers—this meant that independence in 1776 was tied up with complicated, even fearful, sentiments about humans designated as slaves. This expansion in the colonies fueled by enslavement of Africans then undergirded the conflict with London that erupted in 1776. — location: 381 ^ref-52454
Madrid’s reliance upon Africans in the Americas may have seemed less risky than reliance upon men with roots in Catalonia. — location: 424 ^ref-20721
from 1756 to 1763, London fought an expensive and largely successful war against Paris and Madrid to oust the latter two from a good deal of North America to the benefit of the colonists, then sought to raise taxes to pay for this gigantic venture—only to have the settlers go behind the back of London and conspire with Spain and France against Britain. — location: 498 ^ref-18477
before 1763, mainland settlers were huddling in fear of Negro insurrection combined with foreign invasion, particularly from Spanish Florida or, possibly, French Canada; afterward, it appeared to a number of colonists—particularly as abolitionist sentiment grew in London—that Negro insurrection would be coupled with a throttling of the colonies by redcoats, many of them bearing an ebony hue. — location: 507 ^ref-53757
The traditional narrative of the republic’s founding has emphasized insufficiently the amorality and trans-border ethos that came to define capitalism—which often was at odds with traditional notions of patriotism and even sovereignty. — location: 514 ^ref-51873
by 1764, he owed one of his London creditors a still hefty eighteen hundred pounds sterling74 and certainly had an incentive to both preserve his slave property and escape from the Crown which seemed to be calling it into question. — location: 524 ^ref-40493
As June 1772 approached, beating slaves was much less common in London than in the colonies. Increasingly, Londoners were beginning to see slavery and slaveholders as an American phenomenon that sophisticated metropolitans disdained as uncivilized— — location: 538 ^ref-16444
In 1775, a leading British official proposed that London was willing to return to the status quo ante of 1763 with regard to taxes and the like if the settlers would concur with the notion that slavery was a “vice” that was “contrary to the law of God” and, thus, “every slave in North America should be entitled to his trial by jury in all criminal cases … as a foundation to extirpate slavery from the face of earth”; — location: 544 ^ref-28870
“let the only contention hence forward between Great Britain and America be, which shall exceed the other in zeal for establishing the fundamental rights of liberty to all mankind.” — location: 547 ^ref-32062
Ian Smith—the leader of the newly founded racist republic that was Rhodesia (which became Zimbabwe in 1980)—argued that his Unilateral Declaration of Independence was a replay of 1776: he and his comrades were seeking to escape the logic of decolonization, just as 1776 sought to escape the logic of slavery’s abolition. — location: 555 ^ref-46664
The rebels of 1776 were victorious and have been hailed widely ever since, suggesting that there is something to be said for winning in the shaping of history’s judgment of a rebellion. — location: 560 ^ref-16129
Blas Roca, a leader of what became the Communist Party in Cuba, then in a desperate confrontation with Washington, asked a question not often posed in Washington: why, he asked, was the plight of Negroes in the U.S. probably worse than that of any other group of Africans in the hemisphere? — location: 562 ^ref-64121
unlike in Cuba, where the anti-colonial and anti-slavery struggles merged, in the person of Antonio Maceo,83 or in Mexico, where an early leader was of African descent, Vicente Guerrero,84 in what became the U.S., there was a divergence between the struggle against London and the struggle for abolition— — location: 564 ^ref-47578
one of the more striking aspects of the anti-London struggle on the mainland was how often it merged with a “Black Scare” in the form of the imprecations tossed at Lord Dunmore and Governor Martin of North Carolina. — location: 569 ^ref-63095
it is difficult to ignore the point that one central reason for this awful persecution has been the simple fact that this besieged group had their own ideas about the configuration of North America and that their conceptions often involved collaboration with the antagonists of Euro-American elites (be they indigenes, Madrid, or ultimately London). — location: 576 ^ref-58847
it was not until the 1950s that Washington came to realize that, perhaps, easing racist oppression at home might serve to foil such dangerous diplomatic alliances—until then, such relations served partially to provide further grist for the oppressive mill. — location: 581 ^ref-3095
in no small part from their historically consistent and staunch opposition to the capacious plans of slaveholding rebel—then republican—elites, which too often targeted these very same Africans. — location: 584 ^ref-17620
Increasingly, settlers were referring to their principal labor force as “intestine” enemies, a deadly threat that could not be easily expelled or digested. — location: 614 ^ref-50466
