Preface Introduction 1 Rebellious Africans: How Caribbean Slavery Came to the Mainland 2 Free Trade in Africans? Did the Glorious Revolution Unleash the Slave Trade? 3 Revolt! Africans Conspire with the French and Spanish 4 Building a "White" Pro-Slavery Wall: The Construction of Georgia 5 The Stono Uprising: Will the Africans Become Masters and the Europeans Slaves? 6 Arson, Murders, Poisonings, Shipboard Insurrections: The Fruits of the Accelerating Slave Trade 7 The Biggest Losers: Africans and the Seven Years' War 8 From Havana to Newport, Slavery Transformed: Settlers Rebel against London 9 Abolition in London: Somerset's Case and the North American Aftermath 10 The Counter-Revolution of 1776 Notes Index 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.
"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 1776, from the questions asked to the comparisons drawn, is
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*
"This utterly original book argues that story of the American
Revolution has been told without a major piece of the puzzle in
place. The rise of slavery and the British empire created a pattern
of imperial war, slave resistance, and arming of slaves that led to
instability and, ultimately, an embrace of independence. Horne
integrates the British West Indies, Florida, and the entire
colonial period with recent work on the Carolinas and Virginia; the
result is a larger synthesis that puts slave-based profits and
slave restiveness front and center. The Americans re-emerge not
just as anti-colonial free traders but as particularly devoted to
an emerging color line and to their control over the future of a
slavery based economy. A remarkable and important contribution to
our understanding of the creation of the United States."
*David Waldstreicher, Temple University*
"The Counter-Revolution of 1776 asks us to rethink the fundamental
narrative of American history and to interrogate nationalist myths.
Horne demands that historians consider slavery not as the exception
to the republican promise of the American Revolution but rather as
the norm insofar as protecting slavery was a fundamental cause of
colonial revolt."
*The New England Quarterly*
"History books have painted a narrative of the U.S. founding that
any student can recite: Colonists, straining against the tyranny of
the British crown, revolted in the name of freedom, liberty and
justice for all. But in recent years, historians have revisited
that conventional story, examining the important role slaves played
for Britain in its quest to quell colonists. Now, in a new book,
historian Gerald Horne argues it was the desire to maintain slavery
that was the prime motivator of the uprising . . . . Horne
revisit[s] the period leading up to 1776 to find out how slavery in
North America and the British colonies influenced the
revolution."
*The Kojo Nnamdi Show, DC Public Radio*
"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*
"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 . . . . Horne's 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*
"In The Counter Revolution of 1776, Horne marshals considerable
research to paint a picture of a U.S. that wasn't founded on
liberty, with slavery as an uncomfortable and aberrant remnant of a
pre-Enlightenment past, but rather was founded on slavery as a
defense of 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*
"[I]t is Horne's book that has the most to teach about the complex
intersections of race, class, religion, and ethnicity."
*Cambridge Humanities Review*
"With The 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*
"Gerald Horne's Counter Revolution of 1776 is a critical
contribution in the struggle for clarity around one of the most
misconceived periods of history. Horne's work provides the vast
historical narrative that proves how this premise is false. He
centers his analysis on the inherently counter-revolutionary nature
of what led to the colonists desire for succession."
*Black Agenda Report*
"Horne returns with insights about the American Revolution that
fracture even more some comforting myths about the Founding
Fathers.The author does not tiptoe through history's grassy fields;
he swings a scythe . . . . Clear and sometimes-passionate prose
shows us the persistent nastiness underlying our founding
narrative."
*Kirkus Reviews*
"The Counter Revolution of 1776 drives us to a radical new
understanding of the traditional heroic creation myth of the United
States."
*Philadelphia Tribune*
"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*
"Every person committed 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*
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