Chris Cutrone

The recent protests against police brutality have raised questions about the revolutionary character of the United States. Platypus argues that any revolution in America for human emancipation would have to build on the legacy of 1776 and not 1619. We see the erasure of 1776 as a fundamental acquiescence to defeat. This is why today we are making the case for 1776 and the promise of liberty yet to be fulfilled.

The red thread running through the lecture series is the persistence & legacy of the revolution. We ask: How does America remain a revolutionary society? How did each chapter of American history give a new impetus to the revolution that began in 1776? Our approach to the American Revolution and the subsequent history of the polity it founded is from the perspective of the bourgeois revolution and its crisis in the Marxist philosophy of history.

Chris Cutrone’s presentation from the Platypus Affiliated Society public forum panel discussion on the American Revolution and the Left, February 22, 2020, at Columbia University, New York:
<https://platypus1917.org/2020/03/01/the-american-revolution-and-the-left/>

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), some quotations

“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.”
— Thomas Jefferson, original draft of the Declaration of Independence (1776)

“I go right back to the equality clause. It is ‘all men are created equal.’ I think that’s the key one. And that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of happiness — it’s difficult to know. It’s not quite — he isn’t a pleasure-seeker. And yet he knows that freedom is happiness too. That liberty will enable you to pursue happiness. And how grand it is that in a capitalistic country like this, that he did not follow Locke and have life, liberty and property. And that mystery of the pursuit of happiness suits me just fine. If the equality clause will trouble us a thousand years, as [Robert] Frost said [in North of Boston, ‘The Black Cottage’ (1915)], if it’ll trouble us, then the pursuit of happiness will mystify us forever. And I like the trouble and I like the mystery. And that suits me just fine about Jefferson.”
— James Cox in Ken Burns’s PBS documentary Thomas Jefferson (1997)

“Whatever else the Civil War was for
It wasn’t just to keep the States together,
Nor just to free the slaves, though it did both.
She wouldn’t have believed those ends enough
To have given outright for them all she gave.
Her giving somehow touched the principle
That all men are created free and equal.
And to hear her quaint phrases — so removed
From the world’s view to-day of all those things.
That’s a hard mystery of Jefferson’s.
What did he mean? Of course the easy way
Is to decide it simply isn’t true.
It may not be. I heard a fellow say so.
But never mind, the Welshman got it planted
Where it will trouble us a thousand years.
Each age will have to reconsider it.”
— Robert Frost, “The Black Cottage” (1915)

“The people can not be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. . . . And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
— Jefferson, Paris, November 13, 1787

“The tone of your letters had for some time given me pain, on account of the extreme warmth with which they censured the proceedings of the Jacobins of France. . . . In the struggle which was necessary, many guilty persons fell without the forms of trial, and with them some innocent. These I deplore as much as any body, and shall deplore some of them to the day of my death. But I deplore them as I should have done had they fallen in battle. It was necessary to use the arm of the people, a machine not quite so blind as balls and bombs, but blind to a certain degree. A few of their cordial friends met at their hands, the fate of enemies. But time and truth will rescue and embalm their memories, while their posterity will be enjoying that very liberty for which they would never have hesitated to offer up their lives. The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood? My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is.”
— Jefferson, Secretary of State, letter to William Short, U.S. Ambassador to France, January 3, 1793

“I do not permit myself to take part in any new enterprises, even for bettering the condition of man, not even in the great one which is the subject of your letter [the abolition of slavery], and which has been thro’ life that of my greatest anxieties. the march of events has not been such as to render it’s completion practicable within the limits of time alloted to me; and I leave it’s accomplishment as the work of another generation. and I am cheared when I see that on which it is devolved, taking it up with so much good will, and such mind engaged in it’s encoragement. the abolition of the evil is not impossible: it ought never therefore to be despaired of. every plan should be adopted, every experiment tried, which may do something towards the ultimate object. that which you propose is well worthy of tryal. it has succeeded with certain portions of our white brethren, under the care of a [Christian communist George] Rapp and an [Utopian Socialist Robert] Owen; and why may it not succeed with the man of colour?”
— Jefferson to Frances Wright, August 7, 1825