THIRTEEN CLOCKS

A sobering argument that American independence was gained principally after Colonial leaders purposefully “weaponized” prejudices against African Americans and Native peoples.

As Parkinson notes at the beginning, this book is a distillation and revision of his much longer book, The Common Cause (2016), and it features a “new introduction and conclusion and new material exploring all the myriad problems patriot leaders faced when they began the nearly impossible task of constructing a durable union in the 1770s.” Using rarely studied Colonial newspaper evidence, the author reveals how fear as much as idealism drove American colonists to independence. It was because of their shared conviction that the British were preparing to use non-White people against them that, Parkinson argues in John Adams’ words, “thirteen clocks were made to strike together.” The author convincingly demonstrates how Colonial anxieties emerged immediately after the 1775 Battles of Lexington and Concord and, only 15 months later, made their way into the Declaration of Independence, which described “merciless Indian savages,” “foreign Mercenaries,” and “domestic insurrectionists.” Colonial leaders didn’t create these fears; instead, they stoked long-existing ones to unite the Colonies in their unprecedented drive for political freedom. Then they structured post-Revolution constitutions to prevent the incorporation of Blacks and Natives into the population as citizens. Parkinson pulls no punches. “When the war was won,” he writes, “the so-called ‘founding fathers’ wanted the ‘candid world’ to believe that only the first paragraphs of the Declaration—with the lofty sentiments of self-evident truths and inalienable rights—animated the colonists’ fight for liberty….What they wanted us to forget—and we largely have—was that the drive to have thirteen colonial clocks strike as one was also a campaign stamped by the vicious, the confining, and the destructive.” While omitting other factors, the author makes a strong case for the soiled origins of the U.S.

A knowledgeable, disturbing presentation of the prominent role of racism in the years of the nation’s birth.