"What neither the American public nor Parliament knew was that the man who would go on to draft the Declaration had secretly encouraged Norfolk’s ruin shortly before it happened." Andrew Lawler on the biggest coverup of the American Revolution:
— The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com) July 4, 2025 at 3:31 PM
I thought I knew a fair bit about our Revolution, but this was news to me. Per the Bulwark:
… THERE IS NO DISPUTING that King George III’s military forces treated New England’s coastal towns harshly at the start of the conflict. At the Battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775, redcoats torched the Boston suburb of Charlestown to prevent patriot snipers from targeting their troops during the bloody fight.
That fall, in retaliation for a deadly patriot attack on a Royal Navy ship in Maine, Admiral Samuel Graves, writing from Boston Harbor on July 6, ordered a fleet under Captain Henry Mowat “to lay waste burn and destroy such Sea Port towns as are accessible to His Majesty’s ships” in the northern province. On October 17, Mowat gave the residents of Falmouth—today’s Portland—two hours to evacuate. The subsequent bombardment and landing parties left most of its four hundred buildings in ruin and nearly half the population of 2,500 homeless.
But the fates of Charlestown and Falmouth paled in comparison with the annihilation of the port of Norfolk—Virginia’s largest city and the eighth-largest settlement in the thirteen colonies—which lay five hundred miles to the south. With its fine harbor and recent influx of Scottish merchants, the port had burgeoned from a regional trading center into an important node in the expanding Atlantic trade. As the largest port between Philadelphia and Charleston, it boasted a population triple that of the capital of Williamsburg. Half were enslaved people, many of whom were highly skilled laborers in the Scottish-owned factories, at the shipyards, on the docks, and aboard the many vessels plying the waters.
Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, had fled Williamsburg in the summer of 1775 and made a Norfolk shipyard his base of operations to defeat the rebels. By year’s end, however, the patriots had seized the town, pushing his troops and civilian loyalists onto ships in the harbor. On New Year’s Day 1776, after a bombardment by four Royal Navy warships to destroy sniper posts, an enormous fire swept the port that burned for three days. Soon not a single building was left standing. Dunmore was immediately fingered as the villain.
The news shocked and outraged Americans. John Hancock, presiding over the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, called the act “contrary to the rules of war . . . by all civilized nations.” George Washington, commander of the young Continental Army, decried British leaders who behaved like “the most barbarous Savages,” and predicted “the destruction of Norfolk, & threatned devastation of other places, will have no other effect than to unite the whole Country.”…
WHAT NEITHER THE AMERICAN PUBLIC nor Parliament knew was that the man who would go on to draft the Declaration had secretly encouraged Norfolk’s ruin shortly before it happened. Nor did they know that the colony’s patriots perpetrated the deed themselves and successfully blamed it on the enemy. Later historians continued to consider Dunmore the culprit in what was arguably the greatest war crime of the American Revolution.
The truth only came out sixty years later, when a 1777 report on Norfolk’s destruction, long hidden, came to light. The careful study of the blaze by a committee of Virginia patriots determined that 96 percent of the destruction was caused—on purpose—by the patriots themselves. They had used Dunmore’s bombardment, which by itself had caused limited damage, as an opportunity to set fire to and loot the town. They did not even spare the Anglican church, Masonic Hall, or homes of fervent patriots.
This was not, however, the result of raw troops running amok. According to eyewitnesses deposed by the committee, officers urged them on. Letters from patriot leaders also reveal that there was a secret plan to destroy the town, despite their public insistence that they would protect all property. Just weeks before the blaze, a pseudonymous newspaper writer urged the patriotic residents of Norfolk to take action for “the general good,” even if it “cost the lives of a few” and resulted in “either the partial or total destruction” of the town. A few days after that, Jefferson wrote a letter to John Page, a senior Virginia patriot, that concluded on an intriguing line, rendered in capital letters: “DELENDA EST NORFOLK”—Latin for “Norfolk must be destroyed,” an allusion to the famous declamation about Carthage with which Cato the Elder ended all his speeches while calling for war.
THE PERPLEXING QUESTION IS WHY Virginia’s patriot leaders would want to burn the leading city in their own colony. Other ports like Philadelphia and New York had large loyalist factions, but no one proposed demolition as a solution. Some have argued that Norfolk’s destruction was a simple move to deny the British a strategic harbor. Yet after the Royal Navy abandoned Boston in the spring of 1776, no one seriously proposed leveling that town.
A major reason has little to do with tea or taxes and a lot to do with immigrants and race. The rich tobacco planters of English descent who led Virginia’s rebellion had long viewed Norfolk’s prosperous Scottish merchants with suspicion. Many also owed them a good deal of money. As Jews were (and often still are), these savvy Scots were viewed as wealthy and untrustworthy cosmopolitans.
The port posed another threat to tobacco planters, since it had long been a magnet for the enslaved people who made their lives easy. In the crowded alleys and dark taverns along the waterfront, those who had fled plantations could hide, forge papers, and even find a measure of liberty in servitude rare in Virginia’s plantations, which were tightly controlled forced-labor camps. Then, in November 1775, Lord Dunmore freed those in bondage if they would fight for the king. This emancipation proclamation, and the resulting black regiment, terrified the patriots. Norfolk’s destruction promised to snuff out this dual threat to their wealth and power…
As a great man is supposed to have said, History doesn’t repeat itself.. but it rhymes.
