Yves here. Michael Hudson will be one of the featured speakers in a related webinar on Monday, The US Revolution/Counterrevolution @250 by the International Manifesto Group. His focus there as in the short precis below will be on the role of slave-related banking and capital on US financial policies.
1776: Liberty or slavery? Historians & activists dissect US revolution, empire & today’s crisis.
Sunday 5th July 2026. 4pm BST, 11am US Eastern
About this webinar
Two hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence, how should we understand 1776? The familiar story celebrates a revolution for liberty and self-government. A powerful counter-tradition argues that it was in large part a counter-revolution: a bid by slaveholders and settlers to defend slavery and westward expansion against a British empire that had begun to constrain both. This webinar weighs the republic’s radical and democratic legacy – the universalist language later seized upon by abolitionists, suffragists and anti-colonial movements – against the realities of slavery, dispossession and an imperial trajectory visible from the founding.
We then trace that trajectory through its milestones: continental expansion, the Spanish–American War of 1898, the Bretton Woods settlement of 1945 and the supposedly unipolar moment of 1991 – before turning to the profound crisis we are witnessing today. We ask how the US’s domestic troubles (economic decline, debt, deindustrialisation, social division and political dysfunction) connect to signs of imperial decline abroad – military defeat by Iran, economic and technological defeat by China, and a rising multipolarity – and what might come next.
Speakers
- Gerald Horne is a renouned historian who holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, and is the author of more than three dozen books on race, colonialism and resistance. His work is especially apt for this anniversary: in The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, he argues that the American Revolution was in significant part a conservative revolt by colonists determined to protect slavery against a London increasingly inclined toward abolition.
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a historian and a longtime activist in the Indigenous movement, and winner of the 2017 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize. Her An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States retells the country’s founding and expansion from the perspective of Native nations, recasting 1776 and after as a story of settler colonialism and 250 years of Indigenous resistance.
- Ajamu Baraka is the national organiser and spokesperson for the Black Alliance for Peace and a longtime human-rights campaigner who founded and directed the US Human Rights Network. He was the Green Party’s vice-presidential nominee in 2016 alongside Jill Stein, and brings a Black radical, anti-imperialist lens to questions of American empire and the unfinished business of liberation.
- Michael Hudson is an economist and professor at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, and a former Wall Street analyst. His landmark study Super Imperialism dissects how the US sustains global economic dominance through the dollar and institutions like the IMF and World Bank — a reading of US power well suited to assessing what 250 years of the republic has produced.
- Sara Flounders is a writer and socialist activist, a co-director of the International Action Center and a leading member of the Workers World Party who has been organising against US militarism since the 1960s. She has authored or edited more than ten books on war and empire, including the anthology Sanctions: A Wrecking Ball in a Global Economy, offering a sharply anti-imperialist account of the US at home and abroad.
- Alan Freeman is the co-director, with Radhika Desai, of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group (GERG) at the University of Manitoba. He was an economist at the Greater London Authority between 2000 and 2011, where he held the brief for the Creative Industries and the Living Wage. He wrote The Benn Heresy, a biography of British politician Tony Benn, and co-edited three books on value theory. He is honorary life vice-president of the UK-based Association for Heterodox Economics and a Vice-Chair of the World Association for Political Economy.
- Radhika Desai is Professor at the Department of Political Studies, and Director, Geopolitical Economy Research Group, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. Her books include Capitalism, Coronavirus and War: A Geopolitical Economy (2023), Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire (2013), Slouching Towards Ayodhya: From Congress to Hindutva in Indian Politics (2nd rev ed, 2004) and Intellectuals and Socialism: ‘Social Democrats’ and the Labour Party (1994), a New Statesman and Society Book of the Month.
Please consider joining this event!
By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest book is The Destiny of Civilization
The role of slave states in shaping the U.S. Constitution goes far beyond slavery itself. I want to discuss the distinctively American effect of this states-rights policy for banking and financial policy.
The main aim of the slave states was to block federal power – via the rule of the democratic majority – to take measures to limit or end slavery, and to prevent its westward expansion. From the very beginning, the southern slave states insisted on the national government relinquishing as much power to the states as possible – and to give them the power to block federal actions binding on the entire United States.
This anti-federal policy set the Southern states at odds with the North and West. The fear that the northern population would increase and become more urban, electing candidates for Congress, the Senate and the Presidency whose policies would be adverse to that of the slave states.
