In December 1773, colonists threw a shipment of tea from a British ship into Boston Harbor. This marked the beginning of the Tea Party and the myth of the American Revolution—a story that children and young people will study in school and that older people will repeat on Fox News. The attack was carried out by colonists dressed as Mohawks, the easternmost tribe of the Iroquois League of the Six Nations. This cross-dressing was a common practice among the colonist militias, who often dressed as their adversaries and flew the enemy’s flag.
Another founding myth that obscured the true motivation behind the rebellion of white men (the wealthy, slaveholders) against Great Britain and against their own local governments: the right to ignore the 1763 Treaty between Native Americans and the British; the right to strip Native Americans of their lands in order to occupy them or sell them to new white immigrants. Similarly, the demonym American, used by the colonists to refer to the Native Americans, came to be the demonym for the “band of armed madmen” (in the words of Benjamin Franklin) who were fighting for the freedom to expropriate the Native Americans. In the same way, slaveholders later fought for their freedom to enslave others and to expropriate half of Mexico’s territory as if it were another “unoccupied country.” In the same way that cowboys, a century later, would represent the cultural appropriation of the dispossessed Mexican vaquero.
After several victories by the Ottawa, led by Pontiac in the early 1760s, General Jeffrey Amherst ordered the shipment of a handkerchief and two blankets contaminated with the smallpox virus as a token of recognition for their bravery. The disease spread to the other side of the Appalachians, bringing a painful death marked by sores, fever, and vomiting. Reports from the time mention a smallpox outbreak “more effective than firearms” among the Native Americans around 1764. General Amherst wrote: “we must use every resource at our disposal. All prisoners must be executed… Eradicating them will be the only way to protect our security.” Sound familiar?
On October 7, 1763, Great Britain had signed the Royal Proclamation treaty with the Indigenous nations—a treaty that would spark the Revolution against this right of Indigenous peoples not to be harassed, robbed, and massacred on the other side of the Appalachians. It was not a promise of independence, but a regulatory agreement that granted Indigenous peoples a certain degree of autonomy as colonies, along with a promise of non-aggression. In exchange, they were to provide European authorities with political stability and increased tax revenue—something London needed in the wake of the Seven Years’ War with France.
According to historian Ned Blackhawk, “as Benjamin Franklin put it in 1764, ‘an armed gang of madmen’ defined the region’s policies”—and those of the centuries to come.
The Pennsylvania Declaration of Rights and Constitution, signed in September 1776 by a committee of citizens who called themselves the “Sons of Liberty,” would establish its own Bill of Rights and serve as the foundation for the country’s constitution, proclaiming “that all men are born equally free and independent, and have natural rights, such as the right to enjoy and defend life and liberty, to possess and protect property…; that government must be instituted for the common good and not for the private enrichment of any man, family, or group…; that the people have the right to bear arms for their own defense… and, since standing armies in times of peace are dangerous to liberty, they must not be maintained.”
In 1765, a month after the attack on the Cherokee, Fauquier wrote to the board: “the Paxton Boys of Pennsylvania have sent a message to our people: no one need suffer for the murder of a savage.” The settlers’ level of impunity and fanaticism closely resembled that of the 21st century. In 1766, Virginia Governor Francis Fauquier, in a letter to the governor of Pennsylvania, acknowledged the violent settler militia, the Augusta Boys: “From experience, I can tell you that it is impossible to bring anyone to justice for the murder of a Native American… [For the murderers] it is a meritorious act, and they know they are protected.” Special rights. Sound familiar?
It was clear that freedom and democracy applied only to “free men”—that is, white property owners with the exclusive right to pursue “their own happiness”—a stark contrast to the Native American world.
One of the independence revolutionaries, the mulatto Lamuel Haynes, reacted to the “Declaration of Independence” in 1776 with a long essay titled “Freedom Deferred,” noting the contradiction between “all” and “race.” He was surely the first to point out the hypocrisy of the famous phrase “All men are created equal” in a supposedly new society that upheld the legality of slavery.
By 1773, in violation of the Royal Proclamation, 40 percent of white colonists were already living on occupied Native American lands. They violated the laws of their own states when they were winning and requested military assistance from their governors when they were losing. Benjamin Franklin, who worked for decades with Indigenous delegates and knew their system of direct democracy very well, criticized this fanatical violence, but was careful not to give them any credit for the ideological conception of the new Anglo-Saxon republic. For Jefferson, the British not only signed a non-aggression treaty but also “helped the savages without compassion” so that they would attack the white settlers on the frontier. “These people know only the language of arms and are willing to exterminate the settlers.” Sound familiar?
Indigenous territories offered unlimited opportunities for the expansion of capitalism. The first millionaire of the new American republic—created in 1776 by slaveholders fighting for freedom—was the German John Jacob Astor. His fortune stemmed from a fur trade monopoly with Indigenous peoples, the export of opium to China, and, finally, the real estate business, which would lead to Manhattan’s prosperity in the 19th century.
Shortly before that, in 1839, Senator Nathaniel Tallmadge would state that one out of every hundred dollars in circulation throughout the country belonged to John Jacob Astor. Modern estimates confirm this: his fortune amounted to one percent of the U.S. GDP. Today, the Waldorf Astoria Hotel stands as a memorial to him, along with a legacy that cemented the spirit of the new imperial nation: The freedom to plunder under the law of the gun.
The founding of the United States stemmed from the colonists’ desire for freedom to plunder the Native peoples even beyond the Appalachians. The Declaration of Independence of 1776 itself was a lengthy act of self-victimization achieved through the criminalization of the legitimate owners of the coveted territories and the projection of blame onto King George III, who allegedly “provoked internal insurrections among us and attempted to incite against the inhabitants of our frontiers, the ruthless savage Indians, whose well-known rule of war is the indiscriminate destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.”
Jorge Majfud. Summary of a chapter from the book Tawiscara: The Kidnapping of Democracy (2026).
https://www.amazon.com/1976-Exile-Terror-Jorge-Majfud/dp/1956760172/ref=https://www.amazon.com/Moscas-telara%C3%B1a-Historia-comercializaci%C3%B3n-existencia_y/dp/195676030X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
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