These Truths: A History of the United States

The English called the Indigenous ruler Wahunsunacock, Powhatan, or “king,” for diplomacy. James I, Elizabeth’s successor, regarded himself as king of Virginia, thereby making Powhatan his subject. James believed that he had been divinely appointed, making him more determined than Elizabeth to create a colony in the Americas. In 1606, he issued a charter allowing men to settle in Virginia. This emphasis on settlement encouraged trade with Powhatan instead of war. Still, the settlers dug for minerals. James also granted land to two corporations: the Virginia Company and the Plymouth Company. Virginia, then extended “from what is now South Carolina to Canada” (33). England’s colonies would be commercial and comprised of “free men, not vassals” (33). The English, who were also Protestants, would teach converts to read Scripture and set up churches.

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, the English set up over two dozen colonies, comprising Eastern coastal settlements and rice fields in Georgia and the Caribbean. To settle Virginia, the Virginia Company gathered both soldiers from England’s religious wars and men who were eager to make fortunes. John Smith, who was later elected the colony’s governor, was among these former fighters in religious wars. While there, he crowned Powhatan “king” and draped over the chief’s shoulders the scarlet robe that James I had sent. Meanwhile, the English colonists starved and sent Smith back to England, complaining that, under his rule, Virginia had become a hell. In the winter of 1609-10, 500 colonists were reduced to 60 as a result of starvation. Soon they resorted to cannibalism. England received word of these conditions. In 1622, the indigenous people rose up against the English and killed hundreds. The colony recovered with the help of a cash crop—tobacco, a plant then found only in the Americas and “long cultivated by the natives” (37).

In July 1619, “two men from each of eleven parts of the colony” met in the House of Burgesses, “the first self-governing body in the colonies” (37). A month later, 20 Africans arrived in Virginia—the first enslaved people in British America. They came from what is now Angola and were seized by the English from a Portuguese ship.

In the summer of 1620, the Mayflower “lay anchored in the harbor of the English town of Plymouth” (38). There were around 60 passengers on the ship—41 of them were men who had clashed with the Church of England. They brought their wives, children, and servants. William Bradford was the chronicler of these people whom he called “pilgrims.” He also became the governor of the colony, in addition to its primary historian. The pilgrims, Bradford explained, had left England for Holland a decade earlier. They settled in Leiden, a university town known for its religious tolerance. Then, after 10 years in exile, they decided to start anew elsewhere. They thought “of those vast and unpeopled countries of America […] devoid of all civil inhabitants,” Bradford wrote (38). They sailed for 66 days and ended up on the coast of Cape Cod, due to drifting off course. They had intended to sail to Virginia. Unwilling to risk the choppy seas again, they rowed to the nearest shore. On the day they arrived, they signed the Mayflower Compact—a pledge to form a civic body.

Unlike the men who settled in Virginia, those who set up New England had no charter from the king. They were fleeing from the king. In England, members of Parliament also questioned James’s “divine right” to rule. The battle that ensued between the king and his government would send tens of thousands more exiles to North America. Those who immigrated to the colonies would have within them “a deep and abiding spirit of rebellion against arbitrary rule” (39).

John Winthrop, one of another band of church dissenters known as Puritans, joined an expedition to found a colony in Massachusetts Bay. In 1630, Winthrop became the first governor of Massachusetts. In his address “A Model of Christian Charity,” he described the union between his people as one held together “by the ligaments of love” (43). Roger Williams, who had once been Edward Coke’s stenographer, arrived with the Massachusetts Bay mission. For his commitment to religious tolerance, he was banished. The following year, he founded Rhode Island. Colonies that were not founded on religious principles were still created by dissenters of some sort.

English migrants arrived as families and, sometimes, as entire towns, “hoping to found a Christian commonwealth, a religious community bound to the common wealth of all” (44). Their understanding of the world was hierarchical. Their family units were also small commonwealths, in which the father was the head. They built towns around land owned in common. They also believed that everything happened for a reason—all events were ordained by God, particularly the accretion of wealth.

