Greetings! In an upcoming webinar on Monday, titled “The US Revolution/Counterrevolution @250,” Michael Hudson will be among the keynote speakers. He will delve into the significant influence of slave-related banking and capital on U.S. financial policies, a topic that is explored further in the summary below.
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1776: Liberty or slavery? Historians and activists analyze the US revolution, empire, and the current crisis.
Sunday, July 5, 2026. 4 PM BST, 11 AM US Eastern Time.
About this webinar
As we mark 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, how should we re-evaluate the events of 1776? While traditional narratives celebrate this period as a fight for liberty and self-governance, a powerful counter-argument suggests it was primarily a counter-revolution—a maneuver by slaveholders and settlers to safeguard slavery and westward expansion against a British empire that began to impose constraints. This webinar will examine the radical and democratic legacy of the republic, highlighted by its universalist language that later inspired abolitionists, suffragists, and anti-colonial movements, and juxtapose it with the harsh realities of slavery, dispossession, and an imperial path from inception.
We will trace this trajectory through key milestones: continental expansion, the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Bretton Woods agreement in 1945, and the supposed unipolar moment of 1991, leading to the profound crises we face today. Discussions will also consider how the US’s internal issues—economic decline, rising debt, deindustrialization, social fragmentation, and political strife—are connected to signs of imperial decline abroad, including military setbacks in Iran, economic challenges posed by China, and the rise of a multipolar world.
Speakers
- Gerald Horne is a prominent historian and the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. He has authored over three dozen books on race, colonialism, and resistance, notably The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, which argues that the American Revolution was, in significant measure, a conservative rebellion aimed at preserving slavery against an increasingly abolitionist British crown.
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a historian and long-term advocate in the Indigenous sovereignty movement. She was awarded the 2017 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize. Her book, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, tells the founding and expansion of the country from the perspective of Native nations, reframing 1776 and beyond as a narrative of settler colonialism and centuries of Indigenous resistance.
- Ajamu Baraka serves as the national organizer and spokesperson for the Black Alliance for Peace and is a veteran human rights advocate, having founded the US Human Rights Network. He was the Green Party’s vice-presidential candidate in 2016 alongside Jill Stein, and he approaches discussions of American empire and the unfinished work of liberation from a Black radical, anti-imperialist perspective.
- Michael Hudson is an economist and professor at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, as well as a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. A former Wall Street analyst, his influential work Super Imperialism examines how the US maintains global economic hegemony through the dollar and institutions like the IMF and World Bank, offering insights pertinent to evaluating the outcomes of 250 years of the republic.
- Sara Flounders is a writer and socialist activist, co-director of the International Action Center, and a prominent member of the Workers World Party. She has been organizing against US militarism since the 1960s and has authored or edited over ten books on war and empire, including the anthology Sanctions: A Wrecking Ball in a Global Economy, which provides a strongly anti-imperialist perspective on US actions both domestically and internationally.
- Alan Freeman co-directs the Geopolitical Economy Research Group (GERG) at the University of Manitoba and has served as an economist for the Greater London Authority. He authored a biography of British politician Tony Benn titled The Benn Heresy and has co-edited several works on value theory. Alan is a life honorary vice-president of the Association for Heterodox Economics in the UK and serves as Vice-Chair of the World Association for Political Economy.
- Radhika Desai is a Professor in the Department of Political Studies and directs the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba, Canada. Her publications include Capitalism, Coronavirus and War: A Geopolitical Economy (2023) and Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire (2013), alongside other academic explorations of political and economic themes.
We encourage you to participate in this enlightening event!
By Michael Hudson, research professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest work is The Destiny of Civilization.
The influence of slave states on the formation of the U.S. Constitution extends well beyond the issues of slavery. In this discussion, I aim to explore how this distinctive policy of states’ rights has shaped American banking and financial practices.
Slave states primarily sought to limit federal authority—particularly the will of the democratic majority—to take actions that might restrict or abolish slavery and hinder its expansion westward. From the outset, the southern slave states insisted that the national government cede substantial power to the states, which included the ability to obstruct federal actions applicable nationwide.
This anti-federal stance placed the Southern states at odds with the North and West. Their concerns revolved around the likelihood of a rising Northern population—more urbanized—electing representatives to Congress, the Senate, and the Presidency whose agendas might not align with the interests of slaveholders.
The Southern states opposed tariff protection, internal improvements, and the establishment of a national bank coupled with commercial banking to generate credit for industrial growth and employment. Henry Clay and the Whigs promoted such initiatives, which the South viewed as a threat to its population, risking a shift towards abolition.
To impose financial austerity, the Southern slave states advocated restricting money and credit to gold and silver coinage. Their strategy aimed to deprive the economy of necessary credit by preventing the rotation of federal tax revenues and tariffs back into the economy to facilitate bank credit creation.
