On the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, Christopher Reid writes its history from below and centres the standpoints of the Black Americans and indigenous peoples that influenced its development.
by Christopher D. Reid
‘‘Who shall write the History of the American Revolution? Who can write it? Who will ever be able to write it?’’ wrote John Adams to his former political antagonist Thomas Jefferson in 1815. Vain, jealous, proud, and ambitious but always self-aware, Adams could see that Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin had outshone him in public memory; and he was incredulous that the complexities of the Revolution were being replaced by false simplifications. ‘‘The principles of the American Revolution,’’ he wrote to Mercy Warren in 1807, ‘‘may be said to have been as various as the thirteen states that went through it, and in some sense almost as diversified as the individuals who acted in it.’’
The New Englander’s words ring true. The battle over the history of the American Revolution parallels the struggles for power in the 18th century Atlantic that anticipated it and that the Revolution itself further shaped and defined. Poor versus rich, workers versus owners, tenants versus landlords, enslaved versus enslavers, debtors versus creditors, the yeomanry versus merchants and planters, free Blacks versus the whole of white America, indigenous people versus white settlers—these are just some of the many contests that must be part of any story of the American Revolution.
The series of clashes leading to 1776 do not tell the full story of the sentiment that R. R. Palmer convincingly argues animated people in British North America and elsewhere. Palmer, in his now classic work The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 contends that rebellion against constituted authority was a motive power of the period. He focussed his analysis on the rising class of European and American professionals, planters, and entrepreneurs who had grown increasingly hostile to the inherited privileges and power of the aristocracy, saw it as weak, corrupt, and vulnerable, and organised amongst themselves to replace it.
I will extend this analysis downward, and limit it to the thirteen colonies and their western frontier. In doing so, I will emphasise and foreground one of the many diverse principles that made the Revolution: Black freedom. The latter was bound up with the Revolution and its aftermath. However, one cannot fully understand the conditions of this particular endeavour without some insight into the strivings of poor whites, the resistances of indigenous peoples, and the ideas of more well-known individuals such as Adams, Jefferson, Washington, and Hamilton. Such multi-perspective narration is the best way to explain how a movement that rooted itself in opposition to the ruling class in Britain and America also sought to foist the tyrannies of race and imperialism on the new nation. Empire, capitalism, and white domination were enthusiastically embraced by most white patriots. But those subject to the new impositions continued to toil for freedom.
Americans today who are exploited, imprisoned, and marginalised by a system established at the birth of the republic can find the progenitors of their fight in the many and varied rebellions of the American Revolution. Here, I will centre the voices and aspirations of the people who produced me—for they were unquestionably at the bottom of a highly stratified society.
Early stirrings
If the American Revolution was an acceleration of the decades-long effort of peoples in British North America to get out from under the heel of arbitrary power, then the first risings were the agitations against landlordism—the tendency of English and Scottish magnates to buy up large tracts of land and force tenant farmers to work under extortionate conditions. By the 1750s the New York Hudson River Valley was wracked with tenant revolts against the landlords, which often came in the form of refusing to pay rent and provide the menial services demanded of them and essentially taking control of their patches of land and working for themselves. At other times, the rebellions were more organised and took the form of direct action against the proprietors. Similar rebellions occurred in North Carolina. Farmers in the western part of the state created the Regulator Movement, dedicated to exposing the corrupt deal-making and monopolistic practices of the eastern plutocrats who dominated colonial government and defying their authority. Throughout the 1750s, 60s, and 70s these agrarian radicals sprung up in Vermont, northeastern New York, and South Carolina.
The Regulators were not the only ones fighting for dignity, respect, and fairness so as to get their livelihood, make their way in the world, and enjoy the fruits of freedom. Enslaved Africans were also astir in North America. As rebel farmers troubled landowners across the colonies, enslaved individuals such as Venture Smith fought their own battles against the most violent, extractive, and de-humanising form of oppression in British America. Born in 1729 to a West African king, Smith’s world was turned upside down in 1736 when his father was betrayed by a neighbouring monarch and his entire family sold into slavery. Smith ended up in New England, where he married an enslaved woman and, after years of thrift and resilience, managed to purchase his own freedom and that of his wife and children. By the 1770s, he owned multiple houses, commercial boats, and other property.