In 1636, Puritans in New England founded Harvard College with the intention of educating both Indigenous and English youth. The following year, in Connecticut, colonists and the Pequots began warring with each other. After the colonists won, they sold captured Pequots as slaves to English settlers in the Caribbean. In 1638, the first enslaved Africans arrived in Salem, Massachusetts on board a ship called Desire. They had been traded for the Pequots. The ship also carried cotton and tobacco. About half of colonial New Englanders’ wealth would come from profits derived from the sugar grown by those enslaved in the Caribbean.

Though the English came late to slave-trading, once they entered the trade, they quickly dominated it. Between 1600 and 1800, 1 million Europeans migrated to the British colonies, while 2.5 million Africans were forcibly transported there. Though they died faster than the European settlers, they still outnumbered their free counterparts by “two and a half to one” (45). While the English had previously told stories of the cruelty of the Spanish and condemned the Portuguese for trading Africans, they abandoned these judgments by the 1640s. By then, English settlers in the Barbados had started to plant sugar. The planters purchased Africans from the Spanish and Dutch and, later, from the English. In 1663, the English founded the Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading with Africa. In the final quarter of that century, English ships, piloted and crewed by English captains and sailors, carried over 250 million men, women, and children across the Atlantic in shackles. Most of the Africans were Bantu speakers, while others were Akan and some Igbo.

Having found no clear guidelines from antiquity or modern Western civilization on how to determine who would be enslaved and who would be free, the English settlers created new practices and laws in which they established the division between “blacks” and “whites.” They used a Roman law, which declared that one’s position in society was determined by whatever one’s mother was, to ensure that no children begat by white men and Black women would be free.

While English colonists sought to justify the enslavement of Africans, the English king’s subjects struggled over his “divine right” to rule. As a result of this battle, the notion of divine right was replaced by another idea: the people’s sovereignty. English American colonists rewrote laws to determine the relationship between governors and the governed. Indigenous tribes, meanwhile, revolted again and again in the final quarter of the 17th century. New England Algonquians, led by Metacom, tried to oust the colonists by attacking a series of towns. As a result of their efforts, over half of all English towns were either abandoned or destroyed. Metacom was later captured, shot, and beheaded. His severed head was set on a pike. The colonists then sold his nine-year-old son to the Caribbean, while a slave uprising broke out in Barbados. The Barbadian legislature passed a law banning the purchase of indigenous peoples from New England, believing their presence would help stoke rebellion. Native peoples also attacked English towns in Maryland and Virginia.

William Berkeley, governor of Virginia, refused to retaliate against warring tribes, causing a colonist named Nathaniel Bacon to lead 500 men to Jamestown in revolt. Bacon and his men, in what came to be called Bacon’s Rebellion, burned the town to the ground. Before Bacon’s Rebellion, poor white men in the region had little political power. Most were “debtors or convicts or indentured servants”—neither enslaved nor quite free (56). After the rebellion, such men were granted the right to vote. The rebellion also helped to solidify race as a marker between who was enslaved and who was free—"to be black was to be a slave” (56).

Meanwhile, in 1692, 19 men and women were convicted of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts. Those declared witches were likely coping with the trauma of being attacked by indigenous tribes. They repeatedly described the devil as a tawny or brown man. Some described the devil as “a black man.” Both descriptions led Boston minister Cotton Mather to think that Black people and native peoples were evil.

Uprisings of enslaved Africans broke out throughout North America. In Jamaica, which had a majority Black population, a Black man named Cudjoe built towns in the mountains that the English called “maroon” towns. The First Maroon War ended in 1739 with a treaty in which the British agreed to acknowledge the five maroon towns and freed both Cudjoe and his followers. The formerly enslaved men were granted over 1,500 acres of land. Rumors of rebellion in the Caribbean reached the Carolinas and Georgia within weeks. Slaves, like colonists, traded gossip with those who arrived on ships. In 1739, during the Stono Rebellion, over 100 Black men killed 20 white people in South Carolina—“a colony where blacks outnumbered whites by two to one” (58). The rebels hoped to go to Spanish Florida, where the Spanish had promised fugitive slaves freedom. They were led by a man from Angola named Jemmy who spoke his native Kikongo, English, and Portuguese. He could also read and write.

