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Black Youth in the Union Army, undated photo
Th is young African American soldier sits proudly in his Civil War uniform. Black Americans advocated for both freedom and equality from the beginning of the war. With emancipation, they achieved part of that promise.
ABOUT THE COVER IMAGE
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FIFTH EDITION
James L. Roark Emory University
Michael P. Johnson Johns Hopkins University
Patricia Cline Cohen University of California, Santa Barbara
Sarah Stage Arizona State University
Susan M. Hartmann The Ohio State University
BEDFORD/ST. MARTIN’S Boston ◆ New York
The American Promise A Concise History
FOR BEDFORD/ST. MARTIN’S Publisher for History: Mary V. Dougherty Executive Editor for History: William J. Lombardo Director of Development for History: Jane Knetzger Senior Developmental Editor: Heidi L. Hood Production Editor: Kendra LeFleur Assistant Production Manager: Joe Ford Editorial Assistant: Arrin Kaplan Production Assistant: Elise Keller Copy Editor: Susan Moore Indexer: Melanie Belkin Photo Researchers: Picture Research by Pembroke Herbert and Sandi Rygiel, Picture Research Consultants, Inc. Permissions Manager: Kalina K. Ingham Senior Art Director: Anna Palchik Text Designer: Jerilyn Bockorick Cover Designer: Marine Miller Cover Photo: Black Youth in the Union Army in undated photo. AP Photo. Cartography: Mapping Specialists Limited Composition: Cenveo® Publisher Services Printing and Binding: RR Donnelley and Sons
President, Bedford/St. Martin's: Denise B. Wydra Director of Marketing: Karen R. Soeltz Production Director: Susan W. Brown Director of Rights and Permissions: Hilary Newman
Copyright © 2014, 2010, 2007, 2003 by Bedford/St. Martin’s
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except as may be expressly permitted by the applicable copyright statutes or in writing by the Publisher.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
8 7 6 5 4 3 f e d c b a
For information, write: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 75 Arlington Street, Boston, MA 02116 (617-399-4000)
ISBN: 978–0–312–66676–7 (Combined Edition) ISBN: 978–1–4576–4813–7 (Loose-leaf Format, Combined Volume) ISBN: 978–1–4576–3145–0 (Volume 1) ISBN: 978–1–4576–4814–4 (Loose-leaf Format, Volume 1) ISBN: 978–1–4576–3146–7 (Volume 2) ISBN: 978–1–4576–4815–1 (Loose-leaf Format, Volume 2)
Acknowledgments: Acknowledgments and copyrights appear at the back of the book on page CR-1 which constitute an extension of the copyright page. It is a violation of the law to reproduce these selections by any means whatsoever without the written permission of the copyright holder.
Getting students to engage with their history survey course is one of the toughest challenges instructors face. From the beginning, The American Promise has been shaped by our firsthand knowledge that the survey course is one of the most difficult to teach and, for many, also the most difficult to take. With this edition we have entirely rethought how the textbook can best capture students’ interest and support instructors in their classes, whether face-to-face or online. We have undertaken a major overhaul of this edition to bring a new option never before available — a truly concise narrative in a smaller format that is more accessible and affordable than ever. We also strove to offer more of what instructors asked to use in their classes — additional primary sources to foster historical skills and critical think- ing as well as features that consider the relationship of the United States to the rest of the world to give students the global perspective they need more than ever today. In addition, this concise edition comes with LearningCurve, an automatically graded, adaptive learning tool that helps students remember what they have read and tells instructors which topics students are having trouble with. Finally, this edition intro- duces a robust new interactive e-book built into its own course space that makes customizing and assigning the book and its resources simpler than ever. We are pleased this new edition packs in so much in such a concise and affordable format.
The Story of The American Promise Our experience as teachers and our frustrations with available textbooks inspired us to create a book that we could use effectively in our own classrooms. Our knowledge of classroom realities has informed every aspect of each edition and version of The American Promise. We began with a clear framework. We have found that students need both the structure a political narrative provides and the insights gained from examining social and cultural experience. To write a comprehensive, balanced account of American history, we focus on the public arena — the place where politics intersects social and cultural developments — to show how Americans confronted the major issues of their day and created far-reaching historical change.
Our title, The American Promise, reflects our emphasis on human agency and our conviction that the essence of America has been its promise. For millions, the nation has held out the promise of a better life, unfettered worship, equality before the law, representative government, democratic politics, and other freedoms seldom found elsewhere. But none of these promises has come with guarantees. As we see it, much of American history is a continuing struggle over the definition and realiza- tion of the nation’s promise.
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Preface
Why This Book This Way
vi PREFACE
To engage students in this American story and to portray fully the diversity of the American experience, we stitch into our narrative the voices of hundreds of contemporaries, provide a vivid art and map program, and situate American history in the global world in which students live. To help students understand American history, we provide the best in pedagogical aids. While this edition rests solidly on our original goals and premises, it has taken on a new role to address the specific needs of brief book users.
The Birth of the Concise Edition Not long after we published the first full-length edition of The American Promise, we realized that many colleagues were seeking a text with all the features of a full- length book but in a briefer, more affordable version. We soon produced such a text in the first Compact Edition, which offered the richness of a full text with multiple special features, a rich art and map program, and ample pedagogy. But in time, the needs of instructors for a still more streamlined text became more acute. Students now entering the classroom are juggling more than ever before, and brief books represent more manageable reading, especially when instructors assign readings beyond the core text. We recognized that a truly concise book would be more attractive to many students and thus would be a version more students would likely read. With those thoughts in mind, we carefully crafted the new Concise Edition, which is shorter in narrative length, still affordable, less intimidating, and also smaller in size to allow students to more easily carry it to class and to their favorite places to read.
The Concise Edition is more than just another brief book, however. As authors, we continue to do our own abridgment to make a narrative that is both brief and rich with memorable details. To engage students more fully, we’ve given the book a new look and have reorganized some of its pedagogical tools so students who are pressed for time can see at a glance what they need to learn. The Concise Edition also offers more of what instructors tell us they really want — primary sources. To give students more direct engagement with the past and more opportunities for instructors to prompt historical thinking, we have expanded the number of document primary sources and added visual sources to the special features program as well. With today’s increasingly interconnected world and the increasing diversity of students, we felt it was essential to convey global connections, so we retained the popular international essays in the special features.
Because, like other instructors, we are eager to ensure students do read this rich material, we are proud to announce the Concise Edition comes with LearningCurve — a game-like online learning tool that can be assigned with each chapter and is automatically graded and scored. LearningCurve provides detailed reports on what students do and do not understand, which allows instructors to adapt lectures and class activities as needed. We are confident instructors will enjoy this feature because their students will come to class far better prepared than ever before. And so, like America itself over the centuries, the fifth edition of The American Promise: A Con- cise History is both recognizable and new.
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Features We know that a history survey textbook is often challenging for many students. The benefit of this concise text is that we have made room for all of the essentials busy students need to succeed. Our book is designed to pique students’ interest while helping them with their reading and comprehension. We believe that three aspects of this new Concise Edition make it stand out from the crowd — the special features, visual program, and pedagogical support.
Special Features. We have designed the special features of this Concise Edition as interesting and informative in-depth examinations of key topics that can be used in class discussion or as homework. Each boxed feature concentrates on a historical thinking skill or models historical inquiry, the curiosity at the heart of our discipline. In addition to the questions that probe the substance of each spe- cial feature, we have added a new Connect to the Big Idea question to each fea- ture to help students understand the significance of the featured topic to the chapter as a whole.
Primary sources form the heart of the feature program in this edition. We are pleased to offer more Documenting the American Promise features than ever before — now doubled since the last edition. Each of these features juxtaposes three or four primary documents to show varying perspectives on a topic or an issue and to provide students with opportunities to build and practice their skills of historical interpretation. Feature introductions and document headnotes con- textualize the sources, and Questions for Analysis and Debate promote critical thinking about primary sources. In addition to bringing back some favorites enjoyed in the past, new topics have been added that are rich with human drama and include “Hunting Witches in Salem, Massachusetts,” “Families Divide over the Revolution,” “Mill Girls Stand Up to Factory Owners,” and “The Press and the Pullman Strike.”
Because students are so attuned to visuals and instructors have told us they want a variety of primary sources in this brief text, we have added a new Visualizing History feature to many chapters. Early Native American artifacts, nineteenth- century paintings, photographs by progressive reformers, early-twentieth-century advertisements, and twenty-first-century political cartoons are all presented as sources for examination. By stressing the importance of historical context and asking critical questions, each of these new features shows students how to mine visual documents for evidence about the past.
To demonstrate American history’s relevance in today’s increasingly global world, we felt it was essential to convey global connections in the feature program. Beyond America’s Borders considers the reciprocal relationships between the United States and the wider world and challenges students to think about the effects of transnational connections over time. With the goal of widening students’ perspec- tives and helping students see that this country did not develop in isolation, these features are enhanced by new America in Global Context questions at the end of the essay. New essays in this edition include “Fascism: Adolf Hitler and National Socialism” and “1968: A Year of Protest.”
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Visuals. From the beginning, readers have proclaimed this textbook a visual feast, richly illustrated in ways that extend and reinforce the narrative. The fifth Concise Edition offers more than 400 contemporaneous illustrations — one-third of them new — along with innovative techniques for increasing visual literacy. In addition to the new Visualizing History special features that emphasize the use of images for historical analysis, one picture in each chapter includes a special visual activ- ity caption that reinforces this critical skill. More than 200 artifacts — from dolls and political buttons to spy cameras and sewing machines — emphasize the importance of material culture in the study of the past and make the historical account tangible.
Our highly regarded map program, with 165 maps in all, rests on the old truth that “History is not intelligible without geography.” Each chapter typically offers three to four full-size maps showing major developments in the narrative and two or three spot maps embedded in the narrative that emphasize an area of detail from the discussion. To help students think critically about the role of geography in American history, we include two critical-thinking map exercises per chapter. Revised maps in the fifth edition illustrate new scholarship on topics such as the Comanche empire in the American Southwest and events such as the 2012 election.
Pedagogy. The most exciting news about the pedagogy in this Concise Edition is the integration of a new adaptive learning tool — LearningCurve. When instructors assign it, LearningCurve ensures students come to class prepared. LearningCurve offers a game-like interface in which students earn quick points for what they under- stand but are given repeated practice on material — both factual and conceptual —that they still need to master. LearningCurve questions are linked to the corresponding sec- tions in the book so students can read and review the pertinent information they need to master. Prompts in the book remind students to log in and check their understand- ing of the chapter they have just read. Instructors benefit too because they can instantly see who has done the assigned reading and which pieces of information students strug- gle with most. With these detailed reports in hand, instructors can adjust lectures and class activities to address topics students are having trouble with and help them suc- ceed. Every new book comes with a code that unlocks LearningCurve; if students have bought a used book, they can purchase LearningCurve access separately online.
As part of our ongoing efforts to make The American Promise: A Concise His- tory the most teachable and readable survey text available, we paid renewed atten- tion to what would make the most effective pedagogy for a brief text. We started by reimagining our chapter openers with the needs of busy students in mind. Each chapter begins with new Quick Start instructions, a brief chapter outline, a chro- nology, and a concise but colorful opening vignette that invites students into the narrative with lively accounts of individuals or groups who embody the central themes of the chapter. New vignettes in this edition include the Grimké sisters speaking out against slavery, Frederick Jackson Turner proclaiming his frontier hypothesis, migrant mother Frances Owens struggling to survive in the Great Depression, and the experience of Vietnam War veteran Frederick Downs Jr.
We’ve enhanced the pedagogy within the chapters as well. Every major section now begins with an Essential Question that guides students toward comprehension
PREFACE ix
of main ideas. In addition, key terms, set in boldface type with new marginal glos- sary definitions, highlight important people, events, and concepts.
The Chapter Review section at the end of each chapter provides a thorough guide to ensure student success. A cross-reference to LearningCurve reminds stu- dents to use this adaptive quizzing tool to make what they’ve read stick. A list of Key Terms reminds students to reflect on items in the marginal glossary, while Essential Questions, repeated from within the narrative, focus on specific topics or events. Culminating Making Connections questions ask students to think about broad developments within the chapter. Student Center prompts at the bottom of the review page remind students to visit this site, where they will find free self- assessment quizzes, study aids, and other resources.
Updated Scholarship In our ongoing effort to offer a comprehensive text that braids all Americans into the national narrative and to frame that national narrative in a more global perspective, we updated the fifth Concise Edition in many ways. We have paid particular attention to the most recent scholarship and, as always, appreciated and applied many sugges- tions from our users that keep the book fresh, accurate, and organized in a way that works best for students.
Volume One draws on exciting new scholarship on Native Americans, leading to enhanced coverage of Pontiac’s Rebellion in chapter 6 and more attention to Indi- ans and their roles in the conflict between the British and the colonists in chapter 7. Chapter 9 expands the coverage of American interactions with Indians in the South- west, adding new material on Creek chief Alexander McGillivray. Chapter 10 greatly increases the coverage of Indians in the West, with a new section devoted to the Osage territory and the impressive Comanche empire known as Comanchería. In addition, several new Visualizing History features — on ancient tools used in Chaco Canyon, on Aztec weaponry and its weaknesses in the face of Spanish steel, on Mohawk clothing and accessories, and on gifts exchanged between Anglos and Indians on the Lewis and Clark trail — highlight the significance of Native American material culture over the centuries.
Volume Two also includes expanded attention to Native Americans — particularly in chapter 17, where we improved our coverage of Indian schools, assimilation techniques used by whites, and Indian resistance strategies — but our main effort for the fifth Concise Edition in the second half of the book has been to do more of what we already do best, and that is to give even more attention to women, African Americans, and the global context of U.S. history. In the narrative, we consider the ways in which the GI Bill disproportionately benefited white men after World War II. New features and opening vignettes focus on widely recognized as well as less well-known women who both shaped and were shaped by the Ameri- can experience: the depression-era struggle of Florence Owens (the face of the famous Dorothea Lange photograph Migrant Mother), the workplace reforms set in motion by progressive activist Alice Hamilton, and the World War I service of over- seas volunteer Nora Saltonstall. Chapter 16 includes new coverage of the Colfax massacre, arguably the single worst incidence of brutality against African Americans
x PREFACE
during the Reconstruction era. Chapter 27 provides new coverage of civil rights activism in northern states.
Because students live in an increasingly global world and need help making connections with the world outside the United States, we have continued our efforts to incorporate the global context of American history throughout the fifth edition. This is particularly evident in Volume Two, where we have expanded coverage of transnational issues in recent decades, such as the U.S. bombing campaign in Vietnam and U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.
In addition to the many changes noted above, in both volumes we have updated, revised, and improved this fifth Concise Edition in response to both new scholar- ship and requests from instructors. New and expanded coverage areas include, among others, taxation in the pre-Revolutionary period and the early Republic, the Newburgh Conspiracy of the 1780s, the overbuilding of railroads in the West during the Gilded Age, the 1918–1919 global influenza epidemic, finance reform in the 1930s, post–World War II considerations of universal health care, Latino activism, the economic downturn of the late 2000s, the most recent developments in the Mid- dle East, and the Obama presidency.
Acknowledgments We gratefully acknowledge all of the helpful suggestions from those who have read and taught from previous editions of The American Promise, and we hope that our many classroom collaborators will be pleased to see their influence in the fifth edition. In particular, we wish to thank the talented scholars and teachers who gave generously of their time and knowledge to review this book: Kirk R. Abendroth, Vincennes University; Donna J. Benson, Winston-Salem State University; Edward Black, Jefferson State Community College; David Burleson, Doña Ana Community College; Brian Casserly, Bellevue College; John W. Catron, Santa Fe College; William J. Cuddihy, Long Beach City College; Andy DeRoche, Front Range Community College; Kimberly DesRoches, Western Nevada College; David Driscoll, University of Massachusetts – Lowell; Amy Drumb, Polk State College; Robert Elder, Valparaiso University; Mary Frederickson, Miami University of Ohio; Kirsten Gardner, The University of Texas at San Antonio; George Gerdow, Northeastern Illinois University; Nicki Gonzales, Regis University; Brian L. Hackett, Northern Kentucky University; Lindsey Hinds-Brown, Middle Tennessee State University; Antoinnette Hudson, Jacksonville State University; Clifton Huffmaster, Middle Tennessee State University; Carey Kelley, Missouri State University; William J. Lipkin, Union County College; Matthew Loayza, Minnesota State University, Mankato; Stephanie A. L. Molholt, The Community College of Baltimore County – Catonsville; Johnny S. Moore, Radford University; Steven Noll, University of Florida; Ellen Holmes Pearson, University of North Carolina Asheville; Robert D. Pittman, Lindenwood University/St. Louis Community College; Emily Rader, El Camino College; David B. Raymond, Northern Maine Community College; Daniel Rezny, St. Charles Community College; Tom Robertson, The Community College of Baltimore County; Thomas J. Rowland, University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh; Christopher Staaf, Georgia Gwinnett College; Richard Trimble, Ocean County College; James H. Tuten, Juniata College; Christina
PREFACE xi
A. Wilbur, Lamar University; Louis Williams, St. Louis Community College – Forest Park; and John Ralph Wilson, Lone Star College North Harris.
A project as complex as this requires the talents of many individuals. First, we would like to acknowledge our families for their support, forbearance, and toleration of our textbook responsibilities. Pembroke Herbert and Sandi Rygiel of Picture Research Consultants, Inc., contributed their unparalleled knowledge, soaring imagination, and diligent research to make possible the extraordinary illustration program.
We would also like to thank the many people at Bedford/St. Martin’s who have been crucial to this project. No one has done more than our friend, senior editor Heidi Hood, who managed the entire revision and supplements program. Heidi’s intelligence, knowledge of U.S. history, commitment to excellence, and unfailing good judgment saved us from many a misstep. Thanks also go to editorial assistant Arrin Kaplan for her assistance coordinating the pre-revision review, preparing the manuscript, and for working on the supplements, along with associate editor Jack Cashman. We are also grateful to Jane Knetzger, director of development for history; William J. Lombardo, executive editor for history; and Mary Dougherty, publisher for history, for their support and guidance. For their imaginative and tireless efforts to promote the book, we want to thank Amy Whitaker, John Hunger, Sean Blest, and Alex Kaufman. With great skill and professionalism, production editors Katherine Caruana and Kendra LeFleur pulled together the many pieces related to copyediting, design, and composition, with the able assistance of Elise Keller and the guidance of managing editor Elizabeth Schaaf and assistant managing editor John Amburg. Senior production supervisor Joe Ford oversaw the manufacturing of the book. Designer Jerilyn Bockorick, copyeditor Susan Moore, and proofreaders Linda McLatchie and Angela Morrison attended to the myriad details that help make the book shine. Melanie Belkin provided an outstanding index. The book’s gorgeous covers were designed by Marine Miller. New media editor Marissa Zanetti and media producer Michelle Camisa made sure that The American Promise remains at the forefront of technological support for students and instructors. President of Bedford/St. Martin’s Denise Wydra provided helpful advice throughout the course of the project. Finally, Charles H. Christensen, former president, took a personal interest in The American Promise from the start, and Joan E. Feinberg, co-president of Macmillan Higher Education, encouraged us through each edition.
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PREFACE xiii
Adopters of The American Promise: A Concise History and their students have access to abundant extra resources, including documents, presentation and testing materials, the acclaimed Bedford Series in History and Culture volumes, and much more. See below for more information, visit the book’s catalog site at bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise/catalog, or contact your local Bedford/St. Martin’s sales representative.
Get the Right Version for Your Class To accommodate different course lengths and course budgets, The American Promise is available in several different formats, including three-hole punched loose-leaf Budget Books versions and e-books, which are available at a substantial discount.
• Combined edition (Chapters 1–31) — available in paperback, loose-leaf, and e-book formats
• Volume 1: To 1877 (Chapters 1–16) — available in paperback, loose-leaf, and e-book formats
• Volume 2: From 1865 (Chapters 16–31) — available in paperback, loose-leaf, and e-book formats
Any of these volumes can be packaged with additional books for a discount. To get ISBNs for discount packages, see the online catalog at bedfordstmartins.com /roarkconcise/catalog or contact your Bedford/St. Martin’s representative.
NEW Assign LaunchPad — the online, interactive e-book in a course space enriched with integrated assets. The new standard in digital history, LaunchPad course tools are so intuitive to use that online, hybrid, and face-to-face courses can be set up in minutes. Even novices will find it’s easy to create assignments, track students’ work, and access a wealth of relevant learning and teaching resources. It is the ideal learning environment for students to work with the text, maps, documents, video, and assessment. LaunchPad is loaded with the full interactive e-book and the Reading the American Past documents collection—plus LearningCurve, additional primary sources, videos, guided reading exercises designed to help students read actively for key concepts, boxed feature reading quizzes, chapter summative quizzes, and more. LaunchPad can be used as is or customized, and it easily integrates with course management systems. And with fast ways to build assignments, rearrange chapters, and add new pages, sections, or links, it lets teachers build the course mate- rials they need and hold students accountable.
Versions and Supplements
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xiv VERSIONS AND SUPPLEMENTS
Let students choose their e-book format. In addition to the LaunchPad e-book, students can purchase the downloadable Bedford e-Book to Go for The American Promise: A Concise History from our Web site or find other PDF versions of the e-book at our publishing partners’ sites: CourseSmart, Barnes & Noble NookStudy; Kno; CafeScribe; or Chegg.
NEW Assign LearningCurve So You Know What Your Students Know and They Come to Class Prepared As described in the preface and on the inside front cover, students purchasing new books receive access to LearningCurve for The American Promise: A Concise History. Assigning LearningCurve in place of reading quizzes is easy for instructors, and the reporting features help instructors track overall class trends and spot topics that are giving students trouble so they can adjust their lectures and class activities. This online learning tool is popular with students because it was designed to help them rehearse content at their own pace in a nonthreatening, game-like environment. The feedback for wrong answers provides instructional coaching and sends students back to the book for review. Students answer as many questions as necessary to reach a target score, with repeated chances to revisit material they haven’t mastered. When LearningCurve is assigned, students come to class better prepared.
Send Students to Free Online Resources The book’s Student Site at bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise gives students a way to read, write, and study by providing plentiful quizzes and activities, study aids, and history research and writing help.
FREE Online Study Guide. Available at the Student Site, this popular resource pro- vides students with quizzes and activities for each chapter, including multiple-choice self-tests that focus on important concepts; flashcards that test students’ knowledge of key terms; timeline activities that emphasize causal relationships; and map quiz- zes intended to strengthen students’ geography skills. Instructors can monitor stu- dents’ progress through an online Quiz Gradebook or receive e-mail updates.
FREE Research, Writing, and Anti-plagiarism Advice. Available at the Student Site, Bedford’s History Research and Writing Help includes the textbook authors’ Suggested References organized by chapter; History Research and Reference Sources, with links to history-related databases, indexes, and journals; Build a Bib- liography, a simple Web-based tool known as The Bedford Bibliographer that gen- erates bibliographies in four commonly used documentation styles; and Tips on Avoiding Plagiarism, an online tutorial that reviews the consequences of plagiarism and features exercises to help students practice integrating sources and recognize acceptable summaries.
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Take Advantage of Instructor Resources Bedford/St. Martin’s has developed a rich array of teaching resources for this book and for this course. They range from lecture and presentation materials and assess- ment tools to course management options. Most can be downloaded or ordered at bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise/catalog.
Bedford Coursepack for Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Canvas, Angel, Sakai, or MoodIe. We have free content to help you integrate our rich content into your course management system. Registered instructors can download coursepacks with no hassle and no strings attached. Content includes our most po pular free resources and book-specific content for The American Promise: A Concise History. Visit bedfordstmartins.com/coursepacks to see a demo, find your version, or down- load your coursepack.
Instructor’s Resource Manual. The instructor’s manual offers both experienced and first-time instructors tools for preparing lectures and running discussions. It includes chapter-review material, teaching strategies, and a guide to chapter-specific supplements available for the text, plus suggestions on how to get the most out of LearningCurve and a survival guide for first-time teaching assistants.
Guide to Changing Editions. Designed to facilitate an instructor’s transition from the previous edition of The American Promise: A Concise History to the current edition, this guide presents an overview of major changes as well as of changes in each chapter.
Computerized Test Bank. The test bank includes a mix of fresh, carefully crafted multiple-choice, short-answer, and essay questions for each chapter. It also contains volume-wide essay questions. All questions appear in Microsoft Word format and in easy-to-use test bank software that allows instructors to add, edit, re-sequence, and print questions and answers. Instructors can also export questions into a variety of formats, including Blackboard, Desire2Learn, and Moodle.
The Bedford Lecture Kit: PowerPoint Maps, Images, Lecture Outlines, and i>clicker Content. Look good and save time with The Bedford Lecture Kit. These presentation materials are downloadable individually from the Instructor Resources tab at bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise/catalog and are availa- ble on The Bedford Lecture Kit Instructor’s Resource CD-ROM. They provide ready-made and fully customizable PowerPoint multimedia presentations that include lecture outlines with embedded maps, figures, and selected images from the textbook and extra background for instructors. Also available are maps and selected images in JPEG and PowerPoint formats; content for i>clicker, a class- room response system, in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint formats; the Instruc- tor’s Resource Manual in Microsoft Word format; and outline maps in PDF for- mat for quizzing or handing out. All files are suitable for copying onto transparency acetates.
xvi VERSIONS AND SUPPLEMENTS
Reel Teaching: Film Clips for the U.S. History Survey. This DVD provides a large collection of short video clips for classroom presentation. Designed as engaging “lecture launchers” varying in length from one to fifteen or more minutes, the fifty- nine documentary clips were carefully chosen for use in both semesters of the U.S. survey course. The clips feature compelling images, archival footage, personal narra- tives, and commentary by noted historians.
America in Motion: Video Clips for U.S. History. Set history in motion with Amer- ica in Motion, an instructor DVD containing dozens of short digital movie files of events in twentieth-century American history. From the wreckage of the battleship Maine, to FDR’s fireside chats, to Oliver North testifying before Congress, America in Motion engages students with dynamic scenes from key events and challenges them to think critically. All files are classroom-ready, edited for brevity, and easily inte- grated with PowerPoint or other presentation software for electronic lectures or assignments. An accompanying guide provides each clip’s historical context, ideas for use, and suggested questions.
Videos and Multimedia. A wide assortment of videos and multimedia CD-ROMs on various topics in U.S. history is available to qualified adopters through your Bedford/St. Martin’s sales representative.
Package and Save Your Students Money For information on free packages and discounts up to 50%, visit bedfordstmartins .com/roarkconcise/catalog, or contact your local Bedford/St. Martin’s sales repre- sentative. The products that follow all qualify for discount packaging.
Reading the American Past, Fifth Edition. Edited by Michael P. Johnson, one of the authors of The American Promise, and designed to complement the textbook, Read- ing the American Past provides a broad selection of over 150 primary-source documents, as well as editorial apparatus to help students understand the sources. Available free when packaged with the print text and included in the LaunchPad e-book. Also available as a downloadable PDF e-book or with the main text’s e-Book to Go.
NEW Bedford Digital Collections @ bedfordstmartins.com/bdc/catalog. This source collection provides a flexible and affordable online repository of discovery- oriented primary-source projects and single primary sources that you can easily cus- tomize and link to from your course management system or Web site. Package discounts are available.
The Bedford Series in History and Culture. More than 120 titles in this highly praised series combine first-rate scholarship, historical narrative, and important primary doc- uments for undergraduate courses. Each book is brief, inexpensive, and focused on a specific topic or period. For a complete list of titles, visit bedfordstmartins.com /history/series. Package discounts are available.
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Rand McNally Atlas of American History. This collection of more than eighty full- color maps illustrates key events and eras from early exploration, settlement, expansion, and immigration to U.S. involvement in wars abroad and on U.S. soil. Introductory pages for each section include a brief overview, timelines, graphs, and photos to quickly establish a historical context. Available for $5.00 when packaged with the print text.
Maps in Context: A Workbook for American History. Written by historical cartography expert Gerald A. Danzer (University of Illinois at Chicago), this skill-building workbook helps students comprehend essential connections between geographic literacy and historical understanding. Organized to corre- spond to the typical U.S. history survey course, Maps in Context presents a wealth of map-centered projects and convenient pop quizzes that give students hands-on experience working with maps. Available free when packaged with the print text.
The Bedford Glossary for U.S. History. This handy supplement for the survey course gives students historically contextualized definitions for hundreds of terms — from abolitionism to zoot suit — that they will encounter in lectures, reading, and exams. Available free when packaged with the print text.
U.S. History Matters: A Student Guide to World History Online. This resource, written by Alan Gevinson, Kelly Schrum, and the late Roy Rosenzweig (all of George Mason University), provides an illustrated and annotated guide to 250 of the most useful Web sites for student research in U.S. history as well as advice on evaluating and using Internet sources. This essential guide is based on the acclaimed “History Matters” Web site developed by the American Social History Project and the Center for History and New Media. Available free when packaged with the print text.
Trade Books. Titles published by sister companies Hill and Wang; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Henry Holt and Company; St. Martin’s Press; Picador; and Palgrave Macmillan are available at a 50% discount when packaged with Bedford/St. Martin’s textbooks. For more information, visit bedfordstmartins.com/tradeup.
A Pocket Guide to Writing in History. This portable and affordable reference tool by Mary Lynn Rampolla provides reading, writing, and research advice useful to students in all history courses. Concise yet comprehensive advice on approach- ing typical history assignments, developing critical reading skills, writing effective history papers, conducting research, using and documenting sources, and avoid- ing plagiarism — enhanced with practical tips and examples throughout — have made this slim reference a best seller. Package discounts are available.
A Student’s Guide to History. This complete guide to success in any history course provides the practical help students need to be effective. In addition to introducing students to the nature of the discipline, author Jules Benjamin teaches a wide range of skills from preparing for exams to approaching common writing assignments, and explains the research and documentation process with plentiful examples. Package discounts are available.
xviii VERSIONS AND SUPPLEMENTS
Going to the Source: The Bedford Reader in American History. Developed by Victoria Bissell Brown and Timothy J. Shannon, this reader’s strong pedagogical framework helps students learn how to ask fruitful questions in order to evaluate documents effectively and develop critical reading skills. The reader’s wide variety of chapter topics that complement the survey course and its rich diversity of sources — from personal letters to political cartoons — provoke students’ interest as it teaches them the skills they need to successfully interrogate historical sources. Package discounts are available.
America Firsthand. With its distinctive focus on ordinary people, this primary documents reader, by Anthony Marcus, John M. Giggie, and David Burner, offers a remarkable range of perspectives on America’s history from those who lived it. Popular Points of View sections expose students to different perspectives on a specific event or topic, and Visual Portfolios invite analysis of the visual record. Package discounts are available.
VERSIONS AND SUPPLEMENTS xix
Brief Contents
About the Cover Art i Preface: Why This Book This Way v Versions and Supplements xiii Contents xx Maps, Figures, and Tables xxix Special Features xxxii
1 Ancient America: Before 1492 2 2 Europeans Encounter the New World, 1492–1600 26 3 The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1601–1700 50 4 The Northern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1601–1700 76 5 Colonial America in the Eighteenth Century, 1701–1770 102 6 The British Empire and the Colonial Crisis, 1754–1775 130 7 The War for America, 1775–1783 158
8 Building a Republic, 1775–1789 188 9 The New Nation Takes Form, 1789–1800 216 10 Republicans in Power, 1800–1824 242 11 The Expanding Republic, 1815–1840 272 12 The New West and the Free North, 1840–1860 302 13 The Slave South, 1820–1860 332 14 The House Divided, 1846–1861 358 15 The Crucible of War, 1861–1865 386 16 Reconstruction, 1863–1877 418 Appendices A-1 Glossary G-1
Spot Artifact Credits CR-1 Index I-1 U.S. Political/Geographic and World Maps M-1 About the Authors last book page
LearningCurve Make it stick. bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
xix
About the Cover Art i Preface: Why This Book This Way v Versions and Supplements xiii Brief Contents xix Maps, Figures, and Tables xxix Special Features xxxii
CHAPTER 1
Ancient America, Before 1492 2
OPENING VIGNETTE: An archaeological dig helps uncover ancient North American traditions 2
Archaeology and History 4 The First Americans 5
African and Asian Origins 5 Paleo-Indian Hunters 7
Archaic Hunters and Gatherers 8 Great Plains Bison Hunters 9 Great Basin Cultures 10 Pacific Coast Cultures 10 Eastern Woodland Cultures 11
Agricultural Settlements and Chiefdoms 12 Southwestern Cultures 12 VISUALIZING HISTORY: “Daily Life in Chaco Canyon” 14 Woodland Burial Mounds and Chiefdoms 16
Native Americans in the 1490s 17 Eastern and Great Plains Peoples 18 Southwestern and Western Peoples 20 Cultural Similarities 20
The Mexica: A Mesoamerican Culture 21 Conclusion: The World of Ancient
Americans 23
CHAPTER REVIEW 25 LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
Contents
xx
CONTENTS xxi
CHAPTER 3
The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century,
1601–1700 50 OPENING VIGNETTE: Pocahontas “rescues” John Smith 50
An English Colony on Chesapeake Bay 52 The Fragile Jamestown Settlement 53 Cooperation and Conflict between Natives and
Newcomers 54 From Private Company to Royal Government 55
A Tobacco Society 56 Tobacco Agriculture 56 A Servant Labor System 57 BEYOND AMERICA’S BORDERS: “American Tobacco and European Consumers” 60 The Rigors of Servitude 63 Cultivating Land and Faith 63
Hierarchy and Inequality in the Chesapeake 64 Social and Economic Polarization 65 Government Policies and Political Conflict 65 Bacon’s Rebellion 66
Toward a Slave Labor System 68 Religion and Revolt in the Spanish Borderland 68 The West Indies: Sugar and Slavery 69 Carolina: A West Indian Frontier 70 Slave Labor Emerges in the Chesapeake 72
Conclusion: The Growth of English Colonies Based on Export Crops and Slave Labor 73
CHAPTER REVIEW 75 LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
CHAPTER 2
Europeans Encounter the New World, 1492–1600 26
OPENING VIGNETTE: Queen Isabella of Spain supports Christopher Columbus’s risky plan to sail west across the Atlantic 26
Europe in the Age of Exploration 28 Mediterranean Trade and European Expansion 28 A Century of Portuguese Exploration 30
A Surprising New World in the Western Atlantic 31 The Explorations of Columbus 31 The Geographic Revolution and the Columbian
Exchange 33 Spanish Exploration and Conquest 35
The Conquest of Mexico 35 The Search for Other Mexicos 37 Spanish Outposts in Florida and New Mexico 38 New Spain in the Sixteenth Century 39 DOCUMENTING THE AMERICAN PROMISE: “Justifying Conquest” 42 The Toll of Spanish Conquest and
Colonization 45 The New World and Sixteenth-
Century Europe 45 The Protestant Reformation and the Spanish
Response 45 Europe and the Spanish Example 46
Conclusion: The Promise of the New World for Europeans 48
CHAPTER REVIEW 49 LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
xxii CONTENTS
CHAPTER 4
The Northern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century,
1601–1700 76 OPENING VIGNETTE: Roger Williams is banished from Puritan Massachusetts 76
Puritans and the Settlement of New England 78 Puritan Origins: The English Reformation 78 The Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony 80 The Founding of Massachusetts Bay
Colony 80 The Evolution of New England
Society 82 Church, Covenant, and Conformity 83 Government by Puritans for Puritanism 84 The Splintering of Puritanism 85 Religious Controversies and Economic
Changes 87 The Founding of the Middle Colonies 91
From New Netherland to New York 91 DOCUMENTING THE AMERICAN PROMISE: “Hunting Witches in Salem, Massachusetts” 92 New Jersey and Pennsylvania 95 Toleration and Diversity in Pennsylvania 95
The Colonies and the English Empire 96 Royal Regulation of Colonial Trade 96 King Philip’s War and the Consolidation of Royal
Authority 98 Conclusion: An English Model of
Colonization in North America 100
CHAPTER REVIEW 101 LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
CHAPTER 5
Colonial America in the Eighteenth Century,
1701–1770 102 OPENING VIGNETTE: The Robin Johns experience horrific turns of fortune in the Atlantic slave trade 102
A Growing Population and Expanding Economy in British North America 104
New England: From Puritan Settlers to Yankee Traders 106 Natural Increase and Land Distribution 106 Farms, Fish, and Atlantic Trade 106
The Middle Colonies: Immigrants, Wheat, and Work 109 German and Scots-Irish Immigrants 109 “God Gives All Things to Industry”: Urban and
Rural Labor 110 The Southern Colonies: Land of Slavery 113
The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Growth of Slavery 113
Slave Labor and African American Culture 116 Tobacco, Rice, and Prosperity 118
Unifying Experiences 119 Commerce and Consumption 119 Religion, Enlightenment, and Revival 120 Trade and Conflict in the North American
Borderlands 122 Colonial Politics in the British Empire 125 DOCUMENTING THE AMERICAN PROMISE: “Spanish Priests Report on California Missions” 126
Conclusion: The Dual Identity of British North American Colonists 128
CHAPTER REVIEW 129 LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
CONTENTS xxiii
CHAPTER 7
The War for America, 1775–1783 158
OPENING VIGNETTE: Deborah Sampson masquer- ades as a man to join the Continental army 158
The Second Continental Congress 160 Assuming Political and Military Authority 160 Pursuing Both War and Peace 161 Thomas Paine, Abigail Adams, and the Case for
Independence 163 The Declaration of Independence 164
The First Year of War, 1775–1776 165 The American Military Forces 165 The British Strategy 166 Quebec, New York, and New Jersey 166
The Home Front 168 Patriotism at the Local Level 169 The Loyalists 169 Who Is a Traitor? 171 DOCUMENTING THE AMERICAN PROMISE: “Families Divide over the Revolution” 172 Prisoners of War 174 Financial Instability and Corruption 175
The Campaigns of 1777–1779: The North and West 175 Burgoyne’s Army and the Battle of Saratoga 176 The War in the West: Indian Country 177 The French Alliance 178
The Southern Strategy and the End of the War 181 Georgia and South Carolina 181 Treason and Guerrilla Warfare 182 Surrender at Yorktown 184 The Losers and the Winners 184
Conclusion: Why the British Lost 186
CHAPTER REVIEW 187 LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
CHAPTER 6
The British Empire and the Colonial Crisis, 1754–1775 130
OPENING VIGNETTE: Loyalist governor Thomas Hutchinson stands his ground in radical Massachusetts 130
The Seven Years’ War, 1754–1763 132 French-British Rivalry in the Ohio Country 132 The Albany Congress 134 The War and Its Consequences 135 VISUALIZING HISTORY: “Cultural Cross-Dressing in Eighteenth-Century Portraits” 136 Pontiac’s Rebellion and the Proclamation of
1763 138 The Sugar and Stamp Acts, 1763–1765 140
Grenville’s Sugar Act 140 The Stamp Act 141 Resistance Strategies and Crowd Politics 142 Liberty and Property 144
The Townshend Acts and Economic Retaliation, 1767–1770 145 The Townshend Duties 145 Nonconsumption and the Daughters of Liberty 146 Military Occupation and “Massacre” in Boston 147
The Destruction of the Tea and the Coercive Acts, 1770–1774 149 The Calm before the Storm 149 Tea in Boston Harbor 150 The Coercive Acts 151 Beyond Boston: Rural New England 152 The First Continental Congress 152
Domestic Insurrections, 1774–1775 153 Lexington and Concord 153 Rebelling against Slavery 155
Conclusion: The Long Road to Revolution 156
CHAPTER REVIEW 157 LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
xxiv CONTENTS
CHAPTER 9
The New Nation Takes Form, 1789–1800 216
OPENING VIGNETTE: Brilliant and brash, Alexander Hamilton becomes a polarizing figure in the 1790s 216
The Search for Stability 218 Washington Inaugurates the
Government 219 The Bill of Rights 220 The Republican Wife and Mother 221
Hamilton’s Economic Policies 222 Agriculture, Transportation,
and Banking 222 The Public Debt and Taxes 223 The First Bank of the United States and the
Report on Manufactures 225 The Whiskey Rebellion 226
Conflict on America’s Borders and Beyond 227 Creeks in the Southwest 228 Ohio Indians in the Northwest 229 France and Britain 231 The Haitian Revolution 233 BEYOND AMERICA’S BORDERS: “France, Britain, and Woman’s Rights in the 1790s” 234
Federalists and Republicans 236 The Election of 1796 236 The XYZ Affair 237 The Alien and Sedition Acts 238
Conclusion: Parties Nonetheless 240
CHAPTER REVIEW 241 LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
CHAPTER 8
Building a Republic, 1775–1789 188
OPENING VIGNETTE: James Madison comes of age in the midst of revolution 188
The Articles of Confederation 190 Confederation and Taxation 190 The Problem of Western Lands 191 Running the New Government 192
The Sovereign States 193 The State Constitutions 193 Who Are “the People”? 194 Equality and Slavery 195 DOCUMENTING THE AMERICAN PROMISE: “Massachusetts Blacks Petition for Freedom and Rights” 196
The Confederation’s Problems 199 The War Debt and the Newburgh Conspiracy 199 The Treaty of Fort Stanwix 200 Land Ordinances and the Northwest Territory 202 The Requisition of 1785 and Shays’s Rebellion,
1786–1787 205 The United States Constitution 206
From Annapolis to Philadelphia 207 The Virginia and New Jersey Plans 208 Democracy versus Republicanism 209
Ratification of the Constitution 210 The Federalists 210 The Antifederalists 212 The Big Holdouts: Virginia and New York 213
Conclusion: The “Republican Remedy” 214
CHAPTER REVIEW 215 LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
CONTENTS xxv
CHAPTER 11
The Expanding Republic, 1815–1840 272
OPENING VIGNETTE: The Grimké sisters speak out against slavery 272
The Market Revolution 274 Improvements in Transportation 275 Factories, Workingwomen, and Wage Labor 277 Bankers and Lawyers 279 Booms and Busts 279 DOCUMENTING THE AMERICAN PROMISE: “Mill Girls Stand Up to Factory Owners, 1834” 280
The Spread of Democracy 282 Popular Politics and Partisan Identity 282 The Election of 1828 and the Character
Issue 283 Jackson’s Democratic Agenda 284
Jackson Defines the Democratic Party 285 Indian Policy and the Trail of Tears 285 The Tariff of Abominations and Nullification 288 The Bank War and Economic Boom 289
Cultural Shifts, Religion, and Reform 290 The Family and Separate Spheres 291 The Education and Training of Youths 292 The Second Great Awakening 292 The Temperance Movement and the Campaign for
Moral Reform 294 Organizing against Slavery 294
Van Buren’s One-Term Presidency 296 The Politics of Slavery 297 Elections and Panics 297
Conclusion: The Age of Jackson or the Era of Reform? 299
CHAPTER REVIEW 301 LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
CHAPTER 10
Republicans in Power, 1800–1824 242
OPENING VIGNETTE: The Shawnee chief Tecumseh attempts to forge a pan-Indian confederacy 242
Jefferson’s Presidency 244 Turbulent Times: Election and Rebellion 245 The Jeffersonian Vision of Republican Simplicity 245 Dangers Overseas: The Barbary Wars 247
Opportunities and Challenges in the West 248 The Louisiana Purchase 248 The Lewis and Clark Expedition 249 Osage and Comanche Indians 251 VISUALIZING HISTORY: “Cultural Exchange on the Lewis and Clark Trail” 252
Jefferson, the Madisons, and the War of 1812 254 Impressment and Embargo 254 Dolley Madison and Social Politics 255 Tecumseh and Tippecanoe 255 The War of 1812 256 Washington City Burns: The British Offensive 258
Women’s Status in the Early Republic 259 Women and the Law 260 Women and Church Governance 260 Female Education 261
Monroe and Adams 262 From Property to Democracy 263 The Missouri Compromise 264 The Monroe Doctrine 265 The Election of 1824 267 The Adams Administration 268
Conclusion: Republican Simplicity Becomes Complex 269
CHAPTER REVIEW 271 LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
xxvi CONTENTS
CHAPTER 13
The Slave South, 1820–1860 332
OPENING VIGNETTE: Slave Nat Turner leads a revolt to end slavery 332
The Growing Distinctiveness of the South 334 Cotton Kingdom, Slave Empire 334 The South in Black and White 336 The Plantation Economy 337 DOCUMENTING THE AMERICAN PROMISE: “Defending Slavery” 338
Masters and Mistresses in the Big House 342 Paternalism and Male Honor 342 The Southern Lady and Feminine Virtues 344
Slaves in the Quarter 346 Work 346 Family and Religion 347 Resistance and Rebellion 348
The Plain Folk 349 Plantation-Belt Yeomen 350 Upcountry Yeomen 350 Poor Whites 351 The Culture of the Plain Folk 352
Black and Free: On the Middle Ground 353 Precarious Freedom 353 Achievement despite Restrictions 354
The Politics of Slavery 354 The Democratization of the Political Arena 355 Planter Power 355
Conclusion: A Slave Society 356
CHAPTER REVIEW 357 LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
CHAPTER 12
The New West and the Free North, 1840–1860 302
OPENING VIGNETTE: With the support of his wife, Abraham Lincoln struggles to survive in antebellum America 302
Economic and Industrial Evolution 304 Agriculture and Land Policy 305 Manufacturing and Mechanization 305 Railroads: Breaking the Bonds of Nature 306 VISUALIZING HISTORY: “The Path of Progress” 308
Free Labor: Promise and Reality 309 The Free-Labor Ideal 310 Economic Inequality 310 Immigrants and the Free-Labor Ladder 311
The Westward Movement 312 Manifest Destiny 312 Oregon and the Overland Trail 313 The Mormon Exodus 315 The Mexican Borderlands 317
Expansion and the Mexican- American War 319 The Politics of Expansion 319 The Mexican-American War, 1846–1848 320 Victory in Mexico 323 Golden California 324
Reforming Self and Society 326 The Pursuit of Perfection: Transcendentalists and
Utopians 326 Woman’s Rights Activists 327 Abolitionists and the American Ideal 328
Conclusion: Free Labor, Free Men 330
CHAPTER REVIEW 331 LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
CONTENTS xxvii
CHAPTER 15
The Crucible of War, 1861–1865 386
OPENING VIGNETTE: Runaway slave William Gould enlists in the U.S. Navy 386
“And the War Came” 388 Attack on Fort Sumter 389 The Upper South Chooses Sides 389
The Combatants 391 How They Expected to Win 391 Lincoln and Davis Mobilize 392
Battling It Out, 1861–1862 394 Stalemate in the Eastern Theater 394 Union Victories in the Western Theater 397 The Atlantic Theater 398 International Diplomacy 399
Union and Freedom 400 From Slaves to Contraband 400 From Contraband to Free People 401 The War of Black Liberation 402
The South at War 403 Revolution from Above 403 Hardship Below 405 The Disintegration of Slavery 405 DOCUMENTING THE AMERICAN PROMISE: “Home and Country” 406
The North at War 408 The Government and the Economy 409 Women and Work at Home and at War 409 Politics and Dissent 410
Grinding Out Victory, 1863–1865 411 Vicksburg and Gettysburg 411 Grant Takes Command 412 The Election of 1864 414 The Confederacy Collapses 415
Conclusion: The Second American Revolution 416
CHAPTER REVIEW 417 LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
CHAPTER 14
The House Divided, 1846–1861 358
OPENING VIGNETTE: Abolitionist John Brown takes his war against slavery to Harpers Ferry, Virginia 358
The Bitter Fruits of War 360 The Wilmot Proviso and the Expansion of
Slavery 360 The Election of 1848 362 Debate and Compromise 362
The Sectional Balance Undone 365 The Fugitive Slave Act 365 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 366 The Kansas-Nebraska Act 366 BEYOND AMERICA’S BORDERS: “Filibusters: The Underside of Manifest Destiny” 368
Realignment of the Party System 370 The Old Parties: Whigs and
Democrats 371 The New Parties: Know-Nothings and
Republicans 371 The Election of 1856 373
Freedom under Siege 374 “Bleeding Kansas” 374 The Dred Scott Decision 376 Prairie Republican: Abraham
Lincoln 377 The Lincoln-Douglas Debates 378
The Union Collapses 379 The Aftermath of John Brown’s
Raid 379 Republican Victory in 1860 380 Secession Winter 382
Conclusion: Slavery, Free Labor, and the Failure of Political Compromise 383
CHAPTER REVIEW 385 LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
xxviii CONTENTS
CHAPTER 16
Reconstruction, 1863–1877 418
OPENING VIGNETTE: James T. Rapier emerges in the early 1870s as Alabama’s most prominent black leader 418
Wartime Reconstruction 420 “To Bind Up the Nation’s Wounds” 420 Land and Labor 422 The African American Quest for Autonomy 423 DOCUMENTING THE AMERICAN PROMISE: “The Meaning of Freedom“ 424
Presidential Reconstruction 426 Johnson’s Program of Reconciliation 427 White Southern Resistance and Black Codes 427 Expansion of Federal Authority and Black Rights 428
Congressional Reconstruction 429 The Fourteenth Amendment and Escalating
Violence 430 Radical Reconstruction and Military Rule 431 Impeaching a President 432 The Fifteenth Amendment and Women’s
Demands 433 The Struggle in the South 434
Freedmen, Yankees, and Yeomen 434 Republican Rule 435 White Landlords, Black Sharecroppers 438
Reconstruction Collapses 440 Grant’s Troubled Presidency 440 Northern Resolve Withers 441 White Supremacy Triumphs 442 An Election and a Compromise 445
Conclusion: “A Revolution But Half Accomplished” 446
CHAPTER REVIEW 447 LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
APPENDIX I
Suggested References A-1
APPENDIX II
Documents A-7 The Declaration of Independence A-7 The Constitution of the United States A-9 Amendments to the Constitution with Annotations
(including the six unratified amendments) A-16
APPENDIX III
Facts and Figures: Government, Economy, and Demographics A-32
Presidential Elections A-32 Presidents, Vice Presidents, and Secretaries of State A-37 Supreme Court Justices A-39 Federal Spending and the Economy,
1790–2009 A-41 Population Growth, 1630–2010 A-42 Birthrate, 1820–2007 A-42 Life Expectancy, 1900–2007 A-43 Major Trends in Immigration,
1820–2010 A-44
Glossary G-1
Spot Artifact Credits CR-1 Index I-1 U.S. Political/Geographic and World Maps M-1 About the Authors last book page
Maps, Figures, and Tables
CHAPTER 1 Map 1.1 Continental Drift 6 Spot Map Beringia 6 Map 1.2 Native North American Cultures 9 Spot Map Ancient California Peoples 11 Figure 1.1 Native American Population in North America, about 1492 (Estimated) 18 Map 1.3 Native North Americans about 1500 19
CHAPTER 2 Map 2.1 European Trade Routes and Portuguese Exploration in the Fifteenth
Century 29 Spot Map Columbus’s First Voyage to the New World, 1492–1493 31 Map 2.2 European Exploration in Sixteenth-Century America 33 Spot Map Cortés’s Invasion of Tenochtitlán, 1519–1521 36 Map 2.3 Sixteenth-Century European Colonies in the New World 40 Spot Map Roanoke Settlement, 1587–1590 47
CHAPTER 3 Map 3.1 Chesapeake Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 58 Spot Map Settlement Patterns along the James River 64 Map 3.2 The West Indies and Carolina in the Seventeenth Century 71
CHAPTER 4 Map 4.1 New England Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 81 Figure 4.1 Population of the English North American Colonies in the Seventeenth
Century 88 Map 4.2 Middle Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 91 Map 4.3 American Colonies at the End of the Seventeenth Century 97 Spot Map King Philip’s War, 1675 98
CHAPTER 5 Map 5.1 Europeans and Africans in the Eighteenth Century 105 Map 5.2 Atlantic Trade in the Eighteenth Century 107 Spot Map Patterns of Settlement, 1700–1770 111 Table 5.1 Slave Imports, 1451–1870 113 Map 5.3 The Atlantic Slave Trade 114 Map 5.4 Zones of Empire in Eastern North America 123 Spot Map Spanish Missions in California 124
xxix
xxx MAPS, FIGURES, AND TABLES
CHAPTER 6 Map 6.1 European Areas of Influence and the Seven Years’ War, 1754–1763 133 Spot Map Ohio River Valley, 1753 134 Map 6.2 Europe Redraws the Map of North America, 1763 138 Spot Map Pontiac’s Uprising, 1763 139 Map 6.3 Lexington and Concord, April 1775 154
CHAPTER 7 Spot Map Battle of Bunker Hill, 1775 161 Map 7.1 The War in the North, 1775–1778 167 Map 7.2 Loyalist Strength and Rebel Support 170 Spot Map Battle of Saratoga, 1777 176 Map 7.3 The Indian War in the West, 1777–1782 179 Map 7.4 The War in the South, 1780–1781 182 Spot Map Siege of Yorktown, 1781 184
CHAPTER 8 Map 8.1 Cession of Western Lands, 1782–1802 192 Spot Map Legal Changes to Slavery, 1777–1804 199 Spot Map Treaty of Fort Stanwix, 1784 202 Spot Map Shays’s Rebellion, 1786–1787 206 Map 8.2 Ratification of the Constitution, 1788–1790 211
CHAPTER 9 Spot Map Major Roads in the 1790s 222 Map 9.1 Travel Times from New York City in 1800 223 Map 9.2 Western Expansion and Indian Land Cessions to 1810 230 Spot Map Haitian Revolution, 1791–1804 233
CHAPTER 10 Map 10.1 Jefferson’s Expeditions in the West, 1804–1806 250 Spot Map The Chesapeake Incident, June 22, 1807 254 Spot Map Battle of Tippecanoe, 1811 256 Map 10.2 The War of 1812 257 Map 10.3 The Missouri Compromise, 1820 266 Map 10.4 The Election of 1824 268
CHAPTER 11 Map 11.1 Routes of Transportation in 1840 275 Spot Map Cotton Textile Industry, ca. 1840 277 Table 11.1 The Growth of Newspapers, 1820–1840 283 Map 11.2 The Election of 1828 284 Map 11.3 Indian Removal and the Trail of Tears 287 Figure 11.1 Western Land Sales, 1810–1860 290
MAPS, FIGURES, AND TABLES xxxi
CHAPTER 12 Map 12.1 Railroads in 1860 307 Figure 12.1 Antebellum Immigration, 1840–1860 311 Spot Map Plains Indians and Trails West in the 1840s and 1850s 313 Map 12.2 Major Trails West 314 Map 12.3 Texas and Mexico in the 1830s 317 Map 12.4 The Mexican-American War, 1846–1848 321 Map 12.5 Territorial Expansion by 1860 324
CHAPTER 13 Spot Map The Upper and Lower South 335 Map 13.1 Cotton Kingdom, Slave Empire: 1820 and 1860 335 Map 13.2 The Agricultural Economy of the South, 1860 340 Spot Map Immigrants as a Percentage of State Populations, 1860 341 Spot Map The Cotton Belt 350 Spot Map Upcountry of the South 350
CHAPTER 14 Spot Map Mexican Cession, 1848 361 Map 14.1 The Election of 1848 362 Map 14.2 The Compromise of 1850 364 Spot Map Gadsden Purchase, 1853 367 Map 14.3 The Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854 370 Map 14.4 Political Realignment, 1848–1860 372 Spot Map “Bleeding Kansas,” 1850s 375 Map 14.5 The Election of 1860 382 Spot Map Secession of the Lower South, December 1860–February 1861 383
CHAPTER 15 Map 15.1 Secession, 1860–1861 390 Figure 15.1 Resources of the Union and Confederacy 392 Map 15.2 The Civil War, 1861–1862 395 Spot Map Peninsula Campaign, 1862 396 Spot Map Battle of Glorieta Pass, 1862 397 Table 15.1 Major Battles of the Civil War, 1861–1862 399 Spot Map Vicksburg Campaign, 1863 411 Spot Map Battle of Gettysburg, July 1–3, 1863 412 Map 15.3 The Civil War, 1863–1865 413 Table 15.2 Major Battles of the Civil War, 1863–1865 415
CHAPTER 16 Spot Map Reconstruction Military Districts 432 Figure 16.1 Southern Congressional Delegations, 1865–1877 436 Map 16.1 A Southern Plantation in 1860 and 1881 439 Map 16.2 The Election of 1868 440 Map 16.3 The Reconstruction of the South 444 Map 16.4 The Election of 1876 445
American Tobacco and European Consumers 60 France, Britain, and Woman’s Rights in the 1790s 234 Filibusters: The Underside of Manifest Destiny 368
Special Features
Justifying Conquest 42 Hunting Witches in Salem, Massachusetts 92 Spanish Priests Report on California Missions 126 Families Divide over the Revolution 172 Massachusetts Blacks Petition for Freedom and Rights 196 Mill Girls Stand Up to Factory Owners, 1834 280 Defending Slavery 338 Home and Country 406 The Meaning of Freedom 424
Daily Life in Chaco Canyon 14 Cultural Cross-Dressing in Eighteenth-Century Portraits 136 Cultural Exchange on the Lewis and Clark Trail 252 The Path of Progress 308
Visualizing History
Documenting the American Promise
Beyond America’s Borders
xxxii
The American Promise A Concise History
Volume 1: To 1877
Nobody today knows his name. But almost a thousand years ago, more than four hundred years before Europeans arrived in the Western Hemisphere, many ancient Americans celebrated this man — let’s call him Sun Falcon. They buried Sun Falcon during elaborate rituals at Cahokia, the largest residential and ceremonial site in ancient North America, the giant landmass north of present-day Mexico. Located near the eastern shore of the Mississippi River in what is now southwestern Illinois, Cahokia stood at the spiritual and political center of the world of more than
20,000 ancient Americans who lived there and nearby. The way Cahokians buried Sun Falcon suggests that he was a very important person who represented spiritual and political authority.
What we know about Sun Falcon and the Cahokians who buried him has been discovered by archaeologists — scientists
who study artifacts, material objects left behind by ancient peoples. Cahokia attracted the attention of archaeologists because of the hundreds of earthen mounds that ancient
2
Ancient America, Before 1492
MISSISSIPPIAN WOODEN MASK Sometime between AD 1200 and 1350, a Native American among the
Mississippian people in what is now central Illinois fashioned this mask from red cedar. Influenced by the culture of Cahokia, the mask was
probably used in rituals to depict the face of both worldly and supernatural power. The haunting visage evokes the long history of ancient Americans and
their impressive achievements. Photograph: © 2002 John Bigelow Taylor, www.kubaba.com. Illinois State Museum, Springfield, Cat. No. 273.
Archaeology and History (pp. 4–5)
The First Americans (pp. 5–8)
Archaic Hunters and Gatherers (pp. 8–12)
Agricultural Settlements and Chiefdoms (pp. 12–17)
Native Americans in the 1490s (pp. 17–21)
The Mexica: A Mesoamerican Culture (pp. 21–23)
Conclusion: The World of Ancient Americans (pp. 23–24)
1
CHAPTER OUTLINE QUICK START
Quickly learn what is important in this chapter by doing the following:
• READ the Chapter Outline to see how the chapter is organized. • SKIM the Chronology on the next page to see what will be covered.
When you are ready, read the chapter and the Essential Questions for each section. Then use the Chapter Review to check what you know.
Before 1492
ca. 400,000 BP Homo sapiens evolve in Africa.
ca. 25,000– Glaciation exposes 14,000 BP Beringia land bridge.
ca. 15,000 BP Humans arrive in North America.
ca. 13,500– Paleo-Indians use 13,000 BP Clovis points.
ca. 11,000 BP Extinction of mammoths.
ca. 10,000– Archaic hunter- 3000 BP gatherer cultures
dominate ancient America.
ca. 5000 BP Chumash culture emerges in southern California.
ca. 4000 BP Eastern Woodland peoples grow gourds, make pottery.
ca. 3500 BP Southwestern cul- tures cultivate corn.
ca. 2500 BP Eastern Woodland cultures build burial mounds, cultivate corn.
ca. 2500– Adena culture 2100 BP develops in Ohio.
ca. 2100 BP– Hopewell culture AD 400 emerges in Ohio
and Mississippi valleys.
ca. AD 200–900 Mogollon culture develops in New Mexico.
ca. AD 500 Bows and arrows appear south of Arctic.
ca. AD 500– Hohokam culture 1400 develops in
Arizona.
ca. AD 800– Mississippian 1500 culture flourishes
in Southeast.
ca. AD 1000– Anasazi peoples 1200 build cliff dwellings
and pueblos.
ca. AD 1325– Mexica establish 1500 Mexican empire.
AD 1492 Christopher Columbus arrives in New World.
Americans built in the region. The largest surviving mound, Monks Mound, is a huge pyramid that covers sixteen acres, making it the biggest single structure ever built by ancient North Americans.
Atop Monks Mound, political and religious leaders performed ceremonies watched by thousands of Cahokians who stood on a fifty-acre plaza at the base of the mound. Their ceremonies were probably designed to demonstrate to onlookers the leaders’ access to supernatural forces. At the far edge of the plaza, Cahokians buried Sun Falcon in an oblong mound about 6 feet high and 250 feet long.
Before Cahokians lowered Sun Falcon into his grave sometime around AD 1050, they first placed the body of another man facedown in the dirt. On top of that man, Cahokians draped a large cape made of twenty thousand shell beads crafted into the likeness of a bird. They then put Sun Falcon faceup on the beaded cape with his head pointing southeast, aligned with the passage of the sun across the sky during the summer solstice. Experts speculate that Cahokians who buried Sun Falcon sought to pay homage not only to him but also to the awe-inspiring forces of darkness and light, of earth and sun, that governed their lives.
To accompany Sun Falcon, Cahokians also buried hundreds of exquisitely crafted artifacts and the bodies of seven other adults who probably were relatives or servants of Sun Falcon. Not far away, archaeologists discovered several astonishing mass graves. One contained 53 women, all but one between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, who had been sacrificed by poison, strangulation, or having their throats slit. Other graves contained more than eighty sacrificed men and women half of whom had been executed at the burial site. In all, more than 270 people were buried in the mound with Sun Falcon.
Nobody knows exactly who Sun Falcon was or why Cahokians buried him as they did. To date, archaeologists have found no similar burial site in ancient North America. Most likely, Sun Falcon’s burial and the human sacrifices that accompanied it were major public rituals that communicated to the many onlookers the fearsome power he wielded, the respect he commanded, and the authority his survivors intended to honor and maintain. Much remains unknown and unknowable about him and his fellow Cahokians, just as it does with other ancient Americans. The history of ancient Americans is therefore necessarily incomplete and controversial. Still, archaeologists have learned enough to understand where ancient Americans came from and many basic features of the complex cultures they created and passed along to their descendants, who dominated the history of America until 1492.
CHRONOLOGY
4 CHAPTER 1 Ancient America Before 1492
Archaeology and History Archaeologists and historians share the desire to learn about people who lived in the past, but they usually employ differ- ent methods to obtain information. Both archaeologists and historians study artifacts as clues to the activities and ideas of the humans who created them. They concentrate, how-
ever, on different kinds of artifacts. Archaeologists tend to focus on physical objects such as bones, spear points, pots, baskets, jewelry, clothing, and buildings. Historians direct their attention mostly to writings, such as letters, diary entries, laws, speeches, newspapers, and court cases. The characteristic concentration of historians on writ- ings and of archaeologists on other physical objects denotes a rough cultural and chronological boundary between the human beings studied by the two groups of scholars, a boundary marked by the use of writing.
Writing is defined as a system of symbols that record spoken language. Writ- ing originated among ancient peoples in China, Egypt, and Central America about eight thousand years ago, within the most recent 2 percent of the four
hundred millennia that modern human beings have existed. While the ancient Americans who buried Sun Falcon at Cahokia about AD 1050 and all those who inhabited North America in 1492 possessed many forms of symbolic representation, they did not use writing. Much of what we would like to know about their experiences and those of other ancient Americans remains unknown because they did not write about it.
CAHOKIA BURIAL The excavation of a burial site at Cahokia revealed the remains of a man — presumably a revered leader — whom Cahokians buried atop a large cape covered with shell beads in the shape of a bird. Nearby in the same mound, excavators found mass graves of scores of other Cahokians, many of them executed just before burial, evidently during ceremonies to honor their leader. Photo courtesy of University of Wisconsin-
Milwaukee Archaeological Research
Laboratory (ARL image 1967.2.31).
Why do historians rely on the work of archaeologists to write the history of ancient North America?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
The First Americans 5Before 1492
Archaeologists specialize in learning about people who did not document their history in writing. They study the millions of artifacts these people created. They also scrutinize geological strata, pollen, and other environmental features to reconstruct as much as possible about the world inhabited by ancient peoples. This chapter relies on studies by archaeologists to sketch a brief overview of ancient America, the long first phase of the history of the United States.
Ancient Americans and their descendants resided in North America for thou- sands of years before Europeans arrived. While they created societies and cultures of remarkable diversity and complexity, their history cannot be reconstructed with the detail and certainty made possible by writing.
The First Americans The first human beings to arrive in the Western Hemisphere emigrated from Asia. They brought with them hunting skills, weapon- and tool-making techniques, and other forms of human knowledge developed millennia earlier in Africa, Europe, and Asia. These first Americans hunted large mammals, such as the mam- moths they had learned in Europe and Asia to kill, butcher, and process for food, cloth- ing, and building materials. Most likely, these first Americans wandered into the Western Hemisphere more or less accidentally in pursuit of prey.
African and Asian Origins. Human beings lived elsewhere in the world for hundreds of thousands of years before they reached the Western Hemisphere. They lacked a way to travel to the Western Hemisphere because millions of years before humans existed anywhere on the globe, North and South America became detached from the gigantic common landmass scientists now call Pangaea. About 240 million years ago, powerful forces deep within the earth fractured Pangaea and slowly pushed continents apart to their present positions (Map 1.1). This process of conti- nental drift encircled the land of the Western Hemisphere with large oceans that isolated it from the other continents long before early human beings (Homo erectus) first appeared in Africa about two million years ago.
More than 1.5 million years after Homo erectus appeared, or about 400,000 BP, modern humans (Homo sapiens) evolved in Africa. (The abbreviation BP — for “years before the present” — indicates dates earlier than two thousand years ago; for more recent dates, the common and familiar notation AD is used, as in AD 1492.) All human beings throughout the world today are descendants of these ancient Afri- cans. Slowly, over many millennia, Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa and into Europe and Asia, which had retained land connections to Africa, allowing ancient humans to migrate on foot. For roughly 97 percent of the time Homo sapiens have been on earth, none migrated across the enormous oceans isolating North and South America from the Eurasian landmass.
Two major developments made it possible for ancient humans to migrate to the Western Hemisphere. First, people successfully adapted to the frigid environment near the Arctic Circle. Second, changes in the earth’s climate reconnected North America to Asia.
How and why did humans migrate into North America after 15,000 BP?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
6 CHAPTER 1 Ancient America Before 1492
By about 25,000 BP, Homo sapiens had spread from Africa throughout Europe and Asia. People, probably women, had learned to use bone needles to sew animal skins into warm clothing that permitted them to become permanent residents of extremely cold regions such as northeastern Siberia. A few of these ancient Siberians clothed in animal hides walked to North America on land that now lies submerged beneath the sixty miles of water that currently separates east- ernmost Siberia from westernmost Alaska. A pathway across this watery chasm opened during the last global cold spell — which endured from about 25,000 BP to 14,000 BP — when the sea level dropped and exposed a land bridge hundreds of miles wide called Beringia that connected Asian Siberia and American Alaska.
Siberian hunters roamed Beringia for centuries in search of mammoths, bison, and numerous smaller animals. As the hunters ventured farther and farther east, they eventually became pioneers of human life in the Western
Hemisphere. Although they did not know it, their migrations revolutionized the his- tory of the world.
Archaeologists refer to these first migrants and their descendants for the next few millennia as Paleo-Indians. They speculate that these Siberian hunters traveled in small bands of no more than twenty-five people. How many such bands arrived in North America before Beringia disappeared beneath the sea will never be known.
When the first migrants came is hotly debated by experts. They probably arrived sometime after 15,000 BP. Scattered and inconclusive evidence suggests that they may have arrived several thousand years earlier. Certainly, humans who came from Asia — whose ancestors left Africa hundreds of thousands of years earlier — inhabited the Western Hemisphere by 14,000 BP.
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MAP 1.1 CONTINENTAL DRIFT Massive geological forces separated North and South America from other continents eons before human beings evolved in Africa 1.5 million years ago.
READING THE MAP: Which continents separated from Pangaea earliest? Which ones separated from each other last? Which are still closely connected to each other?
CONNECTIONS: How does continental drift explain why human life developed elsewhere on the planet for hundreds of thousands of years before the first person entered the Western Hemisphere 15,000 years ago?
Map Activity
Beringia The land bridge between Siberia and Alaska that was exposed by the Wisconsin glaciation, allowing people to migrate into the Western Hemisphere.
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The First Americans 7Before 1492
Paleo-Indian Hunters. When humans first arrived in the Western Hemisphere, massive glaciers covered most of present-day Canada. Many archaeologists believe that Paleo-Indians probably migrated along an ice-free passageway on the eastern side of Can- ada’s Rocky Mountains in pursuit of game. Other Paleo-Indians may have traveled along the Pacific coast in small boats, hunting marine life and hopscotching from one desirable landing spot to another. At the southern edge of the glaciers, Paleo-Indians entered a hunters’ paradise teeming with wildlife that had never before confronted human preda- tors armed with razor-sharp spears. The abundance of game presumably made hunting relatively easy. Ample food permitted the Paleo-Indian population to grow. Within a thousand years or so, Paleo-Indians had migrated throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Early Paleo-Indians used a distinctively shaped spearhead known as a Clovis point, named for the place in New Mexico where it was first excavated. Archaeologists’ discovery of abundant Clovis points throughout North and Central America in sites occupied between 13,500 BP and 13,000 BP provides evidence that these nomadic hunt- ers shared a common ancestry and way of life. At a few isolated sites, archaeologists have found still-controversial evidence of pre-Clovis artifacts that suggest the people who used Clovis spear points may have been preceded by several hundred years by a few non-Clovis pioneers. Paleo-Indians hunted mammoths and bison, but they probably also killed smaller animals. Concentration on large animals, when possible, made sense because just one mammoth could supply meat for months. In addition, mammoths provided Paleo-Indians with hides and bones for clothing, shelter, tools, and much more.
About 11,000 BP, Paleo-Indians confronted a major crisis. The mammoths and other large mammals they hunted became extinct. The extinction was gradual,
Paleo-Indians Archaeologists’ term for the first migrants into North America and their descendants who spread across the Americas between 15,000 BP and 13,500 BP, approximately.
Clovis point Distinctively shaped spearhead used by Paleo- Indians and named for the place in New Mexico where they were first excavated.
ANCIENT PETROGLYPH These petroglyphs — drawings incised onto the surface of rocks — located in the Mohave Desert in eastern California probably depict shamans, ancient American spiritual leaders and healers who claimed the ability to communicate with supernatural powers. Petroglyphs portraying animals, people, or geometric designs can be found throughout North America. © Flirt/Superstock.
8 CHAPTER 1 Ancient America Before 1492
stretching over several hundred years. Scientists are not completely certain why it occurred, although environmental change probably contributed to it. About this time, the earth’s climate warmed, glaciers melted, and sea levels rose. Mammoths and other large mammals probably had difficulty adapting to the warmer climate. Many archaeologists also believe, however, that Paleo-Indians probably contributed to the extinctions in the Western Hemisphere by killing large animals more rapidly than they could reproduce. Whatever the causes, after the extinction of large mam- mals, Paleo-Indians literally inhabited a new world.
Paleo-Indians adapted to this drastic environmental change by making at least two important changes in their way of life. First, hunters began to prey more intensively on smaller animals. Second, Paleo-Indians devoted more energy to foraging — that is, to collecting wild plant foods such as roots, seeds, nuts, berries, and fruits. When Paleo-Indians made these changes, they replaced the apparent uniformity of the big- game-oriented Clovis culture with great cultural diversity adapted to the many natural environments throughout the hemisphere.
These post-Clovis adaptations to local environments resulted in the astounding variety of Native American cultures that existed when Europeans arrived in AD 1492. By then, more than three hundred major tribes and hundreds of lesser groups inhabited North America alone. Hundreds more lived in Central and South America. Hundreds of other ancient American cultures had disappeared or transformed as their people constantly adapted to environmental and other challenges.
Archaic Hunters and Gatherers Archaeologists use the term Archaic to describe the many different hunting and gathering cultures that descended from Paleo-Indians and the long period of time when those cultures dominated the history of ancient America — roughly from 10,000 BP to somewhere between 4000 BP
and 3000 BP. The term describes the era in the history of ancient America that fol- lowed the Paleo-Indian big-game hunters and preceded the development of agricul- ture. It denotes a hunter-gatherer way of life that persisted in North America long after European colonization.
Like their Paleo-Indian ancestors, Archaic Indians hunted with spears, but they also took smaller game with traps, nets, and hooks. Unlike their Paleo-Indian predecessors, most Archaic peoples prepared food from wild plants by using a variety of stone tools. A characteristic Archaic artifact is a grinding stone used to pulverize seeds into edible form. Most Archaic Indians migrated from place to place to harvest plants and hunt animals. They usually did not establish permanent vil- lages, although they often returned to the same river valley or fertile meadow year after year. In regions with especially rich resources — such as present-day California and the Pacific Northwest — they developed permanent settlements. Archaic peo- ples followed these practices in distinctive ways in the different environmental regions of North America (Map 1.2).
Why did Archaic Native Americans shift from big-game hunting to foraging and hunting smaller animals?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
hunter-gatherer A way of life that involved hunting game and gathering food from naturally occurring sources, as opposed to engaging in agriculture and animal husbandry. Archaic Indians and their descendants survived in North America for centuries as hunter-gatherers.
Archaic Indians Hunting and gathering peoples that descended from Paleo-Indians and dominated the Americas from 10,000 BP to between 4000 and 3000 BP, approximately.
Archaic Hunters and Gatherers 9Before 1492
Great Plains Bison Hunters. After the extinction of large game animals, some hunters began to concentrate on bison in the huge herds that grazed the plains stretching hundreds of miles east of the Rocky Mountains. For almost a thousand years after the big-game extinctions, Archaic Indians hunted bison with Folsom points, named after a site near Folsom, New Mexico. Like their nomadic predeces- sors, Folsom hunters moved constantly to maintain contact with their prey. Great
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MAP 1.2 NATIVE NORTH AMERICAN CULTURES Environmental conditions defined the boundaries of the broad zones of cultural similarity among ancient North Americans.
READING THE MAP: What crucial environmental features set the boundaries of each cultural region? (The topography indicated on Map 1.3, “Native North Americans about 1500,” may be helpful.)
CONNECTIONS: How did environmental factors and variations affect the development of different groups of Native American cultures? Why do you think historians and archaeologists group cultures together by their regional positions?
Map Activity
10 CHAPTER 1 Ancient America Before 1492
Plains hunters often stampeded bison herds over cliffs and then slaughtered the ani- mals that plunged to their deaths.
Bows and arrows reached Great Plains hunters from the north about AD 500. They largely replaced spears, which had been the hunters’ weapons of choice for mil- lennia. Bows permitted hunters to wound animals from farther away, arrows made it possible to shoot repeatedly, and arrowheads were easier to make and therefore less costly to lose than the larger, heavier spear points. Great Plains people hunted on foot. After Europeans imported horses in the decades after 1492, Great Plains bison hunters acquired them and soon became expert riders.
Great Basin Cultures. Archaic peoples in the Great Basin between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada inhabited a region of great environmen- tal diversity defined largely by the amount of rain. While some lived on the shores of lakes and marshes fed by the rain and ate fish, others hunted deer, antelope, bison, and smaller game. To protect against shortages in fish and game caused by the fickle rainfall, Great Basin Indians relied on plants as their most important food. Unlike meat and fish, plant food could be collected and stored for long periods. Many Great Basin peoples gathered piñon nuts as a dietary staple. Great Basin peoples adapted to the severe environmental challenges of the region and maintained their Archaic hunter-gatherer way of life for centuries after Europeans arrived in AD 1492.
Pacific Coast Cultures. The richness of the natural environment made present-day California the most densely settled area in all of ancient North Amer- ica. The land and ocean offered such ample food that California peoples remained hunters and gatherers for hundreds of years after AD 1492. The diversity of
FISHHOOKS Ancient Americans crafted these fishhooks sometime between AD 900 and 1600 from abalone shells collected in the waters off coastal California. The hooks illustrate Pacific coast cultures’ exploitation of their rich marine environment. © The Field Museum #A114464_32d.
Archaic Hunters and Gatherers 11Before 1492
California’s environment also encouraged corresponding variety among native peoples. The mosaic of Archaic settlements in California included about five hundred separate tribes speaking some ninety languages, each with local dialects.
The Chumash, one of the many California cultures, emerged in the region surrounding what is now Santa Barbara about 5000 BP. Comparatively plentiful food resources — especially acorns — permitted Chumash people to establish relatively permanent villages. Although few other California cultures achieved the population density and village settlements of the Chumash, all shared the hunter-gatherer way of life and reliance on acorns as a major food source.
Another rich natural environment lay along the Pacific Northwest coast. Like the Chumash, Northwest peoples built more or less permanent villages. After about 5500 BP, they concentrated on catching whales and large quanti- ties of salmon, halibut, and other fish, which they dried to last throughout the year. They also traded with people who lived hundreds of miles from the coast. Fishing freed Northwest peoples to develop sophisticated woodwork- ing skills. They fashioned elaborate wood carvings that denoted wealth and status, as well as huge canoes for fishing, hunting, and conducting warfare against neighboring tribes.
Eastern Woodland Cultures. East of the Mississippi River, Archaic peo- ples adapted to a forest environment that included the major river valleys of the Mississippi, Ohio, Tennessee, and Cumberland; the Great Lakes region; and the Atlantic coast (see Map 1.2). Throughout these diverse locales, Archaic peoples pursued similar survival strategies.
Woodland hunters stalked deer as their most important prey. Deer supplied Woodland peoples with food as well as hides and bones that they crafted into cloth- ing, weapons, and many other tools. Like Archaic peoples elsewhere, Woodland Indians gathered edible plants, seeds, and nuts. About 6000 BP, some Woodland groups established more or less permanent settlements of 25 to 150 people, usually near a river or lake that offered a wide variety of plant and animal resources. Woodland burial sites suggest that life expectancy was about eighteen years, a relatively short time to learn all the skills necessary to survive, reproduce, and adapt to change.
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OZETTE WHALE EFFIGY This carving of a whale fin decorated with hundreds of sea otter teeth was discovered along with thousands of other artifacts of daily life at Ozette, an ancient village on the tip of the Olympic Peninsula in present-day Washington that was inundated by a catastrophic mud slide about five hundred years ago. The fin illustrates the importance of whale hunting to the residents of Ozette. Richard Alexander Cooke III.
f 25 of ife n all
12 CHAPTER 1 Ancient America Before 1492
Around 4000 BP, Woodland cultures added two important features to their basic hunter-gatherer lifestyles: agriculture and pottery. Trade and migration from Mexico brought gourds and pumpkins to Woodland peoples, who also began to cultivate sunflowers and small quantities of tobacco. Corn, which had been grown in Mexico and South America since about 7000 BP, also traveled north and became a significant food crop among Eastern Woodland peoples around 2500 BP. Most likely, women learned how to plant, grow, and harvest these crops as an outgrowth of their work gathering edible wild plants. Cultivated crops did not alter Woodland peoples’ dependence on gathering wild plants, seeds, and nuts.
Like agriculture, pottery probably originated in Mexico. Pots were more durable than baskets for cooking and the storage of food and water, but they were also much heavier and therefore were shunned by nomadic peoples. The permanent settle- ments of Woodland peoples made the heavy weight of pots much less important than their advantages compared to leaky and fragile baskets. While pottery and agri- culture introduced changes in Woodland cultures, ancient Woodland Americans retained the other basic features of their Archaic hunter-gatherer lifestyle until 1492 and beyond.
Agricultural Settlements and Chiefdoms
Among Eastern Woodland peoples and most other Archaic cultures, agriculture supplemented hunter-gatherer subsistence strategies but did not replace them. Reliance on wild animals and plants required most Archaic groups
to remain small and mobile. But beginning about 4000 BP, distinctive southwestern cultures began to depend on agriculture and to build permanent settlements. Later, around 2500 BP, Woodland peoples in the vast Mississippi valley began to construct burial mounds and other earthworks that suggest the existence of social and political hierarchies that archaeologists term chiefdoms. Although the hunter- gatherer lifestyle never entirely disappeared, the development of agricultural settlements and chiefdoms represented important innovations to the Archaic way of life.
Southwestern Cultures. Ancient Americans in present-day Arizona, New Mexico, and southern portions of Utah and Colorado developed cultures characterized by agricultural settlements and multiunit dwellings called pueblos. All southwestern peoples confronted the challenge of a dry climate and unpredictable fluctuations in rainfall that made the supply of wild plant food very unreliable. These ancient Americans probably adopted agriculture in response to this basic environmental uncertainty.
About 3500 BP, southwestern hunters and gatherers began to cultivate corn, their signature food crop. The demands of corn cultivation encouraged hunter-gatherers to
How did food-gathering strategies influence ancient cultures across North America?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
pueblos Multiunit dwellings, storage spaces, and ceremonial centers — often termed kivas — built by ancient Americans in the Southwest for centuries around AD 1000.
Agricultural Settlements and Chiefdoms 13Before 1492
restrict their migratory habits in order to tend the crop. A vital consideration was access to water. Southwestern Indians became irrigation experts, conserving water from streams, springs, and rainfall and distributing it to thirsty crops.
About AD 200, small farming settlements began to appear throughout southern New Mexico, marking the emergence of the Mogollon culture. Typi- cally, a Mogollon settlement included a dozen pit houses, each made by digging out a pit about fifteen feet in diameter and a foot or two deep and then erecting poles to support a roof of branches or dirt. Larger villages usually had one or two bigger pit houses that may have been the predecessors of the circular kivas, the ceremonial rooms that became a characteristic of nearly all southwestern settle- ments. About AD 900, Mogollon culture began to decline, for reasons that remain obscure.
Visual Activity ANCIENT AGRICULTURE Dropping seeds into holes punched in cleared ground by a pointed stick known as a “dibble,” this ancient American farmer sows a new crop while previously planted seeds — including the corn and beans immediately opposite him — bear fruit for harvest. Created by a sixteenth- century European artist, the drawing misrepresents who did the agricultural work in many ancient American cultures — namely, women rather than men. The Pierpont Morgan Library/Art
Resource, NY.
READING THE IMAGE: In what ways has this ancient farmer modified and taken advantage of the natural environment?
CONNECTIONS: What were the advantages and disadvantages of agriculture compared to hunting and gathering?
14 CHAPTER 1 Ancient America Before 1492
Around AD 500, while the Mogollon culture prevailed in New Mexico, other ancient people migrated from Mexico to southern Arizona and established the dis- tinctive Hohokam culture. Hohokam settlements used sophisticated grids of irriga- tion canals to plant and harvest crops twice a year. Hohokam settlements reflected Mexican cultural practices that northbound migrants brought with them, including the building of sizable platform mounds and ball courts. About AD 1400, Hohokam culture declined for reasons that remain a mystery, although the rising salinity of the soil brought about by centuries of irrigation probably caused declining crop yields and growing food shortages.
Daily Life in Chaco Canyon
Visualizing History
SANDAL
CHACO CANYON, NEW MEXICO
About AD 1000, Pueblo Bonito stood at the center of Chacoan culture in the arid region at the intersection of present-day Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico.
The largest site in Chaco Canyon, Pueblo Bonito originally stood four or five stories tall and housed more than 600 rooms, including 35 kivas, the cir- cular structures visible around the perimeter of the large plazas. Chaco residents covered each kiva with a roof, creating a darkened under-
ground space for ceremonial rituals. Why might these spaces be built below ground and separated from the other rooms of the pueblo?
The exact nature of Chacoan ceremonies remains a mystery, but less mysteri- ous are the routines of daily life that sustained the people at Pueblo Bonito for cen- turies. Imagine a woman setting out from the pueblo on a spring day to plant corn, the most important food crop. She might first strap on sandals, like the one shown here, woven from fibers of the yucca plant. To dig a hole for planting corn seeds, our imagined woman might use a digging stick like the one shown here, tipped by the horn of a mountain sheep, tightly bound with sinew to a sturdy cottonwood branch,
Agricultural Settlements and Chiefdoms 15Before 1492
North of the Hohokam and Mogollon cultures, in a region that encompassed southern Utah and Colorado and northern Arizona and New Mexico, the Anasazi culture began to flourish about AD 100. The early Anasazi built pit houses on mesa tops and used irrigation much as their neighbors did to the south. Beginning around AD 1000, some Anasazi began to move to large, multistory cliff dwellings whose spec- tacular ruins still exist at Mesa Verde, Colorado, and elsewhere. Other Anasazi com- munities — like the one known as Pueblo Bonito whose impressive ruins can be vis- ited at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico — erected huge stone-walled pueblos with enough rooms to house everyone in the settlement. (See “Visualizing History,” below.) Anasazi
Pueblo Bonito The largest residential and ceremonial site, containing more than 600 rooms and 35 kivas, in the major Anasazi cultural center of Chaco Canyon in present- day New Mexico.
and covered with animal hide to protect the binding. What do the sandal and digging stick suggest about the interdependence of hunting and agriculture in the daily lives of Chacoans?
Once harvested and dried, corn needed to be ground in order to be cooked and eaten. By looking at the small flat stone (the mano) and the larger stone slab (the metate) shown here, can you imagine how our Chacoan woman used these tools? Some rooms at Pueblo Bonito held numerous grinding stones like the ones shown here. What does such grouping suggest about the corn-grinding process?
To cook the cornmeal she had ground, our imagined woman needed to mix it with water. She might use a ceramic ladle like the one shown here — crafted and decorated by a pottery maker at Chaco — to dip some fresh water from a storage pot. To make a fire, she could use the Chacoan fire starter kit shown here. After kindling a cooking fire, she could heat the cornmeal gruel in a ceramic pot and use the ladle again to transfer servings into small bowls for eating.
Chacoans flourished at Pueblo Bonito by using their knowl- edge and skills to grow and cook corn and to craft vital items such as ceramics and footwear. Can you imagine each step in the creation of the artifacts shown here? Can you imagine the orga- nization and scheduling of daily tasks required to make and use these basic items?
SOURCES: Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico: Richard Alexander Cooke III; Sandal, digging stick, mano and metate, fire starter Kit, and ladle: Courtesy National Park Service, Chaco Culture National Historic Park.
CONNECT TO THE BIG IDEA C How does the lifestyle of Chaco Canyon society compare to indigenous
societies in other regions?
DIGGING STICK
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FIRE STARTER KIT
16 CHAPTER 1 Ancient America Before 1492
pueblos and cliff dwellings typically included one or more kivas used for secret cer- emonies, restricted to men, that sought to communicate with the supernatural world.
Drought began to plague the region about AD 1130, and it lasted for more than half a century, triggering the disappearance of the Anasazi culture. By AD 1200, the large Anasazi pueblos had been abandoned. Some Anasazi migrated toward regions with more reliable rainfall and settled in Hopi, Zuñi, and Acoma pueblos that their descendants in Arizona and New Mexico have occupied ever since.
Woodland Burial Mounds and Chiefdoms. No other ancient Americans created dwellings similar to pueblos, but around 2500 BP, Woodland cultures throughout the Mississippi River watershed began to build burial mounds. The size of the mounds, the labor and organization required to erect them, and differences in the artifacts buried with certain individuals suggest the existence of a social and political hierarchy that archaeologists term a chiefdom. Experts do not know the name of a single chief. But the only way archaeologists can account for the complex and labor-intensive burial mounds is to assume that one person — whom scholars term a chief — commanded the labor and obedience of very large numbers of other people, who made up the chief ’s chiefdom.
Between 2500 BP and 2100 BP, Adena people built hundreds of burial mounds radiating from central Ohio. In the mounds, the Adena usually included grave goods such as spear points and stone pipes as well as thin sheets of mica (a glasslike mineral) crafted into animal or human shapes. Sometimes burial mounds were constructed all at once, but often they were built up slowly over many years.
About 2100 BP, Adena culture evolved into the more elaborate Hopewell cul- ture, which lasted about five hundred years. Centered in Ohio, Hopewell culture extended throughout the enormous drainage of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Hopewell people built larger mounds than did their Adena predecessors and filled
burial mounds Earthen mounds constructed by ancient American peoples, especially throughout the gigantic drainage of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, after about 2500 BP and often used to bury important leaders and to enact major ceremonies.
MEXICAN BALL COURT MODEL The Mexica and other Mesoamerican peoples commonly built
special courts (or playing fields) for their intensely competitive ball games. This rare model of a Mexican ball court, made between 2200 BP and AD 250, shows a game in progress, complete with players and spectators. A few ball courts have been excavated in North America, compelling evidence of the many connections to Mexico. Yale University Art Gallery/Art Resource, NY.
chiefdom Hierarchical social organization headed by a chief. Archaeologists posit that the Woodland cultures were organized into chiefdoms because the construction of their characteristic burial mounds likely required one person having command over the labor of others.
Native Americans in the 1490s 17Before 1492
them with more magnificent grave goods. Burial rituals appear to have brought many people together to honor the dead person and to help build the mound. Grave goods at Hopewell sites testify to the high quality of Hopewell crafts and to a thriving trade network that ranged from present-day Wyoming to Florida. Hopewell culture declined about AD 400 for reasons that are obscure. Archaeolo- gists speculate that bows and arrows, along with increasing reliance on agriculture, made small settlements more self-sufficient and therefore less dependent on the central authority of the Hopewell chiefs who were responsible for the burial mounds.
Four hundred years later, another mound-building culture flourished. The Mississippian culture emerged in the floodplains of the major southeastern river systems about AD 800 and lasted until about AD 1500. Major Mississippian sites, such as the one at Cahokia, included huge mounds with platforms on top for cer- emonies and for the residences of great chiefs. Most likely, the ceremonial mounds and ritual practices derived from Mexican cultural expressions that were brought north by traders and migrants. At Cahokia, skilled farmers supported the large population with ample crops of corn. In addition to mounds, Cahokians erected what archaeologists call “woodhenges” (after the famous Stonehenge in England) — long wooden poles set upright in the ground and carefully arranged in huge circles. Although the purpose of woodhenges is unknown, experts believe that Cahokians probably built them partly for celestial observations.
Cahokia and other Mississippian cultures dwindled by AD 1500. When Europeans arrived, most of the descendants of Mississippian cultures, like those of the Hopewell culture, lived in small dispersed villages supported by hunting and gathering, supplemented by agriculture. Clearly, the conditions that caused large chiefdoms to emerge — whatever they were — had changed, and chiefs no longer commanded the sweeping powers they had once enjoyed.
Native Americans in the 1490s On the eve of European colonization in the 1490s, Native Americans lived throughout North and South America, but their total population is uncertain. Some experts claim that Native Americans inhabiting what is now the United States and Canada numbered 18 million to 20 million, while others place the population at no more than 1 million. A prudent estimate is about 4 million, or about the same as the number of people living on the small island nation of England at that time. The vastness of the territory meant that the overall population density of North America was low, just 60 people per 100 square miles, compared to more than 8,000 in England. Native Americans were spread thin across the land because of their survival strategies of hunting, gathering, and agricul- ture, but regional populations varied (Figure 1.1).
What cultural similarities were shared by the diverse peoples of the Western Hemisphere in the 1490s, and why?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Cahokia The largest ceremonial site in ancient North America located on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River across from present-day St. Louis where thousands of inhabitants built hundreds of earthen mounds between about AD 800 and AD 1500.
18 CHAPTER 1 Ancient America Before 1492
FIGURE 1.1 NATIVE AMERICAN POPULATION IN NORTH AMERICA ABOUT 1492 (ESTIMATED) Just before Europeans arrived, Native American population density varied widely, depending in large part on the availability of natural resources. The Pacific coast, with its rich marine resources, had the highest concentration of people. Overall, the population density of North America was less than 1 percent that of England, which helps explain why Europeans viewed North America as a relatively empty wilderness.
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Southwest 24%
Northeast 19%
Great Plains 14%
California 12%
Southeast 11%
Northwest Coast
9%
Arctic and Sub-Arctic
9%
Great Basin 2%
Eastern and Great Plains Peoples. About one-third of native North Americans inhabited the enormous Woodland region east of the Mississippi River; their population density approximated the average for North America as a whole. Eastern Woodland peoples clustered into three broad linguistic and cultural groups: Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Muskogean.
Algonquian tribes inhabited the Atlantic seaboard, the Great Lakes region, and much of the upper Midwest (Map 1.3). The relatively mild climate along the Atlantic permitted the coastal Algonquians to grow corn and other crops as well as to hunt and fish. Around the Great Lakes and in northern New England, however, cool summers and severe winters made agriculture impractical. Instead, the Abenaki, Penobscot, Chippewa, and other tribes concentrated on hunting and fishing, using canoes both for transportation and for gathering wild rice.
Inland from the Algonquian region, Iroquoian tribes occupied territories cen- tered in Pennsylvania and upstate New York, as well as the hilly upland regions of the
Native Americans in the 1490s 19Before 1492
Carolinas and Georgia. Three features distinguished Iroquoian tribes from their neighbors. First, their success in cultivating corn and other crops allowed them to build permanent settlements, usually consisting of several longhouses housing five to ten families. Second, Iroquoian societies adhered to matrilineal rules of descent. Property of all sorts belonged to women. Women headed family clans and even selected the chiefs (normally men) who governed the tribes. Third, for purposes of war and diplomacy, an Iroquoian confederation — including the Seneca, Onondaga, Mohawk, Oneida, and Cayuga tribes — formed the League of Five Nations, which remained powerful well into the eighteenth century.
MAP 1.3 NATIVE NORTH AMERICANS ABOUT 1500 Distinctive Native American peoples resided throughout the area that, centuries later, became the United States. This map indicates the approximate location of some of the larger tribes about 1500. In the interest of legibility, many other peoples who inhabited North America at the time are omitted from the map.
6,501–13,000
3,001–6,500
1,501–3,000
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701–1,500
0–700
Below sea level0 300 600 kilometers
3000 600 miles
PAC I F I C O C E A N
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20 CHAPTER 1 Ancient America Before 1492
Muskogean peoples spread throughout the woodlands of the Southeast, south of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi. Including the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez tribes, Muskogeans inhabited a bountiful natural environment that pro- vided abundant food from hunting, gathering, and agriculture. Remnants of the earlier Mississippian culture still existed in Muskogean religion. The Natchez, for example, worshipped the sun and built temple mounds modeled after those of their Mississippian ancestors, including Cahokia.
Great Plains peoples accounted for about one out of seven native North Americans. Inhabiting the huge region west of the Eastern Woodland people and east of the Rocky Mountains, many tribes had migrated to the Great Plains within the century or two before the 1490s, forced westward by Iroquoian and Algonquian tribes. Some Great Plains tribes — especially the Mandan and Pawnee — farmed successfully, growing both corn and sunflowers. But the Teton Sioux, Blackfeet, Comanche, Cheyenne, and Crow on the northern plains and the Apache and other nomadic tribes on the southern plains depended on buffalo (American bison) for their subsistence.
Southwestern and Western Peoples. Southwestern cultures included about a quarter of all native North Americans. These descendants of the Mogollon, Hohokam, and Anasazi cultures lived in settled agricultural communities, many of them pueblos. They continued to grow corn, beans, and squash using methods they had refined for centuries.
However, their communities came under attack by a large number of warlike Athapascans who invaded the Southwest beginning around AD 1300. The Athapas- cans — principally Apache and Navajo — were skillful warriors who preyed on the sedentary pueblo Indians, reaping the fruits of agriculture without the work of farming.
About a fifth of all native North Americans resided along the Pacific coast. In California, abundant acorns and nutritious marine life continued to support high population densities, but this abundance retarded the development of agriculture. Similar dependence on hunting and gathering persisted along the Northwest coast, where fishing reigned supreme.
Cultural Similarities. While trading was common, all native North Americans in the 1490s still depended on hunting and gathering for a major portion of their food. Most of them also practiced agriculture. Some used agriculture to supplement hunting and gathering; for others, the balance was reversed. People throughout North America used bows, arrows, and other weapons for hunting and warfare. To express themselves,
they drew on stones, wood, and animal skins; wove baskets and textiles; crafted pottery, beads, and carvings; and created songs, dances, and rituals.
North American life did not include features common in Europe during the 1490s. Native North Americans did not use writing, wheels, or sailing ships; they had no large domesticated animals such as horses
or cows; their only metal was copper. However, the absence of these European conveniences mattered less than Native Americans’ adap- tations to local natural environments and to the social environment
The Mexica: A Mesoamerican Culture 21Before 1492
among neighboring peoples, adaptations that all native North Americans held in common.
It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that native North Americans lived in blissful harmony. Archaeological sites provide ample evidence of violent conflict. Skeletons, like those at Cahokia, bear the marks of wounds as well as of ritualistic human sacrifice. Religious, ethnic, economic, and familial conflicts must have occurred, but they remain in obscurity because they left few archaeological traces. In general, fear and anxiety must have been at least as common among native North Americans as feelings of peace and security.
Native North Americans not only adapted to the natural environment but also changed it in many ways. They built thousands of structures, from small dwellings to massive pueblos and enormous mounds, permanently altering the landscape. Their gathering techniques selected productive and nutritious varieties of plants, thereby shifting the bal- ance of local plants toward useful varieties. The first stages of North American agriculture, for example, probably involved Native Americans gathering wild seeds and then sowing them in a meadow for later harvest. To clear land for planting seeds, native North Americans set fires that burned off thou- sands of acres of forest.
Native North Americans also used fires for hunting. Hunters often started fires to frighten and force together deer, buffalo, and other animals and make them easy to slaughter. Indians also started fires along the edges of woods to burn off shrubby undergrowth, encouraging the growth of tender young plants that attracted deer and other game, bringing them within convenient range of hunters’ weapons. The burns also encouraged the growth of sun-loving food plants that Indians relished, such as blackberries, strawberries, and raspberries.
Because the fires set by native North Americans usually burned until they ran out of fuel or were extinguished by rain or wind, enormous regions of North America were burned over. In the long run, fires created and maintained a diverse and produc- tive natural environment. Fires, like other activities of native North Americans, shaped the landscape of North America long before Europeans arrived in 1492.
The Mexica: A Mesoamerican Culture The vast majority of the 80 million people who lived in the Western Hemisphere in the 1490s inhabited Mesoamerica and South America, where the population approximately equaled that of Europe. Like their much less numerous counterparts north of the Rio Grande, these people lived in a natural environment of
ANCIENT AMERICAN WEAVING This workbasket of a master weaver illustrates the technology of ancient American textile production. Found in a woman’s grave in the Andes dating from one thousand years ago, the workbasket contains tools and thread for every stage of textile production. Weaving — like cooking, hunting, and worship — depended on human knowledge that survived only when passed from an experienced person to a novice. Photograph © 2012 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Charles H. White 02.680.
Why was tribute important in the Mexican empire?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
22 CHAPTER 1 Ancient America Before 1492
tremendous diversity. Among all these cultures, the Mexica stood out. Their empire stretched from coast to coast across central Mexico, encompassing between 8 million and 25 million people (experts disagree about the total population). Their signifi- cance in the history of the New World after 1492 dictates a brief survey of their culture and society.
The Mexica began their rise to prominence about 1325, when small bands set- tled on a marshy island in Lake Texcoco, the site of the future city of Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Mexican empire. Resourceful, courageous, and cold-blooded war- riors, the Mexica were often hired out as mercenaries for richer, more settled tribes.
By 1430, the Mexica succeeded in asserting their dominance over their former allies and leading their own military campaigns in an ever-widening arc of empire building. Despite pockets of resistance, by the 1490s the Mexica ruled an empire that covered more land than Spain and Portugal combined and contained almost three times as many people.
The empire exemplified the central values of Mexican society. The Mexica wor- shipped the war god Huitzilopochtli. Warriors held the most exalted positions in the social hierarchy, even above the priests who performed the sacred ceremonies that won Huitzilopochtli’s favor. In the almost constant battles necessary to defend and extend the empire, young Mexican men exhibited the courage and daring that would allow them to rise in the carefully graduated ranks of warriors. The Mexica consid- ered capturing prisoners the ultimate act of bravery. Warriors usually turned over the captives to Mexican priests, who sacrificed them to Huitzilopochtli by cutting
Mexica An empire that stretched from coast to coast across central Mexico and encompassed as many as 25 million people. Their culture was characterized by steep hierarchy and devotion to the war god Huitzilopochtli.
MEXICAN HUMAN SACRIFICE This graphic portrayal of human sacrifice drawn by a Mexican artist in the sixteenth century shows the typical routine of human sacrifice. The victim climbed the temple steps and then was stretched over a stone pillar to make it easier for the priest to plunge a stone knife into the victim’s chest, cut out the still-beating heart, and offer it to the bloodthirsty gods. Scala/Art Resource, NY.
Conclusion: The World of Ancient Americans 23Before 1492
out their hearts. The Mexica believed that human sacrifice fed the sun’s craving for blood, which kept the sun aflame and prevented the fatal descent of everlasting dark- ness and chaos.
The empire contributed far more to Mexican society than victims for sacrifice. At the most basic level, the empire functioned as a military and political system that collected tribute from subject peoples. The Mexica forced conquered tribes to pay tribute in goods, not money. Tribute redistributed to the Mexica as much as one- third of the goods produced by conquered tribes. It included everything from candi- dates for human sacrifice to textiles and basic food products as well as exotic luxury items such as gold, turquoise, and rare bird feathers.
