The American Revolution was no exception. Our national narrative mainly focuses on east coast elites who saw British rule as tyrannous and complained about violations of their rights. Many of these people were plugged into political debates going on in Britain, and some in Britain supported their cause.
But there was at least one more important group in the rebel coalition: backwoods farmers who were mainly mad that the British were, as they saw it, supporting Indians against them. Notice the vast area marked Lands Reserved for the Indians in the map at the top, made in 1767 for British General Thomas Gage.
I'm reading Ned Blackhawk's The Rediscovery of America (2023), which narrates North American history from a Native point of view. It's is a pretty good book despite some overblown rhetoric about how people have ignored the Indian part in hitorical events. (Almost all of Blackhawk's sources are books by white men.) Anyway Blackhawk has an excellent section on events on the Pennsylvania frontier in 1765-1766, which presaged the revolution in many ways.
This is right after the Seven Years War and then Pontiac's War had led to great violence all along the Appalachian frontier, and many settlers were mad about that. The British plan for controlling this violence was to rebuild the situation that had existed before war broke out in 1754, which included guaranteeing Indians their rights to land and trading with them extensively. The goods that British traders carried west included guns and ammunition.
It was this last that triggered the revolt of the "Black Boys" along the Pennsylvania and Virginia frontiers. They began stopping the caravans of merchants heading west and searching them for weapons. Sometimes they just seized any weapons they found, but other times they seized or burned all the other goods as well. In March, 1765, six of their number were arrested by the British and imprisoned in Fort Loudoun. Several hundred Black Boys then besieged the fort, demanding the release of their comrades. The British tried to negotiate with them, but one of their leaders, James Smith, threatened to kill everyone in the fort if the men were not released. Eventually they captured some British scouts and forced the British to make an exchange of prisoners.
These border ruffians kept up their violence right down to 1776, whereupon many of them joined the Revolution. Black Boy leader James Smith was elected to the special assembly that wrote Pennsylvania's new, post-independence constitution.
As I have written here before, I do not believe that questions around slavery had any part in the American Revolution. But questions around Indians absolutely did. Some of the most ardent revolutionaries mainly wanted to get the British out of the way so they could seize more Indian land and respond with unlimited violence to any threat of danger from Indians. Of course the Revolutionary coalition also included men like Benjiman Franklin and John Adams who wanted to respect Indian rights, but Indian-hating backwoodsmen made up a good part of the fighting force.
A country born from white supremacism.
ReplyDeletePartly! But also partly from sincere belief in freedom and democracy.
ReplyDelete@John, as I'm sure you're aware, the Black Boys can be seen as an iteration of the same hill country attitudes that produced the somewhat earlier Paxton Boys, who not only conducted a notable Indian massacre but expressed strong hostility toward the ruling Pennsylvania establishment, and at one point marched in arms on Philadelphia. Worth mentioning to indicate that not only was the revolutionary coalition composed of different groups with different motives, but that the different groups were often hostile to one another (that is, in the American colonies one finds the same sort of intergroup hostility as you mention exists in other revolutions, even if we don't get anything like the Terror or the Cultural Revolution in the post-independence US, at least not until the Civil War). Cf. the well-known (initial, at least) hostility of Washington and other Virginia planter types toward the New Englanders' rudeness, lack of hygiene, "Leveller" (as the southerners put it) attitudes, etc.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that saying questions about slavery played *no* part in the Revolution may go too far, as do most categorical statements about history. As I understand it, Exhibit A in the case that argues slavery "caused" the Revolution is the early episode where Virginia's colonial governor tried to recruit slaves to fight the local patriots by offering the slaves freedom, and the violent reaction against this on the part of some Virginians. The importance of this moment can be way overstated, and the revolution had obviously already started without it, but it wasn't a sheer Nothing, it seems to me. Certainly the British ended up with some thousands of Loyalist Blacks who after the war emigrated to Canada (and, IIRC, the British felt duty-bound to put a provision for this in the treaty). My point is one can't say slavery did not have *any* part in the revolution, as though slavery might as well not have been there. It was clearly part of the whole mix, and something people thought about, or else why would Jefferson have famously tried, in one of his drafts of the Declaration, to lay the blame for it on George III--and why would others have bothered to have him take it out? People already cared about the issue. By the time of the Constitutional Convention, slavery was the main issue dividing the delegates--or so Madison said in private. The real question, it seems to me, is how it goes from being a sort of issue/non-issue (perhaps, something one just didn't talk about?) in, say, 1776, to being the main thing in 1787, if we wish to trust Madison.