Steve LaBonne
News to me as well. Wow. But nowadays we wouldn’t know anything about evil destructive racist oligarchs amirite.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone😊😊😊
tam1MI
The truth only came out sixty years later, when a 1777 report on Norfolk’s destruction, long hidden, came to light.
The days when government officials would actually acknowledge when they f***** up.
NotMax
Weekend watch.
Fascinating. All the more as it was constructed during the Depression era 1930s.
Inside Europe’s most remote building.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
O. Felix Culpa
So, a Reichstagsfeuer in tricorn hats.
Princess
The “patriots” were guilty of a lot of brutality.
RevRick
This is just another cautionary tale about the power of propaganda to shape not just opinions but also actual events. But it wasn’t the first time the Revolutionists spread propaganda. The shot heard round the world certainly qualifies.
Professor Bigfoot
It’s in the very founding of this country.
Dennis Doubleday
Rebellion is never pretty, and the victors write the history. How close were Washington, Jefferson, et al to going down in history as traitors who were justly apprehended and hanged?
glc
My goodness.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
There’s a little known book that goes into gory detail on the general campaign and operational context surrounding the burning of Norfolk:
A Quest for Glory
A more recent analysis:
https://allthingsliberty.com/2017/11/norfolk-virginia-sacked-north-carolina-virginia-troops/
There were a lot of strategic implication that went into burning Norfolk, not the least of which was it was a loyalist hotbed. Any student of the American Rev will tell you about the civil war that existed in the southern states during the conflict. You get a better feel of it during Greene’s Southern Campaign of 1780-82 but it was already underway prior as demonstrated by the Norfolk campaign. The Patriot leaders, particularly in the South, would prosecute campaigns against Loyalists with extreme prejudice. If said Loyalists “property” were a collateral casualty in that prosecution, they wouldn’t have cared. So yes, the inherent evil of slavery percolated thru their thought process.
Even better, a look at the 1777 investigation commissioned by the state of VA:
https://uncommonwealth.virginiamemory.com/blog/2025/01/03/norfolk-burning/
knally
@NotMax: That was amazing. Something I would never have found by myself. Thanks.
Deputinize America
I’ve thought badly of the Founding Fuckheads for years now. They were simply merchants that had a unique opportunity that they lucked into, primarily related to distance from the motherland along with a significant population compared to that of the UK. Their desires were based on greed, and they controlled so much of the colonial economy that the populace was bound to be compliant. Their first attempt at governance collapsed completely, and their second attempt (via the 1789 constitution) fell apart with the Dred Scott decision and subsequent civil war. Their whole rotten edifice has been bound together with duct tape and baling wire ever since – and of course, John Taney Roberts, Scam Alito and Uncle Clarence have been stimming by picking at the tape and unwinding the wire ends…
RevRick
@Professor Bigfoot: We were conceived in liberty and in oppression.
Doug R
@Professor Bigfoot:
There’s a line from these guys to the Boogaloo boys shooting and torching police stations during the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis.
lowtechcyclist
@Professor Bigfoot:
Taking those three points, and drawing a line through them, just isn’t enough to hang that thesis on. I’m sure there’s been a shitload of scholarly work about the relation between American slavery and the Revolution, and surely there has been more accessible writing about that, based on that scholarly work.
It just seems that there were plenty of Revolutionary hotheads in New England as well as down in the tobacco plantations of Virginia. Slavery may have ended in the British Isles in 1772, but no attempt was being made to extend that to the Colonies, nor would slavery be outlawed in British colonies in the Western hemisphere until, what, 1838? You don’t put your life on the line due to the prospect of losing one’s wealth at some point in the indefinite future, so I’m skeptical that the reasons for the Revolution had much to do with slavery. I’d have to see the receipts.
I would think it’s enough that the formation of a single country between Canada and Mexico would have been impossible if there had been any attempt to eradicate or even limit slavery on these shores, without any need to attribute the Revolution itself to the issue of slavery.
Doug R
@Deputinize America:
I mean when the British Empire eliminates slavery DECADES before you…
RevRick
@glc: You win the understatement of the day
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I suspect you mean the Boston Massacre was propaganda, something John Adams proved at the time. The British opening fire on the militia at Lexington was major fuck up by the British.
RevRick
@lowtechcyclist: Kevin Phillips (yeah, he of Southern Strategy infamy) wrote a book about 1775:A Good Year for Revolution in which he examines all the motivations and machinations that led up to the Revolution. He identified four colonies as the hotbeds of the Revolution: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, and South Carolina. They all had a variety of reasons, some overlapping, some in utter contradiction. Their fervor and militancy dragged the other nine colonies into the fight.
RevRick
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: But it’s not clear that the British did fire the first shot!
Baud
@RevRick:
Han shot first.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
No they didn’t. They eliminated slavery in the British Isles went full speed ahead in the Caribbean until the British accidentally ended the slave trade by ordering to Royal Navy to make a token effort at interdicted it, and the Royal Navy discovered there was lot of that sweet, sweet prize money to be made off captured slave ships.
Sugar was were the real money was at during that time.
glc
@RevRick: It’s toward the high end of my range.
If I go farther than that I just quote Thurber: “But I am getting surly, and I will close.”
