The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America

by Gerald Horne

Overview

How the preservation of slavery was a motivating factor for the Revolutionary War: “Meticulous, thorough, fascinating, and thought-provoking.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
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, and 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.
 
“Eminently readable, this is a book that should be on any undergraduate reading list and deserves to be taken very seriously in the ongoing discussion as to the American republic’s origins.”―The American Historical Review

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781479808724
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	11/21/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	364
Sales rank:	27,977
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Gerald Horne is Moores Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, and has published three dozen books including, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the USA and Race War! White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire.

Table of Contents

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 Notes Index About the Author

Editorial Reviews

★ 03/03/2014
Horne (Negro Comrades of the Crown), Moores Professor of history and African-American studies at the University of Houston, confidently and convincingly reconstructs the origin myth of the United States grounded in the context of slavery. He examines the forces pushing colonists to rebel against London, focusing specifically on the colonies’ increasing dependence on the institution of slavery, and the increasing problems this very institution was causing for the Crown. London found itself in the middle of a losing battle as its settlers wanted an increasing number of slaves to sustain their economy while London began to recognize the dangers of slavery in the form of slave rebellions (coupled with the very real fear of escaped slaves joining the military forces of London’s Catholic enemies, France and Spain) and private slave merchants trading with these foreign countries, bypassing England. London’s increasing resistance to slavery and such free trade contributed to friction between itself and its colonies—and, ultimately, the fight for independence. Though dense, Horne’s study is rich, not dry; his research is meticulous, thorough, fascinating, and thought-provoking. Horne emphasizes the importance of considering this alternate telling of our American origin myth and how such a founding still affects our nation today. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"History books have painted a narrative of the U.S. founding that any student can recite: Colonists, straining against the tyranny of the British crown, revolted in the name of freedom, liberty and justice for all. But in recent years, historians have revisited that conventional story, examining the important role slaves played for Britain in its quest to quell colonists. Now, in a new book, historian Gerald Horne argues it was the desire to maintain slavery that was the prime motivator of the uprising . . . . Horne revisit[s] the period leading up to 1776 to find out how slavery in North America and the British colonies influenced the revolution."

DC Public Radio The Kojo Nnamdi Show

"Gerald Horne's Counter Revolution of 1776 is a critical contribution in the struggle for clarity around one of the most misconceived periods of history. Horne's work provides the vast historical narrative that proves how this premise is false. He centers his analysis on the inherently counter-revolutionary nature of what led to the colonists desire for succession."

Black Agenda Report

"This utterly original book argues that story of the American Revolution has been told without a major piece of the puzzle in place. The rise of slavery and the British empire created a pattern of imperial war, slave resistance, and arming of slaves that led to instability and, ultimately, an embrace of independence. Horne integrates the British West Indies, Florida, and the entire colonial period with recent work on the Carolinas and Virginia; the result is a larger synthesis that puts slave-based profits and slave restiveness front and center. The Americans re-emerge not just as anti-colonial free traders but as particularly devoted to an emerging color line and to their control over the future of a slavery based economy. A remarkable and important contribution to our understanding of the creation of the United States."

Temple University David Waldstreicher

"The Counter-Revolution of 1776 shows the centrality of slavery in colonial American life, north as well as south. It demonstrates how enslaved peoples struggles merged with international and imperial politics as the British empire frayed. Gerald Horne finds among white American revolutionaries people who wanted to defend slavery against real threats. He addresses how in the United States, alone among the new western hemisphere republics, slavery thrived rather than waned, until its cataclysmic destruction during the Civil War."

Southern Methodist University Edward Countryman

"In a refreshing take on the independence movement, Horne places slavery and its expansion in North American during the early eighteenth century at the center if the conflict between London and its increasingly nervous and truculent colonies across the Atlantic . . . . This is an important book for both its novelty in a crowded field and its implications . . . . Eminently readable, this is a book that should be on any undergraduate reading list and deserves to be taken very seriously in the ongoing discussion as to the American republic's origins."

The American Historical Review

"Nearly everything about Gerald Homes lively The Counter-Revolution of 1776, from the questions asked to the comparisons drawn, is provocative. And if Professor Home is right, nearly everything American historians thought we knew about the birth of the nation is wrong."

Woody Holton

"Every person committed to the struggle for racial justice, liberation, and equality, and who struggles every day with the difficulties of forging unity between Black and white, needs to read this book."

