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It’s long past time Americans face the truth about the Founding Fathers. A critique that places events being celebrated on the Fourth of July in a much larger world historical narrative is urgently needed.
The power of empire is not only the power to control land, labor, armies and financial industries, but also to control minds.
The dominion of the U.S. Empire has turned history upside down. It has transformed some of the biggest criminals into heroes. A history that emphasizes the U.S. as an exemplar of democracy and human rights and holds the constitution as sacrosanct is a history that lies by omission and ignores some of the most important events in its story.
Historian Gerald Horne places the creation of the United States in a larger context in his seminal work, The Counter-Revolution of 1776- Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. He points out that while so many historical accounts of the American War for Independence begin in the 1770s or the decades preceding it, to understand the forces at play we must go back at least to the late 17th century and the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 in England.
This revolution saw the ascendant merchant class overthrowing Catholic King James II and installing his daughter Mary and her Protestant Dutch husband, William III of Orange, whose country, the Netherlands, was facing the onslaught of an aggressive Catholic France under Louis XIV. A Bill of Rights, very similar to the U.S. Bill of Rights, was made law in a parliamentarian show of force, further diminishing the power of the king.
What is lesser known about the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 was the effect on the trade in African bodies. With the king and the Royal African Company losing control of the slave trade, it became unregulated and the venture capitalists, pirates and investor class profited from the emerging global economy, based on the most valuable “commodity” of all.
The “free trade” in Africans became, along with the genocide of the Native Americans, the two original sins and foundational crimes in the European conquest of the Western Hemisphere.
Not only were European investors stealing returns of up to 1700 percent on their capital, enslaved Africans working on plantations in the Caribbean made the European empires the most powerful in the world. Sugar, tobacco, alcohol, rice, indigo, cotton and coffee changed the appetites of Europe, and not for the better.
Centuries of Rebellion
Africans resisted slavery everywhere. And wherever the numbers of Africans enslaved greatly outnumbered the enslavers, the latter feared or faced the constant threat of revolution. British slavery in the Caribbean, on the islands of Jamaica, Antigua and Barbados was rife with continuous revolts against the European colonisers.
In Jamaica, escaped Africans known as Maroons successfully freed themselves from Spanish slavery and continued to wreak havoc on the English slave camps after the island fell to the English in 1655. By 1739 London was forced to make a treaty recognising Maroon sovereignty over sections of the island.
The mainland 13 colonies insisted that Africans were not to be armed, that there could be no advancement or upward mobility for the enslaved. This created a dilemma for the expanding British empire which was competing with the Spanish empire that had a long established practice of arming free and enslaved Africans.
The Spanish stronghold of St. Augustine in Florida was a sanctuary for Africans escaping from the English Carolinas. After converting to Catholicism and swearing allegiance to Spain, former slaves were sent northward on guerrilla raids against the fledgling plantations of the enemy. Arming the enslaved and subsequent refugees from English slavery helped Spain to hold the Florida frontier against British raids in 1728 and a major land and naval assault in 1740.
Seven Years War
The North American political map was radically altered in the 7 Years War (French and Indian War), when the British pushed back the French and Spanish. The French were forced out of the Ohio River valley and the Spanish lost the strategic city of Havana, Cuba, in 1762.
While fought largely to secure the English colonies, the results of the war would have unintended consequences for the British Empire. With the Catholic empires of France and Spain setback, emboldened settler colonists would double down on the slave economy, just as the British Empire was becoming more dependent on using Africans in the military.
In the 1762 attack on Havana, the British used “a combined force of 4,000 Redcoats, a regiment of five hundred free Negroes and two thousand enslaved Africans from Jamaica.”
These two forces: the expansion of slavery in British North American colonies in the mid-18th century and the increased military use and upward mobility of Africans in Britain’s growing global empire would create contrasting visions for how mainland settler colonists and London regarded exploiting Africans.
