Actually this gets to the heart of a very interesting theoretical question that Jim Heartfield and I debated out on the Marxism list. This is whether there is such a thing as a bourgeois revolution, which I think needs rethinking. George Comninel's book on the French Revolution considers the recent historiography which questions whether there were really any deep class antagonisms between the French nobility and bourgeoisie in 1789.
I would like to carve out the time one of these days to subject the American revolution to the same kind of analysis. For example, Staughton Lynd did a study of the upstate NY ruling class at the time of the revolution and discovered conciliatory attitudes toward the crown not unlike those examined by the "revisionist" French historians in Comninel's work.
Comninel questions the traditional Marxist schema of the French revolution as being some kind of precursor to the proletarian revolutions of the 20th century. He says that everything that was revolutionary about 1789 took place despite the bourgeoisie. Daniel Guerin, the French anarchist, wrote a study of the French revolution independent of the "revisionist" scholarship which comes to an identical conclusion.
Perhaps we need to analyze the contending class forces of the American revolution with more acuity than we have in the past. Communist Party historians such as Herbert Aptheker tend to glorify the role of Jefferson. Aptheker presided over the CP's Jefferson School, created during the popular front. Browder described communism as 20th century Americanism.
I suspect that Jefferson was committed to the interests of the plantation-owning class, whose interests collided not only with the working people in the colonies, but the slaves and the American Indian, who Jefferson called openly for the extermination of. Karl Marx, on the other hand, was committed to the freedom of the working class at the expense of plantation-owners and industrialists. Most of the concessions he made to racism were as a result of his tendency to see the "bourgeois revolution" in a too optimistic way. This included his support of the US against Mexico in the border wars. Mexico was seen as an impediment to the consolidation of the bourgeois revolution on this continent and the Mexicans were described in derogatory if not racist terms.
I guess you have to be an Indian to look at all those bastards in a clinical fashion, rather than in the way that Max Sawicky got taught to look at them in seventh grade social studies. The first thing I'd like to see happen in a successful American revolution is Mount Rushmore sandblasted. Jim Craven, my Blackfoot friend and comrade, included this in his signature file:
"The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards Indians; their land and property shall never be taken from them without their consent." (Northwest Ordinance, 1787, Ratified by Congress 1789)
"...but this letter being unofficial and private, I may with safety give you a more
extensive view of our policy respecting the Indians, that you may better comprehend the parts dealt to to you in detail through the official channel, and observing the system of which they make a part, conduct yourself in unison with it in cases where you are obliged to act without instruction...When they withdraw themselves to the culture of a small piece of land, they will perceive how useless to them are their extensive forests, and will be willing to pare them off from time to time in exchange for necessaries for their farms and families. To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries which we have to spare and they want,we shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good and influencial individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by cession of lands...In this way our settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, and they will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi.The former is certainly the termination of their history most happy for themselves; but, in the whole course of this, it is essential to cultivate their love. As to their fear, we presume that our strength and their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them..."
(Classified Letter of President Thomas Jefferson ("libertarian"--for propertied white people) to William Henry Harrison, Feb. 27, 1803)
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)