Thread by @rebeccanagle

I wanna talk about the historical context of this line of the Declaration of Independence and how the British not meeting the colonists demand for more and more Native land was explicitly one of the underlying reasons for the Revolutionary War. #IndependanceDay

When #4thofJuly2020 insurrections amongst us, & has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction...” that shit wasn’t abstract. #FourthofJuly

During the French and Indian War (1754-1763) most tribes fought against the British. At the end of the war, the crown had won precarious control over a continent on the other side of the ocean. To try & maintain peace w/ tribes, King George III issued the 1763 proclamation.

The proclamation forbade the colonists from moving West of the Appalachian mountains without permission from the crown. Reaching into the Ohio Valley region, settlers had already squatted on Indigenous land in violation of numerous treaties. Now they were being ordered back.

(To be clear the order, like Indigenous land rights throughout history, was loosely enforced at best.)

The proclamation hampered both the European poor and the European elite alike. Most of the property along the eastern seaboard had already been gobbled up by wealthier settlers, and the prospect of land ownership for those w/o wealth depended on westward expansion.

War against the tribes was so common that colonies from Maine to Georgia required men to serve in militias.

To maintain both the class structure among Europeans and the system of chattel slavery, the early stages of our country constantly needed more and more land.

And the crown stood in the way.

To talk about the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and not the economic (& yes racist) motives is simply a historical.

Especially when the founding fathers’ anger at the crown for not letting them steal more Native land is written explicitly in the document itself!