Confederate "Heritage" Month 2023, April 9: Fundamental criticism of the American Revolution

David Bell wrote in 2021 about the current round of fundamental criticism of white supremacy in US history:

But there is … a radical critique that calls the founding principles themselves irredeemably tainted and argues that from the very first they were formulated to promote exclusion and oppression. The 1619 Project gestured strongly in this direction when it suggested that the thirteen colonies revolted against Great Britain in large part to preserve American slavery from British moves toward abolition. From the radical point of view, Lincoln’s treatment of Native Americans and certain statements he made about African-Americans confirm his fundamental allegiance to deep structures of exclusion and oppression, even though he ended slavery and promoted citizenship rights for African-Americans.¹ [my emphasis]

Examples of this historical trend include Gerald Horne’s The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (2014) and Tyler Stovall’s White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea (2021).

And, as Bell notes, the 1619 Project suggests something similar.

Bell contrasts this with what he describes as “essentially an internal critique: to judge America by its own professed standards, distinguishing between its admirable founding principles and its frequently deplorable historical record.”

This is the approach with which I have generally identified. One of the most prominent examples is Martin Luther King, Jr., who held up the professed ideals of American patriots to liberty and equality, and the ideals which American Christians of all races professed to believe and pointed to the reality of segregation and white racism as a contrast.

This applies more broadly to everyone who believes in democracy and the rule of law, including the value of international law.

Tyler Stovall presents his position in this 2021 lecture²:

The actual practice of democracy and human rights in the world takes place among the deeply flawed human race. So while aspirations are formed out of material social conditions, the ideas and aspirations that emerged are not completely defined by their origins or their original forms. David Bell puts it this way:

But to view the entire history of modern freedom through the prism of this [historical] association [with white racism and European colonialism] is to misunderstand something important about political language. Such language, especially when enshrined in formal, declarative documents, has a force that even the strongest unspoken associations can never fully undo, and that can undercut its authors’ own unspoken beliefs. It matters that when Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he used the words “all men are created equal” and not “all white men are created equal.” Jefferson owned slaves and considered people of African descent inferior to whites, but this statement would have lost much of its force if couched in anything other than universal (if still gendered) terms. And however much many readers of the Declaration—and perhaps its author as well—may have silently appended the adjective “white” to the statement, its universalism opened a window of possibility that could never again be shut and whose importance was immediately glimpsed by people struggling for racial equality. [my emphasis]

David Waldstreicher in an essay on Horne’s perspective summarizes that general view this way:

Horne’s 1688 is not mainly the “Glorious” Revolution triumph of England’s Parliament over absolute monarchy: it’s when the merchants triumphed over the Royal African Company to deregulate the African slave trade. In The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (2014), after summarizing the expansion of slavery and of enslaved restiveness in the Caribbean and southern mainland, Horne pivoted to argue that rising British antislavery, in response to slave rebellions and disgust with North American and West Indian greed, motivated planter-rebels and their merchant allies to mount the ensuing civil war in the British empire. The real revolutionaries, in other words, were the enslaved; the vaunted American Revolution was nothing less—or, nothing more—than a counter-revolution against the strivings of the truly oppressed of America and their budding alliance with the metropole. We don’t have to wait for C. L. R. James’s “Black Jacobins”—the focus of his 1938 study of the Haitian revolution—to find enslaved rebels rocking the new world. …

This was a stunning about-face from the conventional wisdom, and in some respects it was overstated. Horne took arguments made by historians like Woody Holton—that slavery was one among several key motives, sometimes an ineffable and often ironic and contradictory factor in the making of the imperial controversy, the war for independence, and the outcomes of a long revolutionary era, but particularly for white Virginians and South Carolinians—to a different, if not necessarily higher, level: one of simple cause and effect. It’s also a stretch, because opposition to slavery wasn’t yet strong or even English per se, and American rebels had plenty of other economic motives, not all of which can be reduced to slavery. Horne is also unimpressed by the advance of antislavery in the northern colonies before 1775, whether it was motivated by passions for liberty, accusations of hypocrisy, or fears of armed slaves. Nor does he think much of the thousands who fought for the patriots and, like during the later civil war, undermined racial slavery by doing so. This is unsurprising given his sense of the Gulf South and Caribbean as the motors of U.S. history.³ [my emphasis]

Horne’s view on the American Revolution as a stiff-necked counter-revolution to preserve slavery from Britain’s abolitionist plans is a strained interpretation of US history, at best. Although Waldstreicher goes on to mostly defend Horne’s approach as a useful pushback against what Waldstreicher seems to see as an unhelpful tendency even by those on the left to be too upbeat and hagiographic about the founding revolution.

As Sean Wilentz has noted, the historian Bernard Bailyn defends what I would call a more dynamic view, which Wilentz summarizes this way:

The American Revolution may not have overthrown the institution of slavery but its egalitarian principles were at least implicitly antislavery. … [W]hen Emancipation arrived, it did so as a vindication and affirmation of America’s founding principles, the “new birth of freedom” that Lincoln pronounced at Gettysburg in 1863.⁴

But he also finds that the sort of view Bailyn offers “obscures how new, how radical, antislavery politics were during the revolutionary era, and how, for many patriots, American slavery and American freedom were perfectly compatible.” And how it can justify a complacent liberal the-basic-problem-has-been-solved view.

In other words, he also finds it important to recognize the very real and continuing presence in the US of the white supremacy that was spawned by the slave system: “Far from vanquished, it has morphed and resurged in ways expected and unexpected, from the bloody overthrow of Reconstruction to the menacing rise of Donald J. Trump.”

1. Bell, David (2021): Whose Freedom? New York Review of Books 09/23/2021 issue. <https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/09/23/whose-freedom/> (Accessed: 2023-11-03).

2. Stovall, Tyler (2021): White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea. … YouTube channel. Washington History Seminar YouTube channel. (Accessed: 2023-24-03).

3. Waldstreicher, David (2022): The Long American Counter-Revolution. Boston Review 12/08/2022. <https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-long-american-counter-revolution/> (Accessed: 2023-23-03).

4. Wilentz, Sean (2019): American Slavery and ‘the Relentless Unforeseen’ New York Review blog 11/19/2019. <https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/11/19/american-slavery-and-the-relentless-unforeseen/> (Accessed: 2022-05-03).