Untold Truths About the American Revolution

By Howard Zinn, July 3, 2009

There are things that happen in the world that are bad, and you want to do something about them. You have a just cause. But our culture is so war prone that we immediately jump from, “This is a good cause” to “This deserves a war.”

You need to be very, very comfortable in making that jump.

The American Revolution—independence from England—was a just cause. Why should the colonists here be occupied by and oppressed by England? But therefore, did we have to go to the Revolutionary War?

How many people died in the Revolutionary War?

Nobody ever knows exactly how many people die in wars, but it’s likely that 25,000 to 50,000 people died in this one. So let’s take the lower figure—25,000 people died out of a population of three million. That would be equivalent today to two and a half million people dying to get England off our backs.

You might consider that worth it, or you might not.

Canada is independent of England, isn’t it? I think so. Not a bad society. Canadians have good health care. They have a lot of things we don’t have. They didn’t fight a bloody revolutionary war. Why do we assume that we had to fight a bloody revolutionary war to get rid of England?

In the year before those famous shots were fired, farmers in Western Massachusetts had driven the British government out without firing a single shot. They had assembled by the thousands and thousands around courthouses and colonial offices and they had just taken over and they said goodbye to the British officials. It was a nonviolent revolution that took place. But then came Lexington and Concord, and the revolution became violent, and it was run not by the farmers but by the Founding Fathers. The farmers were rather poor; the Founding Fathers were rather rich.

Who actually gained from that victory over England? It’s very important to ask about any policy, and especially about war: Who gained what? And it’s very important to notice differences among the various parts of the population. That’s one thing were not accustomed to in this country because we don’t think in class terms. We think, “Oh, we all have the same interests.” For instance, we think that we all had the same interests in independence from England. We did not have all the same interests.

Do you think the Indians cared about independence from England? No, in fact, the Indians were unhappy that we won independence from England, because England had set a line—in the Proclamation of 1763—that said you couldn’t go westward into Indian territory. They didn’t do it because they loved the Indians. They didn’t want trouble. When Britain was defeated in the Revolutionary War, that line was eliminated, and now the way was open for the colonists to move westward across the continent, which they did for the next 100 years, committing massacres and making sure that they destroyed Indian civilization.

So when you look at the American Revolution, there’s a fact that you have to take into consideration. Indians—no, they didn’t benefit.

Did blacks benefit from the American Revolution?

Slavery was there before. Slavery was there after. Not only that, we wrote slavery into the Constitution. We legitimized it.

What about class divisions?

Did ordinary white farmers have the same interest in the revolution as a John Hancock or Morris or Madison or Jefferson or the slaveholders or the bondholders? Not really.

It was not all the common people getting together to fight against England. They had a very hard time assembling an army. They took poor guys and promised them land. They browbeat people and, oh yes, they inspired people with the Declaration of Independence. It’s always good, if you want people to go to war, to give them a good document and have good words: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Of course, when they wrote the Constitution, they were more concerned with property than life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You should take notice of these little things.

There were class divisions. When you assess and evaluate a war, when you assess and evaluate any policy, you have to ask: Who gets what?

We were a class society from the beginning. America started off as a society of rich and poor, people with enormous grants of land and people with no land. And there were riots, there were bread riots in Boston, and riots and rebellions all over the colonies, of poor against rich, of tenants breaking into jails to release people who were in prison for nonpayment of debt. There was class conflict. We try to pretend in this country that we’re all one happy family. We’re not.

And so when you look at the American Revolution, you have to look at it in terms of class.

Do you know that there were mutinies in the American Revolutionary Army by the privates against the officers? The officers were getting fine clothes and good food and high pay and the privates had no shoes and bad clothes and they weren’t getting paid. They mutinied. Thousands of them. So many in the Pennsylvania line that George Washington got worried, so he made compromises with them. But later when there was a smaller mutiny in the New Jersey line, not with thousands but with hundreds, Washington said execute the leaders, and they were executed by fellow mutineers on the order of their officers.

The American Revolution was not a simple affair of all of us against all of them. And not everyone thought they would benefit from the Revolution.

