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by
Gerald Horne
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February 2 - February 19, 2020
my conclusion in this book is that many Africans had different plans for the destiny of colonial North America that decidedly did not include a starring role by the now famed Founding Fathers and their predecessors but, instead, contemplated a polity led by themselves in league with the indigenous and, perhaps, a compliant European power.
The colonizing of the Americas was a wild and woolly process. Guy Fawkes and Oliver Cromwell were surging to prominence as London’s creation of colonies in the Americas was accelerating: these two men represented plotting and attempting to overturn an already unstable status quo that was hard to hide from Africans. Moreover, the colonial project unfolded alongside a kind of Cold War between Catholics and Protestants13
Ironically, the founders of the republic have been hailed and lionized by left, right, and center for—in effect—creating the first apartheid state.
the groundwork was laid for the takeoff of capitalism—a trend in which slavery and the slave trade played an indispensable role.
in 1750, fifty thousand more Africans lived in the islands than on the mainland, but as 1776 approached, thirty thousand more Africans lived on the mainland than on the islands.
a number of Irishmen, quite dissatisfied with London, often sought succor with the Crown’s most obstinate foes, providing further impetus for reliance on Africans.
prisoners of war were shipped en masse to the colonies, many of whom arrived in no mood to compromise with London and eager for revenge.
the growing perception that London would move to free the enslaved, arm them, and then squash colonies already perceived as a growing rival.
the colonies—desperate for men and women defined as “white” to counter the fearsome presence of Africans in the prelude to 1776—could empower the Irish and Scots and provide them with more opportunity.
“There must be great caution,” several planters warned, “lest our slaves when arm’d might become our masters.”
“Every slave might be reckoned a domestic enemy,” according to Benjamin Franklin speaking almost two decades before 1776.71
with a flourish, it was added, “let the only contention hence forward between Great Britain and America be, which shall exceed the other in zeal for establishing the fundamental rights of liberty to all mankind.”
The rebels of 1776 were victorious and have been hailed widely ever since, suggesting that there is something to be said for winning in the shaping of history’s judgment of a rebellion.
frequent plots and conspiracies, involving not just the usual suspects—the indigenous and Africans—but, as well, Irish and Scots.
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.”
“Few slave societies,” argues social historian Orlando Patterson, “present a more impressive record of slave revolts than Jamaica,”
simultaneous enslavement of Europeans and Africans was too formidable a task
should a “man be made a slave forever merely because his beard is Red or his Eyebrows Black?”
The growth in the population of enslaved Africans—their numbers reputedly tripled between 1680 and 1690—happened to occur as the more encompassing category of “whiteness” ascended
(A European “bond or free intermarrying with a Negro, mulatto or Indian” was to be “banished forever,” thus hastening the consolidation of “whiteness.”)
The “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 was not so glorious for Africa and the Africans.
the momentum of abolitionism that culminated in June 1772—which in turn unsettled the mainland, contributing to the Unilateral Declaration of Independence.
the rising merchant class so often complained that the state—or at least the RAC monopoly—was a hindrance, while hypocritically this class relied on the coercive power of official London for protection.
The implication was that New York, still retaining a substantial population of Dutch descent and a growing center of the slave trade, was collaborating handsomely against London.
The RAC had been given an unrealistically optimistic term of one thousand years—not unlike the Reich it anticipated
Such was the dilemma of the colonizer: the escalation of the slave trade in the wake of 1698 and 1713 brought head-spinning profits—and mortal danger alike.
It was a crime for a slave to assault any “free man or woman professing Christianity.”
enslaved that reached Quebec were deemed to be free. Apart from the incentive this provided for the enslaved to flee, it affixed in the mind of the African for decades to come the idea of Canada as Canaan, the site of refuge for those fleeing the Union Jack, then the Stars and Stripes.
the rights offered to settlers hardly formed a template that could be extended easily to Africans, precisely because thwarting Africans was at the heart of this offering.
by the 1730s, Africans had become the most stalwart component of the militia in Florida
Africans, due to their skill in subversion, were treated like “free people” by the French:
Eventually some Londoners would believe that escaping the reach of British creditors was a prime reason for the rebel revolt of 1776.
Madrid had revealed its intention not only by enticing Africans southward from Carolina but by forming a regiment of them, appointing officers from among them, allowing them the same pay and clothing them in the same uniform as the regular Spanish soldiers.
“No appearance of slavery, not even in Negroes,” was to be allowed, it was said of Georgia by the colony’s founder with emphasis in 1733,
Antigua 1736 was a paradigmatic event, informing one and all that colonies with overwhelming African majorities were unsustainable in the long run, thus hastening a redeployment of capital and personnel alike to the mainland—which in turn hastened the onset of the 1776 revolt,
straining to be free of the Union Jack as well, while profit-hungry settlers were willing to sell the rope that might be used to encircle their pasty necks.
mainland provinces. Tentative moves toward abolition by London could possibly checkmate Madrid (with the creation of a buffer class of “free Negroes” who could then be armed)—but would not this infuriate mainland settlers, impelling them recklessly toward “independency”?
the “strict connection between popery” and unrest among Africans, a frequent colonial-era complaint,
African troops were deployed promiscuously on both sides,84 reminding the Crown that the mainland project of relentless despotism toward Africans had severe limitations;
increasing plaint on the mainland that settlers were being treated like slaves—for in a certain way, they were.
would not replacing these presumed “Papists” with Africans make more sense, since what was flaring with Spain was more of a religious than a racial conflict?
One flustered Georgian concluded accurately that “the Spaniards depended much upon a Revolt of the Carolina Negroes” for victory.
Madrid felt that enslaved Africans in Georgia and the Carolinas would rise up and join the invaders and set the entire Southeast aflame.
setting the stage for now less harried colonies to make a separate peace with Paris and Madrid against the interests of Britain, sly trickery that eventuated in the formation of the nation now known as the United States of America.
“whiteness” on the mainland could be easily torn asunder in a welter of religious and ethnic and class tensions among Europeans, unless enslaved Africans were there to solder and weld this otherwise unwieldy racial category.
The tendency of mainlanders to improperly dragoon Africans who were subjects of His Catholic Majesty, then enslave them, repeatedly roiled relations between London and Madrid
London’s settlers were telling the world that not only would they refuse to accept an enhanced status for Africans, but they would not accept other powers doing so as well.
settlers were both resisting fighting and seeking to block others from doing so, calling into question their viability as subjects.
the heyday of the RAC was “the most flourishing of any in the Kingdom” and “the most beneficial to this Island of all the Companies that ever were formed by [British] Merchants.”
there were an estimated 6,000 Africans in Virginia in 1700, but by 1756 there were more than 120,000.60 There were about 1,000 Africans next door in North Carolina in 1700; by 1730 there were 6,000 and by 1765 about 65,000.61