O. Felix Culpa
@RevRick: Interesting. Was maintaining slavery a motivating factor for any of the revolutionary “hotbed” colonies?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@RevRick: Whoever shot first, attacking the Militia was specifically against General Gage’s orders because he wanted to seize the artillery and get out before the Militia reacted, because Gage knew that if it turned in a shooting war the British army in Boston was in big trouble. As it was the British column ran out of ammo and was nearly overrun by the Militia.
Deputinize America
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Haiti and its sugar was the single largest driver of wealth of France in the late 1700s. That’s why they were so butthurt about Haitian independence.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
One of the best, more recent, books on the AmRev is
The British Are Coming by Rick Atkinson
Although it’s not as on-point to the issues in this mornings discussion as it could be.
Probably a better shot at that would be Ray Raphael’s
A People’s History of the American Revolution
And everything lowtechcyclist said in #17 and one good book in that shitton of stuff written on slavery and the AmRev:
https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/slave-nation/
Deputinize America
@O. Felix Culpa:
Neither Virginia nor South Carolina could have functioned to provide massive unearned wealth to wannabe aristocrats without enslaved stoop labor.
O. Felix Culpa
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Reading the Zinn Education Project link, it seems to contradict what lowtechcyclist said in #17 and support Prof. Bigfoot’s thesis at #9.
Partial quote:
Janus Daniels
“The truth only came out sixty years later” for a small number of people “when a 1777 report” that was quickly buried again…
Remember the outrage when the 1629 Project claimed that colonists fought the Revolution for the sake of slavery?
Professor Bigfoot
@lowtechcyclist: Washington and Jefferson, the two biggest names in the Revolution, were also the owners of the most Enslaved people.
I find it easy to connect the simply avarice of the planter class and their paranoia that SOMETHING might interfere with their wealth-through-freeloading.
But, as I always say, white people will find other reasons to explain why the Founders revolted, and I just nod and say, “okay, whatever you say.”
sab
Half of my dad’s family came over to Virginia and Maryland as indentured debtors. After their seven years in bondage they thrived, and ended their lives as slaveholders who passed those slaves on to their children.
The other half of my dad’s family came over to New England. They became abolitionists settled in New England, New York or the midwest.
My mom’s family was either in Scotland, Ireland or Switzerland before the Revolution. Later they married Germans as newly arrived as they were.
Elizabelle
You needed all that slave labor for tobacco farming, in a way that would not have been required for wheat, or corn, or another crop.
Tobacco was the cash crop of its day. An addictive product, no less. And could be easily shipped across the Atlantic; not that heavy.
Professor Bigfoot
@RevRick: South Carolina, home of the Southern Revolution for Enslavement. Virginia, the biggest and most influential, led by some of the biggest slavers on the continent at that time.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@O. Felix Culpa:
I listed it to show that there is a body of work promoting the thesis under discussion, not necessarily suggesting that from an academic and research perspective, there’s widespread consensus that that specific thesis is the be-all-and-end-all of “causes” of the AmRev.
It was clearly a contributing factor along with a lot of other factors. I allude to that in the Norfolk piece, namely that the Bulwark author had a thesis, not one widely held quite frankly to include the “cover up” nonsense, the 1777 VA report was circulated, but everything else is either downplayed or ignored.
KSinMA
@NotMax: wow!
O. Felix Culpa
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
I appreciate the link. That there were multiple motivations for the Revolutionary War (unsurprising!) does not belie Professor Bigfoot’s thesis that defense of slavery was “in the very founding of this country” and that the slave states were motivated at least in part by Britain’s ban on slavery.
Deputinize America
@O. Felix Culpa:
I mean, it fits. Those lazy Southern fucks
1. Migrated to Texas and revolted when the Mexican government made it clear that they were serious about “no slaves”; and
2. Had a whole ass civil war over an election which meant that a national discussion about winding slavery down was inevitable.
The indolent dipshits aspired to live like English aristocrats off of the backs of chattel slaves, and the bootlick Southern boys without slaves were more than happy to die for what the lazy planters wanted.
Kristine
@NotMax: wow! Thanks for posting the link.
O. Felix Culpa
@Deputinize America: We differ in style, but not in content. 😁
MagdaInBlack
@NotMax: 11,670 Toblerones above sea level =-)
Gvg
I really doubt any coverup is possible that involves many people involved. I don’t buy this story in full. It can be partially true in that some patriots at the time added to the destruction by looting. That would be pretty normal throughout history. But it’s usually not possible to really control events and cover it up.
I have long thought that Jefferson’s wonderful words in the Declaration of Independence came to be more important than the man that wrote them. They are really inspiring in a way that even the Constitution doesn’t quite match. I think the description is felicity of phrasing. As children we read it together aloud in school for generations and we’re taught to believe it. Then we grew up and many of our predecessors noticed well that we weren’t quite living up to the ideals, and set out to fix that bit by bit. Some become cynics or denialist, but many just insist we do it. And that is why the words matter.
It’s also why I am coming around to being a Supreme Court justices must be impeached and removed person. Some of them are breaking the the clear to even non lawyer, constitution. I can’t get past their ignoring Citizenship, rights to trials and due process and warrants. I think the whole idea of the border patrol not needing reason to search within a 100 miles of the border or an airport is just ludicrous. Presidents not being subject to the law while in office since Nixon is IMO silly and about political problems not law. And I think at least 2 of them have been shown to be taking bribes although they get to rule those aren’t bribes. And Congress isn’t reacting because enough of them are taking bribes too.
