>3. G on the Jacobins and Machiavelli. In referring to these as his models, I
>agree that G did not intend to approve of the high terror of the French
>revolution or the most cold cynical of Machiavelli's suggestions. But the
>Jacobins did have a top down conception of leadership, a commitment to
>creatinga republic of virtue in virtue of their superior ethics and
>understanding, and G accepts this; likewise; it is misleading to say that G
>took Machiavelli merely as a prophet of national unity and republicanism as
>in the Discourses on Livy. It is not accidental that he calls the party the
>Modern Prince: in doing so, he evokes the model of calculating leadership
>presented in The Prince, and its disdain for the popular will insofar as that
>is in the Prince's view inconsistent with the goal.
Though I disagree with you on Gramsci's interpretation of the Jacobins & Machiavelli (more on this later), you are entitled to your opinion on this subject. We should, however, refrain from judging the Jacobins & Machiavelli by our contemporary democratic or socialist standards. Anachronism makes us ignore their _democratic_ achievements while minimizing the _anti-democratic_ aspects of their contemporaries in comparison.
Compare, for instance, the French Jacobins & the American Patriots. The former had a beneficial impact on the Haitian Revolution, while the latter failed to enlist militant slaves & free persons of color enthusiastically in the cause of the Revolution.
***** Lecture Notes 3 - The American Revolution
African American History - Spring 1999 Department of History, St. John's University
by Omar Ali
...Free black people and slaves
This third and least memorialized uprising that forged the American Revolution frequently allied themselves with Native Americans and sometimes with abolitionist colonials. This third grouping, over the period of decades, provided the liberation of what some estimate to be one hundred thousand slaves, a fifth of the black population who numbered 575,000 in 1780. (Underground railroad which was to come, was credited with the emancipation of some 60,000 slaves.
Black resistance took many forms: appealing to the courts, fleeing, forming maroon communities (as we spoke about last week), to physical retaliation.
This mostly black rebellion constituted the largest emancipation of slaves in the Americas prior to the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) and the most significant act of liberation among Africans in North America prior to the Civil War.
It's somewhat remarkable that such a massive emancipation should remain largely unrecounted in American historiography.
The black reaction to the American rebellion against the British was a sharp escalation of slave revolts in South Carolina in 1765 and 1768 and in Georgia in 1771 and 1772.
William Loren Katz reports: "The month before minutemen faced British muskets at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, slaves in Ulster County, NY, organized an uprising that also involved five hundred Native Americans. By the summer of 1775, patriots found armed slaves a menace from Maryland to Georgia. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, struck in three North Carolina counties but were crushed by overwhelming white firepower."
British authorities seized upon this weakness of the American revolutionaries among their slave population in the rebellious colonies.
In November 1775, the British Governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, declared a martial law that included the caveat that "all indented servants, Negroes, or others [are] free, that are able and willing to bear arms."
Tens of thousands of slaves fled to the British side. The effect in Virginia alone, as described by Thomas Jefferson, was that 30,000 slaves left their colonial masters -- though there is no indication that all went over to the British.
Dunmore's appeal was purely practical rather than moral, it was rooted in expediency rather than humanitarian zeal.
As Loyalists, slaves and their free black counterparts (approximately one-third of them) took up arms and served as spies, couriers, guides, cooks, orderlies, waiters, personal servants, and field hands.
News of black people being incited to wage war against the colonial elites was received with mixed reviews in England. The elevation of black people to fight was seen as a lowering of the military and national status of England (Edmund Burke lamented in the House of Commons) -- even though this was filled with hyprocricy since the use of slave labor in a military capacity was common among European powers since the seventeenth century in the Caribbean and Brazil, where shortages of manpower forced colonial nations to recruit slaves for various military functions.
At the outbreak of the American Revolution several colonies, all of them in the North, accepted black people in militia units. Black people were at Lexington and Concord and at Bunker Hill.
Several served with Connecticut units during the Boston campaign. However, at the time of the Lexington battle, rumors that slaves were mobilizing to massacre the citizens left defenseless when the militia marched off to fight caused such panic among white citizens that the Massachusetts Committee of Safety decided to prohibit the enlistment of slaves in any of the colony's armies.
Five days after he was appointed commander in chief of the Continental Army, George Washington, issued orders against enlisting black people, although those in the army were allowed to remain.
The Continental Congress moved that all black people be discharged from the Continental Army - although the motion was strongly supported by southern delegates, it failed. The actuality of black insurrection in Virginia, however gave the delegates second thoughts, and thereafter the Continental Congress formally declared all blacks ineligible for military service.
But the weight of common sense and military necessity compelled the abandonment of the policy. Convinced that the outcome of the war hinged on which side could arm black people faster, Washington publicly advocated the recruitment of black people into the Continental Army.
By 1777 free black men and slaves were serving in mixed regiments in a number of states, most of them in the North - Rhode Island and Connecticut had all-black batallions (enticed by the promise of freedom in exchange of fighting for Independence).
