Usually, when historians are writing about the colonial elite in the thirteen colonies, they are referring to the southern planter class, the large plantation owners with dozens or hundreds of slaves. Especially if Gerald Horne is talking about slave ownership, he is likely referring to this southern elite. My answer, therefore, is going to be focused on the southern colonies, particularly Virginia, where there has been the most research. First, however, some context.

The planter class of the southern colonies was a religious, political, cultural, and economic elite. Unlike the landowning elite in Britain, American landowners did not make their profits from renting their land to smaller farmers. Instead, they farmed their own land with slave labour to grow cash crops like tobacco, and acted as middlemen for surrounding smaller farmers, buying their crops and selling them at a profit to British traders. This gave them both wealth and influence over smaller farmers, who were dependent on the elites economically. Politically, a few families dominated the elected branches of government; in Virginia, this was the House of Burgesses. These families also had places of honour in the largely Anglican churches, and held important roles in the mandatory militia, acting as officers to again reinforce their superior status over others in the colony. It is hard to overstate the amount of influence and power that the elite accumulated before the American Revolution.

However, by the 1760s, the elite planter class was in crisis. Scottish merchants, invigorated by the 1701 Union with Britain, went deeper into the heart of North America in the 1740s, and bought crops directly from smaller planters. This cut out the elite’s role as middlemen, reducing both their wealth and influence. Religiously, the near-uniform Anglicanism of the southern colonies began to break apart in the 1740s during the Great Awakening, as evangelical branches of Protestantism like the Methodists and Baptists began to rise. These new churches often had an egalitarian ethic among their own members, rejecting notions of hierarchy, which challenged the authority of traditional elites both directly, and by removing people from the churches they dominated. Finally, between being cut out of their role as middlemen and the declining price of tobacco, the large planters were becoming almost perpetually indebted, often to the same Scottish merchants who were replacing them.

The American Revolution provided elites with several opportunities to challenge their relative decline. Woody Holton, in Forced Founders, lists several advantages that the American Revolution offered elites:

1: The planters wanted to stop the slave trade (not slave ownership) in order to prevent poorer farmers from buying slaves, which might make them more serious economic competitors to the elites. They also wanted to stop the colony’s population from becoming less white.

2: The American Revolution began with boycotts of British goods across the all the colonies. Supporting the boycotts allowed elites to stop buying expensive British goods, while not needing to admit they were in crippling amounts of debt, which would destroy their social standing.

3: The revolution also allowed elites to pause the repayment of their debts, and pass it off as a patriotic measure rather than bankruptcy.

4: They wanted to raise the militia (which they led) against the possibility of a slave revolt. In November, 1775, Lord Dunmore, the governor of Virginia, offered slaves freedom if they agreed to fight for the British. This terrified white slave owners who lived in fear of a slave revolt, but rather than frightening them into obedience as Dunmore had hoped, it helped bring Virginia into the revolution on the American side.

5: When news came out that the British were negotiating with indigenous peoples to join the war, this likewise motivated whites in the south to raise a militia in what they saw as self-defence.

6: Poorer whites were demanding a more democratic society, and a reduction in rents. Taking a leading role in the revolution allowed elites to keep control of a society in which they were slowly losing status, while mitigating the calls for reduction in payments which would hurt their own bottom line.

7: After the Seven Years’ War, Britain had issued the Proclamation of 1763, which limited the colonies westward expansion, to try to avoid war with the indigenous people who lived to the west. This infuriated the colonists, especially farmers who wanted cheap land and elites who had been speculating on its sale. The Revolution offered a chance to continue making money off of westward expansion.

To Holton’s long list, I would add John Elliott’s argument in Empires in the Atlantic World, that compared to France or Spain, the British Empire offered comparatively few positions of authority to local elites. The House of Burgesses was not a directly imperial institution, and almost none of the elites born in the colony could obtain a position where they owed their authority directly to the British Crown. Therefore, few of them had any material or political incentives to support the empire, and revolting would give them the opportunity to climb higher in the ranks of the new government.

So Gerald Horne’s argument that elites were defending their economic interests from Britain is accurate, but keep in mind there were also social and political reasons for elites to join the revolution. Economically, the elites stood to benefit from the revolution by cancelling their debts owed to British merchants, by hopefully regaining control over domestic trade, and by reopening western land to settlement so they could speculate on it. Your question about slavery is more difficult to answer. The anti-slavery movement in Britain had not started yet; in the 1770s, the anti-slavery movement was largely confined to Quakers, who mostly lived in the more northern North American British colonies. If Gerald Horne said the elite joined the revolution because of slavery, he was likely instead referring to either the fear in the colonies that Britain would raise their slaves in revolt against them, or to the elite’s desire to control slave importation. If you want more information on this, I highly recommend Robert Parkinson’s The Common Cause as a starting place, which gives a detailed, incredibly well-written account of race and its connection to American Revolution.

Tl;dr: One of the motivations for American elites to support the American Revolution was to defend their economic interests from Britain, and although it is a bit early for them to be worrying about the anti-slavery movement in Britain, elites were deeply worried about several aspects of slave ownership.

I hope this answers your questions!

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Selected sources:

Breen, T.H. Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Elliott, John H. Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Holton, Woody. Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Isaac, Rhys. The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1982.

Parkinson, Robert G. The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

Winiarksi, Douglas L. Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakening in Eighteenth-Century New England. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2017.