We’ve got to rethink this question of war and come to the conclusion that war cannot be accepted, no matter what the reasons given, or the excuse: liberty, democracy; this, that. War is by definition the indiscriminate killing of huge numbers of people for ends that are uncertain. Think about means and ends, and apply it to war. The means are horrible, certainly. The ends, uncertain. That alone should make you hesitate.

Once a historical event has taken place, it becomes very hard to imagine that you could have achieved a result some other way. When something is happening in history it takes on a certain air of inevitability: This is the only way it could have happened. No.

We are smart in so many ways. Surely, we should be able to understand that in between war and passivity, there are a thousand possibilities.

Howard Zinn is the author of “A People’s History of the United States.” The History Channel is running an adaptation called “The People Speak.” This article is an excerpt from Zinn’s cover story in the July issue of The Progressive.

African Roots Still Run Deep For Blacks on Mexican Coast

By Alexis Okeowo
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, June 28, 2009

You have to really want to go to Chacahua. The island is nestled along Mexico's Costa Chica, a 200-mile-long strip that straddles the states of Oaxaca and Guerrero on the Pacific Ocean; the nearest hub is Puerto Escondido, a developed beach in Oaxaca.

After your flight from Mexico City or Cancun, the easy part of the trip is over. From Puerto Escondido, you need to reach El Zapotalito, a tiny spot on the coast. The land journey can be done by private taxi or, for the braver, by public transportation. From El Zapotalito you can take a boat to Chacahua.

Luckily, I did want to go. I was on the hunt not only for an idyllic beach getaway, but also for a hidden group of people who call themselves Mexicanos negros (black Mexicans). The end of slavery after Mexico's independence from Spain left black Mexicans throughout the country, but today black towns remain only in remote areas. The African part of Mexican history was neglected by the new Mexican leadership, leaving slave descendants to wonder about their origins.

Yet with the rise of tourism to Costa Chica in recent years, modernity has slowly come to the fishing villages that rest on a sultry, stunning stretch of the Pacific coast. In Chacahua, virgin beaches, glittering lagoons and fresh-seafood-only menus have created an alluring destination that is still little known -- much like its inhabitants.

In Puerto Escondido I squeezed into a colectivo (public van) headed for Rio Grande, not far from El Zapotalito. As the hour-long ride went by, the crowded beaches gave way to lush, neon-green grass; the sun seemed to get brighter and hotter, the waters bluer, the people browner with kinkier hair.

In Rio Grande, I made my way to a taxi stand to cram into another shared car that would take me to the boats. As I walked with the driver to his cab, he smiled down at me. "Hermanas. You two could be sisters," he said, pointing back at the taxi stand. There, a black Mexican woman who was staffing the stall watched me with curiosity.

Chacahua is divided in half by a series of lagoons filled with exotic birds. The surroundings make for a gorgeous ride whether you hire a private boat or take a public ferry to the island. The boat can take you straight to town or you can disembark, as I did the first time, on the island's edge.

I then hopped onto a pickup truck, along with other Chacahuans, for a half-hour's ride on rocky sand past scraggly bushes and cactuses into the village. Once we maneuvered around rams and cows that had decided to congregate in the middle of the road, I had finally reached my destination -- three exhilarating hours after leaving Puerto Escondido. My escapade had begun.

"They say a boat full of slaves, with dark skin like me, was headed for South America," Omar Corcuera told me over lunch the next day at Restaurant Punto de Quiebra. The young surfer, with deep-brown skin and a shock of naturally blond-brown hair, was recounting the far-fetched tale of a wrecked ship whose survivors populated the shore; I would hear it more than once.

What historians know is that the black Mexicans on the Pacific coast hail from the African slaves who were brought by the Spanish to work on cattle ranches during the 16th and 17th centuries. (On the Gulf coast, slaves were mainly deployed on sugar plantations.) Overall, the Spanish brought more than 200,000 Africans to Mexico for slave labor. The residents of Chacahua say they do not know much about their history, and different tales have gotten jumbled together over time.