Smith resisted the numerous attempts of white people to degrade and destroy him. His is an example of the many micro-rebellions that were a feature of the lives of restive Africans—who employed a mixture of provocation, negotiation, defiance, self-defence (sometimes violent), legal action, and other tactics to carve out spaces of freedom. Slavery was a life-long form of bondage that made African people property in the eyes of the law. Individuals like Venture Smith were in a state of permanent rebellion against it. None of the rebellious white populations—poor farmers, indentured servants, urban labourers and apprentices—that had begun organising in the mid-18th century thought longer and harder about the concept of liberty—in the abstract and the concrete—than enslaved people.
The Stamp Act Crisis (1765–1766) is widely recognised as setting Britain on the path of war with her American colonies. The most important thing to note about the crisis, for my purposes, is that the popular protests, including mob violence against British authorities in Boston, were as much about years of pent up frustration at those who used royal authority to accumulate wealth and promote their family and friends as it was against the actual depredations of the Act. As is most often the case with popular uprisings in history, a single egregious act can serve as a catalyst for already volatile conditions. The real worry for the colonial ruling class, as opposed to the temporarily assigned British officials, came after the Stamp Act became effectively a dead letter. Local elites through town hall assemblies and pamphleteering had—so they thought—orchestrated a revolt against the Act. They soon discovered that the vigour of the people had morphed into radicalised politics that they could no longer manipulate and control. It was they who soon had to stay on the side of the people. Where the latter led, the former followed.
The Stamp Act crisis drew heavily but not exclusively from labouring ranks. The length of the crisis enabled people to work in cooperative and coordinate ways to protest the policy, express their enmity toward Crown representatives and local oligarchs, and develop their own ideas about what constitutes a just and equitable society. And so began, in earnest, the irrepressible conflict—with the British parliament demanding that the colonies conform to its strictures and the colonists refusing to do so.
The Townsend Acts—more taxes on consumer goods—passed in 1767 set off a new wave of protest. They generated the kind of strain that made incidents such as the Boston Massacre of 1770 more likely to occur. But in the eight-year period between the Townsend Acts and the battles of Lexington and Concord, the rhetoric of the emerging patriot faction became more heated and extreme. Ordinary people had begun making leaders from amongst themselves, and these had dropped all pretence of restraint and respectability. The talk now was of Parliament’s desire to make slaves of the American colonists. This was the language of the street, and it quickly made its way into the Whig clubs of local elites and into the Massachusetts Assembly.
Black people took notice and added their voices to the fight against possible slavery by invoking the reality of actual slavery. A Petition to the Massachusetts Provincial Legislature on April 20th, 1773 signed by Peter Bestes, Sambo Freeman, Felix Holbrook, and Chester Joe—community leaders in Boston—is representative of such voices:
‘‘Sir,
The efforts made by the legislative of this province in their last sessions to free themselves from slavery, gave us, who are in that deplorable state, a high degree of satisfaction. We expect great things from men who have made such a noble stand against the design of their fellow-men to enslave them. We cannot but wish and hope Sir, that you will have the same grand object, we mean civil and religious liberty, in view in your next session.’’
The promise
The Continental Congress met for the first time on September 5th, 1774. It brought a ten-year debate conducted separately in each colony over the constitutional rights of Englishmen into a single assembly. The crisis in America had deepened. On December 16th, 1773, in an event that would become known as the Boston Tea Party, colonists dumped East India Company tea into the sea. In response, the British closed Boston Harbour, suspended the local government of the colony, and housed troops in private homes. The Congress that met in 1774 became more than a debating society. It began to take on the functions of a national government.