In response to the Stono Rebellion, the South Carolina legislature passed “An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing Negroes.” The law restricted the movement of enslaved Black people, developed standards for their treatment, created punishments for their crimes, and explained procedures for their prosecution and set the rules for presenting evidence at their trials. The law also made it illegal for anyone to teach a slave how to read or write. Meanwhile, literacy was growing among white colonists, who had started to print pamphlets and books, as well as their own newspapers. The first printing press in the New World developed in Boston in 1639. The colonies’ first newspaper, Publick Occurrences, appeared in Boston in 1690. At first, the news comprised developments from Europe. Increasingly, the newspapers reported more about what occurred in colonies. They began to question authority and insisted on their liberties, particularly the liberty of the press. Benjamin Franklin was one of the fiercest advocates of freedom of the press.

A major battle over the freedom of the press occurred in New York, where German immigrant John Peter Zenger published the New-York Weekly Journal, founded in 1733. The newspaper frequently criticized the governor of New York, William Cosby, who had been appointed by the king. Thin-skinned and imperious, Cosby ordered that all copies of the paper be burned and had Zenger arrested for seditious libel. Zenger was tried before New York’s Supreme Court and was represented by Andrew Hamilton, an attorney from Philadelphia. Hamilton argued that everything Zenger had printed about the governor’s misbehavior was true, leading the jury to find Zenger not guilty. Cosby died the following year. While white New Yorkers believed that if a governor misbehaved they had the right to remove him from office, they also worried that enslaved Black people in New York would similarly depose them from power. They were especially concerned because many of those enslaved in New York had come from the Caribbean, particularly from islands known for slave uprisings. Their fear led them to arrest and imprison over 150 Black men in the city. Some were hanged, while others were burned at the stake.

By 1750, the colonies had regionally distinct characteristics. New England settlers had the greatest longevity, while those in the South had a high mortality rate and were outnumbered by enslaved Africans. The middle colonies had a mixed population of European immigrants and a population healthier than those in the South and the Caribbean, but not as healthy as those in New England. However, there were few differences in the manners and characters of the people. A religious revival, led by the English evangelical George Whitefield, was partly responsible for making them more alike. Whitefield told his followers that they could be reborn in the body of Christ. He also “emphasized the divinity of ordinary people” and targeted farmers, artisans, and servants when proselytizing (68).

In this chapter, Lepore illustrates how the settlement of North America depended, too, on the ambitions of new monarchs. Commercial interests were often tied to missionary ones—that is, James I sought to spread Protestantism, perhaps to counteract the increasing influence of Catholicism in French, Portuguese, and Spanish colonies. The settlement of Plymouth County was, unlike Columbus’s landing in Haiti, a matter largely of happenstance and good fortune. The Pilgrims and Puritans who arrived had a different purpose—freedom from religious tyranny. The precedent they set contrasted sharply from the avaricious interests of previous settlers though their vision was somewhat aligned to the idea of America as an Eden: an untouched land in which they could begin anew and live in relative peace. In this vision, they had discounted those who already lived in the Americas, as well as their will to preserve their own autonomy and ways of life.

By pointing out the involvement of the Northern colonies in the slave trade, Lepore debunks the myth that the North had little to do with slavery. Not only did these colonies and, later, states engage in the slave trade and slaveholding until the early 19th century, they continued to depend on the profits of cash crops, harvested by slave labor. Later, they would be particularly dependent on the labor that harvested the cotton supplying the textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts.

