Jan. 6th Rioters Claim They’re Like the Patriots of 1776. Here’s the Ugly Truth.
They’re right that there are historical echoes—just not the ones they intend.
FOUR YEARS AGO, AFTER THE MOB that stormed the U.S. Capitol had finally been dispersed, then-President Donald Trump heralded the rioters as “great patriots.” Those who took part in or supported the January 6th insurrection certainly believed that. Some of the groups bound for Washington called their convoys “patriot caravans.” In anticipation of that day’s drama, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said January 6th would be “our 1776 moment,” while Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Co.) said “Today is 1776.” The nine-page document detailing the Proud Boys’ plan to occupy government buildings that day was titled “1776 Returns.” Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes told a reporter, “We’re walking down the same exact path as the Founding Fathers.”
Most liberals and many conservatives would recoil at the notion that the people who rampaged through the Capitol Building, injuring police officers and threatening to lynch the vice president and speaker of the House, deserve the label of patriot. Yet as we approach the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, a candid consideration of some of the darker aspects our history, too often overlooked, supports the claims by rioters that they were following in many of our Founders’ footsteps, as are millions of Trump supporters today—just not in the way they think.
For one, both the patriots of 1776 and the insurrectionists of January 6th embraced a conspiracy theory that lacked a basis in fact. While the former and soon-to-be president and his backers insist the 2020 election was stolen by a nefarious deep state, patriot leaders and their followers at the start of the American Revolution were in thrall to a similarly false claim.
On the eve of the conflict, prominent Americans were convinced that Britain intended to enslave the colonists. George Washington warned that London powerbrokers intended to make white Americans “as tame, & abject Slaves, as the Blacks we Rule over with such arbitrary Sway.” Alexander Hamilton agreed that “a system of slavery” was being “fabricated against America.” The Declaration of Independence asserted that Great Britain’s goal was “an absolute Tyranny” over the thirteen colonies.
These claims don’t stand up to scrutiny. Unlike France or Spain, Britain was run by an elected Parliament and a king with severely restricted powers. Historians who agree on little else are united in their conviction that neither George III nor Parliament intended to enslave white Americans. “The conspiracy did not exist, but the colonists sincerely believed that it did,” writes historian Michael Butter. This fear that government—whether based in London or Washington—harbors a secret plan to subjugate citizens is a thread tightly woven into our national fabric.
The sanctity of gun ownership is another. Members of the January 6th mob were armed with weapons, including guns, and confident in their conviction that the Second Amendment is designed to allow citizens to launch “an armed rebellion against the government, if that becomes necessary,” as former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fl.) said at the time. The April 1775 battles at Lexington and Concord were, after all, sparked by a British attempt to seize gunpowder and weapons stockpiled by the patriots.
This is, however, only half the story. South of New England, where there were few redcoats, many colonists were disinclined to take on the world’s most powerful empire. This was especially true in Virginia, the oldest, richest, and largest of the colonies. Two days after the battles in Massachusetts, the royal governor, Lord Dunmore, transferred gunpowder housed in the arsenal in the capital of Williamsburg to a British navy ship. The populist leader Patrick Henry—who weeks before had delivered his famous “Give me liberty or give me death!” speech—immediately saw an opportunity to spread another conspiracy theory to rouse a still largely apathetic public.
“You may in vain talk to [the people] about the duties on tea, etc.,” he explained to a friend. “They depend on principles, too abstracted for their apprehension and feeling. But tell them of the robbery of the magazine, and that the next step will be to disarm them,” and this will “bring the subject home to their bosoms, and they will be ready to fly to arms to defend themselves.” Soon after, Henry gave a rousing speech to his county militia, warning that the gunpowder seizure was “nothing more than a part of the general system of subjugation,” and calling for his men to strike the first blow in the “great cause of American liberty.”
When thousands of Virginia’s small farmers responded to his call, it was less out of fear of invading redcoats than at the prospect of being left defenseless against enslaved Africans, who by then accounted for four of every ten people in Virginia. A patriot later wrote that whites “believed at the time” that the royal governor “designed, by disarming the people, to weaken the means of opposing an insurrection of the slaves.” Henry, however, knew that Dunmore and the British government had neither the intention nor the capability of taking muskets and rifles out of the hands of individual colonists.
THIS LEADS TO THE THIRD AND MOST DISTURBING way in which many January 6th insurrectionists—and many Trump supporters—resemble the patriots of old. In the early 1770s, enslaved Americans made up more than a fifth of the colonies’ total population, and that fraction was growing. Even abolitionist-minded founders were alarmed. “There has been in Town a conspiracy of the Negroes,” Abigail Adams wrote her husband John in 1774. This fear was even more entrenched in the South, in some parts of which the enslaved population outnumbered those who were free. “We shall fall like Achilles by the hand of one that knows that secret,” a worried James Madison warned.
At the war’s start, however, the British government rejected proposals to arm enslaved Americans, mostly out of concern that this would spark uprisings in their lucrative sugar colonies in the Caribbean. But it proved the only option for an outgunned and outnumbered Lord Dunmore, who by late 1775 had abandoned Williamsburg for the port of Norfolk.
Henry commanded Virginia’s patriot troops, who wore hunting shirts emblazoned with his “Liberty or Death” motto. As the men marched on Norfolk, Dunmore—without London’s knowledge or approval—issued his famous proclamation emancipating “all indented Servants, Negroes, or others” willing to fight for the Crown. He formed the Ethiopian Regiment, the first organized black corps in North America, and gave them muskets and military training. Their uniforms, according to one contemporary report, bore the slogan “Liberty for Slaves.”
Norfolk was destroyed by vengeful patriot troops and Dunmore and his multiracial army eventually were defeated. But for many whites, the royal governor’s actions were proof that the British wanted to overturn their longstanding control over black people, and that enslaved Americans could not be trusted. Even after the Revolution, the fear of tyranny entwined with support for slavery. In 1861, many Southern whites viewed Abraham Lincoln as a resurrected King George III, and Confederates claimed the mantle of patriots fighting against the despotism of a federal government bent on empowering the enslaved.
IN OUR OWN CENTURY, CONSPIRACY THEORIES regarding people of color replacing whites are widely accepted in right-wing circles. Tucker Carlson—who has defended the January 6th mob—is a prominent proponent of the so-called “great replacement” theory and asserts, without statistical evidence, that “anti-white racism is exploding across the country.” Tellingly, as the rioters surged through the Capitol four years ago, at least one carried the Confederate battle flag.
So, yes, when the January 6th sympathizers say they resemble the patriots of 1776, they are right. They indeed are replaying the shadow side of the Revolution in their adherence to conspiratorial, violent, and racist views that stemmed from their fear of losing power.
Yet our Founders also created the ingenious means for overcoming the ignorance and hypocrisies hobbling their generation, by giving voice to Enlightenment ideals that would inspire the world, and by establishing a constitutional system that eventually abolished slavery, extended the vote, improved education, and ended legal segregation. We don’t need to blindly imitate those who lived a quarter of a millennium ago. Instead, we can embrace the tougher task of the true patriot—forging a country with freedom and justice for all.
Andrew Lawler’s latest book is A Perfect Frenzy: A Royal Governor, His Black Allies, and the Crisis That Spurred the American Revolution, forthcoming this month from Grove Atlantic.
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