As the United States Celebrates the 240 year anniversary of the Declaration of Independence :

WOULD SLAVERY HAVE ENDED SOONER IF THE BRITISH HAD DEFEATED THE
COLONISTS BID FOR INDEPENDENCE ?
I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America, if I could have conceived that thereby I
was founding a land of slavery. Marquis de Lafayette, French military leader who was instrumental in
enlisting French support for the colonists in the American War of Independence
Historians have long grappled with the contradiction of a revolution under the banner of all
men are created equal being largely led by slave owners. Once free of England, the U.S. grew over the
next 89 years to be the largest slave owning republic in history. But the July 4th 1776 Declaration of
Independence (DI) was in itself a revolutionary document . Never before in history had people asserted
the right of revolutionnot just to overthrow a specific government that no longer met the needs of the
people, but as a general principle for the relationship between the rulers and the ruled : We hold these
truths to be self-evident, 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. That to
secure these rights, governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent
of the governed.That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the
Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government...
And yes, all men are created equal excluded women, black people and the indigenous
populations of the continent, and was written by slave owner Thomas Jefferson with all his personal
hypocrisies. But the words themselves have been used many times since to challenge racism and other
forms of domination and inequality. Both the 1789 French Revolution and the 1804 Haitian
revolutionthe only successful slave revolt in human historydrew inspiration from this clarion call. In
1829 black abolitionist David Walker threw the words of the DI back in the face of the slave republic :
See your declarations Americans !!! Do you understand your own language ? The 1848 Seneca Falls
womens rights convention issued a Declaration of Sentiments proclaiming that We hold these truths to
be self evident that all men and women are created equal. Vietnam used these very words in declaring
independence from France in 1946. And as ML King stated in his 1963 I have a Dream Speech , it was
A promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights
of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Americans are taught to see the birth of our country as a gift to the world, even when its original
defects are acknowledged. The DI along with the Constitution are pillars of American
Exceptionalismthe belief that the U.S. is superior and unique from all others, holding the promise of an
Asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty in the words of Thomas Paine in
Common Sense . Historian Gary Nash has made a case that upon winning independence, the conditions
for at least the gradual abolition of slavery throughout the 13 colonies were present but lacked political
leadership. One of the lessons of history is that in cases where a fundamental change has been
accomplished against heavy odds, inspired leadership has been critically important and Washington,
Jefferson, and Madison were strategically positioned to take the lead on the slavery issue. All three
professed a hatred of slavery and a fervent desire to see it ended in their own time. (The Forgotten Fifth,
91, 95 ). For all their lofty rhetoric none of them lifted a finger to bring that about. Perhaps though a
different question might be asked : what if the British had won, had defeated the colonists bid to break
from the mother country ? Is it possible that the cause of freedom and the ideals of the DI would have
been paradoxically better served by that outcome ?
Englands Victory Over France Leads to the American War For Independence
It was, ironically, Englands victory over France for control of the North American continent in
the seven years war (1756-1763) that laid the basis for their North American colonies to revolt just 13
years later. As the war with France ended, the British 1763 Proclamation prohibited white settlement
west of the Appalachian mountains in an attempt at detente with Native Americans -- bringing England
into conflict with colonists wanting to expand westward. More serious still were the series of taxes
England imposed on the colonies to pay off its large war debt : the 1765 Stamp Act, the 1767-1770
Townshend Acts, and the 1773 Tea Acts among others. As colonial leaders mounted increasingly militant
resistance to these measures, so too did British repression ramp up.
And while No taxation without representation and opposition to British tyranny are the two
most commonly cited causes propelling the colonists drive for independence, recent scholarship (Slave
Nation by Ruth and Alfred Blumrosen, Gerald Hornes The Counter-Revolution of 1776, and Alan
Gilberts Black Patriots and Loyalists in particular) has revealed a heretofore unacknowledged third
major motivating force --the preservation and protection of slavery itself. In 1772, the highest British
court ruled in the Somerset decision that slave owners had no legal claims to ownership of other humans