From the Southern perspective, bank credit facilitated industrial investment and urban employment, which threatened to raise the cost of grain needed to sustain enslaved laborers. Their goal was to ensure that cotton and other plantation exports remained competitively priced in foreign markets.
The first significant debate over monetary policy arose in 1791 when Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s inaugural Secretary of the Treasury, proposed establishing a government mint and creating the First Bank of the United States in Philadelphia. This institution was not a central bank in the traditional sense; it did not hold the Treasury’s reserves but functioned as a national bank authorized to open branches across state boundaries. However, the anti-Federalist president Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809) and his fellow Virginian slave-owning successor, James Madison (4th U.S. president, 1809-1817), contended that monetary functions should remain under state control.
Virginia’s Democratic senator John Taylor (who served at various times from 1792 to 1824) cautioned, “If Congress could incorporate a bank, it might emancipate a slave.” Advocates of states’ rights feared that federal power could potentially advance the cause of abolition.
A more tangible concern was that a thriving national banking system would favor the industrializing North. This was incompatible with the South’s plantation economy, which focused on supplying cotton to Britain. The South aimed to keep grain prices low to sustain its plantation labor, so an increase in bank credit and protection for northern industries would ramp up urban demand for grain, elevating costs for plantation owners.
During the era of the Democratic Party’s “Solid South,” federal policy adhered to a hard-money bullion system from the 1820s until just before World War I. This approach relied on commodity money, using silver and gold coinage, resulting in deflation in contrast to the paper money being utilized by Britain and other European nations for industrial expansion.
The insistence on high bullion reserves by banks was a deliberate public policy following Andrew Jackson’s presidency (1829-1837). To address the debts incurred during the War of 1812, the government had surpluses for most of the following two decades, enabling the national debt to be fully paid off by 1835 under Jackson.
These federal surpluses mainly came from customs duties, which had to be settled in bullion, draining coinage from the economy. While the Treasury enjoyed a surplus, it was at the expense of the broader economy. Banks faced heightened demands for coinage to convert notes and deposits, particularly during harvest time in autumn. This reliance on bullion constrained the extent to which paper credit could be safely generated without risking a banking crisis.
The Whig Party, comprising northern industrialists and proponents of free labor, led by Henry Clay, sought to reinvest Treasury surpluses back into the economy by depositing bullion within banks. This approach would have established a stable basis for banking reserves, but widespread discontent towards banks allowed Southern politicians to curb this initiative, thereby imposing deflationary monetary policies.
Jackson’s refusal to renew the charter of the Second Bank of the United States in 1836, coupled with his withdrawal of Treasury deposits from banks holding them, severely limited the ability of banks to generate a secure framework of credit and paper money for Northern industry.
Calvin Colton articulated in his work Public Economy for the United States that the “avowed object of the [Jackson-Democratic] administration and its advisers” was to restrict the paper currency in circulation and promote a metallic currency; the independent or sub-treasury was intended to achieve that end, despite its destined failure according to Mr. Clay, which would potentially lead to a dangerous new paper medium.
A similar deflationary trend in monetary policy manifested after the Civil War, financed by Northern states through the issuance of greenbacks. Post-war, creditor groups—including Southern interests—pressed for the redemption of this paper currency in bullion, which initiated a deflationary spiral that continued into the 1890s. During this period, William Jennings Bryan, a Democratic presidential candidate in 1896, famously stated that agriculture and industry were being “crucified on a cross of gold.” Republican protectionist tariffs generated budget surpluses payable in coinage, further draining bullion from the economy and compelling banks to redeem paper currencies in coinage, restricting their capacity to create substantial bank credit.
When the United States convened the National Monetary Commission after the 1907 crash to review global banking practices, David Kinley’s report on U.S. Treasury history noted the independent treasury law mandated that the government manage its own funds without banking institutions’ involvement, thus neglecting the economy’s currency needs. This “independence” culminated in the Treasury’s fiscal surpluses from tariff duties and land sales draining coinage from circulation.
Ultimately, the Federal Reserve was established in 1913, asserting its “independence” from the government’s own deflationary hard-money approach. The Federal Reserve utilized this independence to support its member commercial banks, which were effectively the institution’s shareholders.
On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court granted President Donald Trump the authority to dismiss administration appointees across the board, with the exception of the Federal Reserve—ensuring its policy independence. Rather than discriminating against the banking sector as had been the case prior to 1913, effectively stifling its credit and money creation capabilities, the Federal Reserve has instead acted as a defender of the banking system. Its increasingly reckless approach to credit generation is now constrained by the post-2009 Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) in an era marked by rising tech bubbles—reflecting a turnaround from the government’s previous hard-money restrictions on credit before 1913.
