It's Our America Too
The radical legacy of the revolution
(I’m Henry Snow, and you’re reading Another Way.)
Today you are going to see friends, family, and neighbors wave flags and set off fireworks in the name of a republic. Some of them will not believe in the same country as you. I know I’ll be watching and wondering who here believes that “Allagator Alcatraz” is a triumph instead of a concentration camp, that Medicaid cuts killing Americans are “fiscal responsibility,” that ICE is saving America instead of damning it, that the genocide in Gaza is fake, good, or somehow both. Some of these people will call themselves patriots.
You do not have to give them America. This is our country too. Many of the earliest most important actions on the road to revolution came from ordinary Americans resisting state kidnapping, police violence, and imperialism. The best of this nation has always come from radical popular mobilization. I plan on using the next year to explore this, in this newsletter and in other formats. America’s 249th birthday might feel like a funeral. This is not the end. And in the beginning we can find better futures than what we are being promised right now.
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During the summer of 1765, Royal Navy warships terrorized the coast of Rhode Island. Americans had long treated trade regulations and taxes the way we treat going a little over the speed limit today– you aren’t supposed to do 75 in a 70, but if an officer pulled you over for this you’d consider it outrageous. In the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, Britain began enforcing long-ignored taxes and regulations meant to limit the movement of French and Spanish goods into British territory. The infamous Stamp Act, which put taxes on all kinds of printed material, was only the latest in a string of new customs enforcement measures.
Hostility to customs enforcement was actually three grievances at once. The first was taxes. And this was, frankly, a tantrum by elite merchants profiting off of slavery: one of the primary goods involved here was Caribbean rum. But the other two problems were decidedly more real. The second was impressment: the kidnapping of Americans to serve in the Navy, in this case in peacetime as enforcers of these same regulations against their friends and neighbors. Impressment wasn’t an abstract outrage. It was a life-ruining threat. Navy wages were lower and late. An impressed man’s family might starve while he was off down the coast for months helping terrorize a different port.
The third was the state of the broader economy. It turns out running a maritime economy while warships threaten to kidnap anyone in a boat and seize their cargo is difficult. A writer in Rhode Island’s Newport Mercury newspaper wrote that “few of the fishermen dare venture out,” and a “truly affecting” winter was ahead. With coastal trade in firewood and fish stopped, residents of Newport– which is on an island– feared they would freeze and starve.
So Americans rioted. They stole a boat from the Maidstone, paraded it through town, and set it on fire. This was just one of many similar incidents in the 1760s– in Rhode Island alone, the colonial government fired on His Majesty’s Ship St. John the year before, and in August 1765, the people of Newport launched a massive protest, including vandalism and threats of violence, against the Stamp Act. The Maidstone riot consisted of several hundred sailors and Black Americans (overlapping populations, of course), many of them likely enslaved. The Stamp Act riots included the same populations, as well as artisans.
One useful example for today: John Weber, whom I promised more details on in a post a few months ago. A sailor in his early 20s, he was one of the many ordinary working people who attacked Martin Howard Junior’s house, and chased Augustus Johnston out of his, on August 28th, 1765. Johnston was the man in charge of collecting Stamp Act revenues, once the tax kicked in. Who was Martin Howard? A man who had looked at all the injustice of that summer and thought to defend it, in print. In today’s parlance: a well-off right-wing troll who mocked the suffering of the town from behind a pseudonym.
The riots worked– they worked too well, in fact. While they ensured by intimidation that the Stamp Act would never become reality in Rhode Island, they also outraged the imperial state, and alarmed local elites. Mariners had a long history of radical action– Weber was compared in print to a centuries-earlier Neapolitan revolutionary fisherman named Masaniello.
John Weber and sailors like him knew that local merchants could be their enemies just as much as the local government. When he insulted local merchant elites, those same elites turned him over to the British– partly as a scapegoat, and partly to quell the mob they feared might take liberty too far. His fellow radicals tried to free him, and briefly succeeded, but he was again arrested and conditions poor enough that he attempted suicide. I wish I could tell you with certainty what happened to him afterward.
Another man who played a similar role in these riots got off scot-free. His name was Samuel Crandal. While he appeared in one of the same warrants as Weber, and there is actually more concrete evidence of his involvement in the riots– we have a detailed description of this, because Crandall began the aggressive street altercation that ignited them– Crandal was mysteriously protected– the sheriff refused to act on the warrant due to intimidation. Unlike Weber, Crandal had the backing of the town’s elite.