The thrust into self-created sovereignty became unambiguous after the battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19th, 1775 compelled the meeting of a Second Continental Congress on May 10th, 1775. This Congress assumed the powers of a provisional wartime government, forming a Continental Army and appointing George Washington as Commander-in-Chief. The thirteen colonies were now in outright revolt and at war with the mother country. The boldest response of the latter came six months later when Lord Dunmore, the Governor-General of Virginia, made his proclamation that any slave who joined his Ethiopian Regiment would be set free.
There are a few things to note about this proclamation. First, it was not made in the spirit of abolitionist fervour but to undermine the revolutionary cause and diminish any material benefit the rebels might gain from the enslaved. Second, it did not lead to some mass movement of reluctant southern colonists toward independence. Though Dunmore’s proclamation was surprising in its unprecedented move of putting ‘free’ and ‘Negroes’ in the same sentence of a government document, the news of it was hardly shocking. Planters in the South had been accusing royal officials of encouraging slave agitation for months. With good reason. Enslaved people had been joining British and loyalist forces since 1774 in exchange for their freedom and encouraged the British to issue a general proclamation of emancipation. Dunmore’s move also changed Washington’s mind about letting free and enslaved Blacks serve in the Continental Army. However, the fear of further inciting already irascible bands of white men made him unwilling to allow the recruitment of large numbers of Black Americans in the fight against King George and his parliament.
A permanent break with Britain was seen as inevitable and the Congress, in June of 1776, established a committee to draft a declaration that would announce the separation. Congress found Thomas Jefferson’s original Declaration of Independence much too specific and dramatic in its accusations that King George was responsible for everything from attacks by indigenous people on frontier settlements to the slave trade and slavery itself. Their cuts and revisions were made for the purpose of increasing ambiguity and decreasing Jefferson’s charged precision. And it must be said that the final copy was less outrageously hypocritical than the first draft, though still relentlessly dishonest.
Yet the fine sentiments expressed in the Declaration were sufficient to solicit a response by the ever-alert Black gaze. There is nothing more dangerous than an idea. Once let loose in the world, it is likely to be taken up by any vigilant and active mind that encounters it and turned to its purpose. Thus, the response of Lemuel Haynes, who would join the ranks of the Continental Army and go on to serve as a Calvinist minister to white congregations in New Hampshire for thirty years. In his Liberty Further Extended (late 1776), he writes:
‘‘To affirm, that an Englishman has a right to his liberty, is a truth which has Been so clearly Evinced, Especially of late, that to spend time in illustrating this, would be But Superfluous tautology. But I query, whether Liberty is so constructed a principle as to be Confin’d to any nation under Heaven; nay, I think it is not hyperbolical to affirm, that Even an affrican, has Equally as good a right to his Liberty in common with Englishmen.’’
He goes on to say: ‘‘And the main proposition, which I intend for some Brief illustration is this, Namely, That an African, or, in other terms, that a Negro may Justly Challenge, and has an undeniable right to his Liberty: Consequently, the practice of Slave-keeping, which so much abounds in this Land is illicit.’’
Flailing to victory
The Continental Army was filled with the poor, the landless, the desperate. Most of the propertied eligible white men tired of serving after the first year of war—1775—and went back to their farms and businesses. The British defeated the Continentals in the North, taking New York City in 1776 and Philadelphia in 1777. Predominantly Tory and loyalist, New York City would remain the headquarters of the British High Command until 1783.
General Washington proved expert in two things: losing battles, and keeping his defeated army together and on the move. He was also a skilled politician who knew how to shore up his image as the hope of the nation among the Continental Congress. Even after a string of military disasters, there was no prospect that the commanding general of the rebel army would either surrender or be replaced by someone who might. The British therefore decided to move the war further South in 1778, in hopes of squeezing the Continental Army geographically and logistically.
In the mid-Atlantic, in addition to being poor, most soldiers were recently arrived migrants from Scotland, Ireland, England, and Germany. And in Maryland, the provisional state government emptied the jails and pressed convicts into service. Washington preferred these dregs of the earth. He believed they could more easily endure the hardships and deprivations of a guerrilla war, whereas the yeoman farmer, city merchant, and skilled tradesman, used to the comforts of hearth and home, were harder to discipline, restrain, and inure to the conditions of camp life and the horrors of battle. The American Revolution after 1776 was, as the old cliché has it, a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.