Tribute reflected the fundamental relations of power and wealth that pervaded the Mexican empire. The relatively small nobility of Mexican warriors, supported by a still smaller priesthood, possessed the military and religious power to command the obedi- ence of thousands of non-noble Mexicans and of millions of non-Mexicans in subju- gated colonies. The Mexican elite exercised their power to obtain tribute and thereby to redistribute wealth from the conquered to the conquerors, from the commoners to the nobility, from the poor to the rich. This redistribution of wealth made possible the achievements of Mexican society that eventually amazed the Spaniards who followed after Christopher Columbus arrived with the first Europeans in AD 1492.
On the whole, the Mexica did not interfere much with the internal government of conquered regions. Instead, they usually permitted the traditional ruling elite to stay in power — so long as they paid tribute. Subjugated communities felt exploited by the constant payment of tribute to the Mexica. The high level of discontent among subject peoples constituted the soft, vulnerable underbelly of the Mexican empire, a fact that Spanish intruders exploited after 1492 to conquer the Mexica.
Conclusion: The World of Ancient Americans Ancient Americans shaped the history of human beings in the New World for more than thirteen thousand years. They established continuous human habitation in the Western Hemisphere from the time the first big-game hunters crossed Beringia until 1492 and beyond. Much of their history remains lost because they relied on oral rather than written communication. But much can be pieced together from artifacts they left behind at camps, kill sites, and ceremonial and residential centers such as Cahokia and Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Mexican empire. Ancient Americans achieved their success through resourceful adaptation to the hemisphere’s many and changing natural environments. They also adapted to social and cultural changes caused by human beings — such as marriages and deaths, as well as political strug- gles and warfare among chiefdoms. Their creativity and artistry are unmistakably documented in their numerous artifacts. Those material objects sketch the only like- nesses of ancient Americans we will ever have — blurred, shadowy images that are indisputably human but forever silent.
tribute The goods the Mexica collected from conquered peoples, from basic food products to candidates for human sacrifice. Tribute engendered resentment among the Mexica’s subjects, creating a vulnerability the Spanish would later exploit.
24 CHAPTER 1 Ancient America Before 1492
When European intruders began arriving in the Western Hemisphere in 1492, their attitudes about the promise of the New World were heavily influenced by the diverse peoples they encountered. Europeans coveted Native Americans’ wealth, labor, and land, and Christian missionaries sought to save their souls. Likewise, Native Americans marveled at such European technological novelties as sailing ships, steel weapons, gunpowder, and horses, while often reserving judgment about Europeans’ Christian religion.
In the centuries following 1492, as the trickle of European strangers became a flood of newcomers from both Europe and Africa, Native Americans and settlers continued to encounter each other. Peaceful negotiations as well as violent conflicts over both land and trading rights resulted in chronic fear and mistrust. While the era of European colonization marked the beginning of the end of ancient America, the ideas, subsistence strategies, and cultural beliefs of native North Americans remained powerful among their descendants for generations and continue to persist to the present.
Before 1492
1 How did ancient peoples’ different approaches to survival contribute to the diversity of Native American cultures?
2 Native Americans both adapted to environmental change in North America and produced changes in the environments around them. Discuss specific examples of such changes.
3 How did the Mexica establish and maintain their expansive empire?
MAKING CONNECTIONS
1 Why do historians rely on the work of archaeologists to write the history of ancient North America? (pp. 4–5)
2 How and why did humans migrate into North America after 15,000 BP? (pp. 5–8)
3 Why did Archaic Native Americans shift from big-game hunting to foraging and hunting smaller animals? (pp. 8–12)
4 How did food-gathering strategies influence ancient cultures across North America? (pp. 12–17)
5 What cultural similarities were shared by the diverse peoples of the Western Hemisphere in the 1490s, and why? (pp. 17–21)
6 Why was tribute important in the Mexican empire? (pp. 21–23)
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
Beringia (p. 6)
Paleo-Indians (p. 6)
Clovis point (p. 7)
hunter-gatherer (p. 8)
Archaic Indians (p. 8)
pueblos (p. 12)
KEY TERMS
Pueblo Bonito (p. 15)
burial mounds (p. 16)
chiefdom (p. 16)
Cahokia (p. 17)
Mexica (p. 22)
tribute (p. 23)
Chapter Review MAKE IT STICK
Go to LearningCurve: See what you know. Then review the key terms and answer the questions.
LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com /roarkconcise
25
STUDENT SITE @ bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
Two babies were born in southern Europe in 1451, separated by about seven hundred miles and a chasm of social, economic, and political power. The baby girl, Isabella, was born in a king’s castle in what is now Spain. The baby boy, Christopher, was born in the humble dwelling of a weaver near Genoa in what is now Italy. Forty-one years later, the lives and aspirations of these two people intersected in southern Spain and permanently changed the
history of the world. Isabella was named for her mother, the wife of the king of
Castile, whose monarchy encompassed the large central region of present-day Spain. As a young girl, Isabella was
well educated, and she became a strong, resolute woman. When her half-brother Henry became king and tried to arrange her marriage, Isabella refused to accept Henry’s choices and maneuvered to marry Ferdinand, the king of Aragon, a region of northeastern Spain. The couple married in 1469, and Isabella became queen when Henry died in 1474.
26
Europeans Encounter the New World, 1492–1600
SPANISH GOLD COIN This Spanish gold coin celebrates Queen Isabella and King
Ferdinand, who patronized the voyages of Christopher Columbus, which eventually transformed Europeans’ knowledge of the world.
Minted around 1500, the coin illustrates the use of gold as the premier form of currency in sixteenth-century Europe. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.
Europe in the Age of Exploration (pp. 28–31)
A Surprising New World in the Western Atlantic (pp. 31–35)
Spanish Exploration and Conquest (pp. 35–45)
The New World and Sixteenth-Century Europe (pp. 45–47)
Conclusion: The Promise of the New World for Europeans (p. 48)
2
CHAPTER OUTLINE QUICK START
Quickly learn what is important in this chapter by doing the following:
• READ the Chapter Outline to see how the chapter is organized. • SKIM the Chronology on the next page to see what will be covered.
When you are ready, read the chapter and the Essential Questions for each section. Then use the Chapter Review to check what you know.
1480 Portuguese ships reach Congo.
1488 Bartolomeu Dias rounds Cape of Good Hope.
1492 Christopher Columbus lands in the Caribbean.
1493 Columbus’s second voyage to New World.
1494 Treaty of Tordesillas.
1497 John Cabot searches for Northwest Passage.
1498 Vasco da Gama sails to India.
1513 Vasco Núñez de Balboa crosses Isthmus of Panama.
1517 Protestant Reformation begins in Germany.
1519 Hernán Cortés searches for wealth in Mexico.
Ferdinand Magellan sets out to sail around the world.
1520 Mexica in Tenochtitlán revolt against Spaniards.
1521 Cortés conquers Mexica.
1532 Francisco Pizarro begins conquest of Peru.
1535 Jacques Cartier explores St. Lawrence River.
1539 Hernando de Soto explores southeastern North America.
1540 Francisco Vásquez de Coronado starts to explore Southwest and Great Plains.
1542 Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo explores California coast.
1549 Repartimiento reforms replace encomienda.
1565 St. Augustine, Florida, settled.
1576 Martin Frobisher explores northern Canadian waters.
1587 English settle Roanoke Island.
1598 Juan de Oñate explores New Mexico.
1599 Acoma pueblos revolt against Oñate.
Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand battled to unite the monarchies of Spain under their rule, to complete the long campaign known as the Reconquest to eliminate Muslim strongholds on the Iberian Peninsula, and to purify Christianity. In their intense efforts to defend Christianity, persecute Jews, and defeat Muslims, Isabella and Ferdinand traveled throughout their realm, meeting local notables, hearing appeals and complaints, and impressing all with their regal splendor.
Tagging along in the royal cavalcade of advisers, servants, and hangers-on that moved around Spain in 1485 was Christopher Columbus, a deeply religious man obsessed with obtaining support for his scheme to sail west across the Atlantic Ocean to reach China and Japan. An experienced sailor, Columbus had become convinced that it was possible to reach the riches of the East by sailing west. Columbus finally won an audience with the monarchs in January 1486. They rejected his plan. Doggedly, year after year, Columbus kept trying to interest Isabella until mid-April 1492, when she summoned him and agreed to support his risky scheme, hoping to expand the wealth and influence of her monarchy.
Columbus hurriedly organized his expedition, and just before sunrise on August 3, 1492, three ships under his command caught the tide out of a harbor in southern Spain and sailed west. Barely two months later, in the predawn moonlight of October 12, 1492, he glimpsed an island on the western horizon. At daybreak, Columbus rowed ashore, and as the curious islanders crowded around, he claimed possession of the land for Isabella and Ferdinand.
Columbus’s encounters with Isabella and those islanders in 1492 transformed the history of the world and unexpectedly made Spain the most important European power in the Western Hemisphere for more than a century. Long before 1492, other Europeans had restlessly expanded the limits of the world known to them, and their efforts helped make possible Columbus’s voyage. But without Isabella’s sponsorship, it is doubtful that Columbus could have made his voyage. With her support and his own unflagging determination, Columbus blazed a watery trail to a world that neither he nor anyone else in Europe knew existed. As Isabella, Ferdinand, and subsequent Spanish monarchs sought to reap the rewards of what they consid- ered their emerging empire in the West, they created a distinctively Spanish colonial society that conquered and killed Native Americans, built new institutions, and extracted great wealth that enriched the Spanish monarchy and made Spain the envy of other Europeans.
CHRONOLOGY
1492–160028 CHAPTER 2 Europeans Encounter the New World
Europe in the Age of Exploration Historically, the East — not the West — attracted Europeans. Wealthy Europeans developed a taste for luxury goods from Asia and Africa, and merchants competed to satisfy that desire. As Europeans traded with the East and with one
another, they acquired new information about the world they inhabited. A few people — sailors, merchants, and aristocrats — took the risks of exploring beyond the limits of the world known to Europeans. Those risks could be deadly, but some- times they paid off in new information, new opportunities, and eventually the discovery of a world entirely new to Europeans.
Mediterranean Trade and European Expansion. From the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries, spices, silk, carpets, ivory, and gold traveled over- land from Persia, Asia Minor, India, and Africa and then funneled into continental
Europe through Mediterranean trade routes (Map 2.1). Dominated primarily by the Italian cities of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, this lucrative trade enriched Italian merchants and bankers. The vitality of the Mediterranean trade offered mer- chants few incentives to look for alternatives. New routes to the East and the discovery of new lands were the stuff of fantasy.
Preconditions for turning fantasy into reality developed in fifteenth-century Europe. In the mid-fourteenth century, a catastrophic epidemic of bubonic plague (or the Black Death, as it was called) killed about a third of the European population. This devastating pestilence had major long-term consequences. By drastically reducing the population, it made Europe’s limited supply of food more plentiful for sur- vivors. Many survivors inherited property from plague vic- tims, giving them new chances for advancement.
Understandably, most Europeans perceived the world as a place of alarming risks where the delicate balance of health, harvests, and peace could quickly be tipped toward disaster by epidemics, famine, and violence. Most people protected themselves from the constant threat of calamity by worship- ping the supernatural, by living amid kinfolk and friends, and by maintaining good relations with the rich and power- ful. But the insecurity and uncertainty of fifteenth-century European life also encouraged a few people to take greater risks, such as embarking on dangerous sea voyages through uncharted waters to points unknown.
In European societies, exploration promised fame and fortune to those who succeeded, whether they were kings or commoners. Monarchs such as Isabella hoped to enlarge
Why did European exploration expand dramatically in the fifteenth century?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
SPANISH TAPESTRY This detail from a lavish sixteenth-century tapestry depicts Columbus (kneeling) receiving a box of jewels from Queen Isabella (whose husband, King Ferdinand, stands slightly behind her) in appreciation for his voyages to the New World. © Julio Donoso/Sygma/Corbis.
Black Death A disease that in the mid-fourteenth century killed about a third of the European population and left a legacy of increased food and resources for the survivors as well as a sense of a world in precarious balance.
Europe in the Age of Exploration 291492–1600
their realms and enrich their dynasties by sponsoring journeys of exploration. More territory meant more subjects who could pay more taxes, provide more soldiers, and participate in more commerce, magnifying the monarch’s power and prestige. Voyages of exploration also could stabilize the monarch’s regime by divert- ing unruly noblemen toward distant lands. Some explorers, such as Columbus, were commoners who hoped to be elevated to the aristocracy as a reward for their daring achievements.
Scientific and technological advances also helped set the stage for exploration. The invention of movable type by Johannes Gutenberg around 1450 in Germany made printing easier and cheaper, stimulating the diffusion of information, including news of discoveries, among literate Europeans such as Isabella and Columbus. By 1400, crucial navigational aids employed by maritime explorers like Columbus were already available: compasses; hourglasses; and the astrolabe and quadrant, which were devices for determining latitude. The Portuguese were the first to use these technological advances in a campaign to sail beyond the limits of the world known to Europeans.
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cloth linen
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precious stones sugar
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perfumes porcelain
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a 1497
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Constantinople
Tunis
Tripoli Alexandria
Cairo
Mecca
Goa
Calicut
Baghdad
Samarkand
Zanzibar Mombasa
Canton
Malacca
MAP 2.1 EUROPEAN TRADE ROUTES AND PORTUGUESE EXPLORATION IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY The trade of Italian cities from Asia was slowly undermined during the fifteenth century by Portuguese explorers who hopscotched along the coast of Africa and eventually found a sea route that opened the rich trade of the East to Portuguese merchants.
30 CHAPTER 2 Europeans Encounter the New World 1492–1600
A Century of Portuguese Exploration. With only 2 percent of the popula- tion of Christian Europe, Portugal devoted far more energy and wealth to the geo- graphic exploration of the world between 1415 and 1460 than all other European countries combined. As a Christian kingdom, Portugal cooperated with Spain in the Reconquest, the centuries-long drive to expel the Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula. The religious zeal that propelled the Reconquest also justified expansion into what the Portuguese considered heathen lands.
The most influential advocate of Portuguese exploration was Prince Henry the Navigator, son of the Portuguese king. From 1415 until his death in 1460, Henry col- lected the latest information about sailing techniques and geography, supported new crusades against the Muslims, sought fresh sources of trade to fatten Portuguese pocketbooks, and pushed explorers to go farther still.
Neither the Portuguese nor anybody else in Europe knew the immensity of Africa or the length of its coastline, which fronted the Atlantic for more than seven thousand miles. At first, Portuguese mariners cautiously hugged the west coast of Africa, seldom venturing beyond sight of land. By 1434, they had reached the northern edge of the Sahara Desert, where they learned to ride strong westerly currents before catching favorable easterly winds that turned them back toward land, which allowed them to reach Cape Verde by 1444.
To stow the supplies necessary for long sea voyages and to withstand the batter- ing of waves in the open ocean, the Portuguese developed the caravel, a fast, sturdy ship that became explorers’ vessel of choice. In caravels, Portuguese mariners sailed into and around the Gulf of Guinea and as far south as the Congo by 1480.
Fierce African resistance confined Portuguese expeditions to coastal trading posts, where they bartered successfully for gold, slaves, and ivory. Powerful African kingdoms welcomed Portuguese trading ships loaded with iron goods, weapons, textiles, and ornamental shells. Portuguese merchants learned that establishing rela- tively peaceful trading posts on the coast offered more profit than attempting violent conquest and colonization of inland regions. In the 1460s, the Portuguese used African slaves to develop sugar plantations on the Cape Verde Islands, inaugurating an association between enslaved Africans and plantation labor that would be trans- planted to the New World in the centuries to come.
About 1480, Portuguese explorers, eager to bypass the Mediterranean mer- chants, began a conscious search for a sea route to Asia. In 1488, Bartolomeu Dias sailed around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa and hurried back to Lisbon with the exciting news that it appeared to be possible to sail on to India and China. In 1498, after ten years of careful preparation, Vasco da Gama commanded
IVORY SALTCELLAR This exquisitely carved sixteenth-century ivory saltcellar combines African materials, craftsmanship, and imagery in an artifact for Portuguese tables. Designed to hold table salt in the central globe, the saltcellar dramatized African brutality and quietly suggested the beneficial influence of Portuguese in Africa. Archivio Fotografico del Museo Preistorico Etnografico L. Pigorini, Roma.
Reconquest The centuries-long drive to expel Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula undertaken by the Christian kingdoms of Spain and Portugal. The military victories of the Reconquest helped the Portuguese gain greater access to sea routes.
A Surprising New World in the Western Atlantic 311492–1600
the first Portuguese fleet to sail to India. Portugal quickly capitalized on the com- mercial potential of da Gama’s new sea route. By the early sixteenth century, the Portuguese controlled a far-flung commercial empire in India, Indonesia, and China (collectively referred to as the East Indies). Their new sea route to the East elimi- nated overland travel and allowed Portuguese merchants to charge much lower prices for the Eastern goods they imported.
Portugal’s African explorations during the fifteenth century broke the monop- oly of the old Mediterranean trade with the East, dramatically expanded the world known to Europeans, established a network of Portuguese outposts in Africa and Asia, and developed methods of sailing the high seas that Columbus employed on his revolutionary voyage west.
A Surprising New World in the Western Atlantic The Portuguese and other experts believed that sailing west across the Atlantic to Asia was literally impossible. The European discovery of America required someone bold enough to believe that the experts were wrong. That person was Christopher Columbus. His explorations inaugurated a geographic revolution that forever altered Europeans’ understanding of the world and its peoples, including themselves. Columbus’s landfall in the Caribbean initiated a thriving exchange between the people, ideas, cultures, and institutions of the Old and New Worlds that continues to this day.
The Explorations of Columbus. Columbus went to sea when he was about fourteen, and eventually made his way to Lisbon, where he gained access to maps and information about the tricky currents and winds in the Atlantic. Like other educated Europeans, Columbus believed that the earth was a sphere and that theoretically it was possible to reach the East Indies by sailing west. With flawed calculations, he estimated that Asia was only about 2,500 miles away, a shorter distance than Portuguese ships routinely sailed between Lisbon and the Congo. In fact, the shortest distance to Japan from Europe’s jumping-off point was nearly 11,000 miles. Convinced by his erroneous calculations, Columbus became obsessed with a scheme to prove he was right.
In 1492, after years of unsuccessful lobbying in Portugal, Spain, England, and France, Columbus finally won financing for his journey from the Spanish monarchs, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. They saw Columbus’s venture as an inexpensive gamble: The potential loss was small, but the potential gain was huge.
After frantic preparation, Columbus and his small fleet — the Niña and Pinta, both caravels, and the Santa María, a larger merchant vessel — headed west. Six weeks after leaving the Canary Islands, Columbus landed on a tiny Caribbean island about three hundred miles north of the eastern tip of Cuba.
How did Columbus’s discoveries help revolu- tionize Europeans’ understanding of global geography?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Gulf of Mexico
C a r i b b e a n S e a
AT L A N T I C O C E A NCuba
Santiago (Jamaica) Santo
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12 Oct. 1492 First landing on San Salvador I.
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COLUMBUS’S FIRST VOYAGE TO THE NEW WORLD, 1492–1493
32 CHAPTER 2 Europeans Encounter the New World 1492–1600
Columbus claimed possession of the island for Spain and named it San Salvador, in honor of the Savior, Jesus Christ. He called the islanders “Indians,” assuming that they inhabited the East Indies somewhere near Japan or China. The islanders called themselves Tainos, which in their language meant “good” or “noble.” An agricul- tural people, the Tainos grew cassava, corn, cotton, tobacco, and other crops. Instead of dressing in the finery Columbus had expected to find in the East Indies, the Tainos “all . . . go around as naked as their mothers bore them,” Columbus wrote. Although Columbus concluded that the Tainos “had no religion,” in reality they worshipped gods they called zemis, ancestral spirits who inhabited natural objects such as trees and stones. The Tainos had no riches. “It seemed to me that they were a people very poor in everything,” Columbus wrote.
What the Tainos thought about Columbus and his sailors we can only surmise, since they left no written documents. At first, Columbus got the impression that the Tainos believed the Spaniards came from heaven. But after six weeks of encounters, Columbus decided that “the people of these lands do not understand me nor do I, nor anyone else that I have with me, [understand] them.” The confused communica- tion between the Spaniards and the Tainos suggests how strange each group seemed to the other. Columbus’s perceptions of the Tainos were shaped by European atti- tudes, ideas, and expectations, just as the Tainos’ perceptions of the Europeans were no doubt colored by their own culture.
Columbus and his men understood that they had made a momentous discovery. In 1493, when Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand learned Columbus’s news, they were overjoyed. With a voyage that had lasted barely eight months, Columbus appeared to have catapulted Spain into a serious challenger to Portugal, whose explorers had not yet sailed to India or China.
Soon after Columbus returned to Spain, the Spanish monarchs rushed to obtain the pope’s support for their claim to the new lands in the West. When the pope, a Spaniard, complied, the Portuguese feared that their own claims to recently discov- ered territories were in jeopardy. To protect their claims, the Portuguese and Spanish monarchs negotiated the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. The treaty drew an imagi- nary line eleven hundred miles west of the Canary Islands (Map 2.2). Land discov- ered west of the line (namely, the islands that Columbus discovered and any addi- tional land that might be found) belonged to Spain; Portugal claimed land to the east (namely, its African and East Indian trading empire).
Isabella and Ferdinand moved quickly to realize the promise of their new claims. In the fall of 1493, they dispatched Columbus once again, this time with a fleet of seventeen ships and more than a thousand men who planned to locate the Asian mainland, find gold, and get rich. Before Columbus died in 1506, he returned to the New World two more times (in 1498 and 1502) without relinquishing his belief that the East Indies were there, someplace. Other explorers continued to search for a pas- sage to the East or some other source of profit. Before long, however, prospects of beating the Portuguese to Asia began to dim along with the hope of finding vast hoards of gold.
Nonetheless, Columbus’s discoveries forced sixteenth-century Europeans to think about the world in new ways. He proved it was possible to sail from Europe to the western rim of the Atlantic and return to Europe. Most important, Columbus’s voyages demon- strated that lands and peoples entirely unknown to Europeans lay across the Atlantic.
Tainos The Indians who inhabited San Salvador and many Caribbean islands and who were the first people Columbus encountered after making landfall in the New World.
Treaty of Tordesillas The treaty negotiated in 1494 to delineate land claims in the New World. The treaty drew an imaginary line west of the Canary Islands; land discovered west of the line belonged to Spain, and land to the east belonged to Portugal.
A Surprising New World in the Western Atlantic 331492–1600
The Geographic Revolution and the Columbian Exchange. Within thirty years of Columbus’s initial discovery, Europeans’ understanding of world geog- raphy underwent a revolution. An elite of perhaps twenty thousand people with access to Europe’s royal courts and trading centers learned the exciting news about global geography. But it took a generation of additional exploration before they could comprehend the larger contours of Columbus’s discoveries.
European monarchs hurried to stake their claims to the newly discovered lands. In 1497, King Henry VII of England sent John Cabot to look for a Northwest Passage to the Indies across the North Atlantic (see Map 2.2). Cabot reached the tip of Newfoundland, which he believed was part of Asia, and hurried back to England, where he assembled a small fleet and sailed west in 1498. But he was never heard from again.
Three thousand miles to the south, a Spanish expedition landed on the north- ern coast of South America in 1499 accompanied by Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian businessman. In 1500, Pedro Álvars Cabral commanded a Portuguese fleet bound for the Indian Ocean that accidentally made landfall on the east coast of Brazil as it looped westward into the Atlantic.
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rd esillas, 1494
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Ponce de León 1513
Ayllón 1526Cabrillo 1542–1543
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Marquette & Jolliet 1673
Champlain 1615
La Salle 1679–1682
Pizarro 1531
Hudson 1609
Hudson 1610
Cortés 1519
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de Soto 1539–1542
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MAP 2.2 EUROPEAN EXPLORATION IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA This map illustrates the approximate routes of early European explorations of the New World.
READING THE MAP: Which countries were most actively exploring the New World? Which countries were exploring later than others?
CONNECTIONS: What were the motivations behind the explorations? What were the motivations for colonization?
Map Activity
34 CHAPTER 2 Europeans Encounter the New World 1492–1600
By 1500, European experts knew that several large chunks of land cluttered the western Atlantic. A few cartographers speculated that these chunks were connected to one another in a landmass that was not Asia. In 1507, Martin Waldseemüller, a German cartographer, published the first map that showed the New World separate from Asia; he named the land America, in honor of Amerigo Vespucci.
Two additional discoveries confirmed Waldseemüller’s speculation. In 1513, Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and reached the Pacific Ocean. Clearly, more water lay between the New World and Asia. Ferdinand Magellan discov- ered just how much water when he led an expedition to circumnavigate the globe in 1519. Sponsored by Spain, Magellan’s voyage took him first to the New World, around the southern tip of South America, and into the Pacific. Crossing the Pacific took almost four months, decimating his crew with hunger and thirst. Magellan himself was killed by Philippine tribesmen. A remnant of his expedition continued on to the Indian Ocean and managed to transport a cargo of spices back to Spain in 1522.
In most ways, Magellan’s voyage was a disaster. One ship and 18 men crawled back from an expedition that had begun with five ships and more than 250 men. But the geo- graphic information it provided left no doubt that America was a continent separated from Asia by the enormous Pacific Ocean. Magellan’s voyage made clear that it was pos- sible to sail west to reach the East Indies, but that was a terrible way to go. After Magellan, most Europeans who sailed west set their sights on the New World, not on Asia.
Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean anchored the western end of what might be imagined as a sea bridge that spanned the Atlantic, connecting the Western Hemisphere to Europe. Somewhat like the Beringian land bridge traversed by the first Americans millennia earlier (see chapter 1), the new sea bridge reestablished a connection between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. The Atlantic Ocean, which had previously iso- lated America from Europe, became an aquatic highway, thanks to sailing technology, intrepid seamen, and their European sponsors. This new sea bridge launched the Columbian exchange, a transatlantic trade of goods, people, and ideas that has contin- ued ever since.
Columbian exchange The transatlantic exchange of goods, people, and ideas that began when Columbus arrived in the Caribbean, ending the age-old separation of the hemispheres.
MAIZE GODDESS In 1493, Columbus told Spaniards about an amazingly productive New World plant he called maize, his version of the Taino word mahiz, which means “life-giver.” This maize, or corn, goddess was crafted in Peru about a thousand years before Columbus arrived in the New World. Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY.
Spanish Exploration and Conquest 351492–1600
Spaniards brought novelties to the New World that were com- monplace in Europe, including Christianity, iron technology, sail- ing ships, firearms, wheeled vehicles, and horses. Unknowingly, they also carried many Old World microorganisms that caused devastating epidemics of smallpox, measles, and other diseases that killed the vast majority of Indians during the sixteenth cen- tury and continued to decimate survivors in later centuries. Euro- pean diseases made the Columbian exchange catastrophic for Native Americans. In the long term, these diseases helped trans- form the dominant peoples of the New World from descendants of Asians, who had inhabited the hemisphere for millennia, to descendants of Europeans and Africans, the recent arrivals from the Old World.
Ancient American goods, people, and ideas made the return trip across the Atlantic. Europeans were introduced to New World foods such as corn and potatoes that became important staples in European diets, especially for poor people. Columbus’s sailors became infected with syphilis in sexual encounters with New World women and unwittingly carried the deadly bacteria back to Europe. New World tobacco created a European fashion for smok- ing that ignited quickly and has yet to be extinguished. But for almost a generation after 1492, this Columbian exchange did not reward the Spaniards with the riches they yearned to find.
Spanish Exploration and Conquest During the sixteenth century, the New World helped Spain become the most powerful monarchy in both Europe and the Americas. Initially, Spaniards enslaved Caribbean tribes and put them to work growing crops and mining gold. But the prof- its from these early ventures barely covered the costs of maintaining the settlers. After almost thirty years of exploration, the promise of Columbus’s discovery seemed illusory.
In 1519, however, that promise was spectacularly fulfilled by Hernán Cortés’s march into Mexico. By about 1545, Spanish conquests extended from northern Mexico to southern Chile, and New World riches filled Spanish treasure chests. Cortés’s expedition served as the model for Spaniards’ and other Europeans’ expectations that the New World could yield bonanza profits for its conquerors while forced labor and deadly epidemics decimated native populations.
The Conquest of Mexico. Hernán Cortés, an obscure nineteen-year-old Spaniard, arrived in the New World in 1504. Throughout his twenties, he fought in the conquest of Cuba and elsewhere in the Caribbean. In 1519, the governor of Cuba authorized Cortés to organize an expedition of about six hundred men and
SMALLPOX VICTIM IN HUT This sixteenth-century Mexican drawing shows a victim of smallpox lying in a hut made of branches. Spaniards brought smallpox to Mexico, where it sickened and killed millions, while greatly disfiguring and demoralizing many of those who survived. Arxiu Mas.
How did New Spain’s distinctive colonial popu- lation shape its economy and society?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
36 CHAPTER 2 Europeans Encounter the New World 1492–1600
eleven ships to investigate rumors of a fabulously wealthy kingdom somewhere in the interior of the mainland.
A charismatic and confident man, Cortés could not speak any Native American language. Landing first on the Yucatán peninsula with his ragtag army, he had the good fortune to receive from a local chief the gift of a young girl named Malinali. She spoke several native languages, including Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica, the most powerful people in what is now Mexico and Central America (see chapter 1). Malinali, whom the Spaniards called Marina, soon learned Spanish and became Cortés’s interpreter. “Without her help,” wrote one of the Spaniards who accompanied Cortés, “we would not have understood the language of New Spain and Mexico.”
In Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Mexican empire, the emperor Montezuma heard about some strange creatures sighted along the coast. (Montezuma and his people called themselves Mexica.) The emperor sent representatives to bring the strangers large quan- tities of food. But along with the food, the Mexica also brought the Spaniards another gift, a “disk in the shape of a sun, as big as a cartwheel and made of very fine gold,” as a Mexican recalled. Here was conclusive evidence that the rumors of fabulous riches heard by Cortés had some basis in fact.
In August 1519, Cortés marched inland to find Montezuma. Leading about 350 men, Cortés had to live off the land, establishing peaceful relations with indigenous tribes when he could and killing them when he thought it necessary. On November 8, 1519, Cortés reached Tenochtitlán, where Montezuma wel- comed him and showered the Spaniards with lavish hospitality. Quickly, Cortés took Montezuma hostage and held him under house arrest, hoping to make him a puppet through whom the Spaniards could rule the Mexican empire. This uneasy peace existed for several months until one of Cortés’s men led a brutal massacre of many Mexican nobles, causing the people of Tenochtitlán to revolt. Montezuma was killed, and the Mexica mounted a ferocious assault on the Spaniards. On June 30, 1520, Cortés and about a hundred other Spaniards fought their way out of Tenochtitlán and retreated about one hundred miles to Tlaxcala, a stronghold of bitter enemies of the Mexica. The Tlaxcalans — who had long resented Mexican power — allowed Cortés to regroup, obtain rein- forcements, and plan a strategy to conquer Tenochtitlán.
In the spring of 1521, Cortés and thousands of Indian allies laid siege to the Mexican capital. With a relentless, scorched-earth strategy, Cortés finally defeated the last Mexican defenders on August 13, 1521. The great capital of the Mexican empire “looked as if it had been ploughed up,” one of Cortés’s soldiers remembered.
How did a few hundred Spaniards so far away from home defeat millions of Indians fighting on their home turf ? For one thing, the Spaniards had superior military technol- ogy that partially offset the Mexicans’ numerical advantages. They fought with weapons of iron and steel against the Mexicans’ stone, wood, and copper. The muscles of Mexican warriors could not match the power of cannons and muskets fueled by gunpowder.
European viruses proved to be even more powerful weapons. Smallpox arrived in Mexico with Cortés, and in the ensuing epidemic thousands of Mexicans died and many others became too sick to fight. The sickness spread along the network of trade and tribute feeding Tenochtitlán, causing many to fear that their gods had aban- doned them. “Cut us loose,” one Mexican pleaded, “because the gods have died.”
CORTÉS’S INVASION OF TENOCHTITLÁN, 1519–1521
Cortés’s original route, 1519 Cortés’s retreat, 1520 Cortés’s return route, 1520–1521
0 2550 km.
0 25 50 mi.
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Otumba Texcoco
Tenochtitlán Cholula Tlaxcala
Zautla Jalapa
Veracruz
Gulf of Mexico
Spanish Exploration and Conquest 371492–1600
The Spaniards’ concept of war also favored them. Mexicans tended to consider war a way to impose their tribute system on conquered people and to take captives for sacrifice. They believed that the high cost of continuing to fight would cause their adversaries to surrender and pay tribute. By contrast, Spaniards sought total victory by destroying their enemy’s ability to fight.
Politics proved decisive in Cortés’s victory over the Mexicans. Cortés shrewdly exploited the tensions between the Mexica and the people they ruled in their empire (see chapter 1). Cortés reinforced his small army with thousands of Indian allies who were eager to seek revenge against the Mexica. Hundreds of thousands of other Indi- ans aided Cortés by failing to come to the Mexicans’ defense. In the end, the political tensions created by the Mexican empire proved to be its crippling weakness.
The Search for Other Mexicos. Lured by their insatiable appetite for gold, Spanish conquistadors (soldiers who fought in conquests) quickly fanned out from Tenochtitlán in search of other sources of treasure. The most spectacular prize fell to Francisco Pizarro, who conquered the Incan empire in Peru. The Incas controlled a vast, complex region that contained more than nine million people and stretched along the western coast of South America for more than two thousand miles. In 1532, Pizarro and his army of fewer than two hundred men captured the Incan emperor Atahualpa and held him hostage. As ransom, the Incas gave Pizarro the largest treasure yet produced by the conquests: gold and sil- ver equivalent to half a century’s worth of precious-metal production in Europe. With the ransom safely in their hands, the Spaniards mur- dered Atahualpa. The Incan treasure proved that at least one other Mexico did indeed exist, and it spurred the Spaniards’ search for others.
MEXICAN WARRIORS BATTLE SPANISH CONQUISTADORS This sixteenth-century painting illustrates the war clubs, spears, and feather shields Mexican warriors deployed against the steel swords and armor of attacking Spaniards. The Spaniards’ horses (which appear here almost like deer) gave them superior height, mobility, and power in combat. Album/Art Resource, NY.
conquistadors Term, literally meaning “conqueror,” that refers to the Spanish explorers and soldiers who conquered lands in the New World.
Incan empire A region under the control of the Incas and their emperor, Atahualpa, that stretched along the western coast of South America and contained more than nine million people and a wealth in gold and silver.
38 CHAPTER 2 Europeans Encounter the New World 1492–1600
Juan Ponce de León sailed to Florida in 1521 to find riches, only to be killed in battle with Calusa Indians. A few years later, Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón explored the Atlantic coast north of Florida to present-day South Carolina. In 1526, he established a small settlement on the Georgia coast that he named San Miguel de Gualdape, the first Spanish attempt to establish a foothold in what is now the United States. This settlement was soon swept away by sickness and hostile Indians. In 1528, Pánfilo de Narváez surveyed the Gulf coast from Florida to Texas, but his expedition ended disastrously with a shipwreck near present-day Gal- veston, Texas.
In 1539, Hernando de Soto, a seasoned conquistador, set out with more than six hundred men to find another Peru in North America. Landing in Florida, de Soto slashed his way through much of southeastern North America for three years. After brutal slaughter of many Native Ameri- cans and much hardship, de Soto died in 1542. His men buried him in the Mississippi River and turned back to Mexico, disappointed.
Tales of the fabulous wealth of the mythical Seven Cities of Cíbola also lured Francisco Vásquez de Coronado to search the Southwest and Great Plains of North America. In 1540, Coronado left northern Mexico with more than three hundred Spaniards, a thousand Indians, and a priest who claimed to know the way to what he called “the greatest and best of the discoveries.” Cíbola turned out to be a small Zuñi pueblo of about a hundred families. When the Zuñi shot arrows at the Spaniards, Coronado attacked the pueblo and routed the defenders after a hard battle. Convinced that the
rich cities must lie somewhere over the horizon, Coronado kept moving all the way to central Kansas before deciding in 1542 that the rumors he had pursued were just that.
The same year Coronado abandoned his search for Cíbola, Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo’s maritime expedition sought to find wealth along the coast of California. Cabrillo died on Santa Catalina Island, offshore from present-day Los Angeles, but his men sailed on to Oregon, where a ferocious storm forced them to turn back toward Mexico.
These probes into North America by de Soto, Coronado, and Cabrillo persuaded other Spaniards that although enormous territories stretched northward from Mex- ico, their inhabitants had little to loot or exploit. After a generation of vigorous explo- ration, the Spaniards concluded that there was only one Mexico and one Peru.
Spanish Outposts in Florida and New Mexico. Disappointed by the explorers’ failure to discover riches in North America, the Spanish monarchy insisted that a few settlements be established in Florida and New Mexico to give a token of reality to its territorial claims. Settlements in Florida would have the additional
ZUÑI DEFEND PUEBLO AGAINST CORONADO This sixteenth-century drawing by a Mexican artist shows Zuñi bowmen fighting back against Coronado’s men and the entreaties of Christian missionaries. The drawing depicts a Zuñi defender aiming his arrow at a Mexican missionary armed with a crucifix, a rosary, and the Bible. Hunterian Museum Library, University of Glasgow. Glasgow University Library, Department of Special Collections.
Spanish Exploration and Conquest 391492–1600
benefit of protecting Spanish ships from pirates and privateers who lurked along the southeastern coast, waiting for the Spanish treasure fleet sailing toward Spain.
In 1565, the Spanish king sent Pedro Menéndez de Avilés to found St. Augustine in Florida, the first permanent European settlement within what became the United States. By 1600, St. Augustine had a population of about five hundred, the only remaining Spanish beachhead on North America’s vast Atlantic shoreline.
More than sixteen hundred miles west of St. Augustine, the Spaniards founded another outpost in 1598. Juan de Oñate led an expedition of about five hundred people to settle northern Mexico, now called New Mexico, and claim the booty rumored to exist there. When Oñate and his companions reached pueblos near present-day Albuquerque and Santa Fe, he sent out scouting parties to find the legendary treasures of the region. Meanwhile, many of his soldiers planned to mutiny, and relations with the Indians dete- riorated. When Indians in the Acoma pueblo revolted against the Spaniards, Oñate ruth- lessly suppressed the uprising, killing eight hundred men, women, and children. Although Oñate’s response to the Acoma pueblo revolt reconfirmed the Spaniards’ military superiority, he did not bring peace or stability to the region. After another pueblo revolt occurred in 1599, many of Oñate’s settlers returned to Mexico, leaving New Mexico a small, dusty assertion of Spanish claims to the North American Southwest.
New Spain in the Sixteenth Century. For all practical purposes, Spain was the dominant European power in the Western Hemisphere during the sixteenth cen- tury (Map 2.3). Portugal claimed the giant territory of Brazil under the Tordesillas treaty but was far more concerned with exploiting its hard-won trade with the East Indies than with colonizing the New World. England and France were absorbed by domestic and diplomatic concerns in Europe and largely lost interest in America until late in the century. In the decades after 1519, the Spaniards created the distinc- tive colonial society of New Spain, which showed other Europeans how the New World could be made to serve the purposes of the Old.
The Spanish monarchy gave the conquistadors permission to explore and plunder what they found. (See “Documenting the American Promise,” page 42.) The crown took one-fifth, called the “royal fifth,” of any loot confiscated and allowed the conquerors to divide the rest. In the end, most conquistadors received very little after the plunder was divided among leaders such as Cortés and his favorite officers. To compensate his disap- pointed, battle-hardened soldiers, Cortés gave them towns the Spaniards had subdued.
The distribution of conquered towns institutionalized the system of encomienda, which empowered the conquistadors to rule the Indians and the lands in and around their towns. Encomienda transferred to the Spanish encomendero (the man who “owned” the town) the tribute that the town had previously paid to the Mexican empire. In theory, the encomendero was supposed to guarantee order and justice, be responsible for the Indians’ material welfare, and encourage them to become Christians.
Catholic missionaries worked to convert the Indians. They fervently believed that God expected them to save the Indians’ souls by convincing them to abandon their old sinful beliefs and to embrace the one true Christian faith. But after baptizing tens of thousands of Indians, the missionaries learned that many Indians continued to worship their own gods. Most priests came to believe that the Indians were lesser beings inher- ently incapable of fully understanding Christianity.
Acoma pueblo revolt Revolt against the Spaniards by Indians living at the Acoma pueblo in 1599. Juan de Oñate violently suppressed the uprising, but the Indians revolted again later that year, after which many Spanish settlers returned to Mexico.
New Spain Land in the New World held by the Spanish crown. Spain pioneered techniques of using New World colonies to strengthen the kingdom in Europe and would become a model for other European nations.
encomienda A system for governing used during the Reconquest and in New Spain. It allowed the Spanish encomendero, or “owner” of a town, to collect tribute from the town in return for providing law and order and encouraging “his” Indians to convert to Christianity.
40 CHAPTER 2 Europeans Encounter the New World 1492–1600
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Hispaniola (1492)
Puerto Rico (1502)
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Potosí (1544)
Cuzco (1535)
Santiago (1541)
Buenos Aires (1535)
Lima (1535)
Panama City (1519)
Caracas (1567)
St. Augustine (1565)
Zacatecas
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MAP 2.3 SIXTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPEAN COLONIES IN THE NEW WORLD Spanish control spread throughout Central and South America during the sixteenth century, with the important exception of Portuguese Brazil. North America, though claimed by Spain under the Treaty of Tordesillas, remained peripheral to Spain’s New World empire.
READING THE MAP: Track Spain’s efforts at colonization by date. How did political holdings, the physical layout of the land, and natural resources influence where the Spaniards directed their energies?
CONNECTIONS: What was the purpose of the Treaty of Tordesillas? How might the location of silver and gold mines have affected Spain’s desire to assert its claims over regions still held by Portugal after 1494, and Spain’s interest in California, New Mexico, and Florida?
Map Activity
In practice, encomenderos were far more interested in what the Indians could do for them than in what they or the missionaries could do for the Indians. Encomenderos subjected the Indians to chronic overwork, mis- treatment, and abuse. According to one Spaniard, “Everything [the Indi-
ans] do is slowly done and by compulsion. They are malicious, lying, [and] thievish.” Economically, however, encomienda recognized a fundamental real- ity of New Spain: The most important treasure the Spaniards could plunder from the New World was not gold but uncompensated Indian labor.
The practice of coerced labor in New Spain grew directly out of the Spaniards’ assumption that they were superior to the Indians. As one missionary put it, the Indians “are more stupid than asses and refuse to improve in anything.” Therefore, most Spaniards assumed, Indians’ labor should be organized by and for their
Spanish Exploration and Conquest 411492–1600
conquerors. Spaniards seldom hesitated to use violence to punish and intimidate recalcitrant Indians.
Encomienda engendered two groups of influential critics. A few missionaries were horrified at the brutal mistreatment of the Indians. “What will [the Indians] think about the God of the Christians,” Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas asked, when they see their friends “with their heads split, their hands amputated, their intestines torn open? . . . Would they want to come to Christ’s sheepfold after their homes had been destroyed, their children imprisoned, their wives raped, their cities devastated, their maidens deflowered, and their provinces laid waste?” Las Casas and other out- spoken missionaries softened few hearts among the encomenderos, but they did win some sympathy for the Indians from the Spanish monarchy and royal bureaucracy. The Spanish monarchy moved to abolish encomienda in an effort to replace swash- buckling old conquistadors with royal bureaucrats as the rulers of New Spain.
In 1549, a reform called the repartimiento began to replace encomienda. It lim- ited the labor an encomendero could command from his Indians to forty-five days per year from each adult male. The repartimiento, however, did not challenge the principle of forced labor, nor did it prevent encomenderos from continuing to cheat, mistreat, and overwork their Indians. Many Indians were put to work in silver mines. Mining was grueling and dangerous for the workers, but very profitable for the Spaniards who supervised them: During the entire sixteenth century, precious-metal exports from New Spain to Spain were worth twenty-five times more than the next most important export, leather hides.
For Spaniards, life in New Spain after the conquests was relatively easy. As one colonist wrote to his brother in Spain, “Don’t hesitate [to come]. . . . This land [New Spain] is as good as ours [in Spain], for God has given us more here than there, and we shall be better off.” During the century after 1492, about 225,000 Spaniards settled in the colonies. Virtually all of them were poor young men of common (non-noble) line- age who came directly from Spain. Laborers and artisans made up the largest propor- tion, but soldiers and sailors were also numerous. Men vastly outnumbered women.
The gender and number of Spanish settlers shaped two fundamental features of the society of New Spain. First, Europeans never made up more than 1 or 2 percent of the total population. Although Spaniards ruled New Spain, the population was almost wholly Indian. Second, the shortage of Spanish women meant that Spanish men frequently mar- ried Indian women or used them as concubines. The relatively few women from Spain usually married Spanish men, contributing to a tiny elite defined by European origins.
The small number of Spaniards, the masses of Indians, and the frequency of inter- marriage created a steep social hierarchy defined by perceptions of national origin and race. Natives of Spain — peninsulares (people born on the Iberian Peninsula) — enjoyed the highest social status in New Spain. Below them but still within the white elite were creoles, the children born in the New World to Spanish men and women. Together, pen- insulares and creoles made up barely 1 or 2 percent of the population. Below them on the social pyramid was a larger group of mestizos, the offspring of Spanish men and Indian women, who accounted for 4 or 5 percent of the population. Some mestizos worked as artisans and labor overseers and lived well, and a few rose into the ranks of the elite, espe- cially if their Indian ancestry was not obvious from their skin color. Most mestizos, how- ever, were lumped with the Indians, the enormous bottom slab of the social pyramid.
creoles Children born to Spanish parents in the New World who, with the peninsulares, made up the tiny portion of the population at the top of the colonial social hierarchy.
42 CHAPTER 2 Europeans Encounter the New World 1492–1600
According to the Requerimiento, Indians who failed to welcome Spanish conquest and all its blessings deserved to die. Conquistadors were commanded to read the Requerimiento to the Indians before any act of conquest.
On the part of the King . . . [and] queen of [Spain], subduers of the barbarous nations, we their ser- vants notify and make known to you, as best we can, that the Lord our God, living and eternal, created the heaven and the earth, and one man and one woman, of whom you and we, and all the men of the world, were and are descendants. . . .
God our lord gave charge to one man called St. Peter, that he should be lord and superior to all the men in the world, that all should obey him, and that he should be the head of the whole human race, wherever men should live . . . and he gave him the world for his king- dom and jurisdiction. . . .
[The Pope] who succeeded that St. Peter as lord of the world . . . made donation of these islands and main- land to the . . . king and queen [of Spain]. . . .
So their highnesses are kings and lords of these islands and mainland by virtue of this donation; and . . . almost all those to whom this has been notified, have received and served their highnesses, as lords and kings, in the way that subjects ought to do, with good will, without any resistance, immediately, without delay, when they were informed of the aforesaid facts. And also they received and obeyed the priests whom their highnesses sent to preach to them and to teach them our holy faith; and all these, of their own free will, with- out any reward or condition have become Christians, and are so, and their highnesses have joyfully and gra- ciously received them, and they have also commanded them to be treated as their subjects and vassals; and you too are held and obliged to do the same. Wherefore, as best we can, we ask and require that you consider
Justifying Conquest The immense riches Spain reaped from its New World empire came largely at the expense of Native Americans. A few individual Spaniards raised their voices against the brutal exploitation of the Indians. Their criticisms prompted the Spanish monarchy to formulate an offi cial justifi cation of conquest that, in effect, blamed the Indians for resisting Spanish dominion.
Documenting the American Promise
DOCUMENT 1
DOCUMENT 2
Montecino’s 1511 Sermon In 1511, a Dominican friar named Antón Montecino delivered a blistering sermon that astonished the Spaniards gathered in the church in Santo Domingo, headquarters of the Spanish Caribbean.
Your greed for gold is blind. Your pride, your lust, your anger, your envy, your sloth, all blind. . . . You are in mortal sin. And you are heading for damnation. . . . For you are destroying an innocent people. For they are God’s people, these innocents, whom you destroyed. By what right do you make them die? Mining gold for you in your mines or working for you in your fields, by what right do you unleash enslaving wars upon them? They have lived in peace in this land before you came, in peace in their own homes. They did nothing to harm you to cause you to slaughter them wholesale. . . .
Are you not under God’s command to love them as you love yourselves?
Are you out of your souls, out of your minds? Yes. And that will bring you to damnation.
SOURCE: Zvi Dor-Ner, Columbus and the Age of Discovery (New York: William Morrow, 1991), 220–21.
42
The Requerimiento In 1512 and 1513, King Ferdinand met with philoso- phers and theologians, and concluded that the holy duty to spread Christianity justified conquest. To buttress this claim, the king had his advisers prepare the Requerimiento.
what we have said to you, and that you take the time that shall be necessary to understand and deliberate upon it, and that you acknowledge the Church as the ruler and superior of the whole world, and the high priest called Pope, and in his name the king and queen [of Spain] our lords, in his place, as superiors and lords and kings of these islands and this mainland . . . and that you consent and permit that these religious fathers declare and preach to you. . . .
If you do so . . . we . . . shall receive you in all love and charity, and shall leave you, your wives and your children and your lands free without servitude, that you may do with them and with yourselves freely what you like and think best, and they shall not compel you to turn to Christians unless you yourselves, when informed of the truth, should wish to be converted to our holy Catholic faith. . . . And besides this, their highnesses award you many privileges and exemptions and will grant you many benefits.
But if you do not do this or if you maliciously delay in doing it, I certify to you that with the help of God we shall forcefully enter into your country and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the
Church and of their highnesses; we shall take you and your wives and your children and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as their highnesses may command; and we shall take away your goods and shall do to you all the harm and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey and refuse to receive their lord and resist and contradict him; and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault, and not that of their high- nesses, or ours, or of these soldiers who come with us.
The Indians who heard the Requerimiento could not understand Spanish, of course. No native documents survive to record the Indians’ thoughts upon hearing the Spaniards’ official justification for conquest, even when it was translated into a language they recog- nized. But one conquistador reported that when the Requerimiento was translated for two chiefs in Colombia, they responded that if the pope gave the king so much territory that belonged to other people, “the Pope must have been drunk.”
SOURCE: Adapted from A. Helps and M. Oppenheim, eds., The Spanish Conquest in America and Its Relation to the History of Slavery and to the Government of the Colonies, 4 vols. (London and New York, 1900–1904), 1:264–67.
Questions for Analysis and Debate 1 How did the Requerimiento address the criticisms of Montecino? According to the
Requerimiento, why was conquest justified? What was the source of the Indians’ resistance to conquest?
2 What arguments might a critic like Montecino have used to respond to the Requerimiento’s justification of conquest? What arguments might the Mexican leader Montezuma have made against those of the Requerimiento?
3 Was the Requerimiento a faithful expression or a cynical violation of the Spaniards’ Christian faith?
CONNECT TO THE BIG IDEA C How did the Spanish view the conquest of the Americas?
43
44 CHAPTER 2 Europeans Encounter the New World 1492–1600
The society of New Spain established the precedent for what would become a pronounced pattern in the European colonies of the New World: a society stratified sharply by social origin and race. All Europeans of whatever social origin considered themselves superior to Native Americans; in New Spain, they were a dominant minority in both power and status.
Visual Activity
MIXED RACES These eighteenth-century paintings illustrate forms of racial mixture common in the sixteenth century. In the first painting, a Spanish man and an Indian woman have a mestizo son; in the fourth, a Spanish man and a woman of African descent have a mulatto son. Can you detect any meanings of racial categories in the clothing? Schalklwijk/Art Resource, NY.
READING THE IMAGE: What do these paintings reveal about social status in New Spain?
CONNECTIONS: How do the paintings illustrate the power the Spaniards exercised in their New World colonies? What were some other aspects of colonial society that demonstrated Spanish domination?
The New World and Sixteenth-Century Europe 451492–1600
The Toll of Spanish Conquest and Colonization. By 1560, the major centers of Indian civilization had been conquered, their leaders overthrown, their religion held in contempt, and their people forced to work for the Spaniards. Profound demoralization pervaded Indian society.
Adding to the culture shock of conquest and colonization was the deadly toll of European diseases. As conquest spread, the Indians suc- cumbed to epidemics of measles, smallpox, and respiratory illnesses. They had no immunity to these diseases because they had not been exposed to them before the arrival of Europeans. By 1570, the Indian population of New Spain had fallen about 90 percent from what it was when Columbus arrived, a catastrophe unequaled in human history.
For the Spaniards, Indian deaths meant that the most valuable resource of New Spain — Indian labor — dwindled rapidly. By the last quarter of the sixteenth century, Spanish colonists began to import African slaves. In the years before 1550, while Indian labor was still adequate, only 15,000 slaves were imported from Africa. The relatively high cost of African slaves kept imports low, totaling approximately 36,000 from 1550 to the end of the century. During the sixteenth century, New Spain continued to rely primarily on a shrinking number of Indians.
The New World and Sixteenth- Century Europe The riches of New Spain helped make the sixteenth century the Golden Age of Spain. After Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand died, their sixteen-year-old grandson became King Charles I of Spain in 1516. Three years later, just as Cortés ventured into Mexico, King Charles became Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. His empire encompassed more territory than that of any other European monarch. He used the wealth of New Spain to promote his interests in sixteenth-century Europe. He also sought to defend orthodox Christianity from the insurgent heresy of the Protestant Reformation. The power of the Spanish monarchy spread the message throughout sixteenth-century Europe that a New World empire could bankroll Old World ambitions.
The Protestant Reformation and the Spanish Response. In 1517, Martin Luther, an obscure Catholic priest in central Germany, initiated the Protestant Reformation by publicizing his criticisms of the Catholic Church. Luther’s ideas won the sympathy of many Catholics, but they were considered extremely dangerous by church officials and by monarchs such as Charles V, who believed that just as the church spoke for God, they ruled for God.
Luther preached a doctrine known as “justification by faith”: Individual Chris- tians could obtain salvation and life everlasting only by having faith that God would save them. Giving monetary offerings to the church, following the orders of priests,
How did Spain’s conquests in the New World shape Spanish influence in Europe?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Protestant Reformation The reform movement that began in 1517 with Martin Luther’s critiques of the Roman Catholic Church, which precipitated an enduring schism that divided Protestants from Catholics.
46 CHAPTER 2 Europeans Encounter the New World 1492–1600
or participating in church rituals would not bring believers closer to heaven. The only true source of information about God’s will was the Bible, not the church. By reading the Bible, any Christian could learn as much about God’s commandments as any priest. Indeed, Luther called for a “priesthood of all believers.”
In effect, Luther charged that the Catholic Church was in many respects fraudu- lent. Luther declared that the church had neglected its true purpose of helping indi- vidual Christians understand the spiritual realm revealed in the Bible and had wasted its resources in worldly conflicts of politics and wars. Luther hoped his ideas would reform the Catholic Church, but instead they ruptured forever the unity of Christianity in western Europe.
Charles V pledged to exterminate Luther’s Protestant heresies. The wealth pour- ing into Spain from the New World fueled his efforts to defend orthodox Catholic faith against Protestants, as well as against any other challenge to Spain’s supremacy. As the most powerful monarch in Europe, Charles V, followed by his son and succes- sor Philip II, assumed responsibility for upholding the existing order of sixteenth- century Europe.
American wealth, particularly Mexican silver, fueled Spanish ambitions, but Charles V’s and Philip II’s expenses for constant warfare far outstripped the revenues arriving from New Spain. The monarchy’s ambitions impoverished the vast majority of Spain’s population and brought the nation to the brink of bankruptcy. By the end of the sixteenth century, interest payments on royal debts swallowed two-thirds of the crown’s annual revenues. In retrospect, the riches from New Spain proved a short-term blessing but a long-term curse.
Most Spaniards, however, looked upon New Spain as a glorious national achieve- ment that displayed Spain’s superiority over Native Americans and other Europeans. They had added enormously to their own knowledge and wealth. They had built mines, cities, Catholic churches, and even universities on the other side of the Atlantic. These military, religious, and economic achievements gave them great pride and confidence.
Europe and the Spanish Example. The lessons of sixteenth-century Spain were not lost on Spain’s European rivals. Spain proudly displayed the fruits of its New World conquests. In 1520, for example, the German artist Albrecht Dürer wrote in his diary that he “marveled over the subtle ingenuity of the men in these distant lands [of New Spain]” who created such things as “a sun entirely of gold, a whole fathom [six feet] broad.” But the most exciting news about “the men in these distant lands” was that they could serve the interests of Europeans, as Spain had shown. With a few notable exceptions, Europeans saw the New World as a place for the expansion of European influence, a place where, as one Spaniard wrote, Europeans could “give to those strange lands the form of our own.”
France and England tried to follow Spain’s example. Both nations warred with Spain in Europe, preyed on Spanish treasure fleets, and ventured to the New World, where they too hoped to find an undiscovered passageway to the East Indies or another Mexico or Peru.
In 1524, France sent Giovanni da Verrazano to scout the Atlantic coast of North America from North Carolina to Canada, looking for a Northwest Passage (see Map 2.2). Eleven years later, France probed farther north with Jacques Cartier’s voyage up the
The New World and Sixteenth-Century Europe 471492–1600
St. Lawrence River. Encouraged, Cartier returned to the region with a group of settlers in 1541, but the colony they established — like the search for a Northwest Passage — came to nothing.
English attempts to follow Spain’s lead were slower but equally ill-fated. Not until 1576, almost eighty years after John Cabot’s voyages, did the English try again to find a Northwest Passage. This time Martin Frobisher sailed into the frigid waters of northern Canada (see Map 2.2). Like many other explorers mes- merized by the Spanish example, Frobisher believed he had found gold. But the tons of “ore” he hauled back to England proved worthless, and English interests shifted southward to the giant region on the northern margins of New Spain.
English explorers’ attempts to establish North American settlements were no more fruitful than their search for a northern route to China. Sir Humphrey Gilbert led expeditions in 1578 and 1583 that made feeble efforts to found colonies in Newfoundland until Gilbert vanished at sea. Sir Walter Raleigh organized an expedi- tion in 1585 to settle Roanoke Island off the coast of present-day North Carolina. The first group of explorers left no colonists on the island, but in 1587 Raleigh sent a contingent of more than one hundred settlers to Roanoke under John White’s leader- ship. White went back to England for supplies, and when he returned to Roanoke in 1590, the colonists had disappeared, leaving only the word Croatoan (whose meaning is unknown) carved in a tree. The Roanoke colonists most likely died from a combi- nation of natural causes and unfriendly Indians. By the end of the century, England had failed to secure a New World beachhead.
ALGONQUIAN CEREMONIAL DANCE When English artist John White visited the coast of present-day North Carolina in 1585 as part of Raleigh’s expedition, he painted this Algonquian ceremonial dance. This is one of the few likenesses of sixteenth- century North American Indians that were drawn from direct observation. Trustees of the British Museum/
Bridgeman Art Library.
ROANOKE SETTLEMENT, 1587–1590
0 50 km.
0 25 50 mi.
Albem arle
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Roanoke R.
ATLANTIC OCEAN
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Cape Hatteras
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48 CHAPTER 2 Europeans Encounter the New World 1492–1600
Conclusion: The Promise of the New World for Europeans The sixteenth century in the New World belonged to the Spaniards who employed Columbus and to the Indians who greeted him as he stepped ashore. The Portuguese, whose voyages to Africa and Asia set the stage for Columbus’s voyages, won the important consolation prize of Brazil, but Spain hit the jackpot. Isabella of Spain helped initiate the Columbian exchange between the New World and the Old, which massively benefited first Spain and later other Europeans and which continues to this day. The exchange also subjected Native Americans to the ravages of European dis- eases and Spanish conquest. Spanish explorers, conquistadors, and colonists forced the Indians to serve the interests of Spanish settlers and the Spanish monarchy. The exchange illustrated one of the most important lessons of the sixteenth century: After millions of years, the Atlantic no longer was an impermeable barrier separating the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. After the voyages of Columbus, European sailing ships regularly bridged the Atlantic and carried people, products, diseases, and ideas from one shore to the other.
No European monarch could forget the seductive lesson taught by Spain’s example: The New World could vastly enrich the Old. Spain remained a New World power for almost four centuries, and its language, religion, culture, and institutions left a permanent imprint. By the end of the sixteenth century, however, other European monarchies had begun to contest Spain’s dominion in Europe and to make forays into the northern fringes of Spain’s New World preserve. To reap the benefits the Spaniards enjoyed from their New World domain, the others had to learn a difficult lesson: how to deviate from Spain’s example. That discovery lay ahead.
While England’s rulers eyed the huge North American hinterland of New Spain, they realized that it lacked the two main attractions of Mexico and Peru: incredible material wealth and large populations of Indians to use as workers. In the absence of gold and silver booty and plentiful native labor in North America, England would need to find some way to attract colonizers to a region that — compared to New Spain — did not appear very promising. During the next century, England’s leaders overcame these dilemmas by developing a distinctive colonial model, one that encouraged land-hungry settlers from England and Europe to engage in agriculture and that depended on other sources of unfree labor: indentured servants from Europe and slaves from Africa.
Conclusion: The Promise of the New World for Europeans 491492–1600
1 How did the Columbian exchange lead to redistributions of power and popula- tion? Discuss these changes, being sure to cite examples from both contexts.
2 Why did the Spanish conquest of the Mexica succeed, and how did the Spaniards govern the conquered territory to maintain their dominance?
3 How did the Spaniards’ and Indians’ perceptions of each other shape their interactions? How did perceptions change over time?
4 How did the wealth generated by the Spanish conquest of the New World influence interest in European colonial exploration throughout the six- teenth century?
MAKING CONNECTIONS
1 Why did European exploration expand dramatically in the fifteenth century? (pp. 28–31)
2 How did Columbus’s discoveries help revolutionize Europeans’ under- standing of global geography? (pp. 31–35)
3 How did New Spain’s distinctive colonial population shape its economy and society? (pp. 35–45)
4 How did Spain’s conquests in the New World shape Spanish influence in Europe? (pp. 45–47)
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
Black Death (p. 28)
Reconquest (p. 30)
Tainos (p. 32)
Treaty of Tordesillas (p. 32)
Columbian exchange (p. 34)
conquistadors (p. 37)
KEY TERMS
Incan empire (p. 37)
Acoma pueblo revolt (p. 39)
New Spain (p. 39)
encomienda (p. 39)
creoles (p. 41)
Protestant Reformation (p. 45)
Chapter Review MAKE IT STICK
Go to LearningCurve: See what you know. Then review the key terms and answer the questions.
LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com /roarkconcise
49
STUDENT SITE @ bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
I n December 1607, after arriving at Jamestown with the first English colonists, Captain John Smith was captured by warriors of Powhatan, the supreme chief of about fourteen thousand Algonquian Indians who inhabited the coastal plain of present-day Virginia.
According to Smith, Powhatan “feasted him after their best barbarous manner.” Then, Smith recalled, “two great stones were brought before Powhatan: then as many [Indians] as could layd hands on [Smith], dragged him to [the stones],
and thereon laid his head, and being ready with their
50
The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1601–1700
TOBACCO CUTTER Planters in the southern colonies of British
North America shipped tobacco to England, where tobacconists used machines like the one shown here to chop the leaves into small pieces for smoking. Tobacco merchants often flavored the chopped leaves with oils, herbs, and spices. The illustration on the side of the cutter refers to the Native American origins of tobacco. Niemeyer Nederlands Tabacologisch Museum.
An English Colony on Chesapeake Bay (pp. 52–56)
A Tobacco Society (pp. 56–64)
Hierarchy and Inequality in the Chesapeake (pp. 64–68)
Toward a Slave Labor System (pp. 68–73)
Conclusion: The Growth of English Colonies Based on Export Crops and Slave Labor (pp. 73–74)
3
CHAPTER OUTLINE QUICK START
Quickly learn what is important in this chapter by doing the following:
• READ the Chapter Outline to see how the chapter is organized. • SKIM the Chronology on the next page to see what will be covered.
When you are ready, read the chapter and the Essential Questions for each section. Then use the Chapter Review to check what you know.
1601–1700
1606 Virginia Company receives royal charter.
1607 English colonists found Jamestown; Pocahontas “rescues” John Smith.
1607– Starvation plagues 1610 Jamestown.
1612 John Rolfe begins to plant tobacco in Virginia.
1617 First commercial tobacco shipment to England.
Pocahontas dies in England.
1618 Powhatan dies; Opechancanough becomes Algonquian chief.
1619 First Africans arrive in Virginia.
House of Burgesses begins to meet.
1622 Opechancanough leads first uprising in Virginia.
1624 Virginia becomes royal colony.
1630s Barbados colonized by English.
1632 Colony of Maryland founded.
1634 Colonists begin to arrive in Maryland.
1640s Barbados colonists grow sugarcane with slave labor.
1644 Opechancanough leads second uprising.
1660 Navigation Act requires colonial products be shipped only to English ports.
Virginia law defines slavery as inherited, lifelong servitude.
1663 Carolina colony founded.
1670 Charles Towne, South Carolina, founded.
1670– Slave labor system emerges 1700 in Carolina and Chesapeake
colonies.
1676 Bacon’s Rebellion.
1680 Pueblo Revolt.
clubs, to beate out his braines.” At that moment, Pocahontas, Powhatan’s eleven-year-old daughter, rushed forward and “got [Smith’s] head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death.” Pocahontas, Smith wrote, “hazarded the beating out of her owne braines to save mine, and . . . so prevailed with her father, that I was safely conducted [back] to James towne.”
Historians believe that this episode happened more or less as Smith described it. But Smith did not understand why Pocahontas acted as she did. Most likely, what Smith interpreted as Pocahontas’s saving him from certain death was instead a ritual enacting Powhatan’s willingness to incorporate Smith and the white strangers at Jamestown into Powhatan’s empire. By appearing to save Smith, Pocahontas was probably acting out Smith’s new status as an adopted member of Powhatan’s extended family.
After Smith returned to England about two years later, relations between Powhatan and the English colonists deteriorated into bloody raids. In 1613, the colonists captured Pocahontas and held her hostage at Jamestown. Within a year, she converted to Christianity and married a colonist named John Rolfe. After giving birth to a son named Thomas, Pocahontas, her husband, and the new baby sailed for England in the spring of 1616. There, promot- ers of the Virginia colony dressed her as a proper Englishwoman and arranged for her to go to a ball attended by the king and queen.
Pocahontas died in England in 1617. Her son, Thomas, ultimately returned to Virginia, but the world he and his descendants inhabited was shaped by a reversal of the power ritualized when his mother “saved” John Smith. By the end of the seventeenth century, Native Americans no longer dominated the newcomers who arrived in the Chesapeake with John Smith.
During the seventeenth century, English colonists learned how to deviate from the example of New Spain (see chapter 2) by growing tobacco, a crop Native Americans had cultivated in small quantities for centuries. The new settlers grew enormous quantities of tobacco and exported most of it to England. Instead of incorporating Powhatan’s people into their emerging society, the settlers encroached on Indian land and built new societies on the foundation of tobacco and transatlantic trade.
CHRONOLOGY
52 CHAPTER 3 The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1601–1700
Producing large crop surpluses for export required hard labor and people who were willing — or could be forced — to do it. While New Spain took advantage of Native American labor, for the most part the Native Americans in British North America refused to be conscripted into the English colonists’ fields. Instead, the settlers depended on the labor of family mem- bers, indentured servants, and, by the last third of the seventeenth century, African slaves.
By the end of the century, the southern colonies had become sharply different both from the world dominated by Powhatan when the Jamestown settlers first arrived and from seventeenth-century English society. In ways unimaginable to Powhatan, Pocahontas, and John Smith, the colonists paid homage to the international market and the English monarch by working mightily to make a good living growing crops for sale to the Old World.
An English Colony on Chesapeake Bay In 1606, England’s King James I granted the Virginia Com- pany more than six million acres in North America in hopes of establishing the English equivalent of Spain’s New World empire. Enthusiastic reports from the Roanoke voy-
ages twenty years earlier (see chapter 2) claimed that in Virginia “the earth bringeth foorth all things in aboundance . . . without toile or labour.” Investors hoped to profit by growing some valuable exotic crop, finding gold or silver, or raiding Spanish treasure ships. Their hopes failed to confront the difficulties of adapting English desires and expectations to the New World already inhabited by Native Americans. The Jamestown settlement struggled to survive for nearly two decades, until the
Why did Powhatan behave as he did toward the English colonists?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
POCAHONTAS IN ENGLAND Shortly after Pocahontas and her husband, John Rolfe, arrived in England in 1616, she posed for this portrait dressed in English clothing. The portrait captures the dual novelty of England for Pocahontas and of Pocahontas for the English. The mutability of Pocahontas’s identity is displayed in the identification of her as “Matoaks” or “Rebecka.” National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/Art Resource, NY.
An English Colony on Chesapeake Bay 531601–1700
royal government replaced the private Virginia Company, which never earned a profit for its investors.
The Fragile Jamestown Settlement. Although Spain claimed all of North America under the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas (see chapter 2), King James believed that England could encroach on the outskirts of Spain’s New World empire. In effect, his land grant to the Virginia Company, a joint-stock company, was a royal license to poach on both Spanish claims and Powhatan’s chiefdom.
English merchants had pooled their capital and shared risks for many years by using joint-stock companies for trading voyages to Europe, Asia, and Africa. The London investors of the Virginia Company, however, had larger ambitions: They hoped to found an empire that would strengthen England both overseas and at home. Richard Hakluyt, a strong proponent of colonization, claimed that a colony would provide work for swarms of poor “valiant youths rusting and hurtfull by lack of employment” in England. Colonists could buy English goods and supply products that England now had to import from other nations.
In December 1606, the ships Susan Constant, Discovery, and Godspeed carried 144 Englishmen toward Virginia. A few weeks after they arrived at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay on April 26, 1607, they went ashore on a small peninsula in the midst of the territory ruled by Powhatan and quickly built a fort, the first building in Jamestown. The fort showed the colonists’ awareness that they needed to protect themselves. For weeks, the settlers and Powhatan’s Algonquian warriors skirmished repeatedly.
The settlers soon confronted dangerous, invisible threats: disease and starva- tion. During the summer, many of the Englishmen lay “night and day groaning in every corner of the Fort most pittiful to heare,” wrote George Percy, one of the set- tlers. The colonists increased their misery by bickering among themselves, leaving crops unplanted and food supplies shrinking. “For the most part [the settlers] died of meere famine,” Percy wrote; “there were never Englishmen left in a forreigne Countrey in such miserie as wee were in this new discovered Virginia.”
Powhatan’s people came to the rescue of the weakened and demoralized Englishmen. Early in September 1607, they began to bring corn to the colony for barter. Accustomed to eating food derived from wheat, English people consid- ered corn the food “of the barbarous Indians which know no better.” The fam- ished colonists soon overcame their prejudice against corn. Indians’ corn acquired by both trade and plunder managed to keep 38 of the original settlers alive until a fresh supply of food and 120 more colonists arrived from England in January 1608.
It is difficult to exaggerate the fragility of the early Jamestown settlement. One colonist lamented that “this place [is] a meere plantacion of sorrowes and Cropp of trobles, having been plentifull in nothing but want and wanting nothing but plenty.” The Virginia Company sent hundreds of new settlers to Jamestown each year, each of them eager to find the paradise promised by the company. But most settlers went instead to early graves.
Virginia Company A joint-stock company organized by London investors in 1606 that received a land grant from King James I in order to establish English colonies in North America. Investors hoped to enrich themselves and strengthen England economically and politically.
Jamestown The first permanent English settlement in North America, established in 1607 by colonists sponsored by the Virginia Company.
Algonquian Indians People who inhabited the coastal plain of present-day Virginia, near the Chesapeake Bay, when English colonists first settled the region.
54 CHAPTER 3 The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1601–1700
Cooperation and Conflict between Natives and Newcomers. Powhatan’s people stayed in contact with the English settlers but maintained their distance. The Virginia Company boasted that the settlers bought from the Indians “the pearles of earth [corn] and [sold] to them the pearles of heaven [Christianity].” In fact, few Indians converted to Christianity, and the English devoted scant effort to proselytizing. Marriage between Indian women and English men also was rare, despite the acute shortage of English women in Virginia in the early years. Few set- tlers other than John Smith bothered to learn the Indians’ language.
Powhatan’s people regarded the English with suspicion, for good reason. Although the settlers often made friendly overtures to the Indians, they did not hesi- tate to use their guns and swords to enforce English notions of proper Indian behavior. When Indians refused to trade their corn to the settlers, the English pillaged their villages and confiscated their corn.
SECOTAN VILLAGE This engraving was copied from an original drawing John White made in 1585 when he visited the village of Secotan on the coast of North Carolina. The drawing shows daily life in the village, which may have resembled one of Powhatan’s settlements. This drawing conveys the message that Secotan was orderly, settled, religious, harmonious, and peaceful, and very different from English villages. Princeton University Libraries, Department of Rare Books and Special
Collections.
READING THE IMAGE: What does this image say about Indian life in Secotan?
CONNECTIONS: How did Indian society differ from the English tobacco society that emerged later?
Visual Activity
An English Colony on Chesapeake Bay 551601–1700
The Indians retaliated against English violence, but for fifteen years they did not organize an all-out assault on the European intruders, probably for several reasons. Although Christianity held few attractions for the Indians, the power of the settlers’ God impressed them. One chief told John Smith that “he did believe that our [English] God as much exceeded theirs as our guns did their bows and arrows.” Powhatan probably concluded that these powerful strangers would make better allies than enemies.
They also traded with his people, usually exchanging European goods for corn. Native Virginians quickly recognized the superiority of the intruders’ iron and steel knives, axes, and pots, and they eagerly traded corn for them.
But why were the settlers unable to feed themselves for more than a decade? First, as the staggering death rate suggests, many settlers were too sick to be productive. Second, very few farmers came to Virginia in the early years. Instead, most of the new- comers were gentlemen and their servants who, in John Smith’s words, “never did know what a day’s work was.” Smith declared repeatedly that in Virginia “there is no country to pillage [as in New Spain]. . . . All you can expect from [Virginia] must be by labor.”
The persistence of the Virginia colony created difficulties for Powhatan’s chief- dom. Steady contact between natives and newcomers spread European diseases among the Indians, who suffered deadly epidemics. To produce enough corn for trade with the English required the Indian women to spend more time and effort growing crops. But from the Indians’ viewpoint, the most important fact about the always-hungry English colonists was that they were not going away.
Powhatan died in 1618, and his brother Opechancanough replaced him as supreme chief. In 1622, Opechancanough organized an all-out assault on the English settlers. As an English colonist observed, “the savages . . . fell upon us murdering and killing everybody they could reach[,] sparing neither women nor children.” In all, the Indians killed 347 colonists, nearly a third of the English population. But the attack failed to dislodge the colonists. Instead, in the years to come the settlers unleashed a murderous campaign of Indian extermination that pushed the Indians beyond the small circumference of white settlement. After 1622, most colonists con- sidered Indians their perpetual enemies.
From Private Company to Royal Government. In the immediate after- math of the 1622 uprising, the survivors became demoralized because, as one explained, the “massacre killed all our Countrie . . . [and] burst the heart of all the rest.” The disaster prompted a royal investigation of affairs in Virginia. The investiga- tors discovered that the appalling mortality among the colonists was caused more by disease and mismanagement than by Indian raids. In 1624, King James revoked the charter of the Virginia Company and made Virginia a royal colony, subject to the direction of the royal government rather than to the company’s private investors, an arrangement that lasted until 1776.
The king now appointed the governor of Virginia and his council, but most other features of local government established under the Virginia Company remained intact. In 1619, for example, the company had inaugurated the House of Burgesses,
royal colony A colony ruled by a king or queen and governed by officials appointed to serve the monarchy and represent its interests.
House of Burgesses Organ of government in colonial Virginia made up of an assembly of representatives elected by the colony’s male inhabitants. It was established by the Virginia Company and continued by the crown after Virginia was made a royal colony.
56 CHAPTER 3 The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1601–1700
an assembly of representatives (called burgesses) elected by the colony’s male inhab- itants. Under the new royal government, laws passed by the burgesses had to be approved by the king’s bureaucrats in England rather than by the company. Other- wise, the House of Burgesses continued as before, acquiring distinction as the oldest representative legislative assembly in the English colonies. Under the new royal government, all free adult men in Virginia could vote for the House of Burgesses, giving it a far broader and more representative constituency than the English House of Commons.
The demise of the Virginia Company marked the end of the first phase of colo- nization of the Chesapeake region. From the first 105 adventurers in 1607, the popu- lation had grown to about 1,200 by 1624. Despite mortality rates higher than during the worst epidemics in London, new settlers still came. Their arrival and King James’s willingness to take over the struggling colony reflected a fundamental change in Virginia. After years of fruitless experimentation, it was becoming clear that En glish settlers could make a fortune in Virginia by growing tobacco.
A Tobacco Society Tobacco grew wild in the New World, and Native Americans used it for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. Many sixteenth-century European explorers noticed the Indians’ habit of “drinking smoke.” During the sixteenth
century, tobacco was an expensive luxury used sparingly by a few in Europe. During the next century, English colonists in North America sent so much tobacco to European markets that it became an affordable indulgence used often by many people. (See “Beyond America’s Borders,” page 60.)
By 1700, nearly 100,000 colonists lived in the Chesapeake region, encompassing Virginia, Maryland, and northern North Carolina (Map 3.1). Although they differed in wealth, landholding, access to labor, and religion, they shared a dedication to growing tobacco. They exported more than 35 million pounds of tobacco in 1700, a fivefold increase in per capita production since 1620. Settlers lived by the rhythms of tobacco agriculture, and their endless need for labor attracted droves of English indentured servants to grueling work in tobacco fields.
Tobacco Agriculture. Initially, the Virginia Company had no plans to grow and sell tobacco. John Rolfe — future husband of Pocahontas — planted West Indian tobacco seeds in 1612 and learned that they flourished in Virginia. By 1617, the colonists had grown enough tobacco to send the first commercial shipment to England, where it sold for a high price. After that, Virginia pivoted from a colony of rather aimless adventurers to a society of dedicated tobacco planters.
A demanding crop, tobacco required close attention and a great deal of hand labor year-round. Like the Indians, the colonists “cleared” fields by cutting a ring of bark from each tree (a procedure known as “girdling”), thereby killing the tree. Girdling brought sunlight to clearings but left fields studded with tree stumps,
Why did the vast majority of European immigrants to the Chesapeake come as indentured servants?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
headright Fifty acres of free land granted by the Virginia Company to planters for each indentured servant they purchased.
indentured servants Poor immigrants who signed contracts known as indentures, in which they committed to four to seven years of labor in North America in exchange for transportation from England, as well as food and shelter after they arrived in the colony.
A Tobacco Society 571601–1700
requiring colonists to use heavy hoes to till their tobacco fields. To plant, a visitor observed, they “just make holes [with a stick] into which they drop the seeds,” much as the Indians did.
The English settlers worked hard because their labor prom- ised greater rewards in the Chesapeake region than in England. One colonist proclaimed that “the dirt of this Province affords as great a profit to the general Inhabitant, as the Gold of Peru doth to . . . the Spaniard.” Although he exaggerated, it was true that a hired man could expect to earn two or three times more in Virginia’s tobacco fields than in England. Better still, in Virginia land was so abundant that it was extremely cheap compared with land in England.
By the mid-seventeenth century, common laborers could buy a hundred acres for less than their annual wages — an im possibility in England. New settlers who paid their own trans portation to the Chesapeake received a grant of fifty acres of free land (termed a headright). The Virginia Company granted headrights to encour- age settlement, and the royal government continued them for the same reason.
A Servant Labor System. Headrights, cheap land, and high wages gave poor English folk powerful incentives to immigrate to the New World. Yet many potential immigrants could not scrape together the money to pay for a trip across the Atlantic. Their pov- erty and the colonists’ crying need for labor formed the basic con- text for the creation of a servant labor system.
About 80 percent of the immigrants to the Chesapeake during the seventeenth century came as indentured servants. Instead of a slave society, the seventeenth-century Chesapeake region was fundamentally a society of white servants and ex-servants.
Relatively few African slaves were brought to the Chesapeake in the first half century after settlement. The first known Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619. The “20. And odd Negroes,” as John Rolfe called them, were slaves captured in Angola in west-central Africa. A few more slaves trickled into the Chesapeake region during the next several decades. Men and women of African descent occasionally became
ADVERTISEMENT FOR JAMESTOWN SETTLERS Virginia imported thousands of indentured servants to labor in the tobacco fields, but the colony also advertised in 1631 for settlers like those pictured here. How would the English experiences of the individuals portrayed in the advertisement have been useful in Virginia? If indentured servants had been pictured, how might they have differed in appearance from these people? Harvard Map Collection, Pusey Library, Harvard University.
58 CHAPTER 3 The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1601–1700
indentured servants, served out their terms of servitude, and became free. A few slaves purchased their way out of bondage and lived as free people. These people were exceptions, however. Almost all people of African descent were slaves and remained enslaved for life.
The overwhelming majority of indentured servants were white immigrants from England. To buy passage aboard a ship bound for the Chesapeake, an English immigrant had to come up with about a year’s wages for an English servant or laborer. Earning wages at all was difficult in England since job opportunities were shrinking. Unemployed people drifted into seaports such as Bristol, Liverpool, and
Settled by 1650
Settled by 1700
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MAP 3.1 CHESAPEAKE COLONIES IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY This map illustrates the intimate association between land and water in the settlement of the Chesapeake in the seventeenth century. The fall line indicates the limit of navigable water, where rapids and falls prevented travel farther upstream.
READING THE MAP: Using the notations on the map, create a chronology of the establishment of towns and settlements. What physical features correspond to the earliest habitation by English settlers?
CONNECTIONS: Why was access to navigable water so important? Given the settlers’ need for defense against native tribes, what explains the distance between settlements?
Map Activity
A Tobacco Society 591601–1700
London, where they learned about the plentiful jobs in North America. Unable to pay for their trip across the Atlantic, poor immigrants agreed to a contract called an indenture, which functioned as a form of credit. By signing an indenture, an immi- grant borrowed the cost of transportation to the Chesapeake from a merchant or ship captain in England. To repay this loan, the indentured person agreed to work as a servant for four to seven years in North America.
Once the indentured person arrived in the colonies, the merchant or ship cap- tain sold his right to the immigrant’s labor to a local tobacco planter. To obtain the servant’s labor, the planter paid about twice the cost of transportation and agreed to provide the servant with food and shelter during the term of the indenture. When the indenture expired, the planter owed the former servant “freedom dues,” usually a few barrels of corn and a suit of clothes.
Ideally, indentures allowed poor immigrants to trade their most valuable assets — their freedom and their ability to work — for a trip to the New World and a period of servitude followed by freedom in a land of opportunity. Planters reaped more immediate benefits. Servants meant more hands to grow more tobacco. A planter expected a servant to grow enough tobacco in one year to cover the price the planter paid for the indenture. Servants’ labor during the remaining three to six years of the indenture promised a handsome profit for the planter. Planters also prof- ited because they received a headright of fifty acres of land from the colonial govern- ment for every newly purchased servant.
TOBACCO PLANTATION This print illustrates the processing of tobacco on a seventeenth-century plantation. Workers cut the mature plants and put the leaves in piles to wilt (left foreground). After the leaves dried somewhat, they were suspended from poles in a drying barn (right foreground), where they were seasoned before being packed in casks for shipping. From “About Tobacco,” Lehman Brothers.
American Tobacco and European Consumers
Beyond America’s Borders
English colonies in the Chesapeake were “wholly built upon smoke,” King Charles I observed during the second quarter of the seventeenth century. The king’s shrewd observation highlighted the fundamental reason the seventeenth-century Chesapeake colonies prospered by growing ever-larger crops of tobacco: namely, because people on the eastern side of the Atlantic were willing to buy ever-greater quantities of tobacco to smoke — and to sniff and chew. Europeans’ desire for tobacco was the only reason it had commer- cial value.
Some Europeans hated tobacco, most notably England’s King James I (who preceded Charles I). In A Counterblaste to Tobacco, a pamphlet published in 1611, James declared that smoking was “A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, [and] dangerous to the Lungs.” He reviled the “filthy smoke,” the “stinking Suffumigation,” the “spitting,” the “lust,” the “shameful imbecilitie,” and the “sin” of tobacco. James’s fulminations acknowledged that “the generall use of Tobacco” was “daily practiced . . . by all sorts and complexions of people.” He noted, “The
publike use [of tobacco], at all times, and in all places, hath now so farre prevailed that a man cannot heartily welcome his friend now, but straight they must bee in hand with Tobacco.” Clearly, James championed a lost cause.
When the Spaniards first brought tobacco to Europe during the sixteenth century, physicians praised it as a wonder drug. One proclaimed that “this precious herb is so general a human need [that it is] not only for the sick but for the healthy.” Such strong recommendations from learned men were reinforced by everyday experiences of commoners. Sailors return- ing from the New World “suck in as much smoke as they can,” one Spaniard observed, “[and] in this way they say that their hunger and thirst are allayed, their strength is restored and their spirits are refreshed; [and] . . . their brains are lulled by a joyous intoxication.” That joyous intoxication — “a bewitching quality,” King James called it — made tobacco irresistible to most Europeans.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, tobacco was scarce and therefore expensive. In 1603,
60
SMOKING CLUB In Europe, tobacco smokers congregated in clubs to enjoy the intoxicating weed. This seventeenth-century print satirizes smokers’ gatherings of fashionable men, women, and children who indulged their taste for tobacco. Emblems of the tobacco trade adorn the wall; pipes, spittoons, and other smoking implements are close at hand; and the dog cleans up after those who cannot hold their smoke. The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 789 J26, f. 69r.
for example, England imported only about 25,000 pounds of tobacco, all from New Spain. By 1700, England imported nearly 40 million pounds of tobacco, almost all from the Chesapeake colonies. The huge increase in the tobacco supply caused prices to plum- met. A quantity of tobacco that sold for a dollar in 1600 cost less than two and a half cents by 1700.
The low prices made possible by bumper crops harvested by planters in the Chesapeake transformed tobacco consumption in England and elsewhere in Europe. Annual per capita tobacco use in England grew more than 200-fold during the seventeenth cen- tury. American tobacco became the first colonial prod- uct of mass consumption by Europeans, blazing a trail followed by New World sugar, coffee, and chocolate.
Tobacco altered European culture. It spawned new industries, new habits, and new forms of social life. Smoking was the most common form of tobacco con- sumption in the seventeenth century, and smokers also needed pipes, boxes or tins to hold their tobacco, a flint and steel to strike sparks, pipe cleaners, and spittoons if they were smoking in a respectable place that disap- proved of spitting on the floor. European merchants and
manufacturers supplied all these needs, along with the tobacco itself, which had to be graded, chopped, fla- vored, packaged, stored, advertised, and sold. Men and women smoked in taverns, in smoking clubs, around dinner tables, and in bed.
The somewhat cumbersome paraphernalia of smok- ing caused many tobacco users to shift to snuff, which became common in the eighteenth century. Snuff use eliminated smoke, fire, and spitting, replacing them with the more refined gesture of taking a pinch of powdered, flavored tobacco from a snuffbox and sniffing it into one or both nostrils, which produced a fashionable sneeze fol- lowed by a genteel wipe with a dainty handkerchief. One snuff taker explained the health benefits of such a sneeze: “by its gently pricking and stimulating the membranes, [snuff] causes Sneezing or Contractions, whereby the Glands like so many squeezed Sponges, dismiss their Seriosities and Filth.”
Whether consumed by sniffing, smoking, or in other ways, tobacco profoundly changed European habits, economies, and societies. And its popularity turned the Chesapeake colonies into invaluable assets for England.
America in a Global Context 1 Why did European demand for tobacco grow so dramatically during the seventeenth
century?
2 How did Europeans use tobacco, and why? Why did some people object to tobacco use?
3 What were the consequences of the transatlantic tobacco market both in the Chesapeake and in Europe?
CONNECT TO THE BIG IDEA C In what ways did tobacco shape America’s colonial history?
61
62 CHAPTER 3 The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1601–1700
About three out of four servants were young men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five when they arrived in the Chesapeake. Typically, they shared the desperation of sixteen-year-old Francis Haires, who indentured himself for seven years because, according to his contract, “his father and mother and All friends [are] dead and he [is] a miserable wandering boy.” Like Francis, most servants had no special training or skills, although the majority had some experience with agricul- tural work. A skilled craftsman could obtain a shorter indenture, but few risked coming to the colonies since their prospects were better in England.
Women were almost as rare as skilled craftsmen in the Chesapeake and more ardently desired. In the early days of the tobacco boom, the Virginia Company shipped young single women servants to the colony as prospective wives for male settlers willing to pay “120 weight [pounds] of the best leaf tobacco for each of them,” in effect getting both a wife and a servant. The company reasoned that, as one official wrote in 1622, “the plantation can never flourish till families be planted, and the respect of wives and children fix the people on the soil.” Nonetheless, women remained a small minority of the Chesapeake population until late in the seven- teenth century.
The servant labor system perpetuated the gender imbalance. Although female servants cost about the same as males and generally served for the same length of time, planters preferred male servants, as one explained, because they were “the
BRISTOL DOCKS This painting of the docks in Bristol, England, portrays a scene common at ports throughout the seventeenth- century Atlantic world. Tobacco flooded into Bristol in the seventeenth century while Bristol merchants also became active in the African slave trade, trading British goods on the West African coast for slaves, who were then taken to the New World to be sold to eager sugar and tobacco planters. © Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery/UK
Bridgeman Art Library.
A Tobacco Society 631601–1700
mor[e] excellent and yousefull Cretuers,” especially for field work. Although many servant women hoed and harvested tobacco fields, most also did household chores such as cooking, washing, cleaning, gardening, and milking.
The Rigors of Servitude. Servants — whether men or women, whites or blacks, English or African — tended to work together and socialize together. During the first half century of settlement, racial intermingling occurred, although the small num- ber of blacks made it infrequent. In general, the commonalities of servitude caused servants — regardless of their race and gender — to consider themselves apart from free people, whose ranks they longed to join eventually.
Servant life was harsh by the standards of seventeenth-century England and even by the frontier standards of the Chesapeake. Unlike servants in England, Chesapeake servants had no control over who purchased their labor — and thus them — for the period of their indenture. They were “sold here upp and downe like horses,” one observer reported. But tobacco planters’ need for labor muffled com- plaints about treating servants as property.
For servants, the promise of indentured servitude in the Chesapeake often with- ered when they confronted the rigors of labor in the tobacco fields. Severe laws aimed to keep servants in their place. Punishments for petty crimes stretched servi- tude far beyond the original terms of indenture. After midcentury, the Virginia leg- islature added three or more years to the indentures of most servants by requiring them to serve until they were twenty-four years old.
Women servants were subject to special restrictions and risks. They were pro- hibited from marrying until their servitude had expired. A servant woman, the law assumed, could not serve two masters at the same time: one who owned her inden- tured labor and another who was her husband. As a rule, if a woman servant gave birth to a child, she had to serve two extra years and pay a fine.
Harsh punishments reflected four fundamental realities of the servant labor system. First, planters’ hunger for labor caused them to demand as much labor as they could get from their servants. Second, servants hoped to survive their servitude and use their freedom to obtain land and start a family. Third, since servants saw themselves as free people in a temporary status of servitude, they often made grudg- ing, halfhearted workers. Finally, planters put up with this contentious arrangement because the alternatives were less desirable.
Planters could not easily hire free men and women because land was readily available and free people preferred to work for themselves on their own land. Nor could planters depend on much labor from family members because families were few, were started late, and thus had few children. And, until the 1680s and 1690s, slaves were expensive and hard to come by. Before then, masters who wanted to grow more tobacco had few alternatives to buying indentured servants.
Cultivating Land and Faith. Villages and small towns dotted the rural land- scape of seventeenth-century England, but in the Chesapeake towns were few and far between. Instead, tobacco farms occupied small clearings surrounded by hun- dreds of acres of wilderness. Since tobacco was a labor-intensive crop that quickly
64 CHAPTER 3 The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1601–1700
exhausted the fertility of the soil, each farmer cultivated only 5 or 10 percent of his land at any one time. Tobacco planters sought land that fronted a navi- gable river in order to minimize the work of transporting the heavy barrels of tobacco onto ships. A settled region thus resembled a lacework of farms stitched around waterways.
Most Chesapeake colonists were nominally Protestants. Attendance at Sunday services and conformity to the doctrines of the Church of England were required of all English men and women. Few clergymen migrated to the Chesapeake, however, and too few of those who did were models of piety. Certainly, some colonists took their religion seriously. But on the whole, religion did not awaken the zeal of Chesapeake settlers, certainly not as it did the zeal of New England settlers in these same years (as discussed
in chapter 4). The religion of the Chesapeake colonists was Anglican, but their faith lay in the turbulent, competitive, high-stakes gamble of survival as tobacco planters.
The situation was similar in the Catholic colony of Maryland. In 1632, England’s King Charles I granted his Catholic friend Lord Baltimore
about six and a half million acres in the northern Chesapeake region. Lord Baltimore intended to create a refuge for Catholics, who suf-
fered severe discrimination in England. He fitted out two ships, the Ark and the Dove; gathered about 150 settlers; and sent them to the
new colony, where they arrived on March 25, 1634. However, Maryland failed to live up to Baltimore’s hopes. The colony’s population grew very slowly for twenty years, and most settlers were Protestants rather than Catholics. The religious tur- moil of the Puritan Revolution in England (as discussed in chapter 4) spilled across the Atlantic, creating conflict between Maryland’s few Catholics — most of them wealthy and prominent — and the Protestant majority, most of them neither wealthy nor prominent. During the 1660s, Maryland began to attract settlers, mostly Prot- estants, as readily as Virginia. Although Catholics and the Catholic faith continued to exert influence in Maryland, the colony’s society, economy, politics, and culture became nearly indistinguishable from Virginia’s. Both colonies shared a devotion to tobacco, the true faith of the Chesapeake.
Hierarchy and Inequality in the Chesapeake
The system of indentured servitude sharpened inequality in Chesapeake society by the mid-seventeenth century, propelling social and political polarization that culminated in 1676 with Bacon’s Rebellion. The rebellion prompted
reforms that stabilized relations between elite planters and their lesser neighbors and paved the way for a social hierarchy that muted differences of landholding and wealth and amplified racial differences. Amid this social and political evolution, Chesapeake colonists’ dedication to growing tobacco did not change.
Farm or plantation
Ja m
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Jamestown
Hog Island
SETTLEMENT PATTERNS ALONG THE JAMES RIVER
Why did Chesapeake colonial society become increasingly polarized between 1650 and 1670?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Hierarchy and Inequality in the Chesapeake 651601–1700
Social and Economic Polarization. The first half of the seventeenth century in the Chesapeake was the era of the yeoman — a farmer who owned a small plot of land sufficient to support a family and tilled largely by servants and a few family members. A small number of elite planters had larger estates and commanded ten or more servants. But for the first several decades, few men lived long enough to accumulate for- tunes sufficient to set them much apart from their neighbors.
Until midcentury, the principal division in Chesapeake society was less between rich and poor planters than between free farmers and unfree servants. Although these two groups contrasted sharply in their legal and economic status, their daily lives had many similarities. Servants looked forward to the time when their indentures would expire and they would become free and eventually own land.
Three major developments splintered this rough frontier equality during the third quarter of the century. First, as planters grew more and more tobacco, the ample supply depressed tobacco prices in European markets. Cheap tobacco reduced planters’ profits and made saving enough to become landowners more difficult for freed servants. Second, because the mortality rate in the Chesapeake colonies declined, more and more servants survived their indentures, and landless freemen became more numerous and grew more discontented. Third, declining mortality also encouraged the formation of a planter elite. By living longer, the most success- ful planters compounded their success. The wealthiest plant- ers also began to buy slaves as well as to serve as merchants.
By the 1670s, the society of the Chesapeake had become polarized. Landowners — the planter elite and the more numerous yeoman planters — clustered around one pole. Landless colonists, mainly freed servants, gathered at the other. Each group eyed the other with suspicion and mistrust. For the most part, planters saw landless freemen as a dangerous rabble rather than as fellow colonists with legitimate grievances. Governor William Berkeley feared the political threat to the governing elite posed by “six parts in seven [of Virginia colonists who] . . . are poor, indebted, discontented, and armed.”
Government Policies and Political Conflict. In general, government enfor- ced the distinction separating servants and masters with an iron fist. Poor men com- plained that “nether the Governor nor Counsell could or would doe any poore men right, but that they would shew favor to great men and wronge the poore.” Most Chesapeake colonists, like most Europeans, assumed that “great men” should bear the responsibilities of government. Until 1670, all freemen could vote, and they rou- tinely elected prosperous planters to the legislature. No former servant served in either the governor’s council or the House of Burgesses after 1640. Yet poor
GOVERNOR WILLIAM BERKELEY This portrait illustrates the distance that separated Governor Berkeley and the other Chesapeake grandees from poor planters, landless freemen, servants, and slaves. Berkeley’s clothing suited the genteel homes of Jamestown, not the rustic dwellings of lesser Virginians. His haughty, satisfied demeanor suggests his lack of sympathy for poor Virginians, who, he was certain, deserved their lot. Courtesy of Berkeley Castle Charitable Trust, Gloucestershire. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., USA/SuperStock.
66 CHAPTER 3 The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1601–1700
Virginians believed that the “great men” used their government offices to promote their selfish personal interests rather than governing impartially.
As discontent mounted among the poor during the 1660s and 1670s, colonial officials tried to keep political power in safe hands. Beginning in 1661, for example, Governor William Berkeley did not call an election for the House of Burgesses for fifteen years. In 1670, the House of Burgesses outlawed voting by poor men, permit- ting only men who headed households and were landowners to vote.
The king also began to tighten the royal government’s control of trade and to collect substantial revenue from the Chesapeake colonies. A series of English laws funneled the colonial trade exclusively into the hands of English merchants and shippers. The Navigation Acts of 1650 and 1651 specified that colonial goods had to be transported in English ships with predominantly English crews. A 1660 act required colonial products to be sent only to English ports, and a 1663 law stipulated further that all goods sent to the colonies must pass through English ports and be carried on English ships manned by English sailors. Taken together, these navigation
acts reflected the English government’s mercantilist assumption that what was good for England should determine colonial policy.
Assumptions about mercantilism also underlay the import duty on tobacco inaugurated by the Navigation Act of 1660. The law assessed an import tax of two pence on every pound of colonial tobacco brought into England, about the price a Chesapeake tobacco farmer received. The tax gave the king a major financial interest in the
size of the tobacco crop, which yielded about a quarter of all English customs revenues during the 1660s.
Bacon’s Rebellion. Colonists, like residents of European monarchies, accepted class divisions and inequality as long as they believed that government officials ruled for the general good. When rulers violated that precept, ordinary people felt justified in rebelling. In 1676, Bacon’s Rebellion erupted as a dispute over Virginia’s Indian policy. Before it was over, the rebellion convulsed Chesapeake politics and society, leaving in its wake death, destruction, and a legacy of hostility between the great planters and their poorer neighbors.
Opechancanough, the Algonquian chief who had led the Indian uprising of 1622 in Virginia, mounted another surprise attack in 1644 and killed about five hun- dred Virginia colonists in two days. During the next two years of bitter fighting, the colonists eventually gained the upper hand, capturing and murdering the old chief. After the war, the Indians relinquished all claims to land already settled by the English. Wilderness land beyond the fringe of English settlement was supposed to be reserved exclusively for Indian use. The colonial government hoped this arrange- ment would minimize contact between settlers and Indians and thereby maintain the peace.
If the Chesapeake population had not grown, the policy might have worked. But the number of land-hungry colonists multiplied. In their quest for land, they encroached steadily on Indian land. During the 1660s and 1670s, violence between colonists and Indians repeatedly flared along the frontier. The government,
Bacon’s Rebellion An unsuccessful rebellion against the colonial government in 1676, led by frontier settler Nathaniel Bacon, that arose when increased violence between Indians and colonists pushing westward was met with government refusal to protect settlers or allow them to settle Indian lands.
Navigation Acts English laws passed in the 1650s and 1660s requiring that English colonial goods be shipped through English ports on English ships in order to benefit English merchants, shippers, and seamen.
acts w
cu
Hierarchy and Inequality in the Chesapeake 671601–1700
headquartered in the tidewater region near the coast, far from the danger of Indian raids, tried to calm the disputes and reestablish the peace.
Frontier settlers thirsted for revenge against what their leader, Nathaniel Bacon, termed “the protected and Darling Indians.” Bacon proclaimed his “Design not only to ruine and extirpate all Indians in Generall but all Manner of Trade and Commerce with them.” Bacon also urged the colonists to “see what spounges have suckt up the Publique Treasure.” He charged that grandees, or elite planters, operated the govern- ment for their private gain, a charge that made sense to many colonists. In fact, office- holders had profited enough to buy slaves to replace their servants; by the 1660s, they owned about 70 percent of all the colony’s slaves. Bacon crystallized the grievances of the small planters and poor farmers against both the Indians and the colonial rulers in Jamestown.
Hoping to maintain the fragile peace on the frontier in 1676, Governor Berkeley pronounced Bacon a rebel, threatened to punish him for treason, and called for new elections of burgesses who, Berkeley believed, would endorse his get-tough policy. To Berkeley’s surprise, the elections backfired. Almost all the old burgesses were voted out of office and replaced by local leaders, including Bacon, who chafed at the rule of the elite planters.
In June 1676, the new legislature passed a series of reform measures known as Bacon’s Laws. Among other changes, the laws gave local settlers a voice in setting tax levies, forbade officeholders from demanding bribes or other extra fees for carrying out their duties, placed limits on holding multiple offices, and restored the vote to all freemen. But elite planters soon convinced Berkeley that Bacon and his supporters among small planters and frontiersmen were a greater threat than Indians.
When Bacon learned that Berkeley had once again branded him a traitor, he declared war against Berkeley and the other grandees. For three months, Bacon’s forces fought the Indians, sacked the grandees’ plantations, and attacked Jamestown. Berkeley’s loyalists retaliated by plundering the homes of Bacon’s supporters. The fighting continued until Bacon unexpectedly died, most likely from dysentery, and several English ships arrived to bolster Berkeley’s strength.