The colony’s free Negro population was effectively expelled, which narrowed the base of support for the colonial project, necessitating the importation of—perhaps—more unsteady Scots and Irish. A decade earlier, the authorities in recently claimed Jamaica already were hedging against the possibility of an African “mutiny.” — location: 629 ^ref-38901
the planters were instructed to “take care to provide themselves with one white servant for every ten Negroes on their plantations”—but left unsaid was where these “whites” would be found who would be sufficiently intrepid to reside among angry insurrectionists.13 Almost through absence of mind but actually driven by the desperation of mere survival, the base of support for colonialism was expanded to include groups often disfavored in London itself—for example, those who were Jewish and the Irish—now admitted into the hallowed halls of a form of colonial “whiteness.” — location: 640 ^ref-42475
the ineluctable adaptation in the colonies was a grouping together of Europeans in the evolving “racial” category that was “whiteness”: this process facilitated the degradation and subjugation of a recalcitrant African labor force. — location: 646 ^ref-17754
authorities in Barbados quickly moved to increase the “supply of servants from Scotland to strengthen the island against the outrages of the Negroes”—but casting increasingly restive Scots into this turmoil was not necessarily a formula for calm repose. — location: 649 ^ref-997
That the Irish could—and did—defect to “Catholic” invaders did little to dissuade the developing notion that, perhaps, the mainland, with a more diverse and substantial European population, was a preferable site for investment. — location: 679 ^ref-32023
In the overriding context of Catholic-Protestant conflict, seizing more Africans for enslavement, while trying to incorporate Irish and other dissidents in the superseding category of “whiteness,” made sense— — location: 689 ^ref-15547
London encouraged migration of Sephardim to Jamaica, and just as the Spanish had co-opted countless Africans on English soil, the English returned the favor with the Iberian Jews. — location: 697 ^ref-24904
just as London was forced to try to protect Africans under its jurisdiction from often harsh measures by settlers, English elites in the metropolis had to act similarly in Jamaica in overriding special taxes against Jews pursued by local elites. — location: 698 ^ref-27584
“Few slave societies,” argues social historian Orlando Patterson, “present a more impressive record of slave revolts than Jamaica,” — location: 708 ^ref-28135
It is easy to infer that the colonizers came to recognize that simultaneous enslavement of Europeans and Africans was too formidable a task and that narrowing bondage to the latter was more practicable. — location: 747 ^ref-35434
the construction of “whiteness” or the forging of bonds between and among European settlers across class, gender, ethnic, and religious lines was a concrete response to the real dangers faced by all of these migrants in the face of often violent rebellions from enslaved Africans and their indigenous comrades. — location: 750 ^ref-38986
fleeing Europeans “must of necessity fall in a short time into the hands of the Enemy from abroad or the Negroes from within”—neatly encapsulating the internal and external dilemmas faced by the colonizer. — location: 770 ^ref-7006
Frenchman Robert Cavelier de la Salle was confident that “Mulattoes, Indians and Negroes” once promised their liberty would assist Paris in driving the Spanish from Mexico. — location: 791 ^ref-36038
by the late 17th century, the colonizing project presupposed enslavement of Africans, but, simultaneously, to gain an advantage against a European competitor could involve arming Africans, which could lead gradually away from the degradation that enslavement dictated—and, ultimately, toward abolition. — location: 794 ^ref-3545
Late 17th-century realities were seemingly contradictory: arming Africans and enslaving Africans; incorporating religious dissidents and ousting religious dissidents. By 1684, realization of the racial stakes at play was slowly dawning on at least one Londoner, who wondered pensively, should a “man be made a slave forever merely because his beard is Red or his Eyebrows Black?” — location: 801 ^ref-30621
“in true Christian Love we earnestly recommend it to all our friends and Brethren, not to buy any Negroes.” — location: 807 ^ref-19398
The point-counterpoint between enthusiasm for the wealth that slavery generated and apprehension about the bloodiness it engendered was reflected in a legal zigzag. — location: 814 ^ref-43273
as African rebelliousness surged, the besieged planter class of Barbados began a great trek to the mainland. By the late 17th century, Caribbean settlers and their enslaved Africans from this sugar island were trickling into Newport. — location: 825 ^ref-11011
1686, the Spanish from Florida had landed with a force of Africans and indigenes to launch a surprise attack on the Carolina settlers. — location: 846 ^ref-38210
