REAL Reason for American Revolution: Founding Fathers Didn't Care About 'Freedom' — Britain Was Turning Against Slavery & 'Revolutionaries' Wanted to Keep their Slaves

The tall tale that claims to be U.S. history depicts the war of independence from Britain as motivated by a deep yearning for democracy. Dr, Gerald Horne’s new book frames the white settler secession as a revolt to ensure the continuity of slavery, which was growing unpopular in the home country and intolerable to the Black captives. Horne “shows that slave resistance forced the settler elite to declare independence from Britain.”

By Dr. T P Wilkinson
Since 1976, the bicentennial of the unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) that led to the founding of the United States of America from thirteen originally British colonies, Black History Month has been an officially recognized period—in February—when the descendants of the Founding Fathers acknowledge that the descendants of their slaves also have a history. Also in February, Presidents’ Day—initially George Washington’s birthday but now a combined birthday celebration for Washington and Abraham Lincoln: the Father of the Country and the Great Liberator. The year starts with Martin Luther King Day in January, when some whites and Blacks commemorate the man who was the highlight of the Great March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963—assassinated in 1968 for saying in 1967:

“I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”

Today the United States is governed with a Black president. And yet as can be seen by the representations of the man occupying the White House, the Black person born in the United States upon whose ancestors—to paraphrase the assassinated Malcolm X—the “rock of Plymouth” fell, still have no history commensurate with the lives taken from them in the establishment of the American Empire.

Maybe this deficit is in some way a blessing. The token historical commemorations dictated by the psychological pacification policies of the US regime are based on the attempt—as in the election campaign of that “son of Africa”—to implicate ordinary Black Americans in the creation of the present regime.

As James Baldwin so forcefully told William Buckley Jr. and the members of the Cambridge Union in 1965— “From a very literal point of view, the harbors and the ports and the railroads of the country--the economy, especially in the South--could not conceivably be what they are if it had not been (and this is still so) for cheap labour. I am speaking very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: I picked cotton, I carried it to the market, I built the railroads under someone else's whip for nothing. For nothing."

“The real principles ''held to be self-evident' were those that defined Blacks in the original colonies as property and not as people.”

There is a significant difference between Baldwin’s claim to have built America and the regime’s rulers’ infamy for founding it. Unfortunately this distinction is not very clear in the popular consciousness because the creation of the USA is always presented as the sum of business transactions performed by the white settler elite. The prevailing historical narrative—across the political spectrum—describes the development (conquest) of the North American continent as one endless series of clever, innovative and even enlightened business deals whose frustration by the archaic practices of the British monarchy were challenged by a declaration adopted and promulgated in 1776.

Gerald Horne’s latest book The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (NYU Press, 2014) is a continuation of his careful scholarly efforts to correct that historical deficit. Two of his previous books, also reviewed by this author, recover the record of how the United States of America was made by the slave labor of Black Americans and the fanatical determination to preserve this method of enrichment by the white settlers called the Founding Fathers. Professor Horne goes beyond those who have finally acknowledged that slavery was fundamental to the economy of the original colonies. He shows that slave resistance forced the settler elite to declare independence from Britain. In doing so he makes Black Americans the drivers of the revolution and white Americans the motor of counter-revolution. Taking Professor Horne’s thesis seriously not only restores the historical dignity of Blacks—more than a month of history—it shows that Africans throughout the Western hemisphere were joined in a liberation struggle whose defeat in mainland North America relied upon the “isolationism” and “exceptionalism” that continue to govern the US regime even today.

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