The result was an opposition to tariff protection, internal improvements, and a national bank and related commercial banking to provide credit for industrial investment and employment. That was the program of Henry Clay and the Whigs. To the South, it threatened to increase the population of northern states, which threatened to back abolitionist policies.
The Southern slave states advocated limiting money and credit to gold and silver coinage precisely to impose financial austerity. The aim was to starve the economy of credit by blocking federal tax and tariff collection from being circulated back into the economy to provide a basis for bank credit.
The South viewed bank credit as financing industrial investment and urban employment. That threatened to raise the price of grain that plantation owners had to pay to feed their slaves. The aim was to make their cotton and other plantation exports less expensive and hence more competitive in foreign markets.
The first fight over monetary policy erupted in 1791 when the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton (1789-1795) proposed to establish a government mint and created the First Bank of the United States in Philadelphia. The First Bank was not a central bank and did not hold the Treasury’s reserves, but was merely a national bank permitted to establish branches across state lines. But the anti-Federalist president Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809) and his fellow Virginian slave-owning successor James Madison (fourth U.S. president, 1809-1817) urged that monetary functions should be left to the states.
Virginia’s Democratic senator John Taylor (in office at various times from 1792 to 1824) warned that “if Congress could incorporate a bank, it might emancipate a slave.” Advocates of states’ rights feared federal authority for its potential to support the abolition of slavery.
A more concrete concern was that a thriving national banking system would benefit the industrializing urban north. This was at odds with the South’s plantation economy based largely on supplying cotton to Britain’s textile mills, as I’ve just indicated. The South wanted to keep the price of grain low to feed its slaves to produce cotton and tobacco. Providing more credit and tariff protection to northern industry would increase the urban industrial population, and hence its demand for grain, raising its price for plantation owners to feed their slaves. Southern politicians therefore opposed northern industrial development and sought to restrict money to bullion as much as possible to prevent food prices from rising.
Under the Democratic Party’s “Solid South,” the federal government followed a hard-money bullion-based policy from the 1820s up to the eve of World War I. It was based on commodity money in the form of silver and gold coinage. This was deflationary, in contrast to the paper bank money that Britain and other European economies were creating to finance their industrial takeoff.
That need for banks to keep high bullion reserves was a deliberate aim of public policy after the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829-1837). To pay off the new debt from the War of 1812, the government ran surpluses for all but two of the next twenty years. That enabled the entire national debt to be paid off by 1835 under Jackson.
These federal surpluses were largely derived from customs duties, which had to be paid in bullion. That drained coinage out of the economy and its banking system. The Treasury was cash-rich at the economy’s expense. Banks had to maintain high levels of coinage as reserves to meet the frequent spikes in demand to convert their notes and deposits into bullion, above all to pay for moving and selling the crops in autumn. That focus on bullion coinage limited the degree to which paper credit could be created without risk of a run on the banks.
The Whig party of northern industrialists and free labor, led by Henry Clay, wanted the Treasury to recycle its budget surpluses into the economy by depositing its bullion in the banking system. That would have made government surpluses the foundation of bank reserves. But popular resentment toward banks enabled Southern politicians to mobilize opposition to this, imposing deflationary monetary policy.
Jackson refused to renew the charter of the Second Bank of the United States in 1836, and removed the Treasury’s deposits from banks in which it had held its deposits. Removing these deposits limited the ability of banks to create a safe superstructure of credit and paper debt-money to finance northern industry.
“The avowed object of the [Jackson-Democratic] administration and its advisers,” asserted Calvin Colton in his Public Economy for the United States, “was to suppress the paper medium of the country, and introduce a metallic currency; and the independent or sub-treasury was to be the means of accomplishing the end, although, as shown by Mr. Clay, it must necessarily fail, and itself establish a paper medium of a most dangerous tendency.”
A similar monetary deflation occurred after the Civil War, which the northern states financed by printing greenbacks. After the war, creditor interests – and the South – again insisted on redeeming this paper currency in bullion. That led to a steady deflation that persisted into the 1890s, when William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic Party candidate for the presidency in 1896, described agriculture and industry as being crucified on a cross of gold. The Republican protectionist tariffs created budget surpluses that had to be paid in coinage, draining bullion from the economy. while requiring banks to redeem their paper currency in coinage, limiting their ability to create a superstructure of bank credit.