The rebellion did nothing to dislodge the grandees from their positions of power. If anything, it strengthened them. When the king learned of the turmoil in the Chesapeake and its devastating effect on tobacco exports and customs duties, he ordered an investigation. Royal officials replaced Berkeley with a governor more attentive to the king’s interests, nullified Bacon’s Laws, and instituted an export tax on tobacco as a way of paying the expenses of government without having to obtain the consent of the tightfisted House of Burgesses.
In the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion, tensions between great planters and small farmers moderated. Bacon’s Rebellion showed, a governor of Virginia said, that it was necessary “to steer between . . . either an Indian or a civil war.” The ruling elite concluded that it was safer for the colonists to fight the Indians than to fight each other, and the government made little effort to restrict settlers’ encroachment on Indian land. Tax cuts also were welcomed by all freemen. The export duty on tobacco imposed by the king allowed the colonial government to reduce taxes by 75 percent between 1660 and 1700. In the long run, however, the most important contribution to political stability was the declining importance of
68 CHAPTER 3 The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1601–1700
the servant labor system. During the 1680s and 1690s, fewer servants arrived in the Chesapeake, partly because of improving economic conditions in England. Accordingly, the number of poor, newly freed servants also declined, reducing the size of the lowest stratum of free society. In 1700, when about one-third of the free colonists still worked as tenants on land owned by others, the Chesapeake was in the midst of transitioning to a slave labor system that minimized the dif- ferences between poor farmers and rich planters and magnified the differences between whites and blacks.
Toward a Slave Labor System Although forced native labor was common practice in New Spain, English colonists were unsuccessful in conscripting Indian labor. They looked instead to another source of workers used by the Spaniards and Portuguese: enslaved Africans. On this foundation, European colonizers built
African slavery into the most important form of coerced labor in the New World. During the seventeenth century, English colonies in the West Indies followed
the Spanish and Portuguese examples and developed sugar plantations with slave labor. In the English North American colonies, however, a slave labor system did not emerge until the last quarter of the seventeenth century. During the 1670s, settlers from Barbados brought slavery to the new English mainland colony of Carolina, where the imprint of the West Indies remained strong for decades. In Chesapeake tobacco fields at about the same time, slave labor began to replace servant labor, marking the transition toward a society of freedom for whites and slavery for Africans.
Religion and Revolt in the Spanish Borderland. While English colonies in the Chesapeake grew and prospered with the tobacco trade, the northern outposts of the Spanish empire in New Mexico and Florida stagnated. Only about fifteen hun- dred Spaniards lived in Florida, and roughly twice as many inhabited New Mexico, yet both colonies required regular deliveries of goods and large subsidies. One royal governor complained that “no [Spaniard] comes . . . to plow and sow [crops], but only to eat and loaf.”
Instead of attracting settlers and growing crops for export, New Mexico and Florida appealed to Spanish missionaries seeking to convert Indians to Christianity. In both colonies, Indians outnumbered Spaniards ten or twenty to one. Royal offi- cials hoped that the missionaries’ efforts would pacify the Indians and be a relatively cheap way to preserve Spanish footholds in North America. The missionaries baptized thousands of Indians in Spanish North America during the seventeenth century, but they also planted the seeds of Indian uprisings against Spanish rule.
The missionaries followed royal instructions that Indians should be taught “to live in a civilized manner, clothed and wearing shoes . . . [and] given the use of . . . bread, linen, horses, cattle, tools, and weapons, and all the rest that Spain has had.”
slavery Coerced labor. African slavery became the most important form of coerced labor in the New World in the seventeenth century.
Why had slave labor largely displaced indentured servant labor by 1700 in Chesapeake tobacco production?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Toward a Slave Labor System 691601–1700
In effect, the missionaries sought to convert the Indians not just into Christians but also into surrogate Spaniards.
The missionaries supervised the building of scores of Catholic churches across Florida and New Mexico. Adopting practices common elsewhere in New Spain, they forced the Indians both to construct these churches and to pay tribute in the form of food, blankets, and other goods. Although the missionaries congratulated them- selves on the many Indians they converted, their coercive methods subverted their goals. A missionary reported that an Indian in New Mexico asked him, “If we [mis- sionaries] who are Christians caused so much harm and violence [to Indians], why should they become Christians?”
The Indians retaliated repeatedly against Spanish exploitation, but the Span- iards suppressed the violent uprisings by taking advantage of the disunity among the Indians, much as Cortés did in the conquest of Mexico (see chapter 2). In 1680, however, the native leader Popé organized the Pueblo Revolt, ordering his follow- ers, as one recounted, to “break up and burn the images of the holy Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the other saints, the crosses, and everything pertaining to Christianity.” During the revolt, Indians desecrated churches, killed two-thirds of the Spanish mis- sionaries, and drove the Spaniards out of New Mexico to present-day El Paso, Texas. The Spaniards managed to return to New Mexico by the end of the seventeenth century, but only by curtailing the missionaries and reducing labor exploitation. Florida Indians never mounted a unified attack on Spanish rule, but they too orga- nized sporadic uprisings and resisted conversion.
The West Indies: Sugar and Slavery. The most profitable part of the English New World empire in the seventeenth century lay in the Caribbean (Map 3.2). The tiny island of Barbados, colonized in the 1630s, was the jewel of the English West Indies. During the 1640s, a colonial official proclaimed Barbados “the most flourishing Island in all those American parts, and I verily believe in all the world for the production of sugar.” Sugar commanded high prices in England, and planters rushed to grow as much as they could. By midcentury, annual sugar exports from the English Caribbean totaled about 150,000 pounds; by 1700, exports reached nearly 50 million pounds.
Sugar transformed Barbados and other West Indian islands. Poor farmers could not afford the expensive machinery that extracted and refined sugarcane juice, but planters with enough capital to grow sugar got rich. By 1680, the wealthiest Barbadian sugar planters were, on average, four times richer than tobacco grandees in the Chesapeake. The sugar grandees differed from their Chesapeake counterparts in another crucial way: The average sugar baron in Barbados owned 115 slaves in 1680.
African slaves planted, cultivated, and harvested the sugarcane that made West Indian planters wealthy. Beginning in the 1640s, Barbadian planters purchased thousands of slaves to work their plantations, and the African population on the island mushroomed. During the 1650s, when blacks made up only 3 percent of the Chesapeake population, they had already become the majority in Barbados. By 1700, slaves constituted more than three-fourths of the island’s population.
For slaves, work on a sugar plantation was a life sentence to brutal, unremitting labor. Slaves suffered high death rates. Since slave men outnumbered slave women
Pueblo Revolt An effective revolt of Pueblo Indians in New Mexico, under the leadership of Popé, against the Spanish in 1680. Particularly targeting symbols of Christianity, they succeeded in killing two-thirds of Spanish missionaries and driving the Spaniards out of New Mexico.
Barbados Colonized in the 1630s, this island in the British West Indies became an enormous sugar producer and a source of wealth for England. The island’s African slaves quickly became a majority of the island’s population despite the deadliness of their work.
70 CHAPTER 3 The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1601–1700
two to one, few slaves could form families and have children. These grim realities meant that in Barbados and elsewhere in the West Indies, the slave population did not grow by natural reproduction. Instead, planters continually purchased enslaved Africans. Although sugar plantations did not gain a foothold in North America in the seventeenth century, the West Indies nonetheless exerted a powerful influence on the development of slavery in the mainland colonies.
Carolina: A West Indian Frontier. The early settlers of what became South Carolina were immigrants from Barbados. In 1663, a Barbadian planter named John Colleton and a group of seven other men obtained a charter from England’s King Charles II to establish a colony north of the Spanish territories in Florida. The men, known as “proprietors,” hoped to siphon settlers from Barbados and other colonies and encourage them to develop a profitable export crop comparable to West Indian sugar and Chesapeake tobacco. The proprietors enlisted the English philosopher John Locke to help draft the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which provided for religious liberty and political rights for small property holders while envisioning a landed aristocracy supported by bound laborers and slaves. Following the Chesapeake example, the proprietors also offered headrights of up to 150 acres of land for each settler, a provision that eventually undermined the Constitutions’ goal of a titled aristocracy. In 1670, the proprietors established the permanent English settlement, Charles Towne, (Charleston) (see Map 3.2).
As the proprietors had planned, most of the early settlers were from Barbados. The Barbadian immigrants brought their slaves with them. More than a fourth of the early settlers were slaves, and by 1700 slaves made up about half the Carolina population.
SUGAR PLANTATION This portrait of a Brazilian sugar plantation shows cartloads of sugarcane being hauled to the mill, which is powered by a waterwheel (far right), where the cane will be squeezed between rollers to extract the sugary juice. The juice will then be distilled over a fire tended by the slaves until it has the desired consistency and purity. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.
Toward a Slave Labor System 711601–1700
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St. Lucia (Br.) Martinique (Fr.)
Dominica (Br.)
Guadeloupe (Fr.)Montserrat (Br.) Antigua (Br.)
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MAP 3.2 THE WEST INDIES AND CAROLINA IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Although Carolina was geographically close to the Chesapeake colonies, it was culturally closer to the West Indies in the seventeenth century because its early settlers — both blacks and whites — came from Barbados. South Carolina maintained strong ties to the West Indies for more than a century.
READING THE MAP: Locate English colonies in America and English holdings in the Caribbean. Which European country controlled most of the mainland bordering the Caribbean? Where was the closest mainland English territory?
CONNECTIONS: Why were colonists in Carolina so interested in Barbados? What goods did they export? Describe the relationship between Carolina and Barbados in 1700.
Map Activity
The Carolinians experimented unsuccessfully to match their semitropical climate with profitable export crops of tobacco, cotton, indigo, and olives. In the mid-1690s, colonists identified a hardy strain of rice and took advantage of the knowledge of rice cultivation among their many African slaves to build rice plan- tations. Settlers also sold livestock and timber to the West Indies, as well as another “natural resource”: They captured and enslaved several thousand local Indians and sold them to Caribbean planters. Both economically and socially, seventeenth-century Carolina was a frontier outpost of the West Indian sugar economy.
72 CHAPTER 3 The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1601–1700
Slave Labor Emerges in the Chesapeake. By 1700, more than eight out of ten people in the southern colonies of English North America lived in the Chesapeake. Until the 1670s, almost all Chesapeake colonists were white people from England. By 1700, however, one out of eight people in the region was a black person from Africa. A few black people had lived in the Chesapeake since the 1620s, but the black population grew fivefold between 1670 and 1700 as hundreds of tobacco planters made the transition from servant to slave labor.
Planters saw several advantages to purchasing slaves rather than servants. Although slaves cost three to five times more than servants, slaves never became free. Because the mortality rate had declined by the 1680s, planters could reasonably expect a slave to live longer than a servant’s period of indenture. Slaves also promised to be a perpetual labor force, since children of slave mothers inherited the status of slavery. And unlike servants, they could be con- trolled politically. A slave labor system promised to avoid the political problems such as Bacon’s Rebellion caused by the servant labor system. Slavery kept discontented laborers in permanent servitude, and their color was a badge of their bondage.
The slave labor system polarized Chesapeake society along lines of race and status: All slaves were black, and nearly all blacks were slaves; almost all free people were white, and all whites were free or only temporarily bound in indentured servitude. Unlike Barbados, however, the Chesapeake retained a vast white majority. Among whites, huge differences of wealth and status still existed. By 1700, more than three-quarters of white families had nei- ther servants nor slaves. Nonetheless, poor white farmers
enjoyed the privileges of free status. They could own property, get married, have families, and bequeath their property and their freedom to their descendants; they could move when and where they wanted; they could associate freely with other people; they could serve on juries, vote, and hold political office; and they could work, loaf, and sleep as they chose. These privileges of freedom — none of them possessed by slaves — made lesser white folk feel they had a genuine stake in the existence of slavery, even if they did not own a single slave. By emphasiz- ing the privileges of freedom shared by all white people, the slave labor system reduced the tensions between poor folk and grandees that had plagued the Chesapeake region in the 1670s.
In contrast to slaves in Barbados, most slaves in the seventeenth-century Chesa- peake colonies had frequent and close contact with white people. Slaves and white servants performed the same tasks on tobacco plantations, often working side by
TOBACCO WRAPPER This wrapper labeled a container of tobacco from the English colonies sold at Reighly’s shop in Essex. The wrapper was much like a brand, promising consumers consistency in quality and taste. The wrapper illustrates tobacco growing in a field and harvested leaves ready to be packed into a barrel, ferried to the ships waiting offshore, and transported to Reighly’s and other tobacconists in England. The Granger Collection, NYC.
Conclusion: The Growth of English Colonies Based on Export Crops and Slave Labor 731601–1700
side in the fields. Slaves took advantage of every opportunity to slip away from white supervision and seek out the company of other slaves. Planters often feared that slaves would turn such seemingly innocent social pleasures to political ends, either to run away or to conspire to strike against their masters. Slaves often did run away, but they were usually captured or returned after a brief absence. Despite planters’ nightmares, slave insurrections did not occur.
Although slavery resolved the political unrest caused by the servant labor sys- tem, it created new political problems. By 1700, the bedrock political issue in the southern colonies was keeping slaves in their place, at the end of a hoe. The slave labor system in the southern colonies stood roughly midway between the sugar plantations and black majority of Barbados to the south and the small farms and homogeneous villages that developed in seventeenth-century New England to the north (as discussed in chapter 4).
Conclusion: The Growth of English Colonies Based on Export Crops and Slave Labor By 1700, the colonies of Virginia, Maryland, and Carolina were firmly estab- lished. The staple crops they grew for export provided a livelihood for many, a fortune for a few, and valuable revenues for shippers, merchants, and the English monarchy. Their societies differed markedly from English society in most respects, yet the colonists considered themselves English people who happened to live in North America. They claimed the same rights and privileges as English men and women, while they denied those rights and privileges to Native Ameri- cans and African slaves.
The English colonies also differed from the example of New Spain. Settlers and servants flocked to English colonies, in contrast to Spaniards who trickled into New Spain. Few English missionaries sought to convert Indians to Protestant Christianity, unlike the numerous Catholic missionaries in the Spanish settlements in New Mexico and Florida. Large quantities of gold and silver never materialized in English North America. English colonists never adopted the system of encomienda (see chapter 2). Yet important forms of coerced labor and racial dis- tinction that developed in New Spain had North American counterparts, as En glish colonists employed servants and slaves and defined themselves as superior to Indians and Africans.
By 1700, the remnants of Powhatan’s people still survived. As English settlement pushed north, west, and south of Chesapeake Bay, the Indians faced the new colonial world that Powhatan and Pocahontas had encountered when John Smith and the first colonists had arrived at Jamestown. By 1700, the many descendants of Pocahontas’s son, Thomas, as well as other colonists and Native Americans, understood that the English had come to stay.
74 CHAPTER 3 The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1601–1700
Economically, the southern colonies developed during the seventeenth cen- tury from the struggling Jamestown settlement that could not feed itself into a major source of profits for England. The European fashion for tobacco provided livelihoods for numerous white families and riches for elite planters. But after 1700, enslaved Africans were conscripted in growing numbers to grow tobacco in the Chesapeake and rice in Carolina. The slave society that dominated the eighteenth- century southern colonies was firmly rooted in the developments of the seventeenth century.
A desire for land, a hope for profit, and a dream for security motivated south- ern white colonists. Realizing these aspirations involved great risks, considerable suffering, and frequent disappointment, as well as seizing Indian lands and coercing labor from servants and slaves. By 1700, despite huge disparities in individual colo- nists’ success in achieving their goals, tens of thousands of white colonists who were immigrants or descendants of immigrants now considered the southern colonies their home, shaping the history of the region and of the nation as a whole for centuries to come.
1601–1700
1 Given the vulnerability of the Jamestown settlement in its first two de cades, why did its sponsors and settlers not abandon it?
2 How did tobacco agriculture shape the Chesapeake region’s development? In your answer, be sure to address the demographic and geographic features of the colony.
3 Bacon’s Rebellion highlighted significant tensions within Chesapeake society. What provoked the rebellion, and what did it accomplish?
4 How did European colonists’ relations with Native Americans and enslaved Africans contribute to political friction and harmony within the English colonies.
MAKING CONNECTIONS
1 Why did Powhatan behave as he did toward the English colonists? (pp. 52–56)
2 Why did the vast majority of European immigrants to the Chesapeake come as indentured servants? (pp. 56–64)
3 Why did Chesapeake colonial society become increasingly polarized between 1650 and 1670? (pp. 64–68)
4 Why had slave labor largely displaced indentured servant labor by 1700 in Chesapeake tobacco production? (pp. 68–73)
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
Virginia Company (p. 53)
Jamestown (p. 53)
Algonquian Indians (p. 53)
royal colony (p. 55)
House of Burgesses (p. 55)
headright (p. 57)
KEY TERMS
indentured servants (p. 57)
Navigation Acts (p. 66)
Bacon’s Rebellion (p. 66)
slavery (p. 68)
Pueblo Revolt (p. 69)
Barbados (p. 69)
Chapter Review MAKE IT STICK
Go to LearningCurve: See what you know. Then review the key terms and answer the questions.
LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com /roarkconcise
75
STUDENT SITE @ bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
R oger Williams and his wife, Mary, arrived in Massachusetts in February 1631. Fresh from a superb education at Cambridge University, the twenty-eight-year-old Williams was “a godly [Puritan] minister,” noted Governor John Winthrop, whose Boston church asked Williams to become its minister. But Williams refused the invitation
because the church had not openly rejected the corrupt Church of England. New England’s premier Puritan church was not pure enough for Roger Williams.
Williams and his wife moved to Plymouth colony, where he spent a great deal of time among the Narragansett Indians. Williams believed that “Nature
knows no difference between Europeans and [Native] Americans in blood, birth, [or] bodies . . . God having made of one blood all mankind.” He insisted that the
The Northern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1601–1700
Puritans and the Settlement of New England (pp. 78–82)
The Evolution of New England Society (pp. 82–91)
The Founding of the Middle Colonies (pp. 91–96)
The Colonies and the English Empire (pp. 96–100)
Conclusion: An English Model of Colonization in North America (p. 100)
4
CHAPTER OUTLINE QUICK START
Quickly learn what is important in this chapter by doing the following:
• READ the Chapter Outline to see how the chapter is organized. • SKIM the Chronology on the next page to see what will be covered.
When you are ready, read the chapter and the Essential Questions for each section. Then use the Chapter Review to check what you know.
AMERICA’S FIRST BOOK The first book printed in what is now the United States, this copy of The Whole Book of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre was published in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1640. Worshippers used this book to sing psalms, celebrating God’s Truth with an unadorned chorus
of voices. The words of the famous twenty-third psalm begin near the bottom of the left-hand page. Roger Foley/Library of Congress.
76
colonists respect the Indians’ religion and culture since all human beings — Christians and non-Christians alike — should live according to their consciences as revealed to them by God.
Williams condemned English colonists for their “sin of unjust usurpation” of Indian land. He believed that English claims were legally, morally, and spiritually invalid. By contrast, Massachusetts officials defended colonists’ settlement on Indian land. Governor Winthrop declared, “if we leave [the Indians] sufficient [land] for their use, we may lawfully take the rest, there being more than enough for them and us.” Winthrop’s arguments prevailed, but Williams refused to knuckle under. “God Land,” he said, “[is] as great a God with us English as God Gold was with the Spaniards.”
In 1633, Williams believed that the Bible shrouded the Word of God in “mist and fog.” That observation led him to denounce the emerging New England order as impure, ungodly, and tyrannical. He disagreed with the New England government’s requirement that everyone attend church services. He argued that forcing people who were not Christians to attend church was “False Worshipping” that only promoted “spiri- tual drunkenness and whoredom.” He believed that to regulate religious behavior would be “spiritual rape”; that governments should tolerate all religious beliefs because only God knows the Truth. “I commend that man,” Williams wrote, “whether Jew, or Turk, or Papist, or whoever, that steers no otherwise than his conscience dares.”
New England’s leaders denounced Williams’s arguments and banished him for his “extreme and dangerous” opinions. In January 1636, he fled south to Narragansett Bay, where he and his followers established the colony of Rhode Island, which enshrined “Liberty of Conscience” as a fundamental ideal and became a refuge for other dissenters. Although New England’s leaders expelled Williams from their holy commonwealth, his dissenting ideas arose from orthodox Puritan doctrines. Puritanism inspired believers such as Roger Williams to draw their own conclusions and stick to them.
During the seventeenth century, New England’s Puritan zeal cooled, and the promise of a holy New England faded. Late in the century, the new “middle” colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania were founded, featuring greater religious and ethnic diversity than New England. Religion remained important through- out all the colonies, but it competed with the growing faith that a better life required less focus on salvation and more attention to worldly concerns of family, work, and trade.
CHRONOLOGY
1534 English Reformation begins.
1609 Henry Hudson searches for Northwest Passage.
1620 Plymouth colony founded.
1626 Manhattan Island purchased; New Amsterdam founded.
1629 Massachusetts Bay Company receives royal charter.
1630 John Winthrop leads Puritan settlers to Massachusetts Bay.
1636 Rhode Island colony established.
Connecticut colony founded.
1636– Pequot War. 1637
1638 Anne Hutchinson excommunicated.
1642 Puritan Revolution inflames England.
1649 English Puritans win civil war.
1656 Quakers arrive in Massachusetts and are persecuted.
1660 Monarchy restored in England.
1662 Many Puritan congregations adopt Halfway Covenant.
1664 English seize Dutch colony, rename it New York.
Colony of New Jersey created.
1675– King Philip’s War. 1676
1681 Colony of Pennsylvania founded.
1686 Dominion of New England created.
1688 England’s Glorious Revolution.
1689– King William’s War. 1697
1692 Salem witch trials.
78 CHAPTER 4 The Northern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1601–1700
Throughout the English mainland colonies, settlements encroached on Indian land, causing violent conflict to flare up repeatedly. Political conflict also arose among colonists, particularly in response to major political upheavals in England. By the end of the seventeenth century, the English monarchy exerted greater control over North America and the rest of its Atlantic empire, but the products, people, and ideas that pulsed between England and the colonies energized both.
Puritans and the Settlement of New England
Puritans who immigrated to North America aspired to escape the turmoil and persecution they suffered in England, a long-term consequence of the English Reformation. They
also sought to build a new, orderly, Puritan version of England. Puritans established the first small settlement in New England in 1620, followed a few years later by additional settlements by the Massachusetts Bay Company. Allowed self-government through royal charter, these Puritans were in a unique position to direct the new colonies according to their faith. Although many New England colonists were not Puritans, Puritanism remained a paramount influence in New England’s religion, politics, and community life during the seventeenth century.
Puritan Origins: The English Reformation. The religious roots of the Puritans who founded New England reached back to the Protestant Reformation, which arose in Germany in 1517 (see chapter 2). The English church initially remained within the Catholic fold. Henry VIII, who reigned from 1509 to 1547, saw that the Reformation offered him an opportunity to break with Rome and take con- trol of the church in England. In 1534, Henry formally initiated the English Refor- mation. At his insistence, Parliament outlawed the Catholic Church and proclaimed the king “the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England.” Henry seized the vast properties of the Catholic Church in England as well as the privilege of appointing bishops and others in the church hierarchy.
In the short run, the English Reformation allowed Henry VIII to achieve his political goal of controlling the church. In the long run, however, the Reformation brought to England the political and religious turmoil that Henry had hoped to avoid. Many English Catholics wanted to revoke the English Reformation; they hoped to return the Church of England to the pope and to restore Catholic doctrines and ceremonies. But many other English people insisted on a genuine, thoroughgoing Reformation; these people came to be called Puritans.
During the sixteenth century, Puritanism was less an organized movement than a set of ideas and religious principles that appealed strongly to many dissenting members of the Church of England. They sought to eliminate what they considered
Why did the Puritans immigrate to North America?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
English Reformation Reform effort initiated by King Henry VIII that included banning the Catholic Church and declaring the English monarch head of the new Church of England but little change in doctrine. Henry’s primary concern was consolidating his political power.
Puritans Dissenters from the Church of England who wanted a genuine Reformation rather than the partial Reformation sought by Henry VIII. The Puritans’ religious principles emphasized the importance of an individual’s relationship with God developed through Bible study, prayer, and introspection.
Puritans and the Settlement of New England 791601–1700
the offensive features of Catholicism that remained in the religious doctrines and practices of the Church of England. For example, they wanted to do away with the rituals of Catholic worship and instead emphasize an individual’s relationship with God developed through Bible study, prayer, and introspection. All Puritans shared a desire to make the English church thoroughly Protestant.
The fate of Protestantism waxed and waned under the monarchs who succeeded Henry VIII. In 1558, Elizabeth I, the daughter of Henry and his second wife, Anne Boleyn, became queen. During her long reign, Elizabeth reaffirmed the English Reformation and tried to position the English church between the extremes of Cathol- icism and Puritanism. Like her father, she desired a church that would strengthen the monarchy and the nation. By the time Elizabeth died in 1603, many people in England looked on Protestantism as a defining feature of national identity.
When Elizabeth’s successor, James I, became king, English Puritans petitioned for further reform of the Church of England. James authorized a new translation of the Bible, known ever since as the King James Version. However, neither James I nor his son Charles I, who became king in 1625, was receptive to the ideas of Puritan reformers. James and Charles moved the Church of England away from Puritanism. They enforced conformity to the Church of England and punished dissenters. In 1629, Charles I dis- solved Parliament — where Puritans were well represented — and initiated aggressive anti-Puritan policies. Many Puritans despaired about continuing to defend their faith in England and made plans to emigrate to Europe, the West Indies, or America.
QUEEN ELIZABETH This sixteenth-century portrait of Queen Elizabeth celebrates English victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588 (shown in the panels on either side of Elizabeth’s head) that resulted in England’s empire reaching North America (notice her right hand covering North America on the globe). The Gallery Collection/Corbis.
80 CHAPTER 4 The Northern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1601–1700
The Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony. One of the first Protestant groups to emigrate, later known as Pilgrims, professed an unorthodox view known as separatism. These Separatists sought to withdraw — or separate — from the Church of England, which they considered hopelessly corrupt. William Bradford, a leader of the Separatists, believed that America promised to better protect and preserve their community. Separatists obtained per- mission to settle in the extensive territory granted to the Virginia Company (see chapter 3). In August 1620, the Pilgrim families boarded the Mayflower, and after eleven weeks at sea all but one of the 102 immigrants arrived in present-day Massachusetts.
The Pilgrims drew up the Mayflower Compact on the day they arrived. They pledged to “covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation.” The signers (all men) agreed to enact and obey necessary and just laws.
The Pilgrims settled at Plymouth and elected William Bradford their governor. That first winter, which they spent aboard their ship, “was most sad and lamentable,” Bradford wrote later. “In two or three months’ time half of [our] company died.”
In the spring, Indians rescued the floundering Plymouth settlement. First Samoset and then Squanto befriended the settlers. Samoset arranged for the Pilgrims to meet and establish good relations with Massasoit, the chief of the Wampanoag Indians, whose territory included Plymouth. With the Indians’ guidance, the Pilgrims managed to harvest enough food to guarantee their sur- vival through the coming winter, an occasion they celebrated in the fall of 1621 with a feast of thanksgiving attended by Massasoit and other Wampanoags.
The Pilgrims persisted, living simply and coexisting in relative peace with the Indians. By 1630, Plymouth had become a small permanent settlement, but it failed to attract many other English Puritans.
The Founding of Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1629, shortly before Charles I dissolved Parliament, a group of Puritans obtained a
royal charter for the Massachusetts Bay Company. The charter pro- vided the usual privileges granted to joint-stock companies, including
land for colonization that spanned present-day Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, and upstate New York. A unique provision of the charter permitted the government of the Mas- sachusetts Bay Company to be located in the colony rather than in England. This provision allowed Puritans to exchange their status as a harassed minority in England for self- government in Massachusetts.
SEAL OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY COLONY In 1629, the Massachusetts Bay Company designed this seal
depicting an Indian man inviting English settlers to “come over and help us.” Of course, such an invitation was never issued.
The seal was an attempt to lend an aura of altruism to the Massachusetts Bay Company’s colonization efforts. What does the
seal suggest about English views of Indians? Courtesy of Massachusetts Archives.
Separatists People who sought withdrawal from the Church of England. The Pilgrims were Separatists.
Puritans and the Settlement of New England 811601–1700
To lead the emigrants, the Massachusetts Bay Company selected John Win- throp, a prosperous lawyer and landowner, to serve as governor. In March 1630, eleven ships crammed with seven hundred passengers sailed for Massachusetts; six more ships and another five hundred emigrants followed a few months later. Unlike the Separatists, Winthrop’s Puritans aspired to reform the corrupt Church of England (rather than separate from it) by setting an example of godliness in the New World. Winthrop and a small group chose to settle on the peninsula that became Boston, and other settlers clustered at promising locations nearby (Map 4.1).
In a sermon to his companions aboard the Arbella while they were still at sea — probably the most famous sermon in American history — Winthrop pro- claimed the cosmic significance of their journey. The Puritans had “entered into a covenant” with God to “work out our salvation under the power and purity of his holy ordinances,” Winthrop declared. This sanctified agreement with God meant that the Puritans had to make “extraordinary” efforts to “bring into familiar and constant practice” religious principles that most people in England merely preached. To achieve their pious goals, the Puritans had to subordinate their individual inter- ests to the common good. “We must be knit together in this work as one man,” Winthrop preached. “We must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together.” The stakes could not be higher, Winthrop told his listeners: “We must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”
That belief shaped seventeenth-century New England as profoundly as tobacco shaped the Chesapeake. Winthrop’s vision of a city on a hill fired the Puritans’ fierce
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MAP 4.1 NEW ENGLAND COLONIES IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY New Englanders spread across the landscape town by town during the seventeenth century. (For the sake of legibility, only a few of the more important towns are shown on the map.)
READING THE MAP: Using the dates on the map, create a chronology of the establishment of towns in New England. What physical features correspond to the earliest habitation by English settlers?
CONNECTIONS: Why were towns so much more a feature of seventeenth-century New England than of the Chesapeake (see also chapter 3)? How did Puritan dissent influence the settlement of New England colonies?
Map Activity
82 CHAPTER 4 The Northern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1601–1700
determination to keep their covenant and live according to God’s laws, unlike the backsliders and compromisers who accommodated to the Church of England. Their resolve to adhere strictly to God’s plan charged nearly every feature of life in seventeenth-century New England with a distinctive, high-voltage piety.
Unlike the early Chesapeake settlers, the first Massachusetts Bay colonists encountered few Indians because the local population had been almost entirely exter- minated by an epidemic. And each year from 1630 to 1640, ship after ship followed in the wake of Winthrop’s fleet, bringing more than twenty thousand new settlers.
Often, when the Church of England cracked down on a Puritan minister in England, he and many of his followers moved together to New England. By 1640, New England had one of the highest ratios of preachers to population in all of Christendom. Several ministers sought to carry the message of Christianity to the Indians and established “praying towns” to encourage Indians to adopt English ways. But the colonists focused far less on saving Indians’ souls than on saving their own.
The occupations of New England immigrants reflected the social origins of English Puritans. On the whole, the immigrants came from the middle ranks of English society. The vast majority were either farmers or tradesmen. Indentured servants, whose numbers dominated the Chesapeake settlers, accounted for only about a fifth of those headed for New England. Most New England immigrants paid their way to Massachusetts. They were encouraged by the promise of bounty in New England reported in Winthrop’s letter to his son: “Here can be no want of anything to those who bring means to raise [it] out of the earth and sea.”
In contrast to Chesapeake newcomers, New England immigrants usually arrived as families. In fact, more Puritans came with family members than did any other group of immigrants in all of American history. Unlike immigrants to the Chesapeake, women and children made up a solid majority in New England.
As Winthrop reminded the first settlers in his Arbella sermon, each family was a “little commonwealth” that mirrored the hierarchy among all God’s creatures. Just as humankind was subordinate to God, so young people were subordinate to their elders, children to their parents, and wives to their husbands. The immigrants’ fam- ily ties reinforced their religious beliefs with the interlocking institutions of family, church, and community.
The Evolution of New England Society The New England colonists, unlike their counterparts in the Chesapeake, settled in small towns, usually located on the coast or by a river (see Map 4.1). Massachusetts Bay colonists founded 133 towns during the seventeenth cen-
tury, each with one or more churches. Church members’ fervent piety, buttressed by the institutions of local government, enforced remarkable religious and social con- formity in the small New England settlements. During the century, tensions within the Puritan faith and changes in New England communities splintered religious orthodoxy and weakened Puritan zeal. By 1700, however, Puritanism retained a dis- tinctive influence in New England.
Why did Massachusetts Puritans adopt the Halfway Covenant?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
The Evolution of New England Society 831601–1700
Church, Covenant, and Conformity. Puritans believed that a church con- sisted of men and women who had entered a solemn covenant with one another and with God. Each new member of the covenant had to persuade existing members that she or he had fully experienced conversion.
Puritans embraced a distinctive version of Protestantism derived from Calvin- ism, the doctrines of John Calvin, who insisted that Christians strictly discipline their behavior to conform to God’s commandments announced in the Bible. Like Calvin, Puritans believed in predestination — the idea that the all-powerful God, before the creation of the world, decided which few human souls would receive eter- nal life. Only God knows the identity of these fortunate predestined individuals — the “elect” or “saints.” Nothing a person did in his or her lifetime could alter God’s choice or provide assurance that the person was predestined for salvation with the elect or damned to hell with the doomed multitude.
Despite the looming uncertainty about God’s choice of the elect, Puritans believed that if a person lived a rigorously godly life — constantly winning the daily battle against sin — his or her behavior was likely to be a hint, a visible sign, that he or she was one of God’s chosen few. Puritans thought that “sainthood” would become visible in individuals’ behavior, especially if they were privileged to know God’s Word as revealed in the Bible.
The connection between sainthood and saintly behavior, however, was far from certain. Some members of the elect, Puritans believed, had not heard God’s Word. One reason Puritans required all town residents to attend church services was to enlighten anyone who was ignorant of God’s Truth. The slippery relationship between saintly behavior and God’s predestined election caused Puritans to worry constantly that individuals who acted like saints were fooling themselves and others. Neverthe- less, Puritans thought that visible saints — persons who passed their demanding tests of conversion and church membership — probably were among God’s elect.
Members of Puritan churches ardently hoped that God had chosen them to receive eternal life and tried to demonstrate saintly behavior. Their covenant bound them to help one another attain salvation and to discipline the entire community by saintly standards. Church members kept an eye on the behavior of everybody in town. By overseeing every aspect of life, the visible saints enforced a remarkable degree of righteous conformity in Puritan communities. Total conformity, however, was never achieved. Ardent Puritans differed among themselves, and non-Puritans shirked orthodox rules, such as the Roxbury servant who declared that “if hell were ten times hotter, [I] would rather be there than [I] would serve [my] master.”
Despite the central importance of religion, churches played no direct role in the civil government of New England communities. Puritans did not want to mimic the Church of England, which they considered a puppet of the king rather than an inde- pendent body that served the Lord. They were determined to insulate New England churches from the contaminating influence of the civil state and its merely human laws. Ministers were prohibited from holding government office.
Puritans had no qualms, however, about their religious beliefs influencing New England governments. As much as possible, the Puritans tried to bring public life into conformity with their view of God’s law. For example, fines were issued for Sabbath-breaking activities such as working, traveling, playing a flute, smoking a pipe, and visiting neighbors.
Calvinism Christian doctrine of Swiss Protestant theologian John Calvin. Its chief tenet was predestination, the idea that God had determined which human souls would receive eternal salvation. Despite this, Calvinism promoted strict discipline in daily and religious life.
predestination Doctrine stating that God determined whether individuals were destined for salvation or damnation before their birth. According to the doctrine, nothing an individual did during his or her lifetime could affect that person’s fate.
visible saints Puritans who had passed the tests of conversion and church membership and were therefore thought to be among God’s elect.
84 CHAPTER 4 The Northern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1601–1700
Puritans mandated other purifications of what they considered corrupt English practices. They refused to celebrate Christmas or Easter because the
Bible did not mention either one. They outlawed religious wedding ceremo- nies; couples were married by a magistrate in a civil ceremony. They
banned cards, dice, shuffleboard, and other games of chance, as well as music and dancing. “Mixt or Promiscuous Dancing . . . of Men and Women” could not be tolerated since “the unchaste Touches and Gesticulations used by Dancers have a palpable tendency to that which is evil.”
Government by Puritans for Puritanism. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that seventeenth-century New England was governed by Puritans for Puritan- ism. The charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company empowered the company’s stockholders, known as freemen, to meet as a body known as the General Court and make the laws needed to govern the company’s affairs. The colonists transformed this arrangement for running a joint-stock company into a structure for governing
Visual Activity THE PURITAN CHALLENGE TO THE STATUS QUO The World Turn’d Upside Down, a pamphlet printed in London in 1647, satirizes the Puritan notion that the contemporary world was deeply flawed. The pamphlet refers to the “distracted Times” of the Puritan Revolution in England. The drawing on the title page ridicules criticisms of English society that also were common among New England Puritans. By permission of the British Library.
READING THE IMAGE: The drawing shows at least a dozen examples of the conventional world of seventeenth-century England turned upside down. Can you identify them?
CONNECTIONS: Puritans would claim that the artist had it wrong — that the conventional world turned God’s order upside down. How might the drawing have been different if a devout Puritan had drawn it?
The Evolution of New England Society 851601–1700
the colony. Hoping to ensure that godly men would decide government policies, the General Court expanded the number of freemen in 1631 to include all male church members. Only freemen had the right to vote for governor and other officials. When the size of the General Court grew too large to meet conveniently, the freemen agreed in 1634 that each town would send two deputies to the General Court to act as the colony’s legislative assembly. All other men were classified as “inhabitants,” who had the right to vote, hold office, and participate fully in town government.
A “town meeting,” composed of a town’s inhabitants and freemen, chose the selectmen who administered local affairs. New England town meetings routinely practiced a level of popular participation in political life that was unprecedented elsewhere in the world during the seventeenth century. Almost every adult man could speak out and vote in town meetings, but all women — even church members — were prohibited from voting. This widespread political participation tended to reinforce conformity to Puritan ideals.
The General Court granted land for town sites to pious petitioners, once the Indians agreed to relinquish their claim to the land, usually in exchange for manu- factured goods. Town founders then apportioned land among themselves and any newcomers they approved. Most family plots clustered between roughly fifty to one hundred acres, resulting in a more nearly equal distribution of land in New England than in the Chesapeake.
The physical layout of New England towns encouraged settlers to look inward toward their neighbors, multiplying the opportunities for godly vigilance. Most peo- ple considered the forest that lay just beyond every settler’s house an alien environ- ment. Footpaths connecting one town to another were so rudimentary that even John Winthrop once got lost and spent a sleepless night in the forest only a half mile from his house.
The Splintering of Puritanism. Almost from the beginning, John Winthrop and other leaders had difficulty enforcing their views of Puritan orthodoxy. In England, persecution as a dissenting minority had unified Puritan voices in opposition to the Church of England. In New England, the promise of a godly society and the Puri- tans’ emphasis on individual Bible study led toward different visions of godliness. Puritan leaders, however, interpreted dissent as an error caused either by a mis- guided believer or by the malevolent power of Satan. As one Puritan minister pro- claimed, “The Scripture saith . . . there is no Truth but one.”
Shortly after banishing Roger Williams, Winthrop confronted another dis- senter, this time a devout Puritan woman steeped in Scripture and absorbed by religious questions: Anne Hutchinson. The mother of fourteen children, Hutchinson served her neighbors as a midwife and in 1634 began to give weekly lectures on recent sermons attended by women who gathered at her home. Hutchinson lec- tured on the “covenant of grace” — the idea that individuals could be saved only by God’s grace in choosing them to be members of the elect. This familiar Puritan doctrine contrasted with the covenant of works, the erroneous belief that a person’s behavior — one’s works — could win God’s favor and ultimately earn a person salvation.
86 CHAPTER 4 The Northern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1601–1700
The meetings at Hutchinson’s house alarmed her nearest neighbor, Governor John Winthrop, who believed that she was subverting the good order of the colony. In 1637, Winthrop had formal charges brought against Hutchinson and denounced her lectures as “not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God nor fitting for your sex.” He told her, “You have stept out of your place, you have rather bine a Husband than a Wife and a preacher than a Hearer; and a Magistrate than a Subject.”
Winthrop and other Puritan elders referred to Hutchinson and her followers as antinomians, people who believed that Christians could be saved by faith alone and did not need to act in accordance with God’s law as set forth in the Bible and as inter- preted by the colony’s leaders. Hutchinson nimbly defended herself against the accu- sation of antinomianism. Yes, she acknowledged, she believed that men and women were saved by faith alone; but no, she did not deny the need to obey God’s law. “The Lord hath let me see which was the clear ministry and which the wrong,” she said. How could she tell, Winthrop asked, which ministry was which? “By an immediate revelation,” she replied, “by the voice of [God’s] own spirit to my soul.” Winthrop seized this statement as the heresy of prophecy, the view that God revealed his will directly to a believer instead of exclusively through the Bible, as every right-minded Puritan knew.
In 1638, the Boston church formally excommunicated Hutchinson. The minister decreed, “I doe cast you out and . . . deliver you up to Satan.” Banished, Hutchinson and her family moved first to Roger Williams’s Rhode Island and then to present-day New York, where she and most of her family were killed by Indians.
The strains within Puritanism exemplified by Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams caused communities to splinter repeatedly during the seventeenth century. Thomas Hooker, a prominent minister, clashed with Winthrop and other leaders
OLD SHIP MEETINGHOUSE Built in Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1681, this meetinghouse is one of the oldest surviving buildings used for church services in English North America. The unadorned walls and windows reflect the austere religious aesthetic of New England Puritanism. The family pews mark boundaries of kinship and piety visible to all. The elevated pulpit signals the superiority of God’s Word as preached by the minister. Steve Dunwell.
antinomians Individuals who believed that Christians could be saved by faith alone and did not need to act in accordance with God’s law as set forth in the Bible. Puritan leaders considered this belief to be a heresy.
The Evolution of New England Society 871601–1700
over the composition of the church. Hooker argued that men and women who lived godly lives should be admitted to church membership even if they had not experienced conversion. In 1636, Hooker led an exodus of more than eight hundred colonists from Massachusetts to the Connecticut River valley, where they founded Hartford and neighboring towns. In 1639, the towns adopted the Funda- mental Orders of Connecticut, a quasi-constitution that could be altered by the vote of freemen, who did not have to be church members, though nearly all of them were.
Other Puritan churches divided and subdivided throughout the seventeenth century as acrimony developed over doctrine and church government. Sometimes churches split over the appointment of a controversial minister. These schisms arose from ambiguities and tensions within Puritan belief. As the colonies matured, other tensions developed as well.
Religious Controversies and Economic Changes. A revolutionary transformation in the fortunes of Puritans in England had profound consequences in New England. Disputes between King Charles I and Parliament, which was domi- nated by Puritans, escalated in 1642 to civil war in England, a conflict known as the Puritan Revolution. Parliamentary forces led by the staunch Puritan Oliver Crom- well were victorious, executing Charles I in 1649 and proclaiming England a Puritan republic. From 1649 to 1660, England’s rulers were not monarchs who suppressed Puritanism but believers who championed it.
When the Puritan Revolution began, the stream of immigrants to New England dwindled to a trickle, creating hard times for the colonists. They could no longer consider themselves a city on a hill setting a godly example for humankind. Puritans in England, not New England, were reforming English society. Further- more, when immigrant ships became rare, the colonists faced sky-high prices for scarce English goods and few customers for their own colonial products. As they searched to find new products and markets, they established the enduring patterns of New England’s economy.
New England’s rocky soil and short growing season ruled out cultivating the southern colonies’ crops of tobacco and rice that found ready markets in Atlantic ports. Exports that New Englanders could not get from the soil they took instead from the forest and the sea. By the 1640s, furbearing animals had become scarce unless traders ventured far beyond the frontiers of English settlement. Trees from the seemingly limitless forests of New England proved a longer-lasting resource. Masts for ships and staves for barrels of Spanish wine and West Indian sugar were crafted from New England timber.
The most important New England export was fish. Dried, salted codfish from the rich North Atlantic fishing grounds found markets in southern Europe and the West Indies. The fish trade also stimulated colonial shipbuilding and trained genera- tions of fishermen, sailors, and merchants. But the lives of most New England colo- nists revolved around their farms, churches, and families.
Although immigration came to a standstill in the 1640s, the population continued to boom, doubling every twenty years. In New England, almost everyone married,
Puritan Revolution English civil war that arose out of disputes between King Charles I and Parliament, which was dominated by Puritans. The conflict began in 1642 and ended with the execution of Charles I in 1649, resulting in Puritan rule in England until 1660.
88 CHAPTER 4 The Northern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1601–1700
and women often had eight or nine children. Long, cold winters minimized the pres- ence of warm-weather ailments such as malaria and yellow fever, so the mortality rate was lower than in the South.
During the second half of the seventeenth century, under the pressures of steady population growth (Figure 4.1) and integration into the Atlantic economy, the red- hot piety of the founders cooled. After 1640, the population grew faster than church membership. Boston’s churches in 1650 could house only about a third of the city’s residents. By the 1680s, women were the majority of church members throughout New England. In some towns, only 15 percent of the adult men were members. This slackening of piety led the Puritan minister Michael Wigglesworth to ask, in verse:
How is it that I find In stead of holiness Carnality; In stead of heavenly frames an Earthly mind, For burning zeal luke-warm Indifferency, For flaming love, key-cold Dead-heartedness. . . . Whence cometh it . . . that an honest man can hardly Trust his Brother?
Most alarming to Puritan leaders, many of the children of the visible saints of Winthrop’s generation failed to experience conversion and attain full church mem- bership. Puritans tended to assume that sainthood was inherited — that the children of visible saints were probably also among the elect. As these children grew up during the 1640s and 1650s, however, they seldom experienced the inward transfor- mation that signaled conversion and qualification for church membership. The problem of declining church membership and the watering-down of Puritan ortho- doxy became urgent during the 1650s when the children of saints, who had grown to adulthood in New England but had not experienced conversion, began to have chil- dren themselves. Their sons and daughters — the grandchildren of the founders of
FIGURE 4.1 POPULATION OF THE ENGLISH NORTH AMERICAN COLONIES IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY The colonial population grew at a steadily accelerating rate during the seventeenth century. New England and the southern colonies each accounted for about half the total colonial population until after 1680, when growth in Pennsylvania and New York contributed to a surge in the population of the middle colonies.
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The Evolution of New England Society 891601–1700
the colony — could not receive the protection that baptism afforded against the ter- rors of death because their parents had not experienced conversion.
Puritan churches debated what to do. To allow anyone, even the child of a saint, to become a church member without conversion was an unthinkable retreat from funda- mental Puritan doctrine. In 1662, a synod of Massachusetts ministers reached a com- promise known as the Halfway Covenant. Unconverted children of saints would be permitted to become “halfway” church members. Like regular church members, they could baptize their infants. But unlike full church members, they could not participate in communion or have the voting privileges of church membership. The Halfway Cov- enant generated a controversy that sputtered through Puritan churches for the remain- der of the century. With the Halfway Covenant, Puritan churches came to terms with the lukewarm piety that had replaced the founders’ burning zeal.
Nonetheless, New England communities continued to enforce piety with holy rigor. Beginning in 1656, small bands of Quakers — members of the Society of Friends, as they called themselves — began to arrive in Massachusetts. Quakers believed that God spoke directly to each individual through an “inner light” and that individuals needed neither a preacher nor the Bible to discover God’s Word. Main- taining that all human beings were equal in God’s eyes, Quakers refused to conform to mere temporal powers such as laws and governments unless God requested other- wise. Women often took a leading role in Quaker meetings, in contrast to Puritan congregations, where women usually outnumbered men but remained subordinate.
NEW ENGLAND CHILDREN In this 1670 painting, which depicts the children of Bostonians Joanna and Anthony Mason, the artist lavished attention on the young subjects’ elaborate clothing and adornments: fashionable slashed sleeves, fancy lace, silver-studded shoes, necklaces for the girls, and a silver-headed cane for the boy. Such finery expresses the growing respect for wealth and its worldly rewards in seventeenth-century New England. David, Joanna, and Abigail Mason, 1670, The Freake-Gibbs Painter
(attrib. to), American archive, 1670. Oil on
canvas 39 1/2 x 42 1/2 in. Fine Arts Museums
of San Francisco. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D.
Rockefeller III. 1979.7.3
Halfway Covenant A Puritan compromise established in Massachusetts in 1662 that allowed the unconverted children of the “visible saints” to become “halfway” members of the church and baptize their own children even though they were not full members of the church themselves.
Quakers Epithet for members of the Society of Friends. Their belief that God spoke directly to each individual through an “inner light” and that neither ministers nor the Bible was essential to discovering God’s Word put them in conflict with orthodox Puritans.
90 CHAPTER 4 The Northern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1601–1700
New England communities treated Quakers with ruthless severity. Some Quak- ers were branded on the face “with a red-hot iron with [an] H. for heresie.” When Quakers refused to leave Massachusetts, Boston officials hanged four of them between 1659 and 1661.
New Englanders’ partial success in realizing the promise of a godly society ulti- mately undermined the intense appeal of Puritanism. In the pious Puritan commu- nities of New England, leaders tried to eliminate sin. In the process, they diminished the sense of utter human depravity that was the wellspring of Puritanism. By 1700, New Englanders did not doubt that human beings sinned, but they were more con- cerned with the sins of others than with their own.
Witch trials held in Salem, Massachusetts, signaled the erosion of religious confi- dence and assurance. From the beginning of English settlement in the New World, more than 95 percent of all legal accusations of witchcraft occurred in New England, a hint of the Puritans’ preoccupation with sin and evil. The most notorious witchcraft trials took place in Salem in 1692, when witnesses accused more than one hundred people of witchcraft, a capital crime. (See “Documenting the American Promise,” page 92.) Bewitched young girls shrieked in pain, their limbs twisted into strange contor- tions, as they pointed out the witches who tortured them. According to the trial court record, the bewitched girls declared that “the shape of [one accused witch] did often- times very grievously pinch them, choke them, bite them, and afflict them; urging them to write their names in a book” — the devil’s book. Most of the accused witches were older women, and virtually all of them were well known to their accusers. The Salem court hanged nineteen accused witches and pressed one to death, signaling enduring
WITCHES SHOW THEIR LOVE FOR SATAN Witches debased themselves by standing in line to kiss Satan’s buttocks — or so it was popularly believed. This seventeenth-century print portrays Satan with clawlike hands and feet, the tail of a rodent, the wings of a bat, and the head of a lustful ram attached to the torso of a man. Notice that women predominate among the witches eager to express their devotion to Satan. UCSF Library/Center for Knowledge Management.
The Founding of the Middle Colonies 911601–1700
belief in the supernatural origins of evil and gnawing doubt about the strength of Puri- tan New Englanders’ faith. Why else, after all, had so many New Englanders succumbed to what their accusers and the judges believed were the temptations of Satan?
The Founding of the Middle Colonies South of New England and north of the Chesapeake, a group of middle colonies were founded in the last third of the seven- teenth century. Before the 1670s, few Europeans settled in the region. For the first two-thirds of the seventeenth century, the most important European outpost in the area was the relatively small Dutch colony of New Netherland. By 1700, however, the English monarchy had seized New Netherland, renamed it New York, and encouraged the creation of a Quaker colony in Pennsylvania led by William Penn. Unlike the New England colonies, the middle colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania originated as land grants by the English monarch to one or more proprietors, who then possessed both the land and the extensive, almost monarchical, powers of government (Map 4.2). These middle colonies attracted settlers of more diverse European origins and religious faiths than were found in New England.
From New Netherland to New York. In 1609, the Dutch East India Company dispatched Henry Hudson to search for a Northwest Passage to the Orient. Hudson ven- tured up the large river that now bears his name until it dwindled to a stream that obvi- ously did not lead to China. A decade later, the Dutch government granted the West India Company — a group of Dutch merchants and shippers — exclusive rights to trade with the Western Hemisphere. In 1626, Peter Minuit, the resident director of the company, pur- chased Manhattan Island from the Manhate Indians for trade goods worth the equivalent of a dozen beaver pelts. New Amsterdam, the small settlement established at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, became the principal trading center in New Netherland and the colony’s headquarters.
Unlike the English colonies, New Netherland did not attract many European immigrants. Like New England and the Chesapeake colonies, New Netherland never realized its sponsors’ dreams of great profits. The company tried to stim- ulate immigration by granting patroonships — allotments of eighteen miles of land along the Hudson River — to wealthy stockholders who would bring fifty families to the colony and settle them as serflike tenants on their huge domains. Only one patroonship succeeded; the others failed to attract set- tlers, and the company eventually recovered much of the land.
Though few in number, New Netherlanders were remarkably diverse, especially compared with the homoge- neous English settlers to the north and south. Religious dis- senters and immigrants from Holland, Sweden, France, Germany, and elsewhere made their way to the colony. A minister of the Dutch Reformed Church complained to
How did Quaker ideals shape the colony of Pennsylvania?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
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MAP 4.2 MIDDLE COLONIES IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Most settlers in the middle colonies in the seventeenth century clustered along the Hudson and Delaware rivers. The extent of the colonies shown in this map reflects land grants authorized in England. Most of this area was inhabited by Native Americans.
New Netherland Dutch colony on Manhattan Island. New Amsterdam was its capital and colony headquarters.
92 CHAPTER 4 The Northern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1601–1700
with his Axe; but he could not Hit it. . . . Going a little further, there appeared unto him a Black Puppy, some- what bigger than the first; but Black as Cole. Its motions were quicker than those of his Ax; it Flew at his Belly and away; then at his Throat, also over his Shoulder. . . . His heart now began to fail him, and he thought the Dog would have Tore his Throat out. But he recovered him- self, and called upon God in his Distress; and Naming the Name of JESUS CHRIST, it Vanished away at once. . . . [The next day, Susanna Martin told other people that he had been frightened by puppies, although] Kembal [said he] had mentioned the Matter to no Creature Living.
Joseph Ring . . . has been strangely carried about by Demons, from one Witch-Meeting to another, for near two years together. . . . Afterwards . . . this poor man would be visited with unknown shapes . . . which would force him away with them, unto unknown Places, where he saw meetings, Feastings, Dancings. . . . When he was brought into these Hellish meetings, one of the First things they still did unto him, was to give him a knock on the Back, whereupon he was . . . as if Bound with chains, uncapable of Stirring out of the place, till they should Release him. . . . There often came to him a man, who presented him a Book, whereto he would have him set his Hand; promising to him, that he should then have even what he would; and presenting him with all the delectable Things, per- sons, and places that he could imagine. But he refus- ing to subscribe, the business would end with dreadful Shapes, Noises and Screechings, which almost scared
Hunting Witches in Salem, Massachusetts In the summer of 1692, many people in and around Salem, Massachusetts, accused dozens of their neighbors and kinfolk of being witches. Offi cials convened a special court to hear the testimony of the accusers and to examine the accused. In the end, nineteen convicted witches were hanged, and more than 150 accused witches crammed the jails before the trials were fi nally called off.
Documenting the American Promise
DOCUMENT 1
Witnesses against Accused Witch Susanna Martin, 1692 Neighbors lined up to give testimony that, in their minds, proved that the accused were witches. Like many other accused people, Susanna Martin pleaded not guilty to witchcraft. The court, persuaded by the testimony of witnesses, sentenced her to death, and she was executed on July 19, 1692.
Bernard Peache testify’d, That being in Bed on a Lords-day Night, he heard a scrabbling at the Window, whereat he then saw, Susanna Martin come in, and jump down upon the Floor. She took hold of this Deponents Feet, and drawing his Body up into an Heap, she lay upon him, near Two Hours; in all which time he could neither speak nor stirr. At length, when he could begin to move, he laid hold on her Hand, and pulling it up to his mouth, he bit three of her Fingers, as he judged, unto the Bone. Whereupon she went from the Chamber, down the Stairs, out at the Door. . . .
John Kembal . . . Being desirous to furnish himself with a Dog, he applied himself to buy one of this Martin. . . . But she not letting him have his Choice [Kembal went to another neighbor to get a puppy]. Within a few days after, [when] this Kembal . . . came below the Meeting-House, there appeared unto him, a little thing like a Puppy, of a Darkish Colour; and it shot Backwards and forwards between his Leggs. He had the Courage to use all possible Endeavors of Cutting it,
The Founding of the Middle Colonies 931601–1700
DOCUMENT 2
Robert Calef, More Wonders of the Invisible World, 1700 A few New Englanders spoke out against the witch- hunt as the persecution of innocent people. Robert Calef, a Boston merchant, wrote a scathing criticism of the witch trials and their supporters.
And now to sum up all in a few words, we have seen a biggotted zeal, stirring up a blind, and most bloody rage, not against enemies, or irreligious,
profligate persons — but . . . against as virtuous and religious as any they have left behind them in this country . . . and this by the testimony of vile varlets, as not only were known before, but have been fur- ther apparent since, by their manifest lives, whore- doms, incest &c. The accusations of these, from their spectral sight, being the chief evidence against those that suffered; in which accusations they were upheld by both magistrates and ministers, so long as they apprehended themselves in no danger. And then, tho’ they could defend neither the doctrine nor the practice, yet none of them have in such a publick manner as the case requires, testified against either; tho’, at the same time they could not but be sensible what a stain and lasting infamy they have brought upon the whole country, to the indangering of the future welfare not only of this but of other places, induced by their example . . . occasioning the great dishonour and blasphemy of the name of God . . . and as a natural effect thereof, to the great increase of Atheism.
SOURCE: Robert Calef, More Wonders of the Invisible World (London, 1700), unpaginated “Epistle to the Reader.”
Questions for Analysis and Debate 1 What persuaded witnesses against Susanna Martin that she was a witch? How might a critic
such as Robert Calef have responded to the testimony of these witnesses? How might the witnesses have explained Martin’s claim that she led “a most virtuous and Holy Life”?
2 What do these documents suggest about the status of Christianity in New England in the late seventeenth century? Why did witch-hunters believe that the devil was such a threat, when Calef believed that the witch-hunters themselves were the greater danger?
CONNECT TO THE BIG IDEA C Why did some Puritans accuse their friends and neighbors of being witches?
him out of his witts. . . . He saw the Prisoner [Susanna Martin], at several of those Hellish Randezvouzes. Note, This Woman was one of the most Impudent, Scurrilous, wicked creatures in the world & she did now throughout her whole Trial, discover herself to be such an one. Yet when she was asked what she had to say for her self, her Cheef Plea was, That she had Led a most virtuous and Holy Life.
SOURCE: Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World (Boston, 1692), 115–26.
94 CHAPTER 4 The Northern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1601–1700
his superiors in Holland that several groups of Jews had recently arrived, adding to the religious mixture of “Papists, Mennonites and Lutherans among the Dutch [and] many Puritans . . . and many other atheists . . . who conceal themselves under the name of Christians.”
The West India Company struggled to govern the motley colonists. Peter Stuyvesant, governor from 1647 to 1664, tried to enforce conformity to the Dutch Reformed Church, but the company declared that “the consciences of men should be free and unshackled,” making a virtue of New Netherland necessity. The company never permitted the colony’s settlers to form a representative government. Instead, the company appointed government officials who established policies, including taxes, that many colonists deeply resented.
In 1664, New Netherland became New York. Charles II, who became king of England in 1660 when Parliament restored the monarchy, gave his brother James, the Duke of York, an enormous grant of land that included New Netherland. The duke quickly organized a small fleet of warships, which appeared off Manhattan Island in late summer 1664, and demanded that Stuyvesant surrender. With little choice, he did.
As the new proprietor of the colony, the Duke of York exercised almost the same unlimited authority over the colony as had the West India Company. Like the Dutch, the duke permitted “all persons of what Religion soever, quietly to inhabit . . . provided they give no disturbance to the publique peace, nor doe molest or disquiet others in the free exercise of their religion.” This policy of religious toleration was less an affirmation of liberty of conscience than a recognition of the reality of the most heterogeneous colony in seventeenth-century North America.
NEW AMSTERDAM The settlement on Manhattan Island appears in the background of this 1673 Dutch portrait of New Amsterdam. In the foreground, the Dutch artist placed native inhabitants of the mainland, drawing them to resemble Africans rather than Lenni Lenape (Delaware) Indians. The portrait contrasts orderly, efficient, businesslike New Amsterdam with the exotic natural environment of America. © Collection of the New-York Historical Society.
The Founding of the Middle Colonies 951601–1700
New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The creation of New York led indirectly to the founding of two other middle colonies, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. In 1664, the Duke of York subdivided his grant and gave the portion between the Hudson and Delaware rivers to two of his friends. The proprietors of this new colony, New Jersey, quarreled and called in a prominent English Quaker, William Penn, to arbitrate their dispute. Penn eventually worked out a settlement that continued New Jersey’s pro- prietary government. In the process, Penn became intensely interested in what he termed a “holy experiment” of establishing a genuinely Quaker colony in America.
Unlike most Quakers, William Penn came from an eminent family. Born in 1644, Penn trained for a military career, but the ideas of dissenters from the reestablished Church of England appealed to him, and he became a devout Quaker.
The Quakers’ concept of an open, generous God who made his love equally available to all people continually brought them into conflict with the English govern- ment. Quaker leaders were ordinary men and women, not specially trained preachers. Quakers allowed women to assume positions of religious leadership. “In souls there is no sex,” they said. Since all people were equal in the spiritual realm, Quakers consid- ered social hierarchy false and evil. They called everyone “friend” and shook hands instead of curtsying or removing their hats — even when meeting the king. These customs enraged many non-Quakers and provoked innumerable beatings and worse. Penn was jailed four times for such offenses, once for nine months.
Despite his many run-ins with the government, Penn remained on good terms with Charles II. Partly to rid England of the troublesome Quakers, in 1681 Charles made Penn the proprietor of a new colony of some 45,000 square miles called Pennsylvania.
Toleration and Diversity in Pennsylvania. Quakers flocked to Pennsylva- nia in numbers exceeded only by the great Puritan migration to New England fifty years earlier. Between 1682 and 1685, nearly eight thousand immigrants arrived, most of them from England, Ireland, and Wales. They represented a cross section of the artisans, farmers, and laborers who predominated among English Quakers. Quaker missionaries also encouraged immigrants from the European continent, and many came, giving Pennsylvania greater ethnic diversity than any other English colony except New York. The Quaker colony prospered, and the capital city, Philadelphia, soon rivaled New York as a center of commerce. By 1700, the city’s five thousand inhabitants participated in a thriving trade exporting flour and other food products to the West Indies and importing English textiles and manufactured goods.
Penn was determined to live in peace with the Indians who inhabited the region. His Indian policy expressed his Quaker ideals and contrasted sharply with the hos- tile policies of the other English colonies. As he explained to the chief of the Lenni Lenape (Delaware) Indians, “God has written his law in our hearts, by which we are taught and commanded to love and help and do good to one another . . . [and] I desire to enjoy [Pennsylvania lands] with your love and consent.” Penn instructed his agents to obtain the Indians’ consent by purchasing their land, respecting their claims, and dealing with them fairly.
Penn declared that the first principle of government was that every settler would “enjoy the free possession of his or her faith and exercise of worship towards God.” Accordingly, Pennsylvania tolerated Protestant sects of all kinds as well as Roman
96 CHAPTER 4 The Northern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1601–1700
Catholicism. All voters and officeholders had to be Christians, but the government did not compel settlers to attend religious services, as in Massachusetts, or to pay taxes to maintain a state-supported church, as in Virginia.
Despite its toleration and diversity, Pennsylvania was as much a Quaker colony as New England was a stronghold of Puritanism. Penn had no hesitation about using civil government to enforce religious morality. One of the colony’s first laws pro- vided severe punishment for “all such offenses against God, as swearing, cursing, lying, profane talking, [and] drunkenness . . . which excite the people to rudeness, cruelty, looseness, and irreligion.”
As proprietor, Penn had extensive powers subject only to review by the king. He appointed a governor, who maintained the proprietor’s power to veto any laws passed by the colonial council, which was elected by property owners who possessed at least one hundred acres of land or who paid taxes. The council had the power to originate laws and administer all the affairs of government. A popularly elected assembly served as a check on the council; its members had the authority to reject or approve laws framed by the council.
Penn stressed that the exact form of government mattered less than the men who served in it. In Penn’s eyes, “good men” staffed Pennsylvania’s government because Quakers dominated elective and appointive offices. Quakers, of course, dif- fered among themselves. Members of the assembly struggled to win the right to debate and amend laws, especially tax laws. They finally won the battle in 1701 when a new Charter of Privileges gave the proprietor the power to appoint the council and in turn stripped the council of all its former powers and gave them to the assembly, which became the only single-house legislature in all the English colonies.
The Colonies and the English Empire Proprietary grants to faraway lands were a cheap way for the king to reward friends. As the colonies grew, however, the grants became more valuable. After 1660, the king took ini- tiatives to channel colonial trade through English hands and
to consolidate royal authority over colonial governments. Occasioned by such economic and political considerations and triggered by King Philip’s War between colonists and Native Americans, these initiatives defined the basic relationship between the colo- nies and England that endured until the American Revolution (Map 4.3).
Royal Regulation of Colonial Trade. English economic policies toward the colonies were designed to yield customs revenues for the monarchy and profitable business for English merchants and shippers. Also, the policies were intended to divert the colonies’ trade from England’s enemies, especially the Dutch and the French.
The Navigation Acts of 1650, 1651, 1660, and 1663 (see chapter 3) set forth two fundamental rules governing colonial trade. First, goods shipped to and from the colonies had to be transported in English ships using primarily English crews. Second, the Navigation Acts listed colonial products that could be shipped only to England or to other English colonies. While these regulations prevented Chesapeake
Why did the Glorious Revolution in England lead to uprisings in the American colonies?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
The Colonies and the English Empire 971601–1700
planters from shipping their tobacco directly to the European continent, they inter- fered less with the commerce of New England and the middle colonies, whose prin- cipal exports — fish, lumber, and flour — could legally be sent directly to their most important markets in the West Indies.
By the end of the seventeenth century, colonial commerce was defined by regu- lations that subjected merchants and shippers to royal supervision and gave them access to markets throughout the English empire. In addition, colonial commerce received protection from the English navy. By 1700, colonial goods (including those
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MAP 4.3 AMERICAN COLONIES AT THE END OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY By the end of the seventeenth century, settlers inhabited a narrow band of land that stretched from Boston to Norfolk, with pockets of settlement farther south. The colonies’ claims to enormous tracts of land to the west were contested by Native Americans as well as by France and Spain.
READING THE MAP: What geographic feature acted as the western boundary for colonial territorial claims? Which colonies were the most settled and which the least?
CONNECTIONS: The map divides the colonies into four regions. Can you think of an alternative organization? On what criteria would it be based?
Map Activity
98 CHAPTER 4 The Northern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1601–1700
from the West Indies) accounted for one-fifth of all English imports and for two- thirds of all goods re-exported from England to the European continent. In turn, the colonies absorbed more than one-tenth of English exports. The commercial regula- tions gave economic value to England’s proprietorship of the American colonies.
King Philip’s War and the Consolidation of Royal Authority. The mon- archy also took steps to exercise greater control over colonial governments. Virginia had been a royal colony since 1624; Maryland, South Carolina, and the middle colonies were proprietary colonies with close ties to the crown. The New England colonies pos- sessed royal charters, but they had developed their own distinctively Puritan govern- ments. Charles II, whose father, Charles I, had been executed by Puritans in England, took a particular interest in harnessing the New England colonies more firmly to the English empire. The occasion was a royal investigation following King Philip’s War.
A series of skirmishes in the Connecticut River valley between 1636 and 1637 culminated in the Pequot War when colonists massacred hundreds of Pequot Indi- ans. In the decades that followed, New Englanders established relatively peaceful relations with the more potent Wampanoags, but they steadily encroached on Indian land. In 1642, a native leader urged warring tribes to band together against the English. “We [must] be one as they [the English] are,” he said; “otherwise we shall be gone shortly, for . . . these English having gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass, and with axes fell the trees, and their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved.”
Such grievances accumulated until 1675, when the Wampanoags led by their chief Metacomet — whom the colonists called King Philip — attacked English settlements in western Massachusetts. Militias from Massachusetts and other New England colonies counterattacked the Wampanoags, Nipmucks, and Narragansetts in a deadly sequence of battles that killed more than a thousand colonists and thousands more Indians. The Indians destroyed thirteen English settlements and partially burned another half dozen. Mary Rowlandson, a minister’s wife in Lancaster, Massachusetts, who was cap- tured by Indians, recalled later that it was a “solemn sight to see so many Christians lying in their blood . . . like a company of sheep torn by wolves.”
By the spring of 1676, Indian warriors ranged freely within seventeen miles of Boston. The colonists finally defeated the Indians, principally with a scorched- earth policy of burning their food supplies. But King Philip’s War left the New England colonists with a large war debt, a devastated frontier, and an enduring hatred of Indians. “A Swarm of Flies, they may arise, a Nation to Annoy,” a colo- nial officer wrote in justification of destroying the Indians; “Yea Rats and Mice, or Swarms of Lice a Nation may destroy.”
In 1676, an agent of the king arrived to investigate whether New England was abiding by English laws. Not surprisingly, the king’s agent found all sorts of deviations from English rules, and the monarchy decided to govern New En gland more directly. In 1684, an English court revoked the Massachusetts charter, the foundation of the distinctive Puritan government. Two years later, royal officials incorporated Massachusetts and the other colonies north of Mary- land into the Dominion of New England. To govern the dominion, the English sent Sir Edmund Andros to Boston. Some New England merchants cooperated
King Philip’s War War begun by Metacomet (King Philip), in which the Wampanoag Indians attacked colonial settlements in western Massachusetts in 1675. Colonists responded by attacking the Wampanoag and other tribes they believed conspired with them. The colonists prevailed in the brutal war.
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KING PHILIP’S WAR, 1675
The Colonies and the English Empire 991601–1700
with Andros, but most colonists were offended by his flagrant disregard of such Puri- tan traditions as keeping the Sabbath. Worst of all, the Dominion of New England invalidated all land titles, confronting every landowner in New England with the hor- rifying prospect of losing his or her land.
Events in England, however, permitted Massachusetts colonists to overthrow Andros and retain title to their property. When Charles II died in 1685, he was suc- ceeded by his brother James II, a zealous Catholic. James’s aggressive campaign to appoint Catholics to government posts engendered such unrest that in 1688 a group of Protestant noblemen in Parliament invited the Dutch ruler William III of Orange, James’s son-in-law, to claim the English throne.
When William III landed in England at the head of a large army, James fled to France, and William III and his wife, Mary II (James’s daughter), became corulers in the relatively bloodless “Glorious Revolution,” reasserting Protestant influence in England and its empire. Rumors of the revolution raced across the Atlantic and emboldened colonial uprisings against royal authority in Massachusetts, New York, and Maryland.
In Boston in 1689, rebels tossed Andros and other English officials in jail, destroyed the Dominion of New England, and reestablished the former charter gov- ernment. New Yorkers followed the Massachusetts example. Under the leadership of Jacob Leisler, rebels seized the royal governor in 1689 and ruled the colony for more than a year. That same year in Maryland, the Protestant Association, led by John Coode, overthrew the colony’s pro-Catholic government, fearing it would not recog- nize the new Protestant king.
But these rebel governments did not last. When King William III’s governor of New York arrived in 1691, he executed Leisler for treason. Coode’s men ruled Maryland until the new royal governor arrived in 1692 and ended both Coode’s rebellion and Lord Baltimore’s proprietary government. In Massachusetts, John Winthrop’s city on a hill became another royal colony in 1691. The new charter said that the governor of the colony would be appointed by the king rather than elected by the colonists’ representatives. But perhaps the most unsettling change was the new qualification for voting. Possession of property replaced church mem- bership as a prerequisite for voting in colony-wide elections. Wealth replaced God’s grace as the defining characteristic of Massachusetts citizenship.
WAMPANOAG WAR CLUB This seventeenth-century war club was used to kill King Philip, according to the Anglican missionary who obtained it from Indians early in the eighteenth century. Although the tale is probably a legend, the club is certainly a seventeenth- century Wampanoag weapon that could have been used in King Philip’s War. The heavy ball carved into the head of the club could deliver a fatal blow. Courtesy of the Fruitlands Museums, Harvard, Massachusetts.
100 CHAPTER 4 The Northern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1601–1700
Much as colonists chafed under increasing royal control, they still valued English protection from hostile neighbors. Colonists worried that the Catholic colony of New France menaced frontier regions by encouraging Indian raids and by competing for the lucrative fur trade. Although French leaders tried to buttress the military strength of New France during the last third of the seventeenth century to block the expansion of the English colonies, most of the military efforts mustered by New France focused on defending against attacks by the powerful Iroquois. However, when the English colonies were distracted by the Glorious Revolution, French forces from the fur-trading regions along the Great Lakes and in Canada attacked villages in New England and New York. Known as King William’s War, the conflict with the French was a colonial outgrowth of William’s war against France in Europe. The war dragged on until 1697 and ended inconclusively in both Europe and the colonies. But it made clear to many colonists that along with English royal government came a welcome measure of military security.
Conclusion: An English Model of Colonization in North America By 1700, the northern English colonies of North America had developed along lines quite different from the example set by their southern counterparts. Emigrants came with their families and created settlements unlike the scattered plantations and largely male environment of early Virginia. Puritans in New England built towns and govern- ments around their churches and placed worship of God, not tobacco, at the center of their society. They depended chiefly on the labor of family members rather than on that of servants and slaves.
The convictions of Puritanism that motivated John Winthrop and others to reinvent England in the colonies became muted, however, as New England matured and dissenters such as Roger Williams multiplied. Catholics, Quakers, Anglicans (members of the Church of England), Jews, and others settled in the middle and southern colonies, creat- ing considerable religious toleration, especially in Pennsylvania and New York. At the same time, northern colonists, like their southern counterparts, developed an ever-increasing need for land that inevitably led to bloody conflict with the Indians who were displaced. By the closing years of the seventeenth century, the royal government in England inter- vened to try to moderate those conflicts and to govern the colonies more directly for the benefit of the monarchy. Assertions of royal control triggered colonial resistance that was ultimately suppressed, resulting in Massachusetts losing its special charter status and becoming a royal colony much like the other British North American colonies.
During the next century, the English colonial world would undergo surprising new developments built on the achievements of the seventeenth century. Immigrants from Scotland, Ireland, and Germany streamed into North America, and unprecedented numbers of African slaves poured into the southern colonies. On average, white colo- nists attained a relatively comfortable standard of living, especially compared with most people in England and continental Europe. While religion remained important, the intensity of religious concern that characterized the seventeenth century waned during the eighteenth century. Colonists worried more about prosperity than about provi- dence, and their societies grew increasingly secular, worldly, and diverse.
1 How did the religious dissenters who flooded into the northern colonies address the question of religious dissent in their new homes? Comparing two colonies, discuss their different approaches.
2 John Winthrop spoke of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as “a city upon a hill.” What did he mean? How did this expectation influence life in New England during the seventeenth century?
3 How did religious and political turmoil in England affect life in the colonies? In your answer, consider the establishment of the colonies and the crown’s attempts to exercise authority over them.
4 To what extent did the New England and middle colonies become more alike during the seventeenth century? To what extent did they remain distinctive?
MAKING CONNECTIONS
1 Why did the Puritans immigrate to North America? (pp. 78–82)
2 Why did Massachusetts Puritans adopt the Halfway Covenant? (pp. 82–91)
3 How did Quaker ideals shape the colony of Pennsylvania? (pp. 91–96)
4 Why did the Glorious Revolution in England lead to uprisings in the American colonies? (pp. 96–100)
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
English Reformation (p. 78)
Puritans (p. 78)
Separatists (p. 80)
Calvinism (p. 83)
predestination (p. 83)
visible saints (p. 83)
KEY TERMS
antinomians (p. 86)
Puritan Revolution (p. 87)
Halfway Covenant (p. 89)
Quakers (p. 89)
New Netherland (p. 91)
King Philip’s War (p. 98)
Chapter Review MAKE IT STICK
Go to LearningCurve: See what you know. Then review the key terms and answer the questions.
LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com /roarkconcise
101
STUDENT SITE @ bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
The brothers Amboe Robin John and Little Ephraim Robin John lived in Old Calabar on the Bight of Biafra in West Africa. The Robin Johns were part of a slave-trading dynasty headed by their kinsman Grandy King George, one of the most powerful leaders of the Efik people. Grandy King George owned hundreds of slaves whom he employed to capture still more slaves in the African interior. He sold these captives to captains of European slave ships for transport to the sugar,
tobacco, and rice fields in the New World. British slave ship captains and Grandy King
George’s African rivals conspired in 1767 to destroy the king’s monopoly.
102
Colonial America in the Eighteenth Century, 1701–1770
TEXTILE SAMPLE BOOK This bulging collection of cloth samples assembled by an
English textile manufacturer allowed colonial merchants to choose combinations of colors, designs, textures, weights,
and fibers (such as wool, cotton, or linen) that they believed their customers would purchase. The book depicts the
bewildering and somewhat intoxicating range of choices available to British North American consumers. NWHCM: 1966.658
Despatch book by Ives and Basely, 1792, from the collections of Norfolk Museums
and Archaeology Service.
A Growing Population and Expanding Economy in British North America (pp. 104–105)
New England: From Puritan Settlers to Yankee Traders (pp. 106–108)
The Middle Colonies: Immigrants, Wheat, and Work (pp. 109–112)
The Southern Colonies: Land of Slavery (pp. 113–119)
Unifying Experiences (pp. 119–128)
Conclusion: The Dual Identity of British North American Colonists (p. 128)
5
CHAPTER OUTLINE QUICK START
Quickly learn what is important in this chapter by doing the following:
• READ the Chapter Outline to see how the chapter is organized. • SKIM the Chronology on the next page to see what will be covered.
When you are ready, read the chapter and the Essential Questions for each section. Then use the Chapter Review to check what you know.
1701–1770
1711 North Carolina founded.
1730s Jonathan Edwards promotes Great Awakening.
1732 Georgia founded.
1733 Benjamin Franklin publishes Poor Richard’s Almanack.
1739 Stono Rebellion.
1740s George Whitefield preaches religious revival.
1745 Olaudah Equiano born.
1750s Colonists move down Shenandoah Valley.
1754 Seven Years’ War begins.
1769 First California mission established.
1770 Mission and presidio established at Monterey, California.
British North American colo- nists number more than two million.
1775 Indians destroy San Diego mission.
In a bloody battle, Little Ephraim and Ancona Robin John were enslaved and transported across the Atlantic to the West Indies.
Unlike most slaves, the Robin Johns spoke and wrote English, a skill they had learned as slave traders in Old Calabar. The Robin Johns escaped from the man who bought them in the West Indies and boarded a ship “determined to get home,” Little Ephraim wrote. But the ship captain took them to Virginia instead and sold them as slaves. Their new master “would tie me up & whip me many times for nothing at all,” Ancona testified, adding that he “was exceedingly badly man ever I saw.” After their master died in 1772, the Robin Johns heard that a slave ship from Old Calabar had recently arrived in Virginia, and the captain promised to take them back to Africa if they would run away. They did, but the captain took the Robin Johns to Bristol, England, and sought to sell them as slaves yet again.
While imprisoned in Bristol harbor, the Robin Johns smuggled letters to a Bristol slave trader they had known in Old Calabar. With his help, the Robin Johns appealed to the chief justice of England for their freedom on the grounds that they were unjustly enslaved because they “were free people . . . [who] had not done anything to forfeit our liberty.” After complex negotiations, they won their freedom.
As free Africans in Bristol, the Robin Johns converted to Christianity, but they longed to return to Africa. In 1774, they left Bristol as free men on a slave ship bound for Old Calabar, where they resumed their careers as slave traders.
The Robin Johns’ quest to escape enslavement and redeem their freedom was shared but not realized by millions of Africans who were victims of slave traders such as Grandy King George and numberless merchants, ship captains, and colonists. By contrast, tens of thousands of Europeans voluntarily crossed the Atlantic to seek opportunities in North America — often by agree- ing to several years of contractual servitude. Both groups illus- trate the undertow of violence and deceit beneath the surface of the eighteenth-century Atlantic commerce linking Britain, Africa, the West Indies, and British North America. Many people, like the Robin Johns, turned to the consolations of religious faith as a source of meaning and hope in an often cruel and unforgiving society.
CHRONOLOGY
104 CHAPTER 5 Colonial America in the Eighteenth Century 1701–1770
The flood of free and unfree migrants crossing the Atlantic contrib- uted to unprecedented population growth in eighteenth-century British North America. By contrast, Spanish and French colonies in North America remained thinly populated outposts of European empires interested principally in maintaining a toehold in the vast continent. While the New England, middle, and southern colonies retained regional distinctions, commercial, cultural, and political trends built unifying experiences and assumptions among British North American colonists.
A Growing Population and Expanding Economy in British North America
The most important fact about eighteenth-century Brit- ish America is its phenomenal population growth: from about 250,000 in 1700 to over two million by 1770. The eightfold growth of the colonial population signaled the maturation of a distinctive colonial society. Colonists of
different ethnic groups, races, and religions lived in varied environments under thirteen different colonial governments, all of them part of the British empire.
In general, the growth and diversity of the eighteenth-century colonial popu- lation derived from two sources: immigration and natural increase (growth through reproduction). Natural increase contributed about three-fourths of the population growth, immigration about one-fourth. Immigration shifted the eth- nic and racial balance among the colonists, making them by 1770 less English and less white than ever before. Fewer than 10 percent of eighteenth-century immi- grants came from England; about 36 percent were Scots-Irish, mostly from
northern Ireland; 33 percent arrived from Africa, almost all of them slaves; nearly 15 percent had left the many German-language principalities (the
nation of Germany did not exist until 1871); and almost 10 percent came from Scotland. In 1670, more than 9 out of 10 colonists were of English ancestry, and only 1 out of 25 was of African ancestry. By 1770, only
How did the North American colonies achieve the remarkable population growth of the eighteenth century?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
“DUMMY BOARD” OF PHYLLIS, A NEW ENGLAND SLAVE This life-size portrait of a slave woman named Phyllis, a mulatto who worked as a domestic servant for her owner, Elizabeth Hunt Wendell, was painted sometime before 1753. Known as a “dummy board,” it was propped against a wall or placed in a doorway or window to suggest that the residence was occupied and to discourage thieves. Courtesy of Historic New England.
natural increase Growth of population through reproduction, as opposed to immigration. In the eighteenth century, natural increase accounted for about three-fourths of the American colonies’ population growth.
A Growing Population and Expanding Economy in British North America 1051701–1770
about half of the colonists were of English descent, while more than 20 percent descended from Africans. Thus, by 1770, the people of the colonies had a dis- tinctive colonial — rather than English — profile (Map 5.1).
The booming population of the colonies hints at a second major feature of eighteenth-century colonial society: an expanding economy. The nearly limitless wilderness stretching westward made land relatively cheap compared with its price in the Old World. The abundance of land made labor precious, and the colonists always needed more. The insatiable demand for labor was the fundamental eco- nomic environment that sustained the mushrooming population. Economic histo- rians estimate that free colonists (those who were not indentured servants or slaves) had a higher standard of living than the majority of people elsewhere in the Atlantic world.
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MAP 5.1 EUROPEANS AND AFRICANS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY This map illustrates regions where Africans and certain immigrant groups clustered. It is important to avoid misreading the map. Predominantly English and German regions, for example, also contained colonists from other places. Likewise, regions where African slaves resided in large numbers also included many whites, slave masters among them. The map suggests the diversity of eighteenth- century colonial society.
106 CHAPTER 5 Colonial America in the Eighteenth Century 1701–1770
New England: From Puritan Settlers to Yankee Traders
The New England population grew sixfold during the eighteenth century but lagged behind the growth in the other colonies. Most immigrants chose other destinations because of New England’s relatively densely settled land and because Puritan orthodoxy made these colonies com-
paratively inhospitable to those of other faiths and those indifferent to religion. As the population grew, many settlers in search of farmland dispersed from towns, and Puritan communities lost much of their cohesion. Nonetheless, networks of eco- nomic exchange laced New Englanders to their neighbors, to Boston merchants, and to the broad currents of Atlantic commerce. In many ways, trade became a faith that competed strongly with the traditions of Puritanism.
Natural Increase and Land Distribution. The New England population grew mostly by natural increase, much as it had during the seventeenth century. The perils of childbirth gave wives a shorter life expectancy than husbands, but wives often lived to have six, seven, or eight babies. The growing New England population pressed against a limited amount of land (see Map 5.1). Moreover, as the northernmost group of British colonies, New England had contested frontiers where powerful Native Americans, especially the Iroquois and Mahicans, jealously guarded their territory. The French (and Catholic) colony of New France also menaced the British (and mostly Protestant) New England colonies when provoked by colonial or European disputes.
During the seventeenth century, New England towns parceled out land to individual families. In most cases, the original settlers practiced partible inheritance — that is, they subdivided land more or less equally among sons. By the eighteenth century, the original land allotments had to be further subdivided, and many plots of land became too small to support a family. Sons who could not hope to inherit sufficient land had to move away from the town where they were born.
During the eighteenth century, colonial governments in New England abandoned the seventeenth-century policy of granting land to towns. Needing revenue, the govern- ments of both Connecticut and Massachusetts sold land directly to individuals, includ- ing speculators. Now money, rather than membership in a community bound by a church covenant, determined whether a person could obtain land. The new land policy eroded the seventeenth-century pattern of settlement. As colonists spread north and west, they tended to settle on individual farms rather than in the towns and villages that charac- terized the seventeenth century. Far more than in the seventeenth century, eighteenth- century New Englanders regulated their behavior by their own individual choices.
Farms, Fish, and Atlantic Trade. A New England farm was a place to get by, not to get rich. New England farmers grew food for their families, but their fields did not produce huge marketable surpluses. Instead of one big crop, a farmer grew many small ones. If farmers had extra, they sold to or traded with neighbors. Poor roads made travel difficult, time-consuming, and expensive, especially with bulky and heavy agricultural goods. The one major agricultural product the New England colonies exported —
Why did settlement patterns in New England change from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
partible inheritance System of inheritance in which land was divided equally among sons. By the eighteenth century, this practice in Massachusetts had subdivided plots of land into units too small for subsistence, forcing children to move away to find sufficient farmland.
New England: From Puritan Settlers to Yankee Traders 1071701–1770
livestock — walked to market on its own legs. By 1770, New Englanders had only one-fourth as much wealth per capita as free colonists in the southern colonies.
As consumers, New England farmers participated in a diversified commercial economy that linked remote farms to markets throughout the Atlantic world. Merchants large and small stocked imported goods — British textiles, ceramics, and metal goods; Chinese tea; West Indian sugar; and Chesapeake tobacco. Farmers’ needs supported local shoemakers, tailors, wheelwrights, and carpenters. Larger towns, especially Boston, housed skilled tradesmen such as cabinetmakers, silversmiths, and printers. Shipbuilders were among the many New Englanders who made their fortunes at sea.
Fish accounted for more than a third of New England’s eighteenth-century exports; livestock and timber made up another third. The West Indies absorbed two-thirds of all New England’s exports. Almost all of the rest of New England’s exports went to Britain and continental Europe (Map 5.2). This Atlantic commerce benefited the entire New England economy, providing jobs for laborers and trades- men as well as for ship captains, clerks, merchants, and sailors.
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MAP 5.2 ATLANTIC TRADE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY This map illustrates the economic outlook of the colonies in the eighteenth century—east toward the Atlantic world rather than west toward the interior of North America. The long distances involved in the Atlantic trade and the uncertainties of ocean travel suggest the difficulties Britain experienced governing the colonies and regulating colonial commerce.
READING THE MAP: What were the major markets for trade coming out of Europe? What goods did the British colonies import and export?
CONNECTIONS: In what ways did the flow of raw materials from the colonies affect British industry? How did British colonial trade policies influence the Atlantic trade?
Map Activity
108 CHAPTER 5 Colonial America in the Eighteenth Century 1701–1770
Merchants dominated Atlantic commerce. The largest and most successful New England merchants lived in Boston at the hub of trade between local folk and the international market. The magnificence of a wealthy Boston merchant’s home stunned John Adams, who termed it a house that seemed fit “for a noble Man, a Prince.” Such luxurious Boston homes contrasted with the modest dwell- ings of Adams and other New Englanders, a measure of the polarization of wealth that developed in Boston and other seaports during the eighteenth century.
By 1770, the richest 5 percent of Bostonians owned about half the city’s wealth; the poorest two-thirds of the population owned less than one-tenth. Still, the inci- dence of genuine poverty did not change much. About 5 percent of New Englanders qualified for poor relief throughout the eighteenth century. Overall, colonists were better off than most people in England.
New England was more homogeneously English than any other colonial region. People of African ancestry (almost all of them slaves) numbered more than fifteen thousand by 1770, but they barely diversified the region’s 97 percent white majority. Most New Englanders had little use for slaves on their family farms. Instead, the few slaves concentrated in towns, especially Boston, where most of them worked as domestic servants and laborers.
By 1770, the population, wealth, and commercial activity of New England differed from what they had been in 1700. Ministers still enjoyed high status, but Yankee traders had replaced Puritan saints as the symbolic New Englanders. Atlantic commerce competed with religious convictions in ordering New Englanders’ daily lives.
BOSTON COMMON IN NEEDLEWORK Hannah Otis embroidered this exquisite needlework portrait of Boston Common in 1750, when she was eighteen years old. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, the scene gives few hints of city life. Otis populated the cityscape with more animals than people and more plants than paving stones. What features of this portrait would suggest a city to an eighteenth-century viewer? Photograph © 2012 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
The Middle Colonies: Immigrants, Wheat, and Work 1091701–1770
The Middle Colonies: Immigrants, Wheat, and Work In 1700, the middle colonies of Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware had only half the population of New England. But by 1770, the population of the middle colonies had multiplied tenfold and nearly equaled the population of New England. Immigrants — mainly German, Irish, Scottish — made the middle colonies a uniquely diverse society. By 1800, barely one-third of Pennsyl- vanians and less than half the total population of the middle colonies traced their ancestry to England. New white settlers, both free and in servitude, poured into the middle colonies because they perceived unparalleled opportunities.
German and Scots-Irish Immigrants. Germans made up the largest con- tingent of migrants from the European continent to the middle colonies. By 1770, about 85,000 Germans had arrived in the colonies. Their fellow colonists often referred to them as Pennsylvania Dutch, an English corruption of Deutsch, the word the immigrants used to describe themselves.
Most German immigrants came from what is now southwestern Germany, where, one observer noted, peasants were “not as well off as cattle elsewhere.” German immi- grants included numerous artisans and a few merchants, but the great majority were farmers and laborers. Economically, they represented “middling folk,” neither the poorest (who could not afford the trip) nor the better-off (who did not want to leave).
By the 1720s, Germans who had established themselves in the colonies wrote back to their friends and relatives, as one reported, “of the civil and religious liberties [and] privileges, and of all the goodness I have heard and seen.” Such letters prompted still more Germans to pull up stakes and embark for the middle colonies.
Similar motives propelled the Scots-Irish, who considerably outnumbered German immigrants. The “Scots-Irish” actually hailed from northern Ireland, Scot- land, and northern England. Like the Germans, the Scots-Irish were Protestants, but with a difference. Most German immigrants worshipped in Lutheran or German Reformed churches; many others belonged to dissenting sects such as the Mennon- ites, Moravians, and Amish, whose adherents sought relief from persecution they had suffered in Europe for their refusal to bear arms and to swear oaths, practices they shared with the Quakers. By contrast, the Scots-Irish tended to be militant Pres- byterians who seldom hesitated to bear arms or swear oaths. Like German settlers, however, Scots-Irish immigrants were clannish, residing when they could among relatives or neighbors from the old country.
In the eighteenth century, wave after wave of Scots-Irish immigrants arrived, culminating in a flood of immigration in the years just before the American Revolu- tion. Deteriorating economic conditions in northern Ireland, Scotland, and England pushed many toward America. Most of the immigrants were farm laborers or tenant farmers fleeing droughts, crop failures, high food prices, or rising rents. They came, they told British officials, because of “poverty,” the “tyranny of landlords,” and their desire to “do better in America.”
Why did immigrants flood into Pennsylvania during the eighteenth century?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Pennsylvania Dutch Name given by other colonists to German immigrants to the middle colonies; an English corruption of the German term Deutsch. Germans were the largest contingent of migrants from continental Europe to the middle colonies in the eighteenth century.
Scots-Irish Protestant immigrants from northern Ireland, Scotland, and northern England. Deteriorating economic conditions in their European homelands contributed to increasing migration to the colonies in the eighteenth century.
110 CHAPTER 5 Colonial America in the Eighteenth Century 1701–1770
Both Scots-Irish and Germans probably heard the common saying “Pennsylva- nia is heaven for farmers [and] paradise for artisans,” but they almost certainly did not fully understand the risks of their decision to leave their native lands. Ship cap- tains, aware of the hunger for labor in the colonies, eagerly signed up the penniless German emigrants as redemptioners, a variant of indentured servants. A captain would agree to provide transportation to Philadelphia, where redemptioners would obtain the money to pay for their passage by borrowing it from a friend or relative who was already in the colonies or, as most did, by selling themselves as servants. Many redemptioners traveled in family groups, unlike impoverished Scots-Irish emigrants, who usually traveled alone and paid for their passage by contracting as indentured servants before they sailed to the colonies.
Redemptioners and indentured servants were packed aboard ships “as closely as herring,” one migrant observed. Seasickness compounded by exhaustion, poverty, poor food, bad water, inadequate sanitation, and tight quarters encouraged the spread of disease. Unlike indentured servants, redemptioners negotiated independently with their purchasers about their period of servitude. Typically, a healthy adult redemp- tioner agreed to four years of labor. Indentured servants commonly served five, six, or seven years.
“God Gives All Things to Industry”: Urban and Rural Labor. An indentured servant in 1743 wrote that Pennsylvania was “the best poor Man’s Country in the World.” Although the servant reported that “the Condition of bought Servants is very hard” and masters often failed to live up to their promise to provide decent food and clothing, opportunity abounded in the middle colonies because there was more work to be done than workers to do it.
Most servants toiled in Philadelphia, New York City, or one of the smaller towns or villages. Artisans, small manufacturers, and shopkeepers prized the labor of male servants. Female servants made valuable additions to households, where nearly all of them cleaned, washed, cooked, or minded children. From the masters’ viewpoint, servants were a bargain. A master could purchase five or six years of a servant’s labor for approximately the wages a common laborer would earn in four months.
Since a slave cost at least three times as much as a servant, only affluent colo- nists could afford the long-term investment in slave labor. Most farmers in the mid- dle colonies used family labor, not slaves. Wheat, the most widely grown crop, did not require more labor than farmers could typically muster from relatives, neigh- bors, and a hired hand or two. Consequently, although people of African ancestry (almost all slaves) increased to more than thirty thousand in the middle colonies by 1770, they accounted for only about 7 percent of the total population and much less outside the cities.
Most slaves came to the middle colonies and New England after a stop over in the West Indies, as the Robin Johns did. Very few came directly from Africa. Slaves — unlike servants — could not charge masters with violating the terms of their contracts. A master’s commands, not a written contract, set the terms of a slave’s bondage. Small numbers of slaves managed to obtain their freedom, but no African Americans escaped whites’ firm convictions about black inferiority.
redemptioners A variant of indentured servants. In this system, a captain agreed to provide passage to Philadelphia, where redemptioners would obtain money to pay for their transportation, usually by selling themselves as servants.
The Middle Colonies: Immigrants, Wheat, and Work 1111701–1770
Whites’ racism and blacks’ lowly social status made African Americans scapegoats for European Americans’ suspicions and anxieties. In 1741, when arson and several unexplained thefts plagued New York City, officials sus- pected a murderous slave conspiracy and executed thirty-one slaves. Although slaves were certifiably impoverished, they were not among the poor for whom the middle colonies were reputed to be the best country in the world.
Immigrants swarmed to the middle colonies because of the availability of land. The Penn family (see chapter 4) encouraged immigration to bring in potential buyers for their enormous tracts of land in Pennsylvania. From the beginning, Pennsylvania followed a policy of negotiating with Indian tribes to purchase additional land. This policy reduced the violent frontier clashes more common elsewhere in the colonies. Few colonists drifted beyond the northern boundaries of Pennsylvania. Owners of the huge estates in New York’s Hudson valley preferred to rent rather than sell their land, and therefore they attracted fewer immigrants. The Iroquois Indians dominated the lucrative fur trade of the St. Lawrence valley and eastern Great Lakes, and they vigorously defended their territory from colonial encroachment, causing most settlers to prefer the comparatively safe environs of Pennsylvania.
Since the cheapest land always lay at the margin of settlement, would- be farmers tended to migrate to promising areas just beyond already improved farms. By midcentury, settlement had reached the eastern slopes of the Appalachian Mountains, and newcomers spilled south down the fer- tile valley of the Shenandoah River into western Virginia and the Carolinas. Thousands of settlers migrated from the middle colonies through this back door to the South.
Farmers made the middle colonies the breadbasket of North America. They planted a wide variety of crops to feed their families, but they grew wheat in abun- dance. Flour milling was the number one industry and flour the number one export, constituting nearly three-fourths of all exports from the middle colonies. Because farmers profited from the grain market in the Atlantic world with the steady rise of grain prices after 1720, the standard of living in rural Pennsylvania was probably higher than in any other agricultural region of the eighteenth-century world. The comparatively widespread prosperity of all the middle colonies permitted residents to indulge in a half-century shopping spree for British imports. The middle colo- nies’ per capita consumption of imported goods from Britain more than doubled between 1720 and 1770, far outstripping the per capita consumption of British goods in New England and the southern colonies.
Philadelphia stood at the crossroads of trade in wheat exports and British imports. Merchants occupied the top stratum of Philadelphia society. In a city where only 2 percent of the residents owned enough property to qualify to vote, merchants built grand homes and dominated local government. Many of Phila- delphia’s wealthiest merchants were Quakers. Quaker traits of industry, thrift, honesty, and sobriety encouraged the accumulation of wealth.
The lower ranks of merchants included aspiring tradesmen such as Benja- min Franklin. In 1733, Benjamin Franklin began to publish Poor Richard’s Alma- nack, which preached the likelihood of long-term rewards for tireless labor and
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112 CHAPTER 5 Colonial America in the Eighteenth Century 1701–1770
Visual Activity
BETHLEHEM, PENNSYLVANIA This view of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1757 dramatizes the profound transformation of the natural landscape humans wrought in the eighteenth century. In less than twenty years, precisely laid-out orchards and fields replaced forests and glades. By carefully penning their livestock (lower center right) and fencing their fields (lower left), farmers safeguarded their livelihoods from the risks and disorders of untamed nature. Individual farmsteads (lower center) and brick town buildings (upper center) integrated the bounty of the land with community life. Few eighteenth- century communities were as orderly as Bethlehem, but many effected a comparable transformation of the environment. The New York Public Library. Art Resource, NY.
READING THE IMAGE: What does this painting indicate about the colonists’ priorities?
CONNECTIONS: Why might Pennsylvanians have been so concerned about maintaining order?
quickly became Franklin’s most profitable product. The popularity of Poor Richard’s Almanack suggests that many Pennsylvanians thought less about the pearly gates of heaven than about their pocketbooks. Poor Richard’s advice that “God gives all Things to Industry” might be considered the motto for the middle colonies. The promise of a worldly payoff made work a secular faith.
Quakers remained influential, but Franklin spoke for most colonists with his aphorisms of work, discipline, and thrift that celebrated the spark of ambition and the promise of gain.
The Southern Colonies: Land of Slavery 1131701–1770
The Southern Colonies: Land of Slavery Between 1700 and 1770, the population of the southern colonies of Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Car- olina, and Georgia grew almost ninefold. By 1770, about twice as many people lived in the South as in either the mid- dle colonies or New England. As elsewhere, natural increase and immigration accounted for the rapid population growth. Many Scots-Irish and German immi- grants funneled from the middle colonies into the southern backcountry. Other immigrants were indentured servants (mostly English and Scots-Irish). But slaves made the most striking contribution to the booming southern colonies, transforming the racial composition of the population. Slavery became the defining characteristic of the southern colonies during the eighteenth century, shaping the region’s economy, society, and politics.
The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Growth of Slavery. The number of southerners of African ancestry (nearly all of them slaves) rocketed from just over 20,000 in 1700 to well over 400,000 in 1770. The black population increased nearly three times faster than the South’s briskly growing white population. Consequently, the proportion of southerners of African ancestry grew from 20 percent in 1700 to 40 percent in 1770.
Southern colonists clustered into two distinct geographic and agricultural zones. The colonies in the upper South, surrounding Chesapeake Bay, specialized in grow- ing tobacco, as they had since the early seventeenth century. Throughout the eight- eenth century, nine out of ten southern whites and eight out of ten southern blacks lived in the Chesapeake region. The upper South retained a white majority during the eighteenth century.
In the lower South, a much smaller cluster of colonists inhabited the coastal region and specialized in the production of rice and indigo (a plant used to make blue dye). Lower South colonists made up only 5 percent of the total population of the southern colonies in 1700 but inched upward to 15 percent by 1770. South Carolina was the sole British colony along the southern Atlantic coast until 1732. (North Carolina, founded in 1711, was largely an extension of the Chesapeake region.) Georgia was founded in 1732 as a refuge for poor people from England. Georgia’s leaders banned slaves from 1735 to 1750, but few settlers arrived until after 1750, when the prohibition on slavery was lifted and slaves flooded in. In South Carolina, in contrast to Georgia and every other British mainland col- ony, slaves outnumbered whites almost two to one; in some low- country districts, the ratio of blacks to whites exceeded ten to one.