That Carolina was facing an ongoing conflict with the indigenous that created a flood of African refugees heading southward to Florida only served to underline the fragility of this extension of Barbados on the mainland. — location: 856 ^ref-13058
because of the threat from the indigenous and European powers, the colonists were forced into the ultimate indignity—arming Africans, a textbook example of tempting fate. — location: 906 ^ref-47202
the illiberality of the settlers, making it difficult to swallow wholly the progressiveness of their revolt against London a scant century later: for, it is reported, driving this rebellion was a settler desire to enforce a quicker extermination of the indigenous, which was thought to be resisted by London’s delegates. — location: 923 ^ref-54844
After this revolt, religion and “race”—which pointedly excluded Africans—helped to bond the colonial elite and European servants. — location: 926 ^ref-36652
“whites had achieved a sense of race solidarity at the expense of blacks,” — location: 948 ^ref-41799
The reluctance of Africans to be subdued mandated an increase in the settler population, which meant ushering previously disfavored Europeans into the warm embrace of “whiteness,” and these migrants were enticed by heady dreams of prosperity driven by a slave society and a complement of rights—doled out via apartheid. — location: 1026 ^ref-29978
as capitalism was taking off, what was striking was how the rising merchant class so often complained that the state—or at least the RAC monopoly—was a hindrance, while hypocritically this class relied on the coercive power of official London for protection. — location: 1066 ^ref-60261
lust for foreign plunder, notably in Africa and Asia, brought war to Europe in a pattern that hardly had abated in the 20th century, notably in 1914 — location: 1101 ^ref-23714
It is possible to view the proliferating moral argument against slavery as a reflection of the reality that increased enslavement brought real danger to colonists and colonialism. — location: 1132 ^ref-59290
the escalation of the slave trade in the wake of 1698 and 1713 brought head-spinning profits—and mortal danger alike. — location: 1183 ^ref-16127
for pushing the Spanish out of Florida and the French out of Quebec by 1763 eased pressure on mainland settlers and infuriated Paris and Madrid, which now had incentive to bolster a rebellion against British rule. — location: 3336 ^ref-27108
a dominant theme of the 1756 war, which makes it a virtual dress rehearsal for the 1776 conflict, was the repeated accusation that settlers were double-dealing, collaborating with the French, as redcoats fought them. — location: 3646 ^ref-62922
London decided that the settlers and the Africans “should have an equal share in all Booty gained from the enemy in common with … regular troops” — location: 3675 ^ref-16232
“Gaining the Negroes to our interest,” Ellis argued, “by assuring them ample liberty and promising them lands [on] one of the neutral islands, where a black colony might be settled,” would be “highly useful to this nation,” — location: 3700 ^ref-20136
The 1756 war seemed to conclude with a smashing victory for London. Though popularly much of the subsequent analysis has focused on the ouster of France from Quebec, in terms of the slavery that provided propulsion to the mainland, the ouster of Spain from Florida (and from Cuba for a while) was decidedly more profound. — location: 3713 ^ref-1918
The 1756 war, in short, lit a fuse that then exploded in a revolt against the Crown in 1776. Likewise—and not unrelated—was the changed circumstance for captive Africans, who continued arriving by the boatload on the mainland but now found weakened rear bases in Quebec and St. Augustine, previously used to launch punishing attacks against British settlements. — location: 3732 ^ref-62303
Influential personalities in the metropolis were beginning to recoil at the enslaving habit of the colonists, spawning mutual rage that was not restrained when the latter began to argue that they—the settlers—were being treated like slaves by London. — location: 4224 ^ref-21330
“in one sense, slaveholding Patriots went to war in 1775 and declared independence in 1776 to defend their rights to own slaves.” — location: 4268 ^ref-7195
the anomaly of the era: settlers saw escaping from London as the goal, while Africans saw escaping to London as the objective. — location: 4310 ^ref-53525
Colonists should have applauded in 1772 when the regime in Virginia sought to impose taxes on imported Africans, even if they were arriving from Maryland and the Carolinas, for this was effectively limiting the numbers of those who could slit their throats—but some were too blind to see. — location: 4449 ^ref-32748
the influential planter Landon Carter got wind of a “Scheme for the Negro Command,” he was “incredulous,” refusing to accord the “least credit to a thing so inhuman as well as so dangerous”—then with resignation he accepted the bitter reality. — location: 4488 ^ref-15371
