'You can't tell the story of 1776 without talking about race and slavery,' writes Robert G. Parkinson
, the nation’s founding has come under the most scrutiny. How much did 1776 have to do with race and slavery? The answer is: you can’t tell the story without it. We have given the founding fathers passes when it comes to race.
Once the shooting started, patriot leaders started talking about race in very different ways than they had before. As soon as the news of Lexington and Concord spread throughout North America, colonists began to think, talk, and worryabout what role enslaved people might play in this new world of war with Great Britain. For the next fifteen months, between April 1775 and July 1776, they would read about British agents trying to incite slave rebellions all over the South.
The patriots’ efforts to get stories about “instigated insurrections” into the mouths of American children culminated in the Declaration of Independence. In fact, it comes at the climax of the document. The Continental Congress accused King George of twenty-seven crimes. These were the “facts to be submitted to a candid world” that led the colonies to the necessity of declaring independence.
Jefferson had written a moving passage that referred to the African slave trade as an “assemblage of horrors” and a “cruel war against human nature itself.” Tragically, Congress cut nearly the whole thing—but not all of it. They kept the bit that was in the mouth of every American child, referring to slaves with the albeit veiled with common 18th century way of referring to slaves as “domestics.
the accusation of “instigated insurrections” was not, suggests just how successful their campaign had been. Patriot leaders found one thing that white colonists shared: racism. The founders embraced and mobilized colonial prejudices about potentially dangerous African Americans and used those fears to unite the colonists in one “common cause.” For too long we have taken an elderly John Adams at his word about what brought the thirteen colonies together.
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