When the United States convened its National Monetary Commission after the crash of 1907 to review banking practices throughout the world, its volume on the history of the U.S. Treasury written by David Kinley, described how, “Under the terms of the law establishing the independent treasury, the Government was expected to keep its own money and have no connection with the banking institutions of the country” and hence the economy’s currency needs. This “independence” meant that the Treasury’s fiscal surpluses from tariff duties and land sales drained coinage from the economy and its banks, as I’ve mentioned.
Finally, in 1913, the Federal Reserve was created and made “independent” from what was the government’s own deflationary hard-money policy. The Federal Reserve used this independence to support the commercial bank members, who were its stockholders.
On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court gave President Donald Trump the power to fire administration appointees across the board, except for the Federal Reserve – in order to ensure its policy independence. Instead of discriminating against the banking system as had been the case prior to 1913 and blocking its money and credit creation, the Federal Reserve has acted as the banking system’s defender. Its increasingly reckless credit creation is capped by the post-2009 Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) and today’s IT bubble This turnabout was initiated by a counter-reaction to the government’s own hard-money limitations on credit prior to 1913.
“After the war, creditor interests – and the South – again insisted on redeeming this paper currency in bullion.”
Wasn’t the effect reinforced by the abandonment of the bi-metallic standard, the USA demonitizing silver currency in 1873?
Yes, demonetizing silver aggravated matters — but mainly the Treasury’s hard-money philosophy, requiring all tariffs to be paid in coinage, and the government running budget surpluses to redeem the greenbacks before that. Fiscal policy was a drain on the economy, with paper money backed by coinage.
Michael Hudson do you describe the US civil war as primarily a war between northern industrial interests vs. southern agrarian interests?
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Slavery did not end in the English Empire until 1834. In 1776 Britannia ruled the waves and therefore Slave Trade. Mr. Hudson pursues a false narrative to promote thr tyranny of democracy as opposed to what remains of the republic wisely preferred by the founding fathers.
Tyranny of the majority or tyranny of the oligarchy? Historically, the latter is the water in the river and the former a few (highly retold) stones. Using their inherent wisdom, the oligarchy recognized their own interests are pre-eminent. No conflict of interest here. At least their was a vote for the 1776 revolution.
Sure, nations need their formation myths, just like religions (and everyone knows theirs is true and all others false). Do they really need to a basis in reality?
It’s interesting to consider that the adoption of the Constitution over the Articles was indeed a soft coup as the Articles had no mechanism for exiting.
[1] In 1772 slavery was banned in England with the Somerset case –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset_v_Stewart
A slave owner attempted to bring his slave into the UK. In the Somerset case, Lord Mansfield ruled: ‘The state of slavery … is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it … Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged.’
[2] In 1775 Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation, issued by the then-governor of Virginia, declared martial law in the colony and freedom for “all indented servants, negroes, or others”, who joined the British Army —
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunmore's_Proclamation
[3] William Mills: Mr. Hudson pursues a false narrative to promote (sic) hr tyranny of democracy as opposed to what remains of the republic wisely preferred by the founding fathers.
It was entirely the Dunmore proclamation that brought ‘founding fathers’ like Washington and Jefferson into the conflict. Overall, of the ‘founding fathers’, 41 of the 56 signers owned slaves at some point. That’s ~73%.
Samuel Johnson asked at the time: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” It was because families like the Washingtons and Jeffersons were Royalists who’d been defeated in the English Civil War in 1642-51 and had fled to the American colonies to recreate their feudal estates there, at first with indentured servants from England and Ireland, and then — when they became worried that the poor whites were breeding too much — with African slaves. By 1774-76 enslaved people comprised 40–50% of the population in many Tidewater counties and plantation wealth depended entirely on slave labor.
[4] Jefferson admitted as much in his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, in a segment which the other ‘founding fathers’ had the sense to cut from the final Declaration. Here’s the original draft in the US Library of Congress –
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/declara/ruffdrft.html
See the paragraph beginning ‘….he has waged cruel war against human nature itself,’ where Jefferson comically tried to claim that the blame for he and his like being slave owners and continuing to be slave owners layGeorge III while simultaneously — and incoherently– complaining that Lord Dunmore’s proclamation freeing those slaves was a terrible crime.