The community of black, white and mestizo Mexicans (those of mixed Spanish and indigenous heritage) on this island numbers about 700 and has been around for some two centuries.

Nevertheless, Omar said, "I feel that I am African and Mexican."

Nearby, Paulina Marcial, scooping up her curly-haired daughter from an impromptu card game, added: "I just think of myself as Mexican. I don't know anyone anywhere else." Patting her Afro, the petite cook then walked off with a wave.

At least 10 sand-floor, door-less restaurants are on the beach, each with multicolored hammocks swinging in the breeze. At Restaurant Punto de Quiebra, fresh seafood meals fetched $5.50 or less, and breakfasts were all under $3, notably a plate of huge enchiladas with shredded cheese, green tomatoes, chili and cilantro for $2.30. A couple of yards down is Restaurant Siete Mares, where the bungalows are the beach's best, with airy, colorful cabanas.

At least seven of the restaurants have bungalows for rent. On my first night at Punto de Quiebra, the feisty housekeeper, Modesta, led me to my room, demanding to know where I was from and marveling over our shared skin color. I tell her that my parents are from West Africa, but that I was born and raised in the United States. Each day after, I would wave to her as I caught her on a hammock, lazily smoking a cigarette.

At Siete Mares I had a tall tumbler of freshly squeezed orange juice with the owner, Luis Carlos Gutierrez, and Rey Ramirez Gopar, the owner of Cabanas Los Almendros, which is near the lagoons. Various people stopped by our table as the day wore on, first American and European tourists, and then a talkative black Mexican teacher named Angel Saguilan, who offered to buy me a beer.

"They call this Little Africa," Angel said, gesturing to the pale sand, illuminated by a pink setting sun. Children in a dazzling rainbow of colors shrieked as they played volleyball nearby.

"I feel Afro-American more than I feel Mexican," Angel went on to say.

He explained that because his dark skin makes him stand out in Mexico, other Mexicans often joke that he is really from Brazil or Cuba. Angel tells me that he knows he is different from non-black Mexicans, but he is just not sure exactly how.

I later walked down the path into the village, passing by Rey's Cabanas Los Almendros. The gruffly amusing Rey could usually be found drinking a beer at one thatch-roofed structure or the other on the beach, but he and his wife, Eva, built Los Almendros out of love for Chacahua, and the devotion is clear in the massive dark-wood, blue-painted bungalows with glassless windows facing the lagoons. Serene artwork decorates the walls of the rooms.

As I continued into town, I came across two men named Juan.

"Prima!" called out Juan Ortiz. I was having a conversation with another Chacahuan named Juan, but as soon as Ortiz saw me across a construction yard, he dropped his wheelbarrow, yelled the Spanish word for "cousin" and rushed over.

Before I could react, the stout fisherman with burnished brown skin had scooped my face in his hands, kissed me on the cheek and was leading me to his boat for a ride on the lagoons. "Everyone is family in Chacahua," he said.

Chacahua Lagoons National Park is one of Mexico's hidden gems. The lagoons allow for not only a breathtaking ride, but also prime bird-watching. The calm, soothing waters are a welcome contrast to the beach's buoyant waves, which attract surfers from Mexico and abroad. At the helm of his speedboat, Ortiz paused at a dock to take a family to the other side of the lagoons, and then told me what he knew about his community's identity.

"We are Mexicans, but black Mexicans," Ortiz said. "We still have traditions of the Africans, in costumes, in dances." He added that relations between black Mexicans and white and mestizo Mexicans are pleasant. Black Mexicans, he said, often advocate intermarriage in the hope their children will better integrate into society. But as for Mexico's politicians, "The government has forgotten about us." The Afro-Mexican communities are some of the poorest and most rural in the country.

As we docked and the family paid him, Juan pulled the father in for a warm handshake. "Now you know my name is Juan Ortiz, not just 'El Moreno' [the Brown-Skinned Man]," he told them with a laugh.

I decided to head back to my favorite hammock with my book, already planning what kind of empanadas I would order from the pink-frocked Morena who wanders on the beach.

Alexis Okeowo is a freelance writer based in Mexico City.