Portside.org

"With The Counter-Revolution of 1776, Gerald Horne refigures the origins of the American & revolution to offer a challenging and potentially explosive critique of foundational myths of liberty and rebellion."

American Historical Review

"The Counter Revolution of 1776 drives us to a radical new understanding of the traditional heroic creation myth of the United States."

Philadelphia Tribune

"The underlying truth of the 'so-called' American Revolution is finally now out of the bag, and told in its fullest glory for the first time here. And what Professor Horne has discovered through meticulous research is nothing short of revolutionary in itself."

OpEdNews

"In The Counter Revolution of 1776, Horne marshals considerable research to paint a picture of a U.S. that wasn't founded on liberty, with slavery as an uncomfortable and aberrant remnant of a pre-Enlightenment past, but rather was founded on slavery as a defense of slavery with the language of liberty and equality used as window dressing. If hes right, in other words, then the traditional narrative of the creation of the U.S. is almost completely wrong."

Salon.com

"[I]t is Horne's book that has the most to teach about the complex intersections of race, class, religion, and ethnicity."

Cambridge Humanities Review

"The Counter-Revolution of 1776 asks us to rethink the fundamental narrative of American history and to interrogate nationalist myths. Horne demands that historians consider slavery not as the exception to the republican promise of the American Revolution but rather as the norm insofar as protecting slavery was a fundamental cause of colonial revolt."

The New England Quarterly

"This utterly original book argues that story of the American Revolution has been told without a major piece of the puzzle in place. The rise of slavery and the British empire created a pattern of imperial war, slave resistance, and arming of slaves that led to instability and, ultimately, an embrace of independence. Horne integrates the British West Indies, Florida, and the entire colonial period with recent work on the Carolinas and Virginia; the result is a larger synthesis that puts slave-based profits and slave restiveness front and center. The Americans re-emerge not just as anti-colonial free traders but as particularly devoted to an emerging color line and to their control over the future of a slavery based economy. A remarkable and important contribution to our understanding of the creation of the United States."

David Waldstreicher

"The Counter-Revolution of 1776 shows the centrality of slavery in colonial American life, north as well as south. It demonstrates how enslaved peoples struggles merged with international and imperial politics as the British empire frayed. Gerald Horne finds among white American revolutionaries people who wanted to defend slavery against real threats. He addresses how in the United States, alone among the new western hemisphere republics, slavery thrived rather than waned, until its cataclysmic destruction during the Civil War."

Edward Countryman

"The Counter-Revolution of 1776 shows the centrality of slavery in colonial American life, north as well as south. It demonstrates how enslaved peoples struggles merged with international and imperial politics as the British empire frayed. Gerald Horne finds among white American revolutionaries people who wanted to defend slavery against real threats. He addresses how in the United States, alone among the new western hemisphere republics, slavery thrived rather than waned, until its cataclysmic destruction during the Civil War."

From the Publisher

2014-02-16
Horne (History and African-American Studies/Univ. of Houston; Negro Comrades of the Crown: African Americans and the British Empire Fight the U.S. Before Emancipation, 2012, etc.) returns with insights about the American Revolution that fracture even more some comforting myths about the Founding Fathers. The author does not tiptoe through history's grassy fields; he swings a scythe. He helps readers see that slavery was pervasive in the American colonies—and not just in the South (Rhode Island was a major player in shipping)—and reminds us of the fierce New World competition among England, France and Spain. But beneath these basics is an aquifer of information about slave revolts and the consequent fears of slaveholders. Horne takes us around the colonies, showing that the vast numbers of Africans were setting off alarms all over. He argues that Georgia, for example, was created as a white buffer state between Spanish Florida and the Carolinas, but the white Georgians were soon unhappy: They didn't want to do the unpleasant manual labor, and their competitors—the slaveholders—had an economic advantage. As a result, slaves were soon flowing into Georgia, and Georgians soon began experiencing the same anxieties as the rest of the white colonists. As England began to move more toward ending its slave trade (not for humanitarian reasons), uneasy Americans (rich white ones) began to meet and bray about freedom and liberty, causing many, of course, to note the hypocrisy. Horne also examines the ever harsher laws passed by timorous whites against slaves who disobeyed or revolted—moves which, as the author shows, only intensified slave anger and resistance. As many as 20,000 slaves joined the Redcoats in the Revolution, and the author traces some of our lingering racism back to 1776. Clear and sometimes-passionate prose shows us the persistent nastiness underlying our founding narrative.

Kirkus Reviews