I am advocating proper investigations and then trial with removal, not arbitrary actions such as the conservatives have devolved into.
Thor Heyerdahl
There could have possibly been fourteen colonies with Nova Scotia (includes today’s New Brunswick), but American privateers’ actions swayed the support to the British.
From the Nova Scotia entry on Wikipedia:
Elizabelle
@Gvg: Great comment, Gvg.
kindness
A Revolutionary false flag maneuver, eh? At least they didn’t try to pin it on the slaves.
Baud
No emancipation without representation!
Nukular Biskits
Good mornin’, y’all!
Damn the things I learn here on Balloon Juice!
CaseyL
Revolutions have many causes, and in the case of the US, at least one was monstrous. To the issue of slavery, you can add the fact that the structure of the new US government was cribbed almost entirely from the work of the Five Nations, which were then destroyed because the Five Nations was a Native American polity, and the European settlers wanted their land. So the US Revolution was tainted in a number of ways.
Granted.
Here’s the thing, though:
So far as I know, previous efforts to eliminate rule-by-kings didn’t do well in Europe: England usurped/murdered quite a few of its kings, and even created the Magna Carta, but never got rid of monarchy. France beheaded its king – but, after a very brief (and atrocity-ridden) flirtation with republicanism, crowned an Emperor; and did not have a permanent “republic” until well into the 19th Century. Germany was a motley collection of duchies – so, no king, but still rule by aristocrats – ditto Italy. And Spain, jeez, absolute monarchy lasted longer there than anywhere else in Europe. Attempts at republicanism, never mind democracy, never went far nor lasted very long.
(The one huge exception was the Netherlands, whose history was in some ways analogous to the US, but three centuries earlier (!). However, I don’t know enough about the Netherlands in detail to know how or why they were able to pull off a republic or what kind of society it was.)
Until the American colonies succeeded in kicking out its colonial rulers and established a workable republic/democracy in their place, no one other than The Netherlands had managed it. The US model was not altogether stable – 50 years later would come a civil war that would test the proposition by fire – but it did provide another workable model.
The US Revolution provided a tested, workable blueprint for governance in a post-monarchy world. That’s not nothing.
Nukular Biskits
@RevRick:
WhY dO yOu HaTe MuRiKa?!?!?!?
Professor Bigfoot
OPEN THREAD, so— is anyone else watching the British Grand Prix?
WOW, what a race so far! Rain, no rain, — Zak Brown just said “Crazy race— exciting!”
Slicks? Intermediates? Full wets?
Best F1 race so far this season, imho.
azlib
There is little doubt that the retention of slavery played a part in the American Revolution. It was not the sole factor, however. One of the issues we all struggle with is projecting our own values back on 18th Century history. Jefferson and Washington would be considered unredeeming racists today. Heck, we have a hard time understanding the values of the 1990s today. People and cultures evolve sometimes for the better and sometime for the worse.
We did create quite the myth about the Amercan Revolution. We were the good guys and the British were the bad guys, full stop. The truth if we can ever discern it is far more complex and sometimes disturbing. History is complicated and we can only interpret it through the lens of our own biases and beliefs.
One more note. Slavery was economically viable longer in the South because of the invention of the cotton gin. The gin did reduce the labor required to remove cotton seeds, but it made cotton very profitable and increased the demand for slave labor.
Professor Bigfoot
@azlib: Not even I am arguing that the defense of the Enslavement was the only cause of the American Revolution.
What *I* am arguing is that it was CENTRAL to the enterprise; that had that particular motivation not existed, I believe we would be part of the Commonwealth today.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Another Scott
@Professor Bigfoot: Dunno if Jefferson and Washington were the biggest slaveholders at the time. Montecello says he had over 600 total, but TJ also suffered booms and busts in his finances throughout his life. Washington’s case was complicated according to Mt Vernon because a large fraction were his wife’s. I think Washington was the richest (or certainly in the top 10) person in the country at the time, so it wouldn’t be surprising if he owned a relatively huge number.
Made me look.
List of slave owners at Wikipedia gives lots of names (world-wide) and some numbers, but isn’t comprehensive.
I also found this (which doesn’t address your point, is decades later, but is tangential and interesting):
It was a horrible, ghastly, extremely profitable business for those who could run it at scale.
More at the links.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Professor Bigfoot: Mr DAW is watching in the next room. I can hear the announcers talking about “normal English weather”
Steve Paradis
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
And the slave trade within the Caribbean went on until 1838, replaced by a defacto system of “apprenticeship”.
jonas
@Another Scott: A sobering story, indeed. Thanks for sharing. It’s an important reminder that it wasn’t just plantation owners who benefited from the South’s chattel slave system — it was a whole network of financiers, dealers, and other middlemen who provided the vast infrastructure for buying, selling, and transporting enslaved people.
Jeffro
so…next time we get into a tax dispute…anything short of burning down the town is relatively reasonable
good to know!
Professor Bigfoot
“This is America, where, if it’s profitable it is by definition moral.”
Professor Bigfoot
@Dorothy A. Winsor: It’s really making for a great, exciting race; and the papaya boys are demonstrating how much superior their car is under pretty much all conditions; its not a fluke they’re way ahead in the Constructors.