Somerset’s Case & the Slaveholders’ Revolt of 1776
The British system of enslaving Africans was shaken to the core in a pivotal judicial case in June 1772. Stolen from Africa in 1749, James Somerset was bought in Virginia by Charles Steuart and later enslaved in Boston, before being shipped to England. With a history of fleeing, Somerset was in England where his master was seeking to sell him. Found shackled aboard a ship on the Thames, abolitionists rallied to his cause in what came to be known as Somerset’s Case.
It was Magistrate Lord Mansfield, of Scottish origin, who freed Somerset, ruling that slavery could not exist in England. The ruling did not abolish slavery in Britain’s colonies but it was seen as a move in that direction by colonial elites who interpreted the case as London siding with the enslaved over the slaveholder.
Widely discussed throughout the colonies, this ruling amplified the schism between the colonies and London, with the British Empire moving away from slavery and the colonial separatists moving toward an independent, republican slavocracy to defend, maintain and preserve slavery long into the future.
All Men Are Created Equal?
When Father-of-Slaves (Thomas Jefferson) wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the war against the British had just begun. The colonial ruling class separatists needed an army to defeat the British Empire.
The Declaration of Independence famously stated that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” In his initial draft of the declaration, Jefferson attacked George III for the transatlantic slave trade, but did not condemn the institution of slavery. There was a burgeoning internal slave market in North America.
Jefferson also complained in the deleted section of the first draft that George III was inciting slaves in America to turn on their masters. He wrote:
“He is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another.”
Father-Of-Slaves was attempting to solidify a white identity that would transcend the class, religious, ethnic and national conflicts of Europe. Somehow when settlers crossed the Atlantic they magically became White and were welcomed into the project of enslaving Africans and conquering indigenous lands. Jefferson had six children with his “property,” Sally Hemings and enslaved over 600 human beings in his lifetime.
The 27th and last grievance issued to King George III in the Declaration states,
“He has excited domestic Insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction of all Ages, Sexes, and Conditions.(sic)”
This last grievance in the declaration reveals the two original sins that drove the colonial ruling class to separate from their country and support a ruling class war for independence. A war that would establish a white supremacist, patriarchal, expansionist government that could unify feuding European identities.
Ned Blackhawk, in his 2023 book The Rediscovery of America, connects the formation of whiteness to the theft of indigenous land and enslavement of Africans:
“Indigenous dispossession facilitated the growth of white male democracy and African American slavery. Each grew from the same trunk of expansion while also sowing the seeds of American disunion. Indeed, many of the nation’s longest-standing racial inequalities remain rooted in this half century of racial formation, one in which American lawmakers struggled to establish legible distinctions between ‘red,’ ‘white,’ and ‘black,’ people. That struggle became ideological. It became social. It became political, and it eventually became legal.”
Lord Dunmore’s Emancipation Proclamation
In 1775, months after the battles of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts triggered the American War for Independence, the British issued their version of the Emancipation Proclamation. In November 1775, Lord John Dunmore, British Colonial governor of Virginia, promised “freedom” to any enslaved person in exchange for joining the British army.
Virginians and all slavers were shocked, Destroyer of Villages (George Washington) called Lord Dunmore “that arch-traitor to the rights of humanity.” The British were moving to end slavery — as President Abraham Lincoln would do nearly a century later — in order to save the union.
For men whose power stemmed directly from slavery, men like Washington, Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe, the threat of losing the humans they enslaved and thus their power, was a decisive factor in their decision to go to war.
Edward Rutledge, who would become governor of South Carolina, said that Dunmore’s Proclamation, more than anything else, would “work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the colonies.”
So what exactly did Jefferson mean by “endeavoured to bring on the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction of all Ages, Sexes, and Conditions?”
The Proclamation Line of 1763
The War for Independence 1775-1783, may have been a war against the British empire but make no mistake, it was also a war against First Nations and the result of the war was an ominous sign for the future of both enslaved Africans and the stewards of Turtle Island.
The British had drawn a political line, The Proclamation of 1763, along the crest of the Appalachians: a political boundary that marked the border of the British Empire in colonial North America. The proclamation came after the French and Indian War 1756-1763, that ended with the French defeated and forced to cede all land claims east of the Mississippi to the British.