Lepore’s chronicles of the slave rebellions throughout the Americas also debunks the myth of Black docility—the belief that reinforces white supremacy by claiming that a lack of resistance among enslaved Africans fostered the institution of slavery. Lepore enumerates and describes rebellions in the Caribbean, particularly, but also in the US, from the 1739 Stono Rebellion to Gabriel Prosser’s attempted revolt in 1800 to Nat Turner’s massive uprising in 1831 to John Brown’s failed attempt to seize Harper’s Ferry on the eve of the Civil War.

Lepore juxtaposes these uprisings which, for many years later were not contextualized as freedom struggles, with Bacon’s Rebellion, which helped lead to the use of race as a marker of one’s citizenship status.

In the 1690s, both racial and gender lines were solidified. Women who behaved outside of the realm of respectability could be severely and mortally punished. “Black” Africans and “brown” Indigenous peoples became agents of evil in the white imagination, partly to demonize those whom white people struggled against for power and dominance. That control came to include restrictions on Black people’s access to information, which would later evolve into vociferous limitations on free speech in the South. Southern states, such as South Carolina, which had a large population of enslaved Black people—so large that it outnumbered the white population—were most dependent on slave labor and, therefore, strongly opposed to any instigations against slavery both internally and externally. Even in New York, a city with a relatively small Black population, the fear of Black dominance was palpable. This suggests that, since the Colonial Era, American political and social structures were built on the notion of hierarchy—the dominant seeking to maintain control over the dominated while living in constant fear of being toppled.

In 1757, Britain and France were attacking each other’s ships, continuing a war that had broken out three years earlier. The fighting had begun in Pennsylvania, as the British had wanted “land that the French had claimed in the Ohio Valley” (76). A skirmish broke out in May 1754, when a small group of Virginia militiamen and their indigenous allies, led by 21-year-old Lieutenant Colonel George Washington, “ambushed a French camp” (76). Washington, however, was inexperienced in battle and the attack proved disastrous for the colonists.

Several weeks later, colonial delegates met in Albany to consider Franklin’s proposal that they set up a common defense. Ultimately, the assemblies rejected the idea. The French and Indian War broke out soon thereafter. William Pitt, Britain’s new secretary of state, was “determined to win the war and settle Britain’s claims in North America” (77). Pitt had also promised the colonies that the Crown would pay for the war. However, Britain broke that promise and, instead, levied taxes on the colonists. This decision would lead the colonists to seek independence.

In 1759, weeks after the British and American forces defeated the French in Quebec, George III was crowned king of Great Britain. The new king, out of fear of more Indigenous uprisings, “issued a proclamation that no colonists could settle west of the Appalachian Mountains,” though many colonists already resided there (80).

In 1764, to help pay for the debts from the Seven Years’ War and to “fund the defense of the colonies,” Parliament passed the American Revenue Act, also called the Sugar Act (80). The colonists argued that because they had no representatives in Parliament the legislative body “had no right to levy taxes on them” (81). Samuel Adams, a Massachusetts assemblyman, suggested that the levying of taxes without legal representation reduced the colonists from subjects to slaves.

The following year, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, which “required placing government-issued paper stamps on all manner of printed paper” (81). Those who opposed the act called themselves the Sons of Liberty, modeled on the Sons of Liberty in 1750s Ireland. They also believed that they were rebelling against slavery. John Adams invoked this sentiment when he declared that the colonists would not be the “negroes” of British creditors. The tax most severely penalized those who printed newspapers. Printers throughout the colonies complained that “Parliament was trying to reduce the colonists to a state of slavery by destroying the freedom of the press” (82).

One month before the Stamp Act was set to take effect, 27 delegates from nine colonies met in New York’s city hall. They called themselves the Stamp Act Congress. The congress declared that the colonists were to consent to taxes or have them levied by their own representatives. In 1766, Benjamin Franklin appeared before the House of Commons to explain why colonists would not pay the tax. He told the members that the colonists’ respect for Parliament had lessened considerably, and that their understanding of common rights, under the Magna Carta, had influenced their aversion to Parliament’s exercise of this authority.