Their CEO is an American— could it be mere coincidence? ;^D
RevRick
@Nukular Biskits: IIt’s not Murika, but my older brother who was a Yankees fan. (I rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers). Murika got caught in the crossfire.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Deputinize America:
Interesting historical piece: the central TX area where the summer camp resides was also an area of pre-Civil War German and Czech immigration. They were staunch abolitionists right in the heart of Texas.
They fought back against the Confederacy to resist forced conscription and apparently the rebel scum could never enforce rule in that general area.
glc
@azlib:
The second time I’ve seen that mentioned this week. Possibly because July 4th turns our thoughts in that direction.
On the other hand, it seems to me it’s been about 5 decades since the last time I noticed that mentioned. I wonder what’s changed. (Hint: I don’t wonder what’s changed.)
Chacal Charles Calthrop
I think the 1629 project is actually the 1619 project. Arguing about what portion of the American revolution was about maintaining slavery is like arguing what portion of the vote for Trump is about racism: you’ll never get enough data to know because people lie.
The 1619 project got pushback from historians who argued that the impulses for democracy and for abolitionism were always intertwined, see, e.g., https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-the-historians-who-critiqued-the-1619-project.html. I’m guessing it’s a debate that will probably never be over.
Jeffro
@RevRick: thanks for the recommendation! I’m a little behind on my reading these days, but it’s on my ‘wish list’ =)
CaseyL
It’s good to have a more honest record of why the US revolution happened. I do remember the thunderclap in my mind when I first learned about the darker side of the US Founding Fathers, and the nation’s founding, back in high school. It’s not like I had previously thought they were demigods, perfect in word and deed, but I hadn’t realized the extent of their moral compartmentalization. I am very sure Jefferson & Co. believed whole-heartedly in what they said and did; I am bemused, as always, by how people can whole-heartedly believe in something while simultaneously violating their own “deeply, sincerely held” beliefs.
My personal take is, the work lasts longer than the people who created it, and can have effects they could never have dreamed. The work itself is more important: it’s not like we’ve concluded that, since the Founders included a bunch of slave-holding rapists, the entire US experiment in self government should be tossed.
It is good and important to know the facts about our country’s founding – particularly now that slavery and genocide are making a comeback, since as a nation we never really faced up to and atoned for those atrocities – but I think it’s equally important to separate, as it were, the artist from the art.
Is coming to honest terms with our past necessary to overcome it and move forward?
I’m not sure what can be done to fully face up to and atone for the atrocities associated with our nation’s history. Even Germany, which has done more than any other country in facing up to and atoning for its Nazi past, is once again having to deal with a large home-grown fascist movement. I’d love to know if there’s anyway to stamp out that metavirus once and for all.
Elizabelle
@CaseyL: Good comments.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@Professor Bigfoot: in the “Man in the High Castle” miniseries, about an America divided between Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany because the Axis won the war, there’s a scene where the schoolchildren have to know exactly how many slaves each of the Founding Fathers owned because the Nazis are teaching the children that America was always based on racial slavery. The whole series shows how easy it would be for the Nazis’ new American colony to fit into the Nazi empire.
Chetan Murthy
I remember a couple of decades ago, in the FTFNYT Sunday Magazine, there was a long article about Jefferson that quoted him writing much later in his life that every Black woman slave was a money-making machine, producing children on the reg’lar who could be “sold South”. By then the lands of Virginia were worked-out, no longer sufficiently fertile, and for a time it looked like slavery was dying out. But then the rich bottomlands of the Deep South were becoming the Land of Cotton, and they could use all the slaves that Virginia could produce.
I remember Ta-Nehisi Coates writing about Black families split by the slavers, about a Black man sitting at the fence, trying to catch a last glimpse of his family as they were taken on the wagon for the first steps of their journey to the Deep South.
Jefferson’s words were lofty. But he was a slavery thru-and-thru, esp. in the later years of his life.
Gin & Tonic
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Robert Caro’s LBJ biography has a long chapter on the visit of the West German Chancellor to that area shortly after LBJ became President. Enough Germans that LBJ thought it would be a good place to invite him there (plus it’s close to where LBJ lived at the start of his political career.)
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Chetan Murthy:
Another great read on this aspect of “the founders” is:
An Imperfect God
Deep dive into Washington and his views on slavery and his own slaves.
There was a massive difference between Washington and Jefferson not just on the issue at the national level but also at the personal level.
Jefferson was a *deeply* flawed person who could intellectually run circles around Washington (who was always self-conscious of his lack of formal education). Nonetheless, Washington comes out of our early history as a much better *man* than Jefferson could have ever dreamed of being.
schrodingers_cat
Any guesses how the British replaced slave labor?
Sunshine Protester
It’s really depressing to read about what shitbirds some of the ‘patriots’ were.
Bursit Hollow at Lowe's Branch Road
We’re getting the punishment we deserve.
Chetan Murthy
@schrodingers_cat: S_C, by some chance do you have any pointers to good detective novels set in India, that center Indians? I ask b/c I’ve been reading Abir Mukerjee’s Wyndham and Banerjee novels, and ….. I’m all tuckered-out with everything being about the Brits in India, really I am. Just tuckered-out.
trollhattan
Thoughts that only summer camps occupy the banks of the Guadalupe River can be dispelled by this video.
https://bbc.com/news/videos/c5yp073gdpvo
Hunch: time spent questioning who might have approved these sites and who built the homes will approach zero. Energy put into blaming the presence of DEI at NOAA Weather for an event “no-one could have anticipated” will outshine the sun. They could bottle that.
