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The reason 1776 wasn't progressive isn't because it was "morally bad" (although it also was that). It's because it hampered the intensification of the means of production and in situ development, in favor of primitive accumulation and sprawl. (1/25) The concept of a phenomenon being "historically progressive" revolves around its role in advancing humanity past existing, regressive social structures. This involves a transformation of the character and scale of material relations, in terms of both production and reproduction. "Character of material relations" refers to: the way in which production is performed in aggregate (mode of production); the way labor is compelled to perform production (access to means of survival); and the ways in which production is able to recapitulate and expand its inputs. That latter category is crucial, because it largely determines how we can consider the historical positioning of a given social structure. We can conceive of societies as being more or less developed based on the ways in which they reproduce and expand their economic production. We can illustrate this with contrasting examples:

Society A is an exaggerated slave society. All of its production is militaristic: it uses slave labor to produce weapons, uses the weapons to invade other lands, and brings back food, metal, and more slaves to repeat the process. In this example, society A does not reproduce its own material inputs or even labor power. Its productive circuit is entirely reliant on the predation of other societies -- ones which do reproduce those things -- and applying the surplus it seizes toward more conquest. A's growth relies not on expanding production, but on expanding its ability to seize the product of others' production. It does not develop new means of production -- everything produced is either food to nourish soldiers or weapons to equip them. Contrast this with society B, which is a largely agricultural society. Nearly every working person is involved in the production of food, but there is enough surplus that some are able to work on other production, such as the manufacturing of agricultural equipment. As time goes on, the manufacturing class builds more and more means of agricultural production, allowing the agricultural class to produce a greater surplus. This means that it is possible for a greater proportion of the working classes to perform non-agricultural labor. Society B is progressive in comparison to society A, not because "slavery is morally wrong," but because A's production relies on a constant stream of primitive accumulation, while B's output is able to expand internally, by intensifying production. It is totally possible, for a time, for society A to grow even faster than B -- in fact, if B never produces sufficient military infrastructure, A could simply conquer B, seize all of its production, and transition B to A's economic system. This wholesale conquest, of course, would not be "progressive." From A's perspective, its wealth has just immediately ballooned, and it even has ready-made manufacturing infrastructure that it can convert to weapons manufacturing. But the social system itself has regressed. The capacity of A to reproduce its (comparatively regressive) mode of production has, itself, progressed. But it has done so at the expense of a social system that had greater potential for intensifying production and expanding output even faster. The conquest cannot be said to have "set society A on an accelerated path toward future higher modes of production," because that relies on abstract counterfactuals -- hypotheses which are necessarily untestable. What we can do is test hypotheses about general rules of the development of various societies in different contexts. Specifically relevant to this discussion is how societies develop depending on their ability to rely on continuous primitive accumulation. And when we do, a clear pattern emerges: a society in which there is a constant availability of fresh land, fresh resources, and fresh labor will tend to prioritize the capture of those things, rather than intensifying the use of land, resources, and labor it already controls. In the context of North America, the war of independence was not about untethering the colonists from a regressive social system back in Britain; instead, it freed them to pursue unchecked primitive accumulation in the form of westward expansion. We can see this pretty clearly in the development of industrial capitalism in Britain, which was already underway by the time of the war of independence. It would take the US another century to catch up to the economic output of Britain, despite conquering an entire continent. This is directly attributable to the economic model of the now-independent settler colony. It did not develop a more progressive economic model, because it didn't have to. Its ruling class could expand their wealth most quickly through acquiring more land, more slaves. Before the war, the colonies exported a fairly diverse array of primary resources back home -- tobacco, grain, lumber, fish, iron, rum, etc.

By 1815, cotton had risen to the top.

By 1840, cotton exports were worth more than ALL other exports combined. Following independence, the US had expanded slavery and genocidal land seizures to transform itself into the cotton capital of the world -- particularly on behalf of Britain, which was the textile capital. The north took nearly a century to start industrializing. The US civil war, then, was progressive. It was the culmination of the divergence of economic interests of the north and the south -- the former developing its economy primarily through intensification, the latter through primitive accumulation. It was only following the civil war and the forceful end of the regressive institution of slavery that the US began to truly put its century-long bonanza of enclosure to use in industrializing.

Of course, there was still much more genocide, exploitation, and expansion to go. The US's transition to industrial capitalism was demonstrably not advanced by its independence from Britain. Quite the contrary -- the south outright regressed, and the north took decades to even come close to the level of development attained in Europe. The only reason 1776 is ever upheld as "progressive" is out of pure idealism, romanticizing the spectacle of a colony breaking away from its progenitor. But this act alone did not alter its class dynamics -- it just freed its ruling class from central regulation. (25/25)