Meanwhile, colonists in the West Indies hardly complained about the Stamp Act. They were too worried about slave insurrections. In the British Caribbean, Black people outnumbered white people eight to one. A quarter of all British troops stationed in British North America were in the West Indies. In exchange for this protection, the Caribbean planters were very willing to pay a tax on stamps. The planters also blamed the colonists on the mainland for stirring a desire for liberty among those enslaved. The American colonists, on the other hand, regarded the West Indian planters as slavish and timid in response to the Crown. Their response was a boycott on Caribbean goods.

Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in 1766. A week after the news reached Boston, the town voted to abolish slavery. Pamphleteers advocated for the abolition of slavery throughout Massachusetts Colony. In 1767, Parliament passed the Townshend Acts, which levied “taxes on lead, paper, paint, glass, and tea” (87). This, too, caused rioting and boycotts among colonists.

In March 1770, British troops fired into a crowd in Boston, killing five men in what came to be called the Boston Massacre. The Sons of Liberty demanded relief from an occupying army, while the colonists in the West Indies asked for a larger military presence to protect them from Black people.

In 1766, the Massachusetts Assembly considered an antislavery bill. However, some in Massachusetts worried that a move toward abolition would divide the Northern colonies from those in the South. John Adams, particularly, worried about the bill’s impact on colonial union. The following year, the British court took up the case of Somerset v. Stewart in which an African man, James Somerset, successfully sued for his freedom from a Boston-based British customs officer, Charles Stewart. The case taught the enslaved two lessons: First, that they could possibly seek their freedom through the courts; and, secondly, that they were likelier able to secure freedom in Britain than in the American colonies.

In May 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act—an attempt to save the nearly bankrupt East India Company by, once again, placing a tax burden on the American colonies. In the fall, when three ships carrying tea arrived in Boston, “dozens of colonists disguised as Mohawks—warring Indians—boarded the boats and dumped chests of tea into the harbor” in what came to be known as “the Boston Tea Party” (88). In response, Parliament passed the Coercive Acts, which closed Boston Harbor and “annulled the Massachusetts charter” (88).

In September, 56 delegates from 12 of the 13 colonies met in Philadelphia as the First Continental Congress. George Washington was the delegate from Virginia. While the Stamp Act concerned all of the colonies, the Coercive Acts seemed to be only Massachusetts’s problem. Worse, delegates from Massachusetts seemed fanatical in their desire to declare independence from Britain. Washington spoke to the Massachusetts delegates and, by the following month, was certain that it was now no one’s wish to seek independence.

Another Virginia delegate, Patrick Henry, suggested that the delegates should “cast a number of votes proportionate to their colonies’ number of white inhabitants” (90). However, without any accurate population figures, the colonists decided to give each colony one vote. Henry was pleased that there would no longer be any distinction between colonists. They were all, simply, Americans.

The new Continental Congress urged colonists to stockpile weapons and form militias. It also decided “to boycott all British imports and to ban all trade with the West Indies” (91). Lord North, the prime minister, commissioned the essayist Samuel Johnson to write a response to the Continental Congress’s complaints against Britain. In his book Taxation No Tyranny (1775), Johnson wondered how it was that the loudest cries for liberty came from those who were slave drivers. Johnson was notably antislavery: His companion, collaborator, and heir, Francis Barber, was a Black man from Jamaica.