While the proclamation upset white settlers living on native lands who wanted the support of the government to help steal more land from the natives, it also upset the most passionate and successful land speculators and master thieves such as Destroyer of Villages (Washington) and Father of Slaves (Jefferson). Between 1747 and 1799 Washington surveyed over 200 tracts of land and held title to more than 65,000 acres in 37 different locations.
Preemptive War
As the War of Independence approached, the settler colonists and slaveholders knew that whatever side native nations chose to support would play an important role in determining the outcome of the war.
The most powerful native confederation of the time was the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Iroquois). Among these, the Seneca followed the Mohawks in joining the British. The Cayuga, Tuscarora, and Onondaga nations remained neutral and only the Christianised Oneidas sided with the separatist settlers.
In response, Conotocaurius or Destroyer of Villages (the name given Washington by the Haudenosaunee) wrote instructions to Major General John Sullivan to make a preemptive attack on the Haudenosaunee,
“to lay waste all the settlements around … that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed … Our future security will be in their inability to injure us … and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire them.”
General Sullivan replied,
“The Indians shall see that there is malice enough in our hearts to destroy everything that contributes to their support.”
During the war for Independence the “Americans” would burn over 50 Haudenosaunee villages to the ground and if that weren’t enough, Destroyer of Villages added, “it will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.” They burned the corn and other crops just before a severe winter, leaving many to die from cold and starvation.
The American separatists would go on to destroy over 100 Cherokee towns and many other native villages. This was, in all likelihood left out of the history books you read in school. Under the leadership of Destroyer of Villages, this first war for “American Independence” was a war against natives and a way of life that honored the land.
This same land conquered by the separatists would become the only source of revenue for the new government as defined in their first constitution: the Articles of Confederation.
Forming a More Perfect Union?
The reality of U.S. colonial expansion and empire building reveals the true motivations that fueled the machinery of power behind the Constitution and why it is so important to understand what the Constitution was designed to do.
The Constitutional Convention was held in the aftermath of a rebellion in Massachusetts that challenged the tenuous control colonial elites held over the impoverished population. Shay’s Rebellion demonstrated the intensity of long-running class conflicts. Named after Daniel Shays, a veteran of the War for Independence, the uprising was a struggle of farmers for their land, against a Massachusetts oligarchy, that was forcing them into debt and off their land.
Shay’s Rebellion was a movement comprised of hundreds of farmers and working class whites in western Massachusetts, unifying and marching on courthouses demanding an end to high property taxes. This working class rebellion put a fright into the colonial ruling class. Virginian elite and their allies moved to seize power and frame the new Constitution to their liking.
In the summer of 1787, colonial rulers held a secret convention in Philadelphia to amend the Articles of Confederation. What they left with was a document that guaranteed slavery, and the racism to justify it would remain part of the United States for the foreseeable future.
The 3/5 clause of the constitution — determining the number of representatives per state — granted that the total number of people counted in a state would include 3/5ths of the total number of enslaved Africans. The 3/5ths “compromise” was a power grab that gave the southern states majority control of the central government.
The electoral college, based on the very same lopsided pro-slavery representation, ensured that the presidency would be in the hands of the enslavers. Four of the first five presidents were Virginian slave masters. They all served two terms. They ruled for 32 of the first 36 years of the Empire. They conquered, plundered and aggressively expanded the Republic-Empire from the East Coast and declared in 1820, with the Monroe Doctrine, that all of the Western Hemisphere was under the dominion of the U.S., not to be interfered with by European powers.
The U.S. Constitution written in Philadelphia, in 1787, was a Virginian and Southern slave plantation owners’ coup. By wedding slavery to power, the constitution rewarded and incentivized the enslavement of Africans. This first slavocracy was imposed by those who profited from the free market of African bodies and guaranteed that slavery would define the new nation enforced by the collaboration of a pan European white identity.
