The slavery metaphor unified otherwise divided white colonists against Britain.

Evidence

The colonies had not yet united to form a new nation. They remained thirteen distinct jurisdictions with their own leadership and individual charters and relationships with Britain. They had differing economic, agricultural, and social practices—a white Bostonian did not naturally feel an alliance with a white South Carolinian. Yet in the period leading up to the Revolution, burdened by rising debt to the motherland, higher taxes, and an intermittent recession, many white colonists felt their status deteriorating. The wealthy, educated men who led the revolt against Britain needed to unify the disparate colonists across social class and region. For those leaders, the comparison to slavery constituted a powerful rhetorical tool. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 92

Categorization

• XREF: Core to the reader’s goal: this is the causal mechanism connecting origin-story founding to how ‘slavery’ functioned as unifying rhetorical infrastructure.
• SEED: Essay angle: how a nation founded on a metaphor of enslavement could simultaneously maintain literal enslavement — the rhetorical double bind at the republic’s origin.