in England itself, declaring slavery to be Odious. Somerset eliminated any possibility of a de jure
defense of slavery in England, further reinforced at the time by Parliament refusing a request by British
slave owners to pass such a law. While Somerset did not apply to Englands colonies, it was taken by
southern colonists as a potential threat to their slave power. Their fear was further reinforced by the 1766
Declaratory Act which made explicit Englands final say over any laws made in the colonies, and the
Repugnancy clause in each colonys charter. Somerset added fuel to the growing fires uniting the
colonies against England in a fight for independence.
Seeing the Revolutionary War through the eyes of enslaved blacks turns its meaning
upside down Simon Schama , Rough Crossings
Among the list of grievances in the DI is the rarely scrutinized He [referring to the king] has
excited domestic insurrections amongst us. This grievance was motivated by Virginia Royal Governor
Lord Dunmores November 1775 proclamation stating that any person held as a slave by a colonist in
rebellion against England would become free by joining the British forces in subduing the revolt. While
5000 mainly free Black people from northern colonies joined with the colonists fight for independence,
few of our school books teach that tens of thousands more enslaved black people joined with the British,
with an even greater number taking advantage of the war to escape the colonies altogether by running to
Canada or Florida. They saw they had a better shot at Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness with
the British-- than with their colonial slave masters.
To further put these numbers in perspective, the total population of the 13 colonies at the time
was 2.5 million, of whom 500,000 were slaves and indentured servants. While there is some debate
about the exact numbers, Peter Kolchin in American Slavery points to the Sharp decline between 1770
and 1790 in the proportion of the population made up of blacks (almost all of whom were slaves) from
60.5 % to 43.8 % in South Carolina and from 45.2 % to 36.1 % in Georgia (73). Other commonly cited
figures from historians estimate 25,000 slaves escaped from South Carolina, 30,000 from Virginia, and
5,000 from Georgia. Alan Gilbert in his Black Patriots and Loyalists says Estimates range between
twenty thousand and one hundred thousand...if one adds in the thousands of not yet organized blacks who
trailed ...the major British forces ...the number takes on dimensions accurately called gigantic( xii ).
Among them were 30 of Thomas Jeffersons slaves, 20 of George Washingtons, and good ole Give
me liberty or give me death Patrick Henry also lost his slave Ralph Henry to the Brits. It was the first

mass emancipation in American history. Evidently domestic insurrection was legitimate when led by
slave owners against England but not when enslaved people rose up for their freedom--against the
rebelling slave owners !
Before There Was Harriet Tubman There was Colonel Tye
Crispus Attucks is often hailed as the first martyr of the American revolution, a free black man
killed defying British authority in the 1770 Boston Massacre. But few have heard of Titus, who just 5
years later was among those thousands of slaves who escaped to the British lines. He became known as
Colonel Tye for his military prowess in leading black and white guerrilla fighters in numerous raids
throughout Monmouth County New Jersey, taking reprisals against slave owners, freeing their slaves,
destroying their weaponry and creating an atmosphere of fear among the rebel colonistsand hope among
their slaves. Other black regiments under the British fought with ribbons emblazoned across their chests
saying Liberty to Slaves .
One might compare Col. Tye to Attucks but if Attucks is a hero, what does that make Tye, who
freed hundreds of slaves ? Perhaps a more apt comparison is with Harriet Tubman who escaped slavery
in 1849 and returned to the south numerous times to also free hundreds of her brothers and sisters held
in bondage.
So What if the British had won ?
At no point though did the British declare the end of slavery to be a war goal; it was always just a
military tactic. But if the Brits had won, as they came close to doing, it might have set off a series of
events that went well beyond their control. Would England have been able to restore slavery in the 13
colonies in the face of certain anti-slavery resistance by the tens of thousands of now free ex-slaves,
joined by growing anti-slavery forces in the northern colonies ? As Gilbert puts it Class and race
forged ties of solidarity in opposition to both the slave holders and the colonial elites. (10) Another sure
ally would have been the abolitionist movement in England which had been further emboldened by the
1772 Somerset decision. And if England had to abolish slavery in the 13 colonies, would that not have
led to a wave of emancipations throughout the Caribbean and Latin America ?
And just what was the cost of the victorious independence struggle to the black population ? To
the indigenous populations who were described in that same DI grievance as The merciless Indian
Savages ? Might it have been better for the cause of freedom if the colonists lost ? And if the colonists

