The Counter-Revolution of 1776

Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America

Gerald Horne

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781479808724
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

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.

1

Rebellious Africans

How Caribbean Slavery Came to the Mainland

The news from Barbados was frightening.

In 1676, a Londoner reported breathlessly about the “bloody tragedy intended against His Majesty’s subjects” there at the hands of “the Heathen, the Negroes”; fortunately, it was said, the conspiracy was “miraculously discovered eight days before the intended murder” was planned.¹ An orgy of beheadings and immolations of Africans—particularly those designated as “Coromantee or Gold Coast Negro”—ensued, but this bloodshed was insufficient to wash away fearful apprehension about what could befall this small island. For the Africans not only sought to eliminate the European settlement and establish their own polity in its stead; they also “intended,” said one contemporaneous writer, “to spare the lives of the fairest and handsomest women (their mistresses and their daughters) to be converted to their own use.”²

The authorities sought to quarantine the contagion by ordering that “no Negroes concerned in the late rebellion or convicted of other crime in Barbadoes be permitted to be bought or sold” (there was fear of what would occur if these Africans wound up in neighboring Jamaica)³—but this was a difficult mandate to observe when African labor was so needed beyond this island’s borders. By importing Africans in such ratios to the point where they grossly outnumbered settlers, the Crown was riding a tiger: it was hard to dismount and harder still not to do so.

The colonial governor, Sir Jonathan Atkins, was convinced that foul play was planned by the Africans. Their “damnable designs,” he asserted was “to destroy them all,” meaning those like himself. A “more thorough inquiry” found this conspiracy “far more dangerous than was at first thought for it had spread over most of the plantations, especially amongst the [Coromantee] Negroes, who are much the greater number from any one country and are a warlike and robust people”⁴—perhaps Africans should be dragooned from elsewhere: but that could mean enhanced conflict in Africa with the French, Spanish, and other competitors. Just a few years earlier, the Dutch had burnt to the ground an English encampment in West Africa with considerable loss. Perhaps inspired, the Africans on an island near Gambia rebelled against the European invaders in their midst, and in the resultant unrest, almost three dozen of the English were slain and about the same number of Africans. At this juncture, even the densest and least observant Londoner might have wondered about the costs of colonialism.⁵

However, as things turned out, rebellious Africans in the Caribbean did not cause London to abandon colonialism but, instead, to move more assets northward to the mainland, as a host of settlers from Barbados simply moved to South Carolina. London feared that small islands—more so than the more spacious mainland—could more easily fall victim to internal revolt by the enslaved, coupled with external attack by competing European powers. This was a reasonable assumption, though London was to find that South Carolina too was not altogether exempt from attack by Africans aided by Madrid, underscoring the difficult dilemma faced by settlers. Increasingly, settlers were referring to their principal labor force as “intestine” enemies, a deadly threat that could not be easily expelled or digested.

Moreover, as the number and importance of enslaved Africans grew on the mainland, as Caribbean colonists and their valued property made the great trek to Carolina and points northward,⁶ predictably there was a concomitant nervousness about the ultimate rebellious intentions of these manacled workers. In any case, London should not have been surprised by a murderous turn of events. In 1649, a plot by the enslaved was discovered that called for the planter class in Barbados to be eliminated and—as it was reported—“their wives to be kept for the Chief of the Conspirators, their children and white servants to be their slaves.”⁷

A full century before the famed lurch for independence in 1776, it seemed that other dreams of independence were brewing. The subjugation and settling of the Caribbean in particular and also the mainland was a riotous and chaotic process accompanied by frequent plots and conspiracies, involving not just the usual suspects—the indigenous and Africans—but, as well, Irish and Scots. This chaos provided opportunities for arbitrage and leverage for all concerned, the Africans not least. Ultimately, conflagrations in the Caribbean were to drive London to focus more on the mainland—but this did not provide a long-term remedy.

It was almost as if the settlers were deeply equivocal when it came to Africans, for a few decades earlier the Bahamian elite had complained that there were “too many Negroes” in their midst and sought to transport quite a number to Bermuda (and Virginia), both of which had Negro problems all their own.⁸ A similar plot by the enslaved had been uncovered in Bermuda in 1673—near Christmas Day, a familiar day of revolt for Africans in the Americas. A result? 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.”⁹

Undaunted, in 1682, recently imported enslaved Africans from Jamaica, brought to Bermuda, devised a far-reaching plan to organize brigades and murder leading planters during Sunday religious services—then flee via the highway that was the vast sea. Settlers were in a quandary since the well-founded fear of external attack meant incorporating Africans in the militia—but this decision could well give succor to the idea that the oppressed should deploy their martial skills against the local elite.¹⁰ This fear of Africans using their weight in colonialism and numerical superiority to turn the tables on the Europeans was a lurking fear during this era, signaled, for example, in 1682 when leading English official William Blathwayt warned darkly about the rise of “piratical Negroes.”¹¹

Runaways were known to hide in the woods, waiting to rob—or murder—Europeans.¹² By late 1675, the authorities in Jamaica—which only had been seized from the Spanish two decades earlier—were fretting about “several insurrections and rebellions” of late by the enslaved; 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.”¹⁴ In other words, the “ethnic” discrimination of the British isles had difficulty in withstanding murderous uprisings of the Africans and indigenous, and 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. Yet, ultimately, racial formation was not a long-term solution to London’s thorny problems in the Caribbean, not least since it was hard to override by fiat or otherwise the Protestant-Catholic divide.