Of Virginia’s total population of 747,610 people counted in the 1790 census, 292,627 were enslaved. There were more enslaved Africans in Virginia than the total population of people in states such as Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, Kentucky, South Carolina and Georgia.
By 1860, on the eve of the Civil War the number of enslaved humans in Virginia was 550,000. This number is misleading however, for Virginia benefited from the end of the legal foreign slave trade in 1808, as written and planned in the constitution.
Virginia became the domestic breeding ground for exporting slaves to the deep south, where they would also count in the census for the slave states. Frighteningly, the “founding fathers” designed a document in which they could literally rape and breed their way to increased political power.
The transformation necessary to create a system that works for everyone will never be achieved as long as Americans believe the U.S. was founded by visionaries with high ideals. For far too long have Americans accepted the lies and celebrated a fantasy.
On the American Revolution and Independence Day
July 4, 2025

Photo by Eric Brehm
“No new social class came to power through the door of the American revolution. The men who engineered the revolt were largely members of the colonial ruling class.” — Howard Zinn
The American Revolution is a source of great pride for many Americans but it is without question one the most poorly remembered events in all of American history. The revolution did effectively nothing to change the social structures or class dynamics in America, outside of swapping kings for big business, in effect. The wealthy ruling class organized the revolt, while the working class and poor were forced to fight in a conflict (executed if they refused or deserted) with promises of an America that would benefit all. But after the revolution, nothing much changed.
The Declaration of Independence and US constitution were not written for the professed values of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for ordinary people. These famous, and rather mythological, words did not apply to African slaves, indigenous Americans, women, immigrants, or poor people who, after having fought in the American Revolutionary war, faced high taxes and seizure of their homes, as well as livestock, for nonpayment—they applied to wealthy property owners and statesmen.
The popular narrative surrounding the American Revolution resides in the belief that fighting a war against the British empire was rooted in American self determination, which was strongly opposed by the interests of the British monarchy. Your average American discusses the revolt as if people collectively fought for independence and overcame what was, at the time, the most powerful empire in world history, essentially on our own. As with most historical events, a closer inspection reveals quite a different picture.
Although most people in the contemporary US celebrate this holiday as the day Americans overcame British tyranny (“no taxation without representation”), it should not be understated, or flat out ignored as is standard in American education, that the British wanting to designate the lands west of the Appalachians as “Indian Territory” and moving towards abolishing slavery had far more to do with the interests of American colonial elites than facing high taxes from the British Government did. And the implication (fable?) that it was simply hard fighting and determination from American soldiers that forced the British to withdraw is pure ignorance, if not outright bastardization, of the historical record. The revolt being successful had much more to do with the French empire intervening on behalf of colonial elites than it did with anything the colonies could do on their own. As Noam Chomsky said, “the American Revolution was a small part of a major world war going on between France and England, so the French intervened and that was a big factor, but the domestic contribution was basically guerrilla warfare.”
The American Revolution is largely rooted in mythology, in a sense, and designed the paint the founding of the country in a noble and courageous light rather than the murderous and expansionist ambitions that were at the forefront of the revolution and surely in its leaders’ hearts.
It’s not well remembered, but most ordinary people in the colonies viewed the revolution as swapping British monarchy and merchants for wealthy American statesmen and merchants. One tyranny for another with the same subpar circumstances and material conditions. The founders (owners) of the country merely replaced one oppressive and imperialist system with another on the basis of “Manifest Destiny.” Best understood as a principle of expansion, exploitation, and empire, but also simply known as the “free market.” While never intending on voting rights for women, slaves, indigenous peoples, or non-land owners (the poor). This is what people are talking about by the revolution bringing “freedom” to America. It’s also worth noting that those leading the revolt made much of their wealth from owning human beings, so perhaps we should caution before treating their vision as sacrosanct.