A proposal emerged in Parliament as early as January 1775 calling for the abolition of slavery and thus “humbling the high aristocratic spirit of Virginia and the southern colonies.”140 It was also in November 1775 that a remarkable debate erupted in Parliament as to whether “all the slaves in America should have the trial by jury.” A formal motion was introduced on this terribly fraught matter, accompanied by a proviso to “annul all laws” on the mainland to the contrary. — location: 4673 ^ref-6012
Freedom to them,” it was said wisely, “is not only an enjoyment but a kind of rank and privilege,” — location: 4690 ^ref-31781
“In such a people,” it was stated, “the haughtiness of domination combines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies it and renders it invincible.” — location: 4691 ^ref-16668
To a degree, by seeking to enlist the Africans, London accelerated the resentment of the settlers, leading directly to its substantial losses in what had been a mighty British North America. — location: 4700 ^ref-41741
During the post-1776 conflict, Africans played a significant role in Florida’s defense and in launching offensive raids against Georgia. — location: 4714 ^ref-36473
In response to this controversial edict, Virginia militarized further, forming thirty-two new volunteer companies and embarking irrevocably on the road to revolt. — location: 4726 ^ref-11937
there was staunch opposition to secession in London—and for good anti-slavery reason. — location: 4730 ^ref-22764
Perhaps thinking North America was demographically akin to the Caribbean helped bolster the controversial edict. — location: 4734 ^ref-9860
now familiar—and effective—rallying cry of the rebels, replying that the “majority” in the isles not only “thought” they were mostly Negroes but “still treated them as such.” — location: 4735 ^ref-55357
Lord Dunmore, it was said, was “assuming powers which the King himself cannot exercise”; — location: 4750 ^ref-48601
this outbreak of smallpox arguably foiled the plan to deploy Africans to squash the settlers’ rebellion. — location: 4775 ^ref-47843
Apparently when Washington arrived in Boston to confront the redcoats, he was shocked to find so many armed Africans, — location: 4794 ^ref-1686
The conclusion stressed by one perspicacious writer, that the Negro was viewed as “not an American,” a permanent outlier, an eternal alien, should be viewed in this context. — location: 4800 ^ref-47117
One astonished resident in Bristol, England, remarked after reading the Declaration that “one would imagine that the Parliament of Great Britain … had treated” the rebels “with as great cruelty and as much injustice as they [rebels] … treat their Negro slaves.” — location: 4811 ^ref-10538
observers should view with skeptical restraint the crassly pragmatic post-1776 attempt by rebels to recruit and assuage Africans—as suggested by Washington’s overtures to free Negroes—a solicitude that virtually disintegrated on cue after London was ousted from the thirteen colonies. — location: 4823 ^ref-48792
it was Adams who bluntly informed the Crown that the settlers “won’t be their [London’s] Negroes.” — location: 4827 ^ref-63531
Just as settlers earlier had pointed to the supposed ubiquitous hand of Madrid in explicating African rebelliousness—which had the advantage of evading responsibility for their own awful maltreatment of slaves—with their armed revolt against His Majesty, it was now the ubiquitous hand of London that was the despised culprit. — location: 4838 ^ref-50249
Suppressing African resistance became a crucial component of forging settler unity—and the solidifying identity that was “whiteness,” which cut prodigiously across religious, ethnic, class, and gender lines. The forging of settler unity and the congealing identity that was “whiteness” also consolidated the developing connection between settlers’ fear of alleged British enslavement, their own possession of Africans as chattel, — location: 4862 ^ref-17367
Ironically, a mainland revolt driven in no small part by opposition to abolition and perceived friendliness of the Crown to the Africans was aided immeasurably by a revolt against the Crown by Africans. — location: 4945 ^ref-29485
enslaved Africans on the mainland “secretly wished the British army might win, for then all Negro slaves will gain their freedom. It is said that sentiment is universal amongst all the Negroes in America” — location: 4968 ^ref-1752
James Madison who argued that the still-bothersome Somerset’s case necessitated that the U.S. Constitution include a rigorous clause mandating the return of enslaved fugitives, — location: 4974 ^ref-35390
Noted writer and anti-slavery advocate Thomas Day captured this mood when he proclaimed that slavery was a “a crime so monstrous against the human species that all those who practice it deserve to be extirpated from the earth.” — location: 5000 ^ref-20373
“They therefore had to create a devolved structure that would stop central government interfering with local courts’ enforcement of land grabs or enforcement of slavery,” he asserts. — location: 5010 ^ref-33945
despite the alleged revolutionary and progressive impulse of 1776, the victors went on from there to crush indigenous polities, 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. — location: 5013 ^ref-50083
