In November 1775, Virginia Governor Lord Dunmore famously issued an emancipation proclamation, but he was not the only royal governor accused of embracing such tactics. Patriot leaders broadcast news of royal officials throughout America plotting with slaves to put down the rebellion. For the next fifteen months, between April 1775 and July 1776, they would read about British agents trying to incite slave rebellions all over the South. As soon as the news of Lexington and Concord spread throughout North America, colonists began to think, talk, and worry a lot about what role enslaved people might play in this new world of war with Great Britain. Once the shooting started, patriot leaders started talking about race in very different ways than they had before. That work was about publicizing stories to make Americans afraid of British-sponsored slave “insurrections” and Native “massacres.” He was hiding just how important race was to the founding. But it covered up the work that Adams and his colleagues undertook at the time. It created an attractive, exceptional origin story for the United States. This magical way of thinking is compelling. “Thirteen clocks were made to strike together-a perfection of mechanism which no artist had ever before effected.” Adams was, of course, bragging, subtly suggesting that the work he, Jefferson, Franklin, and the Continental Congress did was pretty much a miracle. But something phenomenal happened in 1776. They fought with each other all the time. Getting all thirteen colonies to reach this same, momentous decision, Adams remembered, was “certainly a very difficult enterprise” and “perhaps a singular example in the history of mankind.” Colonists really didn’t know or particularly like one another.

More than forty years after 1776, an 83-year-old John Adams wanted Americans to know just how astounding it was that America declared independence.

Part of the reason why we haven’t fully realized this is because of John Adams. We have been reluctant to admit just how thoroughly the Founding Fathers thought about, talked about, and wrote about race at the moment of American independence. Slavery and arguments about race were not only at the heart of the American founding it was what united the states in the first place.

Declaration of independence 1776