So you identify as a (future) billionaire, I suppose? The ‘tyranny of democracy’ is a concept invented by elites to scaremonger about the terrifying possibility that the majority which they exploit and cheat constantly will turn against them and restore justice (at worst by expropriating all of their ill-gotten wealth, at best by horrors such as taxation, making them pay for a welfare state, regulations etc.). A democracy is a subset of a republic – every democracy is a (de jure or de facto) republic. A republic means just not having a king, i.e. a single hereditary ruler. A non-democratic republic means a tyranny of the minority (plutocratic or aristocratic). Anyone who says they are for a republic, but against a democracy, is saying that they are for some kind of tyranny. Societies need to make collective decisions, and the most respect we can show to everyone’s freedom is to let everyone have a say in the decision and a vote that counts equally (i.e. democracy). The alternative is letting only a minority make the decisions for the majority without its consent, which means, by definition, tyranny of the minority over the majority.
Re the peculiar institution–here’s a recent article suggesting that historically speaking it wasn’t that peculiar and that trade in human beings had been going on in Africa for centuries.
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2026/07/01/transatlantic-slavery-and-africa-influence-on-europe/
Perhaps what distinguished the American version was the brutality of the rapes and bullwhips and particularly after high production cotton era came to dominate in the 19th.
Slightly over three quarters of the global human population were either slaves or serfs in bondage as recently as the 19th century’s turn, only two centuries ago.
Before that, slavery was universal in almost all pre-industrial civilizations, because only forced labor could create larger surpluses for their predator classes. Given that some 112 billion human beings have existed and estimating conservatively that only twenty percent of them were enslaved, this means at least twenty-three billion of our species have lived as slaves.
Off the top of my head, only some of Southeast Asian mandala polities (pre‑state Southeast Asia) such as the Lanna and Lan Xang, and some Mon and Khmer polities before state consolidation had no chattel slavery and large-scale serfdom.
Carolinian: Perhaps what distinguished the American version was the brutality of the rapes and bullwhips and particularly after high production cotton era came to dominate in the 19th.
Not especially. In the words of Aristotle, one of civilization’s foundational thinkers, certain people were to be considered slaves by nature and controlled as cattle were controlled. So, for instance, the principles of animal husbandry—culling, castration, and selective breeding—could be applied to them.
This occurred elsewhere, too. China, with the longest continuous history of any human civilization, used it for forty-one centuries on state slaves, for political punishment, and to create eunuchs for imperial service, till by the Ming Dynasty’s end some 70,000 existed. The last imperial eunuch, Sun Yaoting, only died in 1996.
In the Arab world, the ruling Caliphate owned only 11,000 eunuchs, but because slave traders and owners bypassed Islamic law against castration by purchasing already-castrated slaves after having non-Muslims perform the procedure, eunuchs were sought-after possessions across Arab society, with the few African boys who survived complete amputation of penis and scrotum drawing particularly high prices.
“Slightly over three quarters of the global human population were either slaves or serfs in bondage as recently as the 19th century’s turn, only two centuries ago.
Before that, slavery was universal in almost all pre-industrial civilizations, because only forced labor could create larger surpluses for their predator classes.”
Complementing your historical reminder, slavery disappeared in Europe, then America (USA, Brazil, Cuba) after the 1st Industrial Revolution had established an apparently inexhaustible source of concentrated energy — coal — that could be harnessed to achieve much higher levels of production and productivity. That was towards the end of the 1st IR in Europe (from the 1830s onwards), and after the end of the 1st IR in America (from the 1860s onwards).
Slavery is at least as old as the rural usurers of the Bronze Age.
Of course slavery as an institution wasn’t unique to America. It had been going on everywhere for millennia, not centuries. It has been almost universal in human history, with a bit of a decline in some parts of Europe in the High Middle Ages before the revival in the Age of Discovery. It’s just that it was starting to look bad against the background of the increasing prevalence of liberal and humanistic principles and ideals in the West in the late 18th and 19th centuries, hence the attempt to defend it as something uniquely and ‘peculiarly’ Southern that shouldn’t be judged in the light of universal principles. In addition, the integration in capitalism and the focus on production for the market and maximal profit contributed to increased brutality in plantations in the Americas compared to many other places and times.
On the other hand, that article’s blaming European slaving on ‘African influence’ over poor innocent Christian Europe, which was thus brought to act against its own nature as it were, strikes me as a rather extreme, brazen and jingoistic self-congratulatory case of victim blaming from a reactionary and jingoistic ‘European Christian identity’ standpoint. Much of Christian Europe had never really abandoned slavery, and in the rest, its abandonment had been gradual and halfhearted, with eventual official abolition only codifying the de facto trend/situation on the ground. It had also been economically motivated. Christianity was never the decisive factor; as long as, and wherever, slavery remained viable and profitable, Christianity coexisted peacefully with it, and its objections were generally limited to enslaving coreligionists – pagans and Muslims were fair game wherever they were at hand.