Matt McIrvin
@CaseyL: Britain did abolish the monarchy and establish a parliamentary republic in the 1640s– which rapidly devolved into an atrocity-ridden theocratic dictatorship, which then collapsed and the monarchy was restored.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
So you’re saying there’s hope for us?
M31
here’s a great article from the Smithsonian about Jefferson and slavery:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-dark-side-of-thomas-jefferson-35976004/
Jefferson made so much money from enslaved boys making nails that it was a huge percentage of his income, and the fact that they were whipped was suppressed from historical reports made in the 1950s, only emerging in 2005.
azlib
@Professor Bigfoot:
You are likely right. All England had to do was give the colonies representation in Parliament. I am not sure slavery was the central reason, but it sure looks like it was central to the southern plantation class. After all the slavery clause was dropped from the Declaration and we all know about the 3/5 compromise in the Constitution which gave the South a larger representation in Congress.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: I’ve noticed that British dystopian and alternate-history fiction has a tendency to associate republics or other non-monarchic government with tyranny, much as we associate kings and emperors with tyranny.
Red Cedar
@Chetan Murthy: Have you read The Bangalore Detectives Club, by Harini Nagendra. First of a series, set in 1920s , woman detective. Lots of fun!
Chetan Murthy
@Red Cedar: I have not. I’ll look for it. Thank you!
azlib
@glc:
Yes, we seem to have leaders bent on erasing uncomfortable facts about history. I like uncomfortable facts to be discussed and taught. That is the only way we learn from our past mistakes.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
IMHO any government that enforces religious dogma is going to be tyrannical regardless of other aspects of its form.
M31
and even if slavery was the ‘real reason’ the colonies rebelled may be unknown, there’s no way that the southern colonies would have been on board without assurances it would continue
I’ve read some accounts that try to claim that ‘it was clear’ that slavery would gradually die out in the South, the way it had in the North (without huge economic disruption), so the early anti-slavery forces were easier to marginalize, but then the cotton gin changed things. Not sure if this has held up as a historical view.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: In Britain, religion and government have never *not* been entangled, but they’ve learned the hard way to keep the interference lightweight. In France they made the clean break but sometimes their commitment to public secularity extends to what we’d consider violations of the free exercise clause.
zhena gogolia
@Red Cedar: Wow. I have been trying not to buy any new books, but this looks intriguing. I read a sample on Amazon.
Gvg
@Chetan Murthy: Jefferson was bad at money and on the verge of bankruptcy several times I think. He spent way too much on projects like the fancy house and beautiful garden with fruit from all over the world to try here in America. Some of his projects were really successful like the revolution itself or the Louisiana purchase but personally he didn’t make money. That means IMO that over time he became more corrupted by the need to find money and left behind principles. He was worse about a lot of things as he grew older as I recall.
One of the reasons he is one of the most studied founders is he was such an odd colorful personality. Very full of contradictions like a miniseries with plot twists every week within one person. Most of the others were much more normal and easier to understand. Jefferson is not repeatable I think.
CaseyL
@Matt McIrvin: Yes, much the same pattern as France, in fact, and the interregnum lasted about the same amount of time: one generation.
I used to think a lot about how to change a society, what it would take. I looked at places where real changes were made, and whether they lasted and, if so, how that happened.
I’m not a trained sociologist, or any kind of scientist, so my thoughts on the matter are that of a very well read amateur. But the conclusion I came to is, it takes at least three generations for a deep social change to become permanently rooted in a society, and only if those deep social changes are actually implemented and stuck with.
What we’re seeing in the US is what happens when the social changes are not implemented evenly, and not stuck with, and entire regions are allowed to reject them. We rarely seem to get past that three-generations miminus.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Lots of European counties are more entangled with religion that US liberals would like, but they all keep it more for show than for regulation, so they’re not what I would call tyrannical.
Chetan Murthy
@CaseyL: There is a strain of thought that if you want to change the world, you need to do it incrementally, and not via a revolution, for precisely the reasons you outline. Which is why, even though my views on most issues are far to the left of the Dems, I support them anyway.
Baud
@Chetan Murthy:
IMHO you have to at least accept incremental change even if you’re pushing for more. When incremental change itself becomes the enemy, the reactionary becomes a friend.
Chetan Murthy
@Baud: My French colleagues used to say that the reason the French had so many Catholic saints’ holidays, was so they could get to the beach. An American grad student friend explained that church attendance in France fell off pretty much after the Revolution, and the French marveled at how religious we Americans were.
Elizabelle
@Red Cedar: Thank you! On the lookout. Sounds like something our library might have. They know we like our mysteries and detective novels
ETA: Great. They do have them all. Summer reading ahead.
I know criminally nothing about India, and this might be a fun way to slide in.
schrodingers_cat
@Chetan Murthy: I’ll have to think. Do you read or understand any Indian languages? Then we can cast a wider net.
Baud
@Chetan Murthy:
Relgiousity is a big problem for us, because so much of it is right wing in both numbers and aggressiveness.
Chetan Murthy
@schrodingers_cat: Nopes. English and French.
Elizabelle
@trollhattan: I think there will be blowback. Lot of professional, wealthy, and educated parents whose kids were either at risk, or are missing or dead. Texas is not going to slide past this one on “who could have known? Look over there! Libtards!”
