Title is a joke but it's a lot of info to process and if anyone else here has read it they should converse with me about it.
One thing I was thinking about when I was in the middle of it was the fact that I have heard some pop materialists (podcasters don't misunderstand me) who are quick to disagree with the book's premise, saying it's too focused on only one aspect of the revolution. And even in the text, Horne mentions frustration with people who overlook racism in favor of only class analysis
I was only a history minor in college, I'm not well-read enough to dispute either of these positions. But the idea of the revolution being primarily a sort of "brexit to keep slaves" fits so well into my understanding of the situation, so I'm finding myself leaning towards Horne's position.
So naturally I want internet strangers to help me decide instead. What true proletarian elements of the revolution am I ignoring?
All revolutions are driven by different material contradictions for the different participants
It was a brexit to keep slaves for the southern Bourgoisie. If was a brexit for financial centralisation for the Northern Bourgoisie. For the PB and Yeomenry and Proles, it was a radical liberal revolution like that in France.
What was the primary contradiction? I'm not convinced there is always a single one.
I don't know if it can be so neatly separated into North and South at that point. It seems (at least in this book) like slavery was being depended upon pretty fundamentally all over the colonies at that time, not just the Southern ones.
But this point you are making is why I think this book is worth discussing. Horne does make the claim that, for the PB at least, there was a deep fear of (justified) slave uprisings alongside deeper fears tied to the fact that the slave population was becoming larger than any other group.
Basically Horne does claim that it wasn't only supremely wealthy landowners who were afraid of the consequences of abolition. And it does make sense to me that the special cruelty of America being a slaveowning society fucks with the usual dynamics of class--the creation of the "white" identity not much earlier than this time is important here. Horne had no shortage of primary source examples of people whose class interests should have been aligned with the slaves, but whose ability to recognize that had been made fuzzy by that new manufactured racial identity and by their ever-present terror of the slaves' justified animosity.