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

by Gerald Horne

There was also little doubt that tales of bloody resistance of the enslaved in the Caribbean indelibly marked Carolina, particularly since there was a high proportion of men from the Caribbean in the legislature that came to preside there.

Just as expat Cubans greatly influence Florida politics

For in 1693, His Catholic Majesty offered a kind of freedom to any enslaved African who escaped from British soil—who would accept Christian conversion67—which increased instability in Carolina. In turn, the Carolina elite tended to favor the arrival of French Huguenots, rather than Catholics of any type.

Not only were Africans being referred to in English by the Spanish word for “black,”

Hence "negro" becomes a pejorative term

The militia system in South Carolina,

slave-labor encampments in the Caribbean and North America—led to a weakening of the monopoly of the Royal African Company, backed by the Crown and chartered in an earlier iteration in 1660. This weakening meant the entrance into the frenziedly lucrative business of slave trading by “separate” or “private” traders:

herrenvolk democracy and its close relative: right-wing populism.

Perhaps even more troubling for Africans in the long term was the chauvinistic campaign launched by London against Madrid, seeking to prove the alleged superiority of supposedly fair-skinned, fair-haired Protestants, rather than the reputed dark, cruel, treacherous, and Catholic Spanish:

Actually, a dominant theme of the 1756 war, which makes it a virtual dress rehearsal for the 1776 conflict, was the repeated accusation that settlers were double-dealing, collaborating with the French, as redcoats fought them. “I have undoubted proofs,” said the leading redcoat, Lord Jeffrey Amherst, in 1762, “of the Enemy being supplied with Provisions from almost every port on the Continent of North America,” though at that precise moment there was “the greatest demand for provisions to supply the King’s Troops.

The apparent eradication of the threat from both Spain and France to the mainland set the stage for the North American colonies to follow up aggressively on their wartime intimate dealings with London’s European antagonists and forge what amounted to a de facto alliance against Britain, as was reflected in 1776.

Choctaws and other indigenes were undermined—akin to Africans—when European powers were ousted: this was good news for settlers,

The 1756 war, in short, lit a fuse that then exploded in a revolt against the Crown in 1776.