The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America - Hardcover

Horne, Gerald

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1479893404 ISBN 13: 9781479893409

Publisher: NYU Press, 2014

Synopsis

Illuminates how the preservation of slavery was a motivating factor for the Revolutionary War

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.

About this title

About the Author

Gerald Horne is Moores Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, and has published three dozen books including, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the USA and Race War! White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire.

Review

"The Counter Revolution of 1776drives us to a radical new understanding of the traditional heroic creation myth of the United States." (Philadelphia Tribune)

"Horne, Moores Professor of history and African-American studies at the University of Houston, confidently and convincingly reconstructs the origin myth of the United States grounded in the context of slavery . . . . Hornes study is rich, not dry; his research is meticulous, thorough, fascinating, and thought-provoking. Horne emphasizes the importance of considering this alternate telling of our American origin myth and how such a founding still affects our nation today." (STARRED Publishers Weekly)

"The underlying truth of the 'so-called' American Revolution is finally now out of the bag, and told in its fullest glory for the first time here. And what Professor Horne has discovered through meticulous research is nothing short of revolutionary in itself." (OpEdNews)

"Hornereturns with insights about the American Revolution that fracture even more some comforting myths about the Founding Fathers.The author does not tiptoe through historys grassy fields; he swings a scythe . . . . Clear and sometimes-passionate prose shows us the persistent nastiness underlying our founding narrative." (Kirkus)

"In The Counter Revolution of 1776,Horne marshals considerable research to paint a picture of a U.S. that wasnt founded on liberty, with slavery as an uncomfortable and aberrant remnant of a pre-Enlightenment past, but rather was foundedonslavery as adefenseof slavery with the language of liberty and equality used as window dressing. If hes right, in other words, then the traditional narrative of the creation of the U.S. is almost completely wrong." (Salon.com)

"Every personcommitted to the struggle for racial justice, liberation, and equality, and who struggles every day with the difficulties of forging unity between Black and white, needs to read this book." (Portside.org)

"The Counter-Revolution of 1776 shows the centrality of slavery in colonial American life, north as well as south. It demonstrates how enslaved peoples struggles merged with international and imperial politics as the British empire frayed. Gerald Horne finds among white American revolutionaries people who wanted to defend slavery against real threats. He addresses how in the United States, alone among the new western hemisphere republics, slavery thrived rather than waned, until its cataclysmic destruction during the Civil War." (Edward Countryman,Southern Methodist University)

"Nearly everything about Gerald Homes lively The Counter-Revolution of 1776from the questions asked to the comparisons drawnis provocative. And if Professor Home is right, nearly everything American historians thought we knew about the birth of the nation is wrong." (Woody Holton,author of Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in)

"In a refreshing take on the independence movement, Horne places slavery and its expansion in North American during the early eighteenth century at the center if the conflict between London and its increasingly nervous and truculent colonies across the Atlantic . . . . This is an important book for both its novelty in a crowded field and its implications . . . . Eminently readable, this is a book that should be on any undergraduate reading list and deserves to be taken very seriously in the ongoing discussion as to the American republic's origins." (The American Historical Review)

"WithThe Counter-Revolution of 1776, Gerald Horne refigures the origins of the American & revolution to offer a challenging and potentially explosive critique of foundational myths of liberty and rebellion." (American Historical Review)

Edition details

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1479893404
• ISBN 13: 9781479893409
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 363