The successful 1776 revolt against British rule in North America has
been hailed almost universally as a great step forward for humanity. But
the Africans then living in the colonies overwhelmingly sided with the
British. In this trailblazing book, Gerald Horne shows that in the
prelude to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed all but inevitable in
London, delighting Africans as much as it outraged slaveholders, and
sparking the colonial revolt.
Prior to 1776, anti-slavery sentiments were deepening throughout Britain
and in the Caribbean, rebellious Africans were in revolt. For European
colonists in America, the major threat to their security was a foreign
invasion combined with an insurrection of the enslaved. It was a real
and threatening possibility that London would impose abolition
throughout the colonies - a possibility the founding fathers feared
would bring slave rebellions to their shores. To forestall it, they went
to war.
The so-called Revolutionary War, Horne writes, was in part a
counter-revolution, a conservative movement that the founding fathers
fought in order to preserve their right to enslave others. The
Counter-Revolution of 1776 brings us to a radical new understanding of
the traditional heroic creation myth of the United States.