had lost, wouldnt the ideals of the DI have carried just as much if not more weight ?
The price of freedom from England was bondage for African slaves in America. America would be a
slave nation. Eleanor Holmes Norton, introduction to Slave Nation
We do know however the cost of the colonists victory : once independence was won, while the
northern states gradually abolished slavery, slavery BOOMED in the south. The first federal census in
1790 counted 700,000 slaves. By 1810, 2 yrs after the end of the slave trade, there were 1.2 million
slaves, a 70% increase. England ended slavery in all its colonies in 1833, when there were 2 million
enslaved people in the U.S. Slavery in the U.S. continued for another 33 years, during which time the
slave population doubled to 4 million human beings. The U.S abolished slavery in 1865; only Cuba and
Brazil ended slavery at a later date. And the colonists victory also further opened the gates to the
attempted genocide of the indigenous peoples over the next 125 years.
The foregoing is not meant to romanticize and project England as some kind of abolitionist
savior had they kept control of the colonies. Dunmore himself was a slave owner. England was the center
of the international slave trade. Despite losing the 13 colonies, England maintained its position as the
most powerful and rapacious empire in the world till the mid-20th century. As England did away with
chattel slavery, it replaced it with the capitalist wage slavery of the industrial revolution. It used food as a
weapon to starve the Irish, conquered and colonized large swaths of Asia, Africa and the Pacific.
We often see the outcomes of history as predetermined, as inevitabilities, and think there were
no other outcomes possible. We look back 240 years later and for most it seems unquestionable that the
American revolution was good for the world, a step, perhaps somewhat tortured , towards progress and
freedom. But for historian Gerald Horne , Simply because Euro-American colonists prevailed in their
establishing of the U.S. , it should not be assumed that this result was inevitable. History points to other
possibilities... I do not view the creation of the republic as a great leap forward for humanity ( CounterRevolution of 1776, ix ).
The American revolution was not just a war for independence from England. It was also a battle
for freedom against the very leaders of that rebellion by hundreds of thousands of enslaved black people,
a class struggle of poor white tenant farmers in many cases also against that same white colonial elite,
and a fight for survival of the indigenous populations. But the colonists unlikely victory was to lead to
the creation of the largest slave nation in history, the near genocide of the indigenous populations and a

continent-wide expansion gained by invading and taking over half of Mexico. The U.S. went on to
become an empire unparalleled in history, its wealth origins rooted largely in slave labor. The struggles
for equality and justice for all that the DI promised continues of course, a task that remains undone, ML
Kings promissory note unfulfilled to this day.
The late Chinese Premier Chou en Lai was once asked his assessment as to whether the French
revolution was a step forward in history. His response was Its too soon to tell. Was the founding of the
United States a step forward in history ? Or is it still too soon to tell ?

Bibliography
Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen Slave Nation
Alan Gilbert Black Patriots and Loyalists
Gerald Horne the Counter-Revolution of 1776
Peter Kolchin American Slavery
Gary Nash The Forgotten Fifth
Simon Schama Rough Crossings

Bio: Keith Brooks is a long time union, unemployed and tenant organizer and political activist. He recently retired
after 22 years as a NYC high school educator and also taught at Richmond College and at Alternate U. This essay is
from a chapter the Hidden History of the American Revolution in MythAmerica, a book Keith is writing. He has
been published in the Nation, Baltimore Sun, Amsterdam News, and other progressive and mainstream venues.
Synopsis :
Historians have long grappled with the contradiction of a revolution under the banner of all men are created equal
being largely led by slave owners. Once free of England, the U.S. grew over 89 years to be the largest slave owning
republic in history. Upon the 240 year anniversary of the Declaration of Independence W hat If the British Had
W on examines whether the lofty ideals of the DI might have paradoxically been better fulfilled by the 13 colonies
defeat in the war of independence, which would have led to the abolition of slavery at least 33 years before 1865,
saving at least 2 million people from enslavement, and perhaps setting off a chain reaction throughout the Caribbean
and Latin America.
As war broke out between the colonies and England in 1775, British governor Lord Dunmore issued a proclamation
stating that any person held as a slave by a rebelling colonist would become free by joining the British side. W hile
5000 mainly free black people fought for the patriots, few know that many thousands more enslaved people escaped
to British lines. They saw they had a better shot at Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness with the British-- than
with their colonial slave masters.
But If the Brits had won, would they have been able to restore slavery in the face of certain resistance among those
thousands of freed slaves, joined by growing anti-slavery sentiment in the northern colonies ? And a sure ally would
have been the abolitionism in England , further emboldened by the 1772 Somerset decision. The piece is no brief
for England, but points out what seems inevitable might have turned out differently; perhaps the cause of freedom
would have been better served by the colonist defeat. Americans are taught to see the birth of our country as a gift to
the worldbut was the creation of the United States a step forward in history ?