The first of these two lectures by academic authors, given to a room full of peers in an historic Philadelphia building, was delivered by Aaron Sullivan concerning his book on “disaffected” and essentially neutral Americans during the American Revolution. He covers a high status judge who falls from grace due to his pious refusal to pick either of the two criminal sides in the conflict. He also discusses a shape-shifting printer who served whatever power controlled his city.

The Joe Wittall Diary 1775-79, [1] is cited, even as questions of servitude in Pennsylvania, which held many times more European American than African American slaves, were neatly side-stepped. Sullivan does stress that more Americans supported neither side than supported either side, just as in politics today. He also points out that The Test Act [1] in Pennsylvania was an example of the patriots being intolerant of neutrality even as the Crown tolerated neutrality. This viewer takes this as a decided leftward tilt with the birth of this nation from a more conservative European base.

During the Q & A Sullivan lies when asked if the warring factions of European Americans viewed the Indians as sovereign nations. He claimed that “if any one had, I haven’t heard of it,” or some very similar shit. The fact is, that any reading of the Declaration of Independence, The Articles of Confederation and The Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights, makes it crystal clear that the Americans were, in part, seeking to be permitted to treat with Indian Tribes as sovereign peoples rather than as mercenaries for the British Empire.

Sullivan did his narrative duty by continuing the concealment of that which he is supposedly charged with revealing. Do any historians even known that their title is Greek for Inquirer?

To the rescue of my libido came darling Lauren Duvall, who would have been purchased for a wife by the leading men of Philadelphia as soon as her fine form arrived for sale from Ireland…

Interestingly, although she uses terms like “gendered” and “raced” and otherwise abides by liberal-leftist convention, her feminism gets in the way of declaring as Sullivan did that all Europeans were free and all Indians oppressed as individuals not treated with as tribal nations. Lauren’s book was about the “intersectionality” of life in occupied American towns, primarily Philadelphia, where an old Quaker woman named Elizabeth Drinker kept a diary [1], including an account of a British officer breaking her Irish slave girl, Ann Kelley, out of her house and running off with her.

There was a discussion of Sarah Redwood Fisher who may have left a diary [1], and of Jane Boone, a servant girl who somehow won her freedom and who married a Hessian officer.

Duval actually specifies that the world of servitude was wider than Sullivan’s stingy denial of slavery being applied to any folks other than the designated Saint Race, making certain that the fine pale lasses enslaved on these shores long before her lifetime were recognized in the refrain, given thrice, I think, “Africans and other enslaved persons.”

If you have not visited before, welcome to Plantation America, a lie to big to be wrapped tight on the swaddling cloth of academia.

Do note, that during Lauren’s talk on occupied Charleston, that free black women, formerly slaves, actually organized a dance for British officers and that a white slave mistress patriot is depicted in Athena-like artwork of the next generation as being attended by various European slave women.

Notes:

-1. Editor, please provide me with the primary source documents for the follow up volumes, with the Quaker diaries cited for The 13th Tribe and the other entries for the final volume.

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