The enormous growth in the South’s slave population occurred through natural increase and the flourishing Atlantic slave trade (Table 5.1 and Map 5.3). Slave ships brought almost 300,000 Africans to British North America between 1619 and 1780. Of these Africans, 95 percent arrived in the South, and 96 percent arrived during the eighteenth century. Unlike indentured servants and redemptioners, these Africans did not choose to come to the colonies. Like the
How did slavery influence the society and economy of the southern colonies?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Estimated Slave Imports to the Western Hemisphere
1451–1600 275,000
1601–1700 1,341,000
1701–1810 6,100,000
1811–1870 1,900,000
TABLE 5.1 SLAVE IMPORTS, 1451–1870
114 CHAPTER 5 Colonial America in the Eighteenth Century 1701–1770
Map Activity
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MAP 5.3 THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE Although the Atlantic slave trade lasted from about 1450 to 1870, it peaked during the eighteenth century, when more than six million African slaves were imported to the New World. Only a small fraction of these slaves were taken to British North America. Most went to sugar plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean.
READING THE MAP: Where in Africa did most slaves originate? Approximately how far was the trip from the busiest ports of origin to the two most common New World destinations?
CONNECTIONS: Why were so many more African slaves sent to the West Indies and Brazil than to British North America?
The Southern Colonies: Land of Slavery 1151701–1770
Robin Johns, most of them had been born into free families in vil- lages located within a few hundred miles of the West African coast. Although they shared African origins, they came from many dif- ferent African cultures. They spoke different languages, worshipped different deities, observed different rules of kinship, grew different crops, and recognized different rulers. The most important experience they had in common was enslavement.
Captured in war, kidnapped, or sold into slavery by other Africans, they were brought to the coast, sold to African traders like the Robin Johns who assembled slaves for resale, and sold again to European or colonial slave traders or ship captains, who packed two hundred to three hundred or more aboard ships that carried them on the Middle Passage across the Atlantic and then sold them yet again to colonial slave merchants or southern planters.
Olaudah Equiano published an account of his enslavement that hints at the com- mon experiences of millions of other Africans swept up in the slave trade. When he was eleven years old, Equiano was kidnapped by Africans in what is now Nigeria, who sold him to other Africans, who in turn eventually sold him to a slave ship on the coast. Equiano feared that he was “going to be killed” and “eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces, and loose hair.” Once the ship set sail, many of the slaves, crowded together in suffocating heat fouled by filth of all descriptions, died from sick- ness. “The shrieks of the women and the groans of the dying rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable,” Equiano recalled. Most of the slaves on the ship were sold in Barbados, but Equiano and other leftovers were shipped off to Virginia, where he “saw few or none of our native Africans and not one soul who could talk to me.” Equiano felt isolated and “exceedingly miserable” because he “had no person to speak to that I could understand.” Finally, the captain of a tobacco ship bound for England purchased Equiano, and he traveled as a slave between North America, England, and the West Indies for ten years until he succeeded in buying his freedom in 1766.
Only about 15 percent of the slaves brought into the southern colonies came aboard ships from the West Indies, as Equiano and the Robin Johns did. All the other slaves brought into the southern colonies came directly from Africa, and almost all the ships that brought them (roughly 90 percent) belonged to British merchants. Most of the slaves on board were young adults, with men usually outnumbering women two to one. Children under the age of fourteen, like Equiano, typically accounted for no more than 10 to 15 percent of a cargo.
OLAUDAH EQUIANO Painted after he had bought his freedom, this portrait evokes Equiano’s successful acculturation to eighteenth-century English customs. In his Interesting Narrative, Equiano wrote that he “looked upon [the English] . . . as men superior to us [Africans], and therefore I had the stronger desire to resemble them, to imbibe their spirit and imitate their manners.” Library of Congress.
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Africans, Robin Johns
Middle Passage The crossing of the Atlantic by slave ships traveling from West Africa to the Americas. Slaves were crowded together in extremely unhealthful circumstances, and mortality rates were high.
116 CHAPTER 5 Colonial America in the Eighteenth Century 1701–1770
Mortality during the Middle Passage varied considerably from ship to ship. On average, about 15 percent of the slaves died, but sometimes half or more perished. The average mortality among the white crew of slave ships was often nearly as bad. In general, the longer the voyage lasted, the more people died.
Normally, an individual planter purchased at any one time a relatively small number of newly arrived Africans, or new Negroes, as they were called. New Negroes were often profoundly depressed, demoralized, and disoriented. Planters expected their other slaves — either those born into slavery in the colonies (often called country-born or creole slaves) or Africans who had arrived earlier — to help new Negroes become accustomed to their strange new surroundings. Although slaves spoke many different languages, enough linguistic and cultural similarities existed that they could usually communicate with other Africans from the same region.
New Africans had to adjust to the physical as well as the cultural environment of the southern colonies. Slaves who had just endured the Middle Passage were poorly nourished, weak, and sick. In this vulnerable state, they encountered the alien diseases of North America without having developed a biological arsenal of acquired immunities. As many as 10 to 15 percent of newly arrived Africans died during their first year in the southern colonies. Nonetheless, the large number of newly enslaved Africans made the influence of African culture in the South stronger in the eighteenth century than ever before — or since.
While newly enslaved Africans poured into the southern colonies, slave mothers bore children, which caused the slave population in the South to grow rapidly. Slave owners encouraged these births. Thomas Jefferson explained, “I consider the labor of a breeding [slave] woman as no object, that a [slave] child raised every 2 years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring [slave] man.” Although slave mothers loved and nurtured their children, the mortality rate among slave children was high, and the ever-present risk of being separated by sale brought grief to many slave fami- lies. Nonetheless, the growing number of slave babies set the southern colonies apart from other New World slave societies, where mortality rates were so high that deaths exceeded births. The high rate of natural increase in the southern colonies meant that by the 1740s the majority of southern slaves were country-born.
Slave Labor and African American Culture. Southern planters expected slaves to work from sunup to sundown and beyond. George Washing- ton wrote that his slaves should “be at their work as soon as it is light, work til it is dark, and be diligent while they are at it.” The conflict between the masters’
new Negroes Term given to newly arrived African slaves in the colonies. Planters usually maintained only a small number of recent arrivals among their slaves at any given time in order to accelerate their acculturation to their new circumstances.
COLONIAL SLAVE DRUM An African in Virginia made this drum sometime around the beginning of the eighteenth century. The drum combines deerskin and cedarwood from North America with African workmanship and designs. During rare moments of respite from their work, slaves played drums to accompany dances learned in Africa. They also drummed out messages from plantation to plantation. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
The Southern Colonies: Land of Slavery 1171701–1770
desire for maximum labor and the slaves’ reluctance to do more than necessary made the threat of physical punishment a constant for eighteenth-century slaves. Masters preferred black slaves to white indentured servants, not just because slaves served for life but also because colonial laws did not limit the force masters could use against slaves. Slaves often resisted their masters’ demands, one traveler noted, because of their “greatness of soul” — their stubborn unwillingness to conform to their masters’ defini- tion of them as merely slaves.
Some slaves escalated their acts of resistance to direct physical confrontation with the master, the mistress, or an overseer. But a hoe raised in anger, a punch in the face, or a desperate swipe with a knife led to swift and predictable retaliation by whites. Throughout the southern colonies, the balance of physical power rested securely in the hands of whites.
Rebellion occurred, however, at Stono, South Carolina, in 1739. A group of about twenty slaves attacked a country store, killed the two storekeepers, and confis- cated the store’s guns, ammunition, and powder. Enticing other slaves to join, the group plundered and burned more than half a dozen plantations and killed more than twenty white men, women, and children. A mounted force of whites quickly suppressed the rebellion. The Stono Rebellion illustrated that eighteenth-century slaves had no chance of overturning slavery and very little chance of defending themselves in any bold strike for freedom. No other similar uprisings occurred dur- ing the colonial period.
Slaves maneuvered constantly to protect themselves and to gain a measure of autonomy within the boundaries of slavery. In Chesapeake tobacco fields, most slaves were subject to close supervision by whites. In the lower South, the task system gave slaves some control over the pace of their work and some discretion in the use of the rest of their time. A “task” was typically defined as a certain area of ground to be cultivated or a specific job to be completed. A slave who completed the assigned task might use the remainder of the day, if any, to work in a garden, fish, hunt, spin, weave, sew, or cook. When masters sought to boost productivity by increasing tasks, slaves did what they could to defend their customary work assignments.
Eighteenth-century slaves also planted the roots of African American lineages that branch out to the present. Slaves valued family ties, and, as in West African socie- ties, kinship structured slaves’ relations with one another. Slave parents often gave a child the name of a grandparent, aunt, or uncle. In West Africa, kinship identified a person’s place among living relatives and linked the person to ancestors in the past and to descendants in the future. Newly imported African slaves usually arrived alone, like Equiano, without kin. Often slaves who had traversed the Middle Passage on the same ship adopted one another as “brothers” and “sisters.” Likewise, as new Negroes were seasoned and incorporated into existing slave communities, established families often adopted them as fictive kin.
When possible, slaves expressed many other features of their West African origins in their lives on New World plantations. They gave their children traditional dolls and African names such as Cudjo or Quash, Minda, or Fuladi. They grew food crops they had known in Africa, such as yams and okra. They constructed huts with mud walls and thatched roofs similar to African residences. They fashioned banjos, drums, and
Stono Rebellion Slave uprising in Stono, South Carolina, in 1739 in which a group of slaves armed themselves, plundered six plantations, and killed more than twenty whites. Whites quickly suppressed the rebellion.
task system A system of labor in which a slave was assigned a daily task to complete and allowed to do as he wished upon its completion. This system offered more freedom than the carefully supervised gang-labor system.
118 CHAPTER 5 Colonial America in the Eighteenth Century 1701–1770
other musical instruments, held dances, and observed funeral rites that echoed African practices. In these and many other ways, slaves drew upon their African heritages as much as the oppressive circumstances of slavery permitted.
Tobacco, Rice, and Prosperity. Slaves’ labor bestowed prosperity on their masters, British merchants, and the monarchy. Slavery was so important and valua- ble that one minister claimed in 1757 that “to live in Virginia without slaves is morally impossible.” The southern colonies supplied 90 percent of all North American exports to Britain. Rice exports from the lower South exploded from less than half a million pounds in 1700 to eighty million pounds in 1770, nearly all of it grown by slaves. Exports of indigo also boomed. Together, rice and indigo made up three- fourths of lower South exports, nearly two-thirds of them going to Britain and most of the rest to the West Indies, where sugar-growing slaves ate slave-grown rice.
Tobacco was by far the most important export from British North America; by 1770, it represented almost one-third of all colonial exports and three-fourths of all Chesapeake exports. Under the provisions of the Navigation Acts (see chapter 4), nearly all of it went to Britain, where the monarchy collected a lucrative tax on each pound. British merchants then reexported more than 80 percent of the tobacco to the European continent, pocketing a nice markup for their troubles.
These products of slave labor made the southern colonies by far the richest in North America. The per capita wealth of free whites in the South was four times greater than that in New England and three times that in the middle colonies. At the top of the wealth pyramid stood the rice grandees of the lower South and the tobacco gentry of the Chesapeake. These elite families commonly resided on large estates in handsome man- sions adorned by luxurious gardens, all maintained and supported by slaves.
The vast differences in wealth among white southerners engendered envy and occasional tension between rich and poor, but remarkably little open hostility. In private, the planter elite spoke disparagingly of humble whites, but in public the planters acknowledged their lesser neighbors as equals, at least in belonging to the superior — in their minds — white race. Looking upward, white yeomen and tenants (who owned neither land nor slaves) sensed the gentry’s condescension and veiled contempt. But they also appreciated the gentry for granting favors, upholding white supremacy, and keeping slaves in their place. Although racial slavery made a few whites much richer than others, it also gave those who did not get rich a powerful reason to feel similar (in race) to those who were so different (in wealth).
ELIZA LUCAS PINCKNEY’S GOWN When Eliza Lucas was sixteen years old in 1738, she took over day-to-day management of her father’s rice plantations. Highly educated, independent, and energetic, Lucas introduced numerous innovations on the plantations, including the cultivation of indigo — which became a major export crop in South Carolina — and silkworms. The gown shown here was made for her out of silk produced on her plantation. Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, Behring Center.
Unifying Experiences 1191701–1770
The slaveholding gentry dominated the politics and economy of the southern colonies. In Virginia, only adult white men who owned at least one hundred acres of unimproved land or twenty-five acres of land with a house could vote. This property- holding requirement prevented about 40 percent of white men in Virginia from voting for representatives to the House of Burgesses. In South Carolina, the property require- ment was only fifty acres of land, and therefore most adult white men qualified to vote. In both colonies, voters elected members of the gentry to serve in the colonial legisla- ture. The gentry passed elected political offices from generation to generation, almost as if they were hereditary. Politically, the gentry built a self-perpetuating oligarchy — rule by the elite few — with the votes of their many humble neighbors.
The gentry also set the cultural standard in the southern colonies. They enter- tained lavishly, gambled regularly, and attended Anglican (Church of England) services more for social than for religious reasons. Above all, they cultivated the leisurely pur- suit of happiness. They did not condone idleness, however. Their many pleasures and responsibilities as plantation owners kept them busy. Thomas Jefferson, a phenome- nally productive member of the gentry, recalled that his earliest childhood memory was of being carried on a pillow by a family slave — a powerful image of the slave hands supporting the gentry’s leisure and achievement.
Unifying Experiences The societies of New England, the middle colonies, and the southern colonies became more sharply differentiated dur- ing the eighteenth century, but colonists throughout British North America also shared unifying experiences that eluded settlers in the Spanish and French colonies. The first was economic. All three British colonial regions had their economic roots in agriculture. Colonists sold their distinctive products in markets that, in turn, offered a more or less uniform array of goods to consumers throughout British North America. Another unifying experience was a decline in the importance of religion. Some settlers called for a revival of religious intensity, but most people focused less on religion and more on the affairs of the world than they had in the seventeenth century. Also, white inhabitants throughout British North America became aware that they shared a dis- tinctive identity as British colonists. Thirteen different governments presided over these North American colonies, but all of them answered to the British monarchy. British policies governed not only trade but also military and diplomatic relations with the Indians, French, and Spaniards arrayed along colonial borderlands. Royal officials who expected loyalty from the colonists often had difficulty obtaining obedi- ence. The British colonists asserted their prerogatives as British subjects to defend their special colonial interests.
Commerce and Consumption. Eighteenth-century commerce whetted colonists’ appetites to consume. Colonial products spurred the development of mass markets throughout the Atlantic world. Huge increases in the supply of colonial tobacco and sugar brought the price of these small luxuries within the reach of most free whites.
What experiences tended to unify the colonists in British North America during the eighteenth century?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
120 CHAPTER 5 Colonial America in the Eighteenth Century 1701–1770
Colonial goods brought into focus an important lesson of eighteenth-century commerce: Ordinary people, not just the wealthy elite, would buy the things that they desired in addition to what they absolutely needed. Even news, formerly restricted mostly to a few people through face-to-face conversations or private letters, became an object of public consumption through the innovation of newspapers and the rise in literacy among whites. With the appropriate stimulus, market demand seemed unlimited.
The Atlantic commerce that took colonial goods to markets in Britain brought objects of consumer desire back to the colonies. British merchants and manufacturers recognized that colonists made excellent customers, and the Navigation Acts gave British exporters privileged access to the colonial market. By midcentury, export-oriented indus-
tries in Britain were growing ten times faster than firms attuned to the home market. When the colonists’ eagerness to consume exceeded their ability to pay, British exporters willingly extended credit, and colonial debts soared. Imported mirrors, silver plates, spices, bed and table linens, clocks, tea services, wigs, books, and more
infiltrated parlors, kitchens, and bedrooms throughout the colonies. Despite the many differences among the colonists, the consumption of British exports built a
certain material uniformity across region, religion, class, and status. The dazzling variety of imported consumer goods also presented women
and men with a novel array of choices. In many respects, the choices might appear trivial: whether to buy knives and forks, teacups, a mirror, or a clock. But such small
choices confronted eighteenth-century consumers with a big question: What do you want? As colonial consumers defined and expressed their desires with greater frequency during the eighteenth century, they became accustomed to thinking of themselves as indi- viduals who had the power to make decisions that influenced the quality of their lives.
Religion, Enlightenment, and Revival. Eighteenth-century colonists could choose from almost as many religions as consumer goods. Virtually all of the many religious denominations represented some form of Christianity, almost all of them Protestant. Slaves made up the largest group of non-Christians. A few slaves converted to Christianity in Africa or after they arrived in North America, but most continued to embrace elements of indigenous African religions. Roman Catholics concentrated in Maryland as they had since the seventeenth century, but even there they were far out- numbered by Protestants.
The varieties of Protestant faith and practice ranged across a broad spectrum. The middle colonies and the southern backcountry included militant Baptists and Presbyterians. Huguenots who had fled persecution in Catholic France peopled con- gregations in several cities. In New England, old-style Puritanism splintered into strands of Congregationalism that differed over fine points of theological doctrine. The Congregational Church was the official established church in New England, and all residents paid taxes for its support. Throughout the plantation South and in urban centers such as Charleston, New York, and Philadelphia, prominent colonists belonged to the Anglican Church, which received tax support in the South. But dis- senting faiths grew everywhere, and in most colonies their adherents won the right to worship publicly, although the established churches retained official support.
Many educated colonists became deists, looking for God’s plan in nature more than in the Bible. Deism shared the ideas of eighteenth-century European
Unifying Experiences 1211701–1770
Enlightenment thinkers, who tended to agree that science and reason could disclose God’s laws in the natural order. In the colonies as well as in Europe, Enlightenment ideas encouraged people to study the world around them, to think for themselves, and to ask whether the disorderly appearance of things masked the principles of a deeper, more profound natural order. Leading colonial thinkers such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson communicated with each other seeking both to understand nature and to find ways to improve society.
Most eighteenth-century colonists went to church seldom or not at all, although they probably considered themselves Christians. A minister in Charleston observed that on the Sabbath “the Taverns have more Visitants than the Churches.” In the leading colonial cities, church members were a small minority. Anglican parishes in the South rarely claimed more than one-fifth of adults as members. In some regions of rural New England and the middle colonies, church membership embraced two-thirds of adults, while in other areas only one-quarter of the residents belonged to a church. The domi- nant faith overall was religious indifference. As a late-eighteenth-century traveler observed, “Religious indifference is imperceptibly disseminated from one end of the continent to the other.”
The spread of religious indifference, of deism, of denominational rivalry, and of comfortable backsliding profoundly concerned many Christians. A few despaired that, as one wrote, “religion . . . lay a-dying and ready to expire its last breath of life.” To combat what one preacher called the “dead formality” of church services, some ministers set out to convert nonbelievers and to revive the piety of the faithful with a new style of preach- ing that appealed more to the heart than to the head. Historians have termed this wave of revivals the Great Awakening. In Massachusetts during the mid-1730s, the fiery Puri- tan minister Jonathan Edwards reaped a harvest of souls by reemphasizing traditional Puritan doctrines of humanity’s utter depravity and God’s vengeful omnipotence. In Pennsylvania and New Jersey, William Tennent led revivals that dramatized spiritual rebirth with accounts of God’s miraculous powers. The most famous revivalist in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world was George Whitefield. An Anglican, Whitefield preached well-worn messages of sin and salvation to large audiences in England using his spellbinding, unforgettable voice. Whitefield visited the North American colonies seven times, staying for more than three years during the mid-1740s and attracting tens of thousands to his sermons, including Benjamin Franklin and Olaudah Equiano. White- field’s preaching transported many in his audience to emotion-choked states of religious ecstasy, as he wrote, with “most lifting their eyes to heaven, and crying to God for mercy.”
The revivals awakened and refreshed the spiritual energies of thousands of colo- nists struggling with the uncertainties and anxieties of eighteenth-century America. The conversions at revivals did not substantially boost the total number of church members, however. After the revivalists moved on, the routines and pressures of everyday existence reasserted their primacy in the lives of many converts. But the reviv- als communicated the important message that every soul mattered, that men and women could choose to be saved, that individuals had the power to make a decision for everlasting life or death. Colonial revivals expressed in religious terms many of the same democratic and egalitarian values expressed in economic terms by colonists’ patterns of consumption. One colonist noted the analogy by referring to itinerant revivalists as “Pedlars in divinity.” Like consumption, revivals contributed to a set of common experiences that bridged colonial divides of faith, region, class, and status.
Enlightenment An eighteenth-century philosophical movement that emphasized the use of reason to reevaluate previously accepted doctrines and traditions. Enlightenment ideas encouraged examination of the world and independence of mind.
Great Awakening Wave of revivals that began in Massachusetts and spread through the colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. The movement emphasized vital religious faith and personal choice. It was characterized by large, open-air meetings at which emotional sermons were given by itinerant preachers.
122 CHAPTER 5 Colonial America in the Eighteenth Century 1701–1770
Trade and Conflict in the North American Borderlands. British power defended the diverse inhabitants of its colonies from Indian, French, and Spanish enemies on their borders — as well as from foreign powers abroad. Royal officials warily eyed the small North American settlements of New France and New Spain for signs of threats to the colonies.
Alone, neither New France nor New Spain jeopardized British North America, but with Indian allies they could become a potent force that kept colonists on their guard (Map 5.4). Native Americans’ impulse to defend their territory from colonial incursions competed with their desire for trade, which tugged them toward the settlers. As a colonial official observed in 1761, “A modern Indian cannot subsist without Europeans. . . . [The European goods that were] only conveniency at first [have] now become necessity.” To obtain such necessities as guns, ammunition, clothing, and sewing utensils manufactured largely by the British, Indians trapped beavers, deer, and other furbearing animals.
GEORGE WHITEFIELD An anonymous artist portrayed George Whitefield preaching, emphasizing the power of his sermons to transport his audience to a revived awareness of divine spirituality. The woman below his hands appears transfixed. Her eyes and Whitefield’s do not meet, yet the artist’s use of light suggests that she and Whitefield see the same core of holy Truth. National Portrait Gallery, London.
Unifying Experiences 1231701–1770
British, French, Spanish, and Dutch officials competed for the fur trade. Indians took advantage of this competition to improve their own prospects, playing one trader and empire off another. Indian tribes and confederacies also competed among themselves for favored trading rights with one colony or another, a competition colonists encour- aged. The shifting alliances and complex dynamics of the fur trade struck a fragile balance along the frontier. The threat of violence from all sides was ever present, and the threat became reality often enough for all parties to be prepared for the worst.
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MAP 5.4 ZONES OF EMPIRE IN EASTERN NORTH AMERICA The British zone, extending west from the Atlantic coast, was much more densely settled than the zones under French, Spanish, and Indian control. The comparatively large number of British colonists made them more secure than the relatively few colonists in the vast regions claimed by France and Spain or the settlers living among the many Indian peoples in the huge area between the Mississippi River and the Appalachian Mountains. Yet the British colonists were not powerful enough to dominate the French, Spaniards, or Indians. Instead, they had to guard against attacks by powerful Indian groups allied with the French or Spaniards.
124 CHAPTER 5 Colonial America in the Eighteenth Century 1701–1770
Relations between Indians and colonists differed from colony to colony and from year to year. But the British colonists’ nagging perceptions of menace on the frontier kept them continually hoping for help from the British to keep the Indians at bay and to maintain the essential flow of trade. In 1754, the British colonists’ endemic competition with the French flared into the Seven Years’ War (also known as the French and Indian War), which would inflame the frontier for years (as discussed in chapter 6). Colonists agreed that Indians made deadly enemies, profitable trading partners, and powerful allies.
The Spanish kept an eye on the Pacific coast, where Russian hunters in search of seals and sea otters threatened to become a permanent presence on New Spain’s northern frontier. To block Russian access to present-day California, officials in New Spain mounted a campaign to build forts (called presidios) and missions there. In 1769, an expedition headed by a military man, Gaspar de Portolá, and a Catholic priest, Junípero Serra, traveled north from Mexico to present-day San Diego, where they founded the first California mission, San Diego de Alcalá. They soon journeyed all the way to Monterey, which became the capital of Spanish California. There Portolá established a presidio in 1770 “to defend us from attacks by the Russians,” he wrote. The same year, Serra founded Mission San Carlos
Borroméo de Carmelo in Monterey to convert the Indians and recruit them to work to support the soldiers and other Spaniards in the presidio. By 1772, Serra had founded other missions along the path from San Diego to Monterey.
One Spanish soldier praised the work of the missionaries, writing that “with flattery and presents [the missionaries] attract the savage Indians and persuade them to adhere
MISSION CARMEL This eighteenth-century drawing portrays a reception for a Spanish visitor at Mission Carmel in what is now Carmel, California. Lines of mission Indians dressed in robes flank the entrance to the chapel where a priest and his assistants await the visitor. The reception ritual dramatized the strict hierarchy that governed relations among Spanish missionaries, ruling officials, and the subordinate Indians. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (Call
number BANC PIC 1963.02: 1311—FR).
presidios Spanish forts built to block Russian advance into California.
CALIFORNIA
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San Juan Capistrano (1776)
San Gabriel (1771) Los Angeles
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Santa Barbara (1782)
San Luis Obispo (1772)
San Antonio de Padua (1771)
Monterey (1770)
San José (1777)
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SPANISH MISSIONS IN CALIFORNIA
Unifying Experiences 1251701–1770
to life in society and to receive instruction for a knowledge of the Catholic faith, the cul- tivation of the land, and the arts necessary for making the instruments most needed for farming.” Yet for the Indians, the Spaniards’ California missions had horrendous conse- quences, as they had elsewhere in the Spanish borderlands. European diseases decimated Indian populations, Spanish soldiers raped Indian women, and missionaries beat Indi- ans and subjected them to near slavery. Indian uprisings against the Spaniards occurred repeatedly (see “Documenting the American Promise,” page 126), but the presidios and missions endured as feeble projections of the Spanish empire along the Pacific coast.
Colonial Politics in the British Empire. The plurality of peoples, faiths, and communities that characterized the North American colonies arose from the some- what haphazard policies of the eighteenth-century British empire. Unlike Spain and France — whose policies of excluding Protestants and foreigners kept the population of their North American colonial territories tiny — Britain kept the door to its colonies open to anyone, and tens of thousands of non-British immigrants settled in the North Ameri- can colonies and raised families. The open door did not extend to trade, however, as the seventeenth-century Navigation Acts restricted colonial trade to British ships and trad- ers. These policies evolved because they served the interests of the monarchy and of influ- ential groups in Britain and the colonies. The policies also gave the colonists a common framework of political expectations and experiences.
British attempts to exercise political power in their colonial governments met with suc- cess so long as British officials were on or very near the sea. Colonists acknowledged — although they did not always readily comply with — British authority to collect customs duties, inspect cargoes, and enforce trade regulations. But when royal officials tried to wield their authority in the internal affairs of the colonies on land, they invariably encountered colonial resistance. A governor appointed by the king in each of the nine royal colonies (Rhode Island and Connecticut selected their own governors) or by the proprietors in Maryland and Pennsylvania headed the government of each colony. The British envisioned colonial governors as mini-monarchs able to exert influence in the colonies much as the king did in Britain. But colonial governors were not kings, and the colonies were not Britain.
Even the best-intentioned colonial governors had difficulty developing relations of trust and respect with influential colonists because their terms of office averaged just five years and could be terminated at any time. Colonial governors controlled few patronage positions to secure political friendships in the colonies. Obedient and loyal to their superiors in Britain, colonial governors fought incessantly with the colonists’ assemblies. They battled over issues such as governors’ vetoes of colonial legislation, removal of colonial judges, and dismissal of the representative assem- blies. But during the eighteenth century, the assemblies gained the upper hand.
Since British policies did not clearly define the colonists’ legal powers, colonial assem- blies seized the opportunity to make their own rules. Gradually, the assemblies established a strong tradition of representative government analogous, in their eyes, to the British Parliament. Voters often returned the same representatives to the assemblies year after year, building continuity in power and leadership that far exceeded that of the governor.
By 1720, colonial assemblies had won the power to initiate legislation, including tax laws and authorizations to spend public funds. Although all laws passed by the
126 CHAPTER 5 Colonial America in the Eighteenth Century 1701–1770
the mail to Monterey turned their animals into their fields and they ate up their crops. Three other Indian villages . . . [near] here have reported the same thing to me several times. For this reason on several occasions when . . . I have gone to see these Indian villages, as soon as they saw us they fled from their villages and fled to the woods or other remote places. . . . They do this so that the soldiers will not rape their women as they have already done so many times in the past. . . .
Now [the Indians] all want to be Christians because they know that there is a God who created the heavens and earth and all things, that there is a Hell and Glory, that they have souls, etc. . . . [Now] they . . . do not have idols; they do not go on drinking sprees; they do not marry relatives; and they have but one wife. The married men sleep with their wives only. . . . Some of the first adults whom we baptized, when we pointed out to them that it was wrong to have sexual intercourse with a woman to whom they were not married, told me that they already knew that, and that among them it was considered to be very bad, and so they do not do so at all. “The soldiers,” they told me, “are Christians and, although they know that God will punish them in Hell, do so, having sexual intercourse with our wives.” . . . When I heard this, I burst into tears to see how these gentiles were setting an example for us Christians.
SOURCE: Maynard Geiger (trans. & ed.) The Letter of Luís Jayme, O.F.M.: San Diego, October 17, 1772. Copyright © the Academy of American Franciscan History. Used by permission of the Academy of American Franciscan History.
Spanish Priests Report on California Missions Catholic missionaries sent regular reports to their superiors in Mexico City, New Spain’s capital city. The reports described what the missionaries considered their successes in converting pagan Indians — whom they called gentiles — as well as the diffi culties caused by the behavior of both Spaniards and Indians.
DOCUMENT 1
Father Luís Jayme Describes Conditions at Mission San Diego de Alcalá, 1772 Father Luís Jayme, a Franciscan missionary, reported on the deplorable behavior of some of the Spanish soldiers at Mission San Diego de Alcalá, who fre- quently raped Indian women, causing many Indians to resist the efforts of the missionaries.
W ith reference to the Indians, I wish to say that great progress [in converting Indians] would be made if there was anything to eat and the soldiers would set a good example. . . . As for the example set by the soldiers, no doubt some of them are good exem- plars and deserve to be treated accordingly, but very many of them deserve to be hanged on account of the continuous outrages which they are committing in seiz- ing and raping the women. There is not a single mission where all the gentiles have not been scandalized, and even on the roads. . . . Surely, as the gentiles them- selves state, they [the soldiers] are committing a thou- sand evils, particularly of a sexual nature. . . .
At one of these Indian villages near this mission of San Diego . . . the gentiles therein many times have been on the point of coming here to kill us all, and the reason for this is that some soldiers went there and raped their women, and other soldiers who were carrying
Documenting the American Promise
Unifying Experiences 1271701–1770
DOCUMENT 2 together with the sacred vessels, its paintings, its baptis- mal, marriage, and funeral records, and all the furnish- ings for the sacristy, the house, and the farm imple- ments — now the forces [of soldiers] of both presidios [nearby] come together to set things right. . . . What hap- pened was that before they set about reestablishing the Mission, they wanted to . . . lay hands on the guilty ones who were responsible for the burning of the Mission, and the death of the Fathers, and chastise them. The harassed Indians rebelled anew and became more enraged. . . . And so the soldiers there are gathered together in their presi- dios, and the Indians in their state of heathenism. . . .
But . . . what can be gained by campaigns [against the rebellious Indians]? Some will say to frighten them and prevent them from killing others. What I say is that, in order to prevent them from killing others, keep better guard over them than they did over the one who has been killed; and, as to the murderer, let him live, in order that he should be saved — which is the very purpose of our coming here, and the reason which justifies it.
SOURCE: Antonine Tibesar, O.F.M., ed., The Writings of Junípero Serra , Volume 2. Copyright © The Academy of American Franciscan History. Used by permission of the American Academy of Franciscan History.
Questions for Analysis and Debate 1 In what ways did Jayme and Serra agree or disagree about the motivations of Indians in and
around Mission San Diego de Alcalá?
2 How did the goals and activities of the Spanish soldiers compare with those of the Catholic missionaries?
3 What might Spanish soldiers or Indians have said about these events? What might they have said about missionaries like Jayme and Serra?
CONNECT TO THE BIG IDEA C How did Indian resistance to the British and French in the fur trade differ from Indian resistance
to the Spaniards in missions?
Father Junípero Serra Describes the Indian Revolt at Mission San Diego de Alcalá, 1775 Father Junípero Serra, the founder of many of the California missions, reported to his superiors in Mexico City that an Indian uprising had destroyed Mission San Diego de Alcalá. He recommended rebuilding and urged officials to provide additional soldiers to defend the missions, but not to punish the rebellious Indians.
I have just received [news] of the total destruction of the San Diego Mission, and of the death of the senior of its two religious ministers, called Father Luís Jayme, at the hand of the rebellious gentiles and of the Christian neophytes [Indians who lived in the mission]. All this happened . . . about one or two o’clock at night. The gentiles came together from forty rancherías [set- tlements] . . . and set fire to the church, after sacking it. They then went to the storehouse, the house where the Fathers lived, the soldiers’ barracks, and all the rest of the buildings. They killed a carpenter . . . and a black- smith. . . . They wounded with their arrows the four sol- diers, who alone were on guard at the . . . mission. . . .
And now, after the Father has been killed, the Mission burned, its many and valuable furnishings destroyed,
128 CHAPTER 5 Colonial America in the Eighteenth Century 1701–1770
assemblies (except in Maryland, Rhode Island, and Connecticut) had to be approved by the governor and then by the Board of Trade in Britain, the difficulties in com- munication about complex subjects over long distances effectively ratified the assemblies’ decisions. Years often passed before colonial laws were repealed by British authorities, and in the meantime the assemblies’ laws prevailed.
The heated political struggles between royal governors and colonial assemblies that occurred throughout the eighteenth century taught colonists a common set of political lessons. They learned to employ traditionally British ideas of representative government to defend their own colonial interests. More important, they learned that power in the British colonies rarely belonged to the British government.
Conclusion: The Dual Identity of British North American Colonists During the eighteenth century, a society that was both distinctively colonial and dis- tinctively British emerged in British North America. Tens of thousands of immigrants and slaves gave the colonies an unmistakably colonial complexion and contributed to the colonies’ growing population and expanding economy. People of different ethnici- ties and faiths sought their fortunes in the colonies, where land was cheap, labor was dear, and work promised to be rewarding. Indentured servants and redemptioners risked temporary periods of bondage for the potential reward of better opportunities in the colonies than on the Atlantic’s eastern shore. Slaves arrived in unprecedented numbers and endured lifelong servitude, which they neither chose nor desired but from which their masters greatly benefited.
None of the European colonies could claim complete dominance of North America. The desire to expand and defend their current claims meant that the English, French, and Spanish colonies were drawn into regular conflict with one another, as well as with the Indians upon whose land they encroached. In varying degrees, all sought control of the Native Americans and their land, their military power, their trade, and even their souls. Spanish missionaries and soldiers sought to convert Indians on the West Coast and exploit their labor; French alliances with Indian tribes posed a formidable barrier to westward expansion of the British empire.
Yet despite their attempts to tame their New World holdings, Spanish and French colonists did not develop societies that began to rival the European empires that spon- sored and supported them. They did not participate in the cultural, economic, social, and religious changes experienced by their counterparts in British North America, nor did they share in the emerging political identity of the British colonists.
Identifiably colonial products from New England, the middle colonies, and the southern colonies flowed to the West Indies and across the Atlantic. Back came unques- tionably British consumer goods along with fashions in ideas, faith, and politics. The bonds of the British empire required colonists to think of themselves as British subjects and, at the same time, encouraged them to consider their status as colonists. By 1750, British colonists in North America could not imagine that their distinctively dual identity — as British and as colonists — would soon become a source of intense conflict.
1701–1770
1 How did consumption influence the relationship between the American colonies and Britain in the eighteenth century?
2 Why did the importance of religion decline from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century? How did American colonists respond?
3 How did Colonists and Indians manage relations with each other?
4 Compare patterns of immigration to the middle and southern colonies. Who came, and how did they get there? How did they shape the eco- nomic, cultural, and political character of each colony?
MAKING CONNECTIONS
1 How did the North American colonies achieve the remarkable population growth of the eighteenth century? (pp. 104–105)
2 Why did settlement patterns in New England change from the seven- teenth to the eighteenth century? (pp. 106–108)
3 Why did immigrants flood into Pennsylvania during the eighteenth century? (pp. 109–112)
4 How did slavery influence the society and economy of the southern colo- nies? (pp. 113–119)
5 What experiences tended to unify the colonists in British North America during the eighteenth century? (pp. 119–128)
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
natural increase (p. 104)
partible inheritance (p. 106)
Pennsylvania Dutch (p. 109)
Scots-Irish (p. 109)
redemptioners (p. 110)
Middle Passage (p. 115)
KEY TERMS
new Negroes (p. 116)
Stono Rebellion (p. 117)
task system (p. 117)
Enlightenment (p. 121)
Great Awakening (p. 121)
presidios (p. 124)
Chapter Review MAKE IT STICK
Go to LearningCurve: See what you know. Then review the key terms and answer the questions.
LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com /roarkconcise
129STUDENT SITE @ bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
ATRICK HENRY’S MAP DESK
I n 1771, Thomas Hutchinson became the royal governor of the colony of Massachusetts. Most royal governors were British aristocrats sent over by the king for short tours of duty, but Hutchinson was a fifth-generation American with a long record of public service in local institutions. He lived in the finest mansion in Boston; wealth, power, and influence were his in abundance. He was proud of his connection to the British empire and loyal to his king.
Hutchinson had the misfortune to be a loyal colonial leader during the two tumultuous decades leading up to the
American Revolution. He worked hard to keep the British and colonists aligned in interests, even
promoting a plan to unify the colonies with a limited government (the Albany Plan of Union)
to deal with Indian policy. His plan of union ultimately failed, however, and a major war — the Seven Years’ War — ensued,
130
The British Empire and the Colonial Crisis, 1754–1775
The Seven Years’ War, 1754–1763 (pp. 132–140)
The Sugar and Stamp Acts, 1763–1765 (pp. 140–145)
The Townshend Acts and Economic Retaliation, 1767–1770 (pp. 145–149)
The Destruction of the Tea and the Coercive Acts, 1770–1774 (pp. 149–153)
Domestic Insurrections, 1774–1775 (pp. 153–155)
Conclusion: The Long Road to Revolution (p. 156)
6
CHAPTER OUTLINE QUICK START
Quickly learn what is important in this chapter by doing the following:
• READ the Chapter Outline to see how the chapter is organized. • SKIM the Chronology on the next page to see what will be covered.
When you are ready, read the chapter and the Essential Questions for each section. Then use the Chapter Review to check what you know.
PATRICK HENRY’S MAP DESK This map table with pullout extensions belonged to Virginian Patrick Henry, a major speculator in lands west of the Appalachian Mountains. Yet Cherokee Indians lived there, leading the British to prohibit such land purchases. In Virginia’s House of Burgesses, Henry spoke in favor of independence, a position that improved speculators’ chances for profits from resale to settlers. Courtesy of Preservation Virginia.
1754 Seven Years’ War begins. Albany Congress.
1755 Braddock defeated in western Pennsylvania.
1757 William Pitt fully commits to war.
1760 Montreal falls to British. George III becomes British
king.
1763 Treaty of Paris ends Seven Years’ War.
Pontiac’s Rebellion. Proclamation of 1763. Paxton Boys massacre
friendly Indians.
1764 Parliament enacts Sugar Act.
1765 Parliament enacts Stamp Act. Virginia Resolves challenge
Stamp Act. Sons of Liberty stage crowd
actions. Stamp Act Congress meets.
1766 Parliament repeals Stamp Act, passes Declaratory Act.
1767 Parliament enacts Townshend duties.
1768 British station troops in Boston.
1768– Merchants sign non- 1769 importation agreements.
1770 Boston Massacre. Parliament repeals
Townshend duties.
1772 British navy ship Gaspée burned.
1773 Parliament passes Tea Act. Tea dumped in Boston harbor.
1774 Parliament passes Coercive Acts.
Powder Alarm shows colo- nists’ readiness.
First Continental Congress meets.
1775 Battles of Lexington and Concord.
Lord Dunmore promises freedom to defecting slaves.
pitting the British and colonists against the French and their Indian allies in the backcountry of the American colonies. When the war ended and the British government proposed to tax colonists to help pay for it, Hutchinson was certain that the new British taxation policies were legitimate — unwise, perhaps, but legitimate.
Not everyone in Boston shared his opinion. Enthusiastic crowds protested a succession of taxation policies enacted after 1763, from the Sugar Act to the Tea Act. But Hutchinson maintained his steadfast loyalty to Britain. His love of order and tradition inclined him to unconditional support of the British empire, and by nature he was a measured and cautious man. “My temper does not incline to enthusiasm,” he once wrote.
Privately, he lamented the stupidity of the British acts that provoked trouble, but his rigid sense of duty always prevailed, making him an inspiring villain to the emerging revolutionary movement. The man not inclined to enthusiasm unleashed popular enthusiasm all around him. He never appreciated that irony.
In another irony, Thomas Hutchinson early recognized the difficulties of maintaining full rights and privileges for colonists so far from their supreme government, the king and Parliament in Britain. At a crisis point in 1769, when British troops occupied Boston, he wrote privately to a friend in England, “There must be an abridgement of what are called English liberties. . . . I doubt whether it is possible to project a system of government in which a colony three thousand miles distant from the parent state shall enjoy all the liberty of the parent state.” He could not imagine the colonies without a parent state, existing independently.
Thomas Hutchinson was a loyalist, as were most English- speaking colonists in the 1750s. But the Seven Years’ War, in which Britain and its colonies were allies, shook that affection, and impe- rial policies in the decade following the war shattered it completely. Over the course of 1763 to 1773, Americans insistently raised serious questions about Britain’s governance of its colonies. Many came to believe what Thomas Hutchinson could never accept — that a tyrannical Britain had embarked on a course to enslave the colonists by depriving them of their traditional English liberties.
CHRONOLOGY
The Seven Years’ War, 1754–1763 For the first half of the eighteenth century, Britain was at war intermittently with France or Spain. Often the colo- nists in America experienced reverberations from these conflicts, most acutely along the frontier of New France
in northern New England. In 1754, international tensions returned, this time sparked by events in America’s Ohio Valley. The land — variously claimed by Virginians, Pennsylvanians, and the French — was actually inhabited by more than a dozen Indian tribes. The result was the costly Seven Years’ War (its British name — Americans called it the French and Indian War), which spread in 1756 to encompass much of Europe, the Caribbean, and even India. The British and their colonial allies won the war, but the immense costs of the conflict — in money, death, and desire for revenge by losers and even winners — laid the groundwork for the imperial crisis of the 1760s between the British and Americans.
French-British Rivalry in the Ohio Country. For several decades, French traders had cultivated alliances with the Indian tribes in the Ohio Country, a fron- tier region they regarded as part of New France, establishing a profitable exchange of manufactured goods for beaver furs (Map 6.1). But in the 1740s, aggressive Pennsylvania traders began to infringe on the territory. Adding to the tensions, a group of enterprising Virginians, including the brothers Lawrence and Augustine Washington, formed the Ohio Company in 1747 and advanced on the same land. Their hope for profit lay not in the fur trade but in land speculation, fueled by American population expansion.
The opposite of liberty was slavery, a coerced condition of nonfreedom. Political rhetoric about liberty, tyranny, and slavery heated up the emotions of white colonists during the many crises of the 1760s and 1770s. But this rhetoric turned out to be a two-edged sword. The call for an end to tyrannical slavery meant one thing when sounded by Boston merchants whose commercial shipping rights had been curtailed, but the same call meant some- thing quite different in 1775 when sounded by black Americans locked in the bondage of slavery.
1754–1775132 CHAPTER 6 The British Empire and the Colonial Crisis
THOMAS HUTCHINSON The only formal portrait of Thomas Hutchinson still in existence shows an assured young man in ruffles. Doubtless he sat for other portraits, but none survive. One portrait in his summer house outside Boston was mutilated by a revolutionary crowd. In 1775, Hutchinson fled to Britain, the country he regarded as his cultural home, only to realize how very American he was. Courtesy of the Massachusetts
Historical Society.
How did the Seven Years’ War erode relations between colonists and British authorities?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Seven Years’ War War (1754–1762) between Britain and France that ended with British domination of North America; known in America as the French and Indian War. Its high expense laid the foundation for conflict that would lead to the American Revolution.
MAP 6.1 EUROPEAN AREAS OF INFLUENCE AND THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR, 1754–1763 In 1750, the French and Spanish empires had relatively few people on the ground, compared to the exploding population of the Anglo-American colonies. The disputed lands shown here, contested by the imperial powers, were inhabited by a variety of Native American tribes.
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134 CHAPTER 6 The British Empire and the Colonial Crisis 1754–1775
In response to these incursions, the French sent soldiers to build a series of military forts to secure their trade routes and to create a western barrier to American expansion. In 1753, the royal governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, himself a shareholder in the Ohio Company, dispatched a messenger to warn the French that they were trespassing on Virginia land. That messenger was twenty-one-year-old George Washington, half-brother of the Ohio Company leaders, who did not disappoint. Washington returned with crucial intelligence confirming French military intentions. Impressed, Dinwiddie appointed the youth to lead a small military expedi- tion west to assert Virginia’s claim and chase the French away — but with- out attacking them.
In the spring of 1754, Washington set out with 160 Virginians and a small contingent of Mingo Indians equally concerned about the French military presence in the Ohio Country. Early one morning the Mingo chief Tanaghris- son led a detachment of Washington’s soldiers to a small French encampment in the woods. Who fired first was in dispute, but fourteen Frenchmen (and no Virginians) were wounded. While Washington, lacking a translator, struggled
to communicate with the injured French commander, Tanaghrisson and his men intervened to kill and then scalp the wounded soldiers, including the commander, probably with the aim of inflaming hostilities between the French and the colonists.
This sudden massacre violated Dinwiddie’s instructions to Washington and raised the stakes considerably. Fearing retaliation, Washington ordered his men to throw together a makeshift “Fort Necessity.” Several hundred Virginia reinforcements arrived, but the Mingos, sensing disaster and displeased by Washington’s style of command, fled. (Tanaghrisson later said, “The Colonel was a good-natured man, but had no experience; he took upon him to command the Indians as his slaves, [and] would by no means take advice from the Indians.”) Retaliation arrived in the form of six hundred French soldiers aided by one hundred Shawnee and Delaware warriors, who attacked Fort Necessity, killing or wounding a third of Washington’s men. The message was clear: The French would not depart from the disputed territory.
The Albany Congress. British imperial leaders hoped to prevent the conflict in the Ohio Country from leading to a larger war. One obvious strategy was to strengthen an old partnership with the Mohawks of New York’s Iroquois Confed- eracy, who since 1692 had joined with New York fur merchants in an alliance called the Covenant Chain. Yet unsavory land speculators caused the Mohawks to doubt British friendship. Authorities in London directed New York’s royal gover- nor to convene a colonial conference to repair trade relations and secure the Indians’ help — or at least their neutrality — against the looming French threat. The confer- ence convened at Albany, in June and July 1754. All six tribes of the Iroquois Con- federacy attended, along with twenty-four delegates from seven colonies, making this an unprecedented pan-colony gathering. The elderly Mohawk chief Hendrick gave a powerful and widely reprinted speech, asserting that recent British neglect would inevitably reorient Indian trade relations to the French. “Look at the French, they are men; they are fortifying every where; but we are ashamed to say it;
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The Seven Years’ War, 1754–1763 1351754–1775
you are like women, bare and open, without any fortifications.” Hendrick urged the assembled colonists to prepare for defense against the French. (See “Visualiz- ing History,” page 136.)
Delegates Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania and Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts had their own ambitious plan. They coauthored the Albany Plan of Union, a proposal for a unified colonial government to exercise sole authority over questions of war, peace, and trade with the Indians. Delegates at the Albany congress, alarmed by news of the defeat of Virginians at Fort Necessity, agreed to present the plan to their respective assemblies. To Franklin’s surprise, not a single colony approved the Albany Plan. The Massachusetts assembly feared it was “a Design of gaining power over the Colonies,” especially the power of taxation. Others objected that it would be impossible to agree on unified policies toward scores of quite different Indian tribes. The British government never backed the Albany Plan either; instead, it appointed two superintendents of Indian affairs, one for the northern and another for the southern colonies, each with exclusive powers to negotiate treaties, trade, and land sales with all tribes.
The Indians at the Albany Congress were not impressed with the Albany Plan either. The Covenant Chain alliance with the Mohawk tribe was reaffirmed, but the other nations left without pledging to help the British battle the French. Some of the Iroquois figured that the French military presence around the Great Lakes would discourage the westward push of American colonists and therefore better serve their interests.
The War and Its Consequences. By 1755, George Washington’s frontier skirmish had turned into a major war. The British expected quick victories on three fronts. General Edward Braddock, recently arrived from England, marched his army toward Fort Duquesne in western Pennsylvania. Farther north, British troops moved toward Fort Niagara, critically located between Lakes Erie and Ontario. And William Johnson, a New Yorker recently appointed superintendent of northern Indian affairs, led forces north toward Lake Champlain, intending to defend the border against the French in Canada (see Map 6.1).
Unfortunately for the British, the French were prepared to fight and had enlisted many Indian tribes in their cause. When Braddock’s army of 2,000 British soldiers marched west toward Fort Duquesne, a mere eight Oneida warriors came as guides. They were ambushed by 250 French soldiers joined by 640 Indian warriors. In the bloody battle, nearly a thousand on the British side were killed or wounded, includ- ing General Braddock.
For the next two years, British leaders stumbled badly, deploying inadequate numbers of undersupplied troops. What finally turned the war around was the rise to power in 1757 of William Pitt, Britain’s prime minister, a man ready to commit massive resources to fight France and Spain worldwide. In America, British troops aided by American provincial soldiers finally captured Forts Duquesne, Niagara, and Ticon- deroga, followed by the French cities of Quebec and finally Montreal, all from 1758 to 1760. By 1761, the war subsided in America but expanded globally, with battles in the Caribbean, Austria, Prussia, and India. The British captured the French sugar islands
136 CHAPTER 6 The British Empire and the Colonial Crisis 1754–1775
Martinique and Guadeloupe and then invaded Spanish Cuba with an army of some four thousand provincial soldiers from New York and New England. By the end of 1762, France and Spain capitulated, and the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1763.
In the complex peace negotiations that followed, Britain gained control of Canada, eliminating the French threat from the north. British and American title to the eastern half of North America was confirmed. But French territory west of the Mississippi River, including New Orleans, was transferred to Spain as compensation for Spain’s assistance during the war. Strangely, Cuba was returned to Spain, and Martinique and Guadeloupe were returned to France (Map 6.2).
The British credited their army for their victory and criticized the colonists for inadequate support. William Pitt was convinced that colonial smuggling — beaver pelts from French fur traders and illegal molasses in the French Caribbean — “principally, if not alone, enabled France to sustain and protract this long and expensive war.”
Having one’s portrait painted was a mark of distinction in the eighteenth century, usually available only to the wealthy or newsworthy. Rarer still were portraits of sitters dressed in clothes from other cultures. Here, Chief Hendrick, the Mohawk leader at the 1754 Albany Congress, appears in fine British clothing in a 1755 engraving, while John Caldwell, a titled Irishman and a British army officer, sports colorful Indian dress in a 1780 British painting.
Soon after the Albany Congress, Hendrick traveled to Philadelphia, where an elite men’s club paid for a professional portrait. When Hendrick met death in the first northern battle in the Seven Years’ War, great public mourning erupted in both America and Britain. Two taverns and three sailing vessels in Philadelphia were named in his honor. Prints of this engraving, based on the portrait, were sold in British and American bookshops.
Hendrick’s gold-braided coat, ruffled shirt, and three-cornered hat are all signs of a well-dressed English gentleman. Why might he have chosen this outfit for the Philadelphia portrait? What statement might it have made to London purchas- ers about Hendrick’s political allegiance? What marks his Indianness in the engraving? Note the facial tattoos — a starburst over his ear, the two lines under the eye — and the long scar on his left cheek. Do they suggest a generic Indian image, or is this a picture of a particular man?
John Caldwell, of an Irish aristocratic family, spent the Revolutionary War (as discussed in chapter 7) at Fort Detroit, a British garrison supporting the Great
CHIEF HENDRICK
Cultural Cross-Dressing in Eighteenth-Century Portraits
Visualizing History
The Seven Years’ War, 1754–1763 1371754–1775
Colonists read the lessons of the war differently. American soldiers had turned out in force, they claimed, but had been relegated to grunt work by Brit- ish commanders and subjected to harsh military discipline, including flog- gings and executions. They bristled at British arrogance, as when Benjamin Franklin heard General Braddock brag that “these savages may, indeed, be a formidable enemy to your raw American militia, but upon the king’s regular and disciplined troops, sir, it is impossible they should make any impression.” Braddock’s crushing defeat “gave us Americans,” Franklin wrote, “the first sus- picion that our exalted ideas of the prowess of British regulars had not been well founded.”
Perhaps most important, the enormous expense of the war cast a huge shadow over the victory. By 1763, Britain’s national debt, double what it had been when Pitt took office, posed a formidable challenge to the next decade of leader- ship in Britain.
JOHN CALDWELL
Lakes tribes battling Americans. The Ojibwas of that region honored Caldwell by giving him an Indian name in a ceremony, and it was likely that he then acquired the clothing and accessories shown in this portrait. Notice the headdress, breech- cloth, beaded pouch, knife and sheath, tomahawk, wampum belt, red leggings, and garters (showing an expanse of thigh, immodest by British standards). Why might Caldwell have posed in this garb? Was he trying to channel the power of Indian men, doubtless seen as exotic by British viewers of the painting? Did Caldwell “go native”? Or was this his way to display manly courage?
Consider the differences in these images. Hendrick’s portrait of 1755 was engraved and publicly disseminated to memorialize the leader of one of the few tribes loyal to Britain during the Seven Years’ War. The taverns and sailing ships named for him further mark his celebrated status. Caldwell’s portrait was a private possession, commissioned after the Revolutionary War when much of Britain’s North American land claims had fallen to the colonies. What attitude do you think Hendrick and Caldwell intended to convey regarding the other’s culture? How might each have reacted to the other’s portrait?
SOURCE: Chief Hendrick: Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University; John Caldwell: The Board of Trustees of the National Museums & Galleries on Merseyside (King’s Regiment Collection).
CONNECT TO THE BIG IDEA C How did Native Americans participate in the Seven Years’ War?
138 CHAPTER 6 The British Empire and the Colonial Crisis 1754–1775
Pontiac’s Rebellion and the Proclamation of 1763. One glaring omission marred the Treaty of Paris: The major powers at the treaty table failed to include or consult the Indians. Minavavana, an Ojibwa chief of the Great Lakes region, put it suc- cinctly to an English trader: “Englishman, although you have conquered the French, you have not yet conquered us! We are not your slaves. These lakes, these woods and mountains were left to us by our ancestors . . . ; and we will part with them to none.”
Indians north of the Ohio River had cause for concern. Old French trading posts all over the Northwest were beefed up by the British into military bases. Fort Duquesne, renamed Fort Pitt to honor the victorious leader, gained new walls sixty feet thick at their base, announcing that this was no fur trading post. Tensions between the British and the Indians in this area ran high.
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MAP 6.2 EUROPE REDRAWS THE MAP OF NORTH AMERICA, 1763 In 1763, France ceded to Britain its interior territory from Quebec to New Orleans, retaining fishing rights in the north and sugar islands in the Caribbean. France transferred to Spain its claim to extensive territory west of the Mississippi River.
READING THE MAP: Who actually lived on and controlled the lands ceded by France? In what sense, if any, did Britain or Spain own these large territories?
CONNECTIONS: What was the goal of the Proclamation of 1763? (See page 139.) Could it ever have worked?
Map Activity
The Seven Years’ War, 1754–1763 1391754–1775
A religious revival among the Indians magnified feelings of antagonism toward the British. In 1763, the renewal of commitment to Indian ways and the formation of tribal alliances led to open warfare, which the British called Pontiac’s Rebellion, named for the chief of the Ottawas. In mid-May, Ottawa, Potawatomi, and Huron warriors attacked Fort Detroit. Six more attacks on forts followed within weeks, and frontier settlements were raided by tribes from western New York, the Ohio Valley, and the Great Lakes region. By fall, Indians had captured every fort west of Detroit. More than four hundred British soldiers were dead and another two thousand colo- nists killed or taken captive.
Some Americans exacted revenge. The worst violent aggression occurred in late 1763, when some fifty Pennsylvania vigilantes known as the Paxton Boys descended on a peaceful village of friendly Conestoga Indians, murdering twenty. The vigilantes, now numbering five hundred, marched on Philadelphia to try to capture and murder some Christian Indians held in protective custody there. British troops prevented that, but the Paxton Boys escaped punishment for their murderous attack on the Conestoga village.
To minimize violence, the British government issued the Proclamation of 1763, forbidding colonists to settle west of the Appalachian Mountains in order to protect Indian territory. But the Proclamation’s language also took care not to identify western lands as belonging to the Indians. Instead, it spoke of lands that “are reserved to [Indians], as their Hunting Grounds.”
Other parts of the Proclamation of 1763 referred to American and even French colonists in Canada as “our loving subjects,” entitled to English rights and privileges. By contrast, the Indians were rejected as British subjects and described more vaguely as “Tribes of Indians with whom We are connected.” Of course, the British were not really well connected with any Indians, nor did they wish connections to form among the tribes. As William Johnson, the superintendent of northern Indian affairs, advised in 1764, “It will be expedient to treat with each nation separately . . . for could they arrive at a perfect union, they must prove very dangerous Neighbours.”
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SILVER MEDAL TO PRESENT TO INDIANS After Pontiac’s uprising, the British distributed gifts to foster peace. This 1766 silver medal shows King George III on the front and an Indian and a Briton smoking a peace pipe on the back. How would an English translator explain what HAPPY WHILE UNITED might mean? The American Numismatic Society.
Pontiac’s Rebellion A coordinated uprising of Native American tribes in 1763 in the Northwest after the end of the Seven Years’ War. The rebellion heightened Britain’s determination to create a boundary between Americans and Indians, embodied in the Proclamation of 1763.
140 CHAPTER 6 The British Empire and the Colonial Crisis 1754–1775
The Indian uprising had faded by early 1764, but the 1763 boundary was a fur- ther provocation to American settlers and also to land speculators who had already staked claims to huge tracts of western lands in hopes of profitable resale. Yet the boundary proved impossible to enforce. Surging population growth had already sent many hundreds of settlers, many of them squatters, west of the Appalachians. Peri- odic bloodshed continued and left the settlers fearful, uncertain about their future, and increasingly wary of British claims to be a protective mother country.
The Sugar and Stamp Acts, 1763–1765 In 1760, George III, twenty-two years old, became king of England. Timid and insecure, George struggled to gain his footing in his new job. He rotated through a succession of leaders, searching for a prime minister he could trust. A half dozen ministers in seven years took turns dealing with one basic, underlying British reality: A huge war debt needed to be serviced, and the colonists, as British subjects, should help pay it off. To many Americans, however, that proposi- tion seemed in deep violation of what they perceived to be their rights and liberties as British subjects, and it created resentment that eventually erupted in large-scale street pro- tests. The first provocative revenue acts were the work of Sir George Grenville, prime minister from 1763 to 1765.
Grenville’s Sugar Act. To find revenue, George Gren- ville scrutinized the customs service, which monitored the shipping trade and collected all import and export duties. Grenville found that the salaries of customs officers cost the government four times what was collected in revenue. The shortfall was due in part to bribery and smuggling, so Gren- ville began to insist on rigorous attention to paperwork and a strict accounting of collected duties. The hardest duty to enforce was the one imposed by the Molasses Act of 1733 — a stiff tax of six pence per gallon on any molasses imported to British colonies from non-British sources. Rum-loving Amer- icans, however, were eager to buy molasses from French Car- ibbean islands, and they had ignored the tax law for decades.
Grenville’s inspired solution was the Revenue Act of 1764, popularly dubbed the Sugar Act. It lowered the duty on French molasses to three pence, making it more attrac- tive for shippers to obey the law, and at the same time raised penalties for smuggling. The act appeared to be in the tradition of navigation acts meant to regulate trade (see chapter 4), but Grenville’s actual intent was to raise revenue.
Why did the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act draw fierce opposition from colonists?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
GEORGE GRENVILLE, PRIME MINISTER, 1763–1765 George Grenville became prime minister in 1763, but King George found him irksome: “When he has wearied me for two hours, he looks at his watch, to see if he may not tire me for an hour more,” the king said, and sacked him in July 1765 for being insolent, not for his controversial colonial policies. The Earl of Halifax, Garrowby, Yorkshire.
The Sugar and Stamp Acts, 1763–1765 1411754–1775
The Sugar Act toughened enforcement policies. From now on, all British naval crews could act as impromptu customs officers, boarding suspicious ships and seiz- ing cargoes found to be in violation. Smugglers caught without proper paperwork would be prosecuted, not in a local court with a friendly jury but in a vice-admiralty court located in Nova Scotia, where a crown judge presided. The implication was that justice would be sure and severe. Grenville’s hopes for the Sugar Act did not materialize. The small decrease in duty did not offset the attractions of smuggling, while the increased vigilance in enforcement led to several ugly confrontations in port cities. Reaction to the Sugar Act foreshadowed questions about Britain’s right to tax Americans, but in 1764 objections to the act came principally from the small numbers of Americans engaged in the shipping trades. From the British point of view, the Proclamation of 1763 and the Sugar Act seemed to be reasonable efforts to administer the colonies. To Americans, however, the British supervision appeared to be a disturbing intrusion into colonial practices of self-taxation by elected colonial assemblies. Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania’s lobbyist in London, warned that “two distinct Jurisdictions or Powers of Taxing cannot well subsist together in the same country.”
The Stamp Act. In February 1765, Grenville escalated his revenue program with the Stamp Act, precipitating a major conflict between Britain and the colonies over Parliament’s right to tax. The Stamp Act imposed a tax on all paper used for official documents — newspapers, pamphlets, court documents, licenses, wills, ships’ cargo lists — and required an affixed stamp as proof that the tax had been paid. Unlike the Sugar Act, which regulated trade, the Stamp Act was designed plainly and simply to raise money. It affected nearly everyone who used any taxed paper but, most of all, users of official documents in the business and legal communities. Anticipating that the stamp tax would be unpopular — Thomas Hutchinson had forewarned him — Grenville delegated the administration of the act to Americans to avoid taxpayer hostility toward British enforcers. In each colony, local stamp distributors would be hired at a handsome salary of 8 percent of the revenue collected. English tradition held that taxes were a gift of the people to their monarch, granted by the people’s representatives. This view of taxes as a freely given gift preserved an essential concept of English political theory: the idea that citizens have the liberty to enjoy and use their property without fear of confiscation. The king could not demand money; only the House of Commons could grant it. Grenville agreed with the notion of taxa- tion by consent, but he argued that the colonists were already “virtually” rep- resented in Parliament. The House of Commons, he insisted, represented all British subjects, wherever they were. Colonial leaders emphatically rejected this view, argu- ing that virtual representation could not withstand the stretch across the Atlantic. Colonists willingly paid local and provincial taxes, levied by their town, county, or colonial assemblies, to fund government administrative expenses and shared necessities like local roads, schools, and poor relief. By contrast, the stamp tax was a clear departure as a fee-per-document tax, levied by a distant Parliament on unwill- ing colonies.
Sugar (Revenue) Act 1764 British law that decreased the duty on French molasses, making it more attractive for shippers to obey the law, and at the same time raised penalties for smuggling. The Sugar Act regulated trade but was also intended to raise revenue.
Stamp Act 1765 British law imposing a tax on all paper used for official documents, for the purpose of raising revenue. Widespread resistance to the Stamp Act led to its repeal in 1766.
virtual representation The theory that all British subjects were represented in Parliament, whether they had elected representatives in that body or not. American colonists rejected the theory of virtual representation, arguing that only direct representatives had the right to tax the colonists.
142 CHAPTER 6 The British Empire and the Colonial Crisis 1754–1775
Resistance Strategies and Crowd Politics. News of the Stamp Act arrived in the colonies in April 1765, seven months before it was to take effect. There was time, therefore, to object. Governors were unlikely to challenge the law, for most of them owed their office to the king. Instead, the colonial assemblies took the lead; eight of them held discussions on the Stamp Act.
Virginia’s assembly, the House of Burgesses, was the first. At the end of its May session, after two-thirds of the members had left, Patrick Henry, a young political newcomer, presented a series of resolutions on the Stamp Act that were debated and passed, one by one. They became known as the Virginia Resolves. Henry’s resolu- tions inched the assembly toward radical opposition to the Stamp Act. The first three stated the obvious: that Virginians were British citizens, that they enjoyed the same rights and privileges as Britons, and that self-taxation was one of those rights. The fourth resolution noted that Virginians had always taxed themselves, through their representatives in the House of Burgesses. The fifth took a radical leap by pushing the other four unexceptional statements to one logical conclusion — that the Vir- ginia assembly alone had the right to tax Virginians.
Two more fiery resolutions were debated as Henry pressed the logic of his case to the extreme. The sixth resolution denied legitimacy to any tax law originating outside Virginia, and the seventh boldly called anyone who disagreed with these propositions an enemy of Virginia. This was too much for the other representatives. They voted down resolutions six and seven and later rescinded their vote on number five as well.
Their caution hardly mattered, however, because newspapers in other colonies printed all seven Virginia Resolves, creating the impression that a daring first chal- lenge to the Stamp Act had occurred. Consequently, other assemblies were willing to consider even more radical questions, such as this: By what authority could Parlia- ment legislate for the colonies without also taxing them? No one disagreed, in 1765, that Parliament had legislative power over the colonists, who were, after all, British subjects. Several assemblies advanced the argument that there was a distinction between external taxes, imposed to regulate trade, and internal taxes, such as a stamp tax or a property tax, which could only be self-imposed.
Reaction to the Stamp Act ran far deeper than political debate in assemblies. Every person whose livelihood required official paper had to decide whether to comply with the act. The first organized resistance to the Stamp Act began in Boston in August 1765 under the direction of town leaders, chief among them Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and Ebenezer Mackintosh. Many other artisans, tradesmen, printers, tavern keepers, dockworkers, and sailors — the middling and lower orders — mobilized to oppose the Stamp Act, taking the name “Sons of Liberty.”
The plan hatched in Boston called for a large street demonstration highlight- ing a mock execution designed to convince Andrew Oliver, the designated stamp distributor, to resign. On August 14, 1765, a crowd of two thousand to three thousand demonstrators, led by the young shoemaker MacIntosh, hung an effigy of Oliver in a tree and then paraded it around town before finally beheading and burning it. In hopes of calming tensions, the royal governor Francis Bernard took no action. The next day Oliver resigned his office in a well-publicized announcement.
The Sugar and Stamp Acts, 1763–1765 1431754–1775
The demonstration provided lessons for everyone. Oliver learned that stamp distributors would be very unpopular people. Governor Bernard, with no police force to call on, learned the limitations of his power to govern. The demonstration’s leaders learned that street action was effective. And hundreds of ordinary men not only learned what the Stamp Act was all about but also gained pride in their ability to have a decisive impact on politics.
Twelve days later, a second crowd action showed how well these lessons had been learned. On August 26, a crowd visited the houses of three detested customs and court officials, breaking windows and raiding wine cellars. A fourth target was the finest dwelling in Massachusetts, owned by Thomas Hutchinson, lieutenant gov- ernor of Massachusetts and the chief justice of the colony’s highest court. Rumors abounded that Hutchinson had urged Grenville to adopt the Stamp Act. Although he had actually done the opposite, Hutchinson refused to set the record straight, say- ing curtly, “I am not obliged to give an answer to all the questions that may be put me by every lawless person.” The crowd attacked his house, and by daybreak only the exterior walls were standing. Governor Bernard gave orders to call out the militia, but he was told that many militiamen were among the crowd.
The destruction of Hutchinson’s house brought a temporary halt to protest activities in Boston. The town meeting issued a statement of sympathy for Hutchin- son, but a large reward for the arrest and conviction of rioters failed to produce a single lead. Essentially, the opponents of the Stamp Act in Boston had triumphed; no one replaced Oliver as distributor. When the act took effect on November 1, ships without stamped permits continued to clear the harbor. Since he could not bring the lawbreakers to court, Hutchinson, ever principled, felt obliged to resign his office as chief justice. He remained lieutenant governor, however, and within five years he became the royal governor.
SYMBOLIC DEATH TO STAMP AGENTS Protesters in many towns staged threatening demonstrations designed to make any stamp distributor reconsider selling the hated stamps. In this contemporary cartoon, a dummy wearing a hat and waistcoat is being led to destruction. One protester carries a hangman’s gallows, another a large bundle of sticks to burn the dummy. Do you think the cartoonist was in sympathy with the demonstrators? The Granger Collection, NYC.
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Liberty and Property. Boston’s crowd actions of August sparked similar erup- tions by groups calling themselves Sons of Liberty in nearly fifty towns throughout the colonies, and stamp distributors everywhere hastened to resign. A crowd forced one Connecticut distributor to throw his hat and powdered wig in the air while shouting a cheer for “Liberty and property!” This man fared better than another Connecticut stamp agent who was nearly buried alive by Sons of Liberty. Only when the thuds of dirt sounded on his coffin did he have a sudden change of heart, shout- ing out his resignation to the crowd above. Luckily, he was heard. In Charleston, South Carolina, the stamp distributor resigned after crowds burned effigies and chanted “Liberty! Liberty!”
Some colonial leaders, disturbed by the riots, sought a more moderate challenge to parliamentary authority. In October 1765, twenty-seven delegates representing nine colonial assemblies met in New York City as the Stamp Act Congress. For two weeks, the men hammered out a petition about taxation addressed to the king and Parliament. Their statement closely resembled the first five Virginia Resolves, claim- ing that taxes were “free gifts of the people,” which only the people’s representatives could give. They dismissed virtual representation: “The people of these colonies are not, and from their local circumstances, cannot be represented in the House of Commons.” At the same time, the delegates carefully affirmed their subordination to Parliament and monarch in deferential language.
Nevertheless, the Stamp Act Congress, by the mere fact of its meeting, advanced a radical potential — the notion of intercolonial political action. The rallying cry of “Liberty and property” made perfect sense to many white Americans of all social ranks, who feared that the Stamp Act threatened their traditional right to liberty as British subjects. The liberty in question was the right to be taxed only by representa- tive government. “Liberty and property” came from a trinity of concepts — “life, liberty, property” — that had come to be regarded as the birthright of freeborn British subjects since at least the seventeenth century. A powerful tradition of British political thought invested representative government with the duty to protect individual lives, liberties, and property against potential abuse by royal authority. Up to 1765, Ameri- cans had consented to accept Parliament as a body that represented them. But now, in this matter of taxation via stamps, Parliament seemed a distant body that had failed to protect Americans’ liberty and property against royal authority.
Alarmed, some Americans began to speak and write about a plot by British lead- ers to enslave them. A Maryland writer warned that if the colonies lost “the right of
exemption from all taxes without their consent,” that loss would “deprive them of every privilege distinguishing freemen from slaves.” In Virginia, a group of planters headed by Richard Henry Lee issued a document called
the Westmoreland Resolves, claiming that the Stamp Act was an attempt “to reduce the people of this country to a state of abject and detestable slavery.”
The opposite meanings of liberty and slavery were utterly clear to white Ameri- cans, but they stopped short of applying similar logic to the half million black
Americans they held in bondage. Many blacks, however, could see the contradic- tion. When a crowd of Charleston blacks paraded with shouts of “Liberty!” just a few months after white Sons of Liberty had done the same, the town militia turned out to break up the demonstration. Politicians and merchants in Britain reacted with
The Townshend Acts and Economic Retaliation, 1767–1770 1451754–1775
distress to the American demonstrations and petitions. Merchants particularly feared trade disruptions and pressured Parliament to repeal the Stamp Act. By late 1765, yet another new minister, the Marquess of Rockingham, headed the king’s cabinet and sought a way to repeal the act without losing face. The solution came in March 1766: The Stamp Act was repealed, but with the repeal came the Declaratory Act, which asserted Parliament’s right to legislate for the colonies “in all cases what- soever.” Perhaps the stamp tax had been inexpedient, but the power to tax — one prime case of a legislative power — was stoutly upheld.
The Townshend Acts and Economic Retaliation, 1767–1770 Rockingham did not last long as prime minister. By the summer of 1766, George III had persuaded William Pitt to resume that position. Pitt appointed Charles Townshend to be chancellor of the exchequer, the chief financial minister. Facing both the old war debt and the cost of the British troops in America, Towns- hend turned again to taxation, but his plan to raise revenue touched off coordinated boycotts of British goods in 1768 and 1769. Even women were politicized as self- styled “Daughters of Liberty.” Boston led the uproar, causing the British to send peacekeeping soldiers to assist the royal governor. The stage was thus set for the first fatalities in the brewing revolution.
The Townshend Duties. Townshend proposed new taxes in the old form of a navigation act. Officially called the Revenue Act of 1767, it established new duties on tea, glass, lead, paper, and painters’ colors imported into the colonies, to be paid by the importer but passed on to consumers in the retail price. A recent further reduc- tion in the duty on French molasses had persuaded some American shippers to quit smuggling, and finally Britain was deriving a moderate revenue stream from its colonies. Townshend naively concluded that Americans accepted external taxes. The Townshend duties were not especially burdensome, but the principle they embod- ied — taxation through trade duties — looked different to the colonists in the wake of the Stamp Act crisis. Although Americans once distinguished between external and internal taxes, accepting external duties as a means to direct the flow of trade, that distinction was wiped out by an external tax meant only to raise money. John Dick- inson, a Philadelphia lawyer, articulated this view in an essay titled Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, widely circulated in late 1767. “We are taxed without our consent. . . . We are therefore — SLAVES,” Dickinson wrote, calling for “a total denial of the power of Parliament to lay upon these colonies any ‘tax’ whatever.” A contro- versial provision of the Townshend duties directed that some of the revenue gener- ated would pay the salaries of royal governors. Before 1767, local assemblies set the salaries of their own officials, giving them significant influence over crown- appointed officeholders. Through his new provision, Townshend aimed to strengthen the governors’ position as well as to curb what he perceived to be the growing
Why did British authorities send troops to occupy Boston in the fall of 1768?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Declaratory Act 1766 law issued by Parliament to assert Parliament’s unassailable right to legislate for its British colonies “in all cases whatsoever,” putting Americans on notice that the simultaneous repeal of the Stamp Act changed nothing in the imperial powers of Britain.
Townshend duties British law that established new duties on tea, glass, lead, paper, and painters’ colors imported into the colonies. The Townshend duties led to boycotts and heightened tensions between Britain and the American colonies.
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independence of the assemblies. Massachusetts again took the lead in protesting the Townshend duties. Samuel Adams, now an elected member of the provincial assem- bly, argued that any form of parliamentary taxation was unjust because Americans were not represented in Parliament. Further, he argued that the new way to pay governors’ salaries subverted the proper relationship between the people and their rulers. The assembly circulated a letter with Adams’s arguments to other colonial assemblies for their endorsement. As with the Stamp Act Congress of 1765, colonial assemblies were starting to coordinate their protests.
In response to Adams’s letter, Lord Hillsborough, the new man in charge of colo- nial affairs in Britain, instructed Massachusetts governor Bernard to dissolve the assem- bly if it refused to repudiate the letter. The assembly refused, by a vote of 92 to 17, and Bernard carried out his instruction. In the summer of 1768, Boston was in an uproar.
Nonconsumption and the Daughters of Liberty. The Boston town meet- ing led the way with nonconsumption agreements calling for a boycott of all British- made goods. Dozens of other towns passed similar resolutions in 1767 and 1768. For example, prohibited purchases in the town of New Haven, Connecticut, included carriages, furniture, hats, clothing, lace, clocks, and textiles. The idea was to encour- age home manufacture and to hurt trade, causing London merchants to pressure Parliament for repeal of the duties. Nonconsumption agreements were very hard to enforce. With the Stamp Act, there was one hated item, a stamp, and a limited num- ber of official distributors. By contrast, an agreement to boycott all British goods required serious personal sacrifice, which not everyone was prepared to make. A more direct blow to trade came from nonimportation agreements, but getting mer- chants to agree to these proved more difficult, because of fears that merchants in other colonies might continue to import goods and make handsome profits. Not until late 1768 could Boston merchants agree to suspend trade through a nonimpor- tation agreement lasting one year starting January 1, 1769. Sixty signed the agree- ment. New York merchants soon followed suit, as did Philadelphia and Charleston merchants in 1769.
Many of the British products specified in nonconsumption agreements were household goods traditionally under the control of the “ladies.” By 1769, male lead- ers in the patriot cause clearly understood that women’s cooperation in noncon- sumption and home manufacture was beneficial to their cause. The Townshend duties thus provided an unparalleled opportunity for encouraging female patriot- ism. During the Stamp Act crisis, Sons of Liberty took to the streets in protest. During the difficulties of 1768 and 1769, the concept of Daughters of Liberty emerged to give shape to a new idea — that women might play a role in public affairs. Any woman could express affiliation with the colonial protest through conspicuous boy- cotts of British-made goods. In Boston, more than three hundred women signed a petition to abstain from tea, “sickness excepted,” in order to “save this abused Coun- try from Ruin and Slavery.”
Homespun cloth became a prominent symbol of patriotism. A young Boston girl learning to spin called herself “a daughter of liberty,” noting that “I chuse to wear as much of our own manufactory as pocible.” In the boycott period of 1768 to 1770,
The Townshend Acts and Economic Retaliation, 1767–1770 1471754–1775
newspapers reported on spinning matches, or bees, in some sixty New England towns, in which women came together in public to make yarn. Newspaper accounts variously called the spinners “Daughters of Liberty” or “Daughters of Industry.”
This surge of public spinning was related to the politics of the boycott, which infused traditional wom- en’s work with new political purpose. But the women spinners were not equivalents of the Sons of Liberty. The Sons marched in streets, burned effigies, threat- ened hated officials, and celebrated anniversaries of their successes with raucous drinking in taverns. The Daughters manifested their patriotism quietly, in ways marked by piety, industry, and charity. The difference was due in part to cultural ideals of gender, which prized masculine self-assertion and feminine selfless- ness. It also was due to class. The Sons were a cross- class alliance, with leaders from the middling orders reliant on men and boys of the lower ranks to fuel their crowds. The Daughters were genteel ladies accus- tomed to buying British goods. The difference between the Sons and the Daughters also speaks to two views of how best to challenge authority: violent threats and street actions, or the self-disciplined, self-sacrificing boycott of goods?
On the whole, the anti-British boycotts were a success. Imports fell by more than 40 percent; British merchants felt the pinch and let Parliament know it. In Boston, the extended Hutchinson family — whose fortune rested on British trade — also endured losses, but even more alarming to the lieutenant governor, Boston seemed overrun with anti-British sentiment. The Sons of Liberty staged rollicking annual celebrations of the Stamp Act riot, and both Hutchinson and Governor Bernard concluded that British troops were neces- sary to restore order.
Military Occupation and “Massacre” in Boston. In the fall of 1768, three thousand uniformed troops arrived to occupy Boston. Although the situation was frequently tense, no major troubles occurred that winter and through most of 1769. But as January 1, 1770, approached, marking the end of the nonimportation agree- ment, it was clear that some merchants — such as Thomas Hutchinson’s two sons, both importers — were ready to break the boycott.
Trouble began in January, when a crowd smeared the door of the Hutchinson brothers’ shop with excrement. In February, a crowd surrounded the house of a confrontational customs official who panicked and fired a musket, accidentally
EDENTON TEA LADIES Patriotic women in Edenton, North Carolina, pledged to renounce British tea and were satirized in this British cartoon, which shows brazen women shedding their femininity. Neglected babies, urinating dogs, wanton sexuality, and mean-looking women were the consequences, according to the artist. The cartoon was humorous to the British because of the gender reversals it predicts and because of the insult it directs at American men. Library of Congress.
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killing a young boy passing on the street. The Sons of Liberty mounted a massive funeral procession to mark this first instance of violent death in the struggle with Britain.
For the next week, tension gripped Boston. The climax came on Monday even- ing, March 5, 1770, when a crowd taunted eight British soldiers guarding the cus- toms house. Onlookers threw snowballs and rocks and dared the soldiers to fire; finally one did. After a short pause, someone yelled “Fire!” and the other soldiers shot into the crowd, hitting eleven men, killing five of them.
The Boston Massacre, as the event was quickly labeled, was over in minutes. Hutchinson, now acting governor of the colony, immediately removed the regiments to an island in the harbor to prevent further bloodshed, and he jailed Captain Thomas Preston and his eight soldiers for their own protection, promising they would be held for trial.
Visual Activity THE BLOODY MASSACRE PERPETRATED IN KING STREET, BOSTON, ON MARCH 5, 1770 Paul Revere’s mass-produced engraving shows the patriot version of events. Soldiers appear as a firing squad, shooting simultaneously at an unarmed and bewigged crowd; more likely the shooting was chaotic, and the fatalities were from lower classes who were not the sort to wear wigs. Crispus Attucks, an African-Indian dockworker, was killed, but Revere depicts only whites among the injured. Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University Library.
READING THE IMAGE: How does this picture attempt to enlist its viewers’ sympathies?
CONNECTIONS: Does this picture accurately represent the events of the Boston Massacre? What might account for its biases?
Boston Massacre March 1770 incident in Boston in which British soldiers fired on an American crowd, killing five. The Boston Massacre became a rallying point for colonists who increasingly saw the British government as tyrannical and illegitimate.
The Destruction of the Tea and the Coercive Acts, 1770–1774 1491754–1775
The Sons of Liberty staged elaborate martyrs’ funerals for the five victims. Sig- nificantly, the one nonwhite victim shared equally in the public’s veneration. Crispus Attucks, a sailor and rope maker in his forties, was the son of an African man and a Natick Indian woman. A slave in his youth, he was at the time of his death a free laborer at the Boston docks. Attucks was one of the first American partisans to die in the revolutionary struggle with Britain, and certainly the first African American.
At trial in the fall of 1770, the eight soldiers were ably defended by two Boston attorneys, John Adams and Josiah Quincy. While both had direct ties to the leader- ship of the Sons of Liberty, Adams was deeply committed to the principle that even unpopular defendants deserved a fair trial. The five-day trial resulted in acquittal for Preston and for all but two of the soldiers, who were convicted of manslaughter, branded on the thumbs, and released.
The Destruction of the Tea and the Coercive Acts, 1770–1774 In the same week as the Boston Massacre, yet another new British prime minister, Frederick North, acknowledged the harmful impact of the boycott on trade and recommended repeal of the Townshend duties. Seeking peace with the colo- nies and prosperity for British merchants, Lord North persuaded Parliament to remove all the duties except the tax on tea, kept as a symbol of Parliament’s power. For nearly two years following repeal of the Townshend duties, peace seemed possible, but tense incidents in 1772, followed by a renewed struggle over the tea tax in 1773, precipi- tated a full-scale crisis in the summer and fall of 1774. In response, men from nearly all the colonies came together in a special “Continental Congress” to debate the crisis.
The Calm before the Storm. Repeal of the Townshend duties brought an end to nonimportation. Trade boomed in 1770 and 1771, driven by pent-up demand. Moreover, the leaders of the popular movement seemed to be losing their power. Samuel Adams, for example, ran for a minor local office and lost to a conservative merchant. Then in 1772, several incidents again brought the conflict with Britain into sharp focus. One was the burning of the Gaspée, a Royal Navy ship pursuing suspected smugglers near Rhode Island. A British investigating commission failed to arrest anyone but announced that it would send suspects, if any were found, to Britain for trial on charges of high treason. This ruling seemed to fly in the face of the traditional English right to trial by a jury of one’s peers.
When news of the Gaspée investigation spread, it was greeted with disbelief in other colonies. Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and Richard Henry Lee in the Virginia House of Burgesses proposed that a network of standing committees be established to link the colonies and pass along alarming news. By mid-1773, all but one colonial assembly had set up a “committee of correspondence.”
Massachusetts, the continuing hotspot of the conflict, developed its own rapid communications network, with urgency provided by a new proposal by Lord North to
Why did Parliament pass the Coercive Acts in 1774?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
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pay the salaries of county court justices out of the tea revenue, reminiscent of Towns- hend’s plan for paying royal governors. By the spring of 1773, more than half the towns in Massachusetts had set up committees of correspondence to receive, dis- cuss, distribute, and act on political news. The first message to circulate came from Boston; it framed North’s salary plan for judges as the latest proof of a British conspir- acy to undermine traditional liberties: first taxation without consent, then military occupation and a massacre, and now a plot to subvert the justice system. Express riders swiftly distributed the message, which sparked ordinary townspeople to embrace a revolutionary language of rights and constitutional duties. Eventually the committees of correspondence would foster rapid mobilization to defend a countryside feeling under literal attack.
The paramount incident shattering the relative calm of the early 1770s was the Tea Act of 1773. Americans had resumed buying the taxed British tea, but they were also smuggling large quantities of Dutch tea, cutting into the sales of Britain’s East India Company. So Lord North proposed legislation giving favored status to the East India Company, allowing it to sell tea directly to a few selected merchants in four colonial cities, cutting out British middlemen. The hope was to lower the price of the East India tea, including the duty, below that of smuggled Dutch tea, thus motivating Americans to obey the law.
Tea in Boston Harbor. In the fall of 1773, news of the Tea Act reached the colo- nies. Parliamentary legislation to make tea inexpensive struck many colonists as an insidious plot to trick Americans into buying the dutied tea. The real goal, some argued, was the increased revenue that would pay the salaries of royal governors and judges.
But how to resist the Tea Act? Nonimportation was not viable, because the tea trade was too lucrative to expect merchants to give it up willingly. Consumer boy- cotts seemed ineffective, because it was impossible to distinguish between dutied tea and smuggled tea once it was in the teapot. The appointment of official tea agents, parallel to the Stamp Act distributors, suggested one solution. In every port city, revived Sons of Liberty pressured tea agents to resign. Without agents, governors yielded, and tea cargoes either landed duty-free or were sent home.
Governor Hutchinson, however, would not bend any rules. Three ships bearing tea arrived in Boston in November 1773. The ships cleared customs, and the crews, sensing the town’s extreme tension, unloaded all cargo except the tea. Picking up on the tension in the town, the captains wished to return to England, but Hutchinson would not grant them clearance to leave without paying the tea duty. He gave them twenty days to pay, after which time the tea would be confiscated.
For the full twenty days, crowds swelled by concerned people from surrounding towns kept the pressure high. On the final day, December 16, a large crowd gathered at Old South Church to debate a course of action. No solution emerged at that meeting, but immediately after, 100 to 150 men disguised as Indians boarded the three ships and dumped thousands of pounds of tea into the harbor while a crowd of 2,000 watched. In admiration, John Adams wrote: “This Destruction of the Tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible, and it must have so important Consequences.”
committees of correspondence A communications network established among towns in Massachusetts and also among colonial capital towns in 1772–1773 to provide for rapid dissemination of news about important political developments. These committees politicized ordinary townspeople, sparking a revolutionary language of rights and duties.
Tea Act of 1773 British act that lowered the existing tax on tea to entice boycotting Americans to buy it. Resistance to the Tea Act led to the passage of the Coercive Acts and imposition of military rule in Massachusetts.
The Destruction of the Tea and the Coercive Acts, 1770–1774 1511754–1775
The Coercive Acts. Lord North’s response was swift and stern: He persuaded Parliament to issue the Coercive Acts, four laws meant to punish Massachusetts. In America, those laws, along with a fifth one, the Quebec Act, were soon known as the Intolerable Acts. The first act, the Boston Port Act, closed Boston harbor to all shipping as of June 1, 1774, until the destroyed tea was paid for. Britain’s objective was to halt the commercial life of the city. The second act, called the Massachusetts Gov- ernment Act, greatly altered the colony’s charter, underscoring Parliament’s claim to supremacy over Massachusetts. The royal governor’s powers were augmented, and the governor’s council became an appointive, rather than elective, body. Further, the governor could now appoint all judges, sheriffs, and officers of the court. No town meeting beyond the annual spring election of town selectmen could be held without the governor’s approval, and every agenda item required prior approval. Every Massachusetts town was affected. The third Coercive Act, the Impartial Administra- tion of Justice Act, stipulated that any royal official accused of a capital crime — for example, Captain Preston and his soldiers at the Boston Massacre — would be tried in a court in Britain. It did not matter that Preston had received a fair trial in Boston. What this act ominously suggested was that down the road, more Captain Prestons and soldiers might be firing into unruly crowds. The fourth act amended the 1765 Quartering Act and permitted military commanders to lodge soldiers wherever necessary, even in private households. In a related move, Lord North appointed General Thomas Gage, commander of the Royal Army in New York, as governor of Massachusetts. Thomas Hutchinson was out, relieved at long last of his duties. Military rule, including soldiers, returned once more to Boston.
The fifth act, the Quebec Act, was unrelated to the four Coercive Acts, but it magnified American fears. It confirmed the continuation of French civil law as well as Catholicism for Quebec, now part of the British empire. It also awarded Quebec land (and the lucrative fur trade) in the Ohio Valley, an area also claimed by Virginia, Pennsylvania, and a number of Indian tribes. The five Intolerable Acts spread alarm in all the colonies. If Britain could squelch Massachusetts — change its charter, suspend local government, inaugurate military rule, and on top of that give Ohio to Catholic Quebec — what liberties were secure? Fearful royal governors in a half dozen colonies dismissed the sitting assemblies, adding to the sense of urgency. A few of the assemblies defi- antly continued to meet in new locations. Via the committees of correspondence, colonial leaders arranged to convene in Philadelphia in September 1774 to respond to the crisis.
HUTCHINSON THE TRAITOR FACES DEATH This hideous engraving enlivened the cover of a Boston almanac published during the high drama over tea. The devil taunts Thomas Hutchinson while a skeleton representing death spears him. On page 2, readers of this anti-Hutchinson diatribe were invited to think about “the Horrors that Man must endure, who owes his Greatness to his Country’s Ruin.” The Granger Collection, NYC.
Coercive (Intolerable) Acts Four British acts of 1774 meant to punish Massachusetts for the destruction of three shiploads of tea. Known in America as the Intolerable Acts, they led to open rebellion in the northern colonies.
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Beyond Boston: Rural New England. The Coercive Acts fired up all of New England to open insubordination. With a British general occupying the Massachusetts governorship and some three thousand troops controlling Boston, the revolutionary momentum shifted from urban radicals to rural farmers who protested in dozens of spontaneous, dramatic showdowns. Some towns found creative ways to get around the prohibition on new meetings, and others just ignored the law. Governor Gage’s call for elections for a new provincial assembly under his control sparked the formation of a competing unauthorized assembly that met in defiance of his orders. In all Massachusetts counties outside Boston, crowds of thousands of armed men converged to prevent the opening of county courts run by crown-appointed jurists. By August 1774, farmers and artisans all over Massachusetts had effectively taken full control of their local institutions.
Gage was especially distressed by the military preparations of citizen-militias, drilling on village greens to gain proficiency with muskets. The governor wrote London begging for troop reinforcements, and he beefed up fortifications around Boston. But without more soldiers, his options were limited. Seizing stockpiles of gunpowder was his best move.
The Powder Alarm of September 1 showed just how ready the defiant Americans were to take up arms against Britain. Gage sent troops to a town just outside Boston reported to have a hidden powder storehouse, and in the surprise and scramble of the attack, false news spread that the troops had fired on men defending the pow- der, killing six. Within twenty-four hours, several thousand armed men from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut streamed on foot to Boston to avenge the first blood spilled. At this moment, ordinary men became insurgents, willing to kill or be killed in the face of the British clampdown. Once the error was corrected and the crisis defused, the men returned home peaceably. But Gage could no longer doubt the speed and determination of the rebellious subjects.
All this had occurred without orchestration by Boston radicals, Gage reported. But British leaders found it hard to believe, as one put it, that “a tumultuous Rabble, without any Appearance of general Concert, or without any Head to advise, or Leader to conduct” could pull off such effective resistance. Repeatedly in the years to come, the British would seriously underestimate their opponents.
The First Continental Congress. Every colony except Georgia sent delegates to Philadelphia in September 1774 to discuss the looming crisis at the First Conti- nental Congress. Delegates sought to articulate their liberties as British subjects and the powers Parliament held over them, and they debated possible responses to the Coercive Acts. Some wanted a total ban on trade with Britain to force repeal, while others, especially southerners dependent on tobacco and rice exports, opposed halting trade. Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry were eager for a ringing denuncia- tion of all parliamentary control. The conservative Joseph Galloway proposed a plan (quickly defeated) to create a secondary parliament in America to assist the British Parliament in ruling the colonies.
The congress met for seven weeks and produced a declaration of rights couched in traditional language: “We ask only for peace, liberty and security. We wish no
First Continental Congress September 1774 gathering of colonial delegates in Philadelphia to discuss the crisis precipitated by the Coercive Acts. The congress produced a declaration of rights and an agreement to impose a limited boycott of trade with Britain.
Domestic Insurrections, 1774–1775 1531754–1775
diminution of royal prerogatives, we demand no new rights.” But from Britain’s point of view, the rights assumed already to exist were radical. Chief among them was the claim that Americans were not represented in Parliament and so each colonial gov- ernment had the sole right to govern and tax its own people. To put pressure on Britain, the delegates agreed to a staggered and limited boycott of trade: imports prohibited this year, exports the following, and rice totally exempted (to keep South Carolinians happy). To enforce the boycott, they called for a Continental Association, with chapters in each town variously called committees of public safety or of inspec- tion, to monitor all commerce and punish suspected violators of the boycott. Its work done in a month, the congress disbanded with agreement to reconvene in May.
The committees of public safety, the committees of correspondence, the regrouped colonial assemblies, and the Continental Congress were all political bod- ies functioning defiantly without any constitutional authority. British officials did not recognize them as legitimate, but many Americans who supported the patriot cause instantly accepted them. A key reason for the stability of such unauthorized governing bodies was that they were composed of many of the same men who had held elective office before.
Britain’s severe reaction to Boston’s destruction of the tea finally succeeded in making many colonists from New Hampshire to Georgia realize that the problems of British rule went far beyond questions of nonconsensual taxation. The Coercive Acts infringed on liberty and denied self-government; they could not be ignored. With one colony already subordinated to military rule and a British army camped in Boston, the threat of a general war was very real.
Domestic Insurrections, 1774–1775 Before the Second Continental Congress could meet, vio- lence and bloodshed came to Massachusetts in the towns of Lexington and Concord. Fearing domestic insurrection, General Thomas Gage sent his soldiers there to capture an ammunition depot, but New England farmers mobilized against an intrusive power they feared would enslave them. To the south, a different and inverted version of the same story began to unfold, as thousands of enslaved black men and women seized an unprecedented opportunity to mount a different kind of insurrection — against planter-patriots who looked over their shoulders uneasily whenever they called out for liberty from the British.
Lexington and Concord. During the winter of 1774–75, Americans pressed on with boycotts. Optimists hoped to effect a repeal of the Coercive Acts; pessimists stock- piled arms and ammunition. In Massachusetts, militia units known as minutemen pre- pared to respond at a minute’s notice to any threat from the British troops in Boston.
Thomas Gage realized how desperate the British position was. The people, Gage wrote Lord North, were “numerous, worked up to a fury, and not a Boston rabble but the freeholders and farmers of the country.” Gage requested twenty thousand
How did enslaved people in the colonies react to the stirrings of revolution?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
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reinforcements. He also strongly advised repeal of the Coercive Acts, but leaders in Britain could not admit failure. Instead, in mid-April 1775, they ordered Gage to arrest the troublemakers.
Gage quickly planned a surprise attack on a suspected ammunition storage site at Concord, a village eighteen miles west of Boston (Map 6.3). Near midnight on April 18, British soldiers moved west across the Charles River. Paul Revere and Wil- liam Dawes raced ahead to alert the minutemen. When the soldiers got to Lexing- ton, five miles east of Concord, they were met by some seventy armed men. The British commander barked out, “Lay down your arms, you damned rebels, and dis- perse.” The militiamen hesitated and began to comply, but then someone — nobody knows who — fired. Within two minutes, eight Americans were dead and ten were wounded.
The British units continued their march to Concord, any pretense of surprise gone. Three companies of minutemen nervously occupied the town center but offered no challenge to the British as they searched in vain for the ammunition. Finally, at Old North Bridge in Concord, British troops and minutemen exchanged shots, killing two Americans and three British soldiers. As the British returned to Boston, militia units ambushed them, bringing the bloodiest fighting of the day. In the end, 273 British soldiers were wounded or dead; the toll for the Americans stood at about 95. It was April 19, 1775, and the war had begun.
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British retreat Paul Revere’s ride, night of April 18, 1775 William Dawes’s ride, April 18, 1775
American victory
British victory
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MAP 6.3 LEXINGTON AND CONCORD, APRIL 1775 Two Americans slipped out of Boston to warn of a surprise British attack on Concord. Paul Revere went by boat to Charlestown and then by horse to Lexington, while William Dawes casually rode past British sentries and then galloped at full speed through Lexington to Concord.
READING THE MAP: How did Dawes’s route differ from Revere’s? What kinds of terrain and potential dangers did each man face during his ride, according to the map?
CONNECTIONS: Why send two men on the same mission? Why not send four or more?
Map Activity
Domestic Insurrections, 1774–1775 1551754–1775
Rebelling against Slavery. News of the battles of Lexington and Concord spread within days. In Virginia, Thomas Jefferson observed that “a phrenzy of revenge seems to have seized all ranks of people,” causing the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, to remove all gunpowder from the Williamsburg powder house to a ship, out of reach of angry Virginians. He also threatened to arm slaves, if necessary, to ward off attacks by colonists. This proved effective for several months.
In November 1775, as the crisis deepened, Dunmore issued an official proc- lamation promising freedom to defecting able-bodied slaves who would fight for the British. Dunmore had no intention of liberating all slaves, and astute blacks noticed that Dunmore neglected to free his own slaves. A Virginia barber named Caesar declared that “he did not know any one foolish enough to believe him [Dunmore], for if he intended to do so, he ought first to set his own free.” Within a month, some fifteen hundred slaves had joined Dunmore’s “Ethiopian Regi- ment.” Camp diseases quickly set in: dysentery, typhoid fever, and smallpox. When Dunmore sailed for England in mid-1776, he took three hundred black survivors with him. But the association of freedom with the British authorities had been established, and throughout the war thousands more southern slaves fled their masters whenever the British army was close enough to offer safe refuge.
In the northern colonies as well, slaves clearly recognized the evolving politi- cal struggle with Britain as an ideal moment to bid for freedom. A twenty-one- year-old Boston domestic slave employed biting sarcasm in a 1774 newspaper essay to call attention to the hypocrisy of local slave owners: “How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for exercise of oppressive Power over others agree, — I humbly think it does not require the Penetration of a Philoso- pher to Determine.” This extraordinary young woman, Phillis Wheatley, had already gained international recognition through a book of poems published in London in 1773. Wheatley’s poems spoke of “Fair Free- dom” as the “Goddess long desir’d” by Africans enslaved in America. Wheatley’s master freed the young poet in 1775.
From north to south, groups of slaves pressed their case. Several Boston blacks offered to fight for the British in exchange for freedom, but General Gage turned them down. In Maryland, a planter com- plained that blacks impatient for freedom had to be disarmed of about eighty guns along with some swords. In North Carolina, white suspicions about a planned slave uprising led to the arrest of scores of African Americans who were ordered to be whipped by the revolutionary committee of public safety.
By 1783, when the Revolutionary War ended, as many as twenty thousand blacks had voted against slavery with their feet by seeking refuge with the British army. About half failed to achieve the liberation they were seeking, instead suc- cumbing to disease, especially smallpox, in refuge camps. But some eight thousand to ten thousand persisted through the war and later, under the protection of the British army, left America to start new lives of freedom in Canada’s Nova Scotia or Africa’s Sierra Leone.
so- y,
t ons
156 CHAPTER 6 The British Empire and the Colonial Crisis 1754–1775
Conclusion: The Long Road to Revolution In the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, neither losers nor victors came away satisfied. France lost vast amounts of North American land claims, and Indian land rights were increasingly violated or ignored. Britain’s huge war debt and sub- sequent revenue-generating policies distressed Americans and set the stage for the imperial crisis of the 1760s and 1770s. The years 1763 to 1775 brought repeated attempts by the British government to subordinate the colonies into contributing partners in the larger scheme of empire.
American resistance to British policies grew slowly but steadily. In 1765, both loyalist Thomas Hutchinson and patriot Samuel Adams agreed that it was unwise for Britain to assert a right to taxation because Parliament did not adequately represent Americans. As a royal official, Hutchinson was obliged to uphold policy, while Adams protested and made political activists out of thousands in the process.
By 1775, events propelled many Americans to the conclusion that a concerted effort was afoot to deprive them of all their liberties, the most important of which were the right to self-rule and the right to live free of an occupying army. Prepared to die for those liberties, hundreds of minutemen converged on Concord. April 19 marked the start of their rebellion.
Another rebellion under way in 1775 was doomed to be short-circuited. Black Americans who had experienced actual slavery listened to shouts of “Liberty!” from white crowds and appropriated the language of revolution to their own circum- stances. Defiance of authority was indeed contagious.
Despite the military conflict at the battles of Lexington and Concord, a war with Britain seemed far from inevitable to colonists outside New England. In the months ahead, American colonial leaders pursued peaceful as well as military solutions to the question of who actually had authority over them. By the end of 1775, however, reconciliation with the crown would be unattainable.
1 In the mid-eighteenth century, how did Native Americans influence rela- tions between European nations? Between Britain and the colonies?
