The successful 1776 revolt against British rule in North America has been hailed almost universally as a great step forward for humanity. But the Africans then living in the colonies overwhelmingly sided with the British. In this trailblazing book, Gerald Horne shows that in the prelude to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed all but inevitable in London, delighting Africans as much as it outraged slaveholders, and sparking the colonial revolt. Prior to 1776, anti-slavery sentiments were deepening throughout Britain and in the Caribbean, rebellious Africans were in revolt. For European colonists in America, the major threat to their security was a foreign invasion combined with an insurrection of the enslaved. It was a real and threatening possibility that London would impose abolition throughout the colonies—a possibility the founding fathers feared would bring slave rebellions to their shores. To forestall it, they went to war. The so-called Revolutionary War, Horne writes, was in part a counter-revolution, a conservative movement that the founding fathers fought in order to preserve their right to enslave others. The Counter-Revolution of 1776 brings us to a radical new understanding of the traditional heroic creation myth of the United States.
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The Counter-revolution of 1776 by Gerald Horne
I read the Counter-Revolution of 1776 by Gerald Horne at the same time that I read “No Property in Man” by Sean Wilentz. Two books make first rate bookends for the subject. The former deals with the influence slavery on politics in the American colonies up to 1776 and the latter takes up the same subject from the Constitutional Convention of 1789 up to the Civil War. Both books essentially deal with the world of ideas relative to slavery and politics. Horne's book is more Manichean and, at bottom, anti-American. Willentz' book more properly shows the ambiguities of history and how those ambiguities play out over time.
For Horne, the American Revolution was fundamentally and predominately a reaction by American slave-owners to prevent England from abolishing or restricting their peculiar property. From the Glorious Revolution of 1688 until the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, Americans found themselves in a self-created bind. They had been importing huge numbers of angry and rebellious Africans who presented an “intestinal” fifth column. This fifth column was ever-present for exploitation by the Catholic powers of France and Spain.
Horne is very good at providing the details on the quandaries that Americans found themselves in. The slave-holding South was threatened in particular by Spanish Florida. Catholic Spain offered freedom to American slaves, who might then be armed for raids into South Carolina and Georgia.
In many American colonies, African slaves outnumbered the white population. In other colonies, they were a non-trivial part of the population who could strike blows against their enslavers. In 1712, New York was subjected to a spate of slave-caused arson. In other colonies, slaves fled, poisoned or murdered settlers. In British Jamaica, several hundred Africans had fled to the mountains and formed a society free from Britain.
The answer to the quandary was to input more whites, but the other part of the quandary was anti-Catholicism. Catholics also represented a potential fifth column that could be exploited by the Catholic powers. Not for nothing, it was Catholic Spain in Florida threatening the South, and Catholic France in Quebec threatening New England.
All that ended in 1762, when Britain conquered Florida and Quebec. Britain then attempted to impose taxes on slaves, restrict commerce and prevent westward immigration. According to Horne, Britain was moving in the direction of abolition as a way of dealing with its slave problem in the Carribean.
Horne argues that the American Revolution was enabled by the freedom that was given by British victory in the Seven Years War but was sealed in 1772 by Justice Mansfield in Somerset's Case. In Somerset's Case, Mansfield ruled that because the British metropolis did not have laws establishing slavery, any slaves brought to Britain were automatically free. According to Horne, Americans read this decision as an indication that Britain could and would move to free their slaves.
Ultimately, the Revolution was secured by the proclamation of Virginia Governor Lord Dunsmore in November of 1775 to free slaves and employ them as soldiers against the Americans. The threat of servile insurrection drove moderate Americans into the arms of the Revolution. Horne notes that Lord Dunsmore deserves to be known as a founding father of the Revolution.
All in all, I found this book to be fascinating and well-written. Horne is a good prose stylist who fashions some striking prose. I also think that he has basically made a case for understanding the American Revolution through the lens of slavery politics.
However, this book has its problems.
First, Horne is repetitive. We are treated to the same incidents over and over again, sometimes within paragraphs. At times, I thought that Horne might be making up for the lack of examples in his case by reiterating the examples he had.
Second, Horne may be overstating his case. For all his talk about “angry” Africans and “armed Africans,” actual slave rebellions were small and few. The vaunted Stono Rebellions involved 15 to 30 slaves and was put down within days. I am sure that Africans were angry. I am sure that colonists feared slave rebellion, but I have to wonder why there weren't more and bigger slave rebellions. Might it be the case that the militarization of slave societies was effective? Could that fact have played a role in the Revolution? We don't know because it wasn't discussed.
Third, Horne has a Manichaean view of the subject. Everything is about slavery and everything is subordinated to slavery. In that regard he makes all “whites” pro-slavery. I doubt that this is the case since within 20 years, the North would emancipate its slaves and its representatives would be fighting against slavery in principle. The subsequent events suggest that things were more complicated than Horne allows.
Fourth, at the end, Horne lapses into anachronistic and doctrinaire leftism. America is described as a country with institutionalized racism that has always been counter-revolutionary in opposing revolutions in Vietnam and Iran. This is just not a good look for a book purporting to be history.
Nonetheless, Horne's book does provide a useful foundation for Wilentz's book, which does demonstrate that history is the result of often divergent and opposed goals.