The historian James W. Walker states that "several black pioneer corps were formed of fugitive slaves, with their own non-commissioned officers, dozens of black people served the Royal Navy as ordinary seamen or as pilots on coastal vessels, and there was even a black cavalry troop created in 1782." When the British General Cornwallis surrendered to the patriots in 1781, more than 4,000 of his 5,000 seamen were black.
At the end of the war George Washington showed up at New York to insist that all slaves must be returned to their American owners.
He was unsuccessful and the British received 30,000 black people (including 3,000 free black people) in Nova Scotia. Many remained in Canada, others were transported to West Africa (eventually the colony of Sierra Leone), and others joined the thousands of other liberated slaves who had already been transferred to the West Indies.
As we will see next week, while the colonial elite consolidate their power in the newly established nation, the third grouping, black people (as was the case with poor whites) continued their rebellion.
Many black people resorted to marronage. In 1800, however, more direct forms of rebellion resurfaced. There was Gabriel's rebellion in Richmond, and in 1802, Sancho's conspiracy embraced Virginia and North Carolina.
Noteworthy: Thomas Jefferson included in the Declaration of Independence drafted for the Continental Congress in 1776 a paragraph detailing the king's guilt in imposing an "execrable commerce" on the colonies: that is the slave trade and slavery.
That paragraph was however, deleted, in all probability because so many at the Continental Congress (George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson himself) were pursuing the domestic slave trade - that is, the sale and transfer of slaves from the upper to the lower south.
Regarding the Constitution, just as had been the case under the British crown, the whole judicial and military might of the new nation conspired against servants and slaves, which could be seen in articles 1 and 2 of the Constitution.
Under Article 1 of the Constitution The number of representatives and direct taxes apportioned to each state was to be determined by its population: "adding the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other Persons."
Article 2, The whole nation was to serve as an informer against fugitive slaves and servants. "No person held to Service or Labour the State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due."
Again the judicial and military might of the new nation would bring its force to bear against both servants and slaves and then pit one group against the other, further isolating slaves:
The second Congress enacted the Fugitive Slave Act in 1793, condemning any who would provide aid or protection to fugitive slaves....
<http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Workshop/4275/StJohnsLec3.html> *****
It seems to me that, during the Revolutionary period, slaves & free persons of color waged impressive struggles, which achieved a partial success of large-scale emancipation (the largest until the Haitian Revolution), as well as poor whites. American slaves couldn't emancipate themselves, however, mainly because the anti-British white Patriots of America (as well as the anti-Jacobin British) did not think like Simon Bolivar or Léger Félicité Sonthonax:
***** ...To Simón Bolívar, himself of partial African ancestry, it was the Euro-American model of revolution that was to be avoided by the Spanish-American states seeking their independence after 1810, and he suggested the best way was to free all slaves.... (Franklin W. Knight, "The Haitian Revolution," at <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/105.1/ah000103.html>) *****
***** ...The leftward drift of the revolution and the implacable zeal of its colonial administrators, especially the Jacobin commissioner Léger Félicité Sonthonax, to eradicate all traces of counterrevolution and royalism -- which he identified with the whites -- in Saint Domingue facilitated the ultimate victory of the blacks over the whites.... (Franklin W. Knight, "The Haitian Revolution," at <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/105.1/ah000103.html>) *****
North American leaders of the Revolution were, alas, not Jacobins like Bolivar & Sonthonax. Nor were ordinary North American whites too prepared to emancipate slaves & elevate free persons of color to the ranks of patriots. Anti-Jacobinism fueled racism, and vice versa, in England and elsewhere as well.
***** "William Cobbett, John Thelwall, Radicalism, Racism and Slavery: A Study in Burkean Parodics"
by Marcus Wood, University of Sussex
_Romanticism On the Net_ 15 (August 1999)
...In the first half of the 1790s Burke's writings developed, with a unique vigour, the fashionable Loyalist link between French Jacobinism and revolutionary developments in the French Caribbean. He reserved his most lethal moves for developments in San Domingo. The emotionally unstable Letters on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace, the last of which Burke was compulsively working on at the time of his death, set up a series of comparisons between developments in France and revolutionary San Domingo. (5) This work assaulted events in Revolutionary France, and their colonial fallout, with a ferocity which dictated the terms in which Cobbett and Thelwall subsequently wrote about slavery and race. Cobbett swallowed Burke's positions lock stock and barrel, digesting them and then reconstituting them, at times with an horrific negrophobe vigour, into arguments focused on the exploitation of the English labour force. Thelwall passionately opposed everything Burke said, yet he set up his responses in ways which mimmic while subverting Burkean argumentative methods. (6)....
...(5) It is significant that Burke's ferocious treatment of the slave revolution continues to be excised from accounts of his thought and writing during the 1790s. For example _Burke and the French Revolution Bicentennial Essays_ ed. Steven Blakemore (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992) p. 145, makes only a single reference to Burke's writing on slavery, and this suggests that Burke was a strident opponent of the slave trade.
(6) See Gregory Claeys, ed. and intro., _The Politics of English Jacobinism Writings of John Thelwall_ (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995) pp. 329-417....
[The full article is at <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/thelwall.html>.] *****
Yoshie