The most problematic argument Holton makes involves his interpretation of Lord Dunmore’s proclamation of November 1775, which promised freedom to any enslaved person in Virginia who escaped to join the British forces. Numerous colonists read the Virginia governor’s proclamation as a clarion call for a general slave rebellion, the dread fear that regularly coursed through Southern society. “No other document,” Holton suggests, “did more than Dunmore’s proclamation to convert white residents of Britain’s most populous American colony to the cause of independence.” This argument supports a controversial claim made by the New York Times 1619 Project, which posits that one main cause of the American decision for independence was the perceived need to protect the system of plantation chattel slavery from British meddling.
I am one of a group of revolutionary-era historians who have publicly rejected this specific claim about the link between the defense of slavery and the American decision for independence, as well as its implications for how we think about the looming 250th anniversary of independence and indeed the very meaning of the revolution. Here is the basis for our criticisms.
Holton sees the Dunmore Proclamation more as a war measure than an abolitionist manifesto. He knows that a half-century would pass before ending West Indian slavery became a serious issue in Britain. But he still believes that colonial opinion on independence remained cautious and uncertain, and that fears of an enslaved people’s rebellion and frontier warfare with Native Americans were critical in the movement toward independence. Two more Ts are thus added to Holton’s roster of American grievances: traitorous slaves and treacherous Indians.
But in our view the basic framework for a decision on independence had already been set by the summer of 1775, and its authors were the elite decision-makers whose importance Holton doubts. On the American side, the crucial question was whether to offer some concessions to Britain or even send negotiators to London. On the British side, the question was whether to pursue the strategy of military repression that had already failed at Concord and Bunker Hill (the first of the many armed engagements that Holton narrates so well). Rather than rethink this strategy, the ministry of Lord North doubled down on it, with the active support of George III (who was not, by the way, the mere figurehead monarch whom Holton casts him to be, more akin to Elizabeth II than the great Elizabeth I).
In effect, each side was presenting unacceptable ultimatums to the other, and neither relented. The British imposed additional penalties on the Americans, declaring them traitors, disdaining their petitions, subjecting their merchant ships to confiscation and hiring German mercenaries. The Dunmore Proclamation was one more alarm that only confirmed what American leaders already knew. Had Dunmore sailed home to Britain rather than try to govern the Old Dominion from a warship cruising the Chesapeake, the result would have been the same.
In the end, one leaves Holton’s book wondering whether he deems the revolution worth commemorating at all. In his concluding section, “Roads Opened, Roads Closed,” Holton diminishes the events he has just spent 500 pages describing. A dozen pages from the end of “Liberty Is Sweet,” slow reader that I am, I finally realized that its title is ironic. Because the revolution brought little change to the status of women, turned Native Americans into “the war’s worst victims,” left chattel slavery intact and allowed “war-churned disease [to devastate] every segment of the population,” Holton finally concludes that “for the founding generation, the American Revolution produced more misery than freedom.” Had Holton called this book “The Sour Fruits of Independence,” he would have found a more accurate title.
Some of us still naively believe, however, that the American Revolution was an event of world historical significance, precisely because of its political character and its momentous constitutional innovations. When we debate how its 250th anniversary will be observed, when our political fissures and constitutional frailties will probably be so depressingly evident, that is the legacy we will be contesting.
From the WaPOst
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