2 What other grievances, besides taxation, led colonists by 1775 to openly rebel against Britain?
3 How did the colonists organize to oppose British power so effectively? In your answer, discuss the role of communication in facilitating the colonial resistance, being sure to cite specific examples.
MAKING CONNECTIONS
1 How did the Seven Years’ War erode relations between colonists and British authorities? (pp. 132–140)
2 Why did the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act draw fierce opposition from colonists? (pp. 140–145)
3 Why did British authorities send troops to occupy Boston in the fall of 1768? (pp. 145–149)
4 Why did Parliament pass the Coercive Acts in 1774? (pp. 149–153)
5 How did enslaved people in the colonies react to the stirrings of revolu- tion? (pp. 153–155)
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
Seven Years’ War (p. 132)
Pontiac’s Rebellion (p. 139)
Sugar (Revenue) Act (p. 140)
Stamp Act (p. 141)
virtual representation (p. 141)
Declaratory Act (p. 145)
KEY TERMS
Townshend duties (p. 145)
Boston Massacre (p. 148)
committees of correspondence (p. 150)
Tea Act of 1773 (p. 150)
Coercive (Intolerable) Acts (p. 151)
First Continental Congress (p. 152)
Chapter Review
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MAKE IT STICK
Go to LearningCurve: See what you know. Then review the key terms and answer the questions.
LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com /roarkconcise
157
Robert Shurtliff was a latecomer to the American Revolution, enlisting in the Continental army after the last decisive battle at Yorktown had been fought. The army still needed fresh recruits to counter the British army occupying New York City. The standoff would last nearly two years before the peace treaty was finalized in Paris.
New recruits were scarce in a country exhausted by war. Attracted by cash bounties, beardless boys who had been children in 1775 now
stepped forward, Shurtliff among them. Reportedly eighteen, the youth was single, poor, and at loose ends. With a muscular physique and proficiency with a musket, Shurtliff won assign- ment to an elite light infantry unit, part of Washington’s army of 10,000 men stationed north of New York City.
158
The War for America, 1775–1783
CONTINENTAL ARMY UNIFORM This uniform belonged to Colonel Peter Gansevoort, who won fame and promotion for successfully defending Fort Stanwix, in central New York, against a siege by British and Indians. Yet a related battle diminished the joy of his victory. Hundreds of neighboring militiamen hurrying to aid Gansevoort met ambush and slaughter by loyalists and
Indians in the battle of Oriskany. Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, Behring Center.
The Second Continental Congress (pp. 160–164)
The First Year of War, 1775–1776 (pp. 165–168)
The Home Front (pp. 168–175)
The Campaigns of 1777–1779: The North and West (pp. 175–180)
The Southern Strategy and the End of the War (pp. 181–186)
Conclusion: Why the British Lost (p. 186)
7
CHAPTER OUTLINE QUICK START
Quickly learn what is important in this chapter by doing the following:
• READ the Chapter Outline to see how the chapter is organized. • SKIM the Chronology on the next page to see what will be covered.
When you are ready, read the chapter and the Essential Questions for each section. Then use the Chapter Review to check what you know.
1775–1783
1775 Second Continental Congress convenes.
Battle of Bunker Hill. Olive Branch Petition. Battle of Quebec.
1776 Common Sense published. British evacuate Boston. Declaration of Independence. British take Manhattan.
1777 British Parliament suspends habeas corpus.
Ambush at Oriskany; Americans hold Fort Stanwix.
British occupy Philadelphia. British surrender at Saratoga.
1777– Continental army winters at 1778 Valley Forge.
1778 France signs treaty with America.
British take Savannah, Georgia.
1779 Militias attack Cherokee in North Carolina.
Americans destroy Iroquois villages in New York.
Americans take Forts Kaskaskia and Vincennes.
1780 Philadelphia Ladies Association raises money for soldiers.
The siege of Charleston, South Carolina.
French army arrives in Newport, Rhode Island.
British win battle of Camden. Benedict Arnold exposed as
traitor. Americans win battle of
King’s Mountain.
1781 British forces invade Virginia. French blockade Chesapeake
Bay. Cornwallis surrenders at
Yorktown.
1783 Treaty of Paris ends war.
That is, 10,000 men and 1 woman. “Robert Shurtliff” was actually Deborah Sampson, age twenty-three, from Middleborough, Massachusetts. For seventeen months, Sampson masqueraded as a man, marching through woods, skirmishing with the enemy, and enduring the boredom of camp. Understating her age enabled her to blend in with the beardless boys, as did her competence as a soldier. With privacy at a minimum, she faced constant risk of discovery. Why did she run this risk?
A hard-luck childhood had left Sampson both impoverished and unusually plucky. Placed in foster care at age five, Deborah became a servant in a succession of families. Along the way, she learned to plow a field and to read and write, uncommon skills for a female servant. Next she worked as a weaver and then a teacher, low-wage jobs but also ones without supervising bosses. Marriage was the usual next step, but probably the wartime shortage of men kept Deborah “masterless,” rare for an eighteenth-century woman. Masterless, but also poor; the cash bounty enticed her to enlist.
When Sampson’s true sex was finally discovered, she was discharged immediately. What eventually made Sampson famous was not her war service alone but her success in selling her story to the public. In 1797, she told her life story (a blend of fact and fiction) in a short book and then went on tour reenacting her wartime masquerade. Once again, she was crossing gender boundaries, since women normally did not speak from public stages.
Except for her disguised sex, Sampson’s Revolutionary War experience was similar to that of most Americans. Disruptions affected everyone’s life, whether in military service or on the home front. Wartime shortages caused women to take up traditionally male labor. Soldiers fought for ideas, but they also fought to earn money. Hardship was widely endured. And Sampson’s quest for personal independence — a freedom from the constraints of being female — was echoed in the general quest for political independence that many Americans identified as a major goal of the war.
Political independence was not everyone’s primary goal at first. For more than a year after fighting began, the Continental Congress resisted declaring America’s independence. Some delegates cau- tiously hoped for reconciliation with Britain. The congress raised an army, financed it, and sought alliances with foreign countries — all the while exploring diplomatic channels for peace.
CHRONOLOGY
160 CHAPTER 7 The War for America 1775–1783
Once King George III rejected all peace overtures, Americans loudly declared their independence, and the war moved into high gear. In part a classic war with professional armies, the Revolutionary War was also a civil war between committed rebels and loyalists. It also had complex ethnic dimensions, pitting Indian tribes allied with the British against others allied with the Americans, and international involvement as well from France and Spain. It also provided an unprecedented opportunity for some enslaved African Americans to win freedom, by joining either the British or the Continental army and state militias, fighting alongside white Americans.
The Second Continental Congress On May 10, 1775, nearly one month after the fighting at Lex- ington and Concord, the Second Continental Congress assembled in Philadelphia. The congress immediately set to work on two crucial but contradictory tasks: to raise and
supply an army and to explore reconciliation with Britain. To do the former, they needed soldiers and a commander, they needed money, and they needed to work out a declaration of war. To do the latter, they needed diplomacy to approach the king. But the king was not receptive, and by 1776, as the war progressed and hopes of reconcili- ation faded, delegates at the congress began to ponder the treasonous act of declaring independence.
Assuming Political and Military Authority. The delegates to the Second Continental Congress were prominent figures at home, but they now had to learn to know and trust one another. Moreover, they did not always agree. The Adams cousins John and Samuel defined the radical end of the spectrum, favoring inde- pendence. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, who in 1767 critiqued British tax pol- icy in Letters from a Farmer, was now a moderate, seeking reconciliation with Brit- ain. Benjamin Franklin, fresh off a ship from an eleven-year residence in London, was feared by some to be a British spy. Mutual suspicions flourished easily when the undertaking was so dangerous, opinions were so varied, and a misstep could spell disaster.
Most of the delegates were not yet prepared to break with Britain. Some felt that government without a king was unworkable, while others feared it might be suicidal to lose Britain’s protection against its traditional enemies, France and Spain. Colo- nies that traded actively with Britain feared undermining their economies. Probably the vast majority of ordinary Americans were unable to envision complete inde- pendence from the monarchy.
Why were many Americans initially reluctant to pursue independence from Britain?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Second Continental Congress Legislative body that governed the United States from May 1775 through the war’s duration. It established an army, created its own money, and declared independence once all hope for a peaceful reconciliation with Britain was gone.
The Second Continental Congress 1611775–1783
The few men at the Continental Congress who did think that independence was desirable were, not surprisingly, from Massachusetts, the target of the Coercive Acts. Even so, those men knew that it was premature to push for a break with Britain. John Adams wrote his wife, Abigail, in June 1775: “America is a great, unwieldy body. Its progress must be slow. It is like a large fleet sailing under convoy. The fleetest sailors must wait for the dullest and slowest.”
Yet swift action was needed, for the Massachusetts countryside was under threat of further attack. Even the hesitant moderates in the congress agreed that a military buildup was necessary. Around the country, militia units from New York to Georgia collected arms and trained on village greens in anticipation. On June 14, the congress voted to create the Continental army, choosing a Virginian, George Washington, as commander in chief. This sent the clear message that there was widespread com- mitment to war beyond New England.
Next the congress drew up a document titled “A Declaration on the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms,” which rehearsed familiar arguments about the tyr- anny of Parliament and the need to defend English liberties. This declaration was first drafted by a young Virginia planter, Thomas Jefferson, a radical on the ques- tion of independence. The moderate John Dickinson, fearing that the declaration would offend Britain, was allowed to rewrite it. However, he left intact much of Jefferson’s highly charged language about choosing “to die freemen rather than to live slaves.”
To pay for the military buildup, the congress authorized a currency issue of $2 million. The Continental dollars were merely paper; they were not backed by gold or silver. The delegates somewhat naively expected that the currency would be accepted as valuable on trust as it spread in the population through the hands of soldiers, farmers, munitions suppliers, and beyond.
In just two months, the Second Continental Congress had created an army, declared war, and issued its own currency. It had taken on the major functions of a legitimate government, both military and financial, without any legal basis for its authority, for it had not yet declared independence from the king.
Pursuing Both War and Peace. The second battle of the Revolution occurred on June 16 in Boston. New England militia units had fortified the hilly terrain of the peninsula of Charlestown, which faced the city, and Thomas Gage, still commander in Boston, prepared to attack, aided by the arrival of new troops and three talented generals, William Howe, John Burgoyne, and Henry Clinton.
General William Howe insisted on a bold frontal assault, sending 2,500 soldiers across the water and up Bunker Hill in an intimidating but potentially costly attack. Three bloody assaults were needed before the British took the hill, the third succeeding mainly because the American ammunition supply gave out, and the defenders quickly retreated. The battle of Bunker Hill was thus a British victory, but an expensive one. The dead numbered 226 on the British side, with more than 800 wounded; the Americans suffered 140 dead, 271 wounded, and 30 captured. BATTLE OF BUNKER HILL, 1775
Continental army The army created in June 1775 by the Second Continental Congress to oppose the British. Virginian George Washington, commander in chief, had the task of turning local militias and untrained volunteers into a disciplined army.
battle of Bunker Hill Second battle of the war, on June 16, 1775, involving a massive British attack on New England militia units on a hill facing Boston. The militiamen finally yielded the hill, but not before inflicting heavy casualties on the British.
Charlestown Neck
M ystic River
Charles Ri ver
Charles River Basin
Boston Harbor
American forces
British forces
American defenses
Boston
Charlestown
Breed’s Hill
Bunker Hill
rlestown Neck
M y
MM sy titt c RRiivveer
d’s Hill
162 CHAPTER 7 The War for America 1775–1783
Instead of pursuing the fleeing Americans, Howe retreated to Boston, unwilling to risk more raids into the countryside. If the British had had any grasp of the basic instability of the American units around Boston, they might have decisively defeated the Continental army in its infancy. Instead, they lingered in Boston, abandoning it without a fight nine months later.
Howe used the time in Boston to inoculate his army against smallpox because a new epidemic of the deadly disease was spreading in port cities along the Atlantic. Inoculation worked by producing a mild but real (and therefore risky) case of small- pox, followed by lifelong immunity. Howe’s instinct was right: During the American Revolution, some 130,000 people on the American continent, most of them Indians, died of smallpox.
A week after Bunker Hill, when General Washington arrived to take charge of the new Continental army, he found enthusiastic but undisciplined troops. Sanita- tion was an unknown concept, with inadequate latrines fouling the campground. Washington attributed the disarray to the New England custom of letting militia units elect their own officers, which he felt undermined deference. Washington spotted a militia captain, a barber in civilian life, shaving an ordinary soldier, and he moved quickly to impose more hierarchy and authority. “Be easy,” he advised his newly appointed officers, “but not too familiar, lest you subject yourself to a want of that respect, which is necessary to support a proper command.”
While military plans moved forward, the Second Continental Congress pur- sued its contradictory objective: reconciliation with Britain. Delegates from the mid- dle colonies (Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New York), whose merchants depended on trade with Britain, urged that channels for negotiation remain open. In July 1775,
AN EXACT VIEW OF THE LATE BATTLE AT CHARLESTOWN, JUNE 17TH 1775 This engraving was for sale within weeks of the battle of Bunker Hill. British and American soldiers in fixed formation fire muskets at each other, while Charlestown is in flames in the background. Who would buy this picture? Technically, the British won the battle by taking the hill. Is that the story told here? Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
The Second Continental Congress 1631775–1783
Common Sense Pamphlet written by Thomas Paine in 1776 that laid out the case for independence. In it, Paine rejected monarchy, advocating its replacement with republican government based on the consent of the people. The pamphlet influenced public opinion throughout the colonies.
congressional moderates led by John Dickinson engineered an appeal to the king called the Olive Branch Petition, affirming loyalty to the mon- archy and blaming all the troubles on the king’s ministers and on Parlia- ment. It proposed that the American colonial assemblies be recognized as individual parliaments under the umbrella of the monarchy. King George III rejected the Olive Branch Petition and heatedly condemned the Americans as traitors.
Thomas Paine, Abigail Adams, and the Case for Independence. Pressure for independence started to mount in January 1776, when a pamphlet titled Common Sense appeared in Philadelphia. Thomas Paine, its author, was an English artisan and coffeehouse intellectual who had come to America in the fall of 1774. With the encouragement of members of the Second Continental Congress, he wrote Common Sense to justify independence.
In simple yet forceful language, Paine elaborated on the absurdities of the B ritish monarchy. Why should one man, by accident of birth, claim extensive power over others? he asked. A king might be foolish or wicked. “One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings,” Paine wrote, “is that nature disap- proves it; otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving man- kind an ass for a lion.” To replace monarchy, Paine advocated republican government based on the consent of the people. Rulers, according to Paine, were only representa- tives of the people, and the best form of government relied on frequent elections to achieve the most direct democracy possible.
Paine’s pamphlet sold more than 150,000 copies in a matter of weeks. Newspa- pers reprinted it; men read it aloud in taverns and coffeehouses; John Adams sent a copy to his wife, Abigail, who passed it around to neighbors in Braintree, Massachusetts. New Englanders desired independence, but other colonies, under no immediate threat of violence, remained cautious.
Abigail Adams was impatient not only for independence but also for other legal changes that would revolutionize the new country. In a series of astute letters to her husband, she outlined obstacles and gave advice. She worried that southern slave owners might shrink from a war in the name of liberty: “I have sometimes been ready to think that the passion for Liberty cannot be Equally strong in the Breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow Creatures of theirs.” And in March 1776, she expressed her hope that women’s legal status would improve under the new government: “In the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and
COMMON SENSE Thomas Paine’s pamphlet titled Common Sense caused a sensation throughout the colonies and advanced the popular debate on independence. Shown here is George Washington’s own personally inscribed copy. Boston Athenaeum.
164 CHAPTER 7 The War for America 1775–1783
favourable to them than your ancestors.” John Adams dismissed his wife’s concerns. But to a male politician, Adams privately rehearsed the reasons why women (and men who were free blacks, or young, or propertyless) should remain excluded from political participation. Even though he concluded that nothing should change, at least Abigail’s letter had forced him to ponder the exclusion, something few men — or women — did in 1776. Urgent talk of political independence was as radical as most could imagine.
The Declaration of Independence. In addition to Paine’s Common Sense, another factor hastening independence was the prospect of an alliance with France, Britain’s archrival. France was willing to provide military supplies and naval power only if assured that the Americans would separate from Britain. News that the British were negotiating to hire German mercenary soldiers further solidified support for independence. By May 1776, all but four colonies were agitating for a declaration. The holdouts were Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, and South Carolina, the latter two containing large loyalist populations. An exasperated Virginian wrote to his friend in the congress, “For God’s sake, why do you dawdle in the Congress so strangely? Why do you not at once declare yourself a separate independent state?”
In early June, the Virginia delegation introduced a resolution calling for inde- pendence. The moderates still commanded enough support to postpone a vote on the measure until July. In the meantime, the congress appointed a committee, with Thomas Jefferson and others, to draft a longer document setting out the case for independence.
On July 2, after intense politicking, all but one state voted for independence; New York abstained. The congress then turned to the document drafted by Jefferson and his committee. Jefferson began with a preamble that articulated phil- osophical principles about natural rights, equality, the right of revolution, and the consent of the governed as the only true basis for government. He then listed more than two dozen specific grievances against King George. The congress passed over the preamble with little comment, and instead wrangled over the list of grievances, especially the issue of slavery. Jefferson had included an impassioned statement blaming the king for slavery, which delegates from Georgia and South Carolina struck out, not wishing to denounce their labor system. But the congress let stand another of Jefferson’s grievances, blaming the king for mobilizing “the merciless Indian Savages” into bloody frontier warfare, a reference to Pontiac’s Rebellion (see chapter 6).
On July 4, the amendments to Jefferson’s text were complete, and the congress formally adopted the Declaration of Independence. A month later, the delegates gathered to sign the official parchment copy. Four men, including John Dickinson, declined to sign; several others “signed with regret . . . and with many doubts,” according to John Adams. The document was then printed, widely distributed, and read aloud in celebrations everywhere. (Printed copies did not include the signers’ names, for they had committed treason, a crime punishable by death.) On July 15, the New York delegation came on board, making the vote on independ- ence unanimous.
Declaration of Independence A document containing philosophical principles and a list of grievances that declared separation from Britain. Adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, it ended a period of intense debate with moderates still hoping to reconcile with Britain.
The First Year of War, 1775–1776 1651775–1783
The First Year of War, 1775–1776 Both sides approached the war for America with uneasi- ness. The Americans, with inexperienced militias, were opposing the mightiest military power in the world. Also, their country was not unified; many people remained loyal to Britain. The British faced serious obstacles as well. Their disdain for the fighting abilities of the Americans required reassessment in light of the Bunker Hill battle. The logistics of supplying an army with food across three thousand miles of water were daunting. And since the British goal was to regain allegiance, not to destroy and conquer, the army was often constrained in its actions.
The American Military Forces. Americans claimed that the initial months of war were purely defensive, triggered by the British invasion. But the war also quickly became a rebellion, an overthrowing of long- established authority. As both defenders and rebels, many Americans were highly motivated to fight, and the potential manpower that could be mobilized was, in theory, very great.
Local defense in the colonies had long rested with a militia composed of all able-bodied men over age sixteen. Militias, however, were best suited for local and limited engagements, responding to conflict with Indians or slave rebellions. In form- ing the Continental army, the congress set enlistment at one year, which proved inadequate as the war progressed. Incentives produced longer commitments: a $20 bonus for three years of service, a hundred acres of land for enlistment for the duration of the war. Over the course of the war, some 230,000 men enlisted, about one-quarter of the white male adult population.
Women also served in the Continental army, cooking, washing, and nursing the wounded. Close to 20,000 “camp fol- lowers,” as they were called, served during the war, many of them wives of men in service. Some 12,000 children also tagged along, and babies were born in the camps. Some women helped during battles, supplying drinking water or ammunition to soldiers.
Black Americans at first were excluded from the Conti- nental army. But as manpower needs increased, northern states welcomed free blacks into service; slaves in some states could serve with their masters’ permission. About 5,000 black men served in the Revolutionary War on the rebel side, nearly all from the northern states. Black soldiers sometimes were segregated into separate units, and while some of these men were draftees, others were clearly inspired by ideals of freedom in a war against tyranny. For example, twenty-three blacks gave “Liberty,” “Freedom,” and “Freeman” as their sur- names at the time of enlistment.
Why did the British initially exercise restraint in their efforts to defeat the rebellious colonies?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
FLUTE-PLAYING AFRICAN AMERICAN This musician is thought to be Barzillai Lew of Groton, Massachusetts. As a boy, Lew served as a fifer in the Seven Years’ War, and in 1775 he again was a fifer in the Revolution through three enlistments, seeing action at Bunker Hill and Fort Ticonderoga. Fife and drum music supplied rhythm and mood for military marches, so fifing was an essential job. Courtesy Eric Matthew Brooks.
166 CHAPTER 7 The War for America 1775–1783
The American army was at times raw and inexperienced, and often woefully undermanned. It never had the precision and discipline of European professional armies. But it was never as bad as the British continually assumed. The British would learn that it was a serious mistake to underrate the enemy.
The British Strategy. The American strategy was straightforward — to repulse and defeat an invading army. The British strategy was not as clear. Britain wanted to put down a rebellion and restore monarchical power in the colonies, but the question was how to accomplish this. A decisive defeat of the Continental army was essential but not sufficient to end the rebellion, for the British would still have to contend with an armed and motivated insurgent population. Furthermore, there was no single political nerve center whose capture would spell certain victory. The Continental Congress moved from place to place, staying just out of reach of the British. During the course of the war, the British captured and occupied every major port city, but that brought no serious loss to the Americans, 95 percent of whom lived in the countryside.
Britain’s delicate task was to restore the old governments, not to destroy an enemy country. British generals were at first reluctant to ravage the countryside, con- fiscate food, or burn villages. There were thirteen distinct political entities to capture, pacify, and then restore to the crown, and they stretched in a long line from New Hampshire to Georgia. Clearly, a large land army was required for the job. Without the willingness to seize food from the locals, the British needed hundreds of supply ships — hence their desire to capture the ports. The British strategy also assumed that many Americans remained loyal to the king and would come to their aid.
The overall British plan was a divide-and-conquer approach, focusing first on New York, the state judged to have the greatest number of loyal subjects. New York offered a geographic advantage as well: Control of the Hudson River would allow the British to isolate New England. British armies could descend from Canada and move north from New York City along the Hudson River. Squeezed between a naval blockade on the eastern coast and army raids in the west, Massachusetts could be driven to sur- render. New Jersey and Pennsylvania would fall in line, the British thought, because of loyalist strength. Virginia was a problem, like Massachusetts, but the British were con- fident that the Carolinas would help them isolate and subdue Virginia.
Quebec, New York, and New Jersey. In late 1775, an American expedi- tion was launched to capture the cities of Montreal and Quebec before British rein- forcements could arrive (Map 7.1). This offensive was a clear sign that the war was not purely a reaction to the invasion of Massachusetts. A force of New York Conti- nentals commanded by General Richard Montgomery took Montreal easily in September 1775 and then advanced on Quebec. Meanwhile, a second contingent of Continentals led by Colonel Benedict Arnold moved north through Maine to Quebec, a punishing trek through freezing rain with woefully inadequate supplies. Arnold and Montgomery jointly attacked Quebec in December but failed to take the city. Worse yet, they encountered smallpox, which killed more men than had the battle for Quebec.
The First Year of War, 1775–1776 1671775–1783
The main action of the first year of the war came not in Canada, however, but in New York. In August 1776, some 45,000 British troops (including 8,000 German mercenaries, called Hessians) under the command of General Howe landed south of New York City. General Washington had anticipated this move and had relocated his
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Fort Oswego
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Brooklyn Aug. 27, 1776
Siege of Quebec Nov. 1775–Mar. 1776
Battle of Quebec Dec. 31, 1775
Princeton Jan. 3, 1777
Brandywine Creek Sept. 11, 1777 Trenton
Dec. 26, 1776
Monmouth Court House June 28, 1778
Siege of Boston July 1775 –March 1776
Oriskany Aug. 6, 1777
Trois Rivières June 7, 1776
Bennington Aug. 16, 1777
Germantown Oct. 4, 1777
Concord April 19, 1775 Lexington
April 19, 1775
Newburyport Bunker Hill June 17, 1775
Bemis Heights Oct. 7, 1777
Fort Stanwix Held by Americans under Benedict Arnold Aug. 1777
Fort Ticonderoga Captured by British July 1777
Morristown American winter quarters
1776–1777
Valley Forge American winter quarters
1777–1778
British leave Boston March 17, 1776
Saratoga Burgoyne surrenders
Oct. 17, 1777
Philadelphia Captured by British under Howe Sept. 26, 1777
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TrTrTrTrTrTr MAP 7.1 THE WAR IN THE NORTH, 1775–1778 After battles in Massachusetts in 1775, rebel forces invaded Canada but failed to capture Quebec. The British army landed in New York in 1776, causing turmoil in New Jersey in 1777 and 1778. Burgoyne attempted to isolate New England, but he was stopped at Saratoga in 1777 in the decisive battle of the early war.
READING THE MAP: Which general’s troops traveled the farthest in each of these years: 1775, 1776, and 1777? How did the availability of water routes affect British and American strategy?
CONNECTIONS: Why did the French wait until early 1778 to join American forces against the British? What did France hope to gain from participating in the war?
Map Activity
168 CHAPTER 7 The War for America 1775–1783
army of 20,000 south from Massachusetts. The battle of Long Island in late August pitted the well-trained British “redcoats” (slang referring to their red uniforms) against a very green Continental army. Howe attacked, inflicting many casualties and taking a thousand prisoners. A British general crowed, “If a good bleeding can bring those Bible-faced Yankees to their senses, the fever of independency should soon abate.” Howe failed to press forward, however, perhaps remembering the costly
victory of Bunker Hill, and Washington evacuated his troops to Manhattan Island. Washington knew it would be hard to hold Manhattan, so he withdrew
farther north to two forts on either side of the Hudson River. For two months, the armies engaged in limited skirmishing, but in November Howe finally captured Fort Washington and Fort Lee, taking another 3,000 prisoners. Washington retreated quickly across New Jersey into
Pennsylvania. Again Howe unaccountably failed to press his advantage. Instead, he parked his German troops in winter quarters along the Delaware River. Perhaps he knew that many of the Continental soldiers’ enlistment periods ended on December 31, making him confident that
the Americans would not attack him. He was wrong. On December 25, in an icy rain, Washington stealthily moved his army across
the Delaware River and at dawn made a quick capture of the unsuspecting German soldiers. This impressive victory lifted the sagging morale of the patriot side. For the next two weeks, Washington remained on the offensive, capturing supplies in a clever attack on British units at Princeton. Soon he was safe in Morristown, in northern New Jersey, where he settled his army for the winter. Washington finally had time to administer mass smallpox inoculations and see his men through the abbreviated course of the disease.
All in all, in the first year of declared war, the rebellious Americans had a few proud moments but also many worries. The inexperienced Continental army had barely hung on in the New York campaign. Washington had shown exceptional dar- ing and admirable restraint, but what really saved the Americans was the repeated reluctance of the British to follow through militarily when they had the advantage.
The Home Front Battlefields alone did not determine the outcome of the war. Struggles on the home front were equally important. Men who joined the army often left wives to manage on their own. Some men did not join because they were loyal
to Britain and did not welcome war, and many others were undecided about inde- pendence. In many communities, both persuasion and force were used to gain the allegiance of the many neutrals. A major factor pushing neutrals to side with the revolution was the harsh British treatment of prisoners of war. Adding to the turbu- lence of the times was a very shaky wartime economy. The creative financing of the fledgling government brought hardships as well as opportunities, forcing Americans to confront new manifestations of virtue and corruption.
How did the patriots promote support for their cause in the colonies?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
battle of Long Island First major engagement of the new Continental army, defending against 45,000 British troops newly arrived on western Long Island (today Brooklyn). The Continentals retreated, with high casualties and many taken prisoner.
The Home Front 1691775–1783
Patriotism at the Local Level. Committees of cor- respondence, of public safety, and of inspection domi- nated the political landscape in patriot communities. These committees took on more than customary local governance; they enforced boycotts, picked army draftees, and policed suspected traitors. They sometimes invaded homes to search for contraband goods such as British tea or textiles.
Loyalists were dismayed by the increasing show of power by patriots. A man in Westchester, New York, described his response to intrusions by committees: “Choose your committee or suffer it to be chosen by a half dozen fools in your neighborhood — open your doors to them — let them examine your tea-cannisters and molasses-jugs, and your wives’ and daughters’ petty coats — bow and cringe and tremble and quake — fall down and worship our sovereign lord the mob. . . . Should any pragmatical committee- gentleman come to my house and give himself airs, I shall show him the door.” Oppressive or not, the local committees were rarely challenged. Their persuasive powers convinced many middle-of-the-road citizens that neutrality was not a comfortable option.
Another group new to political life — white women — increasingly demonstrated a capacity for patriotism as war- time hardships dramatically altered their work routines. Many wives whose husbands were away on military or political service took on masculine duties. Their compe- tence to manage farms and make business decisions encour- aged some to assert interest in politics as well, as Abigail Adams did while John Adams served in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Eliza Wilkinson managed a South Carolina plantation and talked revolutionary politics with women friends. “None were greater politicians than the several knots of ladies who met together,” she remarked, alert to the unusual turn female conversa- tions had taken.
Women from prominent Philadelphia families took more direct action, forming the Ladies Association in 1780 to collect money for Continental soldiers. A pub- lished broadside, “The Sentiments of an American Woman,” defended their female patriotism: “The time is arrived to display the same sentiments which animated us at the beginning of the Revolution, when we renounced the use of teas [and] when our republican and laborious hands spun the flax.”
The Loyalists. Around one-fifth of the American population remained loyal to the crown in 1776, and another two-fifths tried to stay neutral, providing a strong base for
Ladies Association A women’s organization in Philadelphia that collected substantial money donations in 1780 to reward Continental soldiers for their service. A woman leader authored a declaration, “The Sentiments of an American Woman,” to justify women’s unexpected entry into political life.
ABIGAIL ADAMS Abigail Smith Adams, twenty-two, wears feminine pearls and a lace collar along with a facial expression projecting confidence and maturity not often credited to young women of the 1760s. A decade later, she was running the family’s Massachusetts farm while her husband, John, attended the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Her frequent letters gave him the benefit of her sage advice on politics and the war. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
170 CHAPTER 7 The War for America 1775–1783
the British. In general, loyalists believed that social stability depended on a govern- ment anchored by monarchy and aristocracy. They feared that democratic tyranny was emergent among the self-styled patriots who appeared to be unscrupulous, violent men grabbing power for themselves. Pockets of loyalism thus existed everywhere (Map 7.2).
The most visible loyalists (called Tories by their enemies) were royal officials, not only governors but also local judges and customs officers. Wealthy merchants gravi- tated toward loyalism to maintain the trade protections of navigation acts and the British navy. Conservative urban lawyers admired the stability of British law and order. Some colonists chose loyalism simply to oppose traditional adversaries, for example many backcountry Carolina farmers who resented the power of the pro-revolution
loyalists Colonists who remained loyal to Britain during the Revolutionary War, probably numbering around one-fifth of the population in 1776. Colonists remained loyal to Britain for many reasons, and loyalists could be found in every region of the country.
Loyalist strongholds
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MAP 7.2 LOYALIST STRENGTH AND REBEL SUPPORT The exact number of loyalists can never be known. No one could have made an accurate count at the time, and political allegiance often shifted with the wind. This map shows the regions of loyalist strength on which the British relied — most significantly, the lower Hudson valley and the Carolina Piedmont.
READING THE MAP: Which forces were stronger, those loyal to Britain or those rebelling? (Consider the size of their respective areas, centers of population, and vital port locations.) What areas were contested? If the contested areas ultimately had sided with the British, how would the balance of power have changed?
CONNECTIONS: Who was more likely to be a loyalist and why? How many loyalists left the United States? Where did they go?
Map Activity
The Home Front 1711775–1783
gentry. Southern slaves had their own resentments against the white slave-owning class and looked to Britain in hope of freedom. Even New England towns at the heart of the turmoil, such as Concord, Massachusetts, had a small and increasingly silenced core of loyalists. On occasion, husbands and wives, fathers and sons disagreed com- pletely on the war. (See “Documenting the American Promise,” page 172.)
Many Indian tribes chose neutrality at the war’s start, seeing the conflict as a civil war between the English and Americans. Eventually, however, they were drawn in, most taking the British side. One young Mohawk leader, Thayendanegea (known also by his English name, Joseph Brant), traveled to England in 1775 to complain to King George about land-hungry New York settlers. “It is very hard when we have let the King’s subjects have so much of our lands for so little value,” he wrote “they should want to cheat us in this manner of the small spots we have left for our women and children to live on.” Brant pledged Indian support for the king in exchange for protection from encroaching settlers. In the Ohio Country, parts of the Shawnee and Delaware tribes started out pro-American but shifted to the British side by 1779 in the face of repeated betrayals by American settlers and soldiers.
Loyalists were most vocal between 1774 and 1776, when the possibility of a full- scale rebellion against Britain was still uncertain. They challenged the emerging patriot side in pamphlets and newspapers. In 1776 in New York City, 547 loyalists signed and circulated a broadside titled “A Declaration of Dependence” in rebuttal to the congress’s July 4 declaration, denouncing the “most unnatural, unprovoked Rebellion that ever disgraced the annals of Time.”
Who Is a Traitor? In June 1775, the Second Continental Congress declared all loyalists to be traitors. Over the next year, state laws defined as treason acts such as provisioning the British army, saying anything that undermined patriot morale, and discouraging men from enlisting in the Continental army. Punishments ranged from house arrest and suspension of voting privileges to confiscation of property and deportation. Sometimes self-appointed committees of Tory-hunters bypassed the judicial niceties and raided houses for boycotted goods, threatening to tar and feather the inhabitants.
Were wives of loyalists also traitors? When loyalist families fled the country, their property was typically confiscated. But if the wife stayed, courts usually allowed her to keep one-third of the property, the amount due her if widowed, and confiscated the rest. Yet a wife who fled with her husband might have little choice in the matter. After the Revolution, descendants of refugee loyalists filed several lawsuits to regain property that had entered the family through the mother’s inheritance. In 1805, the American son of loyalist refugee Anna Martin recovered her dowry property on the grounds that she had no independent will to be a loyalist.
House arrest, property confiscation, deportation, tarring and feathering — to the loyalists, such denials of liberty of conscience and of freedom to own private property proved that democratic tyranny was more to be feared than the monarchical variety. A Boston loyalist named Mather Byles aptly expressed this point: “They call me a
172 CHAPTER 7 The War for America 1775–1783
of such Insinuation in our Case you well know, and I am happy that I can with Confidence appeal not only to you but to my God, that I have uniformly acted from a strong Sense of what I conceived my Duty to my King, and Regard to my Country, required. If I have been mistaken, I cannot help it. It is an Error of Judgment what the matur- est Reflection I am capable of cannot rectify; and I verily believe were the same Circumstances to occur again Tomorrow, my Conduct would be exactly similar to what it was heretofore.
The father replied:
Dear Son,
I . . . am glad to find that you desire to revive the affec- tionate Intercourse, that formerly existed between us. It will be very agreeable to me; indeed nothing has ever hurt me so much and affected me with such keen Sensations, as to find myself deserted in my old age by my only Son; and not only deserted, but to find him taking up Arms against me, in a Cause, wherein my good Fame, Fortune and Life were all at Stake. You con- ceived, you say, that your Duty to your King and regard for your Country requir’d this. I ought not to blame you for differing in Sentiment with me in Public Affairs. We are Men, all subject to errors. Our opinions are not in our own Power; they are form’d and govern’d much by Circumstances, that are often as inexplicable as they are irresistible. Your Situation was such that few would have censured your remaining Neuter, tho’ there are Natural Duties which preceded political ones, and can- not be extinguish’d by them.
Families Divide over the Revolution Generalizing about rebels versus loyalists is a complex historical task. Sometimes categorizing by class, race, and geographic descriptors helps explain the split. But beyond economic interests or cultural politics, sometimes the loyalist-patriot divide cut across families — and cut deeply. These documents reveal people pitted against loved ones over wartime allegiance.
DOCUMENT 1
Patriot Benjamin Franklin and Loyalist Son William Correspond, 1784 Benjamin Franklin, a keen advocate of the Revolution, had a son who stayed loyal to the crown. William was Benjamin’s illegitimate son, resulting from a youthful indiscretion. Benjamin raised him and took him to England in 1757 during his extended service as Pennsylvania’s colonial agent. William thus acquired connections at court, and in 1762 he was appointed royal governor of New Jersey, a post he held until 1776. When the war began, he was placed under house arrest as a traitor to the patriot cause. Father and son did not communicate for the next nine years, even when William was confined in a Connecticut prison for eight months. During this time, Benjamin took charge of William’s oldest son, an illegitimate child born before William’s legal marriage. After the war, William moved to England, and in 1784 he wrote to his father, then in Paris, asking for a meeting of reconciliation. He did not apologize for his loyalism.
Dear and honored Father,
Ever since the termination of the unhappy contest between Great Britain and America, I have been anxious to write to you. . . . There are narrow illiberal Minds in all Parties. In that which I took, and on whose Account I have so much suffered, there have not been wanting some who have insinuated that my Conduct has been founded on Collusion with you, that one of us might succeed whichever Party should prevail. . . . The Falsity
Documenting the American Promise
The Home Front 1731775–1783
DOCUMENT 2
Two Oneida Brothers Confront Their Different Allegiances, 1779 Mary Jemison was captured as a girl during the Seven Years’ War and adopted into the Seneca tribe of western New York, where she remained for life. When she was eighty, her narrative was taken down and published. In this story from her narrative, she relates how some Oneida warriors siding with the British captured two Indians guiding General Sullivan’s 1779 campaign of terror in central New York. One of the captors recognized his own brother.
Envy and revenge glared in the features of the con-quering savage, as he advanced to his brother (the
prisoner) in all the haughtiness of Indian pride, height- ened by a sense of power, and addressed him in the following manner:
“Brother, you have merited death! The hatchet or the war-club shall finish your career! When I begged of you to follow me in the fortunes of war, you was deaf to my cries — you spurned my entreaties!
“Brother! You have merited death and shall have your deserts! When the rebels raised their hatchets to fight their good master, you sharpened your knife, you brightened your rifle and led on our foes to the fields of our fathers! You have merited death and shall die by our hands! When those rebels had drove us from the fields of our fathers to seek out new homes, it was you who could dare to step forth as their pilot, and conduct them even to the doors of our wigwams, to butcher our chil- dren and put us to death! No crime can be greater! But though you have merited death and shall die on this spot, my hands shall not be stained in the blood of a brother! Who will strike?”
Little Beard, who was standing by, as soon as the speech was ended, struck the prisoner on the head with his tomahawk, and dispatched him at once.
SOURCE: James E. Seaver, A narrative of the life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, who was taken by the Indians, in the year 1755, when only about twelve years of age, and has continued to reside amongst them to the present time (1824), chapter VII, Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6960 (accessed June 28, 2011).
Questions for Analysis and Debate 1 What did Benjamin Franklin mean by the emphasized words “Natural Duties”? Do you
think Franklin really believed that his son was entitled to his own political opinions on the Revolutionary War? What factors help explain why William remained loyal to the crown?
2 Why did the Oneida warrior believe that his brother merited death?
CONNECT TO THE BIG IDEA C What arguments led American colonists to support the patriot movement?
This is a disagreeable Subject. I drop it. And we will endeavor, as you propose mutually to forget what has happened relating to it, as well as we can. I send your Son over to pay his Duty to you. . . . He is greatly esteem’d and belov’d in this Country, and will make his Way anywhere. . . . Wishing you Health, and more hap- piness than it seems you have lately experienced, I remain your affectionate father, B. Franklin
SOURCE: Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society, www.amphilsoc.org.
174 CHAPTER 7 The War for America 1775–1783
brainless Tory, but tell me . . . which is better — to be ruled by one tyrant three thou- sand miles away, or by three thousand tyrants not a mile away?” Byles was soon sen- tenced to deportation.
Throughout the war, probably 7,000 to 8,000 loyalists fled to England, and 28,000 found haven in Canada. Many stayed put while the war’s outcome was unknown. In New Jersey, for example, 3,000 Jerseyites felt protected (or scared) enough by the occupying British army in 1776 to swear an oath of allegiance to the king. But then the British drew back to New York City, leaving them at the mercy of local patriot committees. Despite the staunch backing of loyalists in 1776, the British found it dif- ficult to build a winning strategy on their support.
Prisoners of War. The poor handling of loyalists as traitors paled in comparison to the handling of American prisoners of war by the British. Among European mili- tary powers, humane treatment of captured soldiers was the custom, including ade- quate provisions (paid for by the captives’ own government) and the possibility of prisoner exchanges. But British leaders refused to see American captives as foot sol- diers employed by a sovereign nation. Instead, they were traitors, to be treated worse than common criminals.
The 4,000 American prisoners taken in the fall of 1776 were crowded onto two dozen vessels anchored in the river between Manhattan and Brooklyn. The largest ship, the HMS Jersey, was a broken-down hull built to house a crew of 400 but now packed with more than 1,100 prisoners. Survivors described the dark, stinking space belowdecks where more than half a dozen men died daily. A twenty-year-old captive seaman described his first view of the hold: “Here was a motley crew, covered with rags and filth; visages pallid with disease, emaciated with hunger and anxiety, . . . and surrounded with the horrors of sickness and death.” The Continental Congress sent food to the prisoners, but most was diverted to British use, leaving General Washington fuming.
Treating the captives as criminals potentially triggered the Anglo-American right of habeas corpus, a thirteenth-century British liberty that guaranteed every prisoner the right to challenge his detention before a judge and to learn the charges against him. To remove that possibility, Parliament voted in early 1777 to suspend habeas corpus specifically for “persons taken in the act of high treason” in any of the colonies.
Despite the prison-ship horrors, Washington insisted that captured British sol- diers be treated humanely. From the initial group of Hessians taken on Christmas of 1776 to the several thousand more soldiers captured in American victories by 1778, America’s prisoners of war were gathered in rural encampments. Guarded by local townsmen, the captives typically could cultivate small gardens, move about freely during the day, and even hire themselves out to farmers suffering wartime labor shortages. Officers with money could purchase lodging with local families and mix socially with Americans. Many officers were even allowed to keep their guns as they waited for prisoner exchanges to release them.
Such exchanges were negotiated when the British became desperate to regain valued officers and thus freed American officers. Death was the most common fate
The Campaigns of 1777–1779: The North and West 1751775–1783
of ordinary American soldiers and seamen. More than 15,000 men endured captivity in the prison ships, and two-thirds of them died, a larger number than those who died in battle (estimated to be around 5,000). News of the horrors of the British death ships increased the revolutionaries’ resolve and convinced some neutrals of the necessity of the war.
Financial Instability and Corruption. Wars cost money — for arms and ammunition, for food and uniforms, for soldiers’ pay, for provisions for prisoners. The Continental Congress printed money, but its value quickly deteriorated because the congress held no precious metals to back the currency. The dollar even- tually bottomed out at one-fortieth of its face value. States, too, were printing paper money to pay for wartime expenses, further complicating the economy.
As the currency depreciated, the congress turned to other means to procure supplies and labor. One method was to borrow hard money (gold or silver coins) from wealthy men in exchange for cer- tificates of debt (public securities) promising repayment with inter- est. The certificates of debt were similar to present-day government bonds. To pay soldiers, the congress issued land grant certificates, written promises of acreage usually located in frontier areas such as central Maine or eastern Ohio. Both the public securities and the land grant certificates quickly became forms of negotiable currency, and they too soon depreciated.
Depreciating currency inevitably led to rising prices, as sellers compensated for the falling value of the money. The wartime economy of the late 1770s, with its unre- liable currency and price inflation, was extremely demoralizing to Americans every- where. In 1778, in an effort to impose stability, local committees of public safety began to fix prices on essential goods such as flour. Inevitably, some turned this unstable situation to their advantage. Money that fell fast in value needed to be spent quickly; being in debt was suddenly advantageous because the debt could be repaid in devalued currency. A brisk black market sprang up in prohibited luxury imports, such as tea, sugar, textiles, and wines, even though these items came from Britain. A New Hampshire delegate to the Continental Congress denounced the trade: “We are a crooked and perverse generation, longing for the fineries and follies of those Egyptian task masters from whom we have so lately freed ourselves.”
The Campaigns of 1777–1779: The North and West In early 1777, the Continental army faced bleak choices. General Washington had skillfully avoided defeat, but the minor victories in New Jersey lent only faint optimism to the American side. Meanwhile, British troops moved south from Quebec, aiming to isolate New England by taking control of the Hudson River. Their presence drew the Continental army up into central New York, polarizing
Why did the Americans need assistance from the French to ensure victory?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
176 CHAPTER 7 The War for America 1775–1783
tribes of the Iroquois nation and turning the Mohawk Valley into a bloody war zone. By 1779, tribes in western New York and in Indian country in the Ohio Valley were fully involved in the Revolutionary War. Despite an impor- tant victory at Saratoga, the involvement of Indians and the continuing strength of the British forced the American government to look to France for help.
Burgoyne’s Army and the Battle of Saratoga. In 1777, British gen- eral John Burgoyne, commanding a considerable army, began the northern squeeze on the Hudson River valley. Coming from Canada, he marched south hoping to capture Albany, near the intersection of the Hudson and Mohawk rivers (see Map 7.1, page 167). Accompanied by 1,000 “camp followers” (cooks, laundresses, musicians) and some 400 Indian warriors, Burgoyne’s army of 7,800 men did not travel light. Food had to be packed in, not only for people but for 400 horses hauling heavy artillery. Primitive roads through dense forests slowed their progress to a crawl.
The logical second step in isolating New England should have been to advance troops up the Hudson from New York City to meet Burgoyne. Amer- ican surveillance indicated that General Howe in Manhattan was readying his men for a major move in August 1777. But Howe surprised everyone by sail- ing south to attack Philadelphia.
To reinforce Burgoyne, British and Hessian troops from Montreal came from the west along the Mohawk River, aided by Mohawks and Senecas of the Iroquois Confederacy. The British were counting on loyalism among the numerous German colonists living in the Mohawk Valley. A hundred miles west of Albany, they encountered American Continental soldiers at Fort Stanwix and laid siege, caus- ing local German militiamen and a small number of Oneida Indians to rush to the Continentals’ support. Mohawk chief Joseph Brant led the Senecas and Mohawks in an ambush on the Germans and the Oneidas in a narrow ravine called Oriskany, killing nearly 500 out of 840 of them. On Brant’s side, some 90 warriors were killed. The defenders of Fort Stanwix ultimately repelled their attackers. These deadly battles of Oriskany and Fort Stanwix were also complexly multiethnic,
pitting Indians against Indians, German Americans against German mercenar- ies, New York patriots against New York loyalists, and English Americans
against British soldiers.
A SOLDIER’S CANTEEN This wooden canteen belonged to Noah Allen of Massachusetts, whose name and regiment number are carved into the side. Almost no piece of equipment surpassed the soldier’s canteen in importance. The water it carried came from streams, lakes, and, when available, wells. Fort Ticonderoga Museum.
battle of Oriskany A punishing defeat for Americans in a ravine named Oriskany near Fort Stanwix in New York in August 1777. German American militiamen aided by allied Oneida warriors were ambushed by Mohawk and Seneca Indians, and 500 on the revolutionary side were killed.
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The Campaigns of 1777–1779: The North and West 1771775–1783
The British retreat at Fort Stanwix deprived General Burgoyne of the addi- tional troops he expected. Camped at a small village called Saratoga, he was iso- lated, with food supplies dwindling and men deserting. His adversary at Albany, General Horatio Gates, began moving his army toward Saratoga. Burgoyne decided to attack first, and the British prevailed, but at the great cost of 600 dead or wounded. Three weeks later, an American attack on Burgoyne’s forces in the second stage of the battle of Saratoga cost the British another 600 men and most of their cannons. General Burgoyne finally surrendered to the American forces on October 17, 1777.
General Howe, meanwhile, had succeeded in occupying Philadelphia in September 1777. Figuring that the Saratoga loss was balanced by the capture of Philadelphia, the British government proposed a negotiated settlement — not including independence — to end the war. The American side refused.
But supplies of arms and food ran precariously low. Washington moved his troops into winter quarters at Valley Forge, just west of Philadelphia. Quartered in drafty huts, the men lacked blankets, boots, stockings, and food. Some 2,000 men at Valley Forge died of dis- ease; another 2,000 deserted over the bitter six-month encampment.
Washington blamed the citizenry for lack of sup- port; indeed, evidence of corruption and profiteering was abundant. Army suppliers too often provided defective food, clothing, and gunpowder. One ship- ment of bedding arrived with blankets one-quarter their customary size. Food supplies arrived rotten. As one Continental officer said, “The people at home are destroying the Army by their conduct much faster than Howe and all his army can possibly do by fighting us.”
The War in the West: Indian Country. Between the fall of 1777 and the summer of 1778, the fighting on the Atlantic coast slowed. But in the interior western areas — the Mohawk Valley, the Ohio Valley, and Kentucky — the war of Indians against the American rebels heated up.
The ambush and slaughter at Oriskany in August 1777 marked the beginning of three years of terror for the inhabitants of the Mohawk Valley. Loyalists and Indians engaged in many raids throughout 1778, cap- turing or killing inhabitants. In retaliation, American militiamen destroyed Joseph Brant’s village, killing several children. A month later, Brant’s warriors attacked the town of Cherry Valley, killing 16 soldiers and 32 civilians.
battle of Saratoga A multistage battle in New York ending with the decisive defeat and surrender of British general John Burgoyne on October 17, 1777. France was convinced by this victory to throw its official support to the American side in the war.
DEATH OF JANE McCREA Jane McCrea, a patriot’s daughter in love with a loyalist in Burgoyne’s army, gained fame as a martyr in 1777. She met death on her way to join her fiancé— either shot in the crossfire of battle (the British claim) or murdered by Indians (the patriots’ version). American leaders used the story of the vulnerable maiden as propaganda to inspire the American drive for victory at Saratoga. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT/Art Resource, NY.
178 CHAPTER 7 The War for America 1775–1783
The following summer, General Washington authorized a campaign to wreak “total destruction and devastation” on all the Iroquois villages of central New York. Some 4,500 troops commanded by General John Sullivan implemented a campaign of terror in the fall of 1779. Forty Indian towns met with total obliteration; the sol- diers torched dwellings, cornfields, and orchards. In a few towns, women and chil- dren were slaughtered, but in most, the inhabitants managed to escape, fleeing to the British at Fort Niagara. Thousands of Indian refugees, sick and starving, camped around the fort in one of the most miserable winters on record.
Much farther to the west, beyond Fort Pitt, another complex story of alliances and betrayals between American militiamen and Indians unfolded. Some 150,000 native people lived between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. Most sided with the British, but a portion of the Shawnee and Delaware at first sought peace with the Americans. In mid-1778, the Delaware chief White Eyes nego- tiated a treaty at Fort Pitt, pledging Indian support for the Americans in exchange for supplies and trade goods. But escalating violence undermined the agreement. That fall, when American soldiers killed two friendly Shawnee chiefs, Cornstalk and Red Hawk, the Continental Congress hastened to apologize, as did the governors of Pennsylvania and Virginia, but the soldiers who stood trial for the murders were acquitted. Two months later, White Eyes died under mysterious circumstances, almost certainly murdered by militiamen, who repeatedly had trouble honoring dis- tinctions between allied and enemy Indians.
West of North Carolina (today’s Tennessee), militias attacked Cherokee settle- ments in 1779, destroying thirty-six villages, while Indian raiders repeatedly attacked white settlements such as Boonesborough (in present-day Kentucky) (Map 7.3). In retaliation, a young Virginian, George Rogers Clark, led Kentucky militiamen into what is now Illinois, attacking and taking the British fort at Kaskaskia. Clark’s men wore native clothing — hunting shirts and breech- cloths — but their dress was not a sign of solidarity with the Indians. When they attacked British-held Fort Vincennes in 1779, Clark’s troops tomahawked Indian captives and threw their still-live bodies into the river in a gory spectacle wit- nessed by the redcoats. “To excel them in barbarity is the only way to make war upon Indians,” Clark announced.
By 1780, very few Indians remained neutral. Violent raids by Americans drove Indians into the arms of the British at Forts Detroit and Niagara, or into the arms of the Spaniards, west of the Mississippi River. Said one officer on the Sullivan cam- paign, “Their nests are destroyed but the birds are still on the wing.” For those who stayed near their native lands, chaos and confusion prevailed. Rare as it was, Indian support for the American side occasionally emerged out of a strategic sense that the Americans were unstoppable in their westward pressure and that it was better to work out an alliance than to lose in a war. But American treatment of even friendly Indians showed that there was no winning strategy for them.
The French Alliance. On their own, the Americans could not have defeated Britain, especially as pressure from hostile Indians increased. Essential help arrived as a result of the victory at Saratoga, which convinced the French to enter the war; a
The Campaigns of 1777–1779: The North and West 1791775–1783
formal alliance was signed in February 1778. France recognized the United States as an independent nation and promised full military and commercial support. Most crucial was the French navy, which could challenge British supplies and troops at sea and aid the Americans in taking and holding prisoners of war.
Well before 1778, however, the French had been covertly providing cannons, muskets, gunpowder, and highly trained military advisers to the Americans. From the French perspective, the main attraction of an alliance was the opportunity it provided to defeat archrival Britain. A victory would also open pathways to trade
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MAP 7.3 THE INDIAN WAR IN THE WEST, 1777–1782 Most Indian tribes supported the British. Iroquois Indians attacked New York’s Mohawk Valley throughout 1778, causing the Continental army to destroy Iroquois villages throughout central New York. Shawnee and Delaware in western Pennsylvania tangled with American militiamen in 1779, while tribes near Fort Detroit conducted raids on Kentucky settlers. Sporadic frontier fighting continued through 1782.
180 CHAPTER 7 The War for America 1775–1783
and perhaps result in France’s acquiring the coveted British West Indies. Even an American defeat would not be a disaster for France if the war lasted many years and drained Britain of men and money.
French support would prove indispensable to the American cause in 1780 and 1781, but the alliance’s first months brought no dramatic changes, and some Americans grumbled that the partnership would prove worthless.
Visual Activity
“THE BALLANCE OF POWER,” 1780 This English cartoon mocks the alliance of Spain and the Netherlands with France in support of the American war. On the left, the female figure Britannia cannot be moved by all the lightweights on the right. France and Spain embrace while a Dutch boy hops on, saying “I’ll do anything for Money.” The forlorn Indian maiden, representing America, wails, “My Ingratitude is Justly punished.” The New York Public Library. Art Resource, NY.
READING THE IMAGE: What does this cartoon reveal about British perceptions of the American Revolution?
CONNECTIONS: How did British attitudes toward the colonies contribute to the British defeat in the war?
The Southern Strategy and the End of the War 1811775–1783
The Southern Strategy and the End of the War When France joined the war, some British officials favored abandoning the war. As one troop commander shrewdly observed, “We are far from an anticipated peace, because the bitterness of the rebels is too widespread, and in regions where we are masters the rebellious spirit is still in them. The land is too large, and there are too many people. The more land we win, the weaker our army gets in the field.” The commander of the British navy agreed, as did Lord North, the prime minister. But the king was determined to crush the rebellion, and he encouraged a new strategy for victory focusing on the southern colonies, thought to be more per- suadably loyalist. It was a brilliant but desperate plan, and ultimately unsuccessful.
Georgia and South Carolina. The new strategy called for British forces to abandon New England and focus on the South, with its valuable crops and its large slave population, a destabilizing factor that might keep rebellious white southerners in line. Georgia and the Carolinas appeared to hold large numbers of loyalists, pro- viding a base for the British to recapture the southern colonies one by one, before moving north to the more problematic middle colonies and New England.
Georgia, the first target, fell at the end of December 1778 (Map 7.4). A small army of British soldiers occupied Savannah and Augusta, and a new royal governor and loyalist assembly were quickly installed. The British quickly organized twenty loyal militia units, and 1,400 Georgians swore an oath of allegiance to the king. So far, the southern strategy looked as if it might work.
Next came South Carolina. The Continental army put ten regiments into the port city of Charleston to defend it from attack by British troops shipped south from New York under the command of General Clinton, Howe’s replacement as com- mander in chief. For five weeks in early 1780, the British laid siege to the city and took it in May 1780, capturing 3,300 American soldiers.
Clinton next announced that slaves owned by rebel masters were welcome to seek refuge with his army, and several thousand escaped to the coastal city. Untrained in formal warfare, they were of use to the British as knowledgeable guides to the countryside and as laborers building defensive fortifications. Escaped slaves with boat-piloting skills were particularly valuable for crucial aid in navigating the inland rivers of the southern colonies.
Clinton returned to New York, leaving the task of pacifying the rest of South Carolina to General Charles Cornwallis and 4,000 troops. A bold commander, Lord Cornwallis quickly chased out the remaining Continentals and established military rule of South Carolina by midsummer. He purged rebels from government office and disarmed rebel militias. Exports of rice, South Carolina’s main crop, resumed, and pardons were offered to Carolinians willing to prove their loyalty by taking up arms for the British.
By August, American troops arrived from the North to strike back at Cornwallis. General Gates, the hero of Saratoga, led 3,000 troops, many of them newly recruited militiamen, into battle against Cornwallis at Camden, South Carolina, on August 16
Why did the British southern strategy ultimately fail?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
182 CHAPTER 7 The War for America 1775–1783
(see Map 7.4). The militiamen panicked at the sight of the approaching British cav- alry, however, and fled. When regiment leaders tried to regroup the next day, only 700 soldiers showed up. The battle of Camden was a devastating defeat, the worst of the entire war, and prospects seemed very grim for the Americans.
Treason and Guerrilla Warfare. Britain’s southern strategy succeeded in 1780 in part because of information about American troop movements secretly con- veyed by an American officer, Benedict Arnold. The hero of several American bat- tles, Arnold was a deeply insecure man who never felt he got his due. Sometime in 1779, he opened secret negotiations with General Clinton in New York, trading information for money and hinting that he could deliver far more of value. When General Washington made him commander of West Point, a new fort on the Hudson River sixty miles north of New York City, Arnold’s plan crystallized. West Point con- trolled the Hudson; its capture might well have meant victory in the war.
MAP 7.4 THE WAR IN THE SOUTH, 1780–1781 After taking Charleston in May 1780, the British advanced into South and North Carolina, touching off a bloody civil war. An American loss at Camden was followed by victories at King’s Mountain and Cowpens. The British next invaded Virginia but got trapped and overpowered at Yorktown in the fall of 1781.
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The Southern Strategy and the End of the War 1831775–1783
Arnold’s plot to sell a West Point victory to the British was foiled in the fall of 1780 when Americans captured the man carrying plans of the fort’s defense from Arnold to Clinton. News of Arnold’s treason created shock waves. Arnold represented all of the patriots’ worst fears about themselves: greedy self-interest, like that of the war profi- teers; the unprincipled abandonment of war aims, like that of turncoat southern Tories; panic, like that of the terrified soldiers at Camden. But instead of demoralizing the Americans, Arnold’s treachery revived their commitment to the patriot cause. Vili- fying Arnold allowed Americans to stake out a wide distance between themselves and dastardly conduct. It inspired a renewal of patriotism at a particularly low moment.
Shock over Gates’s defeat at Camden and Arnold’s treason revitalized rebel support in western South Carolina, an area that Cornwallis thought was pacified and loyal. The backcountry of the South soon became the site of guerrilla warfare. In hit-and-run attacks, both sides burned and ravaged not only opponents’ property but also the property of anyone claiming to be neutral. Loyalist militia units organized by the British were met by fierce rebel militia units. In South Carolina, some 6,000 rebels met loyalist units in engage- ments. Guerrilla warfare soon spread to Georgia and North Carolina. Both sides commit- ted atrocities and plundered property, clear deviations from standard military practice.
The British southern strategy depended on sufficient loyalist strength to hold reconquered territory as Cornwallis’s army moved north. The backcountry civil war proved this assumption false. The Americans won few major battles in the South, but they ultimately succeeded by harassing the British forces and preventing them from foraging for food. Cornwallis moved the war into North Carolina in the fall of 1780 because the North Carolinians were supplying the South Carolina rebels with arms and men (see Map 7.4). Then news of a massacre of loyalist units by 1,400 frontier riflemen at the battle of King’s Mountain, in western South Carolina, sent him hur- rying back. The British were stretched too thin to hold even two colonies.
A SHAMING RITUAL TARGETING THE GREAT TRAITOR In late 1780, Philadelphians staged a ritual humiliation of Benedict Arnold, represented by a two-faced effigy. Behind him stands the devil, prodding him with a pitchfork and shaking a bag of coins near his ear, reminding all that Arnold sold out for money. Library of Congress.
184 CHAPTER 7 The War for America 1775–1783
Surrender at Yorktown. By early 1781, the war was going very badly for the British. Their defeat at King’s Mountain was quickly followed by a second major defeat at the battle of Cowpens in South Carolina in January 1781. Cornwallis retreated to North Carolina and thence to Virginia, where he captured Williamsburg in June. A raiding party proceeded to Charlottesville, the seat of government, capturing members of the Virginia assembly but not Governor Thomas Jefferson, who escaped the soldiers by a
mere ten minutes. These minor victories allowed Cornwallis to imagine he was succeeding in Virginia. His army, now swelled by some 4,000 escaped slaves, marched to Yorktown, near the Chesapeake Bay area. As the general waited for backup troops by ship from British headquarters in New York City, smallpox and typhus began to set in among the black recruits.
At this juncture, the French-American alliance came into play. French regi- ments commanded by the Comte de Rochambeau had joined General Washing- ton in Newport, Rhode Island, in mid-1780, and in early 1781 warships under the Comte de Grasse had sailed from France to the West Indies. Washington, Rochambeau, and de Grasse now fixed their attention on Chesapeake Bay. The French fleet got there ahead of the British troop ships from New York; a five-day naval battle left the French navy in clear control of the Virginia coast. This proved to be the decisive factor in ending the war, because the French ships prevented any rescue of Cornwallis’s army.
On land, General Cornwallis and his 7,500 troops faced a combined French and American army of 16,000. For twelve days, the Americans and French bom- barded the British fortifications at Yorktown; Cornwallis ran low on food and ammunition. He also began to expel the black recruits, some of them sick and
dying. A Hessian officer serving under Cornwallis later criticized this British action as disgraceful: “We had used them to good advantage, and set them free, and now, with fear and trembling, they had to face the reward of their cruel masters.” The twelve-day siege brought Cornwallis to the realization that neither victory nor escape was possible. He surrendered on October 19, 1781.
What began as a promising southern strategy in 1778 had turned into a discouraging defeat. British attacks in the South had energized American resistance, as did the timely exposure of Benedict Arnold’s treason. The arrival of the French fleet sealed the fate of Cornwallis at the battle of Yorktown, and major military operations came to a halt.
The Losers and the Winners. The surrender at Yorktown spelled the end for the British, but two more years of skirmishes ensued. Frontier areas in Kentucky, Ohio, and Illinois blazed with battles pitting Americans against various Indian tribes. The British army still occupied three coastal cities, including New York, and in response, an augmented Continental army stayed at the ready, north of New York City. Occasional clashes occurred, like the ones in which Deborah Sampson saw action while cross-dressing as a male soldier.
The Treaty of Paris, also called the Peace of Paris, was two years in the making. Commissioners from America and Britain worked out the ten articles of peace, while a side treaty signed by Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands sealed related deals. The first article went to the heart of the matter: “His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States to be free Sovereign and independent States.” Other articles set the western
battle of Yorktown October 1781 battle that sealed American victory in the Revolutionary War. American troops and a French fleet trapped the British army under the command of General Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia.
Treaty (Peace) of Paris, 1783 September 3, 1783, treaty that ended the Revolutionary War. The treaty acknowledged America’s independence, set its boundaries, and promised the quick withdrawal of British troops from American soil. It failed to recognize Indians as players in the conflict.
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The Southern Strategy and the End of the War 1851775–1783
boundary at the Mississippi River and guaranteed that creditors on both sides would be paid in sterling money, a provision important to British merchants. Britain agreed to withdraw its troops quickly, but more than a decade later this promise still had not been fully kept. Another agreement prohibited the British from “carrying away any Negroes or other property of the American inhabitants.” The treaty was signed on September 3, 1783.
News of the treaty signing was cause for celebration among most Americans, but not among the thousands of self-liberated blacks who had joined the British under promise of freedom. South Carolinian Boston King, a refugee in New York City, recalled that the provision prohibiting evacuation of black refugees “filled us with inexpressible anguish and terror.” King and others pressed the British com- mander in New York, Sir Guy Carleton, to honor pre-treaty British promises. Carleton obliged: For all refugees under British protection for more than a year, he issued certificates of freedom — making them no longer “property” to be returned. More than 4,000 blacks sailed out of New York for Nova Scotia, Boston King and his family among them. As Carleton coolly explained to a protesting George Washington, “The Negroes in question . . . I found free when I arrived at New York, I had there- fore no right, as I thought, to prevent their going to any part of the world they thought proper.” British commanders in Savannah and Charleston followed Carleton’s lead and aided the exit of perhaps 10,000 blacks from the United States.
“THE P — S OF PARIS” A British broadside of 1783 satirizes the diplomats who negotiated the Peace of Paris. The Indian declares, “I call this a Free and Independent P — s,” while the Frenchman (far right) gloats that “tho’ we have wrangled you out of America, you freely make P — s with us.” Why do you think the artist included an Indian figure? What is the point of view of this cartoon? Library of Congress.
186 CHAPTER 7 The War for America 1775–1783
The Treaty of Paris had nothing to say about the Indian participants in the Revolu- tionary War. As one American told the Shawnee people, “Your Fathers the English have made Peace with us for themselves, but forgot you their Children, who Fought with them, and neglected you like Bastards.” Indian lands were assigned to the victors as though they were uninhabited. Some Indian refugees fled west into present-day Missouri and Arkansas, and others, such as Joseph Brant’s Mohawks, relocated to Canada. But signifi- cant numbers remained within the new United States, occupying their traditional home- lands in areas west and north of the Ohio River. For them, the Treaty of Paris brought no peace at all; their longer war against the Americans would extend at least until 1795 and for some until 1813. Their ally, Britain, conceded defeat, but the Indians did not.
With the treaty finally signed, the British began their evacuation of New York, Charleston, and Savannah, a process complicated by the sheer numbers involved — soldiers, fearful loyalists, and refugees from slavery by the thousands. In New York City, more than 27,000 soldiers and 30,000 loyalists sailed on hundreds of ships for England in the late fall of 1783. In a final act of mischief, on the November day when the last ships left, the losing side raised the British flag at the southern tip of Manhattan, cut away the ropes used to hoist it, and greased the flagpole.
Conclusion: Why the British Lost The British began the war for America convinced that they could not lose. They had the best-trained army and navy in the world; they were familiar with the landscape from the Seven Years’ War; they had the willing warrior-power of most of the native tribes of the backcountry; and they easily captured every port city of consequence in America. A major- ity of colonists were either neutral or loyal to the crown. Why, then, did the British lose?
One continuing problem the British faced was the uncertainty of supplies. The army depended on a steady stream of supply ships from home, and insecurity about food helps explain their reluctance to pursue the Continental army aggressively. A fur- ther obstacle was their continual misuse of loyalist energies. Any plan to repacify the colonies required the cooperation of the loyalists, but the British repeatedly left them to the mercy of vengeful rebels. French aid also helps explain the British defeat. Even before the formal alliance, French artillery and ammunition proved vital to the Conti- nental army. After 1780, the French army fought alongside the Americans, and the French navy made the Yorktown victory possible. Finally, the British abdicated civil power in the colonies in 1775 and 1776, when royal officials fled to safety, and they never really regained it. The basic British goal — to turn back the clock to imperial rule—receded into impossibility as the war dragged on.
The Revolution profoundly disrupted the lives of Americans everywhere. It was a war for independence from Britain, but it was more. It was a war that required men and women to think about politics and the legitimacy of authority. The rhetoric employed to justify the revolution against Britain put the words liberty, tyranny, slavery, independence, and equal- ity into common usage. These words carried far deeper meanings than a mere complaint over taxation without representation. The Revolution unleashed a dynamic of equality and liberty that was largely unintended and unwanted by many of the political leaders of 1776. But that dynamic emerged as a potent force in American life in the decades to come.
1775–1783
1 How did the colonists mobilize for war? Discuss specific challenges they faced and any unintended consequences of their solutions.
2 Discuss the importance of loyalism for British strategy in the Revolutionary War. In your answer, consider both military and political strategy.
3 How did Native Americans shape the Revolutionary War? What role did African Americans play? What benefits did these two groups hope to gain?
MAKING CONNECTIONS
1 Why were many Americans initially reluctant to pursue independence from Britain? (pp. 160–164)
2 Why did the British initially exercise restraint in their efforts to defeat the rebellious colonies? (pp. 165–168)
3 How did the patriots promote support for their cause in the colonies? (pp. 168–175)
4 Why did the Americans need assistance from the French to ensure victory? (pp. 175–180)
5 Why did the British southern strategy ultimately fail? (pp. 181–186)
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
Second Continental Congress (p. 160)
Continental army (p. 161)
battle of Bunker Hill (p. 161)
Common Sense (p. 163)
Declaration of Independence (p. 164)
battle of Long Island (p. 168)
KEY TERMS
Ladies Association (p. 169)
loyalists (p. 170)
battle of Oriskany (p. 176)
battle of Saratoga (p. 177)
battle of Yorktown (p. 184)
Treaty (Peace) of Paris, 1783 (p. 184)
Chapter Review MAKE IT STICK
Go to LearningCurve: See what you know. Then review the key terms and answer the questions.
LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com /roarkconcise
187
STUDENT SITE @ bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
James Madison graduated from Princeton College in New Jersey in 1771, undecided about his next move. Returning to his wealthy father’s plantation in Virginia held little appeal. He much preferred the pleasures of books to farming. Fluent in Greek, Latin, French, and mathematics, he enjoyed reading and discussing the great thinkers, both ancient and modern. So he stayed in Princeton as long as he could.
In 1772, he returned home, still adrift. He tried studying law, but his unimpressive oratorical talents discouraged him. Instead, he swapped reading lists and ideas about political theory by letter with a Princeton classmate. While Madison struggled for direction, the powerful winds before the storm of the American Revolution swirled through the colonies. A trip north to deliver his brother to boarding school put Madison in Philadelphia just as news broke that
Building a Republic, 1775–1789
8
CHAPTER OUTLINE QUICK START
Quickly learn what is important in this chapter by doing the following:
• READ the Chapter Outline to see how the chapter is organized. • SKIM the Chronology on the next page to see what will be covered.
When you are ready, read the chapter and the Essential Questions for each section. Then use the Chapter Review to check what you know.
A CHAIR FOR THE NEW NATION In the summer of 1787, George Washington sat in this splendid chair as he presided over the constitutional convention in Philadelphia. Its gold-painted half-sun worried Benjamin Franklin. Was it setting, he wondered, and thus symbolizing impending defeat for the young country, or did it signal the start of a new day? By the convention’s end, he pronounced it a rising sun. Courtesy of Independence National Historic Park.
188
The Articles of Confederation (pp. 190–193)
The Sovereign States (pp. 193–199)
The Confederation’s Problems (pp. 199–206)
The United States Constitution (pp. 206–210)
Ratification of the Constitution (pp. 210–213)
Conclusion: The “Republican Remedy” (p. 214)
Britain had shut down the port of Boston. Turbulent protests over the Coercive Acts turned the young man into a committed revolutionary.
Back in Virginia, Madison joined his father on the committee of public safety. Enthused, he took up musket practice, but he proved a poor shot. Realizing that his keen study of history and political theory was useful, he gained election in 1776 to the Virginia Convention, a new Revolutionary assembly. The convention’s main task was to hammer out a state constitution with innovations such as frequent elections and limited executive power. Shy and still learning the ropes, Madison mostly stayed on the sidelines, but Virginia’s elder statesmen noted his thoughtful contributions. When his county failed to reelect him, he was appointed to the governor’s council and spent the next two years rapidly gaining political experience.
In 1780, Madison represented Virginia in the Continental Congress. Twenty-eight, single, and supported by family money, he was free of the burdens that made distant political service difficult for older married men. His three years in Philadelphia acquainted him with a network of leading revolutionaries and a thorny bundle of governance problems arising from the chaotic economy and the precarious war effort. In one crisis, Madison’s negotiating skills proved crucial: He broke the deadlock over the ratification of the Articles of Confederation by arranging for the cession of Virginia’s vast western lands, lands that became the Northwest Territory. But more often, service in the congress frustrated Madison because the central government seemed to lack essential powers, chief among them the power to tax.
Madison resumed a seat in the Virginia assembly in 1784. But he did not retreat to a local point of view as so many other state politicians did. The economic hardships created by heavy state taxation — which in Massachusetts led to a full-fledged rebellion against state government — spurred Madison to pursue means to strengthen the new national government.
Madison took the lead in organizing a convention in May 1787, where delegates completely rewrote the structure of the national government, investing it with considerably greater powers. True to form, Madison spent the months before that Philadelphia meeting in feverish study of the great thinkers he had read in college, seeking the best way to constitute a government on republican principles. His lifelong passion for scholarly study, seasoned by a dozen years
CHRONOLOGY
1775 Second Continental Congress opens.
1776 Declaration of Independence adopted.
Virginia adopts state bill of rights.
1777 Articles of Confederation sent to states.
1778 State constitutions completed.
1780 Pennsylvania institutes gradual emancipation.
1781 Articles of Confederation ratified.
Creation of executive departments.
Massachusetts slaves sue for freedom.
1782 Virginia relaxes state manumission law.
1783 Newburgh Conspiracy exposed.
Treaty of Paris ends the war. Massachusetts enfranchises
taxpaying free blacks.
1784 Gradual emancipation laws passed in Rhode Island and Connecticut.
Treaty of Fort Stanwix.
1785 Treaty of Fort McIntosh. Congress calls for large
requisition.
1786 Shays’s Rebellion begins.
1787 Shays’s Rebellion crushed. Northwest Ordinance. Delaware provides
manumission law. Constitutional convention
meets in Philadelphia. The Federalist Papers begin
to publish.
1788 U.S. Constitution ratified.
1790 Maryland provides manumission law.
1799 Gradual emancipation law passed in New York.
1804 Gradual emancipation law passed in New Jersey.
190 CHAPTER 8 Building a Republic 1775–1789
of energetic political experience, paid off handsomely. The United States Constitution was the result.
By the end of the 1780s, James Madison had had his finger in every kind of political pie on the local, state, confed-
eration, and finally national level. He even managed to observe the first U.S.–Indian treaty negotiations carried out in 1784. He had
transformed himself from a directionless and solitary youth into one of the leading political thinkers of the Revolutionary period. His personal
history over the 1780s was deeply entwined with the path of the emerging United States.
The Articles of Confederation Creating and approving a written plan of government for the new confederation took five years, as delegates and states sought agreement on fundamental principles. With monarchy gone, where would sovereignty lie? What would be the nature
of representation? Who would hold the power of taxation? The resulting plan, called the Articles of Confederation, proved to be surprisingly difficult to implement, mainly because the thirteen states disagreed over boundaries in the land to the west of the states. Once the Articles were ratified and the active phase of the war had drawn to a close, the congress faded in importance compared with politics in the individual states.
Confederation and Taxation. Only after declaring independence did the Continental Congress turns its attention to creating a written document that would specify what powers the congress had and by what authority it existed. There was widespread agreement on key government powers: pursuing war and peace, conducting foreign relations, regulating trade, and running a postal service. By late 1777, congressmen reached agreement on the Articles of Confederation, defining the union as a loose confederation of states existing mainly to foster a common defense.
Why was the confederation government’s authority so limited?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Articles of Confederation The written document defining the structure of the government from 1781 to 1788 under which the union was a confederation of equal states, with no executive and limited powers, existing mainly to foster a common defense.
JAMES MADISON, BY CHARLES WILLSON PEALE Philadelphia artist Charles Willson Peale painted this miniature portrait of Madison in 1783, paired with one of Madison’s fiancée, Kitty Floyd, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a New York congressman. Meant to be worn like jewelry (note the pin on the right), miniatures were tokens of mutual affection. After Floyd broke off the engagement, Madison waited eleven more years
before finding a wife. Library of Congress.
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The Articles of Confederation 1911775–1789
Much like the existing Continental Congress, there was no national executive (that is, no president) and no judiciary.
Anywhere from two to seven delegates could represent each state, with each del- egation casting a single vote. Routine decisions required a simple majority of seven states, whereas momentous decisions, such as declaring war, required nine. To approve or amend the Articles required the unanimous consent both of the thirteen state del- egations and of the thirteen state legislatures — giving any state a crippling veto power. Most crucially, the Articles gave the national government no power of direct taxation.
Yet taxation was a necessity, since all governments require money. To finance the Revolutionary War, the confederation congress issued interest-bearing bonds purchased by French and Dutch bankers as well as middling to wealthy Americans, and revenue was necessary to repay these loans. Other routine government functions required money: Trade regulation required salaried customs officers; a postal system required postmen, horses and wagons, and well-maintained postal roads; the western lands required surveyors; and Indian diplomacy (or war) added further large costs. Article 8 of the confederation document declared that taxes were needed to support “the common defence or general welfare” of the country, yet the congress also had to be sensitive to the rhetoric of the Revolution, which denounced taxation by a nonrepresentative power.
The Articles of Confederation posed a delicate two-step solution. The congress would requisition (that is, request) money to be paid into the common treasury, and each state legislature would then levy taxes within its borders to pay the requisition. The Articles called for state contributions assessed in proportion to the improved property value of the state’s land, so that populous states paid more than did sparsely populated states. Requiring that the actual tax bill be passed by the state legislatures preserved the Revolution’s principle of taxation only by direct representation. How- ever, no mechanism compelled states to pay.
The lack of authority in the confederation government was exactly what many state leaders wanted in the late 1770s. A league of states with rotating personnel, no executive branch, no power of direct taxation, and a requirement of unanimity for any major change seemed to be a good way to keep government in check. The catch was that ratification itself required unanimous agreement, and that proved difficult to secure.
The Problem of Western Lands. The most serious disagreement delaying rati- fication of the Articles concerned the absence of any plan for the lands to the west of the thirteen original states. This absence was deliberate: Virginia and Connecticut had old colonial charters that located their western boundaries at the Mississippi River, and six other states also claimed parts of that land. But five states without extensive land claims insisted on redrawing those colonial boundaries to create a national domain to be sold to settlers (Map 8.1). As one Rhode Island delegate put it, “The western world opens an amazing prospect as a national fund; it is equal to our debt.”
The eight land-claiming states were ready to sign the Articles of Confederation in 1777, since it protected their interests. Three states without claims — Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey — eventually capitulated and signed, “not from a Conviction of the Equality and Justness of it,” said a New Jersey delegate, “but merely from an absolute Necessity there was of complying to save the Continent.” But Delaware and Maryland continued to hold out, insisting on a national domain
192 CHAPTER 8 Building a Republic 1775–1789
MAP 8.1 CESSION OF WESTERN LANDS, 1782–1802 The thirteen new states found it hard to ratify the Articles of Confederation without settling their conflicting land claims in the West, a vast area occupied by Indian tribes. The five states objecting to the Articles’ silence over western land policy were Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania.
READING THE MAP: Which state had the largest claims on western territory?
CONNECTIONS: In what context did the first dispute regarding western lands arise? How was it resolved? Does the map suggest a reason why Pennsylvania, a large state, joined the four much smaller states on this issue?
Map Activity
90˚W 85˚W 80˚W 75˚W
70˚W
30˚N
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A T L A N T I C O C E A N
Arkansas R.
Susquehanna R.
Missouri R.
M iss
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pi R
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L. Superior
L. M
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Cumberland Gap
B R I T I S H N O R T H A M E R I C A
S P A N I S H F L O R I D A
N O R T H W E S T
T E R R I T O R Y
Ceded by Virginia 1789 (KENTUCKY)
Claimed by North Carolina Ceded 1790
(TENNESSEE)
Claimed by Georgia
Ceded 1802
Ceded by Spain 1795
LOUISIANA Ceded by Spain to France 1800
Claimed by N.H. & N.Y. Ceded 1791
(VERMONT)
Claimed by S.C. Ceded 1787
Claimed by CONN. and VA.
Ceded 1784–1786
Claimed by MASS. and VA.
Ceded 1784–1785
Claimed by Virginia Ceded 1784
Claimed by CONN.
Western Reserve Claimed by CONN.
Ceded 1800
Claimed by N.Y. & MASS.
Ceded 1786
Claimed by Virginia Ceded 1784
Claimed by U.S. & Great Britain
NORTH CAROLINA
VIRGINIA
PENNSYLVANIA
NEW YORK
GEORGIA
SOUTH CAROLINA
NEW HAMPSHIRE
MASSACHUSETTS
DELAWARE
NEW JERSEY
CONNECTICUT
RHODE ISLAND
MARYLAND
MAINE (part of MASS.)
0 200 400 kilometers
0 400 miles200
Boundary of territory ceded by New York, 1782
Boundary of territory ceded by Virginia, 1784
Original thirteen states after their cessions
Territory ceded
States without land claims
N
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E W
policy. In 1779, the disputants finally compromised: Any land a state volunteered to relinquish would become the national domain. When James Madison and Thomas Jefferson ceded Virginia’s huge land claim in 1781, the Articles of Confederation were at last unanimously approved.
The western lands issue demonstrated that powerful interests divided the thir- teen new states. The apparent unity of purpose inspired by fighting the war against Britain papered over sizable cracks in the new confederation.
Running the New Government. No fanfare greeted the long-awaited inaugura- tion of the new government in 1781. The congress continued to sputter along, its prob- lems far from solved by the signing of the Articles. Lack of a quorum, defined as two
The Sovereign States 1931775–1789
men from seven states, often hampered day-to-day activities. State legislatures were slow to select delegates, and many politicians preferred to devote their energies to state governments, especially when the congress seemed deadlocked or, worse, irrelevant.
It did not help that the congress had no permanent home. During the war, when the British army threatened Philadelphia, the congress relocated to small Pennsylvania towns such as Lancaster and York and then to Baltimore. After hostilities ceased, the congress moved from Trenton to Princeton to Annapolis to New York City. Many delegates were reluctant to travel far from home, especially if they had wives and children. Consequently, some of the most committed delegates were young bache- lors, such as James Madison, and men in their fifties and sixties whose families were grown, such as Samuel Adams.
To address the difficulties of an inefficient congress, executive departments of war, finance, and foreign affairs were created in 1781 to handle purely administrative functions. When the department heads were ambitious — as was Robert Morris, a wealthy Philadelphia merchant who served as superintendent of finance — they could exercise considerable executive power. The Articles of Confederation had deliberately refrained from setting up an executive branch, but a modest one was being invented by necessity.
The Sovereign States In the first decade of independence, the states were sovereign and all-powerful. Only a few functions, such as declaring war and peace, had been transferred to the confederation government. Familiar and close to home, state governments claimed the allegiance of citizens and became the arena in which the Revolution’s innovations would first be tried. Each state implemented a constitution and deter- mined voter qualifications, and many states grappled with the issue of squaring slavery with Revolutionary ideals, with varying outcomes.
The State Constitutions. In May 1776, the congress recommended that all states draw up constitutions based on “the authority of the people.” By 1778, ten states had done so, and three more (Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island) had adopted and updated their original colonial charters. A shared feature of all the state constitu- tions was the conviction that government ultimately rests on the consent of the gov- erned. Political writers in the late 1770s embraced the concept of republicanism as the underpinning of the new governments. Republicanism meant more than popular elections and representative institutions. For some, republicanism stood for leaders who were autonomous, virtuous citizens putting civic values above private interests. For others, it suggested direct democracy, with nothing standing in the way of the will of the people. For all, it meant government that promoted the people’s welfare.
Widespread agreement about the virtues of republicanism went hand in hand with the idea that republics could succeed only in relatively small units, where
How did states determine who would be allowed to vote?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
republicanism A social philosophy that embraced representative institutions (as opposed to monarchy), a citizenry attuned to civic values above private interests, and a virtuous community in which individuals work to promote the public good.
194 CHAPTER 8 Building a Republic 1775–1789
people could make sure their interests were being served. Eleven states continued the colonial practice of a two-chamber assembly but greatly augmented the powers of the lower house. Pennsylvania and Georgia abolished the more elite upper house altogether, and most states severely limited the powers of the governor. Real power thus resided with the lower houses, responsive to popular majorities because of annual elections and guaranteed rotation in office (term limits).
Six of the state constitutions included bills of rights — lists of individual liberties that government could not abridge. Virginia’s bill was the first. Passed in June 1776, it asserted “That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have cer- tain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot by any compact deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and lib- erty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtain- ing happiness and safety.” Along with these inherent rights went more specific rights to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and trial by jury.
Who Are “the People”? When the Continental Congress called for state con- stitutions based on “the authority of the people,” and when the Virginia bill of rights granted “all men” certain rights, who was meant by “the people”? Who exactly were the citizens of this new country, and how far would the principle of democratic gov- ernment extend? Different people answered these questions differently, but in the 1770s certain limits to political participation were widely agreed upon.
One limit was defined by property. In nearly every state, voters and political candidates had to meet varying property qualifications. Only property owners were
presumed to possess the necessary independence of mind to make wise political choices. Are not propertyless men, asked John Adams, “too little
acquainted with public affairs to form a right judgment, and too dependent upon other men to have a will of their own?” Property
qualifications probably disfranchised from one-quarter to one-half of adult white males in all the states. Not all of them took their nonvoter status quietly. One Maryland man wondered what was so special
about being worth £30, his state’s threshold for voting: “Every poor man has a life, a personal liberty, and a right to his earnings; and is in danger of
being injured by government in a variety of ways.” Others noted that propertyless men were fighting and dying in the Revolutionary War; surely they had legitimate political concerns. A few radical voices challenged the notion that wealth was cor- related with good citizenship; maybe the opposite was true. But ideas like this were outside the mainstream. The writers of the new constitutions, themselves men of property, viewed the right to own and preserve property as a central principle of the Revolution.
Another exclusion from voting — women — was so ingrained that few stopped to question it. Yet the logic of allowing propertied females to vote did occur to a handful of well-placed women. Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John, in 1782, “Even in the freest countrys our property is subject to the con- troul and disposal of our partners, to whom the Laws have given a sovereign
presumed ch
ab h
The Sovereign States 1951775–1789
Authority. Deprived of a voice in Legislation, obliged to submit to those Laws which are imposed upon us, is it not sufficient to make us indifferent to the publick Welfare?”
Only three states specified that voters had to be male, so powerful was the unspoken assumption that only men could vote. Yet in New Jersey, small numbers of women began to go to the polls in the 1780s. The state’s constitution of 1776 enfranchised all free inhabitants worth more than £50, language that in theory opened the door to free blacks and unmarried women who met the property requirement. (Married women owned no property, for by law their husbands held title to everything.)
In 1790, only about 1,000 free black adults of both sexes lived in New Jersey, a state with a population of 184,000. The number of unmarried adult white women was probably also small and comprised mainly widows. In view of the property requirement, the voter blocs enfranchised under this law were minuscule. Still, this highly unusual situation lasted until 1807, when a new state law specifically disfran- chised both blacks and women. Henceforth, independence of mind, held essential for voting, was redefined to be sex- and race-specific.
In the 1780s, voting everywhere was class-specific because of property restric- tions. John Adams urged the framers of the Massachusetts constitution to stick with traditional property qualifications. If suffrage is brought up for debate, he warned, “there will be no end of it. New claims will arise; women will demand a vote; lads from twelve to twenty-one will think their rights not enough attended to; and every man who has not a farthing, will demand an equal voice with any other.”
Equality and Slavery. Restrictions on political participation did not mean that propertyless people enjoyed no civil rights and liberties. The various state bills of rights applied to all individuals who were free; unfree people were another matter.
The author of the Virginia bill of rights was George Mason, a planter who owned 118 slaves. When he wrote that “all men are by nature equally free and inde- pendent,” Mason did not have slaves in mind; he instead was asserting that white Americans were the equals of the British and entitled to equal liberties. Other Virginia legislators, worried about misinterpretations, added a qualifying phrase: that all men “when they enter into a state of society” have inherent rights. As one legislator wrote, with relief, “Slaves, not being constituent members of our society, could never pretend to any benefit from such a maxim.”
One month later, the Declaration of Independence used essentially the same phrase about equality, this time without the modifying clause about entering society. Two state constitutions, those of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, also picked it up. In Massachusetts, one town suggested rewording the draft constitu- tion to read “All men, whites and blacks, are born free and equal.” The suggestion was not implemented.
Nevertheless, after 1776, the ideals of the Revolution about natural equality and liberty began to erode the institution of slavery. Often, enslaved blacks led the chal- lenge. In 1777, several Massachusetts slaves petitioned for their “natural & unalienable
give us that ample relief which, as men, we have a natu- ral right to.
But since the wise and righteous governor of the uni- verse, has permitted our fellow men to make us slaves, we bow in submission to him. . . . We are willing to sub- mit to such regulations and laws, as may be made relative to us, until we leave the province, which we determine to do as soon as we can, from our joynt labours procure money to transport ourselves to some part of the Coast of Africa, where we propose a settlement. We are very desirous that you should have instructions relative to us, from your town, therefore we pray you to communicate this letter to them, and ask this favor for us.
In behalf of our fellow slaves in this province, and by order of their Committee.
Peter Bestes,
Sambo Freeman,
Felix Holbrook,
Chester Joie.
SOURCE: Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States (New York: Citadel Press, 1968), 1:7–8. Copyright © by Citadel Press. Reprinted with permission.
Massachusetts Blacks Petition for Freedom and Rights In the 1780s, a language of rights and liberty was in the air and on many lips, encouraging some African Americans to petition to enlarge their freedom. Notice the kinds of arguments made by these petitioners, the ways they describe themselves, and the statements they make about how they will use their hoped-for freedom.
Documenting the American Promise
DOCUMENT 1
Four Men Petition the Massachusetts Assembly for Their Freedom, 1773 Massachusetts law in the 1770s allowed slaves to petition the government. These four men printed their petition and sent a copy to each representative instead of submitting a single petition to the assembly, perhaps a strategy to maximize its impact.
Boston, April 20th, 1773
Sir, The efforts made by the legislative of this province in their last sessions to free themselves from slavery, gave us, who are in that deplorable state, a high degree of satisfaction. We expect great things from men who have made such a noble stand against the designs of their fellow-men to enslave them. We cannot but wish and hope Sir, that you will have the same grand object, we mean civil and religious liberty, in view in your next session. The divine spirit of freedom, seems to fire every humane breast on this continent, except such as are bribed to assist in executing the execrable plan.
We are very sensible that it would be highly detri- mental to our present masters, if we were allowed to demand all that of right belongs to us for past services; this we disclaim. Even the Spaniards, who have not those sublime ideas of freedom that English men have, are conscious that they have no right to all the services of their fellow-men, we mean the Africans, whom they have purchased with their money; therefore they allow them one day in a week to work for themselves, to enable them to earn money to purchase the residue of their time. . . . We acknowledge our obligations to you for what you have already done, but as the people of this province seem to be actuated by the principles of equity and justice, we cannot but expect your house will again take our deplorable case into serious consideration, and
196
DOCUMENT 2
Paul and John Cuffe Protest Taxation in Massachusetts, 1780 Paul and John Cuffe, together with five other freed men from the town of Dartmouth, sent this petition to the Massachusetts legislature.
T o the Honouerable Councel and House of Representatives in General Court assembled for
Let us aside from Paying tax or taxes or cause us to Be Cleaired for we ever have Been a people that was fair from all these thing ever since the days of our four fathers and therefore we take it as aheard ship that we should be so delt By now in these Difficulty times for there is not to exceed more then five or six that hath a cow in this town and theirfore in our Distress we send unto the peaceableness of thee people and the mercy of God that we may be Releaved for we are not alowed in voating in the town meating in nur to chuse an oficer Neither their was not one ever heard in the active Court of the General Asembly. . . . We think that we may be clear from being called tories tho some few of our Colour hath Rebelled and Done Wickedly however we think that there is more of our Collour gone into the wars accord- ing to the Number of them into the Respepiktive towns then any other nation here. . . . We most humbley Request therefore that you would take our unhappy Case into your serious Consideration and in your wis- dom and Power grant us Relief from Taxation while under our Present depressed Circumstances and your poor Petioners as in duty bound shall ever pray & c.
SOURCE: Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States (New York: Citadel Press, 1968), 1:15–16. Copyright © 1968 by Citadel Press. Reprinted with permission.
Questions for Analysis and Debate 1 What do the four Massachusetts petitioners mean when they congratulate the state legislators
for their recent efforts “to free themselves from slavery”? What is it they “disclaim” out of con- sideration to their present masters? Why do they raise the case of a Spanish version of slavery?
2 Does the Cuffe petition call for “no taxation without representation”? Do the petitioners want representation — or relief from taxation?
3 What can you conclude about the options available to northern blacks to secure freedom or rights under law? How have they shaped their petitions to appeal to an all-white legislature? Do you see instances of subtle irony or sarcasm employed?
CONNECT TO THE BIG IDEA C How did African Americans employ the revolutionary language of freedom and liberty to argue
for their rights?
197
the State of the Massachusetts Bay in New England — March 14th AD 1780 —
The petition of several poor Negroes & molattoes who are Inhabitants of the Town of Dartmouth Humbly Sheweth — That we being Chiefly of the African Extract and by Reason of Long Bondag and hard Slavery we have been deprived of Injoying the Profits of our Labouer or the advantage of Inheriting Estates from our Parents as our Neighbouers the white peopel do have- ing some of us not long Injoyed our own freedom & yet of late, Contrary to the invariable Custom & Practice of the Country we have been & now are Taxed both in our Polls and that small Pittance of Estate which through much hard Labour & Industry we have got together to Sustain our selves & families withal — . . . & yor Petitioners farther sheweth that we apprehand our- selves to be Aggreeved, in that while we are not allowed the Privilage of freemen of the State having no vote or Influence in the Election of those that Tax us yet many of our Colour (as is well known) have cheerfully Entered the field of Battle in the defence of the Common Cause and that (as we conceive) against a similar Exertion of Power (in Regard to taxation) too well Known to need a recital in this place —
That these the Most honouerable Court we Humbley Beseech they would take this into Considerration and
198 CHAPTER 8 Building a Republic 1775–1789
right to that freedom which the great Parent of the Universe hath bestowed equally on all mankind.” They modestly asked for freedom for their children at age twenty- one and were turned down. In 1779, similar petitions in Connecticut and New Hampshire met with no success. Seven Massachusetts free men, including the mari- ner brothers Paul and John Cuffe, refused to pay taxes on the grounds that they could not vote and so were not represented. The Cuffe brothers landed in jail in 1780 for tax evasion, but their petition to the Massachusetts legislature spurred the extension of suffrage to taxpaying free blacks in 1783. (See “Documenting the American Promise,” page 196.)
Another way to bring the issue before lawmakers was to sue in court. In 1781, a woman called Elizabeth Freeman (Mum Bett) was the first to win freedom in a
Massachusetts court, basing her case on the just-passed state constitution that declared “all men are born free and equal.” Another Massachusetts slave, Quok Walker, charged his master with assault and battery, arguing that he was a freeman under that same constitutional phrase. Walker won and was set free, a decision confirmed in an appeal to the state’s superior court in 1783. Several similar cases fol- lowed, and by 1789 slavery had been effectively abolished by a series of judicial decisions in Massachusetts.
State legislatures acted more slowly. Pennsylvania enacted a gradual emancipation law in 1780, providing that infants born to a slave mother on or after March 1, 1780, would be freed at age twenty-eight. Not until 1847 did Penn- sylvania fully abolish slavery, but slaves did not wait for such slow implementation. Untold numbers in Pennsylvania sim- ply ran away and asserted their freedom. One estimate holds that more than half of young slave men in Philadelphia joined the ranks of free blacks, and by 1790, free blacks out- numbered slaves in Pennsylvania two to one.
Rhode Island and Connecticut adopted gradual emanci- pation laws in 1784; New York waited until 1799 and New Jersey until 1804 to enact theirs. These last were the two northern states with the largest number of slaves: New York in 1800 with 20,000, New Jersey with more than 12,000, whereas in Pennsylvania the number was just 1,700. Gradual emancipation illustrates the tension between radical and conservative implications of republican ideology. Republican government protected people’s liberties and property, yet slaves were both people and property. Gradual emancipation balanced the civil rights of blacks and the property rights of their owners by promising delayed freedom.
South of Pennsylvania, in Delaware, Maryland, and Vir- ginia, where slavery was critical to the economy, emancipa- tion bills were rejected. All three states, however, eased legal
ELIZABETH FREEMAN IN 1811 In freedom, “Mum Bett” found secure employment with the family of her lawyer, Theodore Sedgwick. A Sedgwick son later wrote, “If there could be a practical refutation of the imagined superiority of our race to hers, the life and character of this woman would afford that refutation. She had, when occasion required it, an air of command which conferred a degree of dignity.” Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
gradual emancipation A law passed in five northern states that balanced civil rights against property rights by providing a multistage process for freeing slaves, distinguishing persons already alive from those not yet born and providing benchmark dates when freedom would arrive for each group.
The Confederation’s Problems 1991775–1789
restrictions and allowed individual acts of emancipation for adult slaves below the age of forty-five under new manumission laws. By 1790, close to 10,000 newly freed Virginia slaves had formed local free black communities complete with schools and churches.
In the deep South — the Carolinas and Georgia — freedom for slaves was unthinkable among whites. Yet several thousand slaves had defected to the British during the war, and between 3,000 and 4,000 left with the British at the war’s conclusion. Adding northern blacks evacuated from New York City in 1783, the probable total of emancipated blacks who left the United States was between 8,000 and 10,000. Some went to Canada, some to England, and some to Sierra Leone on the west coast of Africa. Many hundreds took refuge with the Seminole and Creek Indians, becoming permanent members of their communities in Spanish Florida and western Georgia.
Although all these instances of emancipation were gradual, small, and certainly incomplete, their symbolic importance was enormous. Every state from Pennsylvania north acknowledged that slavery was fundamentally inconsistent with Revolutionary ideology; “all men are created equal” was beginning to acquire real force as a basic principle.
The Confederation’s Problems In 1783, the confederation government faced three inter- related concerns: paying down the large war debt, making formal peace with the Indians, and dealing with western settlement. Lacking the power to enforce its tax requisi- tions, the congress faced added debt pressures when army officers suddenly demanded secure pensions. Revenue from sales of western lands seemed to be a promising solution, but Indian inhabitants of those lands had different ideas.
From 1784 to 1786, the congress struggled mightily with these three issues. Some leaders were gripped by a sense of crisis, fearing that the Articles of Con- federation were too weak. Others defended the Articles as the best guarantee of liberty because real governance occurred at the state level, closer to the people. A major outbreak of civil disorder in western Massachusetts quickly crystallized the debate and propelled the critics of the Articles into decisive and far-reaching action.
The War Debt and the Newburgh Conspiracy. For nearly two years, the Continental army camped at Newburgh, north of the British-occupied city of New York, awaiting news of a peace treaty. The soldiers were bored, restless, and upset about military payrolls that were far in arrears. An earlier promise to officers of gen- erous pensions (half pay for life), made in 1780 in a desperate effort to retain them, seemed unlikely to be honored. In December 1782, officers petitioned the congress
Abolished slavery
Gradual emancipation
Individual cases of emancipation
ATLANTIC OCEAN
L. Ontario
H ud
so n
R .
N.Y. 1799
VT. 1777 N.H.
1783
MAINE (part of MASS.)
CONN. 1784
MASS. 1783
PA. 1780
N.J. 1804
DEL. 1787
R.I. 1784
MD. 1790
VA. 1782
BRITISH NORTH AMERICA
N.C.
LEGAL CHANGES TO SLAVERY, 1777–1804
Why did farmers in western Massachusetts revolt against the state legislature?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
200 CHAPTER 8 Building a Republic 1775–1789
for immediate back pay for their men so that when peace arrived, no one would go home penniless. The petition darkly hinted that failure to pay the men “may have fatal effects.”
Instead of rejecting the petition outright for lack of money, several members of the congress saw an opportunity to pressure the states to approve taxation powers. One of these was Robert Morris, a Philadelphia merchant with a gift for financial dealings. As the congress’s superintendent of finance, Morris kept the books and wheedled loans from European bankers using his own substantial fortune as collat- eral. To forestall total insolvency, Morris led efforts in 1781 and again in 1786 to amend the Articles to allow collection of a 5 percent impost (an import tax). Each time it failed by one vote, illustrating the difficulties of achieving unanimity. Now the officers’ petition offered new prospects to make the case for taxation.
The result was a plot called the Newburgh Conspiracy. Morris and several other congressmen encouraged the officers to march the army on the congress to demand its pay. No actual coup was envisioned; both sides shared the goal of want- ing to augment the congress’s power of taxation. Yet the risks were great, for not everyone would understand that this was a ruse. What if the soldiers, incited by their grievances, could not be held in check?
General George Washington, sympathetic to the plight of unpaid soldiers and officers, had approved the initial petition. But the plotters, knowing of his reputation for integrity, did not inform him of their collusion with congressional leaders. In March 1783, when the general learned of these developments, he delivered an emo- tional speech to a meeting of five hundred officers, reminding them in stirring language of honor, heroism, and sacrifice. He urged them to put their faith in the congress, and he denounced the plotters as “subversive of all order and discipline.” His audience was left speechless and tearful, and the plot was immediately defused.
Morris continued to work to find money to pay the soldiers. But in the end, a trickle of money from a few states was too little and too late, coming after the army began to disband. For its part, the congress voted to endorse a plan to commute, or transform, the lifetime pension prom- ised the officers into a lump-sum payment of full pay for five years. But no lump sum of money was available. Instead, the officers were issued “commutation certificates,” promising future payment with interest, which quickly depreciated in value.
