Top 5 Subversive Tracks · Side A
Liner Notes — the Founders’ Greatest Hits
ive Me Liberty or Give Me Death” by Patrick Henry has been among the top 10 subversive tracks of the American Revolution for the last 250 years — trading the #1 slot with other bangers like “No Taxation Without Representation,” “Hang Together, Or Hang Separately,” and “These Are the Times That Try Men’s Souls.”
That crew produced lots of liberative lyrics for the percussive soundtrack laid down by the drummers and fifer portrayed in the “Spirit of ’76.” For instance, check out these lines from Patrick Henry’s letter to John Alsop on January 13, 1773:
nfortunately, Patrick confessed in the same letter that convenience overruled his Christian conscience. Mr. Henry still kept 98 humans in bondage on his three slave-labor camps, otherwise known as plantations, when he died in 1799. His wife and children divvied up their inheritance, further traumatizing the enslaved by separating their families.
Many of the Founders wanted to keep themselves from slavery, yet wanted to keep slavery for themselves. It’s hard to tell if they sought to embody irony or murder it. Consider George Washington’s Letter to Bryan Fairfax, August 24, 1774:
“[W]e must assert our rights, or submit to every imposition that can be heaped upon us… and… will make us as tame, and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.”
Patrick Henry
98 enslaved at death · 1799
George Washington
123 enslaved at death · 1799
600+ enslaved across his life
he real revolution of the Revolutionary War was black freedom. Attempting to quell the undercurrent of black liberation was part of the reason the “Patriots” were fighting against their government.
Slaveholding Founders’ real dilemma wasn’t over the morality of slavery, but the preservation of it. First, they were nervous that the British legal system might be leaning toward abolition. They were also alarmed that white British colonizers were promising freedom to black slaves if they revolted against white American colonizers who were revolting against the British.
Somerset v. Stewart became the trial of that era on both sides of the Atlantic. “The black must be discharged,” ruled Judge William Murray (aka Lord Mansfield).
Enslavers filled colonial newspapers with complaints that their slaves were running away to England for freedom. Some were as outraged by this court decision as they were about the Stamp Act.
Lord Dunmore (or John Murray as his mama called him) issued a Proclamation in 1775 to offer freedom to blacks if they would join the British military to fight their former masters.
Patrick Henry’s slave. Joined the Ethiopian Regiment, married a fugitive from Philadelphia, named Miney, evacuated to Nova Scotia, then Sierra Leone in 1792 — putting the entire Atlantic between himself and the “land of the free.”
Self-emancipated from George Washington on July 24, 1776. Served as a corporal in the British Black Pioneers. Evacuated to Nova Scotia (1783), then Sierra Leone (1791). Exiled in 1800 — and elected leader by the exile community.
t has been estimated that 20,000 self-emancipated black men served the British military during the Revolutionary War. Additionally, up to 80,000 black men, women, and children fled for their freedom when British forces occupied places like Charleston, Norfolk, and New York City. The Continental Army eventually enlisted about 6,000 blacks after General Washington’s initial resistance to the idea.
The delusion of white supremacy kept Americans from uniting all their inhabitants by giving everyone something worth fighting for.
The Counterfactuals
What if those 100,000 people would have stayed because “All Men Are Created Equal” really meant All?
What if America had abolished slavery in 1776 instead of half the country fighting to keep it in the 1800s?
What if a nation that lights up the sky to celebrate their violent overthrow of the British didn’t insist on peaceful gradualism for minority rights?
What if America had abolished slavery before Britain, France, Mexico, and Haiti in the West?
How much greater would America be if it weren’t still devouring itself with the cancer of white supremacy that caused the Civil War — and still hasn’t been cured by all the bloodletting since?
small group of abolitionists pondered questions like these as they formed the Seventh-day Adventist Church. For them, this wasn’t political — it was prophetic. They believed that Jesus was coming soon and were announcing the judgment hour so that all people can be prepared (Revelation 14:6–7). One of the things that troubled them the most was professed Christians maintaining unjust structures and trafficking in slaves as described in Revelation 18:13.