This part is a particular howler:
‘If we look in papal documents for the origin of the great transatlantic slave trade, we will find the bull Dum diversas (1452), published in the context of the wars against the Ottoman Empire – the great slave empire responsible for kidnapping Europeans in the Mediterranean to sell in Africa, and for giving Eastern Europeans the name of Slavs, that is, slaves. The Ottoman Empire was also the historical enemy of the crusades, as it was from them that the Christians wanted to liberate the Holy Land.’
The Ottoman Empire didn’t exist at the time of the Crusades. The word ‘slave’ arose from the ethnic name Slav, not vice versa, that happened long before the Ottomans, and neither word was introduced by Muslims. The massive trade with Slavs took place in the second half of the first millennium, when they were sold by Christian Venetian, Genoese and Frankish traders as well as by European Vikings – yes, to the Muslim world (especially the Abbasid Caliphate), but also to Christian Byzantium, through whose territory much of the slave exports to the Muslims passed in any case. The decisive fact about the Slavs was precisely that they were still pagan and hence fair game for Christians to enslave and sell. (The Vikings, who were themselves pagan, were obviously fine with enslaving and selling Christians, too.) Blaming all of this longstanding European and Christian entrepreneurship on Africans or Muslims is rather impudent. Enslaving non-Christians is something that Christians had never stopped doing, and the transatlantic slave trade was a logical continuation of that.
Indigenous slavery in Africa, Asia, and in Europe before was nothing like chattel slavery, which was based as much on the sale and resale of human beings as on labor. The contradictions of capitalism became starkly clear with slavery, which is why it was so repulsive. Or perhaps, white people’s barbarity did not restrain them when acting as slavemasters. Take your pick—bad capitalism, bad white people—or maybe both.
Decades ago I recall reading, in Crisis in Black and White by Charles Silberman as I recall, that Southern slavery in the USA was uniquely brutal in dehumanizing the slaves in comparison to bondage in the Spanish colonies and slavery regimes that had previously existed elsewhere. He went on to attribute this to the fact that most of the slave owners came from a Calvinist, Scots Irish background, which emphasized the individual’s standing before God. Therefore, in order to deal with the cognitive dissonance of recognizing the slaves as similarly individuals before God, they had to deny their humanity.
When trying to understand the US, I think it’s important to review the decade prior to the US Constitution.
On July 4, 1776, every governor and judge in the 13-colonies was appointed by the British crown.
Yet, many of the men who authorized the July 4 Declaration created the Articles of Confederation in Nov 1777. When the British decided to grant independence to the colonies in 1783, it was the colonists, under the AOC, which signed the peace treaty.
The AOC accurately described how the colonists viewed themselves. The colonies were independent sovereign states who came together in a “Confederation” for mutual benefit; not much else.
The AOC had some benefits such as expanded voting and improved education. The Articles, however, was entirely a legislative document; there was no executive or judiciary branch and the Articles did not have the power to tax. The States raised money independently. The result was that each state willingly provided for its own defense with its own state militia that provided for their own weapons (the origin of the Second Amendment). And as they mistrusted each other, and small states feared larger ones, after the 1783 peace the Continental Army was disbanded and the Navy was either parked or sold.
The reality of the post-revolutionary world, however, and great power politics where Britain, Spain, and France surrounded the US geographically, and the British froze the Americans out of its trading system, persuaded the states, albeit reluctantly for most, to accept a federal government and create a Constitution.
Some consider around the mid-1870s to sometime in the 1890s to have been the “Long Depression”.
Don’t know if I will be able to make the live webinar, but I will watch it at some point.
The Long Depression is generally accepted by historians of the economy as having lasted from 1873 to 1896.
