The American Revolution & the Golden Circle By Michael

As we have discussed at length on SNN, the civilisations of the Caribbean and the Lower South were basically the same. The Lower South was geographically, socially, politically, economically and demographically the northern-most reaches of the Caribbean. South Carolina was settled (and ruled for the first several decades) by Barbadian colonists who brought their culture and values with them to the mainland. Settlers moved west from Carolina, spreading out across the Lower South. By the 1820s, only a few decades after seceding along with the New England and Mid-Atlantic British colonies and joining them in a common Union, some Southerners (especially in the Lower South) regretted ever leaving the British Empire. Their continual (and ultimately doomed) struggle with New England over the direction of the United States revealed the stark divide between the two great civilisations of the Union. In the end, of course, over half a million people lost their lives and the Southern economy and civilisation was almost completely destroyed when the two distinct civilisations met on the battlefield in a fight to the death in the 1860s.

Did all of this have to happen? Was struggle and war between the two ‘sections’ (as they were then known) of the United States inevitable? Increasingly, historians these days are going back a century or more before Lincoln’s war against the South to answer these questions. The US focus on ‘unity’ and the similarities of the seceded British colonies fades away the more one digs into the colonial world. What is revealed is the fact that half of the Caribbean civilisation seceded from the British Empire in 1770s and joined with the New England civilisation in an ill-advised Union that was to ultimately lead to their conquest and destruction. The other half of the Caribbean civilisation refused to secede, despite its many strong ties to the Lower South, and was thus saved the wrath of Lincoln’s armies in the 1860s. This revisionist look at our history, as it gains more ground, is sure to shape the way future generations of Southerners (and especially Southern nationalists) view the 1770s and early US history.

Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, writes about this issue in his 2000 book An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean. A review of the professor’s book for the University of Pennsylvania Press sums up things nicely:

There were 26—not 13—British colonies in America in 1776. Of these, the six colonies in the Caribbean—Jamaica, Barbados, the Leeward Islands, Grenada and Tobago, St. Vincent, and Dominica—were among the wealthiest. These island colonies were closely related to the mainland by social ties and tightly connected by trade. In a period when most British colonists in North America lived less than 200 miles inland and the major cities were all situated along the coast, the ocean often acted as a highway between islands and mainland rather than a barrier.

The plantation system of the islands was so similar to that of the southern mainland colonies that these regions had more in common with each other, some historians argue, than either had with New England. Political developments in all the colonies moved along parallel tracks, with elected assemblies in the Caribbean, like their mainland counterparts, seeking to increase their authority at the expense of colonial executives. Yet when revolution came, the majority of the white island colonists did not side with their compatriots on the mainland.

A major contribution to the history of the American Revolution, An Empire Divided traces a split in the politics of the mainland and island colonies after the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765-66, when the colonists on the islands chose not to emulate the resistance of the patriots on the mainland. Once war came, it was increasingly unpopular in the British Caribbean; nonetheless, the white colonists cooperated with the British in defense of their islands. O’Shaughnessy decisively refutes the widespread belief that there was broad backing among the Caribbean colonists for the American Revolution and deftly reconstructs the history of how the island colonies followed an increasingly divergent course from the former colonies to the north.