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Chetan Murthy: Many of those who came to New World from Europe were exceptionally religious. So much so that they were persecuted. Maybe the effect of that is still being felt.
Splitting Image
@azlib:
The British government wasn’t even in favour of giving English people representation in Parliament. At the time of the Revolution, the borough of Old Sarum (population zero), elected two members of Parliament, and the city of Manchester (population several hundred thousand) elected none.
If the colonies had pushed harder for representation, Britain would have also had to reform the current Parliament, and they really didn’t want to do that. Britain didn’t reform Parliament until 1832.
M31
@Splitting Image:
reading 19th-C novels or Patrick O’Brian books and learning about ‘pocket boroughs’ was wild
Chetan Murthy
@Splitting Image: @M31: Haha, I learned about ’em from Blackadder.
lowtechcyclist
@Professor Bigfoot:
Reason I’m skeptical is that if they lost, it would be their heads. What’s worth putting one’s life on the line for? Preserving one’s affluence? I really don’t grok that.
different-church-lady
My god, this is almost as big a coverup as the fact that Biden was old!
different-church-lady
@CaseyL: So really, we’re doing great. We lasted almost 250 years before we restored the monarchy.
NotMax
@Chetan Murthy
Pitt the Even Younger.
:)
stinger
@Baud:
Yep. The very first enumerated freedom in the Bill of Rights for a reason.
prostratedragon
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Logistics again.
Matt McIrvin
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Our religious right seems to regard anything less than religious control of government as oppression. The idea that it could go badly for them doesn’t seem to register.
Karen H
@trollhattan:
Just to be clear. The caption states that this is the San Gabriel river in Georgetown which is around 100 miles from the Kerrville area and the storms which caused the flooding there were on Saturday morning, rather than Friday. The caption does seem to conflate the two events. Georgetown is on I35 north of Austin and is much less rural than the area where the camps are. Doesn’t change the fact that those buildings are too close to the river.
RevRick
@stinger: One of the core principles of my Calvinist(Reformed Church) tradition is that in matters of conscience “neither prince, nor priest, nor thrall” has no right to dictate what you believe or don’t believe.
Splitting Image
@Chetan Murthy:
Me too! Blackadder was a gateway to a lot of historical stuff for me.
RevRick
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Much of Eastern Pennsylvania was populated by various German sects, who fled lands that had been devastated during the Thirty Years War. Hence Pennsylvania Dutch. The largest groups were Lutherans and Reformed (German Calvinists), but there were also numerous Mennonite groups (including Amish), Moravians, Brethren (German Baptist), and Schwenkfelder.
NotMax
@RevRick
Video is IMHO too long, so maybe a few minutes or skipping ahead from time to time to sample the examples given will be enough.
The weird world of Christian Instagram.
I’ll say it out loud. These people are downright dangerous charlatans.
Another Scott
@Splitting Image: Zooks!
With that background, undoubtedly known by many of the Founders, no wonder Jefferson thought things like:
Could think and write deeply. And had a very messy and complicated and … life. He had to deal with Aaron Burr as well.
Complicated dude.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Professor Bigfoot
@Baud:
Indeed— how could it be otherwise?
Not that hundreds of years of sectarian warfare across Europe wouldn’t be pretty good evidence, simple reason says you have to use the lash to enforce a belief is something that cannot be seen, heard, felt or tasted.
NotMax
@Professor Bigfoot
Enforcing anti-religion can be just as tyrannical. See: Albania’s postwar dictator Enver Hoxha.
Chetan Murthy
I’m no history-talkin’ dude, but the way I remember it, the Founders were deeply influenced by the Iroquois Confederacy.
Lyrebird
@Professor Bigfoot:
Appreciate all your comments, and I wish my own education had included more about the economic ties between enslaving people and rum.
New England is a different beast than Virginia in many ways still, though and even back then they could barely agree (e.g. founding of Rhode Island).I also realize my teachers glossed over the “no quartering of troops” part. Probably not wanting to go into how that probably meant abuse of women.
I lived long enough in those parts to still believe that the British shot first, and an African American was the first Revolutionary hero to die! (Wiki page for Crispus Attucks for anyone interested.)
Chetan Murthy
@Lyrebird: It has been too long, but ISTR that the bankers and sailors of New England were -critical- to the slave trade. And I definitely remember reading that the finances of King Cotton were intrinsically dependent on Northern bankers who lent money on the literal backs of enslaved people as collateral.
I’ve never read it, but seen good things about a book by Sven Beckert — Empire of Cotton.
Professor Bigfoot
@lowtechcyclist: It’s the founding of American capitalism.
I mean… how many people are perfectly willing to kill for the purpose of gaining wealth? History is littered with them, going back to Caesar conquering Gaul for the wealth he could collect.
I think you’re far kinder to their avaricious natures than they deserve.
Gretchen
@Chetan Murthy: Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a lot of wonderful articles about the Civil War for the Atlantic. They were especially good because a lot of them explored the experiences of average people during the war, rather than battles. I have always wished they’d collect those essays into a book, but nobody seems to be planning to do that.
Professor Bigfoot
@NotMax: Or the infamous Soviet enforcement of atheism… that seems to have led to a very religious backlash.
Any attempt to enforce a human’s thoughts is, in itself, a crime against humanity.
