The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America by Gerald Horne [2014]
In North America a confederacy of rich landowners and the poor Caucasian population under their political tutelage launched a counterrevolution to defend the chattel slavery system on which their rule was based.
According to Gerald Horne, this counterrevolution began in 1776, not 1861.
Horne's thesis is not exclusively the product of his own scholarship. In 2005, Schama's Rough Crossings appeared, and it toucbes on the samecommanding insight: London would have freed the slaves to reduce the overhead cost of their empire in North America had it not been for the slave-holders' 1776 revolt.
The thesis is older than Horne or Schama. Anyone presenting arguments as to the evil of the U.S. government and its history get a ready hearing on the middle class left and among bourgeois liberals today. And there are plenty of writers to supply the product, many trained in Stalinist, social democratic, and centrist schools of axe-grinding, race-baiting, and ahistorical moralizing.
In fact, arguments close to Horne's are being promoted and widely disseminated today by the New York Times in its media juggernaut 1619 Project.
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The most important question to ask of Horne's book is: if 1776 was a counterrevolution, where is the revolution the planter/settler plotters were revolting against?
The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America by Gerald Horne [2014]
Preface
Introduction
1 Rebellious Africans: How Caribbean Slavery Came to the Mainland
2 Free Trade in Africans? Did the Glorious Revolution Unleash the Slave Trade?
3 Revolt! Africans Conspire with the French and Spanish
4 Building a "White" Pro-Slavery Wall: The Construction of Georgia
5 The Stono Uprising: Will the Africans Become Masters and the Europeans Slaves?
6 Arson, Murders, Poisonings, Shipboard Insurrections: The Fruits of the Accelerating Slave Trade
7 The Biggest Losers: Africans and the Seven Years' War
8 From Havana to Newport, Slavery Transformed: Settlers Rebel against London
9 Abolition in London: Somerset's Case and the North American Aftermath
10 The Counter-Revolution of 1776
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