I feel like I’ve read plenty about the historical materialist understanding about how the US constitution was formed and its class characteristics, but a lot less about the actual act of declaring independence. I do know how a bunch of the founding fathers made fortunes from land speculation via genocide and stealing indigenous land; and how the Brits wouldn’t let the yanks do that because they didn’t want to start another incredibly expensive war with the native peoples. I’ve also read of Gerald Horne’s thesis about how the founding fathers were worried that GB would totally outlaw slavery. I have a lot respect for Horne, he’s great but frankly I think that theory has little to no concrete evidence supporting it. But those two are the only materialist analyses of independence that I’ve seen so far.
Horne's Counter-Revolution of 1776 is a heck of a read. I definitely recommend it to everyone here. Fascinating stuff. Great to read up on uprisings of the enslaved. I recently finished Beard's Economic Interpretation of the US Constitution and found it to be an interesting epilogue to CR1776. I had no idea the Constitution was basically a Federalist coup of the Articles of Confederacy in response to an agrarian uprising.
There’s a Cosmopod episode where Matt Christman talks about the book, it got me pretty interested to read it.
The first half was such an info dump that I thought my head was going to explode, but once Horne catches you up things smooth out and become more managable to keep up with around chapter 5. Important read though.