Chetan Murthy
@Gretchen: I still remember reading “The Hyperlinked Ballad Of Eliza Icewalker”
https://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2012/10/the-hyperlinked-ballad-of-eliza-icewalker/263663/
From the end:
I remember reading his writing about how (at the time) there was very little commemoration of the lives of enslaved people in those plantation museums. That changed (perhaps as a result of his writings) but one presumes it’s now changing back.
He woke me in a way I had never been awake before. [which was my fault, for sure]
Professor Bigfoot
@Chetan Murthy: In MANY ways, American industrialization itself was dependent on the Enslavement. Far more than the simple farm hands we imagine, they Enslaved men like Robert Smalls; a skilled seaman and ship handler.
The Enslavement colors very nearly everything about American capitalism.
kalakal
@Splitting Image:
That’s unfair, the population was 7.
My favourite was Dunwich which had fallen into the sea but still had 2 MPs
Chetan Murthy
@Professor Bigfoot: Yes, that is what these economic histories are making clearer and clearer. And I remember reading about factories starting to spring up in Virginia cities, using (skilled) slave labor. So it isn’t at all clear that if the Civil War hadn’t happened, that somehow miraculously slavery would have died-out.
Soprano2
@trollhattan: They’ll blame everything bad in the government on DEI long after they’ve abolished it, because it makes a great scapegoat for them.
exbarrowboy
On the issue of state support for religion, I’ve seen it plausibly argued that the most secular societies in Europe are those where there is an official church. With some semi-guaranteed trade from the “culturally Christian” population for hatch/match/dispatch services there wasn’t the Darwinian struggle for survival amongst creeds that went on in America. The end result was a comfortable and complacent establishment that was happy to settle for a gentle decline in its congregations. I’m sure I’ve seen some studies which show that a small percentage of Church of England priests are actually atheists. In contrast, American sects that were most successful in proselytizing would be the survivors and end up being far more culturally significant.
Soprano2
@Matt McIrvin: I think the world was pretty comfortable for them until the 1960’s. They want to go back to that, and since they can’t control the culture they want to do it through the law.
Geminid
@Professor Bigfoot: I’ve read 47 years of rule by the Shi’ite fundamentalist Islamic Republic has led to a resurgence of Zoastrianism among Iranians. Some of them argue that Islam is a foreign religion from the Arabian Peninsula that was imposed on Iranians by conquest, and that they need to return to the more advanced monotheism of their ancestors.
This was not what the Ayatollah Khomeini had in mind when he helped found tbe Islamic Republic, but even he knew better than to try suppressing Nowruz, the Persian New Year celebrated at the vernal equinox. Nowruz is a survival of Zorastrianism.
Kayla Rudbek
@Professor Bigfoot: and slavery also leads to a lack of invention (because the people doing the work and actually solving the problems on the ground are legally considered property so they can’t actually own their own inventions and the slavers have no incentive to encourage innovation)
Gin & Tonic
@Professor Bigfoot:
The religious “backlash” in many of the non-russian republics of the USSR wasn’t a backlash, they simply continued to worship largely as before, just in secret. Oddly, russia itself has remained far less religious than some of the other countries, e.g. Ukraine. I could write a lot more about this, and the connection of national identity with one’s faith traditions, but don’t have time right now. But the atheism was also, perhaps even primarily, an anti-nationalistic movement.
Lauryn11
@Chetan Murthy:
E. Blackadder: Dunny-on-the-Wold is a tuppenny-
ha’penny place. Half an acre of sodden marshland in the Suffolk Fens with an empty town hall on it. Population: three rather mangy cows, a dachshund named `Colin’, and a small hen in its late forties.
Another Scott
@Chetan Murthy: I’ve read snippets of similar things, but I’m no history dude either.
Made me look. ThePennGazette.com:
Maybe Jefferson was using similar language the same way.
Much more at the link.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
LNNVA
@Another Scott: I just want to thank you so much for what you wrote earlier about the purchasing of slaves in VA and transporting them to Louisiana. Some years ago I did my DNA and found that I had several African American cousins. (I am a white woman born in DC.) All I knew was that they were related through my paternal grandfather’s family from Virginia. I was able to contact one of the cousins and was told that her parents and grandparentys were from New Orleans and Lousiana and she didn’t know of any of them ever being from Virginia. None of my ancestors ever lived in Louisiana, so we never could figure things out beyond that. Until now . . . So, thank you. P.S. Do you know the exact source for the insertion you gave?
Another Scott
@LNNVA: Amazing story. Glad to help!!
Let’s see. Whoops! I posted the Wikipedia link 2x. :-(
The correct link in my @Another Scott comment above is from EncyclopediaVirginia.org – Franklin and Armfield.
Thanks for letting me fix it!
Best wishes,
Scott.
Ramona
@Chetan Murthy: There are Sujata Massey’s Perveen Mistry novels set in Bombay in the 1920’s but there are a few British characters in them though they are not central.
BellyCat
This lesson on our country’s forefathers is as dispiriting as it is repugnant.
LNNVA
@Another Scott: Thank you.
Another Scott
@LNNVA: 👍
Best wishes,
Scott.
LNNVA
@Another Scott: It isn’t easy to come to the realization that some of your ancestors were evil.
Another Scott
@LNNVA: Oh.
Yes, that’s true.
But we don’t choose our relatives. You’re still who you were.
Hang in there.
Best wishes,
Scott.