Slavery and the causes of the American revolution in plantation British America

Only a minority of British American colonies joined Massachusetts in revolt against Britain in July 1776. Depending on how you count colonies, there were either 27 or 31 colonies in British America when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. Only thirteen contiguous colonies in British North America needed to explain why they had dissolved “the political bonds” connecting them to Britain and justify why they claimed “the separate and equal status to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.” Colonies north of New Hampshire and colonies in the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean stayed loyal to Britain. This loyalty was what British ministers expected. In particular, they assumed that all colonies in which slavery was the primary social and economic institution would be too afraid of slave rebellion and were too dependent on British troops to risk making grandiloquent assertions of liberty. Slavery would keep these “yelp[er]s after liberty,” as Samuel Johnson contemptuously described American planters, quiescent. 1 What surprised ministers was not that so few British American colonies joined Massachusetts in armed rebellion, but that the people of Boston and its surroundings were able to attract so much support from southern colonies where the social structure was radically different from the relatively poor and homogeneously white social structure of the American North. They expected the empire to divide over revolution, but expected the break in the imperial “snake,” as depicted in Benjamin Franklin’s famous woodcut “Join or Die,” to occur further north along the chain of colonies than it in fact did