In 1783, the soldiers’ pay and officers’ pensions added some $5 million to the rising public debt, forcing the congress to press for larger requisitions from the states. The confederation, however, had one new source of enormous untapped wealth: the extensive western territories, attractive to the fast-growing white population but cur- rently inhabited by Indians.
The Treaty of Fort Stanwix. Since the Indians had not participated in the Treaty of Paris of 1783, the confederation government hoped to formalize treaties ending ongoing hostilities between Indians and settlers and securing land cessions. The most pressing problem was the land inhabited by the Iroquois Confederacy, a
Newburgh Conspiracy A bogus threatened coup staged by Continental army officers and leaders in the congress in 1782–1783, who hoped that a forceful demand for military back pay and pensions would create pressure for stronger taxation powers. General Washington defused the threat.
The Confederation’s Problems 2011775–1789
league of six tribes, now claimed by the states of New York and Massachusetts based on their colonial charters (see Map 8.1).
At issue was the revenue stream that land sales would generate: Which government would get it? The congress summoned the Iroquois to a meeting in October 1784 at Fort Stanwix, on the upper Mohawk River. The Articles of Con- federation gave the congress (as opposed to individual states) the right to manage diplomacy, war, and “all affairs with the Indians, not members of any of the States.” But New York’s governor seized on that ambiguous language, claiming that the Iroquois were in fact “members” of his state, and called his own meeting at Fort Stanwix in September. Suspecting that New York might be superseded by the congress, the most important chiefs declined to come and instead sent deputies without authority to negotiate. The Mohawk leader Joseph Brant shrewdly identified the problem of divided authority that afflicted the confederation government: “Here lies some Difficulty in our Minds, that there should be two separate bodies to manage these Affairs.” No deal was struck with New York.
Three weeks later, U.S. commissioners opened proceed- ings at Fort Stanwix with the Seneca chief Cornplanter and Captain Aaron Hill, a Mohawk leader, accompanied by six hundred Iroquois. (James Madison, by chance traveling up the Mohawk River on a trip with a friend, witnessed the open- ing ceremonies.)
The Americans demanded a return of prisoners of war; recognition of the confederation’s (and not states’) author- ity to negotiate; and an all-important cession of a strip of land from Fort Niagara due south, which established U.S.- held territory adjacent to the border with Canada. This cru- cial change enclosed the Iroquois land within the United States and made it impossible for the Indians to claim to be between the United States and Canada. When the tribal leaders balked, one of the commissioners sternly replied, “You are mistaken in supposing that, having been excluded from the treaty between the United States and the King of England, you are become a free and independent nation and may make what terms you please. It is not so. You are a subdued people.”
In the end, the treaty was signed, gifts were given, and six high-level Indian hostages were kept at the fort awaiting the release of the American prisoners taken during the Revolutionary War, mostly women and children. In addition, a signifi- cant side deal sealed the release of much of the Seneca tribe’s claim to the Ohio Val- ley to the United States. This move was a major surprise to the Delaware, Mingo, and Shawnee Indians who lived there. In the months to come, tribes not at the meeting tried to disavow the Treaty of Fort Stanwix as a document signed under coercion
CORNPLANTER Cornplanter headed the Seneca delegation at Fort Stanwix in 1784. Raised fully Indian, he was the son of a highborn Seneca woman of the Wolf Clan and a traveling Dutch fur trader he barely knew. During the Revolution, when his father faced capture by Indians, Cornplanter recognized him by his name and released him. © Collection of the New-York Historical Society.
Treaty of Fort Stanwix 1784 treaty with the Iroquois Confederacy that established the primacy of the American confederation (and not states) to negotiate with Indians and resulted in large land cessions in the Ohio Country (northwestern Pennsylvania). Tribes not present at Fort Stanwix disavowed the treaty.
202 CHAPTER 8 Building a Republic 1775–1789
by virtual hostages. But the confederation government ignored those com- plaints and made plans to survey and develop the Ohio Territory.
New York’s governor astutely figured that the congress’s power to imple- ment the treaty terms was limited. So New York quietly began surveying and then selling the very land it had failed to secure by treaty with the Iroquois. As that fact became generally known, it pointed up the weakness of the confed- eration government. One Connecticut leader wondered, “What is to defend us from the ambition and rapacity of New York, when she has spread over that vast territory, which she claims and holds?”
Land Ordinances and the Northwest Territory. The congress ignored western New York and turned instead to the Ohio Valley to make
good on the promise of western expansion. Congressman Thomas Jefferson, charged with drafting a policy, proposed dividing the territory north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi — the Northwest Territory — into nine new states with evenly spaced east-west boundaries and townships ten miles square. He even advocated giving, not selling, the land to settlers, because future property taxes on the improved land would be payment enough. Jefferson’s aim was to encourage rapid and demo- cratic settlement and to discourage land speculation. Jefferson projected representa- tive governments in the new states; they would not become colonies of the older states. Finally, Jefferson’s draft prohibited slavery in the nine new states.
The congress adopted parts of Jefferson’s plan in the Ordinance of 1784: the rectangu- lar grid, the nine states, and the guarantee of self-government and eventual statehood. What the congress found too radical was the proposal to give away the land; it badly needed immediate revenue. The slavery prohibition also failed, by a vote of seven to six states.
A year later, the congress revised the legislation with procedures for mapping and selling the land. The Ordinance of 1785 called for three to five states, divided into townships six miles square, further divided into thirty-six sections of 640 acres, each section enough for four family farms. Reduced to easily mappable squares, the land would be sold at public auction for a minimum of one dollar an acre, with highly desirable land bid up for more. Two further restrictions applied: The mini- mum purchase was 640 acres, and payment had to be in hard money or in certifi- cates of debt from Revolutionary days. This effectively meant that the land’s first owners would be prosperous speculators, many of whom never set foot on the acreage. The commodification of land had been taken to a new level.
Speculators who held the land for resale avoided direct contact with the most serious obstacle to settlement: the dozens of Indian tribes that claimed the land as their own. The treaty signed at Fort Stanwix in 1784 was followed in 1785 by the Treaty of Fort McIntosh, which similarly coerced partial cessions of land from the Delaware, Wyandot, Chippewa, and Ottawa tribes. Finally, in 1786, a united Indian meeting near Detroit issued an ultimatum: No cession would be valid without the unanimous consent of the tribes. For two more decades, violent Indian wars in Ohio and Indiana would continue to impede white settlement (as discussed in chapter 9).
A third land act, called the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, set forth a three- stage process by which settled territories would advance to statehood. First, the
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Northwest Ordinance Land act of 1787 that established a three-stage process by which settled territories would become states. It also banned slavery in the Northwest Territory. The ordinance guaranteed that western lands with white population would not become colonial dependencies.
The Confederation’s Problems 2031775–1789
JEFFERSON’S MAP OF THE NORTHWEST TERRITORY Thomas Jefferson proposed nine states in his initial plan for the Northwest Territory in 1784. Straight lines and right angles held a strong appeal for him. But such regularity ignored inconvenient geographic features such as rivers and even more inconvenient political facts such as Indian territorial claims. William L. Clements Library.
READING THE IMAGE: What does this map indicate about Jefferson’s vision of the Northwest Territory?
CONNECTIONS: What were the problems with Jefferson’s design for the division of the territory? Why did the congress alter it in the land ordinances of 1784, 1785, and 1787?
Visual Activity
congress would appoint officials for a sparsely populated territory who would adopt a legal code and appoint local magistrates. When the male population of voting age and landowning status (fifty acres) reached 5,000, the territory could elect its own legisla- ture and send a nonvoting delegate to the congress. When the population of voting citizens reached 60,000, the territory could write a state constitution and apply for full admission to the Union. At all three territorial stages, the inhabitants were subject to taxation to support the Union, in the same manner as were the original states.
204 CHAPTER 8 Building a Republic 1775–1789
The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 was perhaps the most important legislation passed by the confederation government. It ensured that the new United States, so recently released from colonial dependency, would not itself become a colonial power — at least not with respect to white citizens. The mechanism it established allowed for the orderly expansion of the United States across the continent in the next century.
Nonwhites were not forgotten or neglected in the 1787 ordinance. The brief document acknowledged the Indian presence and promised that “the utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and, in their property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress.” The 1787 ordinance further pledged that “laws founded in justice and humanity, shall from time to time be made for preventing wrongs being done to them.” Such promises indicated noble intentions, but they were not generally honored in the decades to come.
Jefferson’s original and remarkable suggestion to prohibit slavery in the North- west Territory resurfaced in the 1787 ordinance, passing this time without any debate. Probably the addition of a fugitive slave provision in the act set southern congress- men at ease: Escaped slaves caught north of the Ohio River would be returned south. Also, abundant territory south of the Ohio remained available for the spread of slav- ery. The ordinance thus acknowledged and supported slavery even as it barred it from one region. Still, the prohibition of slavery in the Northwest Territory perpetuated the dynamic of gradual emancipation in the North. North-South sectionalism based on slavery was slowly taking shape.
VIEW OF FORT DETROIT, 1789 Originally a French fur- trading fort, Fort Detroit became British in 1763 and American in name in 1783. Yet the British failed to vacate until the Jay Treaty of 1795 forced them out. This watercolor scene of 1789 was painted by Anne Powell, a loyalist refugee from Boston whose family fled to Canada and then to Detroit. Royal Ontario Museum.
The Confederation’s Problems 2051775–1789
The Requisition of 1785 and Shays’s Rebellion, 1786–1787. Without an impost amendment and with public land sales projected but not yet realized, the confed- eration again requisitioned the states to contribute revenue. In 1785, the amount requested was $3 million, four times larger than the previous year’s levy. Of this sum, 30 percent was needed for the government’s operating costs, and another 30 percent was earmarked to pay debts owed to foreign lenders. The remaining 40 percent was to go to Americans who owned government bonds, the IOUs of the Revolutionary years. A significant slice of that 40 percent represented the interest owed to army officers for their recently issued “commutation certificates.” This was a tax that, if collected, was going to hurt.
At this time, states were struggling under state tax levies. Several states without major ports (and the import duties that ports generated) were already pressing their farmer citizens in order to retire state debts from the Revolution. New Jersey and Connecticut fit this profile, and both state legislatures voted to ignore the confedera- tion’s requisition. In New Hampshire, town meetings voted to refuse to pay, because they could not. In 1786, two hundred armed insurgents surrounded the New Hamp- shire capitol to protest the taxes but were driven off by an armed militia. The shocked assemblymen backed off from an earlier order to haul delinquent taxpayers into courts. Rhode Island, North Carolina, and Georgia responded to their constituents’ protests by issuing abundant amounts of paper money and allowing taxes to be paid in greatly depreciated currency.
Nowhere were the tensions so extreme as in Massachusetts. For four years in a row, a fiscally conservative legislature, dominated by the coastal commercial centers, had passed tough tax laws to pay state creditors who required payment in hard money, not cheap paper. Then in March 1786, the legislature in Boston loaded the federal requisi- tion onto the bill. In June, farmers in southeastern Massachusetts marched on a court- house in an effort to close it down, and petitions of complaint about oppressive taxation poured in from the western two-thirds of the state. In July 1786, when the legislature adjourned, having yet again ignored their complaints, dissidents held a series of con- ventions and called for revisions to the state constitution to promote democracy, elimi- nate the elite upper house, and move the capital farther west in the state.
Still unheard in Boston, the dissidents targeted the county courts, the local sym- bol of state authority. In the fall of 1786, several thousand armed men shut down courthouses in six counties; sympathetic local militias did not intervene. The insur- gents were not predominantly poor or debt-ridden farmers; they included veteran soldiers and officers in the Continental army as well as town leaders. One was a farmer and onetime army captain, Daniel Shays.
A SILVER BOWL FOR AN ANTI-SHAYS GENERAL The militiamen who fought under General William Shepard presented him with this expensive engraved silver bowl as a trophy to commemorate his victory at Springfield over the Shaysite insurgents in 1787. Yale University Art Gallery/Art Resource, NY.
206 CHAPTER 8 Building a Republic 1775–1789
The governor of Massachusetts, James Bowdoin, once a protester against British taxes, now characterized the western dissidents as illegal rebels. He vilified Shays as the chief leader, and a Boston newspaper claimed that Shays planned to burn Boston to the ground and overthrow the government. Another former radical, Samuel Adams, took the extreme position that “the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death.” The dissidents challenged the aging revolutionaries’ assumption that popularly elected governments would always be fair and just.
Members of the Continental Congress had much to worry about. In nearly every state, the requisition of 1785 spawned some combination of crowd pro- tests, demands for inflationary paper money, and anger at state authorities and alleged money speculators. The Massachusetts insurgency was the worst epi- sode, and it seemed to be spinning out of control. In October, the congress attempted to triple the size of the federal army, but fewer than 100 men enlisted. So Governor Bowdoin raised a private army, gaining the services of some 3,000 men with pay provided by wealthy and fearful Boston merchants.
In January 1787, the insurgents learned of the private army marching west from Boston, and 1,500 of them moved swiftly to capture a federal armory in Springfield to obtain weapons. But a militia band loyal to the state government beat them to the weapons facility and met their attack with gun- fire; 4 rebels were killed and another 20 wounded. The final and bloodless encounter came at Petersham, where Bowdoin’s army surprised the rebels and took several hundred of them prisoner. In the end, 2 men were executed for rebellion; 16 more sentenced to hang were reprieved at the last moment
on the gallows. Some 4,000 men gained leniency by confessing their misconduct and swearing an oath of allegiance to the state.
Shays’s Rebellion caused leaders throughout the country to worry about the confederation’s ability to handle civil disorder. Inflammatory Massachusetts news- papers wrote about bloody mob rule spreading to other states. New York lawyer John Jay wrote to George Washington, “Our affairs seem to lead to some crisis, some revolution — something I cannot foresee or conjecture. I am uneasy and apprehensive; more so than during the war.” Benjamin Franklin, in his eighties, shrewdly observed that in 1776 Americans had feared “an excess of power in the rulers” but now the prob- lem was perhaps “a defect of obedience” in the subjects. Among such leaders, the sense of crisis in the confederation had greatly deepened.
The United States Constitution Shays’s Rebellion provoked an odd mixture of fear and hope that the government under the Articles of Confederation was losing its grip on power. A small circle of Virginians decided to try one last time to augment the powers granted to the government by the Articles. Their innocuous call for
a meeting to discuss trade regulation led within a year to a total reworking of the
Why did the Constitution proposed by the Philadelphia convention devise multiple checks on the branches of the government?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
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SHAYS’S REBELLION, 1786–1787
Shays’s Rebellion Uprising (1786–1787) led by farmers centered in western Massachusetts. Dissidents protested taxation policies of the eastern elites who controlled the state’s government. Shays’s Rebellion caused leaders throughout the country to worry about the confederation’s ability to handle civil disorder.
The United States Constitution 2071775–1789
national government, one with extensive powers and multiple branches based on dif- fering constituencies.
From Annapolis to Philadelphia. The Virginians, led by James Madison, convinced the confederation congress to allow a September 1786 meeting of delegates at Annapolis, Maryland, to try again to revise the trade regulation powers of the Arti- cles. Only five states participated, and the delegates planned a second meeting for Philadelphia in May 1787. The congress reluctantly endorsed the Philadelphia meet- ing and limited its scope to “the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation.” But a few leaders, such as Alexander Hamilton of New York, had far more ambitious plans.
The fifty-five men who assembled at Philadelphia in May 1787 for the constitu- tional convention were generally those who had already concluded that there were weak- nesses in the Articles of Confederation. Patrick Henry, author of the Virginia Resolves in 1765 and more recently state governor, refused to go to the convention, saying he “smelled a rat.” Rhode Island declined to send delegates. Two men sent by New York’s legislature to check the influence of fellow-delegate Alexander Hamilton left in dismay in the middle of the convention, leaving Hamilton as the sole representative of the state.
THE PENNSYLVANIA STATEHOUSE The constitutional convention assembled at the Pennsylvania statehouse in the summer of 1787. Despite the heat, the delegates nailed the windows shut to eliminate the chance of being heard by eavesdroppers, so intent were they on secrecy. The building is now called Independence Hall in honor of the signing of the Declaration of Independence there in 1776. Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
208 CHAPTER 8 Building a Republic 1775–1789
This gathering of white men included no artisans, day laborers, or ordinary farm- ers. Two-thirds of the delegates were lawyers. Half had been officers in the Continental army. The majority had served in the confederation congress and knew its strengths and weaknesses. Seven men had been governors of their states and knew firsthand the frustrations of thwarted executive power. A few elder statesmen attended, such as Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, but on the whole the delegates were young, like Madison and Hamilton.
The Virginia and New Jersey Plans. The convention worked in secrecy, which enabled the men to freely explore alternatives without fear that their honest opin- ions would come back to haunt them. The Virginia delegation first laid out a fifteen- point plan that repudiated the principle of a confederation of states. Largely the work of Madison, the Virginia Plan set out a three-branch government composed of a two- chamber legislature, a powerful executive, and a judiciary. It practically eliminated the voices of the smaller states by pegging representation in both houses of the congress to population. The theory was that government operated directly on people, not on states. Among the breathtaking powers assigned to the congress were the rights to veto state legislation and to coerce states militarily to obey national laws. To prevent the congress from having absolute power, the executive and judiciary could jointly veto its actions.
In mid-June, delegates from New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, and New Hampshire — all small states — unveiled an alternative proposal. The New Jersey Plan, as it was called, maintained the existing single-house congress of the Articles of Confederation in which each state had one vote. Acknowledging the need for an executive, it created a plural presidency to be shared by three men elected by the congress from among its membership. Where it sharply departed from the existing government was in the sweeping powers it gave to the new congress: the right to tax, regulate trade, and use force on unruly state governments. In favoring national power over states’ rights, it aligned itself with the Virginia Plan. But the New Jersey Plan retained the confederation principle that the national government was to be an assembly of states, not of people.
For two weeks, delegates debated the two plans, focusing on the key issue of representation. The small-state delegates conceded that one house in a two-house legislature could be apportioned by population, but they would never agree that both houses could be. Madison was equally vehement about bypassing representation by state, which he viewed as the fundamental flaw in the Articles.
The debate seemed deadlocked, and for a while the convention was “on the verge of dissolution, scarce held together by the strength of a hair,” according to one delegate. Only in mid-July did the so-called Great Compromise break the stalemate and produce the basic structural features of the emerging United States Constitution. Proponents of the competing plans agreed on a bicameral legislature. Representation in the lower house, the House of Representatives, would be apportioned by population, and repre- sentation in the upper house, the Senate, would come from all the states equally, with each state represented by two independently voting senators.
Representation by population turned out to be an ambiguous concept once it was subjected to rigorous discussion. Who counted? Were slaves, for example, people or
Virginia Plan Plan drafted by James Madison, presented at the opening of the Philadelphia constitutional convention. Designed as a powerful three-branch government, with representation in both houses of the congress to be tied to population, this plan eclipsed the voice of small states in national government.
New Jersey Plan Alternative plan drafted by delegates from small states, retaining the confederation’s single-house congress with one vote per state. It shared with the Virginia Plan enhanced congressional powers, including the right to tax, regulate trade, and use force to stop popular uprisings.
The United States Constitution 2091775–1789
property? As people, they would add weight to the southern delegations in the House of Representatives, but as property they would add to the tax burdens of those states. What emerged was the compromise known as the three-fifths clause: All free per- sons plus “three-fifths of all other Persons” constituted the numerical base for the apportionment of representatives.
Using “all other Persons” as a substitute for “slaves” indicates the discomfort delegates felt in acknowledging in the Constitution the existence of slavery. But though slavery was nowhere named, nonetheless it was recognized, protected, and thereby perpetuated by the U.S. Constitution.
Democracy versus Republicanism. The delegates in Philadelphia made a distinction between democracy and republicanism new to the American political vocabulary. Pure democracy was now taken to be a dangerous thing. As a Massachu- setts delegate put it, “The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy.” The delegates still favored republican institutions, but they created a government that gave direct voice to the people only in the House and that granted a check on that voice to the Senate, a body of men elected not by direct popular vote but by the state legislatures. Senators served for six years, with no limit on reelection; they were protected from the whims of democratic majorities, and their long terms fostered experience and maturity in office.
Similarly, the presidency evolved into a powerful office out of the reach of direct democracy. The delegates devised an electoral college whose only function was to elect the president and vice president. Each state’s legislature would choose the elec- tors, whose number was the sum of representatives and senators for the state, an interesting blending of the two principles of representation. The president thus would owe his office not to the Congress, the states, or the people, but to a temporary assemblage of distinguished citizens who could vote their own judgment on the can- didates. His term of office was four years, but he could be reelected without limitation.
The framers had developed a far more complex form of federal government than that provided by the Articles of Confederation. To curb the excesses of democ- racy, they devised a government with limits and checks on all three of its branches. They set forth a powerful president who could veto legislation passed in Congress, but they gave Congress the power to override presidential vetoes. They set up a national judiciary to settle disputes between states and citizens of different states. They separated the branches of government not only by functions and by reciprocal checks but also by deliberately basing the election of each branch on different uni- verses of voters — voting citizens (the House), state legislators (the Senate), and the electoral college (the presidency).
The convention carefully listed the powers of the president and of Congress. The president could initiate policy, propose legislation, and veto acts of Congress; he could command the military and direct foreign policy; and he could appoint the entire judici- ary, subject to Senate approval. Congress held the purse strings: the power to levy taxes, to regulate trade, and to coin money and control the currency. States were expressly forbidden to issue paper money. Two more powers of Congress — to “provide for the
three-fifths clause Clause in the Constitution that stipulated that all free persons plus “three-fifths of all other Persons” would constitute the numerical base for apportioning both representation and taxation. The clause tacitly acknowledged the existence of slavery in the United States.
210 CHAPTER 8 Building a Republic 1775–1789
common defence and general Welfare” of the country and “to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper” for carrying
out its powers — provided elastic language that came closest to Madison’s wish to grant sweeping powers to the new government. While no one was entirely satisfied with every line of the Constitu-
tion, only three dissenters refused to sign the document. The Constitution specified a mechanism for ratification that avoided the dilemma faced earlier by the confederation government: Nine states, not all thirteen, had to ratify it, and special ratifying conventions elected only for that purpose, not state legislatures, would make the crucial decision.
Ratification of the Constitution The process of ratifying the Constitution was highly contentious. In the three most populous states — Virginia, Massachusetts, and New York — substantial majorities
opposed a powerful new national government. North Carolina and Rhode Island refused to call ratifying conventions. Seven of the eight remaining states were easy victories for the Constitution, but securing the approval of the ninth proved difficult. Pro-Constitution forces, called Federalists, had to strategize very shrewdly to defeat anti-Constitution forces, called Antifederalists.
The Federalists. Proponents of the Constitution moved swiftly into action. They first secured agreement from an uneasy confederation congress, to defer a vote and instead send the Constitution to the states for their consideration. The pro- Constitution forces next called themselves Federalists, a word that implied endorsement of a con- federated government. Their opponents thus became known as Antifederalists, a label that made them sound defensive and negative, lacking a program of their own.
To gain momentum, the Federalists targeted the states most likely to ratify quickly. Delaware ratified in early December, before the Antifederalists had even begun to campaign. Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Georgia followed within a month (Map 8.2). Delaware and New Jersey were small states surrounded by more powerful neighbors; a government that would regulate trade and set taxes according to population was an attractive proposition. Georgia sought the protection that a stronger national govern- ment would afford against hostile Indians and Spanish Florida to the south.
Another three easy victories came in Connecticut, Maryland, and South Carolina. Again, merchants, lawyers, and urban artisans in general favored the new Constitu- tion, as did large landowners and slaveholders. Antifederalists in these states tended to be rural, western, and noncommercial, men whose access to news was limited and whose participation in state government was tenuous.
Massachusetts was the first state to give the Federalists serious difficulty. The vote to select the ratification delegates decidedly favored the Antifederalists, whose strength lay in the western areas of the state, home to Shays’s Rebellion. One rural delegate from Worcester County voiced widely shared suspicions: “These lawyers and men of learning
Why did Antifederalists oppose the Constitution?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Federalists Originally the term for the supporters of the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1787–1788. In the 1790s, it became the name for one of the two dominant political groups that emerged during that decade. Federalist leaders of the 1790s supported Britain in foreign policy and commercial interests at home. Prominent Federalists included George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams.
Ratification of the Constitution 2111775–1789
MAP 8.2 RATIFICATION OF THE CONSTITUTION, 1788–1790 Populated areas cast votes for delegates to state ratification conventions. This map shows Antifederalist strength generally concentrated in backcountry, noncoastal, and non-urban areas, but with significant exceptions (for example, Rhode Island).
READING THE MAP: Where was Federalist strength concentrated? How did the distribution of Federalist and Antifederalist sentiment affect the order of state ratifications of the Constitution?
CONNECTIONS: What objections did Antifederalists have to the new United States Constitution? How did their locations affect their view of the Federalist argument?
Map Activity
A T L A N T I C O C E A N
NEW HAMPSHIRE 9th
June 21, 1788 MAINE
(part of MASS.)
SPANISH LOUISIANA
SPANISH FLORIDA
Kentucky District
Tennessee District
Disputed with Spain
SOUTH CAROLINA
8th May 23, 1788
NORTH CAROLINA 12th
Nov. 21, 1789
VIRGINIA 10th
June 26, 1788
GEORGIA 4th
Jan. 2, 1788
NEW YORK 11th
July 26, 1788
PENNSYLVANIA 2nd
Dec. 12, 1787 NEW JERSEY
3rd Dec. 18, 1787
CONNECTICUT 5th
Jan. 9, 1788
MASSACHUSETTS 6th
Feb. 16, 1788
RHODE ISLAND 13th
May 29, 1790
MARYLAND 7th
Apr. 26, 1788
DELAWARE 1st
Dec. 8, 1787
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and money men that talk so finely, and gloss over matters so smoothly, to make us poor illiterate people swallow down the pill, expect to get into Congress themselves; they expect to be the managers of the Constitution and get all the power and all the money into their own hands, and then they will swallow up all us little folks.” Nevertheless, the Antifederalists’ lead was slowly eroded by a vigorous newspaper campaign. In the end, the Federalists won in Massachusetts by a very slim margin and only with promises that amendments to the Constitution would be taken up in the first Congress.
By May 1788, eight states had ratified; only one more was needed. North Carolina and Rhode Island were hopeless for the Federalist cause, and New Hampshire seemed nearly as bleak. More worrisome was the failure to win over the largest and most eco- nomically critical states, Virginia and New York.
212 CHAPTER 8 Building a Republic 1775–1789
The Antifederalists. The Antifederalists were a com- posite group, united mainly in their desire to block the Constitution. Although much of their strength came from backcountry areas long suspicious of eastern elites, many Antifederalist leaders came from the same social background as Federalist leaders. The Antifederalists also drew strength in states that were already on sure economic footing, such as New York, which could afford to remain independent. Prob- ably the biggest appeal of the Antifederalists’ position lay in the long-nurtured fear that distant power might infringe on people’s liberties.
But by the time eight states had ratified the Constitu- tion, the Antifederalists faced a difficult task. First, they were no longer defending the status quo now that the momentum lay with the Federalists. Second, it was difficult to defend the confederation government with its admitted flaws. Even so, they remained genuinely fearful that the new government would be too distant from the people and could thus become corrupt or tyrannical. “The difficulty, if not impracticability, of exercising the equal and equitable powers of government by a single legislature over an extent of territory that reaches from the Mississippi to the western lakes, and from them to the Atlantic ocean, is an insuperable objection to the adoption of the new system,” wrote Mercy Otis Warren, an Antifeder- alist woman writing under the name “A Columbia Patriot.”
The new government was indeed distant. In the pro- posed House of Representatives, the only directly democratic element of the Constitution, one member represented some 30,000 people. How could that member really know or communicate with his whole constituency, Antifederalists worried. They also worried that representatives would always
be elites and thus “ignorant of the sentiments of the middling and much more of the lower class of citizens, strangers to their ability, unacquainted with their wants, dif- ficulties, and distress,” as one Maryland man worried.
The Federalists generally agreed that the elite would be favored for national elections. Indeed, Federalists wanted power to reside with intelligent, virtuous lead- ers like themselves. They did not envision a government constituted of every class of people. “Fools and knaves have voice enough in government already,” quipped one Federalist, without being guaranteed representation in proportion to their total pop- ulation. Alexander Hamilton claimed that mechanics and laborers preferred to have their social betters represent them. Antifederalists disagreed: “In reality, there will be no part of the people represented, but the rich. . . . It will literally be a government in the hands of the few to oppress and plunder the many.”
MERCY OTIS WARREN Sister of James Otis and wife of James Warren, both prominent Massachusetts revolutionaries, Mercy Otis Warren was well positioned to learn about revolutionary politics from the ground up. Abigail and John Adams were close friends until she broke with them in the late 1780s over her support for Antifederalism. In 1788, Warren published a pamphlet explaining her well-argued objections to the Constitution. Photograph © 2012 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Bequest of Winslow Warren, 31.212.
Antifederalists Opponents of ratification of the Constitution. Antifederalists feared that a powerful and distant central government would be out of touch with the needs of citizens. They also complained that the Constitution failed to guarantee individual liberties in a bill of rights.
Ratification of the Constitution 2131775–1789
Antifederalists fretted over many specific features of the Constitution, such as the prohibition on state-issued paper money, or the federal power to control the time and place of elections. The most widespread objection was the Constitution’s glaring omission of any guarantees of individual liberties in a bill of rights like those con- tained in many state constitutions.
In the end, a small state — New Hampshire — provided the decisive ninth vote for ratification on June 21, 1788, following an intensive and successful lobbying effort by Federalists.
The Big Holdouts: Virginia and New York. Four states still remained out- side the new union, and a glance at a map demonstrated the necessity of pressing the Federalist case in the two largest, Virginia and New York (see Map 8.2). In Virginia, an influential Antifederalist group led by Patrick Henry and George Mason made the outcome uncertain. The Federalists finally but barely won ratification by proposing twenty specific amendments that the new government would promise to consider.
New York voters tilted toward the Antifederalists out of a sense that a state so large and powerful need not relinquish so much authority to the new federal govern- ment. But New York was also home to some of the most persuasive Federalists. Start- ing in October 1787, Alexander Hamilton collaborated with James Madison and New York lawyer John Jay on a series of eighty-five essays on the political philosophy of the new Constitution. Published in New York newspapers and later republished as The Federalist Papers, the essays set out the failures of the Articles of Confederation and offered an analysis of the complex nature of the Federalist position. In one of the most compelling essays, number 10, Madison challenged the Antifederalists’ convic- tion that republican government had to be small-scale. Madison argued that a large and diverse population was itself a guarantee of liberty. In a national government, no single faction could ever be large enough to subvert the freedom of other groups. “Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens,” Madison asserted. He called it “a republican rem- edy for the diseases most incident to republican government.”
At New York’s ratifying convention, Antifederalists predominated, but impas- sioned debate and lobbying — plus the dramatic news of Virginia’s ratification — finally tipped the balance to the Federalists. Even so, the Antifederalists’ approval of the doc- ument was accompanied by a list of twenty-four individual rights and thirty-three structural changes they hoped to see in the Constitution. New York’s ratification ensured the legitimacy of the new government, yet it took another year and a half for Antifederalists in North Carolina to come around. Fiercely independent Rhode Island held out until May 1790, and even then it ratified by only a two-vote margin.
In less than twelve months, the U.S. Constitution was both written and ratified. (See appendix II, page A-9.) The Federalists had faced a formidable task, but by build- ing momentum and ensuring consideration of a bill of rights, they did indeed carry the day.
214 CHAPTER 8 Building a Republic 1775–1789
Conclusion: The “Republican Remedy” Thus ended one of the most intellectually tumultuous and creative periods in American history.
The period began in 1775 with a confederation government that could barely be ratified because of its requirement of unanimity, but there was no reaching una- nimity on the western lands, an impost, and the proper way to respond to unfair taxation in a republican state. The new Constitution offered a different approach to these problems by loosening the grip of impossible unanimity and by embracing the ideas of a heterogeneous public life and a carefully balanced government that together would prevent any one part of the public from tyrannizing another. The genius of James Madison to anticipate that diversity of opinion was not only an un avoidable reality but also a hidden strength of the new society beginning to take shape. This is what he meant in Federalist essay number 10 when he spoke of the “republican remedy” for the troubles most likely to befall a government in which the people are the source of authority.
Despite Madison’s optimism, political differences remained keen and worri- some to many. The Federalists still hoped for a society in which leaders of excep- tional wisdom would discern the best path for public policy. They looked backward to a society of hierarchy, rank, and benevolent rule by an aristocracy of talent, but they created a government with forward-looking checks and balances as a guard against corruption, which they figured would most likely emanate from the people. The Antifederalists also looked backward, but to an old order of small-scale direct democracy and local control, in which virtuous people kept a close eye on poten- tially corruptible rulers. The Antifederalists feared a national government led by dis- tant, self-interested leaders who needed to be held in check. In the 1790s, these two conceptions of republicanism and of leadership would be tested in real life.
1 Leaders in the new nation held that voting should be restricted to citizens possessing independence of mind. What did they mean by that? Who did they mean to exclude from voting?
2 How did the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution handle the issue of slavery? Did authors and proponents of those documents acknowledge any tension between their ideals of liberty and the institution of slavery?
3 What proposals were offered to manage settlement of the Northwest Territory? How did the final Ordinance of 1787 shape the nation’s expansion?
MAKING CONNECTIONS
1 Why was the confederation government’s authority so limited? (pp. 190–193)
2 How did states determine who would be allowed to vote? (pp. 193–199)
3 Why did farmers in western Massachusetts revolt against the state legislature? (pp. 199–206)
4 Why did the Constitution proposed by the Philadelphia convention devise multiple checks on the branches of the government? (pp. 206–210)
5 Why did Antifederalists oppose the Constitution? (pp. 210–213)
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
Articles of Confederation (p. 190)
republicanism (p. 193)
gradual emancipation (p. 198)
Newburgh Conspiracy (p. 200)
Treaty of Fort Stanwix (p. 201)
Northwest Ordinance (p. 202)
KEY TERMS
Shays’s Rebellion (p. 206)
Virginia Plan (p. 208)
New Jersey Plan (p. 208)
three-fifths clause (p. 209)
Federalists (p. 210)
Antifederalists (p. 212)
Chapter Review MAKE IT STICK
Go to LearningCurve: See what you know. Then review the key terms and answer the questions.
LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com /roarkconcise
215
STUDENT SITE @ bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
A lexander Hamilton, the man who brilliantly unified the pro- Constitution Federalists of 1788, headed the Treasury Department in the new government and thereby became the most polarizing figure of the 1790s.
Hamilton grew up on a small West Indies island, the son of an unmarried mother who died when he was eleven. He developed a fierce ambition to overcome his disadvantages and make good. After serving
216
The New Nation Takes Form, 1789–1800
INAUGURAL BALUSTRADE This gold-painted iron railing graced the balcony of Federal Hall in New York City, where George Washington took the president’s oath of office in 1789. Thirteen arrows, distinct yet united, form the centerpiece of the ornate balustrade. Frenchman Pierre l’Enfant designed it for the inauguration, symbolically turning the much older building into the home of the new federal Congress. © Collection of the New-York Historical Society. Gift of the Chamber of
Commerce of the State of New York.
The Search for Stability (pp. 218–221)
Hamilton’s Economic Policies (pp. 222–227)
Conflict on America’s Borders and Beyond (pp. 227–236)
Federalists and Republicans (pp. 236–240)
Conclusion: Parties Nonetheless (p. 240)
9
CHAPTER OUTLINE QUICK START
Quickly learn what is important in this chapter by doing the following:
• READ the Chapter Outline to see how the chapter is organized. • SKIM the Chronology on the next page to see what will be covered.
When you are ready, read the chapter and the Essential Questions for each section. Then use the Chapter Review to check what you know.
1789–1800
1789 George Washington inaugu- rated first president.
French Revolution begins. First Congress meets. Fort Washington erected in
western Ohio.
1790 Congress approves Hamilton’s debt plan.
Judith Sargent Murray publishes “On the Equality of the Sexes.”
National capital moved to Philadelphia.
Indians in Ohio defeat General Josiah Harmar.
1791 States ratify Bill of Rights. Bank of the United States
chartered. Ohio Indians defeat General
Arthur St. Clair. Congress passes whiskey
tax. Haitian Revolution begins. Hamilton issues Report on
Manufactures.
1793 Anglo-French Wars com- mence in Europe.
Washington issues Neutrality Proclamation.
Eli Whitney invents cotton gin.
1794 Whiskey Rebellion. Battle of Fallen Timbers.
1795 Treaty of Greenville. Jay Treaty.
1796 John Adams elected president.
1797 XYZ affair.
1798 Quasi-War with France erupts.
Alien and Sedition Acts. Virginia and Kentucky
Resolutions.
1800 Thomas Jefferson elected president.
an apprenticeship to a trader, the bright lad made his way to New York City, where he soon gained entry to college. During the American Revolution, he wrote political articles for a newspaper that caught the eye of General George Washington, who was moved to select the nineteen-year-old to be his close aide. In the 1780s, Hamilton practiced law in New York and participated in the constitu- tional convention in Philadelphia. His shrewd political tactics greatly aided the ratification process.
A Cinderella story characterized Hamilton’s private life too. Handsome and now well connected, he married a wealthy mer- chant’s daughter. He had a magnetic charm that attracted both men and women; at social gatherings, he excelled. Late-night parties, however, never interfered with Hamilton’s prodigious capacity for work.
As secretary of the treasury, Hamilton took quick action to build the economy. “If a Government appears to be confident of its own powers, it is the surest way to inspire the same confidence in others,” he remarked. He immediately tackled the country’s unpaid Revolutionary War debt, producing a complex proposal to fund the debt and pump millions of dollars into the U.S. economy. He drew up a plan for a national banking system to manage the money supply. And he designed a system of government subsidies and tariff policies to promote the development of manufacturing interests.
Hamilton was both visionary and practical, a gifted man with remarkable political intuitions. Yet this magnetic man made enemies; the “founding fathers” of the 1770s and 1780s became competitors and even bitter rivals in the 1790s. Both political philosophy and personality clashes created friction.
Hamilton’s charm no longer worked with James Madison, now a representative in Congress and an opponent of all of Hamilton’s economic plans. His charm had never worked with John Adams, the new vice president, who privately called him “the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar” motivated by “disappointed Ambition and unbridled malice and revenge.” Years later, when asked why he had deserted Hamilton, Madison coolly replied, “Colonel Hamilton deserted me.” Hamilton assumed that govern- ment was safest when in the hands of “the rich, the wise, and
CHRONOLOGY
218 CHAPTER 9 The New Nation Takes Form 1789–1800
the good” — by which he meant America’s commer- cial elite. By contrast, agrarian values ran deep with Jefferson and Madison, and they were suspicious of get-rich-quick speculators, financiers, and manufac- turing development.
The personal and political antagonisms of this first generation of American leaders left their mark on the young country. Leaders generally agreed on Indian policy in the new republic — peace when possible, war when necessary — but on little else. No one was prepared for the intense and passionate polarization over economic and foreign policy. The disagreements were articulated around particular events and policies: taxation and the public debt, a new treaty with Britain, a rebellion in Haiti, and a near war with France. At their heart, these disagree- ments sprang from opposing ideologies on the value of democracy, the nature of leadership, and the limits of federal power.
By 1800, the oppositional politics ripening between Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian politicians would begin to crystallize into political parties, the Federalists and the Republicans. To the citizens of that day, this was an unhappy development.
The Search for Stability After the struggles of the 1780s, the most urgent task in establishing the new government was to secure stability. Leaders sought ways to heal old divisions, and the first presidential election offered the means to do that in the
person of George Washington, who enjoyed widespread veneration. People trusted him to exercise the untested and perhaps elastic powers of the presidency.
Congress had important work as well in initiating the new government. Con- gress quickly agreed on the Bill of Rights, which answered the concerns of many Antifederalists. Beyond politics, cultural change in the area of gender also enhanced political stability. The private virtue of women was mobilized to bolster the public virtue of male citizens and to enhance political stability. Republicanism was forcing a rethinking of women’s relation to the state.
ALEXANDER HAMILTON, BY JOHN TRUMBULL Hamilton was confident, handsome, audacious, brilliant, and very hardworking. Ever slender, in marked contrast to the more corpulent leaders of his day, he posed for this portrait in 1792, at the age of thirty-seven and at the height of his power. Yale University Art Gallery/Art Resource.
How did political leaders in the 1790s attempt to overcome the divisions of the 1780s?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
The Search for Stability 2191789–1800
Washington Inaugurates the Government. George Washington was elected president in February 1789 by a unanimous vote of the electoral college. (John Adams got just half as many votes; he became vice president, but his pride was wounded.) Washington perfectly embodied the republican ideal of disinterested, public-spirited leader- ship. Indeed, he cultivated that image through astute ceremonies such as the dra- matic surrender of his sword to the Continental Congress at the end of the war, symbolizing the subservience of military power to the law.
Once in office, Washington calculated his moves, knowing that every step set a precedent and that any misstep could be dangerous for the fragile government. Con- gress debated a title for Washington, ranging from “His Highness” to “His Majesty, the President”; Washington favored “His High Mightiness.” But in the end, republi- can simplicity prevailed. The final title was simply “President of the United States of America,” and the established form of address became “Mr. President,” a subdued yet dignified title reserved for property-owning white males.
Washington’s genius in establishing the presidency lay in his capacity for implanting his own reputation for integrity into the office itself. In the political language of the day, he was “virtuous,” meaning that he took pains to elevate the public good over private interest and projected honesty and honor over ambition. He remained aloof, resolute, and dignified, to the point of appearing wooden at times. He encouraged pomp and ceremony to create respect for the office, traveling with six horses to pull his coach, hosting formal balls, and surrounding himself with uniformed servants. He even held weekly “levees,” as European monarchs did, hour-long audiences granted to distinguished visitors (including women), at which Washington appeared attired in black velvet, with a feathered hat and a polished sword. The president and his guests bowed, avoiding the egalitarian familiarity of a handshake. But he always managed, perhaps just barely, to avoid the extreme of royal splendor.
Washington chose talented and experienced men to preside over the newly created Departments of War, Treasury, and State. For the Department of War, Washington selected General Henry Knox, former secretary of war in the confed- eration government. For the Treasury — an especially tough job in view of revenue conflicts during the confederation (see chapter 8) — the president appointed
LIVERPOOL SOUVENIR PITCHER, 1789 A British pottery manufacturer produced this commemorative pitcher for the American market in 1789. It presents Liberty as a woman in a golden gown, holding a laurel wreath (signifying classical honors) over Washington’s head. Fifteen labeled links encircle the scene, representing the states, although in 1789 Rhode Island and North Carolina had not yet ratified the Constitution, and Vermont and Kentucky were merely anticipated states. Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, Behring Center.
220 CHAPTER 9 The New Nation Takes Form 1789–1800
Alexander Hamilton, known for his general brilliance and financial astuteness. To lead the State Department, which handled foreign policy, Washington chose Thomas Jefferson, a master diplomat and the current minister to France. For attor- ney general, Washington picked Edmund Randolph, a Virginian who had attended the constitutional convention but who had turned Antifederalist during ratifica- tion. For chief justice of the Supreme Court, Washington designated John Jay, a New York lawyer who had helped to write The Federalist Papers.
Soon Washington began to hold regular meetings with these men, thereby estab- lishing the precedent of a presidential cabinet. No one anticipated that two decades of party turbulence would emerge from the brilliant but explosive mix of Washington’s first cabinet.
The Bill of Rights. An important piece of business for the First Congress, meet- ing in 1789, was the passage of the Bill of Rights. Seven states had ratified the Constitution on the condition that guarantees of individual liberties and limitations to federal power be swiftly incorporated. The Federalists of 1787 had thought an enumeration of rights unnecessary, but in 1789 Congressman James Madison under- stood that healing the divisions of the 1780s was of prime importance: “It will be a desirable thing to extinguish from the bosom of every member of the community, any apprehensions that there are those among his countrymen who wish to deprive them of the liberty for which they valiantly fought and honorably bled.”
Drawing on existing state constitutions with bills of rights, Madison enumer- ated guarantees of freedom of speech, press, and religion; the right to petition and assemble; and the right to be free from unwarranted searches and seizures. One amendment asserted the right to keep and bear arms in support of a “well-regulated militia,” to which Madison added, “but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.” That provision for what a later century would call “conscientious objector” status failed to gain accep- tance in Congress.
In September 1789, Congress approved a set of twelve amendments and sent them to the states for approval; by 1791, ten were eventually ratified. The First through Eighth dealt with individual liberties, and the Ninth and Tenth concerned the boundary between federal and state authority.
Still, not everyone was entirely satisfied. State ratifying conventions had submit- ted some eighty proposed amendments. Congress never considered proposals to change structural features of the new government, and Madison had no intention of reopening debates about the length of the president’s term or the power to levy excise taxes.
Significantly, no one complained about one striking omission in the Bill of Rights: the right to vote. Only much later was voting seen as a fundamental liberty requiring protection by constitutional amendment — indeed, by four amendments. The Constitution deliberately left the definition of eligible voters to the states because of the existing wide variation in local voting practices. Most of these practices were based on property qualifications, but some touched on religion and, in one unusual case (New Jersey), on sex and race (see chapter 8).
Bill of Rights The first ten amendments to the Constitution, officially ratified by 1791. The First through Eighth Amendments dealt with individual liberties, and the Ninth and Tenth concerned the boundary between federal and state authority.
The Search for Stability 2211789–1800
The Republican Wife and Mother. The exclusion of women from political activity did not mean they had no civic role or responsibility. A flood of periodical articles in the 1790s by both male and female writers reevaluated courtship, mar- riage, and motherhood in light of republican ideals. Tyrannical power in the ruler, whether king or husband, was declared a thing of the past. Affection, not duty, bound wives to their husbands and citizens to their government. In republican mar- riages, the writers claimed, women had the capacity to reform the morals and man- ners of men. One male author promised women that “the solidity and stability of the liberties of your country rest with you; since Liberty is never sure, ’till Virtue reigns triumphant. . . . While you thus keep our country virtuous, you maintain its independence.”
Until the 1790s, public virtue was strictly a masculine quality. But another sort of virtue enlarged in importance: sexual chastity, a private asset prized as a feminine quality. Essayists of the 1790s explicitly advised young women to use sexual virtue to increase public virtue in men. “Love and courtship . . . invest a lady with more authority than in any other situation that falls to the lot of human beings,” one male essayist proclaimed.
Republican ideals also cast motherhood in a new light. Throughout the 1790s, advocates for female education, still a controversial proposition, argued that education would produce better mothers, who in turn would produce better citizens, a concept historians call republican motherhood. Benjamin Rush, a Pennsylvania physician and educator, called for female educa- tion because “our ladies should be qualified . . . in instructing their sons in the principles of liberty and government.” A series of essays by Judith Sargent Murray of Massachusetts favored education that would remake women into self- confident, rational beings. Her first essay, published in 1790, was boldly titled “On the Equality of the Sexes.” In a subsequent essay on education, she reassured readers that educated women would retain their “characteristic trait” of sweetness. Murray thus reas- sured readers that education would not undermine women’s compliant nature.
Although women’s obligations as wives and mothers were now infused with political meaning, traditional gender relations remained unaltered. The analogy between marriage and civil society worked precisely because of the self- subordination inherent in the term virtue. Men should put the public good first, before selfish desires, just as women must put their husbands and families first, before themselves. Women might gain literacy and knowledge, but only in the service of improved domestic duty. In Federalist America, wives and citizens alike should feel affection for and trust in their rulers; neither should ever rebel.
REPUBLICAN WOMANHOOD: JUDITH SARGENT MURRAY The young woman in this 1772 portrait became known in the 1790s as America’s foremost spokeswoman for woman’s equality. Judith Sargent Murray published essays under the pen name “Constantia.” She argued that women had “natural powers” of mind fully the equal of men’s. George Washington and John Adams each bought a copy of her collected essays published in 1798. John Singleton Copley, Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago/Art Resource, NY.
222 CHAPTER 9 The New Nation Takes Form 1789–1800
Hamilton’s Economic Policies Compared to the severe financial instability of the 1780s, the 1790s brimmed with opportunity, as seen in improved trade, transportation, and banking. In 1790, the federal government moved from New York City to Philadelphia, a
more central location with a substantial mercantile class. There, Alexander Hamilton, secretary of the treasury, embarked on multiple plans to solidify the government’s economic base. But controversy ensued. His ambitious plans to fund the national debt, set up a national bank, promote manufacturing through trade laws, and raise
revenue via a tax on whiskey mobilized severe opposition.
Agriculture, Transportation, and Banking. Dramatic increases in international grain prices, caused by underproduction in war-stricken Europe, motivated American farmers to boost agricultural production for the export trade. From the Connecticut River valley to the Chesa-
peake, farmers planted more wheat, generating new jobs for millers, coop- ers, dockworkers, and shipbuilders.
Cotton production also boomed, spurred by market demand from British tex- tile manufacturers and a mechanical invention. Limited amounts of smooth-seed cotton had long been grown in the coastal areas of the South, but this variety of cot- ton did not prosper in the drier inland regions. Greenseed cotton grew well inland, but its rough seeds stuck to the cotton fibers and were labor-intensive to remove. In 1793, Yale graduate Eli Whitney devised a machine called a gin that easily separated out the seeds; cotton production soared.
A surge of road building further stimulated the economy. Before 1790, one road connected Maine to Georgia, but with the establishment of the U.S. Post Office in
1792, road mileage increased sixfold. Private companies also built toll roads, such as the Lancaster Turnpike west of Philadelphia, the Boston-to-Albany turnpike, and a third road from Virginia to Tennessee. By 1800, a dense net- work of dirt, gravel, and plank roadways connected towns in southern New England and the Middle Atlantic states, spurring the establishment of com- mercial stage companies. A trip from New York to Boston took four days; from New York to Philadelphia, less than two (Map 9.1). In 1790, Boston had only three stagecoach companies; by 1800, there were twenty-four.
A third development signaling economic resurgence was the growth of commercial banking. During the 1790s, the number of banks nationwide multiplied tenfold, from three to twenty-nine in 1800. Banks drew in money chiefly through the sale of stock. They then made loans in the form of bank- notes, paper currency backed by the gold and silver from stock sales. By issu- ing two or three times as much money in banknotes as they held in hard money, they were creating new money for the economy.
The U.S. population expanded along with economic development, pro- pelled by large average family size and better than adequate food and land resources. As measured by the first two federal censuses in 1790 and 1800, the population grew from 3.9 million to 5.3 million, an increase of 35 percent.
Why were Hamilton’s economic policies controversial?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
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Hamilton’s Economic Policies 2231789–1800
The Public Debt and Taxes. The upturn in the economy, plus the new taxation powers of the government, suggested that the government might soon repay its wartime debt, amounting to more than $52 million owed to foreign and domestic creditors. But Hamilton had a different plan. He issued a Report on Public Credit in January 1790, recommending that the debt be funded — but not repaid immediately — at full value. This meant that old certificates of debt would be rolled over into new bonds, which would earn interest until they were retired several years later. There would still be a public debt, but it would be secure, giving its holders a direct financial stake in the new government. The bonds would circulate, injecting millions of dollars of new money into the economy. “A national debt if not excessive will be to us a national blessing; it will be a powerful cement of our union,” Hamilton wrote to a financier. Hamilton’s goal was to make the new country creditworthy, not debt-free.
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MAP 9.1 TRAVEL TIMES FROM NEW YORK CITY IN 1800 Notice that travel out of New York extends over a much greater distance in the first week than in subsequent weeks. River corridors in the West and East speeded up travel — but only going downriver. Also notice that travel by sea (along the coast) was much faster than land travel.
READING THE MAP: Compare this map to the map “Major Roads in the 1790s” (page 222) and to Map 9.2 (page 230). What physical and cultural factors account for the slower travel times west of Pittsburgh?
CONNECTIONS: Why did Americans in the 1790s become so interested in traveling long distances? How did travel times affect the U.S. economy?
Map Activity
Report on Public Credit Hamilton’s January 1790 report recommending that the national debt be funded — but not repaid immediately — at full value. Hamilton’s goal was to make the new country creditworthy, not debt-free. Critics of his plan complained that it would benefit speculators.
224 CHAPTER 9 The New Nation Takes Form 1789–1800
Funding the debt in full was controversial because speculators had already bought up debt certificates cheaply, and Hamilton’s report touched off further specu- lation. Hamilton compounded controversy with his proposal to add to the federal debt another $25 million that some state governments still owed to individuals. During the war, states had obtained supplies by issuing IOUs to farmers, merchants, and moneylenders. Some states, such as Virginia and New York, had paid off these debts entirely. Others, such as Massachusetts, had partially paid them off through heavy taxation of the people. About half the states had made little headway. Hamil- ton called for the federal government to assume these state debts and combine them with the federal debt, in effect consolidating federal power over the states.
Congressman James Madison strenuously objected to putting windfall profits in the pockets of speculators. He instead proposed a complex scheme to pay both the original holders of the federal debt and the speculators, each at fair fractions of the face value. He also strongly objected to assumption of all the states’ debts. A large
1790 CENSUS PAGE This page summarizes the tally of the first federal census, data that determined representation in Congress and proportional taxation of the states. Notice the five classifications: free white males sixteen or older, the same under sixteen, free white females, “all other free persons,” and slaves. Separating white males at sixteen provided a rough measure of military strength. U.S. Census Bureau.
READING THE IMAGE: Which northern states still had slaves? Which state had the largest population? Which had the largest white population?
CONNECTIONS: Why did the census separate males from females? Free from enslaved? Who might “all other free persons” include? Since women, children, and “all other free persons” counted for purposes of apportionment, could it be said that those groups were represented in the new government?
Visual Activity
Hamilton’s Economic Policies 2251789–1800
debt was dangerous, Madison warned, especially because it would lead to high taxa- tion. Secretary of State Jefferson was also fearful of Hamilton’s proposals: “No man is more ardently intent to see the public debt soon and sacredly paid off than I am. This exactly marks the difference between Colonel Hamilton’s views and mine, that I would wish the debt paid tomorrow; he wishes it never to be paid, but always to be a thing where with to corrupt and manage the legislature.”
A solution to this impasse arrived when Jefferson invited Hamilton and Madison to dinner. Over good food and wine, Hamilton secured the reluctant Madison’s promise to restrain his opposition. In return, Hamilton pledged to back efforts to locate the nation’s new capital city in the South, along the Potomac River, an out- come that was sure to please Virginians. In early July 1790, Congress voted for the Potomac site, and in late July Congress passed the debt package, assumption and all.
The First Bank of the United States and the Report on Manufac- tures. The second and third major elements of Hamilton’s economic plan were his proposal to create a national Bank of the United States and his program to encourage domestic manufacturing. Arguing that banks were the “nurseries of national wealth,” Hamilton modeled his bank plan on European central banks that used their govern- ment’s money to invigorate the economy. According to Hamilton’s plan, the central bank was to be capitalized at $10 million, a sum larger than all the hard money in the entire nation. The federal government would hold 20 percent of the bank’s stock, making the bank in effect the government’s fiscal agent, holding its revenues derived from import duties, land sales, and various other taxes. The other 80 percent of the bank’s capital would come from private investors, who could buy stock in the bank with either hard money (silver or gold) or the recently funded and thus sound federal securities. Because of its size and the privilege of being the only national bank, the central bank would help stabilize the economy by exerting prudent control over credit, interest rates, and the value of the currency.
Concerned that a few rich bankers might have undue influence over the economy, Madison tried but failed to stop the plan in Congress. Jeffer- son advised President Washington that the Constitution did not permit Congress to charter banks. Hamilton countered that Congress had explicit powers to regulate commerce and a broad mandate “to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers.” Washington sided with Hamilton and signed the Bank of the United States into law in February 1791, giving it a twenty-year charter.
When the bank’s privately held stock went on sale in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City in July, it sold out in a few hours, touching off a lively period of specu- lative trading by hundreds of urban merchants and artisans. A discouraged Madison reported that in New York “the Coffee House is an eternal buzz with the gamblers,” and wide swings in the stock’s price pained Jefferson: “The spirit of gaming, once it has seized a subject, is incurable. The tailor who has made thousands in one day, tho’ he has lost them the next, can never again be content with the slow and moderate earnings of his needle.”
226 CHAPTER 9 The New Nation Takes Form 1789–1800
The third component of Hamilton’s plan was issued in December 1791 in the Report on Manufactures, a proposal to encourage the production of American- made goods. Domestic manufacturing was in its infancy, and Hamilton aimed to mobilize the new powers of the federal government to grant subsidies to manufac- turers and to impose moderate tariffs on those same products from overseas. Hamilton’s plan targeted manufacturing of iron goods, arms and ammunition, coal, textiles, wood products, and glass. The Report on Manufactures, however, was never approved by Congress, and indeed never even voted on. Many confirmed agricultur- alists in Congress feared that manufacturing was a curse rather than a blessing. Madison and Jefferson in particular were alarmed by stretching the “general welfare” clause of the Constitution to include public subsidies to private businesses.
The Whiskey Rebellion. Hamilton’s plan to restore public credit required new taxation to pay the interest on the large national debt. In deference to the merchant class, Hamilton did not propose a general increase in import duties, nor did he propose land taxes, which would have fallen hardest on the nation’s wealthiest land- owners. Instead, he convinced Congress in 1791 to pass a 25 percent excise tax on whiskey, to be paid by farmers bringing grain to the distillery and then passed on to whiskey consumers in higher prices. Even Madison approved, in the hope that the tax might promote “sobriety and thereby prevent disease and untimely deaths.”
Not surprisingly, the new excise tax proved unpopular. In 1791, farmers in Kentucky and the western parts of Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, and the Caro- linas forcefully conveyed their resentment to Congress. One farmer complained that he had already paid half his grain to the local distillery for distilling his rye, and now the distiller was taking the new whiskey tax out of the farmer’s remaining half. “If this is not an oppressive tax, I am at a loss to describe what is so,” the farmer wrote. Congress responded with modest modifications to the tax in 1792, but even so, discontent — along with tax evasion — was rampant. In some places, crowds threat- ened to tar and feather tax collectors. Four counties in Pennsylvania established committees of correspondence and held rallies. Hamilton admitted to Congress that the revenue was far less than anticipated. But rather than abandon the law, he tight- ened up the prosecution of tax evaders.
In western Pennsylvania, Hamilton had one ally, a stubborn tax collector named John Neville who refused to quit even after a group of spirited farmers burned him in effigy. In May 1794, Neville filed charges against seventy-five farmers and distillers for tax evasion. His action touched off the Whiskey Rebellion. In July, he and a federal marshal were ambushed in Allegheny County by a forty-man crowd. Neville’s house was then burned down by a crowd of five hundred. At the end of July, seven thousand Pennsylvania farmers planned a march — or perhaps an attack, some thought — on Pittsburgh to protest the tax.
In response, President Washington nationalized the Pennsylvania militia and set out, with Hamilton at his side, at the head of thirteen thousand soldiers. A wor- ried Philadelphia newspaper criticized the show of force: “Shall torrents of blood be spilled to support an odious excise system?” But in the end, no blood was spilled. By the time the army arrived in late September, the demonstrators had dispersed. No
Report on Manufactures A proposal by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in 1791 calling for the federal government to encourage domestic manufacturers with subsidies while imposing tariffs on foreign imports. Congress initially rejected the measure.
Whiskey Rebellion July 1794 uprising by farmers in western Pennsylvania in response to enforcement of an unpopular excise tax on whiskey. The federal government responded with a military presence that caused dissidents to disperse before blood was shed.
Conflict on America’s Borders and Beyond 2271789–1800
battles were fought, and no shots were exchanged. Twenty men were rounded up and charged with high treason, but only two were convicted, and Washington soon par- doned both.
Had the federal government overreacted? Thomas Jefferson thought so; he saw the event as a replay of Shays’s Rebellion of 1786, when tax protesters had been met with military force (see chapter 8). The rebel farmers agreed; they felt entitled to protest oppressive taxation. Hamilton and Washington, however, thought that laws passed by a republican government must be obeyed. To them, the Whiskey Rebel- lion presented an opportunity for the new federal government to flex its muscles and stand up to civil disorder.
Conflict on America’s Borders and Beyond While the whiskey rebels challenged federal leadership from within the country, disorder threatened the United States from external sources as well. From 1789 onward, serious trouble brewed in four directions. To the south- west, Creek Indians pushed back against the westward-moving white southern population, giving George Washington an opportunity to test diplomacy. To the northwest, a powerful confederation of Indian tribes in the Ohio Country resisted white encroachment, resulting in a brutal war. At the same time, con- flicts between the major European powers forced Americans to take sides and nearly pulled the country into another war. And to the south, a Caribbean slave rebellion raised fears that racial war would be imported to the United States. Despite these grave prospects, Washington won reelection to the presidency unanimously in the fall of 1792.
AN EXCISEMAN, 1792 This crude cartoon targets the hated figure of the whiskey tax collector, shown making off with two barrels of the drink. An evil spirit hooks him by the nose to deliver him to the gallows, where he is roasted over a flaming barrel of whiskey. The ghoulish poem under the gallows begins: “Just where he hung the people meet / To see him swing was music sweet.” Courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection Atwater
Kent Museum of Philadelphia.
Why did the United States feel vulnerable to international threats in the 1790s?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
228 CHAPTER 9 The New Nation Takes Form 1789–1800
Creeks in the Southwest. An urgent task of the new government was to take charge of Indian affairs while avoiding the costs of warfare. Some twenty thousand Indians affiliated with the Creeks occupied lands extending from Georgia into what is now Mississippi, and border skirmishes with land-hungry Georgians were becom- ing a frequent occurrence. Washington and his secretary of war, Henry Knox, singled out one Creek chief, Alexander McGillivray, and sent a delegation to Georgia for preliminary treaty negotiations.
McGillivray had a mixed-race history that prepared him to be a major cultural broker. His French-Creek mother conferred a legitimate claim to Creek leadership, while his Scottish fur-trading father provided exposure to literacy and numeracy. Fluent in English and near fluent in Spanish, McGillivray spoke several Creek lan- guages and had even studied Greek and Latin. In the 1770s, he worked for the British distributing gifts to various southern tribes; in the 1780s, he gained renown for bro- kering negotiations with the Spanish in Florida.
The chief reluctantly met with Knox’s delegates and spurned the substantial concessions the American negotiators offered, chief among them a guarantee of the Creeks’ extensive tribal lands. McGillivray sent the negotiators away, enjoying, as he wrote to a Spanish trader, the spectacle of the self-styled “masters of the new world” having “to bend and supplicate for peace at the feet of a people whom shortly before they despised.”
A year later, Secretary Knox reopened diplomatic relations. To coax McGillivray to the treaty table, Knox invited him to New York City to meet with the president. McGillivray arrived in a triumphal procession of various lesser Creek chiefs and was accorded the honors of a head of state.
The negotiations stretched out for a month, resulting in the 1790 Treaty of New York, which looked much like Knox’s original plan: Creek tribal lands were guaranteed, with a promise of boundary protection by federal troops against land- seeking settlers. The Creeks were assured of annual payments in money and trade goods, including “domestic animals and implements of husbandry” — words that hinted at a future time when the Creeks would become more agricultural and thus less in need of expansive hunting grounds. The Creeks promised to accept the United States alone as its trading partner, shutting out Spain.
Actually, both sides had made promises they could not keep. McGillivray fig- ured that the Creeks’ interests were best served by maintaining creative tension between the American and Spanish authorities, and by 1792, he had signed an agreement with the Spanish governor of New Orleans, in which each side offered mutual pledges to protect against encroachments by Georgia settlers. By the time Alexander McGillivray died in 1793, his purported leadership of the Creeks was in serious question, and the Treaty of New York joined the list of treaties never imple- mented. Its promise of federal protection of Creek boundaries was unrealistic from the start, and its pledge of full respect for Creek sovereignty also was only a promise on paper.
At the very start of the new government, in dealing with the Creeks, Washington and Knox tried to find a different way to approach Indian affairs, one rooted more in British than in American experience. But in the end, the demographic imperative of
Conflict on America’s Borders and Beyond 2291789–1800
explosive white population growth and westward-moving, land-seeking settlers, together with the economic imperative of land speculation, meant that confronta- tion with the native population was nearly inevitable. As Washington wrote in 1796, “I believe scarcely any thing short of a Chinese Wall, or line of Troops will restrain Land Jobbers, and the encroachment of Settlers, upon Indian Territory.”
Ohio Indians in the Northwest. Tribes of the Ohio Valley were even less willing to negotiate with the new federal government. Left vulnerable by the 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix (see chapter 8), in which Iroquois tribes in New York had relinquished Ohio lands to the Americans, the Shawnee, Delaware, Miami, and other groups local to Ohio stood their ground. To confuse matters further, British troops still occupied half a dozen forts in the northwest, protecting an ongoing fur trade between British traders and Indians and thereby sustaining Indians’ claims to that land.
Under the terms of the Northwest Ordinance (see chapter 8), the federal gov- ernment started to survey and map eastern Ohio, and settlers were eager to buy. So Washington sent units of the U.S. Army into Ohio’s western half, to subdue the vari- ous tribes. Fort Washington, built on the Ohio River in 1789 at the site of present- day Cincinnati, became the command post for three major invasions of Indian country (Map 9.2). The first occurred in the fall of 1790, when General Josiah Har- mar marched with 1,400 men into Ohio’s northwest region, burning Indian villages. His inexperienced troops were ambushed by Miami and Shawnee Indians led by their chiefs, Little Turtle and Blue Jacket. Harmar lost one-eighth of his soldiers and retreated.
Harmar’s defeat spurred enhanced efforts to clear Ohio for permanent Amer- ican settlement. General Arthur St. Clair, the military governor of the Northwest Territory, had pursued peaceful tactics in the 1780s, signing questionable treaties with Indians for land in eastern Ohio. In the wake of Harmar’s bungled operation, St. Clair geared up for military action, and in the fall of 1791 he led two thousand men (accompanied by two hundred women camp followers) north from Fort Washington along Harmar’s route. A surprise attack at the headwaters of the Wabash River left 55 percent of the Americans dead or wounded; only three of the women escaped alive. The Indians captured valuable weaponry and scalped and dismembered the dying on the field of battle. With more than nine hundred lives lost, this was the most stunning American loss in the history of the U.S. Indian wars.
Washington doubled the U.S. military presence in Ohio and appointed a new commander, General Anthony Wayne of Pennsylvania. About the Ohio natives, Wayne wrote, “I have always been of the opinion that we never should have a perma- nent peace with those Indians until they were made to experience our superiority.” Throughout 1794, Wayne’s army engaged in skirmishes with various tribes. Chief Little Turtle of the Miami tribe advised negotiation; in his view, Wayne’s large army looked overpowering. But Blue Jacket of the Shawnees counseled continued warfare, and his view prevailed.
230 CHAPTER 9 The New Nation Takes Form 1789–1800
The decisive action came in August 1794 at the battle of Fallen Timbers, near the Maumee River. The confederated Indians — mainly Ottawas, Potawatomis, Shawnees, and Delawares numbering around eight hundred — ambushed the Amer- icans but were under-armed, and Wayne’s troops made effective use of their guns and bayonets. The Indians withdrew and sought refuge at nearby Fort Miami, still
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MAP 9.2 WESTERN EXPANSION AND INDIAN LAND CESSIONS TO 1810 By the first decade of the nineteenth century, intense Indian wars had resulted in significant cessions of land to the U.S. government by treaty.
READING THE MAP: Locate the Appalachians. The Proclamation Line of 1763 that ran along these mountains forbade colonists to settle west of the line. How well was that purpose met?
CONNECTIONS: How much did the population of the United States grow between 1750 and 1790? How did this growth affect western settlement?
Map Activity
Conflict on America’s Borders and Beyond 2311789–1800
held by the British, but their former allies locked the gate and refused protection. The surviving Indians fled to the woods, their ranks decimated.
Fallen Timbers was a major defeat for the Indians. The Americans had destroyed cornfields and villages on the march north, and with winter approach- ing, the Indians’ confidence was sapped. They reentered negotiations in a much less powerful bargaining position. In 1795, about a thousand Indians represent- ing nearly a dozen tribes met with Wayne and other American emissaries to work out the Treaty of Greenville. The Americans offered treaty goods (calico shirts, axes, knives, blankets, kettles, mirrors, ribbons, thimbles, and abundant wine and liquor casks) worth $25,000 and promised additional shipments every year. The government’s idea was to create a dependency on American goods to keep the Indians friendly. In exchange, the Indians ceded most of Ohio to the Americans; only the northwest part of the territory was reserved solely for the Indians.
The treaty brought temporary peace to the region, but it did not restore a peace- ful life to the Indians. The annual allowance from the United States too often came in the form of liquor. “More of us have died since the Treaty of Greenville than we lost by the years of war before, and it is all owing to the introduction of liquor among us,” said Chief Little Turtle in 1800. “This liquor that they introduce into our country is more to be feared than the gun and tomahawk.”
France and Britain. While Indian battles engaged the American military in the west, another war overseas to the east was also closely watched. In 1789, monarchy came under attack in France, bringing on a revolution that inspired
Treaty of Greenville 1795 treaty between the United States and various Indian tribes in Ohio. The United States gave the tribes treaty goods valued at $25,000. In exchange, the Indians ceded most of Ohio to the Americans. The treaty brought only temporary peace to the region.
TREATY OF GREENVILLE, 1795 This contemporary painting purports to depict the signing of the Treaty of Greenville. An American officer kneels and writes — not a likely posture for drafting a treaty. One Indian gestures emphatically, as if to dictate terms, but in fact the treaty was completely favorable to the United States. Although Indians from a dozen Ohio tribes gathered at the signing ceremony, this picture shows very few Indians. Chicago History Museum.
232 CHAPTER 9 The New Nation Takes Form 1789–1800
Americans in many states to celebrate the victory of the French people. Even fashions expressed symbolic solidarity, causing some American women to don sashes and cockades made with ribbons of the French Revolution’s red, white, and blue colors. Pro-French headgear for committed women included an elabo- rate turban, leading one horrified Federalist newspaper editor to chastise the
“fiery frenchified dames” thronging Philadelphia’s streets. In Charleston, South Carolina, a pro-French pageant in 1793 united two women as
partners, one representing France and the other America. The women repudiated their husbands “on account of ill treatment” and pledged mutual “union and friendship.” Most likely, this ceremony was not the country’s first civil union but instead a richly meta-
phorical piece of street theater in which the spurned husbands repre- sented the French and British monarchs. In addition to these symbolic actions,
the growing exchange of political and intellectual ideas across the Atlantic helped plant the seeds of a woman’s rights movement in America (see “Beyond America’s Borders,” page 234).
Anti–French Revolution sentiments also ran deep. Vice President John Adams, who lived in France in the 1780s, trembled to think of radicals in France or America. “Too many Frenchmen, after the example of too many Americans, pant for the equal- ity of persons and property,” Adams said. “The impracticability of this, God Almighty has decreed, and the advocates for liberty, who attempt it, will surely suffer for it.”
Support for the French Revolution remained a matter of personal conviction until 1793, when Britain and France went to war and divided loyalties now framed critical foreign policy debates. Pro-French Americans remembered France’s critical help during the American Revolution and wanted to offer aid now. But those shaken by the report of the guillotining of thousands of French people — including the monarch — as well as those with strong commercial ties to Britain sought ways to stay neutral.
In May 1793, President Washington issued the Neutrality Proclamation, which contained friendly assurances to both sides, in an effort to stay out of European wars. Yet American ships continued to trade between the French West Indies and France. In early 1794, the British expressed their displeasure by capturing more than three hundred of these vessels near the West Indies. Clearly, the president thought, some- thing had to be done to assert American power.
Washington tapped John Jay, the chief justice of the Supreme Court and a man of strong pro-British sentiments, to negotiate commercial relations in the British West Indies and secure compensation for the seized American ships. Jay was also directed to address southerners’ demands for reimbursement for the slaves evacu- ated by the British during the war as well as western settlers’ demands to end the British occupation of frontier forts.”
Jay returned from his diplomatic mission with a treaty that no one could love. First, the Jay Treaty failed to address the captured cargoes or the lost property in slaves. Second, it granted the British a lenient eighteen months to withdraw from the frontier forts, as well as continued rights in the fur trade. (This provision disheart- ened the Indians just then negotiating the Treaty of Greenville in Ohio. It was a
Jay Treaty 1795 treaty between the United States and Britain, negotiated by John Jay. It secured limited trading rights in the West Indies but failed to ensure timely removal of British forces from western forts and reimbursement for slaves removed by the British after the Revolution.
Conflict on America’s Borders and Beyond 2331789–1800
significant factor in their decision to make peace.) Finally, the treaty called for repay- ment with interest of the debts that some American planters still owed to British firms dating from the Revolutionary War. In exchange for such generous terms, Jay secured limited trading rights in the West Indies and agreement that some issues — boundary disputes with Canada and the damage and loss claims of shipowners — would be decided later by arbitration commissions.
When newspapers published the terms of the treaty, powerful opposition quickly emerged. In Massachusetts, disrespectful anti-Jay graffiti appeared on walls, and effigies of Jay along with copies of the treaty were ceremoniously burned. Nevertheless, the treaty passed the Senate in 1795 by a vote of 20 to 10. The corre- sponding vote in the House, on funding implementation of the treaty, passed by only 3 votes. The bitter votes in Congress divided along the same lines as the Hamilton- Jefferson split on economic policy.
The Haitian Revolution. In addition to the Indian troubles and the European war across the Atlantic, another bloody conflict to the south polarized and even ter- rorized many Americans in the 1790s. The French colony of Saint Domingue, in the western third of the large Caribbean island of Hispaniola, became engulfed in revo- lution starting in 1791. Bloody war raged for more than a decade, resulting in 1804 in the birth of the Republic of Haiti, the first and only independent black state to arise out of a successful slave revolution.
The Haitian Revolution was a complex event involving many participants, including the diverse local population and, eventually, three European countries. Some 30,000 whites dominated the island in 1790, running sugar and coffee planta- tions with close to half a million blacks, two-thirds of them of African birth. The white French colonists were not the only plantation owners, however. About 28,000 free mixed-race people (gens de couleur) owned one-third of the island’s plantations and nearly a quarter of the slave labor force. Despite their economic status, these mixed-race planters were barred from political power, but they aspired to it.
The French Revolution of 1789 was the immediate catalyst for rebellion in this already tense society. First, white colonists challenged the white royalist government in an effort to link Saint Domingue with the new revolutionary government in France. Next, the mixed-race planters rebelled in 1791, demanding equal civil rights with the whites. No sooner was this revolt viciously suppressed than another part of the island’s population rose up; thousands of slaves armed with machetes and torches wreaked devastation. In 1793, the civil war escalated to include French, Spanish, and British troops fighting the inhabitants and also one another. Led by former slave Toussaint L’Ouverture, slaves and free blacks in alliance with Spain occupied the north- ern regions of the island, leaving a thousand plantations in ruins and tens of thousands of people dead. Thousands of white and mixed-race planters, along with some of their slaves, fled to Spanish Louisiana and southern cities in the United States.
Haitian Revolution The 1791–1804 conflict involving diverse Haitian participants and armies from three European countries. At its end, Haiti became a free, independent, black-run country. The Haitian Revolution fueled fears of slave insurrections in the United States.
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Border of Haiti/ Santo Domingo, 1820
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During the 1770s and 1780s, no one in America wondered publicly about rights for women. Boycotts by the Daughters of Liberty before the Revolution did not challenge gender hierarchy, nor did New Jersey’s handful of women voters (see chapter 8). It took radical ideas from France and Britain to spark new ideas challenging women’s subordinate status in American society.
In France between 1789 and 1793, the revolution against monarchy enlarged ideas about citizenship and led some women to call themselves citoyennes, female citizens. Women’s political clubs, such as the Society of Republican Revolutionary Women in Paris, sent peti- tions and gave speeches to the National Assembly, demanding education, voting rights, and a curbing of patriarchal powers of men over women. In 1791, Frenchwoman Olympe de Gouges rewrote the male revolutionaries’ document The Declaration of the Rights of Man into The Rights of Woman, a manifesto asserting that “all women are born free and remain equal to men in rights.” Another prominent woman, Anne Josèphe Théroigne de Méricourt, maintained a political salon (intellectual gathering), marched around Paris in mascu- line riding attire, and addressed crowds engaged in vio- lent street actions. Her vision went beyond political rights to the social customs that dictated women’s sub- ordination: “It is time for women to break out of the shameful incompetence in which men’s ignorance, pride, and injustice have so long held us captive.”
Although the male National Assembly never approved voting rights for French women in that era, it did reform French civil and family law in the early 1790s. Marriage was removed from the control of the church, divorce was legalized, and the age of majority for women was lowered. A far - reaching change in inheritance law required division of a patriarch’s estate among all his children, regardless of age, sex, and even legitimacy. By contrast, most American states adopted traditional English family law virtually unchanged.
France, Britain, and Woman’s Rights in the 1790s
Beyond America’s Borders
WOMAN’S RIGHTS IN THE LADY’S MAGAZINE, 1792 A Philadelphia periodical published this engraving to accompany excerpts from Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The kneeling woman in eighteenth-century garb holds out a paper entitled “Rights of Woman” to Lady Liberty, imploring her to embrace this new concept. Notice the objects arranged below Lady Liberty. What do they suggest about the picture’s interpretation of the “rights of woman”? Library Company of Philadelphia.
234
French feminism traveled across the Channel to Britain and inspired the talented Mary Wollstonecraft. Born into a respectable but downwardly mobile family, Wollstonecraft took work as a governess before establishing herself as a writer in London. There she met the radical Thomas Paine and the philosopher William Godwin, along with other leading artists and intellectuals. In 1792, she published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, offering a contrast to Paine’s 1791 book The Rights of Man. Paine wrote about property and politics as fundamental rights and never considered women; Wollstonecraft argued that women also had inherent rights. She spoke forcefully about the intellectual equality of the sexes that would become evident once women could get an equal edu- cation. She championed female economic indepen- dence and, most radically, suggested that traditional marriage at its worst was legalized prostitution.
Wollstonecraft’s book created an immediate sensa- tion in America. Excerpts appeared in periodicals, book- stores stocked the London edition, and by 1795 there were three American reprints. Some women readers were cautious. A sixty-year-old Philadelphian, Elizabeth Drinker, reflected in her diary that Wollstonecraft “speaks my mind” on some issues but not others; “I am not for quite so much independence.” A youthful Priscilla Mason delivered a commencement address at her academy, inspired by Wollstonecraft to condemn
“the high and mighty lords” (men) who denied women education and professional opportunities. “Happily, a more liberal way of thinking begins to prevail,” Mason predicted.
Male readers’ responses were also varied. Aaron Burr, a senator from New York, called Wollstonecraft’s book “a work of genius.” A Fourth of July speaker in New Jersey in 1793 proclaimed that “the Rights of Woman are no longer strange sounds to an American ear” and called for revisions in state law codes. Critics of Wollstonecraft were not in short supply. A New York orator on that same July Fourth rejected Wollstonecraft with the claim that woman’s rights really meant a woman’s duty “to submit to the control of that government she has voluntarily chosen” — namely, the government of a husband.
The interest in the rights of woman faded fast, how- ever. The unhappy fate of de Gouges, guillotined in France in 1794, was soon followed by news of Wollstonecraft’s death in childbirth in 1797. Soon there- after, William Godwin, father of her infant daughter, pub- lished details of her unconventional personal life: love affairs, two children conceived out of wedlock, and two suicide attempts. “Her licentious practice renders her memory odious to every friend of virtue,” declared a prominent American minister in 1801, shutting down nearly all possibility for continued public admiration of Wollstonecraft and her ideas about women.
America in a Global Context 1 Contrast the radical ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft with the more moderate concept of “republican
motherhood,” which summarizes American women’s contributions to civil society and family life.
2 Why might Wollstonecraft’s unconventional personal life cast doubt on the value of her ideas about the rights of woman?
CONNECT TO THE BIG IDEA C How did the struggle for women’s rights reflect the struggle to define the new American nation?
235
236 CHAPTER 9 The New Nation Takes Form 1789–1800
White Americans followed the revolution in horror through newspapers and refugees’ accounts. A few sympa- thized with the impulse for liberty, but many more feared that violent black insurrection might spread to the United States. Many black American slaves also followed the revolution, for the news of the success of a first-ever massive revolution by slaves traveled quickly in this oral culture.
The Haitian Revolution provoked naked fear of a race war in white southerners. Jefferson, agonizing over the contagion of liberty in 1797, wrote another Virginia slaveholder that “if something is not done, and soon done, we shall be the murder- ers of our own children . . . ; the revolutionary storm, now sweeping the globe, will be upon us, and happy if we make timely provision to give it an easy passage over our land. From the present state of things in Europe and America, the day which brings our combustion must be near at hand; and only a single spark is wanting to make that day to-morrow.”
Federalists and Republicans By the mid-1790s, polarization over the French Revolu- tion, Haiti, the Jay Treaty, and Hamilton’s economic plans had led to two distinct and consistent rival political groups: Federalists and Republicans. Federalist lead-
ers supported Britain in foreign policy and commercial interests at home, while Republicans rooted for liberty in France and worried about monarchical Federal- ists at home. The labels did not yet describe full-fledged political parties; such division was still thought to be a sign of failure of the experiment in government. Washington’s decision not to seek a third term led to serious partisan election- eering in the presidential and congressional elections of 1796. Federalist John Adams won the presidency, but party strife accelerated over failed diplomacy in France, bringing the country to the brink of war. Pro-war and antiwar antagonism created a major crisis over political free speech, militarism, and fears of sedition and treason.
The Election of 1796. Washington struggled to appear to be above party politics, and in his farewell address he stressed the need to maintain a “unity of government”
Federalists Originally the term for the supporters of the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1787–1788. In the 1790s, it became the name for one of the two dominant polit ical groups that emerged during that decade. Federalist leaders of the 1790s supported Britain in foreign policy and commercial interests at home. Prominent Federalists included George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams.
TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE This French engraving made around 1800 depicts the Haitian leader in full military dress and feathered hat commandingly issuing a document to French officers. Library of Congress.
Why did Congress pass the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Federalists and Republicans 2371789–1800
reflecting a unified body politic. He also urged the country to “steer clear of perma- nent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” The leading contenders for his position, John Adams of Massachusetts and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, in theory agreed with him, but around them raged a party contest split along pro-British versus pro-French lines.
The leading Federalists informally caucused and chose Adams as their candi- date, with Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina to run with him. The Republicans settled on Aaron Burr of New York to pair with Jefferson. The Constitution did not anticipate parties and tickets. Instead, each electoral college voter could cast two votes for any two candidates, but on only one ballot. The top vote-getter became president, and the next-highest assumed the vice presidency. (This procedural flaw was corrected by the Twelfth Amendment, adopted in 1804.) With only one ballot, careful maneuvering was required to make sure that the chief rivals for the presi- dency did not land in the top two spots.
A failed effort by Alexander Hamilton to influence the outcome of the election landed the country in just such a position. Hamilton did not trust Adams; he pre- ferred Pinckney, and he tried to influence southern electors to throw their support to the South Carolinian. But his plan backfired: Adams was elected president with 71 electoral votes; Jefferson came in second with 68 and thus became vice president. Pinckney got 59 votes, while Burr trailed with 30.
Adams’s inaugural speech pledged neutrality in foreign affairs and respect for the French people, which made Republicans hopeful. To please Federalists, Adams retained three cabinet members from Washington’s administration — the secretaries of state, treasury, and war. But the three were Hamilton loyalists, passing off Hamilton’s judgments and advice as their own to the unwitting Adams. Vice Presi- dent Jefferson extended a conciliatory hand to Adams, but the Hamiltonian cabinet ruined the honeymoon. Jefferson’s advice was spurned, and he withdrew from active counsel of the president.
The XYZ Affair. From the start, Adams’s presidency was in crisis. France retaliated for the British-friendly Jay Treaty by abandoning its 1778 alliance with the United States. French privateers — armed private vessels — started detaining American ships carrying British goods; by March 1797, more than three hundred American vessels had been seized. To avenge these insults, Federalists started murmuring openly about war with France. Adams preferred negotiations and dispatched a three-man commis- sion to France in the fall of 1797. But at the same time, he asked Congress to approve expenditures on increased naval defense.
When the three American commissioners arrived in Paris, French officials would not receive them. Finally, the French minister of foreign affairs, Talleyrand, sent three French agents — unnamed and later known to the American public as X, Y, and Z — to the American commissioners with the information that $250,000 might grease the wheels of diplomacy and that a $12 million loan to the French gov- ernment would be the price of a peace treaty. Incensed, the commissioners brought news of the bribery attempt to the president.
Republicans One of the two dominant political groups that emerged in the 1790s. Republicans supported the revolutionaries in France and worried about monarchical Federalists at home. Prominent Republicans included Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.
238 CHAPTER 9 The New Nation Takes Form 1789–1800
Americans reacted to the XYZ affair with shock and anger. Even staunch pro- French Republicans began to reevaluate their allegiance. The Federalist-dominated Congress appropriated money for an army of ten thousand soldiers and repealed all prior treaties with France. In 1798, twenty naval warships launched the United States into its first undeclared war, called the Quasi-War by historians to underscore its uncertain legal status. The main scene of action was the Caribbean, where more than one hundred French ships were captured.
There was no home-front unity in this time of undeclared war; antagonism only intensified between Federalists and Republicans. Republican newspapers heaped abuse on Adams. One denounced him as “a person without patriotism, without phi- losophy, and a mock monarch.” Pro-French mobs roamed the streets of Philadelphia, the capital, and Adams, fearing for his personal safety, stocked weapons in his presi- dential quarters. Federalists, too, went on the offensive. In Newburyport, Massachusetts, they lit a huge bonfire and burned issues of the state’s Republican newspapers. Officers in a New York militia unit drank a menacing toast on July 4, 1798: “One and but one party in the United States.” A Federalist editor ominously declared that “he who is not for us is against us.”
The Alien and Sedition Acts. With tempers so dangerously high and fears that political dissent was akin to treason, Federalist leaders moved to muffle the opposition. In mid-1798, Congress passed the Sedition Act, which not only made conspiracy and revolt illegal but also criminalized any speech or words that defamed the president or Congress. One Federalist warned of the threat that existed “to over- turn and ruin the government by publishing the most shameless falsehoods against the representatives of the people.” In all, twenty-five men, almost all Republican newspaper editors, were charged with sedition; twelve were convicted.
Congress also passed two Alien Acts. The first extended the waiting period for an alien to achieve citizenship from five to fourteen years and required all aliens to register with the federal government. The second empowered the president in time of war to deport or imprison without trial any foreigner suspected of being a danger to the United States. The clear intent of these laws was to harass French immigrants already in the United States and to discourage others from coming.
Republicans strongly opposed the Alien and Sedition Acts on the grounds that they were in conflict with the Bill of Rights, but they did not have the votes to revoke the acts in Congress, nor could the federal judiciary, dominated by Federalist judges, be counted on to challenge them. Jefferson and Madison turned to the state legislatures, the only other competing political arena, to press their opposition. Each man anonymously drafted a set of resolutions condemning the acts and convinced the legislatures of Virginia and Kentucky to present them to the federal government in late fall 1798. The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions tested the novel argu- ment that state legislatures have the right to judge and even nullify the constitution- ality of federal laws, bold claims that held risk that one or both men could be accused of sedition. The resolutions in fact made little dent in the Alien and Sedition Acts, but the idea of a state’s right to nullify federal law did not disappear. It would resurface
Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions 1798 resolutions con- demning the Alien and Sedition Acts submitted to the federal government by the Virginia and Kentucky state legislatures. The res- olutions tested the idea that state legislatures could judge the constitutionality of federal laws and nullify them.
Alien and Sedition Acts 1798 laws passed to suppress political dissent. The Sedition Act crimi- nalized conspiracy and criticism of government leaders. The two Alien Acts extended the waiting period for citizenship and empowered the president to deport or imprison without trial any foreigner deemed a danger.
XYZ affair 1797 incident in which American negotiators in France were rebuffed for refusing to pay a substantial bribe. The incident led the United States into an undeclared war with France, known as the Quasi-War, which intensified antagonism between Federalists and Republicans.
Federalists and Republicans 2391789–1800
several times in decades to come, most notably in a major tariff dispute in 1832 and in the sectional arguments that led to the Civil War.
Amid all the war hysteria and sedition fears in 1798, President Adams regained his balance. He was uncharacteristically restrained in pursuing opponents under the Sedition Act, and he finally refused to declare war on France, as extreme Fed- eralists wished. No doubt he was beginning to realize how much he had been the dupe of Hamilton. He also shrewdly realized that France was not eager for war and that a peaceful settlement might be close at hand. In January 1799, a peace initia- tive from France arrived in the form of a letter assuring Adams that diplomatic channels were open again and that new peace commissioners would be welcomed in France.
Adams accepted this overture and appointed new negotiators. By late 1799, the Quasi-War with France had subsided, and in 1800 the negotiations resulted in a treaty declaring “a true and sincere friendship” between the United States and France. But Federalists were not pleased; Adams lost the support of a significant part of his own party and sealed his fate as the first one-term president of the United States.
The election of 1800 was openly organized along party lines. The self- designated national leaders of each group met to handpick their candidates for presi- dent and vice president. Adams’s chief opponent was Thomas Jefferson. When the election was finally over, President Jefferson mounted the inaugural platform to
CARTOON OF THE LYON-GRISWOLD FIGHT IN CONGRESS Political tensions ran high in 1798. On the floor of Congress, Federalist Roger Griswold called Republican Matthew Lyon a coward. Lyon responded with some well-aimed spit, the first departure from the gentleman’s code of honor. Griswold raised his cane to strike Lyon, whereupon Lyon grabbed fire tongs to defend himself. Madison later commented that the two should have dueled, the honorable way to avenge insults. Library of Congress.
240 CHAPTER 9 The New Nation Takes Form 1789–1800
announce, “We are all republicans, we are all federalists,” an appealing rhetoric of harmony appropriate to an inaugural address. But his formulation perpetuated a denial of the validity of party politics, a denial that ran deep in the founding genera- tion of political leaders.
Conclusion: Parties Nonetheless American political leaders began operating the new government in 1789 with great hopes of unifying the country and overcoming selfish factionalism. The enormous trust in President Washington was the central foundation for those hopes, and Washington did not disappoint, becoming a model Mr. President with a blend of integrity and authority. Stability was further aided by easy passage of the Bill of Rights (to appease Antifederalists) and by attention to cultivating a virtuous citi- zenry of upright men supported and rewarded by republican womanhood. Yet the hopes of the honeymoon period soon turned to worries and then fears as major political disagreements flared up.
At the core of the conflict was a group of talented men — Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, and Adams — so recently allies but now opponents. They diverged over Hamilton’s economic program, over relations with the British and the Jay Treaty, over the French and Haitian revolutions, and over preparedness for war abroad and free speech at home. Hamilton was perhaps the driving force in these conflicts, but the antagonism was not about mere personality. Parties were taking shape not around individuals, but around principles, such as ideas about what constituted enlightened leadership, how powerful the federal government should be, who was the best ally in Europe, and when oppositional political speech turned into treason.
In his inaugural address of 1800, Jefferson offered his conciliatory assurance that Americans were at the same time “all republicans” and “all federalists,” suggest- ing that both groups shared two basic ideas — the value of republican government, in which power derived from the people, and the value of the unique federal system of shared governance structured by the Constitution. But by 1800, Federalist and Republican defined competing philosophies of government. To at least some of his listeners, Jefferson’s assertion of harmony across budding party lines could only have seemed bizarre. For the next two decades, these two groups would battle each other, each fearing that the success of the other might bring about the demise of the country.
1789–1800
1 Why did the Federalist alliance of the late 1780s fracture in the 1790s? Why was this development troubling to the nation? In your answer, cite specific ideological and political developments that hindered cooperation.
2 What provoked the Whiskey Rebellion? How did the government respond? In your answer, discuss the foundations and precedents of the conflict, as well as the significance of the government’s response.
3 Americans held that virtue was pivotal to the success of their new nation. What did they mean by virtue? How did they hope to ensure that their citizens and their leaders possessed virtue?
4 The domestic politics of the new nation were profoundly influenced by conflicts beyond the nation’s borders. Discuss how conflicts abroad contributed to domestic political developments in the 1790s.
MAKING CONNECTIONS
1 How did political leaders in the 1790s attempt to overcome the divisions of the 1780s? (pp. 218–221)
2 Why were Hamilton’s economic policies controversial? (pp. 222–227)
3 Why did the United States feel vulnerable to international threats in the 1790s? (pp. 227–236)
4 Why did Congress pass the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798? (pp. 236–240)
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
Bill of Rights (p. 220)
Report on Public Credit (p. 223)
Report on Manufactures (p. 226)
Whiskey Rebellion (p. 226)
Treaty of Greenville (p. 231)
Jay Treaty (p. 232)
KEY TERMS
Haitian Revolution (p. 233)
Federalists (p. 236)
Republicans (p. 236)
XYZ affair (p. 238)
Alien and Sedition Acts (p. 238)
Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions (p. 238)
Chapter Review MAKE IT STICK
Go to LearningCurve: See what you know. Then review the key terms and answer the questions.
LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com /roarkconcise
241
STUDENT SITE @ bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
The name Tecumseh translates as “Shooting Star,” a fitting name for the Shawnee chief who reached meteoric heights of fame among Indians during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency. From Canada to Georgia, Tecumseh was by all accounts a charismatic leader. Graceful, eloquent, compelling, astute: Tecumseh was all these and more, a gifted natural commander, equal parts politician and warrior.
The Ohio Country, where Tecumseh was born in 1768, was home to some dozen Indian tribes. During the
Revolutionary War, the region became a battleground, and Tecumseh lost his father and two brothers to American fighters. The Revolution’s end in 1783
242
Republicans in Power, 1800–1824
PATRIOTIC PITCHER, 1800 This earthenware pitcher celebrates American military readiness.
A militia officer strikes a springy pose near a cannon, encircled by a toast: “Success to America Whose Militia Is Better Than Standing
Armies.” The picture’s swagger implies a military preparedness that was in fact woefully off the mark in 1800. Pitchers saw daily use
wherever people gathered to eat or drink in homes and taverns. Kahn Fine Antiques/photo courtesy of Antiques and Fine Arts.
Jefferson’s Presidency (pp. 244–248)
Opportunities and Challenges in the West (pp. 248–253)
Jefferson, the Madisons, and the War of 1812 (pp. 254–259)
Women’s Status in the Early Republic (pp. 259–262)
Monroe and Adams (pp. 262–269)
Conclusion: Republican Simplicity Becomes Complex (pp. 269–270)
10
CHAPTER OUTLINE QUICK START
Quickly learn what is important in this chapter by doing the following:
• READ the Chapter Outline to see how the chapter is organized. • SKIM the Chronology on the next page to see what will be covered.
When you are ready, read the chapter and the Essential Questions for each section. Then use the Chapter Review to check what you know.
1800–1824
1800 Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr tie in electoral college.
Gabriel’s rebellion reported.
1801 House of Representatives elects Jefferson president.
Barbary War with Tripoli begins.
1803 Marbury v. Madison. United States warned not to
ship war goods to Britain or France.
Louisiana Purchase.
1804 U.S. defeats Tripoli. Jefferson meets with Osage
Indians.
1804– Lewis and Clark 1806 expedition.
1807 Chesapeake incident. Embargo Act. United States establishes
trade with Comanche Indians.
1808 James Madison elected president.
1809 Treaty of Fort Wayne. Non-Intercourse Act.
1811 Battle of Tippecanoe.
1812 United States declares war on Great Britain.
1813 Tecumseh dies at battle of the Thames.
1814 British attack Washington City.
Treaty of Ghent. Hartford Convention.
1815 Battle of New Orleans.
1816 James Monroe elected president.
1819 Adams-Onís Treaty.
1820 Missouri Compromise.
1823 Monroe Doctrine asserted.
1825 John Quincy Adams elected president by House of Representatives.
brought no peace to Indian country. The youthful Tecumseh fought at the battle of Fallen Timbers, a major Indian defeat, and stood by as eight treaties ceded much of Ohio to the Americans between 1795 and 1805.
Some resigned Indians looked for ways to accommodate, taking up farming, trade, and intermarriage with white settlers. Others spent their treaty payments on alcohol. Tecumseh’s younger brother Tenskwatawa led an embittered life of idleness and drink. But Tecumseh rejected accommodation and instead campaigned for a return to ancient ways. Donning traditional animal-skin clothing, he traveled around the Great Lakes region persuading tribes to join his pan-Indian confederacy. The territorial governor of Indiana, William Henry Harrison, admired and feared Tecumseh, calling him “one of those uncommon geniuses which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions.”
Even Tecumseh’s dissolute brother was born anew. After a near-death experience in 1805, Tenskwatawa revived and recounted a startling vision of meeting the Master of Life. Renaming himself the Prophet, he urged his many Indian follow- ers to regard whites as children of the Evil Spirit, destined to be destroyed.
President Thomas Jefferson worried about an organized Indian confederacy and its potential for a renewed alliance with the British in Canada. Those worries became a reality during Jefferson’s second term in office (1805–1809). Although his first term (1801–1805) brought notable successes, such as the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark expedition, his second term was consumed by the threat of war with either Britain or France, in a replay of the late- 1790s tensions. When war came in 1812, the enemy was Britain, bolstered by a reenergized Indian-British alliance manifested in battles along the Canadian-U.S. border. Among the causes of the war were insults over international shipping rights and the capture of U.S. vessels, along with unresolved tensions with Indians in the Northwest and Southwest.
In the end, the War of 1812 settled little between the United States and Britain, but it was tragically conclusive for the Indians. Eight hundred warriors led by Tecumseh helped defend Canada
CHRONOLOGY
244 CHAPTER 10 Republicans in Power 1800–1824
against U.S. attacks, but the British did not recipro- cate when the Indians were under threat. Tecumseh died on a Canadian battlefield in the fall of 1813. No Indian leader with his star power would emerge again east of the Mississippi.
Tecumseh’s briefly unified Indian confederacy had no counterpart in the young Republic’s confederation of states, where widespread unity behind a single leader proved impossible to achieve. Republicans did battle with Federalists during the Jefferson and Madison administrations, but then Federalists doomed their party by opposing the War of 1812. The next two presidents, James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, congratulated themselves on the Federalists’ demise and Republican unity, but in fact divisions within their own party were extensive. Wives of politicians increasingly inserted themselves into this dissonant mix, managing their husbands’ politicking and enabling them to appear above the fray and maintain the fiction of a nonpartisan state. That it was a fiction became sharply apparent in the most serious political crisis of this period, the Missouri Compromise of 1820.
Jefferson’s Presidency The first presidential election of the new century was an all-out partisan battle. A panicky Federalist newspaper in Connecticut predicted that a victory by Thomas Jefferson would produce a bloody civil war and usher in an immoral
reign of “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest.” Apocalyptic fears gripped parts of the South, where a frightful slave uprising seemed a possible consequence of Jefferson’s victory. But nothing nearly so dramatic occurred. Jefferson later called his election the “revolution of 1800,” referring to his repudiation of Federalist practices and his cutbacks in military spending and taxes. While he cherished a republican simplicity in governance, he inevitably encountered events that required decisive and sometimes expensive government action, including military action overseas to protect American shipping.
TECUMSEH This 1848 engraving was adapted from an earlier drawing of Tecumseh made in a live sitting by a French fur trader in 1808. The engraver has given Tecumseh a British army officer’s uniform, showing that he fought on the British side in the War of 1812. Notice the head covering and the medallion around Tecumseh’s neck, marking his Indian identity. Library of Congress.
How did Jefferson attempt to undo the Federalist innovations of earlier administrations?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Jefferson’s Presidency 2451800–1824
Turbulent Times: Election and Rebellion. The election of 1800 was his- toric for procedural reasons: It was the first election to be decided by the House of Representatives. Probably by mistake, Republican voters in the electoral college gave Jefferson and his running mate, Senator Aaron Burr of New York, an equal number of votes, an outcome possible because of the single balloting to choose both president and vice president. (To fix this problem, the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitu- tion, adopted in 1804, provided for distinct ballots for the two offices.) That meant that the House had to choose between those two men, leaving the Federalist candi- date, John Adams, out of the race. The vain and ambitious Burr declined to concede, so the sitting Federalist-dominated House of Representatives, in its waning days in early 1801, got to choose the president.
Some Federalists preferred Burr, believing that his character flaws made him susceptible to Federalist pressure. But the influential Alexander Hamilton, though no friend of Jefferson, recognized that the high-strung Burr would be more dangerous in the presidency. Jefferson was a “contemptible hypocrite” in Hamilton’s opinion, but at least he was not corrupt. Thirty-six ballots and six days later, Jefferson got the votes he needed to win the presidency. This election demonstrated a remarkable feature of the new government: No matter how hard fought the campaign, the leadership of the nation could shift from one group to its rivals in a peaceful transfer of power.
As the country struggled over its white leadership crisis, a twenty-four-year-old blacksmith named Gabriel, the slave of Thomas Prossor, plotted rebellion in Virginia. Inspired by the Haitian Revolution (see chapter 9), Gabriel was said to be organizing a thousand slaves to march on the state capital of Richmond and take the governor, James Monroe, hostage. On the appointed day, however, a few nervous slaves went to the authorities with news of Gabriel’s rebellion, and within days scores of impli- cated conspirators were jailed and brought to trial.
One of the jailed rebels compared himself to the most venerated icon of the early Republic: “I have nothing more to offer than what General Washington would have had to offer, had he been taken by the British and put to trial by them.” Such talk wor- ried white Virginians, and in the fall of 1800 twenty-seven black men were hanged for allegedly contemplating rebellion. Finally, Jefferson advised Governor Monroe to halt the hangings. “The world at large will forever condemn us if we indulge a principle of revenge,” Jefferson wrote.