On April 19, 1775, 70 armed militiamen met General Thomas Gage and his troops in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts. The British killed ten of the soldiers—or, minutemen—farmers who had pledged to be ready for battle at a moment’s notice. The rebels then moved into Boston, which had been occupied by the British army. Four-fifths of the city’s inhabitants attempted to escape. They were the first refugees of the Revolutionary War. Those who hoped to reconcile with Britain now had to respond to the stories of those from Massachusetts, who were even more radicalized. In June, Congress voted to set up the Continental Army. John Adams nominated George Washington to be its commander. Washington went to Massachusetts to take command of the forces. At the time, most colonists remained loyal to the Crown. If they supported any resistance, it was in the interest of securing their rights as Englishmen, not as Americans. Meanwhile, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, offered freedom to slaves who agreed to join the British army. Edward Rutledge, a Continental Congress delegate from South Carolina, believed that Lord Dunmore’s declaration created an “eternal separation between Great Britain and the Colonies” (94).

Still, about one-third of colonists were patriots, while another third remained Loyalists. The final third was undecided. At the Continental Congress in June, Pennsylvania delegate John Dickinson drafted the Articles of Confederation. In the document, Dickinson used the phrase “the united states” for the first time, which he may have found in a book of treaties from the mid-17th century. The first draft of the Articles of Confederation called for each state to contribute to the defense and the government according to their respective populations, which therefore required a census to be taken every three years. The final Articles of Confederation were more akin to a peace treaty, “establishing a defensive alliance among sovereign states” and a system of government (97).

Congress then appointed a Committee of Five to draft what became the Declaration of Independence: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman. Jefferson prepared the first draft. The Declaration explained why the colonists were fighting. The cause of the revolution, they argued, was that the king had placed his subjects “under arbitrary power, reducing them to a state of slavery” (98). To write the Declaration, Jefferson borrowed heavily from George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights. It included a list of grievances and charges against the king, particularly unfair taxation, the dissolution of colonial assemblies, and his maintenance of a standing army in the colonies. In the statement’s longest draft, Jefferson blamed George III for imposing slavery on the colonialists and now inciting them to rise up against their owners. Congress later struck this passage from the Declaration.

In July, messengers read the Declaration of Independence aloud to cheering crowds who pulled down statues of the king and melted them for bullets. Several weeks later, another slave rebellion broke out in Jamaica, and the planters blamed the Americans for inciting it. During the Revolutionary War, one in five American slaves left their owners to be freed by the British. Most were caught, recaptured, and punished. Still, it seemed a good bet in a climate in which most expected the British to win the war. The British started with 32,000 soldiers, far better disciplined and experienced than their American opponents, who numbered only 19,000. William Howe, commander in chief of the British forces, focused on New York and Philadelphia, but his victories in those cities brought little benefit. Unlike in Europe, no city in the new nation was established enough to encourage a surrender.

For the British, the American Revolution was “one front in a much larger war, a war for empire, a world war” (100). Like the French and Indian War, it impacted other parts of North America, but also impacted West Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia, and the Mediterranean. In 1778, France entered the war as an ally to the Americans. Spain joined the French-American alliance the following year. Germany supplied paid soldiers, and the Dutch provided Americans with arms and ammunition, leading the British to declare war on the Netherlands in 1780. Meanwhile, the cessation of trade between the British West Indies and mainland North America led to a famine in the former region that most severely impacted enslaved Africans.

In 1778, the Crown sought compliance from the colonists by repealing all of the acts Parliament had imposed since 1763. The British refused, however, to recognize American independence. Henry Clinton, Howe’s successor, held on to New York City and pushed west. Much of the war had moved to the South, however, where British ministers sought to hold on to the southern colonies in an effort to restore the West Indies’ food supply.

In May 1779, Congress proposed enlisting 3,000 enslaved people from Georgia and South Carolina and freeing them in exchange for their service. John Adams believed that the measure would incur the wrath of South Carolina, and he was right. The state rejected the measure, and Henry Clinton captured Charleston in May 1780. The following year, with the hope of seizing the Chesapeake, British general Lord Cornwallis made Yorktown, Virginia, his naval base. American and French forces soon besieged the troops stationed there. Marquis de Lafayette led the French.