that it is much too generous to conclude that the former slaveholding republic has suffered from a tragic flaw: it is more accurate to aver that this polity has suffered from a design flaw, that is, that it was not accidental that the fabled founders somehow “forgot” to include all of the former colonies’ denizens in its bounty. Unavoidably, this design flaw led to a blazing conflagration that concluded formally in 1865. — location: 5027 ^ref-30248
resultant restiveness of overwhelming slave majorities in the Caribbean that drove the Crown to retrench on the mainland and the concomitant growth of the productive forces there, — location: 5031 ^ref-52663
Strikingly, the supposed trailblazing republic and its allegedly wondrous Constitution had a fatal design flaw in the form of enhanced slavery, which caused it to crash and burn by 1861. — location: 5034 ^ref-18230
Like Lincoln, Lord Dunmore faced a strategic disadvantage on the battlefield which forced his hand. — location: 5036 ^ref-12421
the first Congress in 1790 enacted a naturalization rule that made citizenship relatively simple to attain—for Europeans. “Free white persons” who resided in the United States for as little as two years could be naturalized. — location: 5043 ^ref-47652
like starry-eyed devotees of the “Enlightenment,” they failed to note how this naturalization process aided republicans in overcoming the demographic challenge delivered by so many Africans and indigenes. — location: 5046 ^ref-29722
This foreign embrace of 1776 may be more a result of diplomatic niceties and protocol than anything else. — location: 5050 ^ref-14329
It is not self-evident that the aristocracy of class and ancestry that obtained in London was less humane and more retrograde than the aristocracy of “race” that emerged in the aftermath of 1776 in the territory stretching south from Canada. — location: 5051 ^ref-7886
It would be ironic indeed if a perverse form of affirmative action were deployed to excuse or rationalize the misdeeds of a budding superpower, while trumpeting racially questionable offers of refuge, then simply castigating similar misdeeds of a developing nation. — location: 5064 ^ref-2387
though the creating of revolutionary regimes in France, China, and Russia—among others—has been subjected to withering analysis of their respective real and imagined debilities, the United States of America largely has escaped similar scrutiny of its origins, though it has been apparent for some time that the blessings of liberty escaped the grasp of the Africans and the indigenous most terribly: — location: 5066 ^ref-56322
to suggest blithely, as some have, that 1776 created a template for the subsequent extensions of liberty to those who were initially excluded is similar to giving the jailers of apartheid credit for the enfranchisement of Nelson Mandela, while eliding neatly the stark commonalities that have linked white supremacy on both sides of the Atlantic. — location: 5069 ^ref-8985
given the braiding of slavery with independence in the origins of 1776 and the emergence of a superpower as a result, it is unavoidable that those who are concerned with overturning the toxic legacy thereby created have to build more consciously and forthrightly an anti-racist, pro-equality movement of global proportions. — location: 5071 ^ref-54751
the deep historical roots of this phenomenon in a nation where not only was citizenship determined on a racist basis, but, furthermore, benefits were dispensed by the state in a similar fashion—and not just to elites. — location: 5081 ^ref-30210
Few of the pundits have wondered if conservatism among Euro-Americans—notably in the working class and middle class—may hark back to the founding of the republic and a time when opportunity included becoming the owner of land once controlled by indigenes and stocked with enslaved Africans: — location: 5083 ^ref-50289
Surely, the pro-Nazi majority had little incentive to dismiss the “Black Scare” which helped to propel a good deal of Duke’s success, when this phenomenon helped to propel the founding of the tendentiously glorified republic in the first place. — location: 5089 ^ref-54640
It would have been premature to administer last rites to capitalism on the basis of the horrors of slavery, and, similarly, the well-known human rights violations that accompanied the rise of socialism should not be interpreted to mean that this project too is destined for permanent interment. — location: 5095 ^ref-37300
Experience has taught me that instead of defending the atrocious republican record in dealing with Africans, U.S. patriots instead assail the record of those with whom Africans are compelled to join in order to escape republican atrocities. — location: 5170 ^ref-18476
Edmund Burke, viewed in today’s republic as a patron saint of conservatism, not only opposed slavery but in 1765 opposed a plan to seat North American representatives in Parliament since the delegation would include slaveholders: — location: 5383 ^ref-47572
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