The Jeffersonian Vision of Republican Simplicity. Once elected, Thomas Jefferson turned his attention to establishing his administration in clear contrast to the Federalists. For his inauguration, he dressed in everyday clothing to strike a tone of republican simplicity, and he walked to the Capitol for the modest swearing-in ceremony. As president, he scaled back Federalist building plans for Washington and cut the government budget.
Martha Washington and Abigail Adams had received the wives of government officials at weekly teas, thereby cementing social relations in the governing class. But Jefferson, a longtime widower, disdained female gatherings and avoided the women of Washington City. He abandoned George Washington’s practice of holding weekly
246 CHAPTER 10 Republicans in Power 1800–1824
formal receptions. He preferred small dinner parties with care- fully chosen politicos, either all Republicans or all Federalists
(and all male). At these intimate dinners, the president exercised influence and strengthened informal relationships that would
help him govern. Jefferson was no Antifederalist; he had supported the Constitu-
tion in 1788. But events of the 1790s had caused him to worry about the stretching of powers in the executive branch. Jefferson had watched with dis-
trust as Hamiltonian policies refinanced the public debt, established a national bank, and secured commercial ties with Britain (see chapter 9). These policies seemed to Jefferson to promote the interests of greedy speculators and profiteers at the expense of the rest of the country. In Jefferson’s vision, the source of true liberty in America was the independent farmer, someone who owned and worked his land both for himself and for the market.
Jefferson set out to dismantle Federalist innovations. He reduced the size of the army by a third, preferring a militia-based defense, and he cut back the navy to six ships. With the consent of Congress, he abolished all federal taxes based on popula- tion or whiskey. Government revenue would now derive solely from customs duties and the sale of western land. This strategy benefited the South, where three-fifths of the slaves counted for representation but not for taxation now. By the end of his first term, Jefferson had deeply reduced Hamilton’s cherished national debt.
A limited federal government, according to Jefferson, maintained a postal sys- tem, federal courts, and coastal lighthouses; it collected customs duties and con- ducted the census. The president had one private secretary, a young man named Meriwether Lewis, and Jefferson paid him out of his own pocket. The Department of State employed 8 people: Secretary James Madison, 6 clerks, and a messenger. The Treasury Department was by far the largest unit, with 73 revenue commissioners, auditors, and clerks, plus 2 watchmen. The entire payroll of the executive branch amounted to a mere 130 people in 1801.
However, 217 government workers lay beyond Jefferson’s command, all judicial and military appointments made by John Adams as his last act in office. Jefferson refused to honor those “midnight judges” whose hires had not yet been fully processed. One disappointed job seeker, William Marbury, sued the new secretary of state, James Madison, for failure to make good on the appointment. This action gave rise to a
THOMAS JEFFERSON, BY JOHN TRUMBULL This portrait of Jefferson was made in the late 1780s, when he was
a young widower and lived in Paris as a diplomat with his daughters and slave Sally Hemings. In 1802, a scandal erupted when a journalist charged that Jefferson had fathered several children by Hemings. DNA evidence and historical evidence of Jefferson’s whereabouts during the start of Hemings’s pregnancies make a powerful case that he did father at least some of the children. © Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello.
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Jefferson’s Presidency 2471800–1824
landmark Supreme Court case, Marbury v. Madison, decided in 1803. The Court ruled that although Marbury’s commission was valid and the new president should have delivered it, the Court could not compel him to do so. What made the case sig- nificant was little noted at the time: The Court found that the grounds of Marbury’s suit, resting in the Judiciary Act of 1789, were in conflict with the Constitution. For the first time, the Court disallowed a federal law on the grounds that it was unconstitutional.
Dangers Overseas: The Barbary Wars. Jefferson’s desire to keep govern- ment and the military small met a severe test in the western Mediterranean Sea, where U.S. trading interests ran afoul of several states on the northern coast of Africa. For well over a century, Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, called the Bar- bary States by Americans, controlled all Mediterranean shipping traffic by demand- ing large annual payments (called “tribute”) for safe passage. Countries electing not to pay found their ships and crews at risk for seizure. After several years in which some hundred American crew members were taken captive, the United States agreed to pay $50,000 a year in tribute.
In May 1801, when the monarch of Tripoli failed to secure a large increase in his tribute, he declared war on the United States. Jefferson considered such payments extortion, and he sent four warships to the Mediterranean to protect U.S. shipping. From 1801 to 1803, U.S. frigates engaged in skirmishes with Barbary privateers.
Then, in late 1803, the USS Philadelphia ran aground near Tripoli’s harbor and was captured along with its 300-man crew. In early 1804, a U.S. naval ship com- manded by Lieutenant Stephen Decatur sailed into the harbor after dark and set the
Marbury v. Madison 1803 Supreme Court case that established the concept of judicial review in finding that parts of the Judiciary Act of 1789 were in conflict with the Constitution. The Supreme Court assumed legal authority to overrule acts of other branches of the government.
THE BURNING OF THE FRIGATE PHILADELPHIA IN TRIPOLI HARBOR, 1804 After the capture of the warship Philadelphia in 1803, Commander Stephen Decatur engineered a daring nighttime raid to destroy the vessel. With his men concealed, Decatur sailed into the harbor using an Arabic-speaking pilot to fool harbor sentries. The Americans quickly boarded the Philadelphia and set it ablaze, forcing the Tripolitan guards to swim to shore. Decatur departed with only one injured man. The Mariners Museum, Newport News, Virginia.
248 CHAPTER 10 Republicans in Power 1800–1824
Philadelphia on fire, rendering it useless to the Tripoli monarch. Later that year, a small force of U.S. ships attacked the harbor and damaged or destroyed 19 Tripolitan ships and bombarded the city, winning high praise and respect from European gov- ernments. Yet the sailors from the Philadelphia remained in captivity.
In 1805, William Eaton, an American officer stationed in Tunis, requested a thousand Marines to invade Tripoli, but Secretary of State James Madison rejected the plan. On his own, Eaton assembled a force of four hundred men (mostly Greek and Egyptian mercenaries plus eight Marines) and marched them over five hundred miles of desert for a surprise attack on Tripoli’s second-largest city. Amazingly, he succeeded. The monarch of Tripoli yielded, released the prisoners taken from the Philadelphia, and negotiated a treaty in 1805 with the United States.
Periodic attacks by Algiers and Tunis continued to plague American ships dur- ing Jefferson’s second term of office and into his successor’s. This Second Barbary War ended in 1815 when the hero of 1804, Stephen Decatur, now a captain, arrived on the northern coast of Africa with a fleet of 27 ships. By show of force, he engi- neered three treaties that put an end to the tribute system and provided reparations for damages to U.S. ships. Decatur was widely hailed for restoring honor to the United States.
Opportunities and Challenges in the West
Jefferson set aside his cautious exercise of federal power to take advantage of an unexpected offer from France to buy the Louisiana Territory. The president sent four expedi- tions into the prairie and mountains to explore this huge
acquisition of land. The powerful Osage of the Arkansas River valley responded to overtures for an alliance and were soon lavishly welcomed by Jefferson in Washington City, but the even more powerful Comanche of the southern Great Plains stood their ground against all invaders. Meanwhile, the expedition by Lewis and Clark, the longest and northernmost trek of the four launched by Jefferson, mapped U.S. terrain all the way to the Pacific Ocean, giving a boost to expansionist aspirations.
The Louisiana Purchase. In 1763, at the end of the Seven Years’ War, a large area west of the United States shifted from France to Spain, but Spain never effec- tively controlled it (see chapter 6). Centered on the Great Plains, it was home to Indian tribes, most notably the powerful and expansionist Comanche nation. New Orleans was Spain’s principal stronghold, a city strategically sited on the Mississippi River near its outlet to the Gulf of Mexico. Spain profited modestly from trade taxes it imposed on the small flow of agricultural products shipped down the river from American farms in the western parts of Kentucky and Tennessee.
Spanish officials in New Orleans and St. Louis worried that their sparse popula- tion could not withstand an anticipated westward movement of Americans. At first
Why was Spain concerned that France sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Opportunities and Challenges in the West 2491800–1824
they hoped for a Spanish-Indian alliance to halt the expected demographic wave, but defending many hundreds of miles along the Mississippi River against Americans on the move was a daunting prospect. Thus, in 1800 Spain struck a secret deal to return this trans-Mississippi territory to France, in the hopes that a French Louisiana would provide a buffer zone between Spain’s more valuable holdings in northern Mexico and the land-hungry Americans. The French emperor Napoleon accepted the trans- fer and agreed to Spain’s condition that France could not sell Louisiana to anyone without Spain’s permission.
From the U.S. perspective, Spain had proved a weak western neighbor, but France was another story. Jefferson was so alarmed by the rumored transfer that he instructed Robert R. Livingston, America’ s minister in France, to try to buy New Orleans. When Livingston hinted that the United States might seize it if buying was not an option, the French negotiator asked him to name his price for the entire Louisiana Territory from the Gulf of Mexico north to Canada. Livingston shrewdly stalled and within days accepted the bargain price of $15 million (Map 10.1).
On the verge of war with Britain, France needed both money and friendly neutral- ity from the United States, and it got both from the quick sale of the Louisiana Territory. In addition, the recent and costly loss of Haiti as a colony made a French presence in New Orleans less feasible as well. But in selling Louisiana to the United States, France had broken its agreement with Spain, which protested that the sale was illegal.
Moreover, there was no clarity on the western border of this land transfer. Spain claimed that the border was about one hundred miles west of the Mississippi River, while in Jefferson’s eyes it was some eight hundred miles farther west, defined by the crest of the Rocky Mountains. When Livingston pressured the French negotiator to clarify his country’s understanding of the boundary, the negotiator replied, “I can give you no direction. You have made a noble bargain for yourself, and I suppose you will make the most of it.”
Jefferson gained congressional approval for the Louisiana Purchase, but without the votes of Federalist New England, which was anxious about the geo- graphic balance of power under threat by such a large acquisition of land. In late 1803, the American army took formal control of the Louisiana Territory, and the United States nearly doubled in size — at least on paper.
The Lewis and Clark Expedition. Jefferson quickly launched four government- financed expeditions up the river valleys of the new territory to establish relationships with Indian tribes and to determine Spanish influence and presence. The first set out in 1804 to explore the upper reaches of the Missouri River. Jefferson appointed twenty- eight-year-old Meriwether Lewis, his secretary, to head the expedition and instructed him to investigate Indian cultures, to collect plant and animal specimens, and to chart the geography of the West. (See “Visualizing His- tory,” page 252.) Congress wanted the expedition to scout locations for military posts, negotiate fur trade agreements, and identify river routes to the West (see Map 10.1).
For his co-leader, Lewis chose Kentuckian William Clark, a veteran of the 1790s Indian wars. With a crew of forty-five, the explorers left St. Louis
Louisiana Purchase 1803 purchase of French territory west of the Mississippi River that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada. The Louisiana Purchase nearly doubled the size of the United States and opened the way for future American expansion west.
250 CHAPTER 10 Republicans in Power 1800–1824
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MAP 10.1 JEFFERSON’S EXPEDITIONS IN THE WEST, 1804–1806 The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 brought the United States a large territory without clear boundaries. Jefferson sent off four scientific expeditions to take stock of the land’s possibilities and to assess the degree of potential antagonism from Indian and Spanish inhabitants.
READING THE MAP: How did the size of the newly acquired territory compare to the land area of the existing American states and territories? What natural features of the land might have suggested boundaries for the Louisiana Purchase? Did those natural features coincide with actual patterns of human habitation already in place?
CONNECTIONS: What political events in Europe created the opportunity for the Jefferson administration to purchase Louisiana? How did the acquisition of Louisiana affect Spain’s hold on North America?
Opportunities and Challenges in the West 2511800–1824
in the spring of 1804, working their way northwest up the Missouri River. They camped for the winter at a Mandan village in what is now central North Dakota.
The following spring, the explorers headed west, accompanied by a sixteen- year-old Shoshoni woman named Sacajawea. Kidnapped by Mandans at about age ten, she had been sold to a French trapper as a slave/wife. Hers was not a unique story among Indian women; such women knew several languages, making them valuable translators and mediators. Further, Sacajawea and her new baby allowed the American expedition to appear peaceful to suspicious tribes. As Lewis wrote in his journal, “No woman ever accompanies a war party of Indians in this quarter.”
The Lewis and Clark expedition reached the Pacific Ocean at the mouth of the Columbia River in November 1805. When the two leaders returned home the following year, they were greeted as national heroes. They had established favorable relations with dozens of Indian tribes; they had collected invaluable information on the peoples, soils, plants, animals, and geography of the West; and they had inspired a nation of restless explorers and solitary imitators.
Osage and Comanche Indians. The three additional expeditions set forth between 1804 and 1806 to probe the contested southwestern border of the Louisiana Purchase. The first exploring party ascended the Red River to the Ouachita River, ending at a hot springs in present-day Arkansas. Two years later, the second group followed the Red River west into eastern Texas, and the third embarked from St. Louis and traveled west, deep into the Rockies. This third group, led by Zebulon Pike, had gone too far, in the view of the Spaniards: Pike and his men were arrested, taken to northern Mexico, and soon released.
Of the scores of Indian tribes in this lower Great Plains region, two enjoyed reputa- tions for territorial dominance. The Osage ruled the land between the Missouri and the lower Arkansas rivers, while the trading and raiding grounds of the Comanche stretched from the upper Arkansas River to the Rockies and south into Texas, a vast area called Comanchería. Both were formidable tribes that proved equal to the Spaniards. The Osage accomplished this through careful diplomacy and periodic shows of strength, the Comanche by expert horsemanship, a brisk trade in guns and captives, and a readi- ness to employ deadly force.
In 1804, Jefferson invited Osage tribe leaders to Washington City and greeted them with ceremonies and gifts. He positioned the Osage as equals of the Americans: “The great spirit has given you strength & has given us strength, not that we might hurt one another, but to do each other all the good in our power.” Jefferson wanted a trade agreement that would introduce new agricultural tools to the Osage: hoes and ploughs for the men; spinning wheels and looms for the women. These gendered tools signified a departure from the native gender system in which women tended crops while men hunted game. With an agricultural civilization, men would give up the hunt and thus need far less land to sustain their communities. In exchange, the Osage asked for protection against Indian refugees displaced by American settlers east of the Mississippi. Jefferson’s Osage alliance soon proved to be quite expensive, driven up by the costs of providing defense, brokering treaties, and giving gifts all
Lewis and Clark expedition 1804–1806 expedition led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark that explored the trans-Mississippi West for the U.S. government. The expedition’s mission was scientific, political, and geographic.
252 CHAPTER 10 Republicans in Power 1800–1824
around. In 1806, a second ceremonial visit to Washington and other eastern cities by a dozen Osage leaders cost the federal government $10,000.
These promising peace initiatives were short-lived. By 1808, intertribal warfare was on the rise, and the governor of the Louisiana Territory declared
that the U.S. government no longer had an obligation to protect the Osage. Jefferson’s presidency was waning, and soon the practice of whittling away
Indian lands through coercive treaties, so familiar to men like Tecumseh, reas- serted itself. Four treaties between 1808 and 1839 diminished the Osage lands, and by the 1860s they were relocated to present-day Oklahoma.
By contrast, the Comanche resisted attempts to dominate them. European maps marking Spanish ownership of vast North American lands simply did not
correspond to the reality on the ground, and for decades after the Louisiana
Cultural Exchange on the Lewis and Clark Trail
Visualizing History THOMAS JEFFERSON’S PEACE MEDAL, 1801
BLUE TRADE BEADS
Lewis and Clark carried many gifts for the Indians they anticipated meeting as they traveled up the Missouri River toward the Rocky Mountains. Intended to signal goodwill and respect, some of the gifts held other subtle meanings as well.
Upon encountering new tribes, the explorers presented high-ranking Indian leaders with silver medals bearing the likeness of President Jefferson, in two-, three-, or four-inch sizes. Imagine the Indian recipients’ reactions. What specific message might the image of the president convey? On what basis do you think the explorers chose to distribute the various sizes?
The explorers traveled with ornamental trinkets (“ear bobs,” silk handkerchiefs, ivory combs, ribbons) as well as practical goods (brass buttons, needles and thread, blankets, calico shirts) that demonstrated American manufacturing and handcraft. They carried a few small mirrors and magnifying glasses but on one occasion found that making fire with the latter engendered suspicion, not goodwill. Blue glass beads — portable and inexpensive — were a sought-after gift, leading Clark to observe that beads “may be justly compared to gold and Silver among civilized nations.”
Jefferson pointedly urged Lewis to take small hand-cranked corn mills, to accul- turate the native women to American household technology. Indian women, with full charge of corn agriculture and its preparation as food, used mortars and pestles to pulverize dried kernels. Each time Lewis and Clark presented tribal chiefs with a corn mill and demonstrated its use, the recipients professed to be “highly pleased.”
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Opportunities and Challenges in the West 2531800–1824
Purchase of 1803, nothing much changed. In 1807, a newly appointed U.S. Indian agent invited Comanche leaders to Natchitoches in Louisiana, where he proclaimed an improbable solidarity with the Comanche: “It is now so long since our Ancestors came from beyond the great Water that we have no remembrance of it. We ourselves are Natives of the Same land that you are, in other words white Indians, we therefore Should feel & live together like brothers & Good Neighbours.” Trade relations flour- ished, with American traders allowed to enter Comanchería to attend local market fairs, selling weapons, cloth, and household metal goods in exchange for horses, bison, and furs. No matter what the map of the United States looked like, on the ground Comanchería remained under the control of the Comanches and thus off-limits to settlement by white Americans until later in the nineteenth century (see Map 10.1).
Yet a year later, a fur trader visiting the Mandan nation wrote, “I saw the remains of an excellent large corn mill, which the foolish fellows had demol- ished to barb their arrows.” Did the explorers perhaps fail in their mission by giving the mill to male leaders instead of to women? Or could this repurposing of the food grinder be read as a rejection by the women themselves of Americans’ gendered practices?
The explorers received gifts as well. The most impressive was the necklace shown here, made of thirty-five four-inch grizzly bear claws. The explorers encoun- tered a number of Indian men wearing bear claw “collars” (Lewis’s term for it). For many tribes, bears were sacred animals, and their claws embodied spiritual power. Grizzlies are large (up to nine hundred pounds) and aggressive, so acquiring so many claws without firearms clearly took extraordinary cour- age. Can you imagine the impact of wearing such an ornament when meeting visitors from a distant and unknown society? Was it a forceful show of courage and power? Why might Indians bestow this rare necklace on the explorers? Did it honor their manly courage? Or promote a spiritual brotherhood? Or might it have been intended to discourage further shootings of the sacred bears?
SOURCE: Jefferson’s medal: Research Division of the Oklahoma Historical Society; Trade beads: Lewis & Clark Mandan Foundation; Corn mill: The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation; Bear claw necklace: © President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology number 41-54-10/99700 (digital file # 60740049).
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CONNECT TO THE BIG IDEA C Why was the territory of the Louisiana Purchase important to President Jefferson,
and why did he send Lewis and Clark to explore it?
254 CHAPTER 10 Republicans in Power 1800–1824
Jefferson, the Madisons, and the War of 1812
Jefferson easily retained the presidency in the election of 1804, trouncing Federalist Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina. A harder problem was the threat of war with both France and Britain that led Jefferson to try a
novel tactic, an embargo. His successor, James Madison, continued with a modified embargo, but his much narrower margin of victory over Pinckney in the election of 1808 indicated growing dissatisfaction with the Jefferson-Madison handling of for- eign policy.
Madison broke with Jefferson on one very domestic matter: He allowed his gre- garious wife, Dolley Madison, to participate in serious politics. Under James Madison’s leadership, the country declared war in 1812 on Britain and on Tecumseh’s Indian confederacy. The two-year war cost the young nation its White House and its Capitol, but victory was proclaimed at the end nonetheless.
Impressment and Embargo. In 1803, France and Britain went to war, and both repeatedly warned the United States not to ship arms to the other. Britain acted on these threats in 1806, stopping U.S. ships to inspect cargoes for military aid to France and seizing suspected deserters from the British navy, along with many Americans. Ultimately, 2,500 U.S. sailors were “impressed” (taken by force) by the British, who needed them for their war with France. In retaliation against the impressment of American sailors, Jefferson convinced Congress to pass a nonim- portation law banning certain British-made goods.
Jefferson found one event particularly provoking. In June 1807, the American ship Chesapeake, harboring some British deserters, was ordered to stop by the British frigate Leopard. The Chesapeake refused, and the Leopard opened fire, killing three Americans — right at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, well within U.S. territory. In response, Congress passed the Embargo Act of 1807, prohibiting U.S. ships from traveling to all foreign ports, a mea- sure that brought a swift halt to all overseas trade carried in American vessels. Though a drastic measure, the embargo was meant to forestall war by forcing concessions from the British through economic pressure.
The Embargo Act of 1807 was a disaster. From 1790 to 1807, U.S. exports had increased fivefold, but the embargo brought commerce to a standstill. In New England, the heart of the shipping industry, unemployment rose. Grain plummeted in value, river traffic halted, tobacco rotted in the South, and cot- ton went unpicked. Protest petitions flooded Washington. The federal gov- ernment suffered, too, for import duties were a significant source of revenue. The Federalist Party, in danger of fading away after its weak showing in the election of 1804, began to revive.
Secretary of State James Madison was chosen by Republican caucuses — informal political groups that orchestrated the selection of candidates. The Fed-
eralist caucuses again chose Pinckney. Madison won, but Pinckney secured 47 electoral
impressment A British naval practice of seizing sailors on American ships under the claim they were deserters from the British navy. Some 2,500 British and American men were taken by force into service, a grievance that helped propel the United States to declare war on Britain.
Why did Congress declare war on Great Britain in 1812?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
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Jefferson, the Madisons, and the War of 1812 2551800–1824
votes, nearly half of Madison’s total. Support for the Federalists remained centered in New England, and Republicans still held the balance of power nationwide.
Dolley Madison and Social Politics. Although women could not vote and supposedly left politics to men, the female relatives of Washington politicians took on several overtly political functions that greased the wheels of the affairs of state. They networked through dinners, balls, receptions, and the intricate custom of “calling,” in which men and women paid brief visits at each other’s homes. Webs of friendship and influence in turn facilitated female political lobbying. It was not uncommon for women in this social set to write letters of recommendation for men seeking govern- ment work.
When James Madison became president, Dolley Madison, called by some the “presidentress,” struck a balance between queenliness and republican openness. She dressed the part in resplendent clothes, and she opened three elegant rooms in the exec- utive mansion for a weekly open-house party called “Mrs. Madison’s crush” or “squeeze.” In contrast to George and Martha Washington’s stiff, brief receptions, the Madisons’ par- ties went on for hours, with scores or even hundreds of guests milling about, talking, and eating. Members of Congress, cabi- net officers, distinguished guests, envoys from foreign coun- tries, and their womenfolk attended with regularity. Mrs. Madison’s weekly squeeze was an essential event for gaining political access, trading information, and establishing informal channels that would smooth the governing process.
In 1810–1811, the Madisons’ house acquired its present name, the White House. The many guests experienced simulta- neously the splendor of the executive mansion and the atmo- sphere of republicanism that made it accessible to so many. Dolley Madison, ever an enormous political asset to her rather shy husband, understood well the symbolic function of the White House to enhance the power and legitimacy of the presidency.
Tecumseh and Tippecanoe. While the Madisons cemented alliances at home, difficulties with Britain and France overseas and with Indians in the old Northwest continued to increase. The Shawnee chief Tecumseh (see pp. 242–44) actively solidified his confederacy, while the more northern tribes renewed their ties with supportive British agents in Canada, a potential source of food and weapons. If the United States went to war with Britain, there would clearly be serious repercussions on the frontier.
Shifting demographics put the Indians under pressure. The 1810 census counted some 230,000 Americans in Ohio, while another 40,000 inhabited the territories of Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. The Indian population of the same area was much smaller, probably about 70,000.
Embargo Act of 1807 Act of Congress that prohibited U.S. ships from traveling to foreign ports and effectively banned overseas trade in an attempt to deter Britain from halting U.S. ships at sea. The embargo caused grave hardships for Americans engaged in overseas commerce.
DOLLEY MADISON, BY GILBERT STUART The “presidentress” of the Madison administration sat for this official portrait in 1804. She wears a high-fashion empire-style dress, a style worn by many women at the coronation of the emperor Napoleon in Paris. The style featured a light fabric (muslin or chiffon) that dropped from a high waistline straight to the ground, with short sleeves and a daringly low neckline, as shown here. © White House Historical Association.
256 CHAPTER 10 Republicans in Power 1800–1824
Up to 1805, Indiana’s territorial governor, William Henry Harrison, had negotiated a series of treaties in a divide-and-conquer strategy aimed at extract- ing Indian lands for paltry payments. But with the rise to power of Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa, the Prophet, Harrison’s strategy faltered. A fun- damental part of Tecumseh’s message was the assertion that all Indian lands were held in common by all the tribes. “No tribe has the right to sell [these lands], even to each other, much less to strangers . . . ,” Tecumseh said. “Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Didn’t the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?” In 1809, while Tecumseh was away on a recruiting trip, Harrison assembled the leaders of the Potawatomi, Miami, and Delaware tribes to negotiate the Treaty of Fort Wayne. After prom- ising (falsely) that this was the last cession of land the United States would seek, Harrison secured three million acres at about two cents per acre.
When he returned, Tecumseh was furious with both Harrison and the tribal leaders. Leaving his brother in charge at Prophetstown on the Tippecanoe River, the Shawnee chief left to seek alliances with tribes in the South. In Novem- ber 1811, Harrison decided to attack Prophetstown with a thousand men. The
two-hour battle resulted in the deaths of sixty-two Americans and forty Indians before the Prophet’s forces fled. The Americans won the battle of Tippecanoe, but Tecum- seh was now more ready than ever to make war on the United States.
The War of 1812. The Indian conflicts in the old Northwest soon merged into the wider conflict with Britain, now known as the War of 1812. Between 1809 and 1812, Madison teetered between declaring either Britain or France America’s pri- mary enemy, as attacks by both countries on U.S. ships continued. In 1809, Congress replaced Jefferson’s embargo with the Non-Intercourse Act, which prohibited trade only with Britain and France and their colonies, thus opening up other trade routes to alleviate the economic distress of American shippers, farmers, and planters. By 1811, the country was seriously divided and on the verge of war.
The new Congress seated in March 1811 contained several dozen young Repub- licans from the West and South who would come to be known as the War Hawks. Led by thirty-four-year-old Henry Clay from Kentucky and twenty-nine-year-old John C. Calhoun from South Carolina, they welcomed a war with Britain both to justify attacks on the Indians and to bring an end to impressment. Many were also expan- sionists, looking to occupy Florida and threaten Canada. Clay was elected Speaker of the House, and Calhoun won a seat on the Foreign Relations Committee. The War Hawks approved major defense expenditures, and the army soon quadrupled in size.
In June 1812, Congress declared war on Great Britain in a vote divided along sectional lines: New England and some Middle Atlantic states opposed the war, fear- ing its effect on commerce, while the South and West were strongly for it. Ironically, Britain had just announced that it would stop the search and seizure of American ships, but the war momentum would not be slowed. The Foreign Relations Commit- tee issued an elaborate justification titled Report on the Causes and Reasons for War, written mainly by Calhoun and containing extravagant language about Britain’s “lust for power,” “unbounded tyranny,” and “mad ambition.” These were fighting words in a war that was in large measure about insult and honor.
battle of Tippecanoe An attack on Shawnee Indians at Prophetstown on the Tippecanoe River in 1811 by American forces headed by William Henry Harrison, Indiana’s territorial governor. The Prophet Tenskwatawa fled with his followers. Tecumseh, his brother, deepened his resolve to make war on the United States.
War Hawks Young men newly elected to the Congress of 1811 who were eager for war against Britain in order to end impressments, fight Indians, and expand into neighboring British territory. Leaders included Henry Clay of Kentucky and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina.
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Jefferson, the Madisons, and the War of 1812 2571800–1824
The War Hawks proposed an invasion of Canada, confidently predicting victory in four weeks. Instead, the war lasted two and a half years, and Canada never fell. The northern invasion turned out to be a series of blunders that revealed America’s grave unpreparedness for war against the unexpectedly powerful British and Indian forces (Map 10.2). By the fall of 1812, the outlook was grim.
Worse, the New England states were slow to raise troops, and some New England merchants carried on illegal trade with Britain. The fall presidential election pitted Madison against DeWitt Clinton of New York, nominally a Republican but able to attract the Federalist vote. Clinton picked up all of New England’s electoral votes, with the exception of Vermont’s, and also took New York, New Jersey, and part of Maryland. Madison won in the electoral college, 128 to 89, but his margin of victory was considerably smaller than in 1808.
In late 1812 and early 1813, the tide began to turn in the Americans’ favor. First came some victories at sea. Then the Americans attacked York (now Toronto) and
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258 CHAPTER 10 Republicans in Power 1800–1824
burned it in April 1813. A few months later, Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry defeated the British fleet at the western end of Lake Erie. Emboldened, General Har- rison drove an army into Canada from Detroit and in October 1813 defeated the British and Indians at the battle of the Thames, where Tecumseh was killed.
Creek Indians in the South who had allied with Tecumseh’s confederacy were also plunged into war. Some 10,000 living in the Mississippi Territory put up a spir- ited fight against U.S. forces for ten months. But the Creek War ended suddenly in March 1814 when a general named Andrew Jackson led 2,500 Tennessee militiamen in a bloody attack called the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. More than 550 Indians were killed, and several hundred more died trying to escape across a river. Later that year, General Jackson extracted from the defeated tribe a treaty relinquishing thousands of square miles of their land to the United States.
Washington City Burns: The British Offensive. In August 1814, British ships sailed into Chesapeake Bay, landing 5,000 troops and throwing the capital into a panic. The British troops burned the White House, the Capitol, a newspaper office, and a well-stocked arsenal. Instead of trying to hold the city, the British headed north and attacked Baltimore, but a fierce defense by the Maryland militia thwarted that effort.
In another powerful offensive that same month, British troops marched from Canada into New York State, but a series of mistakes cost them a naval skirmish at Plattsburgh on Lake Champlain, and they retreated to Canada. Five months later, another large British army landed in lower Louisiana and, in early January 1815,
encountered General Andrew Jackson and his militia just outside New Orleans. Jackson’s forces carried the day, and Jackson instantly became known as the hero
Creek War Part of the War of 1812 involving the Creek nation in Mississippi Territory and Tennessee militiamen. General Andrew Jackson’s forces gained victory at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814, forcing the Creeks to sign away much of their land.
THE BURNING OF WASHINGTON CITY This engraving celebrates Britain’s attack on Washington, D.C., in 1814. Disciplined troops control the street in front of the burning White House; the dome of the blazing Capitol is on the right. Some soldiers sought trophies of war that night. Above is James Madison’s medicine chest, plundered by a British soldier. In 1939, his descendant returned the souvenir to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Engraving: Anne S. K. Brown Military
Collection, Brown University Library;
Medicine chest: FDR Library.
tha
Ca Pla an
e J
Women’s Status in the Early Republic 2591800–1824
of the battle of New Orleans. No one in the United States knew that negotiators in Europe had signed a peace agreement two weeks earlier.
The Treaty of Ghent, signed in December 1814, settled few of the surface issues that had led to war. Neither country could claim victory, and no land changed hands. Instead, the treaty reflected a mutual agreement to give up certain goals. The Americans dropped their plea for an end to impressments, which in any case subsided as soon as Britain and France ended their war in 1815. They also gave up any claim to Canada. The British agreed to stop all aid to the Indians. Nothing was said about shipping rights.
Antiwar Federalists in New England could not gloat over the war’s ambiguous conclusion because of an ill-timed and seemingly unpatriotic move on their part. The region’s leaders had convened a secret meeting in Hartford, Connecticut, in December 1814 to discuss a series of proposals aimed at reducing the South’s power and breaking Virginia’s lock on the presidency. They proposed abolishing the Constitution’s three- fifths clause as a basis of representation; requiring a two-thirds vote instead of a simple majority for imposing embargoes, admitting states, or declaring war; limiting the president to one term; and prohibiting the election of successive presidents from the same state. They even discussed secession from the Union but rejected that path. Coming just as peace was achieved, however, the Hartford Convention looked very unpatriotic. The Federalist Party never recovered, and within a few years it was reduced to a shadow of its former self, even in New England.
No one really won the War of 1812. The war did, however, give rise to a new spirit of nationalism. The paranoia over British tyranny evident in the 1812 declara- tion of war was laid to rest, replaced by pride in a more equal relationship with the old mother country. Indeed, in 1817 the two countries signed the Rush-Bagot disarma- ment treaty (named after its two negotiators), which limited each country to a total of four naval vessels, each with just a single cannon, to patrol the vast watery border between them. It was the most successful disarmament treaty for a century to come.
The biggest winners in the War of 1812 were the young men, once called War Hawks, who took up the banner of the Republican Party and carried it in new, expansive directions. These young politicians favored trade, western expansion, internal improvements, and the energetic development of new economic markets. The biggest losers of the war were the Indians. Tecumseh was dead, his brother the Prophet was discredited, the prospects of an Indian confederacy were dashed, the Creeks’ large homeland was seized, and the British protectors were gone.
Women’s Status in the Early Republic Dolley Madison’s pioneering role as “presidentress” showed that elite women could assume an active presence in civic affairs. But, as with the 1790s cultural compromise that endorsed female education to make women into better wives and mothers (see chapter 9), Mrs. Madison and her female circle practiced poli- tics to further their husbands’ careers. There was little talk of the “rights of woman.” Indeed, from 1800 to 1825, key institutions central to the shaping of women’s lives — the legal system, marriage, and religion — proved fairly resistant to change.
battle of New Orleans The final battle in the War of 1812, fought and won by General Andrew Jackson and his militiamen against the much larger British army in New Orleans. The celebrated battle made no difference since the peace had already been negotiated.
Hartford Convention A secret meeting of New England Federalist politicians held in late 1814 to discuss constitutional changes to reduce the South’s political power and thus help block policies that injured northern commercial interests.
How did the civil status of American women and men differ in the early Republic?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
260 CHAPTER 10 Republicans in Power 1800–1824
Nonetheless, the trend toward increased commitment to female education that began in the 1780s and 1790s continued in the first decades of the nineteenth century.
Women and the Law. In English common law, wives had no independent legal or political personhood. The legal doctrine of feme covert (covered woman) held that a wife’s civic life was completely subsumed by her husband’s. A wife was obligated to obey her husband; her property was his, her domestic and sexual services were his, and even their children were legally his. Women had no right to keep their wages, to make contracts, or to sue or be sued. American state legislatures generally passed up the opportunity to rewrite the laws of domestic relations even though they redrafted other British laws in light of republican principles. Lawyers never paused to defend, much less to challenge, the assumption that unequal power relations lay at the heart of marriage.
The one aspect of family law that changed in the early Republic was divorce. Before the Revolution, only New England jurisdictions recognized a limited right to divorce; by 1820, every state except South Carolina did so. However, divorce was uncommon and in many states could be obtained only by petition to the state’s legis- lature, a daunting obstacle for many ordinary people. A mutual wish to terminate a marriage was never sufficient grounds for a legal divorce. A New York judge affirmed that “it would be aiming a deadly blow at public morals to decree a dissolution of the marriage contract merely because the parties requested it. Divorces should never be allowed, except for the protection of the innocent party, and for the punishment of the guilty.” States upheld the institution of marriage both to protect persons they thought of as naturally dependent (women and children) and to regulate the use and inheritance of property. (Unofficial self-divorce, desertion, and bigamy were reme- dies that ordinary people sometimes chose to get around the law, but all were socially unacceptable.) Legal enforcement of marriage as an unequal relationship played a major role in maintaining gender inequality in the nineteenth century.
Single adult women could own and convey property, make contracts, initiate lawsuits, and pay taxes. They could not vote (except in New Jersey before 1807), serve on juries, or practice law, so their civil status was limited. Single women’s eco- nomic status was often limited as well, by custom as much as by law. Job prospects were few and low-paying. Unless they had inherited adequate property or could live with married siblings, single adult women in the early Republic very often were poor.
None of the legal institutions that structured white gender relations applied to black slaves. As property themselves, under the jurisdiction of slave owners, they could not freely consent to any contractual obligations, including marriage. The pro- tective features of state-sponsored unions were thus denied to black men and women in slavery. But this also meant that slave unions did not establish unequal power rela- tions between partners backed by the force of law, as did marriages among the free.
Women and Church Governance. In most Protestant denominations around 1800, white women made up the majority of congregants. Yet church leadership of most denominations rested in men’s hands. There were some exceptions, however. In Baptist congregations in New England, women served along with men on church governance
feme covert Legal doctrine grounded in British common law that held that a wife’s civic life was subsumed by her husband’s. Married women lacked independence to own property, make contracts, or keep wages earned. The doctrine shaped women’s status in the early Republic.
Women’s Status in the Early Republic 2611800–1824
committees, deciding on the admission of new members, vot- ing on hiring ministers, and even debating doctrinal points. Quakers, too, had a history of recognizing women’s spiritual talents. Some were accorded the status of minister, capable of leading and speaking in Quaker meetings.
Between 1790 and 1820, a small and highly unusual set of women actively engaged in open preaching. Most were from Freewill Baptist groups centered in New England and upstate New York. Others came from small Methodist sects, and yet others rejected any formal religious affiliation. Prob- ably fewer than a hundred such women existed, but several dozen traveled beyond their local communities, creating converts and controversy.
The best-known exhorting woman was Jemima Wilkinson, who called herself “the Publick Universal Friend.” After a near- death experience from a high fever, Wilkinson proclaimed her body no longer female or male but the incarnation of the “Spirit of Light.” She dressed in men’s clothes, wore her hair in a mas- culine style, shunned gender-specific pronouns, and preached openly in Rhode Island and Philadelphia. In the early nine- teenth century, Wilkinson established a town called New Jeru- salem in western New York with some 250 followers.
The decades from 1790 to the 1820s marked a period of unusual confusion, ferment, and creativity in American reli- gion. New denominations blossomed, new styles of religios- ity gripped adherents, and an extensive periodical press devoted to religion popularized all manner of theological and institutional innovations. In such a climate, the age-old tradition of gender subordination came into question here and there among the most radically democratic of the churches. But the presumption of male authority over women was deeply entrenched in American culture. Even denominations that had allowed women to participate in church governance began to pull back, and most churches reinstated patterns of hierarchy along gender lines.
Female Education. First in the North and then in the South, states and localities began investing in public schools to foster an educated citizenry deemed essential in a republic. Young girls attended district schools along with boys, and by 1830, girls had made rapid gains, in many places approaching male literacy rates.
More advanced female education came from a growing number of private acad- emies. Some dozen were established in the 1790s, and by 1830 that number had grown to nearly two hundred. Students came from elite families as well as those of middling families with intellectual aspirations, such as ministers’ daughters.
The three-year curriculum included both ornamental arts and solid academics. The former strengthened female gentility: drawing, needlework, music, and French
WOMEN AND THE CHURCH: JEMIMA WILKINSON In this early woodcut, Jemima Wilkinson, “the Publick Universal Friend,” wears a clerical collar and body-obscuring robe, in keeping with the claim that the former Jemima was now a person without gender. With hair pulled back tight on the head and curled at the neck in a masculine style of the 1790s, was Wilkinson masculinized. Or did the “Universal Friend” truly transcend gender? Rhode Island Historical Society.
262 CHAPTER 10 Republicans in Power 1800–1824
conversation. The academic subjects included English gram- mar, literature, history, the natural sciences, geography, and elocution (the art of effective public speaking). The most ambi- tious female academies equaled the training offered at male colleges such as Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and Princeton, with classes in Latin, rhetoric, theology, moral philosophy, algebra, geometry, and even chemistry and physics.
Two of the best-known female academies were the Troy Female Seminary in New York, founded by Emma Willard in 1821, and the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, founded by Catharine Beecher in 1822. Both prepared their female students to teach, on the grounds that women made better teachers than did men. Author Harriet Beecher Stowe, educated at her sister’s school and then a teacher there, agreed: “If men have more knowledge they have less talent at communicating it. Nor have they the patience, the long-suffering, and gentleness necessary to superintend the formation of character.”
The most immediate value of advanced female education lay in the self-cultivation and confidence it provided. Female graduation exercises showcased speeches and recitations per- formed in front of a mixed-sex audience of family, friends, and local notables. Academies also took care to promote a pleasing female modesty. Female pedantry or intellectual immodesty triggered the stereotype of the “bluestocking,” a British term of hostility for a too-learned woman doomed to fail in the mar- riage market.
By the mid-1820s, the total annual enrollment at the female academies equaled enrollment at the nearly six dozen male colleges in the United States. Both groups accounted for only about 1 percent of their age cohorts in the country at large, indicating that advanced education was clearly limited
to a privileged few. Most female graduates in time married and raised families, but first many of them became teachers at academies and district schools. A large num- ber also became authors, contributing essays and poetry to newspapers, editing peri- odicals, and publishing novels. The new attention to the training of female minds laid the foundation for major changes in the gender system as girl students of the 1810s matured into adult women of the 1830s.
Monroe and Adams Virginians continued their hold on the presidency with the election of James Monroe in 1816 and again in 1820, when Monroe garnered all but one electoral vote. The collapse of the Federalist Party ushered in an apparent period of one- party rule, but politics remained highly partisan. At the state
PORTRAIT OF EMMA WILLARD Emma Willard, founder of the famed and rigorous Troy Female Seminary, was an exemplary role model to her students. Elizabeth Cady, a student in the 1830s and later an important figure in the woman’s rights movement, recalled that Willard had a “profound self respect (a rare quality in a woman) which gave her a dignity truly regal.” Her confidence shines through in this portrait. Emma Willard School.
How did the collapse of the Federalist Party influence the administrations of James Monroe and John Quincy Adams?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Monroe and Adams 2631800–1824
level, increasing political engagement sparked a drive for universal white male suf- frage. At the national level, ill feelings were stirred by a sectional crisis in 1820 over the admission of Missouri to the Union, and foreign policy questions involving European claims to Latin America animated sharp disagreements as well. Four can- didates vied for the presidency in 1824 in an election decided by the House of Repre- sentatives. One-party rule was far from harmonious.
From Property to Democracy. Up to 1820, presidential elections occurred in the electoral college, at a remove from ordinary voters. The excitement generated by state elections, however, created an insistent pressure for greater democratization of presidential elections.
In the 1780s, twelve of the original thirteen states enacted property qualifica- tions based on the theory that only male freeholders — landowners, as distinct from
“WE OWE ALLEGIANCE TO NO CROWN” John A. Woodside, a Philadelphia sign painter, made his living creating advertisements for hotels, taverns, and city fire engines. He specialized in patriotic paintings and banners carried in parades. At some point in his long career from 1815 to 1850, he created this scene of a youthful sailor receiving a laurel wreath, the ancient Greek symbol of victory, from a breezy Miss Liberty (identified by the liberty cap on a stick). Picture Research Consultants & Archives.
READING THE IMAGE: What might the chain at the sailor’s feet indicate? What do you think the slogan on the banner means? What do you see in the picture that would help date it? (Hint: Examine the flag. And for the truly curious, consider the history of men’s facial hair styles.)
CONNECTIONS: How and why does the painting reference the War of 1812? Regardless of the painting’s date, what message do you think Woodside is trying to convey here?
Visual Activity
264 CHAPTER 10 Republicans in Power 1800–1824
tenants or servants — had sufficient independence of mind to be entrusted with the vote. Of course, not everyone accepted that restricted idea of the people’s role in government (see chapter 8). In the 1790s, Vermont became the first state to enfran- chise all adult males, and four other states soon broadened suffrage considerably by allowing all male taxpayers to vote. As new states joined the Union, most opted for suf- frage for all free white men, which added pressure for eastern states to consider broad- ening their suffrage laws. Between 1800 and 1830, greater democratization became a contentious issue.
Not everyone favored expanded suffrage; propertied elites tended to defend the status quo. But others managed to get legislatures to call new constitutional conventions in which questions of suffrage, balloting procedures, apportionment, and representation were debated. By 1820, half a dozen states passed suffrage reform, some choosing universal manhood suffrage while others tied the vote to tax status or militia service. In the remainder of the states, the defenders of landed property qualifications managed to delay expanded suffrage for two more decades. But it was increasingly hard to persuade the disfranchised that landowners alone had a stake in government. Proponents of the status quo began to argue instead that the “industry and good habits” necessary to achieve a propertied status in life were what gave landowners the right character to vote. Opponents fired back blis- tering attacks. One delegate to New York’s constitutional convention said, “More integrity and more patriotism are generally found in the labouring class of the community than in the higher orders.” Owning land was no more predictive of wisdom and good character than it was of a person’s height or strength, said another observer.
Both sides of the debate generally agreed that character mattered, and many ideas for ensuring an electorate of proper wisdom came up for discussion. The exclu- sion of paupers and felons convicted of “infamous crimes” found favor in legislation in many states. Literacy tests and raising the voting age to a figure in the thirties were debated but ultimately discarded. In one exceptional moment, at the Virginia consti- tutional convention in 1829, a delegate wondered aloud why unmarried women over the age of twenty-one could not vote; he was quickly silenced with the argument that all women lacked the “free agency and intelligence” necessary for wise voting.
Free black men’s enfranchisement was another story, generating much discus- sion at all the conventions. Under existing freehold qualifications, a small number of propertied black men could vote; universal or taxpayer suffrage would inevitably enfranchise many more. Many delegates at the various state conventions spoke against that extension, claiming that blacks as a race lacked prudence, independence, and knowledge. With the exception of New York, which retained the existing prop- erty qualification for black voters as it removed it for whites, the general pattern was one of expanded suffrage for whites and a total eclipse of suffrage for blacks.
The Missouri Compromise. The politics of race produced the most divisive issue during Monroe’s term. In February 1819, Missouri — so recently the territory of the powerful Osage Indians — applied for statehood. Since 1815, four other states had joined the Union (Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, and Alabama) following the
Monroe and Adams 2651800–1824
blueprint laid out by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. But Missouri posed a prob- lem. Although much of its area was on the same latitude as the free state of Illinois, its territorial population included ten thousand slaves brought there by southern planters.
The problem led a New York congressman, James Tallmadge Jr., to propose two amendments to the statehood bill. The first stipulated that slaves born in Missouri after statehood would be free at age twenty-five, and the second declared that no new slaves could be imported into the state. Tallmadge’s model was New York’s gradual emancipation law of 1799 (see chapter 8). It did not strip slave own- ers of their current property, and it allowed them full use of the labor of newborn slaves well into their prime productive years. Still, southern congressmen objected because in the long run the amendments would make Missouri a free state, pre- sumably no longer allied with southern economic and political interests. Just as southern economic power rested on slave labor, southern political power drew extra strength from the slave population because of the three-fifths rule. In 1820, the South owed seventeen of its seats in the House of Representatives to its slave population.
Tallmadge’s amendments passed in the House by a close and sharply sectional vote of North against South. The ferocious debate led a Georgia representative to observe that the question had started “a fire which all the waters of the ocean could not extinguish. It can be extinguished only in blood.” The Senate, with an even number of slave and free states, voted down the amendments, and Missouri statehood was postponed until the next congressional term.
In 1820, a compromise emerged. Maine, once part of Massachusetts, applied for statehood as a free state, balancing against Missouri as a slave state. The Senate fur- ther agreed that the southern boundary of Missouri — latitude 36°30´ — extended west and would become the permanent line dividing slave from free states, guaran- teeing the North a large area where slavery was banned (Map 10.3). The House also approved the Missouri Compromise, thanks to expert deal brokering by Kentucky’s Henry Clay. The whole package passed because seventeen northern congressmen decided that minimizing sectional conflict was the best course and voted with the South.
President Monroe and former president Jefferson at first worried that the Missouri crisis would reinvigorate the Federalist Party as the party of the North. But even ex- Federalists agreed that the split between free and slave states was too dangerous a fault line to be permitted to become a shaper of national politics. When new parties did develop in the 1830s, they took pains to bridge geography, each party developing a presence in both North and South. Monroe and Jefferson also worried about the future of slavery. Both understood slavery to be deeply problematic, but, as Jefferson said, “we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”
The Monroe Doctrine. New foreign policy challenges arose even as Congress struggled with the slavery issue. In 1816, U.S. troops led by General Andrew Jackson invaded Spanish Florida in search of Seminole Indians harboring escaped slaves.
Missouri Compromise 1820 congressional compromise engineered by Henry Clay that paired Missouri’s entrance into the Union as a slave state with Maine’s as a free state. The compromise also established Missouri’s southern border as the permanent line dividing slave from free states.
266 CHAPTER 10 Republicans in Power 1800–1824
Once there, Jackson declared himself the commander of northern Florida, demon- strating his power in 1818 by executing two British men who he claimed were dan- gerous enemies. In asserting rule over the territory, and surely in executing the two British subjects on Spanish land, Jackson had gone too far. Privately, President Monroe was distressed and pondered court-martialing Jackson, prevented only by
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Map Activity
MAP 10.3 THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE, 1820 After a difficult battle in Congress, Missouri entered the Union in 1821 as part of a package of compromises. Maine was admitted as a free state to balance slavery in Missouri, and a line drawn at latitude 36°30’ put most of the rest of the Louisiana Territory off-limits to slavery in the future.
READING THE MAP: How many free and how many slave states were there prior to the Missouri Compromise? What did the admission of Missouri as a slave state threaten to do?
CONNECTIONS: Who precipitated the crisis over Missouri, what did he propose, and where did the idea come from? Who proposed the Missouri Compromise, and who benefited from it?
Monroe and Adams 2671800–1824
Jackson’s immense popularity as the hero of the battle of New Orleans. Instead, John Quincy Adams, the secretary of state, negotiated with Spain the Adams-Onís Treaty, which delivered Florida to the United States in 1819. In exchange, the Americans agreed to abandon any claim to Texas or Cuba. Southerners viewed this as a large concession, having eyed both places as potential acquisitions for future slave states.
Spain at that moment was preoccupied with its colonies in South America. One after another, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and finally Mexico declared themselves independent in the early 1820s. To discourage Spain and other European countries from reconquering these colonies, Monroe in 1823 formulated a declaration of principles on South America, known in later years as the Monroe Doctrine. The president warned that “the American Continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be con- sidered as subjects for future colonization by any European power.” Any attempt to interfere in the Western Hemisphere would be regarded as “the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition towards the United States.” In exchange for noninterference by Europeans, Monroe pledged that the United States would stay out of European struggles.
The Election of 1824. Monroe’s nonpartisan administration was the last of its kind, a throwback to eighteenth-century ideals, as was Monroe, with his powdered wig and knee breeches. Monroe’s cabinet contained men of sharply different phi- losophies, all calling themselves Republicans. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams represented the urban Northeast; South Carolinian John C. Calhoun spoke for the planter aristocracy as secretary of war; and William H. Crawford of Georgia, secre- tary of the treasury, was a proponent of Jeffersonian states’ rights and limited federal power. Even before the end of Monroe’s first term, these men and others began to maneuver for the election of 1824.
Crucially helping them to maneuver were their wives, who accomplished some of the work of modern campaign managers by courting men — and women — of influence. Louisa Catherine Adams had a weekly party for guests numbering in the hundreds. The somber Adams lacked charm — “I am a man of reserved, cold, aus- tere, and forbidding manners,” he once wrote — but his abundantly charming (and hardworking) wife made up for that. She attended to the etiquette of social calls, sometimes making two dozen in a morning, and counted sixty-eight members of Congress as her regular guests.
John Quincy Adams (and Louisa Catherine) were ambitious for the presidency, but so were others. Candidate Henry Clay, Speaker of the House and negotiator of the Treaty of Ghent with Britain in 1814, promoted a new “American System,” a package of protective tariffs to encourage manufacturing and federal expenditures for internal improvements such as roads and canals. Treasurer William Crawford was a favorite of Republicans from Virginia and New York, even after he suffered an incapacitating stroke in mid-1824. Calhoun was another serious contender, having served in Congress and in several cabinets. A southern planter, he attracted northern support for his backing of internal improvements and protective tariffs.
268 CHAPTER 10 Republicans in Power 1800–1824
The final candidate was an outsider and a latecomer: General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee. Jackson had far less national political experience than the others, but he enjoyed great celebrity from his military career. When Jackson’s supporters put his name forward for the presi- dency, and voters in the West and South reacted with enthusiasm, Adams was dismayed, and Calhoun dropped out of the race and shifted his attention to winning the vice presidency.
Along with democratizing the vote, eighteen states (out of the full twenty-four) had put the power to choose mem- bers of the electoral college directly in the hands of voters, making the 1824 election the first one to have a popular vote tally for the presidency. Jackson proved by far to be the most popular candidate, winning 153,544 votes. Adams was second with 108,740, Clay won 47,136 votes, and the debili- tated Crawford garnered 46,618.
In the electoral college, Jackson received 99 votes, Adams 84, Crawford 41, and Clay 37 (Map 10.4). Jackson lacked a majority, so the House of Representatives stepped in for the second time in U.S. history. Each congressional delegation had one vote; according to the Constitution’s Twelfth Amend- ment, passed in 1804, only the top three candidates joined
the runoff. Thus Henry Clay was out of the race and in a position to bestow his support on another candidate.
Jackson’s supporters later characterized the election of 1824 as the “corrupt bar- gain.” Clay backed Adams, and Adams won by one vote in the House in February 1825. Clay’s support made sense on several levels. Despite strong mutual dislike, he and Adams agreed on issues such as federal support to build roads and canals. More- over, Clay was uneasy with Jackson’s volatile temperament and unstated political views and with Crawford’s diminished capacity. What made Clay’s decision look “corrupt” was that immediately after the election, Adams offered to appoint Clay secretary of state — and Clay accepted.
In fact, there probably was no concrete bargain; Adams’s subsequent cabinet appointments demonstrated his lack of political astuteness. But Andrew Jackson felt that the election had been stolen from him, and he wrote bitterly that “the Judas of the West [Clay] has closed the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver.”
The Adams Administration. John Quincy Adams, like his father, was a one- term president. His career had been built on diplomacy, not electoral politics, and despite his wife’s deftness in the art of political influence, his own political horse sense was not well developed. With his cabinet choices, he welcomed his opposition into his inner circle. He asked Crawford to stay on in the Treasury. He retained an openly pro-Jackson postmaster general even though that position controlled thou- sands of nationwide patronage appointments. He even asked Jackson to become
MAP 10.4 THE ELECTION OF 1824
Candidate* Popular
Vote Percent of
Popular Vote Electoral
Vote
John Q. Adams 84
99
37
108,740
153,544
47,136
30.5
43.1
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41 46,618 13.1
Andrew Jackson
Henry Clay
W. H. Crawford
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11 15
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14
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26
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24 3
2 8 8
4 15
87
3 1
3 2
7
1
541
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*No distinct political parties Note: Because no candidate garnered a majority in the electoral college, the election was decided in the House of Representatives. Although Clay was eliminated from the running, as Speaker of the House he influenced the final decision in favor of Adams.
Conclusion: Republican Simplicity Becomes Complex 2691800–1824
secretary of war. With Calhoun as vice president (elected without opposition by the electoral college) and Clay at the State Department, the whole argumentative crew would have been thrust into the executive branch. Crawford and Jackson had the good sense to decline the appointments.
Adams had lofty ideas for federal action during his presidency, and the plan he put before Congress was sweeping. Adams called for federally built roads, canals, and harbors. He proposed a national university in Washington as well as government- sponsored scientific research. He wanted to build observatories to advance astro- nomical knowledge and to promote precision in timekeeping, and he backed a decimal-based system of weights and measures. In all these endeavors, Adams believed he was continuing the legacy of Jefferson and Madison, using the powers of government to advance knowledge. But his opponents feared he was too Hamiltonian, using federal power inappropriately to advance commercial interests.
Whether he was more truly Federalist or Republican was a moot point. Lacking the give-and-take political skills required to gain congressional support, Adams was unable to implement much of his program. He scorned the idea of courting voters to gain support and using the patronage system to enhance his power. He often made appointments to placate enemies rather than to reward friends. A story of a toast offered to the president may well have been mythical, but it came to summarize Adams’s precarious hold on leadership. A dignitary raised a glass and said, “May he strike confusion to his foes,” to which another voice scornfully chimed in, “as he has already done to his friends.”
Conclusion: Republican Simplicity Becomes Complex The Jeffersonian Republicans at first tried to undo much of what the Federalists had created in the 1790s, but their promise of a simpler government gave way to the complexities of domestic and foreign issues. The Louisiana Purchase and the Barbary Wars required a powerful government response, and the challenges posed by Britain on the seas finally drew America into declaring war on the one- time mother country. The War of 1812, joined by restive Indian nations fighting with the British, was longer and more costly than anticipated, and it ended inconclusively.
The war elevated to national prominence General Andrew Jackson, whose pop- ularity with voters in the 1824 election surprised traditional politicians and threw the one-party rule of Republicans into a tailspin. John Quincy Adams had barely assumed office in 1825 before the election campaign of 1828 was off and running. Reformed suffrage laws ensured that appeals to the mass of white male voters would be the hallmark of all nineteenth-century elections after 1824. In such a system, Adams and men like him were at a great disadvantage.
Ordinary American women, whether white or free black, had no place in gov- ernment. Male legislatures maintained women’s feme covert status, keeping wives
270 CHAPTER 10 Republicans in Power 1800–1824
dependent on husbands. A few women found a pathway to greater personal auton- omy through religion, while many others benefited from expanded female schooling in schools and academies. These substantial gains in education would blossom into a major transformation of gender in the 1830s and 1840s.
Two other developments would prove momentous in later decades. The bitter debate over slavery that surrounded the Missouri Compromise accentuated the seri- ous divisions between northern and southern states — divisions that would only widen in the decades to come. And Jefferson’s long embargo and Madison’s wartime trade stoppage gave a big boost to American manufacturing by removing competi- tion with British factories. When peace returned in 1815, the years of independent development burst forth into a period of sustained economic growth that continued nearly unabated into the mid-nineteenth century.
1800–1824
1 Describe Jefferson’s republican vision and his successes and failures in implementing it.
2 How did the United States strengthen its control of territory in North America in the early nineteenth century via diplomatic, military, and political means?
3 Although the United States denied its female citizens equality in public life, some women exerted considerable influence. How did they do so?
MAKING CONNECTIONS
1 How did Jefferson attempt to undo the Federalist innovations of earlier administrations? (pp. 244–248)
2 Why was Spain concerned that France sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States? (pp. 248–253)
3 Why did Congress declare war on Great Britain in 1812? (pp. 254–259)
4 How did the civil status of American women and men differ in the early Republic? (pp. 259–262)
5 How did the collapse of the Federalist Party influence the administrations of James Monroe and John Quincy Adams? (pp. 262–269)
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
Marbury v. Madison (p. 247)
Louisiana Purchase (p. 249)
Lewis and Clark expedition (p. 251)
impressment (p. 254)
Embargo Act of 1807 (p. 254)
battle of Tippecanoe (p. 256)
KEY TERMS
War Hawks (p. 256)
Creek War (p. 258)
battle of New Orleans (p. 259)
Hartford Convention (p. 259)
feme covert (p. 260)
Missouri Compromise (p. 265)
Chapter Review MAKE IT STICK
Go to LearningCurve: See what you know. Then review the key terms and answer the questions.
LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com /roarkconcise
271
STUDENT SITE @ bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
In 1837, audiences throughout Massachusetts witnessed the aston-ishing spectacle of two sisters from a wealthy southern family delivering impassioned speeches about the evils of slavery. Women lecturers were rare in the 1830s, but Sarah and Angelina Grimké were on a mission, channeling a higher power to authorize their outspokenness. Angelina explained that “whilst in the act of speaking I am favored to forget little ‘I’ entirely & to feel altogether hid behind the great cause I am pleading.” In their seventy-nine speaking engagements, forty thousand women — and men — came to hear them.
Not much in their family background predicted the sisters’ radical break with tradition. They grew up in Charleston, where their father was chief justice of the State Supreme Court, yet somehow they managed to develop independent minds and a hatred of slavery. In
the 1820s, both sisters moved to Philadelphia and joined the Quakers’ Society of Friends.
The Expanding Republic, 1815–1840
11
CHAPTER OUTLINE QUICK START
Quickly learn what is important in this chapter by doing the following:
• READ the Chapter Outline to see how the chapter is organized. • SKIM the Chronology on the next page to see what will be covered.
When you are ready, read the chapter and the Essential Questions for each section. Then use the Chapter Review to check what you know.
HOUSEHOLD CLOCK This short pendulum clock of 1802 marks the start of a revolution in timekeeping, supplanting sundials and church bells. The speedup of commerce and transporta- tion put a premium on punctuality. Willard’s small handcraft workshop was soon
outpaced by Connecticut entrepreneurs who devised a cheap compact clock made entirely of machine-cut wood. By the mid-1820s, inexpensive clocks became common household items. Willard House and Clock Museum.
272
The Market Revolution (pp. 274–282)
The Spread of Democracy (pp. 282–285)
Jackson Defines the Democratic Party (pp. 285–290)
Cultural Shifts, Religion, and Reform (pp. 290–296)
Van Buren’s One-Term Presidency (pp. 296–299)
Conclusion: The Age of Jackson or the Era of Reform? (pp. 299–300)
The abolitionist movement was in its infancy in the 1830s, cen- tered around Boston’s William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the Liberator, who demanded an immediate end to slavery. In 1835, Angelina Grimké wrote to Garrison, describing herself as a white southern exile from slavery, and Garrison published her letter. Her rare voice of personal testimony caused a stir and propelled her into her new public career.
The sisters’ 1837 extended tour of Massachusetts led to a doubling of membership in northern antislavery societies. Newspapers and religious leaders fiercely debated the Grimkés’ boldness in presuming to lecture men, and the sisters defended their stand: “Whatever is morally right for a man to do is morally right for a woman to do,” Angelina wrote. “I recognize no rights but human rights.” Sarah produced a set of essays titled Letters on the Equality of the Sexes (1838), the first American treatise asserting women’s equality with men.
The Grimké sisters’ innovative radicalism was part of a vibrant, contested public life that came alive in the United States of the 1830s. This decade — often summed up as the Age of Jackson, in honor of the larger-than-life president — was a time of rapid economic, political, and social change. Andrew Jackson’s bold self-confidence mirrored the new confidence of American society in the years after 1815. An entrepre- neurial spirit gripped the country, producing a market revolution of unprecedented scale. Old social hierarchies eroded; ordinary men dreamed of moving high up the ladder of success. Stunning advances in transportation and economic productivity fueled such dreams and propelled thousands to travel west or to cities. Urban growth and technological change fostered the diffusion of a distinctive and lively public culture, spread mainly through the increased circulation of newspapers and also by thousands of public lecturers, like the Grimké sisters, allowing popular opinions to coalesce and intensify.
Expanded communication transformed politics dramatically. Sharp disagreements over the best way to promote individual liberty, eco- nomic opportunity, and national prosperity in the new economy defined key differences between presidential parties emerging in the early 1830s, attracting large numbers of white male voters into their ranks. Religion became democratized as well. A nationwide evangelical revival brought its adherents the certainty that salvation was now available to all.
Yet there were downsides. Steamboats blew up, banks and busi- nesses periodically collapsed, alcoholism rates soared, Indians were killed or relocated farther west, and slavery continued to expand. The brash
CHRONOLOGY
1807 Robert Fulton sets off steam- boat craze.
1816 Second Bank of the United States chartered.
1817 American Colonization Society founded.
1819 Economic panic.
1825 Erie Canal completed in New York.
1826 American Temperance Society founded.
1828 Tariff of Abominations.
Andrew Jackson elected president.
1829 David Walker’s Appeal . . . to the Coloured Citizens of the World.
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad begun.
1830 Indian Removal Act.
1830– Charles Grandison Finney 1831 preaches in Rochester,
New York.
1831 William Lloyd Garrison starts Liberator.
1832 Massacre of Sauk and Fox Indians.
Worcester v. Georgia. Jackson vetoes charter
renewal of Bank of the United States.
New England Anti-Slavery Society founded.
1833 South Carolina nullifies federal tariffs.
New York and Philadelphia antislavery societies founded.
New York Female Moral Reform Society founded.
1834 Female mill workers strike in Lowell, Massachusetts, and again in 1836.
1836 Martin Van Buren elected president.
American Temperance Union founded.
1837 Economic panic.
1838 Cherokee Trail of Tears.
1839 Economic panic.
1840 William Henry Harrison elected president.
274 CHAPTER 11 The Expanding Republic 1815–1840
confidence that turned some people into rugged, self-promoting individuals inspired others to think about the human costs of rapid economic expansion and thus about reforming society in dramatic ways. The common denominator was a faith that people and societies could shape their own destinies.
The Market Revolution The return of peace in 1815 unleashed powerful forces that revolutionized the organization of the economy. Spectacular changes in transportation facilitated the movement of com- modities, information, and people, while textile mills and
other factories created many new jobs, especially for young unmarried women. Inno- vations in banking, legal practices, and tariff policies promoted swift economic growth.
This was not yet an industrial revolution, as was beginning in Britain, but rather a market revolution fueled by traditional sources — water, wood, beasts of burden, and human muscle. What was new was the accelerated pace of economic activity and the scale of the distribution of goods. The new nature and scale of production and consumption changed Americans’ economic behavior, attitudes, and expectations.
GRIMKÉ SISTERS Sarah and Angelina Grimké sat for these portraits around 1840, at ages forty eight and thirty five. Day caps were typical indoor wear for most older women and for Quaker women of all ages. Caps kept hair neat and in place. As important, they also signaled modesty, in contrast to fancily coiffed or loose hair, which sent a different signal. Library of Congress.
Why did the United States experience a market revolution after 1815?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
The Market Revolution 2751815–1840
Improvements in Transportation. Before 1815, transportation in the United States was slow and expensive; it cost as much to ship a crate over thirty miles of domestic roads as it did to send it across the Atlantic Ocean. A stagecoach trip from Boston to New York took four days. But between 1815 and 1840, networks of roads, canals, steamboats, and finally railroads dramatically raised the speed and lowered the cost of travel (Map 11.1).
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MAP 11.1 ROUTES OF TRANSPORTATION IN 1840 Transportation advances cut travel times significantly. On the Erie Canal, goods and people could move from New York City to Buffalo in four days, a two-week trip by road. Steamboats cut travel time from New York to New Orleans from four weeks by road to less than two weeks by river.
READING THE MAP: In what parts of the country were canals built most extensively? Were most of them within a single state’s borders, or did they encourage interstate travel and shipping?
CONNECTIONS: What impact did the Erie Canal have on the development of New York City? How did improvements in transportation affect urbanization in other parts of the country?
Map Activity
276 CHAPTER 11 The Expanding Republic 1815–1840
Improved transportation moved goods into wider markets. It moved passengers, too, allowing young people as well as adults to take up new employment in cities or factory towns. Transportation also facilitated the flow of political information via the U.S. mail with its bargain postal rates for newspapers, periodicals, and books. Enhanced public transport was expensive and produced uneven economic benefits, so presidents from Jefferson to Monroe were reluctant to fund it with federal dollars. Instead, private investors pooled resources and chartered transport companies, receiving significant subsidies and monopoly rights from state governments. Turnpike and roadway mile- age increased dramatically after 1815, reducing shipping costs. Stagecoach companies proliferated, and travel time on main routes was cut in half.
Water travel was similarly transformed. In 1807, Robert Fulton’s steam-propelled boat, the Clermont, churned up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany, touching off a steamboat craze on eastern rivers and the Great Lakes. By the early 1830s, more than seven hundred steamboats were in operation on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.
Steamboats were not benign advances, however. The urgency to cut travel time led to overstoked furnaces, sudden boiler explosions, and terrible mass fatalities. By the mid- 1830s, nearly three thousand Americans had been killed in steamboat accidents, leading to the first federal attempt to regulate safety on vessels used for interstate commerce. Environment costs were also large: Steamboats had to load fuel — “wood up” — every twenty miles or so, resulting in mass deforestation. By the 1830s, the banks of many main rivers were denuded of trees, and forests miles back from the rivers fell to the ax. The smoke from wood-burning steamboats created America’s first significant air pollution.
Canals were another major innovation of the transportation revolution. Canal boats powered by mules moved slowly — less than five miles per hour — but the
THE ERIE CANAL AT LOCKPORT The Erie Canal, completed in 1825, was impressive not only for its length of 350 miles but also for its elevation, requiring the construction of eighty- three locks. The biggest engineering challenge came at Lockport, twenty miles northeast of Buffalo, where the canal traversed a steep slate escarpment. Work crews — mostly immigrant Irishmen — used gunpowder and grueling physical labor to blast the deep artificial gorge shown here. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Rush
Rhees Library, University of Rochester.
The Market Revolution 2771815–1840
low-friction water enabled one mule to pull a fifty-ton barge. Several states com- menced major government-sponsored canal enterprises, the most impressive being the Erie Canal, finished in 1825, covering 350 miles between Albany and Buffalo and linking the port of New York City with the entire Great Lakes region. Wheat and flour moved east, household goods and tools moved west, and passengers went in both directions. By the 1830s, the cost of shipping by canal fell to less than one- tenth of the cost of overland transport, and New York City quickly blossomed into the premier commercial city in the United States.
In the 1830s, private railroad companies heavily subsidized by state legislatures began to give canals competition. The nation’s first railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio, laid thirteen miles of track in 1829, and by 1840, three thousand more miles of track materialized nationwide. Rail lines in the 1830s were generally short, on the order of twenty to one hundred miles. They did not yet provide an efficient distri- bution system for goods, but passengers flocked to experience the marvelous speeds of fifteen to twenty miles per hour. Railroads and other advances in transportation served to unify the country culturally and economically.
Factories, Workingwomen, and Wage Labor. Transportation advances accelerated manufacturing after 1815, creating an ever-expanding market for goods. The two leading industries, textiles and shoes, altered methods of production and labor relations. Textile production was greatly spurred by the development of water- driven machinery built near fast-coursing rivers. Shoe manufacturing, still using the power and skill of human hands, involved only a reorganization of production. Both industries pulled young women into wage-earning labor for the first time.
The earliest American textile factory was built in the 1790s by an English immigrant in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. By 1815, nearly 170 spinning mills stood along New England rivers. While British manufacturers hired entire families for mill work, American factory owners innovated by hiring young women, assumed to be cheap to hire because of their limited employment options and their short-term prospects, since most left to get married.
In 1821, a group of Boston entrepreneurs founded the town of Lowell on the Merrimack River, centralizing all aspects of cloth production: combing, shrinking, spinning, weaving, and dyeing. By 1836, the eight Lowell mills employed more than five thousand young women, who lived in carefully man- aged company-owned boardinghouses. A typical mill worker earned $2 to $3 for a seventy-hour week, more than a seamstress or domestic servant could earn but less than a young man’s wages.
Despite the long hours, young women embraced factory work as a means to earn spending money and build savings before marriage; several banks in town held the nest eggs of thousands of workers. Also welcome was the unprec- edented, though still limited, personal freedom of living in an all-female social space, away from parents and domestic tasks. In the evening, the women could engage in self-improvement activities, such as attending lectures. In 1837, 1,500 mill girls crowded Lowell’s city hall to hear the Grimké sisters speak about the evils of slavery.
Largest circle represents 8,000 employees
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COTTON TEXTILE INDUSTRY, CA. 1840
Erie Canal Canal finished in 1825, covering 350 miles between Albany and Buffalo and linking the port of New York City with the entire Great Lakes region. The canal turned New York City into the country’s premier commercial city.
Lowell mills Water-powered textile mills constructed along the Merrimack River in Lowell, Massachusetts, that pioneered the extensive use of female laborers. By 1836, the eight mills there employed more than five thousand young women, living in boardinghouses under close supervision.
278 CHAPTER 11 The Expanding Republic 1815–1840
In the mid-1830s, worldwide growth and competition in the cotton market impelled mill owners to speed up work and decrease wages. The workers protested, emboldened by their communal living arrangement and by their relative indepen- dence as temporary employees. In 1834 and again in 1836, hundreds of women at Lowell went out on strike (see “Documenting the American Promise,” pages 280–281). Such strikes spread; in 1834, mill workers in Dover, New Hampshire, denounced their owners for trying to turn them into “slaves.” Their assertiveness surprised many, but ultimately the ease of replacing them undermined their bargaining power, and owners in the 1840s began to shift to immigrant families as their primary labor source.
The shoe manufacturing industry centered in eastern New England reorga- nized production and hired women, including wives, as shoebinders. Male shoe- makers still cut the leather and made the soles in shops, but female shoebinders working from home now stitched the upper parts of the shoes. Working from home meant that wives could contribute to family income — unusual for most wives in that period — and still perform their domestic chores.
In the economically turbulent 1830s, shoebinder wages fell. Unlike mill work- ers, female shoebinders worked in isolation, a serious hindrance to organized pro- test. In Lynn, Massachusetts, a major shoemaking center, women used female church networks to organize resistance, communicating via religious newspapers. The Lynn shoebinders who demanded higher wages in 1834 built on a collective sense of themselves as women. “Equal rights should be extended to all — to the weaker sex as well as the stronger,” they proclaimed.
In the end, the Lynn shoebinders’ protests failed to achieve wage increases. At-home workers all over New England continued to accept low wages, and even in
MILL WORKER TENDING A POWER LOOM, 1850 This young woman’s main task was the frequent restocking of the wooden shuttle with spindles of thread (shown here), which traveled mechanically over and under the threads mounted on the loom. The worker also had to be alert for sudden breaks of thread, which required a fast shutdown of the loom and a quick repair. Mill worker: American Textile History Museum;
Shuttle with spindles: Picture Research
Consultants & Archives.
The Market Revolution 2791815–1840
Lynn many women shied away from organized protest, preferring to situate their work in the context of family duty (helping their husbands to finish the shoes) instead of market relations.
Bankers and Lawyers. Entrepreneurs like the Lowell factory owners relied on innovations in the banking system to finance their ventures. Between 1814 and 1816, the number of state-chartered banks in the United States more than doubled from fewer than 90 to 208. By 1830, there were 330, and by 1840 hundreds more. Banks stimulated the economy by making loans to merchants and manufacturers and by enlarging the money supply. Borrowers were issued loans in the form of banknotes — certificates unique to each bank — that were used as money for all transactions. Neither federal nor state governments issued paper money, so banknotes became the country’s currency.
Bankers exercised great power over the economy, deciding who would get loans and what the discount rates would be. The most powerful bankers sat on the board of directors for the second Bank of the United States, headquartered in Philadelphia and featuring eighteen branches throughout the country. The twenty-year charter of the first Bank of the United States had expired in 1811, and the second Bank of the United States opened for business in 1816 under another twenty-year charter. The rechartering of this bank would become a major issue in the 1832 presidential campaign.
Lawyer-politicians too exercised economic power, by refashioning commercial law to enhance the prospects of private investment. In 1811, states started to rewrite their laws of incorporation (allowing the chartering of businesses by states), and the number of corporations expanded rapidly, from about twenty in 1800 to eighteen hundred by 1817. Incorporation protected individual investors from being held liable for corporate debts. State lawmakers also wrote laws of eminent domain, empowering states to buy land for roads and canals even from unwilling sellers. In such ways, entrepreneurial lawyers created the legal foundation for an economy that favored ambitious individuals interested in maximizing their own wealth.
Not everyone applauded these developments. Andrew Jackson, himself a skillful lawyer turned politician, spoke for a large and mistrustful segment of the population when he warned about the potential abuses of power “which the moneyed interest derives from a paper currency which they are able to control [and] from the multi- tude of corporations with exclusive privileges which they have succeeded in obtaining in the different states.” Jacksonians believed that ending government-granted privi- leges was the way to maximize individual liberty and economic opportunity.
Booms and Busts. One aspect of the economy that the lawyer-politicians could not control was the threat of financial collapse. The boom years from 1815 to 1818 exhibited a volatility that resulted in the first sharp, large-scale economic downturn in U.S. history. Americans called this downturn a “panic,” and the pattern was repeated in the 1830s. Some blamed the panic of 1819 on the second Bank of the United States for failing to control an economic bubble and then contracting the money supply, sending tremors throughout the economy. The crunch was made worse by a financial crisis in Europe in the spring of 1819. Overseas, prices for American cotton, tobacco,
second Bank of the United States National bank with multiple branches chartered in 1816 for twenty years. Intended to help regulate the economy, the bank became a major issue in Andrew Jackson’s reelection campaign in 1832, framed in political rhetoric about aristocracy versus democracy.
ready to take a diminished price, and continue to labor at wages which will give them from one and a half, to two and a half dollars per week, more than their board. — This, to be sure, is not so much as they have had in past times, nor so much as we hope they will soon have again, but it is more than they can get in any other occu- pation in New England.
SOURCE: The Lowell Journal, February 18, 1834, as reprinted in the New-York Spectator, March 6, 1834. Gale Database, “Nineteenth-Century U.S. Newspapers.”
Anonymous Mill Girls, “Union Is Power” A position paper, quickly drafted, framed the strikers’ goals in terms of “rights” and appealed to the patriotic spirit of the American Revolution to justify their actions.
Our present object is to have union and exertion, and we remain in possession of our own unques- tionable rights. We circulate this paper, wishing to obtain the names of all who imbibe the spirit of our patriotic ancestors, who preferred privation to bondage, and parted with all that renders life desirable — and even life itself — to procure independence for their children. The oppressing hand of avarice would enslave us; and to gain their object, they very gravely tell us of the pres- sure of the times; this we are already sensible of, and deplore it. If any are in want of assistance, the Ladies will be compassionate, and assist them; but we prefer to have the disposing of our charities in our own hands; and as we are free, we would remain in possession of what kind Providence has bestowed upon us, and remain daughters of freemen still.
Mill Girls Stand Up to Factory Owners, 1834 Lowell’s fi rst large “turn out” by mill girls came in February 1834, when factory owners announced a 15 percent wage cut. Newspaper accounts played up the spectacle of young women, thought to be docile, taking to the streets in protest. After four days, the strike fi zzled when the inexperienced workers realized that the owners could easily replace them. But lessons were learned, and a later Lowell “turn out,” in 1836, was sustained for several months.
Documenting the American Promise
DOCUMENT 1
The Lowell Journal Reports the Strike, February 18, 1834 A town newspaper favorable to the factory owners characterized the work stoppage as a delusional farce led by a small number of “wicked girls.”
THE FACTORY GIRLS. — It has become known, from rumor, that a considerable number of the girls employed in the mills of this town turned out on Friday last, to prevent a reduction in wages. . . . It was pro- posed, some time since, to make a very small reduction in the wages of all of the hands on the first of March, and notices to that effect were posted in the mills. . . .
Upon this, several wicked and malicious girls . . . undertook to get up a turn out, with a view to threaten the agents with an entire stoppage of the works, in order to exact the higher rates of wages. . . . On Friday and Saturday from 800 to 1000 girls revolted under the most laughable delusions, that mischief could invent. The first day, processions were formed of about 700 girls, who listened to sundry stimulative exhortations, . . . and marched through the streets, ankle-deep in mud. . . . Saturday became a day of repentance to many; and they would gladly have returned to their business, but for a pledge, cunningly devised, that each who did so, should forfeit five dollars to the rebels. The Sabbath afforded opportunity for a little more cool reflection, and on Monday morning, a large concourse attended by a par- cel of idle men and boys, heard another speech. . . . The result of the whole matter is, that a few of the ring- leaders are refused entrance into the mills, and most of the disaffected, having learned the truth, and becoming sensible of the wicked misrepresentations of which they had nearly been the victims, are returning to their work,
280
DOCUMENT 2
DOCUMENT 3
A Strike Leader Speaks Out, Mid-March 1834 A month later, one of the leaders explained that the strike was caused not only by reduced wages but also by anger at the insolence of wealthy factory owners. Her remarks were published in The Man, a New York paper friendly to workingmen’s issues.
The Lowell Girls have been censured in no measured terms by the Federal press of the east, for the “turn out.” . . . One of the girls has turned round on her accus- ers, and while she does not outstep the modesty of her
sex, her spirit would do credit to any parentage in these or other days. Hear the yankee girl:
“We do not estimate our Liberty by dollars and cents; consequently it was not the reduction of wages alone which caused the excitement, but that haughty, over- bearing disposition — that purse proud insolence, which was becoming more and more apparent — that spirit of tyranny so manifest at present among the avaricious and wealthy manufacturers of this and the old country.
“I have only to add, that if the proprietors and agents are not satisfied with alluring us from our homes — from the peaceful abodes of our childhood, under the false promises of a great reward, and then casting us upon the world, . . . merely because we would not be slaves — . . . let them bring down upon us the whole influence of the rich and noble, the proud and the mighty, all piled upon the United States Bank — steep us in poverty to the very dregs, but we beseech them not to asperse our characters, or stigmatize us as disor- derly persons. Grant us this favor, and give us the privi- lege of breathing the air of freedom in its purity, and we will be content.”
SOURCE: The Man, March 20, 1834. Published in New York City by G. H. Evans. American Periodicals Series Online.
Questions for Analysis and Debate 1 Does the Lowell Journal adequately explain how a few “ringleaders” could motivate over
eight hundred female workers to engage in street protests?
2 Why do the strikers invoke Revolutionary-era ideals of independence and liberty and the phrase “daughters of freemen”? Do these young women feel subordinate and deferential to the factory owners? Were they in fact subordinates?
3 How did the Lowell Journal excuse the wage reduction? What did the strike leader mean by “purse proud insolence”? What are the class dimensions of this episode?
CONNECT TO THE BIG IDEA C How was the “turn out” of female workers at Lowell an unintended consequence of the “market
revolution”?
281
All who patronize this effort, we wish to have discontinue their labors until terms of reconciliation are made.
Resolved, That we will not go back into the mills to work unless our wages are continued to us as they have been.
Resolved, That none of us will go back unless they receive us all as one.
SOURCE: Printed in The Man, February 22, 1834. Published in New York City by G. H. Evans. American Periodicals Series Online.
282 CHAPTER 11 The Expanding Republic 1815–1840
and wheat plummeted by more than 50 percent. Thus, when the banks began to call in their outstanding loans, American debtors involved in the commodities trade could not come up with the money. Business and personal bankruptcies skyrocketed. The intricate web of credit and debt relationships meant that almost everyone with even a toehold in the new commercial economy was affected by the panic. Thousands of Americans lost their savings and property, and unemployment estimates suggest that half a million people lost their jobs.
Recovery took several years. Unemployment declined, but bitterness lingered, ready to be stirred up by politicians in the decades to come. The dangers of a system dependent on extensive credit were now clear. In one folksy formulation that circulated around 1820, a farmer compared credit to “a man pissing in his breeches on a cold day to keep his arse warm — very comfortable at first but I dare say . . . you know how it feels afterwards.”
By the mid-1820s, the economy was back on track, driven by increases in pro- ductivity, consumer demand for goods, and international trade. Despite the panic of 1819, credit financing continued to fuel the system. A network of credit and debt relations grew dense by the 1830s in a system that encouraged speculation and risk taking. A pervasive optimism about continued growth supported the elaborate sys- tem, but a single business failure could produce many innocent victims. Well after the panic of 1819, an undercurrent of anxiety about rapid economic change continued to shape the political views of many Americans.
The Spread of Democracy Just as the market revolution held out the promise, if not the reality, of economic opportunity for all who worked, the political transformation of the 1830s held out the promise of political opportunity for hundreds of thousands
of new voters. During Andrew Jackson’s presidency (1829–1837), the second Ameri- can party system took shape, defined by Jackson’s charismatic personality expressed in his efforts to dominate Congress. Not until 1836, however, would the parties have distinct names and consistent programs transcending the particular personalities running for office. Over those years, more men could and did vote, responding to new methods of arousing voter interest.
Popular Politics and Partisan Identity. The election of 1828, pitting Andrew Jackson against John Quincy Adams, was the first presidential contest in which the pop- ular vote determined the outcome. In twenty-two out of twenty-four states, voters — not state legislatures — designated the number of electors committed to a particular candi- date. More than a million voters participated, three times the number in 1824 and nearly half the free male population, reflecting the high stakes that voters perceived in the Adams-Jackson rematch. Throughout the 1830s, voter turnout continued to rise and reached 70 percent in some localities, partly because of the disappearance of property qualifications in all but three states and partly because of heightened political interest.
Why did Andrew Jackson defeat John Quincy Adams so dramatically in the 1828 election?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
The Spread of Democracy 2831815–1840
The 1828 election inaugurated new cam- paign styles. State-level candidates routinely gave speeches at rallies, picnics, and banquets. Adams and Jackson still declined such appear- ances as undignified, but Henry Clay of Kentucky, campaigning for Adams, earned the nickname “the Barbecue Orator.” Campaign rhetoric became more informal and even blunt. The Jackson camp established many Hickory Clubs, trading on Jackson’s popular nickname, “Old Hickory,” from a common Tennessee tree suggesting resilience and toughness.
Partisan newspapers in ever-larger numbers defined issues and publicized political personalities as never before. Improved printing technology and rising lit- eracy rates fueled a great expansion of newspapers of all kinds (Table 11.1). Party leaders dispensed subsidies and other favors to secure the support of papers, even in remote towns and villages. Political news stories traveled swiftly in the mail, gaining coverage by reprintings in sympathetic newspapers. Presidential campaigns were now coordinated in a national arena.
Politicians at first identified themselves as Jackson or Adams men, honoring the fiction of Republican Party unity. By 1832, however, the terminology had evolved to National Republicans, who favored federal action to promote commercial develop- ment, and Democratic Republicans, who promised to be responsive to the will of the majority. Between 1834 and 1836, National Republicans came to be called Whigs, while Jackson’s party became simply the Democrats.
The Election of 1828 and the Character Issue. The campaign of 1828 was the first national election dominated by scandal and character questions. Claims about morality, honor, and discipline became central because voters used them to comprehend the kind of public official each man would make. Jackson and Adams presented two radically different styles of manhood.
John Quincy Adams was vilified by his opponents as an elitist, a bookish aca- demic, and even a monarchist. They attacked his “corrupt bargain” of 1824 — the alleged election deal between Adams and Henry Clay (see chapter 10). Adams’s supporters countered by playing on Jackson’s fatherless childhood to portray him as the bastard son of a prostitute. Worse, the cloudy circumstances around his mar- riage to Rachel Donelson Robards in 1791 gave rise to the story that Jackson was a seducer and an adulterer, having married a woman whose divorce from her first husband was not entirely legal. Pro-Adams newspapers howled that Jackson was sinful and impulsive, while portraying Adams as pious, learned, and virtuous.
Editors in favor of Adams played up Jackson’s violent temper, as evidenced by his participation in many duels, brawls, and canings. Jackson’s supporters used the same stories to project Old Hickory as a tough frontier hero who knew how to command obedience. As for learning, Jackson’s rough frontier education gave him a “natural sense,” wrote a Boston editor, that “can never be acquired by reading books — it can only be acquired, in perfection, by reading men.”
TABLE 11.1 THE GROWTH OF NEWSPAPERS, 1820–1840
1820 1830 1835 1840
U.S. population (in millions)
9.6 12.8 15.0 17.1
Number of newspapers published
500 800 1,200 1,400
Daily newspapers 42 65 — 138
Whigs Political party that evolved out of the National Republicans after 1834. With a Northeast power base, the Whigs supported federal action to promote commercial development and generally looked favorably on the reform movements associated with the Second Great Awakening.
Democrats Political party that evolved out of the Democratic Republicans after 1834. Strongest in the South and West, the Democrats embraced Andrew Jackson’s vision of limited government, expanded political participation for white men, and the promotion of an ethic of individualism.
284 CHAPTER 11 The Expanding Republic 1815–1840
Jackson won a sweeping victory, with 56 percent of the popular vote and 178 electoral votes to Adams’s 83 (Map 11.2). Old Hickory took most of the South and West and carried Pennsylvania and New York as well; Adams carried the remainder of the East. Jackson’s vice president was John C. Calhoun, who had just served as vice president under Adams but had broken with Adams’s policies.
After 1828, national politicians no longer deplored the existence of political parties. They were coming to see that parties mobilized and delivered voters, sharpened candidates’ differences, and created party loyalty that surpassed loyalty to individual candidates and elections. Adams and Jackson clearly symbolized the competing ideas of the emerging parties: a moralistic, top-down party (the Whigs) ready to make major decisions to promote economic growth com- peting against a contentious, energetic party (the Demo- crats) ready to embrace liberty-loving individualism.
Jackson’s Democratic Agenda. Jackson’s supporters went wild at his March 1829 inauguration. Thousands cheered his ten-minute inaugural address, the shortest in history. An open reception at the White House turned into a near riot as well-wishers jammed the premises, used windows as doors, stood on furni- ture for a better view of the great man, and broke thousands of dollars’ worth of china and glasses. During his presidency, Jackson continued to offer unprecedented hospitality to the public. The courteous Jackson, committed to his image as presi- dent of the “common man,” held audiences with unannounced visitors throughout his two terms.
Past presidents had tried to lessen party conflict by including men of different factions in their cabinets, but Jackson would have only loyalists, a political tactic fol- lowed by most later presidents. For secretary of state, the key job, he tapped New Yorker Martin Van Buren, one of the shrewdest politicians of the day. Throughout the federal government, from postal clerks to ambassadors, Jackson replaced competent civil servants with party loyalists. Jackson’s appointment practices were termed a “spoils system” by his opponents, after a Democratic politician coined the affirmative slogan “to the victor belong the spoils.”
Jackson’s agenda quickly emerged. Fearing that intervention in the economy inevitably favored some groups at the expense of others, Jackson favored a Jeffer- sonian limited federal government. He therefore opposed federal support of trans- portation and grants of monopolies and charters that benefited wealthy investors. Like Jefferson, he anticipated the rapid settlement of the country’s interior, where land sales would spread economic democracy to settlers. Thus, establishing a fed- eral policy to remove the Indians from this area had high priority. Jackson was freer than previous presidents with the use of the presidential veto power over Congress. In 1830, he vetoed a highway project in Maysville, Kentucky, Henry
Candidate Popular
Vote Percent of
Popular Vote Electoral
Vote
Andrew Jackson (Democratic Republican)
178
83
647,286
508,064
56
44John Q. Adams (National Republican)
3 5 9
11 15
11
14
3 5 16
28
16
8
24 6 3 8 8 4
15 87
3
5
5
20
1
MAP 11.2 THE ELECTION OF 1828
Jackson Defines the Democratic Party 2851815–1840
Clay’s home state. The Maysville Road veto articulated Jackson’s principled stand that citizens’ tax dollars could be spent only on projects of a “general, not local” character.
Jackson Defines the Democratic Party In his two terms as president, Andrew Jackson worked to implement his vision of a politics of opportunity for all white men. To open land for white settlement, he favored the relocation of all eastern Indian tribes. He dramatically confronted John C. Cal- houn and South Carolina when that state tried to nullify the tariff of 1828. Disapproving of all government-granted privilege, Jackson challenged and defeated the Bank of the United States. In all this, he greatly enhanced the power of the presidency.
Indian Policy and the Trail of Tears. Probably nothing defined Jackson’s presidency more than his efforts to solve what he saw as the Indian problem. Thou- sands of Indians lived in the South and the old Northwest, and many remained in New England and New York. In his first message to Congress in 1829, Jackson declared that removing the Indians to territory west of the Mississippi was the only way to save them. White civilization destroyed Indian resources and thus doomed the Indians, he claimed: “That this fate surely awaits them if they remain within the limits of the states does not admit of a doubt. Humanity and national honor demand that every effort should be made to avert so great a calamity.” Jackson never publicly wavered from this seemingly noble theme, returning to it in his next seven annual messages.
Prior administrations had experimented with different Indian policies. Start- ing in 1819, Congress funded missionary associations eager to “civilize” native peoples by converting them to Christianity and to whites’ agricultural practices. The federal government had also pursued aggressive treaty making with many tribes, dealing with the Indians as foreign nations (see chapters 9 and 10). By con- trast, Jackson saw Indians as subjects of the United States (neither foreigners nor citizens) who needed to be relocated to assure their survival. Congress agreed and passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830. About 100 million acres of eastern land would be vacated for eventual white settlement under this act authorizing ethnic expulsion (Map 11.3).
The Indian Removal Act generated widespread controversy. Newspapers, public lecturers, and local clubs debated the expulsion law, and public opinion, especially in the North, was heated. “One would think that the guilt of African slavery was enough for the nation to bear, without the additional crime of injustice to the aborigines,” one writer declared in 1829. In an unprecedented move, thousands of northern white women signed anti-removal petitions. Between 1830 and 1832, women’s petitions rolled into Washington, arguing that sovereign peoples on the road to Christianity were entitled to stay on their land. Jackson ignored the petitions.
Why did Jackson promote Indian removal?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Indian Removal Act of 1830 Act that directed the mandatory relocation of eastern tribes to territory west of the Mississippi. Jackson insisted his goal was to save the Indians. Indians resisted the controversial act, but in the end most were forced to comply.
286 CHAPTER 11 The Expanding Republic 1815–1840
ANDREW JACKSON AS “THE GREAT FATHER” In 1828, a new process of commercial lithography brought political cartooning to new prominence. Out of some sixty satirical cartoons lampooning Jackson, only one featured his controversial Indian policy. This cropped cartoon lacks the cartoonist’s caption, important for understanding the artist’s intent. Still, the visual humor of Jackson cradling Indians packs an immediate punch. William L. Clements Library.
READING THE IMAGE: Examine the body language conveyed in the various characters’ poses. Are the Indians depicted as children or as powerless, miniature adults? What is going on in the picture on the wall?
CONNECTIONS: Does the cartoon suggest that Jackson offers protection to Indians? What does the picture on the wall contribute to our understanding of the artist’s opinion of Jackson’s Indian removal policy?
Visual Activity
For many northern tribes, diminished by years of war, removal was already under way. But not all went quietly. In 1832 in western Illinois, Black Hawk, a leader of the Sauk and Fox Indians who had fought in alliance with Tecumseh in the War of 1812 (see chapter 10), resisted removal. Volunteer militias attacked and chased the Indians into southern Wisconsin, where, after several skirmishes and a deadly battle (later called the Black Hawk War), Black Hawk was captured and some four hundred of his people were massacred.
The large southern tribes — the Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole, and Cherokee — proved even more resistant to removal. Georgia Cherokees had already taken several assimilationist steps. They had adopted written laws, including, in 1827, a constitution modeled on the U.S. Constitution. Two hundred of the wealthi- est Cherokee men had intermarried with whites, adopting white styles of housing, dress, and cotton agriculture, including the ownership of slaves. They developed a
Jackson Defines the Democratic Party 2871815–1840
written alphabet and published a newspaper and Christian prayer books in their language. These features helped make their cause attractive to the northern white women who petitioned the government on their behalf. Yet most of the seventeen thousand Cherokees maintained cultural continuity with past traditions.
In 1831, when Georgia announced its plans to seize all Cherokee property, the tribal leadership took their case to the U.S. Supreme Court. In Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the Court upheld the territorial sovereignty of the Cherokee people, recogniz- ing their existence as “a distinct community, occupying its own territory, in which the laws of Georgia can have no force.” An angry President Jackson ignored the Court and pressed the Cherokee tribe to move west: “If they now refuse to accept the liberal terms offered, they can only be liable for whatever evils and difficulties may arise. I feel conscious of having done my duty to my red children.”
The Cherokee tribe remained in Georgia for two more years without significant violence. Then, in 1835, a small, unauthorized faction of the acculturated leaders signed a treaty selling all the tribal lands to the state, which rapidly resold the land to whites. Chief John Ross, backed by several thousand Cherokees, petitioned the U.S. Congress to ignore the bogus treaty, to no avail. Most Cherokees refused to move, so
MAP 11.3 INDIAN REMOVAL AND THE TRAIL OF TEARS The federal government under President Andrew Jackson pursued a vigorous policy of Indian removal in the 1830s, forcibly moving tribes west to land known as Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). In 1838, as many as a quarter of the Cherokee Indians died on the route known as the Trail of Tears.
READING THE MAP: From which states were most of the Native Americans removed? Through which states did the Trail of Tears go?
CONNECTIONS: Before Jackson’s presidency, how did the federal government view Native Americans, and what policy initiatives were undertaken by the government and private groups? How did Jackson change the government’s policy toward Native Americans?
Map Activity
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288 CHAPTER 11 The Expanding Republic 1815–1840
in May 1838, the deadline for voluntary removal, federal troops arrived to remove them. Under armed guard, the Cherokees embarked on a 1,200-mile journey west that came to be called the Trail of Tears. Nearly a quarter of the Cherokees died en route from the hardship. Survivors joined the fifteen thousand Creek, twelve thou- sand Choctaw, five thousand Chickasaw, and several thousand Seminole Indians also forcibly relocated to Indian Territory (which became the state of Oklahoma in 1907).
In his farewell address to the nation in 1837, Jackson professed his belief in the humanitarian benefits of Indian removal: “This unhappy race . . . are now placed in a situation where we may well hope that they will share in the blessings of civilization and be saved from the degradation and destruction to which they were rapidly hasten- ing while they remained in the states.” Perhaps Jackson genuinely believed that removal was necessary, but for the forcibly removed tribes, the costs of relocation were high.
The Tariff of Abominations and Nullification. Just as Indian removal in Georgia had pitted a state against a federal power, in the form of a Supreme Court ruling, a second explosive issue also pitted a state against federal regulation. This was the issue of federal tariff policy, strongly opposed by South Carolina.
Federal tariffs as high as 33 percent on imports such as textiles and iron goods had been passed in 1816 and again in 1824 in an effort to shelter new American manufac- turers from foreign competition. Some southern congressmen opposed the steep tar- iffs, fearing they would reduce overseas shipping and thereby hurt cotton exports. In 1828, Congress passed a revised tariff that came to be known as the Tariff of Abominations. A bundle of conflicting duties, some as high as 50 percent, the legislation contained provisions that pleased and angered every economic and sectional interest.
South Carolina in particular suffered from the Tariff of Abominations. World- wide prices for cotton had declined in the late 1820s, and the falloff in shipping caused by the high tariffs further hurt the South. In 1828, a group of South Carolina politicians headed by John C. Calhoun advanced a doctrine called nullification. They argued that when Congress overstepped its powers, states had the right to nullify Congress’s acts. As precedents, they pointed to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, intended to invalidate the Alien and Sedition Acts (see chapter 9). Congress had erred in using tariff policy to benefit specific industries, they claimed; tariffs should be used only to raise revenue.
On assuming the presidency in 1829, Jackson ignored the South Carolina statement of nullification and shut out Calhoun, his new vice president, from influence or power.
CHEROKEE DEER HIDE COAT Durable, supple, and nearly airtight, tanned deer hides made excellent clothing material. This knee-length coat, decorated with red buttons and fringe, dates from the first quarter of the nineteenth century and was still in the possession of Cherokees in Oklahoma in the 1930s. It very likely traveled to Oklahoma with its owner on the Trail of Tears in 1838. Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, (020353). Photos by Photo Services.
Trail of Tears Forced westward journey of Cherokees from their lands in Georgia to present-day Oklahoma in 1838. Despite favorable legal action, the Cherokees endured a grueling 1,200-mile march overseen by federal troops. Nearly a quarter of the Cherokees died en route.
nullification Theory asserting that states could nullify acts of Congress that exceeded congressional powers. South Carolina advanced the theory of nullification in 1828 in response to an unfavorable federal tariff. A show of force by Andrew Jackson, combined with tariff revisions, ended the crisis.
Jackson Defines the Democratic Party 2891815–1840
Tariff revisions in early 1832 brought little relief to the South. Calhoun resigned the vice presidency and became a senator to better serve his state. Finally, strained to their limit, South Carolina leaders took the radical step of declaring federal tariffs null and void in their state as of February 1, 1833. The constitutional crisis was out in the open.
In response, Jackson sent armed ships to Charleston harbor and threatened to invade the state. He pushed through Congress the Force Bill, defining South Carolina’s stance as treason and authorizing military action to collect federal tariffs. At the same time, Congress moved quickly to pass a revised tariff that was more acceptable to the South, reducing tariffs to their 1816 level. On March 1, 1833, Congress passed both the new tariff and the Force Bill. South Carolina with- drew its nullification of the old tariff — and then nullified the Force Bill. It was a symbolic gesture, since Jackson’s show of muscle was no longer necessary.
Yet the question of federal power versus states’ rights was far from settled. The implied threat behind nullification was secession, a position articulated in 1832 by some South Carolinians whose concerns went beyond tariff policy. In the 1830s, the political moratorium on discussions of slavery agreed on at the time of the Missouri Compromise (see chapter 10) was coming unglued, and new northern voices opposed to slavery gained increasing attention. If and when a northern-dominated federal government decided to end slavery, the South Carolinians thought, the South should nullify such laws or else remove itself from the Union.
The Bank War and Economic Boom. Along with the tariff and nullifica- tion, President Jackson fought another political battle, over the Bank of the United States. With twenty-nine branches, the bank handled the federal government’s deposits, extended credit and loans, and issued banknotes — by 1830, the most stable currency in the country. Jackson, however, thought the bank concentrated undue economic power in the hands of a few.
National Republican (Whig) senators Daniel Webster and Henry Clay decided to force the issue. They convinced the bank to apply for charter renewal in 1832, well before the fall election, even though the existing charter ran until 1836. They fully expected that Congress’s renewal would force Jackson to follow through on his rhetoric with a veto, that the unpopular veto would cause Jackson to lose the election, and that the bank would survive on an override vote by a new Congress swept into power on the anti-Jackson tide.
At first, the plan seemed to work. The bank applied for rechartering, Congress voted to renew, and Jackson, angry over being manipulated, issued his veto. But it was a brilliantly written veto, positioning Jackson as the champion of the democratic masses. “Many of our rich men have not been content with equal protection and equal benefits, but have besought us to make them richer by act of Congress,” Jackson wrote.