Thus, the undeterred 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. A further suggestion was loosening barriers on trade between the island and New England—but far-sighted Londoners might have seen that this could only bolster independence sentiments on the mainland.¹⁵

In 1683, on the island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic, the governor was murdered, and the enslaved were enmeshed in seemingly perpetual plots involving poisoning.¹⁶ That same year, yet another plot was uncovered in Barbados, and between 1685 and 1688, dozens of enslaved Africans were executed for various acts of sedition. Then in 1692 yet another major plot was revealed, as the Africans were planning to revolt on the plantations of Barbados, then move toward the urban node that was Bridgetown, where they intended to capture the fortifications, assume control, and dispense an uncertain fate to the settlers: hundreds were arrested, while dozens were executed.¹⁷ An army of enslaved Africans intended to take advantage of the chaos of war to stage a rebellion and form their own polity, which would depend on the assistance of Irish servants as well as the French.¹⁸

Adding fuel to the fire was the seeming reality that as the crisis in London mounted, leading to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, tensions in the colonies proceeded accordingly. In the late 17th century, Barbados was gripped with nervousness over reports of rebellions by Africans, of which the preceding examples were merely the tip of a larger iceberg. After all, by this point many of the enslaved could understand quite well the language of the enslaver and the reports that filtered in from various vessels and overheard at dinner tables.

Ultimately, however, the mutually intelligible language best understood by the Africans and the colonizers alike was the language of force: the colonizers were encountering violent resistance at the source of their labor supply: Africa. Near Whydah in 1686, the would-be enslaved engaged in a shipboard insurrection that, it was reported with sadness, led them to “kill all the white men.”¹⁹ Near Accra in 1695, the would-be enslaved rose again and massacred their captors—though the Africans too absorbed major casualties.²⁰

Of course, tension in London was nothing new either, as various Catholic plots had become a staple of the 17th century; that a significant Catholic population resided in Barbados contributed to the combustibility, as many of these servants were convicted political rebels banished from Ireland. There was reason to believe that this group were involved in plots to massacre island elites in 1634 and 1647; regional unrest in the 1650s was followed by regional revolts in the mid-1660s, connected to warfare in the Leeward Islands. There was a depressing suspicion in London that these servant revolts in the Caribbean were coordinated with foreign invasions—devised by, for example, France and Spain—which could only accelerate the growing fear that such a fate could befall England itself. Such was the conclusion during this tumultuous era after the French invaded Antigua and Montserrat, when a combination of Irish insurgents and invaders plundered and burned both colonies.²¹

Protestant English planters with sizeable holdings ruled Montserrat, while the Irish were small tobacco farmers, as the hierarchy of Europe was replicated in the Caribbean—which proved to be unstable in both sites. The Irish presence complicated the attempt to construct a smoothly synthetic “white” solidarity, which made more complex the overriding objective of exploiting African labor. 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.²²

Yet in 1689 in Maryland, there was frantic discussion “concerning a confederacy with ye papists and Indians to destroy Protestants” that mirrored Montserrat.²³ A decade later, a “general insurrection by the Indians” was feared in this and “neighboring provinces,” and though Catholic—or “papist”—influence was not noted, surely they and their external allies could have taken advantage easily of this situation.²⁴

During this same era, Nevis and St. Christopher in the Caribbean were under constant threat from the French, a threat that was magnified not only by the presence of alienated Africans but by problems in supplying these distant outposts, leading to what Sir William Stapleton referred to as a “sad condition” featuring the “want of armies and ammunition, the soldiers for want of pay and recruits”—generally, “destitute of everything.”²⁵

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—except for the Africans for which this trend was disastrous. Incorporating the Irish was not easy either, not least because of religious rifts. After all, it was in the late 17th century that one Londoner proclaimed haughtily that a “Papist hates a Protestant worse than he doth” all others, just as a “Jew hates a Christian far worse than he doth a Pagan [or] a Turk.”²⁶ Actually, this writer—Thomas Gage—might have written that those who were Jewish had reason to resent His Catholic Majesty in Madrid, not least because of the Spanish Inquisition, which led to their mass persecution and their fleeing en masse to the Americas, among other sites. Many of them were residing in Jamaica, then Spanish soil—until the arrival of the English in 1655, in which case they defected in huge numbers to the side of the invaders, emulating and providing a template for Africans subsequently. Thus, London encouraged migration of Sephardim to Jamaica, and just as the Spanish had co-opted countless Africans on English soil, the English...