In 1782, the British fought in the Battle of the Saintes. Though they succeeded in defeating a French and Spanish invasion of Jamaica, the battle had shifted Britain’s priorities away from the American colonies. Around this time, about 75,000 loyalists left the country with the British. Between 15,000 to 20,000 of those who joined the exodus were formerly enslaved people, who left in what was “the largest emancipation in American history before Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation” (104). Armed slave patrols pursued the escaped slaves, capturing hundreds of men who had become Cornwallis’s soldiers, as well as their families. Among those captured were “two people owned by Washington and five owned by Jefferson” (104). Washington had asked colonists to keep what he called the “Book of Negroes” so that the owners of escaped slaves could later demand compensation from the British for lost property.

In defiance of the slave patrols, pregnant Black women ran toward British lines, in the hopes that their newborns would get freedom papers. Others leapt off docks and swam toward the longboats sailing toward British warships. British soldiers tried to hack off the fingers of swimmers who refused to let go of the already crowded boats. In January 1783, the Marquis de Lafayette wrote to Washington, suggesting that they free enslaved Black people, believing that the move could also lead to the end of slavery in the Caribbean. Washington wrote back, expressing a wish to discuss the plan.

In September 1783, the Treaty of Paris was signed, thereby ending the Revolutionary War. In the aftermath of the war, slave owners in the South, particularly South Carolina, gained political power while those in the West Indies lost it due to Britain’s decision to outlaw trade between the islands and the United States. The decision led to riots. Meanwhile, many freed slaves left the United States for the Caribbean. In Jamaica, the formerly enslaved began to demand the right to vote. After the treaty restored peace, George Washington rode to New York. The last British troops had departed from the city, though the last British ship remained.

In this chapter, Lepore describes the early skirmishes, debates, and battles for territory that led to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. While American colonists struggled against some indigenous tribes and other colonists for territory, they also struggled against the Crown’s authority. Unjust taxes and a lack of autonomy were the colonists’ primary grievances, but their image of themselves in relation to the Crown was ironic. John Adams’s comparison of the colonists’ condition to that of Black Americans was startlingly oblivious, particularly in light of Adams’s antislavery sentiments. The colonists’ use of Mohawk headdresses during the Boston Tea Party was also ironic, considering that the Mohawk struggled against being encroached upon by white colonists. In sum, American colonists recognized the oppression of these groups, but failed both to take responsibility for that oppression and to empathize with it.

Relationships with the British government depended largely on both demographics and one’s position in the respective British colonies. While the American colonies struggled against Parliament, white settlers in the West Indies sought greater support from the British government, due to their fear of the Black population that overwhelmed them. Disparate political interests led to a severance of the American colonists’ relationship with colonists in the Caribbean. Enslaved Black people in the American colonies, on the other hand, found that British courts were more amenable to their desires for liberty than American courts. Another great irony was the American colonialists’ general belief that, while they deserved independence from British tyranny and were willing to enlist support from African Americans who served as soldiers, they had no obligation to examine their own relationship to slaveholding. Worse, their shifting of responsibility onto the British amounted to poor reasoning: If they were able to expand white male suffrage and reduce indentured servitude, two practices that were also legacies of British rule, they also had the ability to abolish slavery. Slaveholders, which included some Founding Fathers, were disinclined to go without the immense profits they reaped from slaveholding. Moreover, indentured servitude came with the obligation that, after a man’s time of indenture expired, he became entitled to his own parcel of land—a deal that would have led to increased competition in agriculture, as well as the inability of large planters to monopolize the market in cash crops.

The Revolutionary War also became an effort to temper the expansion of British powers, as other nations strategically aligned with the patriots. In the aftermath of the war, the Crown, in retaliation, severed trade relations between the US and the British West Indies. This decision likely helped distinguish the regions culturally, while also hurting the British Caribbean economically. The severance of trade relations also made the slave trade within the US a more provincial affair, leading to the rise of South Carolina as a political and economic powerhouse, due to its abilities to supply key cash crops and slaves.