Probably a 57-year-old from a well-connected family, his focus was clearly not impressment or wealth or inequality but taxes and personal matters. While Weber and company went after Howard and the Stamp Collector, Crandal had suffered a “private injury” (in the non-literal sense) from customs collector John Robinson. He started a fight with Robinson and Howard and then led an attack on the former’s house, where he and his mob demanded the return of a captured sloop and the local regulation of customs officials’ fees.
MAGA would have you believe the revolution was made possible by men like Samuel Crandall: well-connected white men from respectable society who demanded lower taxes. But Samuel Crandall needed an entire mob behind him, on a night of multiple riot actions, to succeed. There were not enough angry merchants in all of New England to defeat the British Empire on their own.
While I used John Weber as an example instead of any of the Black workers who participated in the same riots– because they remained anonymous and avoided prosecution– the Stamp Act riots and the broader mobilization they represented were multiracial. Their causes were freedom in a much more real sense than the hypocritical whining of more famous men like Patrick Henry. Newport’s John Quamine, a formerly enslaved man and one-time barrel maker, served as a revolutionary privateer in an effort to make money to free his family. He died at sea in 1779, but men in his social circle formed one of America’s earliest abolitionist groups, and successfully abolished slavery in Rhode Island.
What historian Marcus Rediker called a “motley crew” of maritime revolutionaries included port radicals at what I call the “Atlantic dockside” in my forthcoming book Enemies of Order: Labor and Power at the Atlantic Dockside. While I like to think it’ll be a novel and important contribution to the relevant historiography, there is already an entire body of literature on these radical revolutionaries. Nash wrote about this decades ago. The critical popular wing of the revolution was racially diverse and could be politically and economically radical.
Yet when the 1619 project criticized centuries of American racism in the New York Times, and in particular an essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones characterized the revolution as a defense of slavery, conservative defenders of America somehow never brought any of this up. A widely-circulated open letter from more conservative historians bafflingly resorted to an out-of-context quotation from Frederick Douglass, who was born in 1818, rather than even referencing Black revolutionaries.
If they had brought up Black revolutionaries it would hardly have won them the argument. Even as the project criticized the revolution’s relationship to slavery, it centered the alternative visions at work in our founding. To quote Hannah-Jones’s lead essay:
The very first person to die for this country in the American Revolution was a black man who himself was not free. Crispus Attucks was a fugitive from slavery, yet he gave his life for a new nation in which his own people would not enjoy the liberties laid out in the Declaration for another century.
Mentioning Attucks or other Black revolutionaries in any critique would have reinforced this latter point rather than rebutted the former.
But this wasn’t why conservative defenders of the revolution ignored him. No, the problem was that for conservative defenders of the revolution, historians or otherwise, radical revolutionaries are invisible. For the right, they have to be. The Martin Howard Juniors of today are local Republican officials. The impressment of today is ICE kidnapping our neighbors. Historical parallels are never perfect, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t telling or pointed. If we remembered the revolution as it really was, our celebrations would have to look different.
Just as we did all those years ago, America’s mainstream politics elevates Samuel Crandall and buries John Weber. Conservative historians have called him a “monster” for destroying furniture while elevating slaveholding merchants as merely complicated. We call protests “riots” and “looting” when someone breaks a window, and we call state kidnapping “law enforcement” even when its architects place kidnapped Americans in camps surrounded by alligators– a horror so lurid as to compete with the most outlandish American accusations against the British.
We can celebrate America’s revolutionary legacy best, and celebrate the best of that legacy, by resisting this oppression today and building something better. An America where democracy is meaningful and workers are free, where we prosper together instead of being exploited alone. The revolution should belong not to right-wingers who want to replace “big government” with a police state for migrants and an unregulated hellscape for capitalists. It should belong to us.
Is the other side “American” too? Sure, in the descriptive sense. It would be wrong to imply what’s most American is what’s best. The United States has only been a democracy for 60 years– with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, we actually began to come close to meeting some of the promises we’d been making throughout our history. It has not been a fair democracy. It has not usually been a well-run democracy. And often abroad it has acted like an empire.
But there has always been more than one America, and more than one way to be American. I don’t say this to wrap my cause in the flag, but to embrace the best of our history and encourage you to do the same. Without ordinary people demanding liberty, the revolution in all its complexity would never have happened. The famed “Founding Fathers” would have been footnotes. We have to soberly reflect on the fact that ours was a revolution of slaveholders. But it was also a revolution of the enslaved. It was a revolution of mariners as well as merchants. This can still be Crispus Attucks’s America, and John Weber’s America, and John Quamine’s America, if we fight for it.