The above has been a very strange discussion that almost entirely ignores the point that I was making: the way in which Jackson and the slave slates backed a deflationary monetary policy blocking the creation of paper money and bank credit. That was the point of my article, not a discussion of slavery itself. It explains the pressure to create a truly “independent” central bank, to prevent the Treasury’s being locked into deflationary bullionism.
the Commentariat tends to go on such tangents on holidays.
tryptophan/full bellies, plus alcohol(etc) ,plus stress of family gatherings…and add in the rather dour zeitgeist, given our current situation…all of us Cassandras, while friends and familia somnambulate into a Greater Depression.
i, conversely, had my eldest stop by for 30 minutes, and my hungover mexicans stop by for another 30 to bring me the noble weed, and otherwise have been alone for days.
so i caught yer gist, fo sho.
currently watching an enormous wolf spider hunt in the sandy space between the bar-proper and the now cold big firepit.
picking off some variety of tiny ants that had the temerity to roam around in the open like that.
i look forward to y’all’s confab.
happy fourth, Michael, FWIW.
Michael Hudson: The above has been a very strange discussion that almost entirely ignores the point that I was making: the way in which Jackson and the slave slates backed a deflationary monetary policy blocking the creation of paper money and bank credit
Still, not an irrelevant discussion if — as your co-presenter Gerald Horne up there at the top of the webinar bill maintains — a primary motivation for the Declaration of Independence in 1776 was the maintainance of chattel slavery in North America.
Because if Professor Horne is correct — and on the evidence it’s hard to argue that he’s not — then of course Jackson and the slave slates backed a deflationary monetary policy blocking the creation of paper money and bank credit.
Re ‘Because if Professor Horne is correct — and on the evidence it’s hard to argue that he’s not’:
Really, are you sure it’s that hard? As far as I can tell, it’s extremely easy, since his interpretation totally flies in the face of all the evidence. See the reviews on WSWS by Fred Schleger and on the Midwestern Marx Institute website by Marius Trotter for detailed critiques. By the way, this sort of supposedly ‘radical anti-establishment’ narrative is actually extremely useful to the American (and generally Western) ruling elites. By explaining everything with race conflict and African slavery, it maximises racial divisions and splits the working class along racial lines so as to minimise the awareness of class struggle. And by deprecating most progressive victories that have ever been achieved in the US, and in the history of the West in general, as somehow ‘actually racist / evil’, it erases all precedents that could inspire present and future struggle and resistance. This is part of the good old ‘antiracism’ and ‘wokeism’ that Hillary Clinton’s campaign found so useful against Sanders.
It would be interesting to know whether Brazil, as well as the European states that held the longest onto slavery — Spain and Portugal — also had a comparable monetary policy, and, in the case of Spain, whether a similar dissension took place between industrializing regions and the sectors linked to plantation slavery in Cuba.
Sorry for the unintentional thread jacking. I simply thought the article I linked was interesting.
And the slavery thing has many moving parts. Some areas of the North were part of the slave trade, both literally and via financing.
By a happenstance I’m closing in on the final chapters of the 700+ page Banks and Politics in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War, published in 1957. Per author Bray Hammond the euthanasia of the Second Bank of the United States came about not by the initiative of President Jackson, but that of his kitchen cabinet of Northern Democrats consisting primarily of state-bank-friendly New Yorkers, led by Martin Van Buren, who had their own reasons for wanting the Bank on the ash heap of history. It did, of course, accord with Jackson’s agrarian ant-bank views. A major factor in their success was the political ineptitude of Bank president Nicholas Biddle when facing the master manipulator Van Buren.
I haven’t read Horne’s book, but claiming that the American Revolution was (to a significant extent) about slavery strikes me as somewhat similar to claiming that the American Civil War was not about slavery – in both cases you need to ignore just about everything that the people involved actually said and, as best we can tell, thought at the time.
Fundamentally, for all its limitations and contradictions, the American Revolution was clearly a progressive and emancipatory movement and was seen as such by both its proponents and its opponents. Advocates of increased political equality and restrictions on royal and aristocratic power in Britain naturally sympathised with it. And it was a major ideological inspiration for the French Revolution, which abolished slavery as a natural step.
The case for settler expansion being a factor does, on the other hand, have a basis in fact. This was, indeed, one of the points of contention, as Britain was trying to restrict that expansion for the time being (and was even planning to set up a Native American buffer state) – not for humanitarian reasons, of course. While Britain did happen to be ‘on the right side’ of this particular issue from a modern leftist perspective, presenting that as the key question that the conflict was about would be overdoing it.