The revolution should really be understood as a mere coup by American colonial elites who owned the society, did not want the British meddling in THEIR internal affairs (I.E. the slaves they owned and the land they planned to conquer and settle to the west), and who wanted more centralized government power. While the general population of the colonies were mostly non-land owners or poor farmers who wanted more democracy and freedom of self determination. Hence why instances like the Shays and Whiskey Rebellions occurred and were subsequently put down with force. And not for nothing, but if July 4th is supposed to be about freedom, then why do we as Americans enjoy fewer freedoms than people living in Britain today?
Imagine celebrating a county that doesn’t guarantee its citizens the most basic of human rights—education and healthcare—which just about any other industrialized, and even many less fortunate, countries manage to do for theirs. Not to mention a country actively rolling back climate, labor, reproductive, and a laundry list of rights.
It’s important to understand that the freedoms we enjoy today were not granted to us by those in places of power, and certainly were not won during the American Revolution, but rather by working class movements, organizers, and popular activism that fought and pressed for progressive legislative reforms in subsequent years. This is core American history and critical in understanding why something like our celebrated holiday of “Independence Day” even exists.
INDEPENDENCE DAY & STATE PROPAGANDA
Most Americans are entirely unaware but “Independence Day” was designed by the first state propaganda agency, Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information (CPI). This was a committee created during WWI to take a pacifist and anti-war sentiment (most Americans opposed the First World War at the beginning but gradually supported intervention as years went on) and turn it into an anti-German hysteria, as well as to beat back the threat of radically organized labor which frightened big business interests after events such as the Industrial Workers of the World’s (IWW) victory in the Lawrence, MA strike in 1912.
The CPl’s success impressed the business world, hence one of its members Edward Bernays going on to be a leading figure in a vastly expanding and influential public relations industry which would be used to fabricate needs for apathetic consumers and instill a sense that individual material gain is the driving factor of human life.
This is great for corporate profits and just so happens to keep people distracted from a political establishment essentially owned and controlled by corporate interests. Around the turn of the 20th century, elites had found out that it was getting harder to control general populations with overt force as previously was done throughout history. People were gaining more of a say in political affairs and were showing that they wouldn’t be tamed as easily by state violence (although this still occurs today, it’s far less overtly possible than it used to be). Therefore, it became imperative for the state to control what people think. Corporate and political elites effectively figured out they couldn’t command the masses solely with violence anymore, but they could distract them with consumption and subtle methods of thought control.
This particular propaganda exercise began with big business and Government initiatives to “Americanize immigrants” (their words, not mine) and sow the seeds of patriotism and nationalism into the working class of the country. They wanted to induce loyalty and obedience into their minds, expelling any notion of the rights they had as working and poor people. They wanted to turn immigrants into natural enemies of “destructive forces” like the IWW which undermine the country’s supposed noble ideals and institutions. At a major conference of civic organizations (organized labor excluded), government and private organizations of all creeds had pledged themselves to cooperate in carrying out “Americanization” as a national project, while issuing plans for a successful Americanization program for the coming 4th of July. The title of the indoctrination ceremonies was to be “Americanization Day,” although on reflection “Independence Day” was the preferred moniker.
Labor leaders and organizers immediately recognized what was happening, with a United Mine Workers (UMW) top official stating that the big business-government initiative(propaganda) was: “attempting to set up a paternalism that will bring the workers of this country even more absolutely under the control of the employers, thus strengthening the chain of industrial tyranny in this country. That is what lies behind these efforts to sanctify and confirm oppression by waving the American flag in the face of its victims and by insidiously stigmatizing as unpatriotic any attempts they may make to throw off the yoke of the exploiting interests that they represent.”
But organized labor could not compete with corporate-state power, and lost this battle just as it failed to save “May Day,” which is not much celebrated here but is characterized and respected elsewhere as a labor festival with roots in solidarity with the struggles of brutalized American workers in the late 1800’s. See the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago for more information on this. It’s honestly as simple as understanding that things like patriotism and independence days are instruments for the attainment of the governments aims and the ambitions of the interests it represents. As Leo Tolstoy said, “patriotism is a slavish submission to those who hold power,” and most modern Americans are simply wage slaves for corporate America and the inhumane practices of empire.