Thirteen Clocks is about how the founding fathers mobilized political authority and military resistance to defeat their cultural cousins. This study examines how a discourse evolved delineating friends and enemies in the hopes of garnering support in the first year of the Revolutionary War. It focuses on how, through print, patriot leaders propagated certain representations they thought would resonate with a wide colonial audience. Because they had to make the familiar alien, those depictions centered on projecting representations of the British as the equals of dangerous populations within co ... More

Thirteen Clocks is about how the founding fathers mobilized political authority and military resistance to defeat their cultural cousins. This study examines how a discourse evolved delineating friends and enemies in the hopes of garnering support in the first year of the Revolutionary War. It focuses on how, through print, patriot leaders propagated certain representations they thought would resonate with a wide colonial audience. Because they had to make the familiar alien, those depictions centered on projecting representations of the British as the equals of dangerous populations within colonial society. To accomplish this vital, difficult task, they embraced the most powerful weapons in the colonial cultural arsenal: stereotypes, prejudices, expectations, and fears about violent Indians and Africans. This book is about the “dark side” of the common cause appeal, that America’s fight for independence was also a fight against the King’s assistants, namely Indians and the enslaved. Printed stories about Indians and slaves fighting with the British were the basis for much of the explanations patriot leaders gave for why Americans must resist, most importantly in the final grievance of the Declaration of Independence. They were the initial cement of the American union. Those stories then became codified in the first inchoate conceptions of what it meant to belong to the new American republic. The cultural and political exclusion of African Americans and Indians from the rights of American citizens started at the founding itself. The American creation of race and nation were inextricably intertwined from the very start of the American Revolution.