That’s not the argument of all. Of course the Revolutionary War was about much more than slavery. But when it came to describing just what federal power was, the slave states wanted to circumscribe it — to prevent the threat of the Northern states making laws against the slave interest. And my point is that this was not only an issue of federal power as such, but when it came to creating a national bank, the slave states advocated hard-money deflation to keep prices down so as to feed their slaves with low-priced Western state grain.
I was not responding to the argument in your article. I was commenting on Gerald Horne’s take on the American revolution, which is briefly summarised in the announcement of the webinar at the beginning of your post.
Ah, right. I probably won’t join the seminar live tomorrow because I keep weekends to be peaceful with my wife at home. But if I have a chance I’ll make this argument against what they’re talking about. I’ll send our discussion to the conference’s organizer, Radhika. Thanks for emphasizing this point.
“And it was a major ideological inspiration for the French Revolution, which abolished slavery as a natural step.”
Not quite so natural.
First, it was necessary for the Haitian revolution to take place in 1791.
For a couple of years, the French revolutionists were very hesitant regarding the abolition of slavery, introducing in 1792 a law giving equality of rights only to metis and manumissioned slaves.
When in 1793 former slave owners allied with foreign powers to overthrow the republican authorities in Haiti, these seeked an alliance with the large population of slaves to reinforce them in their fight against the reactionaries. As a counterpart, slavery was officially abolished by the local French revolutionists — but only in Haiti.
It is only after a delegation from Haiti reported back to France that slavery was officially abolished on all French territories in 1794.
Fair enough, the Haitian Revolution was a factor, but it’s hard to claim with certainty that the abolition wouldn’t have happened without it. The National Convention wasn’t forced to abolish slavery in all French colonies; it could have abolished slavery only in Haiti, but chose to act as it did. It should also be taken into account that ‘the French revolutionists’ of 1792 were not exactly the same as ‘the French revolutionists’ of 1794 – both because many of the actual individuals in charge were not the same and because the views and positions of many of the participants were becoming radicalised very rapidly.
In any case, it would have been more relevant for me to point out that several northern US states abolished slavery already in the course of the Revolution and others did so shortly afterwards. Most of the northern states had done it by 1784. Not easy to reconcile with the claim that they were fighting to preserve slavery.
From a black perspective, gradual emancipation could hardly be considered enlightened, given the rhetoric of politicians. In any case slavery explains only a part of the revolutionary ideology; many scholars have pointed to the imperial ambitions of the founders, north as well as south.
What to an Indian is the 4th of July?
The WSWS have been contributing to this argument for a long time.
Their position is very much against assertions that the revolution was undertaken to defend slavery.
They see those assertions as the latest attempt to divert socialistic thinking away from class and towards race.
Here is an article published just yesterday that is the latest in a long line.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/07/03/mzyt-j03.html
Apologies to Michael Hudson for continuing the diversion of this conversation away from his original points which do seem pretty persuasive to me.
Well, you emphasize an important point. Many of the Mineapolis 17 Trotskyists whose families I grew up with were in jail during World War II — not just in jail, but in federal prisons. Many of their inmates were black Jehovah’s Witnesses conscientious objectors, and as you can imagine socialists did much proselytizing among them. By the 1970s the Canonizes had turned into a primary focus on recruiting blacks as oppressed victims of the economy. This racial focus has indeed untracked much socialist agitation. One of its fruits was faith in Barack Obama.
As I recall from reading Counte-revolution shortly after its publication, a key part of Horne’s argument is that in the early 1770s the first stirrings of organized anti-slavery action in Britain took place. Although the British publications on the matter gained little traction there at the time, they were seized upon by the pro-slavery sector of the activists in the American colonies and had a significant impact driving support for the revolutionary cause in the South.
Mr. Hudson, your post reminds me of David Graeber’s theory that human economies fluctuate between systems of credit and systems of coinage. Graeber thought that “credit systems tend to dominate in periods of relative social peace”, but “in periods characterized by widespread war and plunder, they tend to be replaced by precious metal”, because of the usefulness of coinage to armies, historically, and in the slave trade (Debt, the First 5,000 years, p. 213). Do you think the story you lay out is consonant with his view? Thank you as always for lending your time and talents to this community. Really looking forward to hearing you and others in this upcoming webinar.
I’m not so sure. Crises like wars are when metallic standards typically get abandoned in order to allow maximal fiscal policy for the state to mobilize all available labour and real resources.
It never even occurred to me to discuss this with David. I think by “money” he meant commodity money other than the grain that denominated Bronze Age West Asian debt — paid at harvest time.