chat

Oh yeah, the way we we're taught about the American Revolution and that time period just erases like a general undercurrent of uprisings. We're taught what fulfills the narrative and everything else is left by the wayside. Even stuff we fess up to like Native American "relocation" is more like a limited hang out that lets them gloss over some of the more wild laws and one sided violence that was and still is perpetrated.

Probably not. I mean fuck monarchies and all that, but that myth of a righteous revolution is definitely bullshit. One of the big reasons behind the increase of taxation was to pay for the defense of the colonies against other European powers while the colonies themselves were trading with them. I don't think there was really any "good" guys among the players between the Brits and the rich Colonists.

So I'm not aware of it, but there's a lot I'm not aware of either. There was a growing clash that was brewing between the colonies and England. People of the colonies were largely seen as uncouth-ish because of their slave owning ways while also England was starting to have to rely on slaves in their armies in the Caribbean ( it think) that they would then free because the colonists were unreliable. And so there was a lot of back and forth going on at the time around ending slavery, some because it was seen as below the standing of the people of England, some just to piss off the colonists. Somerset's case led to a handful of copycats, but probably one of the biggest events around slavery leading up to that time period of the Declaration was Lord Dunmore's Proclamation.

In April 1775, John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore and Virginia’s royal governor, threatened to free slaves and reduce the capital, Williamsburg, to ashes if the colonists rebelled against British authority. In the months that followed, Dunmore’s position became increasingly desperate. His troop strength fell to just 300 men and, on June 8, fearful of being attacked, he abandoned the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg for the safety of a British ship.

On November 7, 1775, Dunmore issued a proclamation that established martial law and offered freedom to slaves who would leave patriotic owners and join the British army: "I do hereby farther declare all indented servants, Negroes, or others (appertaining to rebels) free, that are able and willing to bear arms, they joining his Majesty’s troops, as soon as may be, for the more speedily reducing this colony to a proper sense of their duty, to his Majesty’s crown and dignity."

I think one of the big things to remember about this time is that it's not like now where everything is happening at the speed of the internet, which people often forget. Communication wasn't nearly as fast so things had to occur at much longer time scale. We kinda fall into a weird way of looking at the past as a number of dates and not really think about how many events had to happen over a period of time for the build up of human interaction that lead to those events. A bit like libs with the Russian/Ukraine conflict only beginning when Russia invaded.

btw I got a lot of this from Gerald Horne's The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. It's an incredible read on uprisings of the enslaved and how it ties into the American Revolutionary period. He starts looking at things about 100 years before the declaration and covers so much stuff that school had never even touched. Interestingly enough it kinda pairs pretty well with the pirate show Black Sails because of the importance of the Caribbean uprisings.