Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
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This was fully proven in practice once again by the While some patriots, such as Samuel Adams, had<br />
1776 War of Independence, a war in which most of the In- for many years been certain of the need for settler indian<br />
and Afrikan peoples opposed settler nationhood and dependence from England,-the settler bourgeoisie was, in<br />
the consolidation of Arnerika. In fact, the majority of op- the main, conservative and uncertain about actual war. It<br />
pressed people gladly allied themselves to the British forces was the land question that in the end proved decisive in<br />
in hopes of crushing the settlers.<br />
swaying the doubtful among the settler elite.<br />
This clash, between an Old European empire and<br />
the emerging Euro-Amerikan empire, was inevitable<br />
decades before actual fighting came. The decisive point<br />
came when British capitalism decided to clip the wings of<br />
the new Euro-Amerikan bourgeoisie-they restricted<br />
emigration, hampered industry and trade, and pursued a<br />
long-range plan to confine the settler population to a controllable<br />
strip of territory along the Atlantic seacoast. They<br />
proposed, for their own imperial needs, that the infant<br />
Amerika be permanently stunted. After all, the European<br />
conquest of just the Eastern shores of North America had<br />
already produced, by the time of Independence, a population<br />
almost one-third as large as that of England and<br />
Ireland. They feared that unchecked, the Colonial tail<br />
might someday wag the imperial dog (as indeed it has).<br />
By first the Proclamation Act of 1763 and then the<br />
Quebec Act of 1773, the British capitalists kept trying to<br />
reserve for themselves alone the great stretches of Indian<br />
land West of theAlleghenies.This was ruinous to the settler<br />
bourgeoisie, who were suffering from the first major<br />
Depression in Amerikan history. Then as now, real estate<br />
speculation was a mania, a profitable obsession to the<br />
Euro-Amerikan patriots. Ben Franklin, the Whartons and<br />
other Philadelphia notables tried to obtain vast acreages<br />
for speculation. George Washington, together with the<br />
Lees and Fitzhughs, formed the Mississippi Company,<br />
which tried to get 2.5 million acres for sale to new settlers.<br />
Heavily in debt to British merchant-bankers, the settler<br />
bourgeoisie had hoped to reap great rewards from seizing<br />
new Indian lands as far West as the Mississippi River.(ll)<br />
The British Quebec Act of 1773, however, attached<br />
all the AmerikabMidwest to British Canada. The Thirteen<br />
Colonies were to be frozen out of the continental land<br />
grab, with their British cousins doing all the looting. And<br />
as for the Southern planter bourgeoisie, they were faced<br />
with literal bankruptcy as a class without the profits of new<br />
conquests and the expansion of thc slavc systcm. It was<br />
this one issue that drove them, at the end, into the camp of<br />
rebellion.(l2)<br />
Historian Richard G. Wade, analyzing the relation<br />
of frontier issues to the War of Independence, says of<br />
British restrictions on settler land-grabbing: "...settlers<br />
hungered to get across the mountains and resented any efforts<br />
to stop them. The Revolution was fought in part to<br />
free the frontier from this confinement."(l3)<br />
Like Bacon's Rebellion, the "liberty" that the<br />
Amerikan Revolutionists of the 1770's fought for was in<br />
large part the freedom to conquer new Indian lands and<br />
profit from the commerce of the slave trade, without any<br />
restrictions or limitations. In other words, the bourgeois<br />
"freedom" to oppress and exploit others. The successful<br />
future of the settler capitalists demanded the scope of independent<br />
nationhood.<br />
APPROXIMATE FRONTIER LINE OF THE<br />
COLONIES IN 1774<br />
But as the first flush of settler enthusiasm faded<br />
into the unhappy realization of how grim and bloody this<br />
war would be, the settler "sunshine soldiers" faded from<br />
the ranks to go home and stay home. Almost one-third of<br />
the Continental Army deserted at Valley Forge. So enlistment<br />
bribes were widely offered to get recruits. New York<br />
State offered new enlistments 40q acres each of Indian<br />
land. Virginia offered an enlistment bonus of an Afrikan<br />
slave (guaranteed to be not younger than age ten) and 100<br />
acres of Indian land. In South Carolina, Gen. Sumter used<br />
a share-the-loot scheme, whereby each settler volunteer<br />
would get an Afrikan captured from Tory estates. Even<br />
these extraordinarily generous offers failed to spark any<br />
sacrificial enthusiasm among the settler masses.(l4)<br />
It was Afrikans who greeted the war with great en-<br />
17 thusiasm. But while the settler slavemasters sought