Barkley raises some interesting questions about attitudes towards slavery in colonial Virginia. Looking back we must remember that slave owners classified Black people as livestock, not as people. Slavery as a national question only came about after the revolution when the question of how to determine representation in the new congress came up and it was agreed upon to count Black slaves as 2/3 of a person. This all seems very cruel now.
The Ohio Co. of French and Indian War fame was a corporation chartered by the British govenment and it's major players(investors) were Tories during the American revolution. George Washington was employed by the Ohio Corporation early in his career and his Virginia military appointments came from the two largest stockholders in the Ohio Co. George Washington may have been the original disgruntled employee.
Sincerely, Tom L.
"Rosser Jr, John Barkley" wrote:
> Actually the real question is why did so many of the
> southern slaveocrats support the American Revolution. In
> the English Revolution the southerners supported the
> monarch against the Puritans in Massachusetts who supported
> the Cromwellians. The US Civil War can be seen as any many
> respects a replay of that particular conflict. Indeed, in
> the English Revolution many aristocrats fled to Virginia,
> to the Northern Neck of Virginia to be precise. This is
> why the University of Virginia sports teams are called the
> "Cavaliers." It was probably the biggest single migration
> of British aristocracy to the Western Hemisphere (or
> anywhere outside England) that ever occurred.
> In the American Revolution the issue that turned the
> attitude of the southern slaveocrats was opening of land in
> the Midwest, especially Ohio. During the French and Indian
> War (Seven Years War in Europe) the British had sided with
> the colonists against the French and the Indians in terms
> of their claims to be able to expand into these lands.
> After that war the British shifted to defending the
> Indians' claims to the land beyond the Ohio River. Many of
> the slaveocrats had gone into debt to British banks to
> expand holdings into the Midwest and this proved to be a
> driving material interest. Indeed the first battle of the
> American Revolution was not Lexington or Concord, but the
> Battle of Point Pleasant on the Ohio River in 1774 where
> colonists fought Indians who were backed by the British.
> As regards the corporate form argument, there is
> something to this, with the American Revolution
> representing a revolt against the kinds of
> state-established monopolies favored in mercantilist
> Britain and which had been used to establish some of the
> colonies, e.g. Virginia. But I would agree with Louis P.
> that none of this was of a sufficiently fundamental nature
> to warrant labeling the American Revolution a "real" or
> major revolution.
> Barkley Rosser
> On Mon, 23 Nov 1998 13:08:42 -0500 Charles Brown
> <CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us> wrote:
>
> > Herbert Aptheker replies to Beard
> > in _The Early Years of the Republic_
> >
> > Actually, standard Marxism is "better".
> >
> > Charles Brown
> >
> > >>> Carl Remick <cremick at rlmnet.com> 11/23 12:05 PM >>>
> > Re Charles': "So, I would say the 'standard' Marxist
> > answer is that the Am. Rev. was a
> > truly great rev."
> >
> > So much the worse for "standard" Marxism. The more I look at the
> > American Revolution, the less impressed I am. Doesn't anyone remember
> > Charles A. Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution
> > (1913), which presented a strong argument that the Constitution was
> > drafted by a basically self-serving elite?
> >
> > Carl Remick
> >
>
> --
> Rosser Jr, John Barkley
> rosserjb at jmu.edu