The political leaders of the American Revolution and the slave owners exaggerated the disloyalty or potential disloyalty of African Americans in their midst. Newspapers ran stories about supposedly disloyal Black people and Native Americans. Ben Franklin literally made up a story about a massacre that never happened in order to stoke racial animus. The common cause that the Revolution’s leaders pulled together was in part constructed out of the issue of race. “We’re all white, and we have these treacherous nonwhite people among us”—that was made into a point of connection.
Annette Gordon Reed in a review of The Common Cause by Robert G. Parkinson in the New Yorker
…the great majority of people turn out to be extraordinarily suggestible, with brains like sieves thru which the truth falls. Fact and fiction meld in their minds.
Zadie Smith: The Fraud