Gerald Horne’s The Counter-Revolution of 1776 was overlooked by most liberal media when it was published last spring, but it really can be considered one of the more notable books of 2014. It is actually a very short but dense and abundantly sourced book, original and broad in its scope—in many ways a magisterial work.

During the 1970s, South Africa used to be characterized by the U.S. government as “partly free” because its white minority had rights. In like manner, the American War of Independence, cast as a battle over kingly prerogative and unfair taxation, is deemed to be liberating except for slavery. Horne argues instead that preserving slavery was an impelling motivation for colonial secession and the outcome proved a human rights disaster. Not only did it lay the basis for a continuation of slavery for 87 years and a subsequent apartheid state in the South (and unofficially in the North)—and this at a time when abolitionist mass sentiment was growing in England and elsewhere in Europe. But because slaves (and indigenous people) were perceived as a subversive element during the war, the rebel victory cast them in the longstanding role of “intestine enemies” of the state.

Abolitionism in the late 18^th century was not simply an intellectual current (whose colonial adherents, taking into account practical problems involved, tended to favor a more gradualist approach). The legality of slavery had come under serious challenge in London’s courts. The historic Somerset decision of 1772 may in fact have delivered the coup de grace to slavery, making it illegal in Britain, a development that would logically extend to the American colonies, where the prospect of ending slavery created a firestorm, as reflected in the newspapers of the time.

Horne argues that there was little ambiguity about the Founding Fathers’ intention to preserve slavery. Notwithstanding the inspirational language of the Declaration of Independence, they “had normalized this form of property as any other.”

“In Boston, those who were pro-London often represented the enslaved in court, while rebels routinely represented masters.” John Adams “served . . . as a counsel for slaveholders and once argued that Massachusetts presumed all Africans to be slaves.” Even Ben Franklin “struck back vigorously” against the abolitionist Granville Sharp, and the list goes on. Africans pretty much had to rely on Tories to get a fair hearing in the court system, and understood that severance from Britain would only worsen their situation.

Fears of violent reprisals at the hands of African slaves fueled the colonists’ animosity and sense of persecution by Britain.
When Lord Dunmore, the Royal governor of the British colony of Virginia, ultimately threw down the gauntlet in November of 1775, issuing his famous proclamation offering to free all…