Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Myth of America
As Charles Davis notes in his post on the myth of America, the revolution favored by the small minority of white aristocrats who founded the US Government was a revolution to protect slavery from the abolition movement then on the rise in Great Britain. Given that 20% of the American population at the time of the revolution were slaves, this was a major economic concern to the landed aristocracy who'd been granted their lands by the British Crown. Of course, British laws prohibiting expansion of the American colonies into Indigenous lands west of the Appalachias also motivated American aristocrats eager to benefit from acquiring more real estate, but we'll leave that story for another day.