But there was another fight quite separate from that dictated by American politicians—in and out of uniform. This was the white settler war against the indigenous nations along the western frontier. Most indigenous people concluded that preserving their political independence and territorial sovereignty meant siding with those whom American colonists had denounced as trampling their natural rights. The British and Americans had succeeded in keeping Native Americans out of the war through 1776. The hunger of poor white farmers for the latter’s land was too great and, given the collapse of royal power in the West, they eventually attacked. Frontier settlers of British extraction, unlike their French counterparts, had no desire to co-habit with indigenous people. They wanted their land and the game that roamed it. This led to a hatred of indigenous people and a desire to drive them west and murder them. This exterminationist impulse set off a cycle of vengeance along the frontiers of New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina. These encounters included massacres of noncombatants by both sides, but they were always precipitated by white atrocities against Native Americans.
This separate war of conquest made more enemies for the patriots and deprived their cause of needed manpower. The shift to the South also brought to light the internal enemy—rebellious slaves. South Carolina, to take one example, had a substantial Maroon settlement that was secluded in the swamps and woodlands of Colleton County in the south-west edge of the state. It could have provided a staging ground for insurrection. But there was never any evidence of a plan for the organising of large-scale revolt by this free Black enclave. The summoning of such a coordinated scheme in the white imagination was enough to cause alarm in the South. And the actual threat presented by restless slaves willing to help the British led to another problem for the American cause, best illustrated through the example of the continent’s wealthiest and most populous colony—Virginia.
When the war moved to the South in 1778, poor whites in Virginia refused to enlist for poor pay, and they resisted all attempts to draft them into service. Officers and many of the propertied enlisted would not answer the call to arms for fear of leaving their farms and plantations in the hands of enslaved people, who were inclined to join the British whenever they were near and invite them to confiscate rebel property. The absence of the prosperous and the reasons for it were not lost on the less fortunate who complained that slave owners had people to labour for them. Poor men had no such help when they were called for militia duty. In short, the entrenchment of Virginia elites in slavery worsened class divisions and further weakened war efforts.
Hemmed in on every side by strategic disadvantage, Washington finally relented and gave his blessing to the state of Rhode Island’s proposal in 1778 to fill its depleted regiments with individuals from its considerable enslaved population. The state offered freedom to ‘every able-bodied Negro, Mullato, or Indian Man slave in this state…to serve during the continuance of the present war with Great Britain.’ Enslaved men who enlisted could only do so with the consent of their owners. Many owners embraced the offer. It relieved them of having to serve and the state compensated them for their lost property at the market price. The First Rhode Island Regiment became almost entirely Black and indigenous below the rank of corporal. It would go on to serve with distinction at the battle of Newport in the summer of 1778 and at Yorktown in September of 1781.
The American Revolution was a war of attrition. It wore down the material, financial, and human resources of Britain and America. Having withdrawn themselves from the financial system of the mother country, the new states turned to the Continental Congress to finance the war. But the Congress had no power to levy taxes for this purpose, and the states had too little money to make ends meet. All Congress could do was issue large quantities of paper currency that amounted to IOUs, while hoping for loans from France and Holland. The two latter would eventually come through for the fledgling nation thanks in no small part to Benjamin Franklin in France and John Adams in Holland; but not before the beast of inflation wreaked havoc on the people most vulnerable to its ravages: the working poor.
By 1780, America’s military supply and financial system had all but crumbled. The soldiers were unpaid, starving, and freezing to death. Nothing signalled an inevitable American victory in 1781. In January of the same year, a mutiny broke out among soldiers quartered in Morristown, New Jersey. The enlisted men were only after the same goals as the cause they fought for: social justice and equal treatment. Washington was not surprised by the uprising and got an alarmed Congress to parlay with the mutineers, which resulted in amnesty, promises to honour agreed to terms of enlistment, and to give them backpay. Nearly half the soldiers were discharged, the remainder were furloughed.
