Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

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