I shall not go too deeply into the British decision to end the war. It must suffice to say that the country had a global empire to defend against France. It was still recovering, financially, from the Seven Years’ War and did not want to sink any more money into fighting the colonials. Besides, for strategic purposes, Britain still had its outposts in Canada to keep watch over the French in North America. And there was no reason that an equitable economic settlement could not be reached. In fact, the trade agreements signed by Britain and the Confederation of States were quite lucrative for planters in the American South and merchants on both sides of the Atlantic.
Joining the empire club
It is not my intention to cover the direct antecedents of the Constitutional Convention, the drafting of that document, and the establishment of the United States of America. I instead wanted to highlight what John Adams characterised as the diverse principles fought for during the American Revolution.
What followed the Revolution in no sense amounted to its betrayal. The American Revolution intensified and accelerated trends already underway in the former thirteen colonies: the growth of white working-class populism; the systematic slaughter and forced migration of indigenous people and the stealing of their lands; and the westward expansion of slavery and the development and spread of a racialised political order. On this last point, the Revolution brought white people at various levels in direct confrontation with Black political aspirations. The shattering of the old order meant the creation of a new one. White people could no longer take for granted a system that put them at the top and everyone else at the bottom. The Revolution forced the question of racial equality. And it was easily answered by the newly formed white citizenry, as the subsequent history of the republic shows.
The British surrender at Yorktown may have ended the carnage in the East, but it did nothing to end the war in the West. The violent grab for indigenous land went on. The blood lust of white men on the frontier was insatiable; their genocidal incursions could not be checked by the British and would not be stopped by the American state governments. The increasingly crowded and economically crippled towns of the eastern seaboard found a relief valve through continued western conquest. White settlers poured across the Appalachians. American empire was created in act long before it was conceived in thought.
It is true that the U.S. Constitution embodied Alexander Hamilton’s desire to yoke the interests of financiers to the national government and vice versa, and that this scheme was integral to the formation of American capitalism and an American ruling class. But these systems were challenged by various populist movements throughout the early to mid-nineteenth century. The destruction of indigenous civilization and the suppression of Black freedom had constant white support. Long before capitalism took firm root in the republic, empire was deeply planted. The new nation shook off its British masters only to rejoin them in the same imperial club.
This is who we are
‘‘Though our faces are black, yet we are men; and though many among us cannot write, yet we all have the feelings and passions of men, and are as anxious to enjoy the birth-right of the human race as those who from our ignorance draw an argument against our Petition; when that Petition has in view the diffusion of Knowledge among the African race, by unfettering their thoughts, and giving full scope to the energy of their minds.’’
This passage is extracted from a letter written by James Forten—one of the wealthiest Black Americans in the nineteenth century and also a Navy veteran, philanthropist, publisher, and abolitionist—in 1800 to a white ally in Congress. The particulars of the petition in question are uncertain. What is clear is that it concerned the education of Black people in Philadelphia. Black Americans never doubted their humanity and refused to accept anything less than equal treatment as citizens of the new nation. Anti-Black violence and racialised tyranny were given a new energy and urgency during the American Revolution, but they were responded to by a reinvigorated Black freedom movement—a movement that would continue to challenge and break down white tyranny and insist on the promise of equality and social justice for all.
The fate of indigenous people was of course very different. They continued the military struggle against white settlers well into the late nineteenth century and made the latter pay with blood for each step they took into Native lands. And though eventually the once powerful armies of indigenous nations were no more, they remained determined to preserve their culture and identity.
One of the more popular refrains to the savage cruelty exhibited by the once and current administration has been that ‘This is not who we are.’ I shall add my voice to the many who have already disproven such nonsense. This is who we are. The history above has been an attempt to show how our first revolution (the second being post-Civil War Reconstruction) played a part in making the U.S. who we are today. The current administration’s glib and almost cartoonish attitude toward killing at home and abroad should shock every morally healthy person. But if we Americans knew our history, it would not surprise us. The same white settler mentality has always informed domestic and foreign policy. An imaginary interlocutor for this way of thinking might summarise it as such: ‘‘We must slaughter the Indians before they slaughter us. And there are Indians everywhere! We must keep the Blacks in line and in their place or else there will be no controlling them—and they must be controlled.’’
The rise of a more technocratic society and the real gains that marginalised people have taken for themselves have somewhat softened, though most of the time only obscured, the aims of this attitude; but the realisation of these aims has been disturbingly steady and persistent. It’s the current administration’s bluntness that we are unaccustomed to and the recapitulation of what amounts to the non-governmental white supremacist infrastructures of old that most offends us.
Though I have little hope for the immediate future of political and social democracy in America, I do believe in the American people. Many of the poor whites who rioted in the camps of the Continental Army would go on to tyrannise their Black and indigenous brothers and sisters. But some of them would also fight the attempts of early capitalist organisations to plunder and exploit them. That impulse and the populist tradition it became cannot be dismissed, despite its recurrent pairing with racism and xenophobia. American culture has come to favour a number of peculiar traits—boosterism and self-inflation among them—that make it hard for us to break out of our rather narrow perspective of how the world is. But there is always hope that, over time, more people will be made to face certain unavoidable facts and will be willing to acknowledge and reckon with illusions they have so readily taken as truth.
Though it is interpretative, the brief history I have given of the American Revolution on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of my county of birth is neither idealistic nor mythological. Ideologically left wing? For sure. But it is also realistic, in the sense of being inclusive and full of particulars. For the observable, the concrete, and the many-sided are congenial to the inquiring spirit of historical research and analysis. That I chose to tell the story of the Revolution from the perspective of those at the bottom of American society was meant to illustrate that rebellion occurred at many levels, through many means, and for many purposes. Vicious, rapacious, and operationalised white domination grew alongside the expanding American empire. But for every John C. Calhoun there has been a Harriet Tubman. For every Jefferson Davis there has been a Frederick Douglass. For every Ben Tillman there has been an Ida B. Wells. For every Josephus Daniels there has been a William Monroe Trotter. For every Phillis Schlafly there has been an Angela Davis. There has always been a fight for America and there always will be. Freedom is for those who struggle for it, and American history makes clear our determination in this regard.
Bibliographical sketch
This section is for readers who like to follow-up on some of the persons and events treated briefly in the article.
I have already mentioned R.R. Palmer The Age of the Democratic: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (1959). Gary B. Nash’s The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (2006) is still the best book on the Revolution from the bottom-up perspective. It is, however, filled with idealistic zeal. A more recent book that tells the story from the same perspective is Woody Holton’s Liberty is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution (2021). Theodore Draper’s A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution (1996) dispenses with idealism completely and deals with the raw self-interest of white merchants and planters in America and the aims and interests of the British government.
Read also Julie Winch’s A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten (2003), Richard S. Newman’s Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (2008), Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008), and the Library of America’s recent anthology Black Writers of the Founding Era (2023).
For more on the dynamics of free Blacks, indigenous people, and the Spanish empire in the West, read Kathleen Duval’s Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (2015). For the white settler war against indigenous people, read Patrick Griffin’s American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (2008).
I could not get into the making of the Constitution. I recommend reading William Hogeland’s The Hamilton Scheme: An Epic Tale of Money and Power and the American Founding (2024). But one should not be lured into believing that the Constitution was a product of a rich men’s conspiracy. To get a broader view, read Woody Holton’s Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (2008).
For another irreverent view of the founders, read Gore Vidal’s historical novel Burr (1973) and his monograph Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson (2004).
Christopher D. Reid is a James McCune Smith PhD Scholar in History at the University of Glasgow. He has an undergraduate degree in Political Science and graduate degrees in Human Relations and in Philosophy. His doctoral thesis examines the role of the colonial racial state in the development of finance capitalism in the early modern British Atlantic.
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