Jackson’s translation of the bank controversy into a language of class antagonism and egalitarian ideals resonated with many Americans. Jackson won the election easily, gaining 55 percent of the popular vote and 219 electoral votes to Clay’s 49. Jackson’s party still controlled Congress, so no override was possible. The second Bank of the United States would cease to exist after 1836.
Jackson wanted to destroy the bank sooner. Calling it a “monster,” he ordered the sizable federal deposits to be removed from its vaults and redeposited into
290 CHAPTER 11 The Expanding Republic 1815–1840
Democratic-inclined state banks. In retaliation, the Bank of the United States raised interest rates and called in loans. This action caused a brief decline in the economy in 1833 and actually enhanced Jackson’s claim that the bank was too powerful for the good of the country.
Unleashed and unregulated, the economy went into high gear in 1834. Just at this moment, an excess of silver from Mexican mines made its way into American banks, giving bankers license to print ever more banknotes. From 1834 to 1837, infla- tion soared; prices of basic goods rose more than 50 percent. States quickly chartered hundreds of new private banks, each issuing its own banknotes. Entrepreneurs bor- rowed and invested money, and the webs of credit and debt relationships that were the hallmark of the American economy grew denser yet. The market in western land sales also heated up. In 1834, about 4.5 million acres of the public domain had been sold, the highest annual volume since 1818. By 1836, the total reached an astonishing 20 million acres (Figure 11.1).
In one respect, the economy attained an admirable goal: The national debt disap- peared, and from 1835 to 1837, for the only time in American history, the government had a monetary surplus. But much of that surplus consisted of questionable bank currencies — “bloated, diseased” currencies, in Jackson’s vivid terminology. While the boom was on, however, few stopped to worry about the consequences if and when the bubble burst.
Cultural Shifts, Religion, and Reform The growing economy, booming by the mid-1830s, trans- formed social and cultural life. For many families, espe- cially in the commercialized Northeast, standards of living rose, consumption patterns changed, and the nature and
location of work were altered. All this had a direct impact on the duties of men and women and on the training of youths for the economy of the future.
FIGURE 11.1 WESTERN LAND SALES, 1810–1860 Land sales peaked in the 1810s, 1830s, and 1850s as Americans rushed to speculate in western land sold by the federal government. The surges in 1818 and 1836 demonstrate the volatile, speculative economy that suddenly collapsed in the panics of 1819 and 1837.
1810 1820 1830 1840 1850 1860
3.5 million acres 1818
20 million acres 1836 15 million acres1855
5
10
15
20
A cr
es (
m ill
io ns
)
How did evangelical Protestantism contribute to the social reform movements of the 1830s?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Cultural Shifts, Religion, and Reform 2911815–1840
Along with economic change came an unprecedented revival of evangelical reli- gion known as the Second Great Awakening. Among the most serious adherents of evangelical Protestantism were men and women of the new merchant classes. Not content with individual perfection, many of these people sought to perfect society as well, by defining excessive alcohol consumption, nonmarital sex, and slavery as three major evils of modern life in need of correction. Three social movements champion- ing temperance, moral reform, and abolition gained strength from evangelistic Christianity.
The Family and Separate Spheres. The centerpiece of new ideas about gen- der relations was the notion that husbands found their status and authority in the new world of work, leaving wives to tend the hearth and home. Sermons, advice books, periodicals, and novels reinforced the idea that men and women inhabited separate spheres and had separate duties. “To woman it belongs . . . to elevate the intellectual character of her household [and] to kindle the fires of mental activity in childhood,” wrote Mrs. A. J. Graves in a popular book titled Advice to American Women. For men, by contrast, “the absorbing passion for gain, and the pressing demands of business, engross their whole attention.” In particular, the home, now said to be the exclusive domain of women, was sentimentalized as the source of intimacy, love, and safety, a refuge from the cruel and competitive world of market relations.
Some new aspects of society gave substance to this formulation of separate spheres. Men’s work was undergoing profound change after 1815 and increasingly brought cash to the household, especially in the manufacturing and urban North- east. Farmers and tradesmen sold products in a market, and bankers, bookkeepers, shoemakers, and canal diggers earned regular salaries or wages. Furthermore, many men now worked away from the home, at an office or a store.
IMAGES OF THE FAMILY AT HOME Hundreds of itinerant amateur artists journeyed the back roads and small villages of antebellum America, earning a modest living painting individuals and families. This picture from the 1830s exhibits a common convention — the arrangement of family members by age and by sex, as if to emphasize the ideal of separate spheres. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Maxim
Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik
Collection of American Watercolors
and Drawings, 1800–1875.
292 CHAPTER 11 The Expanding Republic 1815–1840
A woman’s domestic role was more complicated than the cultural prescriptions indicated. Although the vast majority of married white women did not hold paying jobs, their homes required time-consuming labor. But the advice books treated house- work as a loving familial duty, thus rendering it invisible in an economy that evaluated work by how much cash it generated. In reality, many wives contributed to family income by taking in boarders or sewing for pay. Wives in the poorest classes, including most free black wives, did not have the luxury of husbands earning adequate wages; for them, work as servants or laundresses helped augment family income.
Idealized notions about the feminine home and the masculine workplace gained acceptance in the 1830s because of the cultural ascendancy of the commercialized Northeast, with its domination of book and periodical publishing. Beyond white families of the middle and upper classes, however, these new gender ideals had lim- ited applicability. Despite their apparent authority in printed material of the period, these gender ideals were never all-pervasive.
The Education and Training of Youths. The market economy required expanded opportunities for training youths of both sexes. By the 1830s, in both the North and the South, state-supported public school systems were the norm, designed to produce pupils of both sexes able, by age twelve to fourteen, to read, write, and par- ticipate in marketplace calculations. Literacy rates for white females climbed dramati- cally, rivaling the rates for white males for the first time. The fact that taxpayers paid for children’s education created an incentive to seek an inexpensive teaching force. By the 1830s, school districts replaced male teachers with young females, for, as a Massa- chusetts report on education put it, “females can be educated cheaper, quicker, and better, and will teach cheaper after they are qualified.”
Advanced education continued to expand in the 1830s, with an additional two dozen colleges for men and several more female seminaries offering education on a par with the male colleges. Still, only a very small percentage of young people attended institutions of higher learning. The vast majority of male youths left public school at age fourteen to apprentice in specific trades or to embark on business careers by seeking entry-level clerkships, abundant in the growing urban centers. Young women headed for mill towns or cities in unprecedented numbers, seeking work in the expanding service sector as seamstresses and domestic servants. Changes in patterns of youth employment meant that large numbers of youngsters escaped the watchful eyes of their parents, a cause of great concern for moralists of the era. Advice books published by the hundreds instructed youths in the virtues of hard work and delayed gratification.
The Second Great Awakening. A newly invigorated version of Protestant- ism gained momentum in the 1820s and 1830s as the economy reshaped gender and age relations. The earliest manifestations of this fervent piety, which historians call the Second Great Awakening, appeared in 1801 in Kentucky, when a crowd of ten thou- sand people camped out on a hillside at Cane Ridge for a revival meeting that lasted several weeks. By the 1810s and 1820s, “camp meetings” had spread to the Atlantic seaboard states, accelerating and intensifying the emotional impact of the revival.
Second Great Awakening Unprecedented religious revival in the 1820s and 1830s that promised access to salvation. The Second Great Awakening proved to be a major impetus for reform movements of the era, inspiring efforts to combat drinking, sexual sin, and slavery.
Cultural Shifts, Religion, and Reform 2931815–1840
The gatherings attracted women and men hungry for a more immediate access to spiritual peace, one not requiring years of soul-searching. One eyewitness reported that “some of the people were singing, others praying, some crying for mercy. . . . At one time I saw at least five hundred swept down in a moment as if a battery of a thousand guns had been opened upon them, and then immediately followed shrieks and shouts that rent the very heavens.”
From 1800 to 1820, church membership doubled in the United States, much of it among the evangelical groups. Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians formed the core of the new movement, which attracted women more than men; wives and mothers typically recruited husbands and sons to join them.
A central leader of the Second Great Awakening was a lawyer turned minister named Charles Grandison Finney. Finney lived in western New York, where the com- pletion of the Erie Canal in 1825 fundamentally altered the social and economic land- scape overnight. Growth and prosperity came with other, less admirable side effects, such as prostitution, drinking, and gaming. Finney saw New York canal towns as ripe for evangelical awakening. In Rochester, he sustained a six-month revival through the winter of 1830–31, generating thousands of converts.
Finney’s message, directed primarily at the business classes, argued for a public- spirited outreach to the less-than-perfect to foster their salvation. Evangelicals pro- moted Sunday schools to bring piety to children; they battled to honor the Sabbath by ending mail delivery, stopping public transport, and closing shops on Sundays. Many women formed missionary societies that distributed millions of Bibles and religious tracts. Through such avenues, evangelical religion offered women expanded spheres of influence. Finney adopted the tactics of Jacksonian-era politicians — publicity, argumentation, rallies, and speeches — to sell his cause. His object, he said, was to get Americans to “vote in the Lord Jesus Christ as the governor of the Universe.”
SUNDAY SCHOOL In the 1820s, free Sunday schools for indigent children became a popular national movement, and by 1832, the American Sunday School Union formed to generate curriculum materials and provide volunteer teachers, both male and female, mainly from the newly awakened Protestant churches. Students, both white and free black, often worked six days a week, leaving only the Sabbath free for schooling. The Granger Collection, NYC.
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The Temperance Movement and the Campaign for Moral Reform. The evangelical fervor animated vigorous campaigns to eliminate alcohol abuse and eradicate sexual sin. Millions of Americans took the temperance pledge to abstain from strong drink, and thousands became involved in efforts to end prostitution.
Alcohol consumption had risen steadily in the decades up to 1830. All classes imbibed. A lively saloon culture fostered masculine camaraderie along with exten- sive alcohol consumption among laborers, while in elite homes the after-dinner whiskey or sherry was commonplace. Colleges before 1820 routinely served students a pint of ale with meals, and the military included rum in the daily ration.
Organized opposition to drinking first surfaced in the 1810s among health and religious reformers. In 1826, Lyman Beecher, a Connecticut minister of an “awakened” church, founded the American Temperance Society, which warned that drinking led to poverty, idleness, crime, and family violence. Temperance lecturers spread the word, and middle-class drinking began a steep decline. One powerful tool of persua- sion was the temperance pledge, which many business owners began to require of employees.
In 1836, leaders of the temperance movement regrouped into a new society, the American Temperance Union, which demanded total abstinence from its adherents. The intensified war against alcohol moved beyond individual moral suasion into the realm of politics as reformers sought to deny taverns liquor licenses. By 1845, temperance advocates had put an impressive dent in alcohol consumption, which diminished to one-quarter of the per capita consumption of 1830.
More controversial than temperance was a social movement called “moral reform,” which first aimed at public morals in general but quickly narrowed to a campaign to eradicate sexual sin. In 1833, a group of Finneyite women started the New York Female Moral Reform Society. Its members insisted that uncontrolled male sexual expression, manifested in seduction and prostitution, posed a serious threat to society in general and to women in particular. Within five years, more than four thousand auxiliary groups of women had sprung up, mostly in New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.
In its analysis of the causes of licentiousness and its conviction that women had a duty to speak out about unspeakable things, the Moral Reform Society pushed the limits of what even the men in the evangelical movement could tolerate. Yet these women did not regard themselves as radicals. They were simply pursuing the logic of a gender system that defined home protection and morality as women’s special sphere and a religious conviction that called for the eradication of sin.
Organizing against Slavery. More radical still was the movement in the 1830s to abolish the sin of slavery. Previously, the American Colonization Society, founded in 1817 by Maryland and Virginia planters, promoted gradual individual emancipation of slaves followed by colonization in Africa. By the early 1820s, several thousand ex-slaves had been transported to Liberia on the West African coast. But not surprisingly, newly freed men and women often were not eager to emigrate; their African roots were three or more generations in the past. Colonization was too gradual (and expensive) to have much impact on American slavery.
American Temperance Society Organization founded in 1826 by Lyman Beecher that linked drinking with poverty, idleness, ill-health, and violence. Temperance lecturers traveled the country gaining converts to the cause. The temperance movement had considerable success, contributing to a sharp drop in American alcohol consumption.
New York Female Moral Reform Society An organization of religious women inspired by the Second Great Awakening to eradicate sexual sin and male licentiousness. Formed in 1833, it spread to hundreds of auxiliaries and worked to curb male licentiousness, prostitution, and seduction.
Cultural Shifts, Religion, and Reform 2951815–1840
Around 1830, northern challenges to slavery intensified, beginning in free black communities. In 1829, a Boston printer named David Walker published An Appeal . . . to the Coloured Citizens of the World, which condemned racism, invoked the egalitarian language of the Declaration of Independence, and hinted at racial violence if whites did not change their prejudiced ways. In 1830, at the inaugural National Negro Convention meeting in Philadelphia, forty blacks from nine states discussed the racism of American society and proposed emigration to Canada. In 1832 and 1833, a twenty-eight-year-old black woman named Maria Stewart deliv- ered public lectures on slavery and racial prejudice to black audiences in Boston. Her lectures gained wider circulation when they were published in a national publication called the Liberator.
The Liberator, founded in 1831 in Boston, took antislavery agitation to new heights. Its founder and editor, William Lloyd Garrison, advocated immediate abo- lition: “On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradu- ally extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen . . . — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present.” In 1832, Garrison’s supporters started the New England Anti-Slavery Society.
Similar groups were organized in Philadelphia and New York in 1833. Soon a dozen antislavery newspapers and scores of antislavery lecturers were spreading the word and inspiring the formation of new local societies, which numbered thirteen hundred by 1837. Confined entirely to the North, their membership totaled a quarter of a million men and women.
Many white northerners, even those who opposed slavery, were not prepared to embrace the abolitionist call for emancipation. From 1834 to 1838, there were more than a hundred eruptions of serious mob violence against abolitionists and free blacks. In one incident, Illinois abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy was killed by a rioting crowd attempting to destroy his printing press. When the Grimké sisters lectured in 1837 (see pages 272–273), some authorities tried to intimidate them and deny them meeting space. The following year, rocks shattered windows when Angelina Grimké gave a speech at a female antislavery convention in Phila- delphia. After the women vacated the building, a mob burned the building to the ground.
Despite these dangers, large numbers of northern women played a prominent role in abolition. They formed women’s auxiliaries and held fairs to sell handmade crafts to support male lecturers in the field. They circulated antislavery petitions, presented to the U.S. Congress with tens of thousands of signatures. At first women’s petitions were framed as respectful memorials to Congress about the evils of slavery, but soon they demanded political action to end slavery in the District of Columbia, under Congress’s jurisdiction.
By the late 1830s, the cause of abolition divided the nation as no other issue did. Even among abolitionists, significant divisions emerged. The Grimké sisters, radicalized by the public reaction to their speaking tour, began to write and speak about woman’s rights. Angelina Grimké compared the silencing of women to the silencing of slaves: “The denial of our duty to act, is a bold denial of our right to act;
296 CHAPTER 11 The Expanding Republic 1815–1840
and if we have no right to act, then may we well be termed ‘the white slaves of the North’ — for, like our brethren in bonds, we must seal our lips in silence and despair.” The Grimkés were opposed by moderate abolitionists who were unwilling to mix the new and controversial issue of woman’s rights with their first cause, the rights of blacks.
The many men and women active in reform movements in the 1830s found their initial inspiration in evangelical Protestantism’s dual message: Salvation was open to all, and society needed to be perfected. Their activist mentality squared well with the interventionist tendencies of the Whig Party forming in opposition to Andrew Jackson’s Democrats.
Van Buren’s One-Term Presidency By the mid-1830s, a vibrant and tumultuous political culture occupied center stage in American life. Andrew Jackson, too ill to stand for a third term, made way for Martin Van Buren, who faced tough opposition from an
array of opposing Whigs and even from slave-owning Jacksonians. Van Buren was a skilled politician, but soon after his inauguration the country faced economic collapse. A shattering panic in 1837, followed by another in 1839, brought the country its worst economic depression yet.
CONTROVERSY OVER ABOLITIONISM Mob violence erupted in northern cities with regularity when abolitionist speakers came to town. This 1837 poster from Poughkeepsie, New York, exemplifies the extremely inflammatory language that kindled riots. Antislavery societies raised money to support these lecture tours, one way being the weekly pledge. This contribution box is inscribed with biblical passages and the symbolic yet disturbing image of the slave in chains. Poster: Library of Congress; Box: Boston Public Library/Rare Books Department—Courtesy
of the Trustees.
How did slavery figure as a campaign issue in the election of 1836?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Van Buren’s One-Term Presidency 2971815–1840
The Politics of Slavery. Sophisticated party organization was the specialty of Martin Van Buren, nicknamed “the Little Magician” for his consummate political skills. First a senator and then governor, the New Yorker became Jackson’s secretary of state and then his running mate in 1832, replacing John C. Calhoun. His eight years in the volatile Jackson administration required the full measure of his political deftness as he sought repeatedly to save Jackson from both his enemies and his own obstinacy.
Jackson clearly favored Van Buren for the nomination in 1836, but starting in 1832, the major political parties had developed nominating conventions to choose their candidates. In 1835, Van Buren got the convention nod unanimously, to the dismay of his archrival, Calhoun, who then worked to discredit Van Buren among southern pro- slavery Democrats. Van Buren spent months assuring them that he was a “northern man with southern principles.” This was a credible line, since his Dutch family hailed from the Hudson River counties where New York slavery had once flourished, and his own family had owned slaves as late as the 1810s, permitted under New York’s gradual emancipation law.
Calhoun was able to stir up trouble for Van Buren because southerners were becoming increasingly alarmed by the rise of northern antislavery sentiment. When, in late 1835, abolitionists prepared to circulate in the South a million pamphlets con- demning slavery, a mailbag of their literature was hijacked at the post office in Charleston, South Carolina, and ceremoniously burned along with effigies of leading abolitionists. President Jackson condemned the theft but issued approval for indi- vidual postmasters to exercise their own judgment about whether to allow incendiary materials to reach their destination. Abolitionists saw this as censorship of the mail.
The petitioning tactics of abolitionists escalated sectional tensions. When hundreds of antislavery petitions inundated Congress, proslavery congressmen responded by passing a “gag rule” in 1836. The gag rule prohibited entering the doc- uments into the public record on the grounds that what the abolitionists prayed for was unconstitutional and, further, an assault on the rights of white southerners, as one South Carolina representative put it. Abolitionists like the Grimké sisters con- sidered the gag rule to be an abridgment of free speech. They also argued that, tabled or not, the petitions were effective. “The South already turns pale at the number sent,” Angelina Grimké said in a speech exhorting more petitions to be circulated.
Van Buren shrewdly seized on both mail censorship and the gag rule to express his prosouthern sympathies. Abolitionists were “fanatics,” he repeatedly claimed, possibly under the influence of “foreign agents” (British abolitionists). He dismissed the issue of abolition in the District of Columbia as “inexpedient” and promised that if he was elected president, he would not allow any interference in southern “domes- tic institutions.”
Elections and Panics. Although the elections of 1824, 1828, and 1832 clearly bore the stamp of Jackson’s personality, by 1836 the party apparatus was sufficiently developed to give Van Buren, a backroom politician, a shot at the presidency. Local and state committees existed throughout the country, and more than four hundred newspapers were Democratic partisans.
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The Whigs had also built state-level organizations and newspaper loyalty. They had no top contender with nationwide support, so three regional candidates opposed Van Buren. Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts could deliver New England, home to reformers, merchants, and manufacturers; Senator Hugh Lawson White of Tennessee attracted proslavery voters still suspicious of the northern Magician; and the aging General William Henry Harrison, now residing in Ohio and remembered for his Indian war heroics in 1811, pulled in the western anti-Indian vote. Not one of the three candidates had the ability to win the presidency, but together they came close to denying Van Buren a majority vote. Van Burenites called the three- Whig strategy a deliberate plot to derail the election and move it to the House of Representatives.
In the end, Van Buren won with 170 electoral votes, while the other three received a total of 113. But Van Buren’s victories came from narrow majorities, far below those Jackson had commanded. Although Van Buren had pulled together a national Demo- cratic Party with wins in both the North and the South, he had done it at the cost of committing northern Democrats to the proslavery agenda. And running three candidates had maximized the Whigs’ success by drawing Whigs into office at the state level.
When Van Buren took office in March 1837, the financial markets were already quaking; by April, the country was plunged into crisis. The causes of the panic of 1837 were multiple and far-ranging. Bad harvests in Europe and a large trade imbal- ance between Britain and the United States caused the Bank of England to start calling in loans to American merchants. Failures in various crop markets and a 30 percent downturn in international cotton prices fed the growing disaster. Cotton merchants in the South could no longer meet their obligations to New York creditors, whose firms began to fail — ninety-eight of them in March and April 1837 alone. Frightened citi- zens thronged the banks to try to get their money out, and businesses rushed to liqui- date their remaining assets to pay off debts. Prices of stocks, bonds, and real estate fell 30 to 40 percent. The familiar events of the panic of 1819 unfolded again, with terrifying rapidity, and the credit market tumbled like a house of cards. Newspapers describing the economic free fall generally used the language of emotional states — excitement, anxiety, terror, panic. Such words focused on human reactions to the crisis rather than on the structural features of the economy that had interacted to amplify the downturn. The vocabulary for understanding the wider economy was still quite limited, making it hard to track the bigger picture of the workings of capitalism.
Instead, many observers looked to politics, religion, and character flaws to explain the crisis. Some Whig leaders were certain that Jackson’s antibank and hard-money policies were responsible for the ruin. New Yorker Philip Hone, a wealthy Whig, called the Jackson administration “the most disastrous in the annals of the country” for its “wicked interference” in banking and monetary matters. Others framed the devastation as retribution for the frenzy of speculation that had gripped the nation. A religious periodical in Boston hoped that Americans would now moderate their greed: “We were getting to think that there was no end to the wealth, and could be no check to the progress of our country; that economy was not needed, that prudence was weakness.” In this view, the panic was a wakeup call, a
panic of 1837 First major economic crisis of the United States that led to several years of hard times from 1837 to 1841. Sudden bankruptcies, contraction of credit, and runs on banks worked hardships nationwide. Causes were multiple and global and not well understood.
Conclusion: The Age of Jackson or the Era of Reform? 2991815–1840
blessing in disguise. Others identified the competitive, profit-maximizing capitalist system as the cause and looked to Britain and France for new socialist ideas calling for the common ownership of the means of production. American socialists, though few in number, were vocal and imaginative, and in the early 1840s several thousand developed utopian alternative communities (as discussed in chapter 12).
The panic of 1837 subsided by 1838, but in 1839 another run on the banks and ripples of business failures deflated the economy, creating a second panic. Presi- dent Van Buren called a special session of Congress to consider creating an inde- pendent treasury system to perform some of the functions of the defunct Bank of the United States. Such a system, funded by government deposits, would deal only in hard money and would exert a powerful moderating influence on inflation and the credit market. But Van Buren encountered strong resistance in Congress, even among Democrats. The treasury system finally won approval in 1840, but by then Van Buren’s chances of winning a second term in office were virtually nil.
In 1840, the Whigs settled on William Henry Harrison to oppose Van Buren. The campaign drew on voter involvement as no other presidential campaign ever had. The Whigs borrowed tricks from the Democrats: Harrison was touted as a common man born in a log cabin (in reality, he was born on a Virginia plantation), and campaign parades featured toy log cabins held aloft. His Indian-fighting days, now thirty years behind him, were played up to give him a Jacksonian aura. Whigs staged festive rallies around the country, drumming up mass appeal with candlelight parades and song shows, and women participated in rallies as never before. Some 78 percent of eligible voters cast ballots — the highest percentage ever in American history.
Harrison took 53 percent of the popular vote and won a resounding 234 elec- toral college votes to Van Buren’s 60. A Democratic editor lamented, “We have taught them how to conquer us!”
Conclusion: The Age of Jackson or the Era of Reform? Economic transformations loom large in explaining the fast-paced changes of the 1830s. Transportation advances put goods and people in circulation, augmenting urban growth and helping to create a national culture, and water-powered manu- facturing began to change the face of wage labor. Trade and banking mushroomed, and western land once occupied by Indians was auctioned off in a landslide of sales. Two periods of economic downturn — including the panic of 1819 and the panics of 1837 and 1839 — offered sobering lessons about speculative fever.
Andrew Jackson symbolized this age of opportunity for many. His fame as an aggressive general, Indian fighter, champion of the common man, and defender of slavery attracted growing numbers of voters to the emergent Democratic Party,
p g
300 CHAPTER 11 The Expanding Republic 1815–1840
which championed personal liberty, free competition, and egalitarian opportunity for all white men.
Jackson’s constituency was challenged by a small but vocal segment of the popu- lation troubled by serious moral problems that Jacksonians preferred to ignore. Inspired by the Second Great Awakening, reformers targeted personal vices (illicit sex and intemperance) and social problems (prostitution, poverty, and slavery) and joined forces with evangelicals and wealthy lawyers and merchants (North and South) who appreciated a national bank and protective tariffs. The Whig Party was the party of activist moralism and state-sponsored entrepreneurship. Whig voters were, of course, male, but thousands of reform-minded women broke new ground by signing political petitions on the issues of Indian removal and slavery. A few exceptional women, like Sarah and Angelina Grimké, captured the national lime- light by offering powerful testimony against slavery and in the process pioneering new pathways for women to contribute a moral voice to politics.
National politics in the 1830s were more divisive than at any time since the 1790s. The new party system of Democrats and Whigs reached far deeper into the electorate than had the Federalists and Republicans. Stagecoaches and steamboats carried newspapers from the cities to the backwoods, politicizing voters and creating party loyalty. Politics acquired immediacy and excitement, causing nearly four out of five white men to cast ballots in 1840.
High rates of voter participation would continue into the 1840s and 1850s. Unprecedented urban growth, westward expansion, and early industrialism marked those decades, sustaining the Democrat-Whig split in the electorate. But critiques of slavery, concerns for free labor, and an emerging protest against women’s second- class citizenship complicated the political scene of the 1840s, leading to third-party political movements. One of these third parties, called the Republican Party, would achieve dominance in 1860 with the election of an Illinois lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, to the presidency.
1 How did the market revolution that began in the 1810s affect Americans’ work and domestic lives?
2 Discuss how Jackson benefited from, and contributed to, the vibrant politi- cal culture of the 1830s. Cite specific national developments.
3 Describe Andrew Jackson’s response to the “Indian problem” during his presidency. How did his policies revise or continue earlier federal policies?
4 Discuss the objectives and strategies of two reform movements of the 1830s and how they relate to larger political and economic trends.
MAKING CONNECTIONS
1 Why did the United States experience a market revolution after 1815? (pp. 274–282)
2 Why did Andrew Jackson defeat John Quincy Adams so dramatically in the 1828 election? (pp. 282–285)
3 Why did Jackson promote Indian removal? (pp. 285–290)
4 How did evangelical Protestantism contribute to the social reform move- ments of the 1830s? (pp. 290–296)
5 How did slavery figure as a campaign issue in the election of 1836? (pp. 296–299)
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
Erie Canal (p. 277)
Lowell mills (p. 277)
second Bank of the United States (p. 279)
Whigs (p. 283)
Democrats (p. 283)
Indian Removal Act of 1830 (p. 285)
KEY TERMS
Trail of Tears (p. 288)
nullification (p. 288)
Second Great Awakening (p. 292)
American Temperance Society (p. 294)
New York Female Moral Reform Society (p. 294)
panic of 1837 (p. 298)
Chapter Review MAKE IT STICK
Go to LearningCurve: See what you know. Then review the key terms and answer the questions.
LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com /roarkconcise
301 STUDENT SITE @ bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
Early in November 1842, Abraham Lincoln and his new wife, Mary, moved into their first home in Springfield, Illinois, a small rented room on the second floor of the Globe Tavern, the nicest place that Abraham had ever lived in and the worst place that Mary had ever inhabited. She grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, attended by slaves in the elegant home of her father, a prosperous merchant and banker. In
March 1861, the Lincolns moved into the presidential mansion in Washington, D.C.
Abraham Lincoln climbed from the Globe Tavern to the White House by work, ambition, and immense
talent — traits he had honed since boyhood. Lincoln and many others celebrated his rise from humble origins as an example of the opportunities in the
302
The New West and the Free North, 1840–1860
GOLD NUGGET Gold nuggets like this one scooped from a California river
drove easterners crazy with excitement. Although the quarter of a million individuals who joined the gold rush succeeded in escaping routine jobs and mundane lives, western riches eluded all but a few. Still, the rest
participated in one of the great adventures of the nineteenth century and rarely regretted their experiences. Collection of the
Oakland Museum of California.
Economic and Industrial Evolution (pp. 304–308)
Free Labor: Promise and Reality (pp. 309–312)
The Westward Movement (pp. 312–319)
Expansion and the Mexican-American War (pp. 319–325)
Reforming Self and Society (pp. 326–330)
Conclusion: Free Labor, Free Men (p. 330)
12
CHAPTER OUTLINE QUICK START
Quickly learn what is important in this chapter by doing the following:
• READ the Chapter Outline to see how the chapter is organized. • SKIM the Chronology on the next page to see what will be covered.
When you are ready, read the chapter and the Essential Questions for each section. Then use the Chapter Review to check what you know.
1840–1860
1830 The Book of Mormon published.
1836 Battle of the Alamo. Texas declares independence
from Mexico.
1837 Steel plow patented.
1840s Practical mechanical reapers created.
Fourierist communities founded.
1841 First wagon trains head west on Oregon Trail.
Vice President John Tyler becomes president when William Henry Harrison dies.
1844 James K. Polk elected president.
Samuel F. B. Morse demon- strates telegraph.
1845 Term manifest destiny coined. Texas enters Union as slave
state. Potato blight spurs Irish
immigration.
1846 Bear Flag Revolt. Congress declares war on
Mexico. United States and Great
Britain divide Oregon Country.
1847 Mormons settle in Utah.
1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Oneida community organized. Seneca Falls convention.
1849 California gold rush begins.
1850 Utah Territory annexed. Railroads granted six square
miles of land for every mile of track.
1851 Fort Laramie conference marks the beginning of Indian concentration.
1855 Massachusetts integrates public schools.
1857 Mormon War.
1861 California connected to nation by telegraph.
free-labor economy of the North and West. They attributed his spectacular ascent to his individual qualities and tended to ignore the help he received from Mary and many others.
Born in a Kentucky log cabin in 1809, Lincoln grew up on small, struggling farms as his family migrated west. His father, Thomas Lincoln, who had been born in Virginia, never learned to read and, as his son recalled, “never did more in the way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name.” Lincoln’s mother, Nancy, could neither read nor write. In 1816, Thomas Lincoln moved his young family from Kentucky to the Indiana wilderness, where Abraham learned the arts of agriculture, but “there was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education,” Lincoln recollected. By contrast, Mary Todd received ten years of schooling in Lexington’s best private academies for young women.
In 1830, Thomas Lincoln decided to move farther west and headed to central Illinois. The next spring, when Thomas moved yet again, Abraham set out on his own, a “friendless, uneducated, penniless boy,” as he described himself.
By dogged striving, Abraham Lincoln gained an education and the respect of his Illinois neighbors, although a steady income eluded him for years. The newlyweds received help from Mary’s father, including eighty acres of land and a yearly allowance of about $1,100 for six years that helped them move out of their room above the Globe Tavern and into their own home. Abraham eventually built a thriving law practice in Springfield, Illinois, and served in the state legislature and in Congress. Mary helped him in many ways, rearing their sons, tending their household, and integrating him into her wealthy and influential extended family in Illinois and Kentucky. Mary also shared Abraham’s keen interest in politics and ambition for power. With Mary’s support, Abraham became the first president born west of the Appalachian Mountains.
Like Lincoln, millions of Americans believed they could make something of themselves, whatever their origins, so long as they were willing to work. Individuals who were lazy, undisciplined, or foolish had only themselves to blame if they failed, advocates of free-labor ideology declared. Work was a prerequisite for success, not a guarantee. This emphasis on work highlighted the individual efforts of men and tended to slight the many crucial contributions of women and family members to the successes of men like Lincoln.
CHRONOLOGY
304 CHAPTER 12 The New West and the Free North 1840–1860
In addition, the rewards of work were skewed toward white men and away from women and free African Americans, as antislavery and woman’s rights reformers pointed out. Nonetheless, the promise of such rewards spurred efforts
that shaped the contours of America, plowing new fields and building railroads that pushed the boundaries of the nation ever westward to the Pacific Ocean. The nation’s economic, political, and geographic expansion raised anew the question of whether slavery should also move west, the question that Lincoln and other Americans confronted repeatedly following the Mexican-American War, yet another outgrowth of the nation’s ceaseless westward movement.
Economic and Industrial Evolution During the 1840s and 1850s, Americans experienced a pro- found economic transformation. Since 1800, the total out- put of the U.S. economy had multiplied twelvefold. Four fundamental changes in American society fueled this
remarkable economic growth. First, millions of Americans moved from farms to towns and cities, Abraham Lincoln among them. Second, factory workers (primarily in towns and cities) increased to about 20 percent of the labor force by 1860. Third, a
Why did the United States become a leading industrial power in the nineteenth century?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
LINCOLN’S LOG CABIN AND SPRINGFIELD HOME Abraham Lincoln grew up in Indiana between 1816 and 1830, where he, his father, stepmother, and assorted kinfolk lived in the log cabin shown here. After becoming a successful lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln and his wife, Mary, moved into the home shown here, which highlights the opportunities the free-labor system offered to all Americans, according to Lincoln. Log cabin: Meserve-Kunhandt Collection;
Springfield home: © Bettmann/Corbis.
Economic and Industrial Evolution 3051840–1860
shift from water power to steam as a source of energy raised productivity, especially in factories and transportation. Railroads in particular harnessed steam power, speeding transport and cutting costs. Fourth, agricultural productivity nearly dou- bled during Lincoln’s lifetime, spurring the nation’s economic growth more than any other factor.
Historians often refer to this cascade of changes as an industrial revolution. However, these changes did not cause an abrupt discontinuity in America’s economy or society, which remained overwhelmingly agricultural. Old methods of produc- tion continued alongside the new. The changes in the American economy during the 1840s and 1850s might better be termed “industrial evolution.”
Agriculture and Land Policy. The foundation of the United States’ economic growth lay in agriculture. As farmers pushed westward in a quest for cheap land, they encountered the Midwest’s comparatively treeless prairie, where they could spend less time clearing land and more time with a plow and hoe. Rich prairie soils yielded bumper crops, enticing farmers to migrate to the Midwest by the tens of thousands between 1830 and 1860.
Laborsaving improvements in farm implements also boosted agricultural productivity. Inventors tinkered to craft stronger, more efficient plows. In 1837, John Deere made a strong, smooth steel plow that sliced through prairie soil so cleanly that farmers called it the “singing plow.” Deere’s company produced more than ten thousand plows a year by the late 1850s. Human and animal muscles provided the energy for plowing, but Deere’s plows permitted farmers to break more ground and plant more crops.
Improvements in wheat harvesting also increased farmers’ productivity. In 1850, most farmers harvested wheat by hand, cutting two or three acres a day. In the 1840s, Cyrus McCormick and others experimented with designs for mechanical reapers, and by the 1850s a McCormick reaper that cost between $100 and $150 allowed a farmer to harvest twelve acres a day. Improved reapers and plows allowed farmers to cultivate more land, doubling the corn and wheat harvests between 1840 and 1860.
Federal land policy made possible the leap in agricultural productivity. Up to 1860, the United States continued to be land-rich and labor-poor. Territorial acquisi- tions made the nation a great deal richer in land, adding more than a billion acres with the Louisiana Purchase (see chapter 10) and vast territories following the Mexican- American War. The federal government made most of this land available for purchase to attract settlers and to generate revenue. Millions of ordinary farmers bought federal land for just $1.25 an acre, or $50 for a forty-acre farm that could support a family. Millions of other farmers squatted on unclaimed federal land, and carved out farms. By making land available on relatively easy terms, federal land policy boosted the increase in agricultural productivity that fueled the nation’s impressive economic growth.
Manufacturing and Mechanization. Changes in manufacturing arose from the nation’s land-rich, labor-poor economy. Western expansion and government land policies buoyed agriculture, keeping millions of people on the farm — 80 percent
mechanical reapers Tools usually powered by horses or oxen that enabled farmers to harvest twelve acres of wheat a day, compared to the two or three acres a day possible with manual harvesting methods.
306 CHAPTER 12 The New West and the Free North 1840–1860
of the nation’s 31 million people lived in rural areas in 1860 — and thereby limiting the supply of workers for manufacturing and elevating wages. Because of this relative shortage of workers, American manufacturers searched constantly for ways to save labor.
Mechanization allowed manufacturers to produce more with less labor. In gen- eral, factory workers produced twice as much (per unit of labor) as agricultural workers. The practice of manufacturing and then assembling interchangeable parts spread from gun making to other industries and became known as the American system. Standardized parts produced by machine allowed manufacturers to employ unskilled workers, who were much cheaper than highly trained craftsmen.
Manufacturing and agriculture meshed into a dynamic national economy. New England led the nation in manufacturing, shipping goods such as guns, clocks, plows, and axes west and south, while southern and western states sent commodities such as wheat, pork, whiskey, tobacco, and cotton north and east. Between 1840 and 1860, coal production in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and elsewhere multiplied eightfold, cutting prices in half and powering innumerable coal-fired steam engines. Even so, by 1860 coal accounted for less than a fifth of the nation’s energy consumption, and even in manufacturing, muscles provided thirty times more energy than steam did.
American manufacturers specialized in producing for the gigantic domestic market rather than for export. British goods dominated the international market and usually were cheaper and better than American-made products. U.S. manufacturers supported tariffs to minimize British competition, but their best protection from British competitors was to please their American customers, most of them farmers. The burgeoning national economy was accelerated by the growth of railroads, which linked farmers and factories in new ways.
Railroads: Breaking the Bonds of Nature. Railroads captured Americans’ imagination because they seemed to break the bonds of nature. (See “Visualizing History,” pages 308–309.) When canals and rivers froze in winter or became impass- able during summer droughts, trains steamed ahead, averaging more than twenty miles an hour during the 1850s. Above all, railroads gave cities not blessed with canals or navigable rivers a way to compete for rural trade.
In 1850, trains steamed along 9,000 miles of track, almost two-thirds of it in New England and the Middle Atlantic states. By 1860, several railroads spanned the Mississippi River, connecting frontier farmers to the nation’s 30,000 miles of track, approximately as much as in all of the rest of the world combined (Map 12.1).
In addition to speeding transportation, railroads propelled the growth of other industries, such as iron and communications. Iron production grew five times faster than the population during the decades up to 1860, in part to meet railroads’ demand. Railroads also stimulated the fledgling telegraph industry. In 1844, Samuel F. B. Morse
demonstrated the potential of his telegraph by transmitting an elec- tronic message between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. By 1861,
more than fifty thousand miles of telegraph wire stretched across the continent to the Pacific Ocean, often alongside railroad tracks, accelerating communications of all sorts.
American system The practice of manu- facturing and then assembling interchangeable parts. A system that spread quickly across American industries, the use of standardized parts allowed American manufacturers to employ cheap unskilled workers.
Economic and Industrial Evolution 3071840–1860
In contrast to the government ownership of railroads common in other industrial nations, private corporations built and owned almost all American railroads. But the railroads received massive government aid, especially federal land grants. Up to 1850, the federal government had granted a total of seven million acres of federal land to various turnpike, highway, and canal projects. In 1850, Congress approved a precedent- setting grant to railroads of six square miles of federal land for each mile of track laid. By 1860, Congress had granted railroads more than twenty million acres of federal land, thereby underwriting construction costs and promoting the expansion of the rail network, the settlement of federal land, and the integration of the domestic market.
The railroad boom of the 1850s signaled the growing industrial might of the American economy. Like other industries, railroads succeeded because they served both farms and cities. But transportation was not revolutionized overnight. Most Americans in 1860 were still far more familiar with horses than with locomotives.
MAP 12.1 RAILROADS IN 1860 Railroads were a crucial component of the revolutions in transportation and communications that transformed nineteenth- century America. The railroad system reflected the differences in the economies of the North and South.
READING THE MAP: In which sections of the country was most of the railroad track laid by the middle of the nineteenth century? What cities served as the busiest railroad hubs?
CONNECTIONS: How did the expansion of railroad networks affect the American economy? Why was the U.S. government willing to grant more than twenty million acres of public land to the private corporations that ran the railroads?
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308 CHAPTER 12 The New West and the Free North 1840–1860
WESTWARD THE STAR OF EMPIRE TAKES ITS WAY — NEAR COUNCIL BLUFFS, IOWA
The Path of Progress
Visualizing History
This painting depicts a mid-nineteenth-century landscape of agricultural and indus- trial progress. Created by Andrew Melrose to celebrate the recently built railroad connecting Chicago and Council Bluffs, Iowa, almost four hundred miles to the west, the painting contrasts the irregularity of nature with the new principles of order imposed on the natural landscape by human beings.
What principles of order are suggested by the locomotive and the railroad tracks? How do they contrast with the natural order represented by the forest on the right side of the painting, by the rock-studded vegetation on either side of the rail bed, and by the deer scampering across the tracks?
The economy of the 1840s and 1850s linked an expanding, westward-moving population in farms and cities with muscles, animals, machines, steam, and rail- roads. Abraham Lincoln planted corn and split fence rails as a young man before he moved to Springfield, Illinois, and became a successful attorney who defended, among others, railroad corporations. His mobility — westward, from farm to city, from manual to mental labor, and upward — illustrated the direction of economic change and the opportunities that beckoned enterprising individuals.
Free Labor: Promise and Reality 3091840–1860
DETAIL OF FARMHOUSE
DETAIL OF DEER CROSSING TRACKS
DETAIL OF
DETAIL OF DEER
The locomotive barreling down the tracks is barely visible behind its blazing headlight, which illuminates the way forward and startles the deer accustomed to shadowed hiding places in the forest. What does the contrast between the immense power of the locomotive and the skittish, vulnerable deer suggest about industrial progress? Likewise, how do the speed, direction, and glaring headlight of the loco- motive contrast with the obstacles to progress in the painting? Are the deer headed toward progress? Why or why not?
The left side of the painting shows a frontier farm cultivated by a family standing in the shadow of the log cabin. How do the principles of agricultural order represented by the farm compare with those of the industrial order represented by the railroad and the natural order represented by the forest? What attributes of familial order are visible in the depic- tion of the farm? Do these attributes differ from the attributes of order among the deer?
To what extent does the farm suggest agricultural progress? Why have so many trees been chopped down? Why are the stumps littering the fields? What do these farming practices suggest about the farm family’s attitudes toward nature?
Notice that the family is not watching the natural beauty of the setting sun bathing the landscape in a golden twilight but instead is looking toward the artificial light of the locomotive. Why might they have gathered outside their cabin to watch the train? What does their interest in the locomotive suggest about their attitudes toward the railroad?
The smoke rises vertically from the chimney of the log cabin, yet it trails backward from the smokestack of the locomotive. What does this contrast suggest about the differences between agricultural and industrial progress?
Overall, what does this painting suggest about the benefits and costs of progress for the farm family, the forest, the deer, the railroad, and American society in general?
SOURCE: Museum of the American West, Autry National Center, 92.147.1.; Detail: Museum of the American West, Autry National Center, 92.147.1.
CONNECT TO THE BIG IDEA C How did Americans alter the physical landscape of the nation in the early nine-
teenth century?
Free Labor: Promise and Reality The nation’s impressive economic performance did not reward all Americans equally. Native-born white men tended to do better than immigrants. With few exceptions, women were excluded from opportunities open to men. Tens of thousands of women worked as seamstresses, laundresses, domestic servants, factory hands, and
How did the free-labor ideal account for economic inequality?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
310 CHAPTER 12 The New West and the Free North 1840–1860
teachers but had little opportunity to aspire to higher-paying jobs. In the North and West, slavery was slowly eliminated in the half century after the American Revolution, but most free African Americans were relegated to dead-end jobs as laborers and ser- vants. Discrimination against immigrants, women, and free blacks did not trouble most white men. With certain notable exceptions, they considered it proper and just, the out- come of the free-labor system that rewarded hard work and, ideally, education.
The Free-Labor Ideal. During the 1840s and 1850s, leaders throughout the North and West emphasized a set of ideas that seemed to explain why the changes under way in their society benefited some people more than others. They referred again and again to the advantages of what they termed free labor. (The word free referred to laborers who were not slaves. It did not mean laborers who worked for nothing.) By the 1850s, free-labor ideas described a social and economic ideal that accounted for both the successes and the shortcomings of the economy and society taking shape in the North and West.
Spokesmen for the free-labor ideal celebrated hard work, self-reliance, and inde- pendence. They proclaimed that the door to success was open not just to those who inherited wealth or status but also to self-made men such as Abraham Lincoln. Free labor, Lincoln argued, was “the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all — gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.” Free labor permitted farmers and artisans to enjoy the products of their own labor, and it also benefited wageworkers. Wage labor, Lincoln claimed, was the first rung on the ladder toward self-employment and eventually hiring others.
The free-labor ideal affirmed an egalitarian vision of human potential. Lincoln and other spokesmen stressed the importance of universal education to permit “heads and hands [to] cooperate as friends.” Throughout the North and West, com- munities supported public schools to make the rudiments of learning available to young children. In rural areas, where the labor of children was more difficult to spare, schools typically enrolled no more than half the school-age children. Text- books and teachers — most of whom were young women — drummed into students the lessons of the free-labor system: self-reliance, discipline, and, above all else, hard work. “Remember that all the ignorance, degradation, and misery in the world is the result of indolence and vice,” one textbook intoned. Both in and outside school, free- labor ideology emphasized labor as much as freedom.
Economic Inequality. The free-labor ideal made sense to many Americans, especially in the North and West, because it seemed to describe their own experi- ences. Lincoln frequently referred to his humble beginnings as a hired laborer and implicitly invited his listeners to consider how far he had come. In 1860, his assets of $17,000 easily placed him in the wealthiest 5 percent of the population. A few men became much richer. Most Americans, however, measured success in more modest terms. The average wealth of adult white men in the North in 1860 barely topped $2,000. Nearly half of American men had no wealth at all; about 60 percent owned no land. Because property possessed by married women was normally considered to
Free Labor: Promise and Reality 3111840–1860
belong to their husbands, women typically had less wealth than men. Free African Americans had still less; 90 percent of them were propertyless.
Free-labor spokesmen considered these economic inequalities a natural out- growth of freedom — the inevitable result of some individuals being both luckier and more able and willing to work. These inequalities also demonstrate the gap between the promise and the performance of the free-labor ideal. Economic growth permitted many men to move from being landless squatters to landowning farmers and from being hired laborers to independent, self-employed producers. But many more Americans remained behind, landless and working for wages. Even those who realized their aspirations often had a precarious hold on their independence. Bad debts, market volatility, crop failure, sickness, or death could quickly eliminate a family’s gains.
Seeking out new opportunities in pursuit of free-labor ideals created restless social and geographic mobility. While fortunate people such as Abraham Lincoln rose far beyond their social origins, others shared the misfortune of a merchant who, an observer noted, “has been on the sinking list all his life.” In search of better pros- pects, roughly two-thirds of the rural population moved every decade, and popula- tion turnover in cities was even greater.
Immigrants and the Free-Labor Ladder. The risks and uncertainties of free labor did not deter millions of immigrants from entering the United States dur- ing the 1840s and 1850s. Almost 4.5 million immigrants arrived between 1840 and 1860, six times more than had come during the previous two decades (Figure 12.1).
Nearly three-fourths of the immigrants who arrived in the United States between 1840 and 1860 came from either Germany or Ireland. The majority of the
FIGURE 12.1 ANTEBELLUM IMMIGRATION, 1840–1860 After increasing gradually for several decades, immigration shot up in the mid-1840s. Between 1848 and 1860, nearly 3.5 million immigrants entered the United States.
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312 CHAPTER 12 The New West and the Free North 1840–1860
1.4 million Germans who entered during these years were skilled tradesmen and their families. Roughly a quarter were farmers, many of whom settled in Texas. German Americans were often Protestants and usually occupied the middle stratum of independent producers celebrated by free-labor spokesmen; relatively few worked as wage laborers or domestic servants.
Irish immigrants, by contrast, entered at the bottom of the free-labor ladder and struggled to climb up. Nearly 1.7 million Irish immigrants arrived between 1840 and 1860, nearly all of them desperately poor and often weakened by hunger and disease. Potato blight caused a catastrophic famine in Ireland in 1845 and returned repeatedly in subsequent years. Many Irish people crowded into ships and set out for America, where they congregated in northeastern cities. As one immigrant group declared, “All we want is to get out of Ireland; we must be better anywhere than here.”
Roughly three out of four Irish immigrants worked as laborers or domestic servants. Almost all Irish immigrants were Catholic, which set them apart from the overwhelmingly Protestant native-born residents. Many natives regarded the Irish as hard-drinking, unruly, half-civilized folk. Despite such prejudices, native residents hired Irish immigrants because they accepted low pay and worked hard.
In America’s labor-poor economy, Irish laborers could earn more in one day than in several weeks in Ireland. In America, one immigrant explained in 1853, there was “plenty of work and plenty of wages plenty to eat and no land lords thats enough what more does a man want.” But many immigrants also craved respect and decent working conditions.
Amidst the opportunities for some immigrants and native-born laborers, the free-labor system often did not live up to the optimistic vision outlined by Abraham Lincoln. Many wage laborers could not realistically aspire to become independent, self-sufficient property holders, despite the claims of free-labor proponents.
The Westward Movement Beginning in the 1840s, the nation’s swelling population, booming economy, and boundless confidence propelled a new era of rapid westward migration. Under the banner of manifest destiny, Americans encountered Native Americans
who inhabited the plains, deserts, and rugged coasts of the West; the British, who claimed the Oregon Country; and the Mexicans, whose flag flew over the vast expanse of the Southwest. Nevertheless, by 1850 the United States stretched to the Pacific and included the Utah Territory with its Mormon settlement.
The human cost of aggressive expansionism was high. The young Mexican nation lost a war and half of its territory. Two centuries of Indian wars, which ended east of the Mississippi during the 1830s, continued for another half century in the West.
Manifest Destiny. Most Americans believed that the superiority of their institu- tions and white culture bestowed on them a God-given right to spread across the continent. They imagined the West as a howling wilderness, empty and undeveloped.
Why did westward migration expand dramatically in the mid-nineteenth century?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
The Westward Movement 3131840–1860
If they recognized Indians and Mexicans at all, they dismissed them as primitives who would have to be redeemed, shoved aside, or exterminated. The West provided young men especially an arena in which to “show their manhood.” Most Americans believed that the West needed the civilizing power of the hammer and the plow, the ballot box and the pulpit, which had transformed the East.
In 1845, a New York political journal edited by John L. O’Sullivan coined the term manifest destiny to justify white settlers taking the land they coveted. O’Sullivan called on Americans to resist any effort to thwart “the fulfillment of our manifest des- tiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions . . . [and] for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federative self-government entrusted to us.” Almost overnight, the magic phrase manifest destiny swept the nation, providing an ideological shield for conquer- ing the West.
As important as national pride and racial arrogance were to manifest destiny, economic gain made up its core. Land hunger drew hundreds of thousands of Americans westward. Some politicians, moreover, had become convinced that national prosperity depended on capturing the rich trade of the Far East. To trade with Asia, the United States needed the Pacific coast ports that stretched from San Diego to Puget Sound. The United States and Asia must “talk together, and trade together,” Mis- souri senator Thomas Hart Benton declared. “Commerce is a great civilizer.” In the 1840s, American economic expansion came wrapped in the rhetoric of uplift and civilization.
Oregon and the Overland Trail. American expansionists and the British competed for the Oregon Country — a vast region bounded on the west by the Pacific Ocean, on the east by the Rocky Mountains, on the south by the forty-second parallel, and on the north by Russian Alaska. In 1818, the United States and Great Britain decided on “joint occupation” that would leave Oregon “free and open” to settlement by both countries. By the 1820s, a handful of American fur traders and “mountain men” roamed the region.
In the late 1830s, settlers began to trickle along the Oregon Trail, follow- ing a path blazed by the mountain men (Map 12.2). The first wagon trains headed west in 1841, and by 1843 about 1,000 emigrants a year set out from Independence, Missouri. By 1869, when the first transcontinental railroad was completed, approximately 350,000 migrants had traveled west in wagon trains.
Emigrants encountered the Plains Indians, a quarter of a million Native Americans scattered over the area between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. Some were farmers who lived peaceful, sedentary lives, but a majority — the Sioux, Cheyenne, Shoshoni, and Arapaho of the central plains and the Kiowa, Wichita, and Comanche of the southern plains — were horse- mounted, nomadic, nonagricultural peoples whose warriors symbolized the “savage Indian” in the minds of whites.
Horses, which had been brought to North America by Spaniards in the sixteenth century, permitted the Plains tribes to become highly mobile hunt- ers of buffalo. They came to depend on buffalo for nearly everything — food,
manifest destiny Term coined in 1845 by journalist John L. O’Sullivan to justify American expansion. O’Sullivan claimed that it was the nation’s “manifest destiny” to transport its values and civilization westward. Manifest destiny framed the American conquest of the West as part of a divine plan.
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Oregon Trail Route from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon traveled by American settlers starting in the late 1830s. Disease and accidents caused many more deaths along the trail than did Indian attacks, which migrants feared.
PLAINS INDIANS AND TRAILS WEST IN THE 1840s AND 1850s
314 CHAPTER 12 The New West and the Free North 1840–1860
clothing, shelter, and fuel. Competition for buffalo led to war between the tribes. Young men were introduced to warfare early, learning to ride ponies at breakneck speed while firing off arrows and, later, rifles with astounding accuracy. “A Coman- che on his feet is out of his element,” observed western artist George Catlin, “but the moment he lays his hands upon his horse, his face even becomes handsome, and he gracefully flies away like a different being.”
The Plains Indians struck fear in the hearts of whites on the wagon trains. But Native Americans had far more to fear from whites. Indians killed fewer than four hundred emigrants on the trail between 1840 and 1860, while whites brought alco- hol and deadly epidemics. Moreover, white hunters slaughtered buffalo for the inter- national hide market and sometimes just for sport.
The government constructed a chain of forts along the Oregon Trail (see Map 12.2) and adopted a new Indian policy: “concentration.” In 1851, government nego- tiators at the Fort Laramie conference persuaded the Plains Indians to sign agree- ments that cleared a wide corridor for wagon trains by restricting Native Americans to specific areas that whites promised they would never violate. This policy of con- centration became the seedbed for the subsequent policy of reservations. But whites
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MAP 12.2 MAJOR TRAILS WEST In the 1830s, wagon trains began snaking their way to the Southwest and the Pacific coast. Deep ruts, some of which can still be seen today, soon marked the most popular routes.
The Westward Movement 3151840–1860
would not keep out of Indian territory, and Indians would not easily give up their traditional ways of life. Struggle for control of the West meant warfare for decades to come.
Still, Indians threatened emigrants less than life on the trail did. Emigrants could count on at least six months of grueling travel. With nearly two thousand miles to go and traveling no more than fifteen miles a day, the pioneers endured parching heat, drought, treacherous rivers, disease, physical and emotional exhaus- tion, and, if the snows closed the mountain passes before they got through, freezing and starvation. It was said that a person could walk from Missouri to the Pacific stepping only on the graves of those who had died heading west.
Men usually found Oregon “one of the greatest countries in the world.” From “the Cascade mountains to the Pacific, the whole country can be cultivated,” exclaimed one eager settler. When women reached Oregon, they found that neighbors were scarce and things were in a “primitive state.” Work seemed unending. “I am a very old woman,” declared twenty-nine-year-old Sarah Everett. “My face is thin sunken and wrinkled, my hands bony withered and hard.” Another settler observed, “A woman that can not endure almost as much as a horse has no business here.” Yet despite the ordeal of the trail and the difficulties of starting from scratch, emigrants kept coming.
The Mormon Exodus. Not every wagon train heading west was bound for the Pacific Slope. One remarkable group of religious emigrants halted near the Great Salt Lake in what was then Mexican territory. After years of persecution in the East, the Mormons fled west to find religious freedom and communal security.
KEE-O-KUK, THE WATCHFUL FOX, CHIEF OF THE TRIBE, BY GEORGE CATLIN, 1835 In the 1830s, George Catlin traveled the West painting Native Americans. Catlin was the first artist to portray Indians in their own environments and one of the few to present them as human beings, not savages. Keokuk, chief of the Sauk and Fox, struggled with the warrior Black Hawk (see chapter 11). Black Hawk fought American expansion; Keokuk believed that war was fruitless. Smithsonian American Art Institution, Washington, D.C./
Art Resource, NY.
Mormons Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints founded by Joseph Smith in 1830. Most Americans deemed the Mormons heretics. After Smith’s death at the hands of an angry mob in 1844, Brigham Young moved the people to Utah in 1846.
316 CHAPTER 12 The New West and the Free North 1840–1860
In the 1820s, an upstate New York farm boy named Joseph Smith Jr. said that he was visited by an angel who led him to golden tablets buried near his home. With the aid of magic stones, he translated the mysterious language on the tablets to produce The Book of Mormon, which he published in 1830. It told the story of an ancient Hebrew civilization in the New World and predicted the appearance of an American prophet who would reestablish Jesus Christ’s undefiled kingdom in America. Converts, attracted to the promise of a pure faith in the midst of antebellum America’s social turmoil and rampant materialism, flocked to the new Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons).
Neighbors branded Mormons heretics and drove Smith and his followers from New York to Ohio, then to Missouri, and finally in 1839 to Nauvoo, Illinois, where they built a prosperous community. But after Smith sanctioned “plural marriage” (polygamy), non-Mormons arrested Smith and his brother. On June 27, 1844, a mob stormed the jail and shot both men dead.
The embattled church turned to an extraordinary new leader, Brigham Young, who oversaw a great exodus to a new home beside the Great Salt Lake. Young described the region as a barren waste, “the paradise of the lizard, the cricket and the rattlesnake.” Within ten years, however, the Mormons developed an irrigation system that made the desert bloom. Under Young’s stern leadership, the Mormons built a thriving community.
Visual Activity
PIONEER FAMILY ON THE TRAIL WEST In 1860, W. G. Chamberlain photographed these unidentified travelers momentarily at rest by the upper Arkansas River in Colorado. We do not know their fates, but we can only hope that they fared better than the Sager family. Henry and Naomi Sager and their children set out from Missouri to Oregon, in 1844. Still far from Oregon, Henry Sager died of fever. Twenty-six days later, Naomi died, leaving seven children. The Sager children, under the care of other families in the wagon train, pressed on. After traveling two thousand miles, they arrived in Oregon where Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, whose own daughter had drowned, adopted all seven of the Sager children. Denver Public Library, Western History Division # F3226.
READING THE IMAGE: Based on this photograph, what were some of the difficulties faced by pioneers traveling west?
CONNECTIONS: How did wagon trains change the western United States?
The Westward Movement 3171840–1860
In 1850, the Mormon kingdom was annexed to the United States as Utah Terri- tory. Shortly afterwards, Brigham Young announced that many Mormons practiced polygamy. Although only one Mormon man in five had more than one wife (Young had twenty-three), Young’s statement forced the U.S. government to establish its authority in Utah. In 1857, 2,500 U.S. troops invaded Salt Lake City in what was known as the Mormon War. The bloodless occupation illustrated that most Americans viewed the Mormons as a threat to American morality and institutions.
The Mexican Borderlands. In the Mexican Southwest, westward-moving Anglo-American pioneers confronted northern-moving Spanish-speaking frontiers- men. On this frontier as elsewhere, national cultures, interests, and aspirations collided. Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821 (Map 12.3), but the young nation was plagued by civil wars, economic crises, quarrels with the Roman Catholic Church, and devastating raids by the Comanche, Apache, and Kiowa. Mexico found it increasingly difficult to defend its northern provinces, especially when faced with a neighbor con- vinced of its superiority and bent on territorial acquisition.
The American assault began quietly. In the 1820s, Anglo-American traders drifted into Santa Fe, a remote outpost in the northern province of New Mexico. The traders made the long trek southwest along the Santa Fe Trail (see Map 12.2) with wagons
MAP 12.3 TEXAS AND MEXICO IN THE 1830S As Americans spilled into lightly populated and loosely governed northern Mexico, Texas and then other Mexican provinces became contested territory.
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318 CHAPTER 12 The New West and the Free North 1840–1860
crammed with inexpensive American manufactured goods and returned home with Mexican silver, furs, and mules.
The Mexican province of Texas attracted a flood of Americans who had settle- ment, not long-distance trade, on their minds (see Map 12.3). Wanting to populate and develop its northern territory, the Mexican government granted the American Stephen F. Austin a huge tract of land along the Brazos River. In the 1820s, Austin offered land at only ten cents an acre, and thousands of Americans poured across the border. Most were Southerners who brought cotton and slaves with them.
By the 1830s, the settlers had established a thriving plantation economy in Texas. Americans numbered 35,000, while the Tejano (Spanish-speaking) population was fewer than 8,000. Few Anglo-American settlers were Roman Catholic, spoke Spanish, or cared about assimilating into Mexican culture. The Mexican government in 1830 banned further immigration to Texas from the United States and outlawed the intro- duction of additional slaves. The Anglo-Americans made it clear that they wanted to be rid of the “despotism of the sword and the priesthood” and to govern themselves.
When the Texan settlers rebelled, General Antonio López de Santa Anna ordered the Mexican army northward. In February 1836, the army arrived at the outskirts of San Antonio. Commanded by Colonel William B. Travis from Alabama, the rebels included the Tennessee frontiersman Davy Crockett and the Louisiana adventurer James Bowie, as well as a handful of Tejanos. They took refuge in a for- mer Franciscan mission known as the Alamo. Santa Anna sent wave after wave of his 2,000-man army crashing against the walls until the attackers finally broke through and killed all 187 rebels. A few weeks later, outside the small town of Goliad, Mexican forces captured and executed almost 400 Texans as “pirates and outlaws.” In April 1836, at San Jacinto, General Sam Houston’s army adopted the massacre of Goliad as a battle cry and crushed Santa Anna’s troops in a surprise attack. The Texans had succeeded in establishing the Lone Star Republic, and the following year the United States recognized the independence of Texas from Mexico.
Earlier, in 1824, in an effort to increase Mexican migration to the province of California, the Mexican government granted ranchos — huge estates devoted to cattle raising — to new settlers. Rancheros ruled over near-feudal empires worked by Indians whose condition sometimes approached that of slaves. In 1834, rancheros persuaded the Mexican government to confiscate the Franciscan missions and make their lands available to new settlement, a development that accelerated the decline of the California Indians. Devastated by disease, the Indians, who had numbered approximately 300,000 when the Spaniards arrived in 1769, had declined to half that number by 1846.
Despite the efforts of the Mexican government, California in 1840 had a popu- lation of only 7,000 Mexican settlers. Non-Mexican settlers numbered only 380, but among them were Americans who championed manifest destiny. They sought to convince American emigrants who were traveling the Oregon Trail to head south- west on the California Trail (see Map 12.2). As a New York newspaper put it in 1845, “Let the tide of emigration flow toward California and the American population will soon be sufficiently numerous to play the Texas game.” Few Americans in California wanted a war, but many dreamed of living again under the U.S. flag.
In 1846, American settlers in the Sacramento Valley took matters into their own hands. Prodded by John C. Frémont, a former army captain and explorer who had
Lone Star Republic Independent republic, also known as the Republic of Texas, that was established by a rebellion of Texans against Mexican rule. The victory at San Jacinto in April 1836 helped ensure the region’s independence and recognition by the United States.
Expansion and the Mexican-American War 3191840–1860
arrived with a party of sixty buckskin-clad frontiersmen spoiling for a fight, the Californians raised an independence movement known as the Bear Flag Revolt. By then, James K. Polk, a champion of aggressive expansion, sat in the White House.
Expansion and the Mexican- American War Although emigrants acted as the advance guard of American empire, there was nothing automatic about the U.S. annexa- tion of territory in the West. Acquiring territory required political action. In the 1840s, the politics of expansion became entangled with sectionalism and the slavery question. Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican borderlands also thrust the United States into dangerous diplomatic crises with Great Britain and Mexico.
Aggravation between Mexico and the United States escalated to open antago- nism in 1845 when the United States annexed Texas. Absorbing territory still claimed by Mexico set the stage for war. But it was President James K. Polk’s insistence on having Mexico’s other northern provinces that made war certain. The war was not as easy as Polk anticipated, but it ended in American victory and the acquisition of a new American West. The discovery of gold in one of the nation’s new territories, California, prompted a massive wave of emigration that nearly destroyed Native American and Californio society.
The Politics of Expansion. Texans had sought admission to the Union almost since winning their independence from Mexico in 1836. Almost constant border warfare between Mexico and the Republic of Texas in the decade following the revo- lution underscored the precarious nature of independence. But any suggestion of adding another slave state to the Union outraged most Northerners, who applauded westward expansion but imagined the expansion of liberty, not slavery.
John Tyler, who became president in April 1841 when William Henry Harrison died one month after taking office, understood that Texas was a dangerous issue. Adding to the danger, Great Britain began sniffing around Texas, apparently con- templating adding the young republic to its growing empire. In 1844, Tyler, an ardent expansionist, decided to risk annexing the Lone Star Republic. However, howls of protest erupted across the North. Future Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner deplored the “insidious” plan to annex Texas and carve from it “great slaveholding states.” The Senate soundly rejected the annexation treaty.
During the election of 1844, the Whig nominee for president, Henry Clay, in an effort to woo northern voters, came out against annexation of Texas. “Annexation and war with Mexico are identical,” he declared. The Democratic nominee, Tennessean James K. Polk, vigorously backed annexation. To make annexation palatable to North- erners, the Democrats shrewdly yoked the annexation of Texas to the annexation of Oregon, thus tapping the desire for expansion in the free states of the North as well as in the slave states of the South.
Why was the annexation of Texas such a controversial policy?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
320 CHAPTER 12 The New West and the Free North 1840–1860
When Clay finally recognized the popularity of expansion, he waffled, hinting that he might accept the annexation of Texas after all. His retreat succeeded only in alienating antislavery opinion in the North. In the November election, Polk won a narrow victory.
In his inaugural address on March 4, 1845, Polk underscored his faith in America’s manifest destiny. “This heaven-favored land,” he proclaimed, enjoyed the “most admi- rable and wisest system of well-regulated self-government . . . ever devised by human minds.” He asked, “Who shall assign limits to the achievements of free minds and free hands under the protection of this glorious Union?”
The nation did not have to wait for Polk’s inauguration to see results from his victory. One month after the election, President Tyler announced that the triumph of the Democratic Party provided a mandate for the annexation of Texas “promptly and immediately.” In February 1845, after a fierce debate between antislavery and proslavery forces, Congress approved a joint resolution offering the Republic of Texas admission to the United States. Texas entered as the fifteenth slave state.
While Tyler delivered Texas, Polk had promised Oregon, too. But Polk was close to war with Mexico and could not afford a war with Britain over U.S. claims in Canada. He renewed an old offer to divide Oregon along the forty-ninth parallel. When Britain accepted the compromise, the nation gained an enormous territory peacefully. When the Senate approved the treaty in June 1846, the United States and Mexico were already at war.
The Mexican-American War, 1846–1848. From the day he entered the White House, Polk craved Mexico’s remaining northern provinces: California and New Mexico, land that today makes up California, Nevada, Utah, most of New Mexico and Arizona, and parts of Wyoming and Colorado. Since the 1830s, Coman- ches, Kiowas, Apaches, and others had attacked Mexican ranches and towns, killing thousands, and the Polk administration invoked Mexico’s inability to control its northern provinces to denigrate its claims to them. Polk hoped to buy the territory, but when the Mexicans refused to sell, he concluded that military force would be needed to realize the United States’ manifest destiny.
Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to march his 4,000-man army 150 miles south from its position on the Nueces River, the southern boundary of Texas according to the Mexicans, to the banks of the Rio Grande, the boundary claimed by Texans (Map 12.4). Viewing the American advance as aggression, Mexican cavalry on April 25, 1846, attacked a party of American soldiers, killing or wounding sixteen and capturing the rest.
On May 11, the president told Congress, “Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory, and shed American blood upon American soil.” Thus “war exists, and, notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it, exists by the act of Mexico herself.” Congress passed a declaration of war and began raising an army. The U.S. Army was pitifully small, only 8,600 soldiers. Faced with the nation’s first foreign war, against a Mexican army that numbered more than 30,000, Polk called for volunteers. Eventually, more than 112,000 white Americans (40 percent of whom were immigrants; blacks were banned) joined the army to fight in Mexico.
Despite the flood of volunteers, the war divided the nation. Northern Whigs in particular condemned the war. The Massachusetts legislature claimed that the war was being fought for the “triple object of extending slavery, of strengthening the
Expansion and the Mexican-American War 3211840–1860
slave power, and of obtaining control of the free states.” On January 12, 1848, a gan- gly freshman Whig representative from Illinois rose in the House of Representatives. Before Abraham Lincoln sat down, he had questioned Polk’s intelligence, honesty, and sanity. The president ignored the upstart representative, but antislavery, antiwar Whigs kept up the attack throughout the conflict.
President Polk expected a short war in which U.S. armies would occupy Mexico’s northern provinces and defeat the Mexican army in a decisive battle or two, after which Mexico would sue for peace and the United States would keep the territory its armies occupied.
MAP 12.4 THE MEXICAN-AMERICAN WAR, 1846–1848 American and Mexican soldiers skirmished across much of northern Mexico, but the major battles took place between the Rio Grande and Mexico City.
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322 CHAPTER 12 The New West and the Free North 1840–1860
At first, Polk’s strategy seemed to work. In May 1846, Zachary Taylor’s troops drove south from the Rio Grande and routed the Mexican army, first at Palo Alto, then at Resaca de la Palma (see Map 12.4). “Old Rough and Ready,” as Taylor was affection- ately known among his adoring troops, became an instant war hero. Polk rewarded Taylor for his victories by making him commander of the Mexican campaign.
A second prong of the campaign centered on Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny, who led a 1,700-man army from Missouri into New Mexico. Without firing a shot, U.S. forces took Santa Fe in August 1846. Kearny then marched to San Diego, where he encountered a major Mexican rebellion against American rule. In January 1847, after several clashes and severe losses, U.S. forces occupied Los Angeles. California and New Mexico were in American hands.
By then, Taylor had driven deep into the interior of Mexico. In September 1846, he had taken the city of Monterrey. Taylor then pushed his 5,000 troops southwest, where the Mexican hero of the Alamo, General Antonio López de Santa Anna, was concentrating an army of 21,000. On February 23, 1847, Santa Anna’s troops attacked Taylor at Buena Vista. The Americans won the day but suffered heavy casualties. The Mexicans suffered even greater losses (some 3,400 dead, wounded, and missing, com- pared with 650 Americans). During the night, Santa Anna withdrew his battered army.
The series of uninterrupted victories in northern Mexico fed the American troops’ sense of invincibility. “No American force has ever thought of being defeated by any amount of Mexican troops,” one soldier declared. The Americans worried about other hazards, however. “I can assure you that fighting is the least dangerous & arduous part
MEXICAN FAMILY This family had its portrait taken in 1847, in the middle of the war. Mexican civilians were vulnerable to atrocities committed by the invading army, a large part of which were volunteers who received little training and resisted discipline. The “lawless Volunteers stop at no outrage,” Brigadier General William Worth declared. “Innocent blood has been basely, cowardly, and barbarously shed in cold blood.” Unknown photographer. Daguerreotype, ca. 1847, 2-7/8 x 3-3/16 inches, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth,
Texas, P1981.65.18.
Expansion and the Mexican-American War 3231840–1860
of a soldier’s life,” one young man declared. Letters home told of torturous marches across arid wastes alive with tarantulas, scorpions, and rattlesnakes. Others recounted dysentery, malaria, smallpox, cholera, and yellow fever. Of the 13,000 American sol- diers who died (some 50,000 Mexicans perished), fewer than 2,000 fell to Mexican bullets and shells. Disease killed most of the others. Medicine was so primitive that, as one Tennessee man observed, “nearly all who take sick die.”
Victory in Mexico. Despite heavy losses on the battlefield, Mexico refused to trade land for peace. One American soldier captured the Mexican mood: “They cannot sub- mit to be deprived of California after the loss of Texas, and nothing but the conquest of their Capital will force them to such a humiliation.” Polk had arrived at the same conclu- sion. While Taylor occupied the north, General Winfield Scott would land an army on the Gulf coast of Mexico and march 250 miles inland to Mexico City. Polk’s plan entailed enormous risk because Scott would have to cut himself off from supplies and lead his men deep into enemy country against a much larger army.
An amphibious landing on March 9, 1847, near Veracruz put some 10,000 American troops ashore. After furious shelling, Veracruz surrendered. In April 1847, Scott’s forces moved westward, following the path blazed more than three centuries earlier by Hernán Cortés to “the halls of Montezuma” (see chapter 2).
After the defeat at Buena Vista, Santa Anna had returned to Mexico City, where he rallied his ragged troops and marched them east to set a trap for Scott in the mountain pass at Cerro Gordo. Knifing through Mexican lines, the Americans almost captured Santa Anna, who fled the field on foot. So complete was the victory that Scott gloated to Taylor, “Mexico no longer has an army.” But Santa Anna, ever resilient, again rallied the Mexican army. Some 30,000 troops took up defensive positions on the outskirts of Mexico City and began melting down church bells to cast new cannons.
In August 1847, Scott began his assault on the Mexican capital. The fighting proved the most brutal of the war. Santa Anna backed his army into the city, fighting each step of the way. At the battle of Churubusco, the Mexicans took 4,000 casualties in a single day and the Americans more than 1,000. At the castle of Chapultepec, American troops scaled the walls and fought the Mexican defenders hand to hand. After Chapultepec, Mexico City officials persuaded Santa Anna to evacuate the city to save it from destruction, and on September 14, 1847, Scott rode in triumphantly.
On February 2, 1848, American and Mexican officials signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in Mexico City. Mexico agreed to give up all claims to Texas north of the Rio Grande and to cede the provinces of New Mexico and California — more than 500,000 square miles — to the United States (see Map 12.4). The United States agreed to pay Mexico $15 million and to assume $3.25 million in claims that American citizens had against Mexico. In March 1848, the Senate ratified the treaty. Polk had his Rio Grande border, his Pacific ports, and all the land that lay between.
The American triumph had enormous consequences. Less than three-quarters of a century after its founding, the United States had achieved its self-proclaimed manifest destiny to stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific (Map 12.5). It would enter the industrial age with vast new natural resources and a two-ocean economy, while Mexico faced a sharply diminished economic future.
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo February 1848 treaty that ended the Mexican- American War. Mexico gave up all claims to Texas north of the Rio Grande and ceded New Mexico and California to the United States. The United States agreed to pay Mexico $15 million and to assume American claims against Mexico.
324 CHAPTER 12 The New West and the Free North 1840–1860
MAP 12.5 TERRITORIAL EXPANSION BY 1860 Less than a century after its founding, the United States spread from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific coast. War, purchase, and diplomacy had gained a continent.
READING THE MAP: List the countries from which the United States acquired land. Which nation lost the most land because of U.S. expansion?
CONNECTIONS: Who coined the phrase manifest destiny? When? What does it mean? What areas targeted for expansion were the subjects of debate during the presidential campaign of 1844?
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Golden California. Another consequence of the Mexican defeat was that California gold poured into American, not Mexican, pockets. In January 1848, James Marshall discovered gold in the American River in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. His discovery set off the California gold rush, one of the wildest mining stampedes in the world’s history. Between 1849 and 1852, more than 250,000 “forty-niners,” as the would-be miners were known, descended on the Golden State. In less than two years, Marshall’s discovery transformed California from foreign territory to statehood.
Gold fever quickly spread around the world. A stream of men of various races and nationalities poured into California. Only a few struck it rich, and life in the gold- fields was nasty, brutish, and often short. The prospectors faced cholera and scurvy,
exorbitant prices for food (eggs cost a dollar apiece), deadly encounters with claim jumpers, and endless backbreaking labor.
Violent crime was an everyday occurrence, and establishing civic order was made more difficult by California’s diversity. The Chinese attracted special scrutiny from Anglos. By 1851, 25,000 Chinese lived in California, and their religion, language, dress, queues (long pigtails), eat- ing habits, and use of opium convinced many Anglos that they were not fit citizens of the Golden State. In 1850, the California legislature passed
the Foreign Miners’ Tax Law, which levied high taxes on non-Americans to drive them from the goldfields, except as hired laborers working on
claims owned by Americans. The Chinese were segregated residentially and
California gold rush Mining rush initiated by James Marshall’s discovery of gold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in 1848. The hope of striking it rich drew over 250,000 aspiring miners to California between 1849 and 1852 and accelerated the push for statehood.
exorbi cla
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Expansion and the Mexican-American War 3251840–1860
occupationally and, along with blacks and Indians, denied public education and the right to testify in court.
Opponents demanded a halt to Chinese immigration, but Chinese leaders in San Francisco fought back. Admit- ting deep cultural differences, they insisted that “in the important matters we are good men. We honor our parents; we take care of our children; we are industrious and peace- able; we trade much; we are trusted for small and large sums; we pay our debts; and are honest, and of course must tell the truth.” Their protestations offered little protection, however, and racial vio- lence grew.
Anglo-American prospectors asserted their dominance over other groups, espe- cially Native Americans and the Californios, Spanish and Mexican settlers who had lived in California for decades. Despite the U.S. government’s pledge to protect Mexican and Spanish land titles, Americans took the land of the rancheros and through discriminatory legislation pushed Hispanic professionals, merchants, and artisans into the ranks of unskilled labor. Mariano Vallejo, a leading Californio, said of the forty- niners, “The good ones were few and the wicked many.”
For Indians, the gold rush was catastrophic. Numbering about 150,000 in 1848, the Indian population of California fell to 25,000 by 1854. Starvation, disease, and a declining birthrate took a heavy toll. Indians also fell victim to wholesale murder. The nineteenth-century historian Hubert Howe Bancroft described white behavior toward Indians during the gold rush as “one of the last human hunts of civilization, and the basest and most brutal of them all.”
The forty-niners created dazzling wealth: In 1852, 81 million ounces of gold, nearly half of the world’s production, came from California. However, most miners eventually took up farming, opened small businesses, or worked for wages for the corporations that took over the mining industry. Other Americans traded furs, hides, and lumber and engaged in whaling and the China trade in tea, silk, and porcelain. Still, as one Californian observed, the state was separated “by thousands of miles of plains, deserts, and almost impossible mountains” from the rest of the Union. Some dreamers imagined a railroad that would someday connect the Golden State with the thriving agriculture and industry of the East. Others imagined a country transformed not by transportation but by progressive individual and institutional reform.
MINER WITH PICK, PAN, AND SHOVEL This young man exhibits the spirit of individual effort that was the foundation of free-labor ideals. Posing with a pick and shovel to loosen gold-bearing deposits and a pan to wash away debris, the man appears determined to succeed as a miner by his own muscles and sweat. Hard work with these tools, the picture suggests, promised rewards and maybe riches. Collection of Matthew Isenburg.
326 CHAPTER 12 The New West and the Free North 1840–1860
Reforming Self and Society While manifest destiny, the Mexican-American War, and the California gold rush transformed the nation’s boundaries, many Americans sought personal and social reform. The emphasis on self-discipline and individual effort at the core of
the free-labor ideal led Americans to believe that insufficient self-control caused the major social problems of the era. Evangelical Protestants struggled to control individ- uals’ propensity to sin. Temperance advocates exhorted drinkers to control their taste for alcohol. Only about one-third of Americans belonged to a church in 1850, but the influence of evangelical religion reached far beyond church members.
The evangelical temperament — a conviction of righteousness coupled with energy, self-discipline, and faith that the world could be improved — animated most reformers. However, a few activists pointed out that certain fundamental injustices lay beyond the reach of individual self-control. Transcendentalists and utopians believed that perfection required rejecting the competitive, individualistic values of main- stream society. Woman’s rights activists and abolitionists sought to reverse the subor- dination of women and to eliminate the enslavement of blacks by changing laws, social institutions, attitudes, and customs. These reformers confronted the daunting chal- lenge of repudiating widespread beliefs in male supremacy and white supremacy and somehow challenging the entrenched institutions that reinforced those views: the family and slavery.
The Pursuit of Perfection: Transcendentalists and Utopians. A group of New England writers who came to be known as transcendentalists believed that individuals should conform neither to the dictates of the materialistic world nor to the dogma of formal religion. Instead, people should look within themselves for truth and guidance. The leading transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson — an essayist, poet, and lecturer — proclaimed that the power of the solitary individual was nearly limitless. But the inward gaze and confident egoism of transcendentalism represented less an alternative to mainstream values than an extreme form of the rampant individualism of the age.
Unlike transcendentalists who sought to turn inward, a few reformers tried to change the world by organizing utopian communities as alternatives to prevailing social arrangements. Although these communities never attracted more than a few thousand people, the activities of their members demonstrated dissatisfaction with the larger society and efforts to realize their visions of perfection.
Some communities set out to become models of perfection whose success would point the way toward a better life for everyone. During the 1840s, more than two dozen communities organized themselves around the ideas of Charles Fourier. Members of Fourierist phalanxes, as these communities were called, believed that individualism and competition were evils that denied the basic truth that “men . . . are brothers and not competitors.” Phalanxes aspired to replace competition with harmonious coopera- tion based on communal ownership of property. But Fourierist communities failed to realize their lofty goals, and few survived more than two or three years.
Why were women especially prominent in many nineteenth-century reform efforts?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Reforming Self and Society 3271840–1860
The Oneida community went beyond the Fourierist notion of communalism. John Humphrey Noyes, the charismatic leader of Oneida, believed that American society’s commitment to private property made people greedy and selfish. Noyes claimed that the root of private property lay in marriage, in men’s conviction that their wives were their exclusive property. Drawing from a substantial inheritance, Noyes organized the Oneida community in New York in 1848 to abolish marital property rights by permitting sexual intercourse between any consenting man and woman in the community. Noyes also required all members to relinquish their economic prop- erty to the community. Most of their neighbors considered Oneidans adulterers and blasphemers. Yet the practices that set Oneida apart from its mainstream neighbors strengthened the community, and it survived long after the Civil War.
Woman’s Rights Activists. Women participated in the many reform activities that grew out of evangelical churches. Women church members outnumbered men two to one and worked to put their religious ideas into practice by joining peace, temperance, antislavery, and other societies. Involvement in reform organizations gave a few women activists practical experience in such political arts as speaking in public, running a meeting, drafting resolutions, and circulating petitions.
In 1848, about three hundred reformers led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott gathered at Seneca Falls, New York, for the first national woman’s rights convention in the United States. As Stanton recalled, “The general discontent I felt with women’s portion as wife, mother, housekeeper, physician, and spiritual guide, [and] the wearied anxious look of the majority of women impressed me with a strong feeling that some active measure should be taken to right the wrongs of society in general, and of women in particular.” The Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments set an ambitious agenda to demand civil liberties for women and to right the wrongs of society. The declaration proclaimed that “the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.” In the style of the Declaration of Independence (see appendix I, page A-1), the Seneca Falls dec- laration demanded that women “have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States,” particularly the “inalienable right to the elective franchise.”
Nearly two dozen other woman’s rights conventions assembled before 1860, repeatedly calling for suffrage and an end to discrimination against women. But women had difficulty receiving a respectful hearing, much less achieving legislative action. Even so, the Seneca Falls declaration served as a pathbreaking manifesto of dissent against male supremacy and of support for woman suffrage, and it inspired many women to challenge the barriers that limited their opportunities.
Stanton and other activists sought fair pay and expanded employment opportuni- ties for women by appealing to free-labor ideology. Woman’s rights advocate Paula Wright Davis urged Americans to stop discriminating against able and enterprising women: “Let [women] . . . open a Store, . . . learn any of the lighter mechanical Trades, . . . study for a Profession, . . . be called to the lecture-room, [and] . . . the Temperance rostrum . . . [and] let her be appointed [to serve in the Post Office].” Some women
Oneida community Utopian community organized by John Humphrey Noyes in New York in 1848. Noyes’s opposition to private property led him to denounce marriage as the root of the problem. The community embraced sexual and economic communalism, to the dismay of its mainstream neighbors.
Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments Declaration issued in 1848 at the first national woman’s rights convention in the United States, which was held in Seneca Falls, New York. The document adopted the style of the Declaration of Independence and demanded equal rights for women, including the franchise.
328 CHAPTER 12 The New West and the Free North 1840–1860
pioneered in these and many other occupations during the 1840s and 1850s. Woman’s rights activists also succeeded in protecting married women’s rights to their own wages and property in New York in 1860. But discrimination against women persisted, as most men believed that free-labor ideology required no compromise of male supremacy.
Abolitionists and the American Ideal. During the 1840s and 1850s, aboli- tionists continued to struggle to draw the nation’s attention to the plight of slaves and the need for emancipation. Former slaves Frederick Douglass, Henry Bibb, and Sojourner Truth lectured to reform audiences throughout the North about the cruel- ties of slavery. Abolitionists published newspapers, held conventions, and petitioned Congress, but they never attracted a mass following among white Americans. Many white Northerners became convinced that slavery was wrong, but they still believed that blacks were inferior. Many other white Northerners shared the common view of white Southerners that slavery was necessary and even desirable. The westward extension of the nation during the 1840s offered abolitionists an opportunity to link their unpopular ideal to a goal that many white Northerners found much more attractive — limiting the geographic expansion of slavery, an issue that moved to the center of national politics during the 1850s (as discussed in chapter 14).
Black leaders rose to prominence in the abolitionist movement during the 1840s and 1850s. African Americans had actively opposed slavery for decades, but a new
BLOOMERS AND WOMAN’S EMANCIPATION This 1851 British cartoon lampoons bloomers, the trouserlike garment worn beneath shortened skirts by two cigar-smoking American women. Bloomers were invented in the United States as an alternative to the uncomfortable, confining, and awkward dresses worn by the “respectable” women on the right. In the 1850s, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other woman’s rights activists wore bloomers and urged all American women to do likewise. The New York Public Library. Art Resource, NY.
Reforming Self and Society 3291840–1860
generation of leaders came to the forefront in these years. Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, William Wells Brown, Martin R. Delany, and others became impa- tient with white abolitionists’ appeals to the conscience of the white majority. To express their own uncompromising ideas, black abolitionists founded their own newspapers and held their own antislavery conventions, although they still cooper- ated with sympathetic whites.
The commitment of black abolitionists to battling slavery grew out of their own experiences with white supremacy. The 250,000 free African Americans in the North and West constituted less than 2 percent of the total population in 1860. They con- fronted the humiliations of racial discrimination in nearly every arena of daily life. Only Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont permitted black men to vote; New York imposed a special property-holding requirement on black — but not white — voters, effectively excluding most black men from the franchise. The perva- sive racial discrimination both handicapped and energized black abolitionists. Some cooperated with the efforts of the American Colonization Society to send freed slaves and other black Americans to Liberia in West Africa. Others sought to move to Canada, Haiti, or elsewhere. Most black American leaders refused to embrace emigration and worked against racial prejudice in their own communities, organiz- ing campaigns against segregation, particularly in transportation and education. Their most notable success came in 1855 when Massachusetts integrated its public schools. Elsewhere, white supremacy continued unabated.
Outside the public spotlight, free African Americans in the North and West con- tributed to the antislavery cause by quietly aiding fugitive slaves. Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery in Maryland in 1849 and repeatedly risked her freedom and her
American Colonization Society An organization dedicated to sending freed slaves and other black Americans to Liberia in West Africa. Although some African Americans cooperated with the movement, others campaigned against segregation and discrimination.
ABOLITIONIST MEETING This rare daguerreotype portrays an abolitionist meeting in New York in 1850. Frederick Douglass, who had escaped from slavery in Maryland, is seated on the platform next to the woman at the table. One of the nation’s most eloquent abolitionists, Douglass also supported equal rights for women. The man behind Douglass is Gerrit Smith, a wealthy and militant abolitionist whose funds supported many reform activities. Collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, CA.
330 CHAPTER 12 The New West and the Free North 1840–1860
life to return to the South to escort slaves to freedom. When the opportunity arose, free blacks in the North provided fugitive slaves with food, a safe place to rest, and a helping hand. An outgrowth of the antislavery sentiment and opposition to white supremacy that unified nearly all African Americans in the North, this “underground railroad” ran mainly through black neighborhoods, black churches, and black homes.
Conclusion: Free Labor, Free Men During the 1840s and 1850s, a cluster of interrelated developments — population growth, steam power, railroads, and the growing mechanization of agriculture and manufacturing — meant greater economic productivity, a burst of output from farms and factories, and prosperity for many. Diplomacy with Great Britain and war with Mexico handed the United States 1.2 million square miles and more than 1,000 miles of Pacific coastline. One prize of manifest destiny, California, almost immediately rewarded its new owners with tons of gold. Most Americans believed that the new territory and vast riches were appropriate rewards for the nation’s stunning eco- nomic progress and superior institutions.
To Northerners, industrial evolution confirmed the choice they had made to eliminate slavery and promote free labor as the key to independence, equality, and prosperity. Like Abraham Lincoln, millions of Americans could point to their per- sonal experiences as evidence of the practical truth of the free-labor ideal. But millions of others knew that in the free-labor system, poverty and wealth continued to rub shoulders. Free-labor enthusiasts denied that the problems were inherent in the coun- try’s social and economic systems. Instead, they argued, most social ills — including poverty and dependency — sprang from individual deficiencies. Consequently, many reformers focused on personal self-control and discipline, on avoiding sin and alcohol. Other reformers focused on woman’s rights and the abolition of slavery. They chal- lenged widespread conceptions of male supremacy and black inferiority, but neither group managed to overcome the prevailing free-labor ideology based on individual- ism, racial prejudice, and notions of male superiority.
By midcentury, half of the nation had prohibited slavery, and half permitted it. The North and the South were animated by different economic interests, cultural values, and political aims. Each celebrated its regional identity and increasingly dis- paraged that of the other. Not even the victory over Mexico could bridge the deepen- ing divide between North and South.
underground railroad Network consisting mainly of black homes, black churches, and black neighborhoods that helped slaves escape to the North by supplying shelter, food, and general assistance.
1840–1860
1 Discuss westward migration to two different regions.
2 How did the ideology of manifest destiny contribute to mid-nineteenth-century expansion? Discuss its implications for individual migrants and the nation.
3 How did the Mexican-American War affect national political and economic developments in subsequent decades?
4 How did nineteenth-century reform movements draw on the ideal to pursue specific reforms?
MAKING CONNECTIONS
1 Why did the United States become a leading industrial power in the nine- teenth century? (pp. 304–308)
2 How did the free-labor ideal account for economic inequality? (pp. 309–312)
3 Why did westward migration expand dramatically in the mid-nineteenth century? (pp. 312–319)
4 Why was the annexation of Texas such a controversial policy? (pp. 319–325)
5 Why were women especially prominent in many nineteenth-century reform efforts? (pp. 326–330)
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
mechanical reapers (p. 305)
American system (p. 306)
manifest destiny (p. 313)
Oregon Trail (p. 313)
Mormons (p. 315)
Lone Star Republic (p. 318)
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (p. 323)
KEY TERMS
California gold rush (p. 324)
Oneida community (p. 327)
Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments (p. 327)
American Colonization Society (p. 329)
underground railroad (p. 330)
Chapter Review MAKE IT STICK
Go to LearningCurve: See what you know. Then review the key terms and answer the questions.
LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com /roarkconcise
331
STUDENT SITE @ bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
Nat Turner was born a slave in Southampton County, Virginia, in October 1800. His parents noticed special marks on his body, which they said were signs that he was “intended for some great purpose.” As an adolescent, he adopted an austere lifestyle of Christian devotion and fasting. In his twenties, he received visits from the “Spirit,” the same spirit, he believed, that had spoken to the ancient prophets. In time, Nat Turner began to interpret these things to mean that God had appointed
him an instrument of divine vengeance for the sin of slaveholding. On the morning of August 22, 1831, he set out with six
friends — Hark, Henry, Sam, Nelson, Will, and Jack — to punish slave owners. Turner struck the first blow, an ax to the head of his master, Joseph Travis. The rebels killed all of the white men, women, and children they encountered. By noon, they had visited eleven farms and slaughtered fifty-seven whites. Along the way, they had added fifty or
The Slave South, 1820–1860
The Growing Distinctiveness of the South (pp. 334–342)
Masters and Mistresses in the Big House (pp. 342–345)
Slaves in the Quarter (pp. 346–349)
The Plain Folk (pp. 349–353)
Black and Free: On the Middle Ground (pp. 353–354)
The Politics of Slavery (pp. 354–356)
Conclusion: A Slave Society (p. 356)
13
CHAPTER OUTLINE QUICK START
Quickly learn what is important in this chapter by doing the following:
• READ the Chapter Outline to see how the chapter is organized. • SKIM the Chronology on the next page to see what will be covered.
When you are ready, read the chapter and the Essential Questions for each section. Then use the Chapter Review to check what you know.
CLAY JUG Enslaved African American potters created tens of thousands
of ceramic pots to hold water and store food. Dave, a renowned South Carolina slave potter, created this three-foot-tall pot in 1857.
Although teaching slaves to read and write was illegal, Dave usually signed his work. While Dave worked in his potter’s shed, most slaves
toiled in cotton fields. Collection of McKissick Museum, University of South Carolina.
332
sixty men to their army. Word spread quickly, and soon the militia and hundreds of local whites gathered. They quickly captured or killed all of the rebels except Turner, who hid out for about ten weeks before being captured in nearby woods. Within a week, he was tried, convicted, and executed. By then, forty-five slaves had stood trial, twenty had been convicted and hanged, and another ten had been banished from Virginia. Frenzied whites had killed another hundred or more blacks — insurgents and innocent bystanders — in their counterattack against the rebellion.
White Virginians blamed the rebellion on outside agitators. In 1829, David Walker, a freeborn black man living in Boston, had published his Appeal . . . to the Coloured Citizens of the World, an invitation to slaves to rise up in bloody revolution, and copies had fallen into the hands of Virginia slaves. Moreover, on January 1, 1831, the Massachusetts abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison had published the first issue of the Liberator, his fiery newspaper (see chapter 11).
In the months following the insurrection, the Virginia legislature reaffirmed the state’s determination to preserve slavery by passing laws that strengthened the institution and further restricted free blacks. A professor at the College of William and Mary, Thomas R. Dew, published a vigorous defense of slavery that became the bible of Southerners’ proslavery arguments. More than ever, the nation was divided along the Mason-Dixon line, the surveyors’ mark that in colonial times had established the boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania but half a century later divided the free North and the slave South.
Black slavery increasingly molded the South into a distinctive region. In the decades after 1820, Southerners, like Northerners, raced westward, but unlike Northerners who spread small farms, manufacturing, and free labor, Southerners spread slavery, cotton, and plantations. Geographic expansion meant that slavery became more vigorous and more profitable than ever, embraced more people, and increased the South’s political power. Antebellum Southerners sometimes found themselves at odds with one another — not only slaves and free people but also women and men; Indians, Africans, and Europeans; and aristocrats and common folk. Nevertheless, beneath this diversity, a distinctively southern society and culture were forming. The South became a slave society, and most white Southerners were proud of it.
CHRONOLOGY
1808 External slave trade outlawed.
1810s– Suffrage extended 1850s throughout South to all
adult white males.
1820s– Southern legislatures enact 1830s slave codes. Southern legislatures
restrict free blacks. Southern intellectuals
fashion systematic defense of slavery.
1822 Denmark Vesey executed.
1829 Appeal . . . to the Coloured Citizens of the World published.
1830 Southern slaves number approximately two million.
1831 Nat Turner’s rebellion. First issue of the Liberator
published.
1836 Arkansas admitted to Union as slave state.
1840 Cotton accounts for more than 60 percent of nation’s exports.
1845 Texas and Florida admitted to Union as slave states.
1860 Southern slaves number nearly four million, one- third of South’s population.
334 CHAPTER 13 The Slave South 1820–1860
The Growing Distinctiveness of the South
From the earliest settlements, inhabitants of the southern colonies had shared a great deal with northern colonists. Most whites in both sections were British and Protestant, spoke a common language, and celebrated their victorious
revolution against British rule. The creation of the new nation under the Constitu- tion in 1789 forged political ties that bound all Americans. The beginnings of a national economy fostered economic interdependence and communication across regional boundaries. White Americans everywhere praised the prosperous young nation, and they looked forward to its seemingly boundless future.
Despite these national similarities, Southerners and Northerners grew increasingly different. The French political observer Alexis de Tocqueville believed he knew why. “I could easily prove,” he asserted in 1831, “that almost all the differences which may be noticed between the character of the Americans in the Southern and Northern states have originated in slavery.” Even more than the cotton-based agriculture that dominated the region, slavery made the South different, and it was the differences between the North and South, not the similarities, that increasingly shaped antebellum American history.
Cotton Kingdom, Slave Empire. In the first half of the nineteenth century, millions of Americans migrated west. In the South, hard-driving slaveholders seeking virgin acreage for new plantations, ambitious farmers looking for patches of cheap
Why did the nineteenth-century southern economy remain primarily agricultural?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
HORRID MASSACRE IN VIRGINIA No contemporary images of Nat Turner are known to exist. This woodcut simply imagines the rebellion as a nightmare in which black brutes took the lives of innocent whites. Although there was never another rebellion as large as Turner’s, images of black violence continued to haunt white imaginations. Library of Congress.
Mason-Dixon line A surveyor’s mark that had established the boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania in colonial times. By the 1830s, the boundary divided the free North and the slave South.
cotton kingdom Term for the South that reflected the dominance of cotton in the southern economy. Cotton was particularly important in the tier of states from South Carolina west to Texas. Cotton cultivation was the key factor in the growth of slavery.
The Growing Distinctiveness of the South 3351820–1860
land for small farms, striving herders and drovers pushing their hogs and cattle toward fresh pastures — everyone felt the pull of western land.
But more than anything it was cotton that propelled Southerners westward. South of the Mason-Dixon line, climate and geography were ideally suited for the cultivation of cotton. By the 1830s, cotton fields stretched from the Atlantic seaboard to central Texas. Heavy migration led to statehood for Arkansas in 1836 and for Texas and Florida in 1845. Cotton production soared to nearly 5 million bales in 1860, when the South produced three-fourths of the world’s supply. The South — especially that tier of states from South Carolina west to Texas called the Lower South — had become the cotton kingdom (Map 13.1).
The cotton kingdom was also a slave empire. The South’s cotton boom rested on the backs of slaves. As cotton agriculture expanded westward, whites shipped more than a million enslaved men, women, and children from the Atlantic coast across the continent in what has been called the “Second Middle Passage,” a massive deportation that dwarfed the transatlantic slave trade to North America.
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MAP 13.1 COTTON KINGDOM, SLAVE EMPIRE: 1820 AND 1860 As the production of cotton soared, the slave population increased dramatically. Slaves continued to toil in tobacco and rice fields, but in Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas, they increasingly worked on cotton plantations.
READING THE MAP: Where was slavery most prevalent in 1820? In 1860? How did the spread of slavery compare with the spread of cotton?
CONNECTIONS: How much of the world’s cotton was produced in the American South in 1860? How did the number of slaves in the American South compare with that in the rest of the world? What does this suggest about the South’s cotton kingdom?
Map Activity
Upper South
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336 CHAPTER 13 The Slave South 1820–1860
Victims of this brutal domestic slave trade marched hundreds of miles southwest to new plantations in the Lower South. Cotton, slaves, and plantations moved west together.
The slave population grew enormously. Southern slaves numbered fewer than 700,000 in 1790, about 2 million in 1830, and almost 4 million by 1860. By 1860, the South contained more slaves than all the other slave societies in the New World combined. The extraordinary growth was not the result of the importation of slaves, which the federal government outlawed in 1808. Instead, the slave population grew through natural reproduction; by midcentury, most U.S. slaves were native-born Southerners.
The South in Black and White. By 1860, one in every three Southerners was black (approximately 4 million blacks to 8 million whites). In the Lower South states of Mississippi and South Carolina, blacks constituted the majority. The contrast with the North was striking: In 1860, only one Northerner in seventy-six was black (about 250,000 blacks to 19 million whites).
The presence of large numbers of African Americans had profound conse- quences for the South. Southern culture — language, food, music, religion, and even accents — was in part shaped by blacks. But the most direct consequence of the South’s biracialism was southern whites’ commitment to white supremacy. Northern whites believed in racial superiority, too, but their dedication to white supremacy lacked the intensity and urgency increasingly felt by white Southerners who lived among millions of blacks who had every reason to strike back, as Nat Turner had.
After 1820, attacks on slavery — from slaves and from northern abolitionists — caused white Southerners to make extraordinary efforts to strengthen slavery. State legislatures constructed slave codes (laws) that required the total submission of slaves. As the Loui- siana code stated, a slave “owes his master . . . a respect without bounds, and an absolute obedience.” The laws also underlined the authority of all whites, not just masters. Any white could “correct” slaves who did not stay “in their place.”
Intellectuals joined legislators in the campaign to strengthen slavery. The South’s academics, writers, and clergy employed every imaginable defense. They argued that slaves were legal property, and wasn’t the protection of property the bedrock of American liberty? History also endorsed slavery, they claimed. Weren’t the great civilizations — such as those of the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans — slave societies? They argued that the Bible, properly interpreted, also sanctioned slavery. Old Testament patriarchs owned slaves, they observed, and in the New Testament, Paul returned the runaway slave Onesimus to his master. Proslavery spokesmen claimed that the freeing of slaves would lead to the sexual mixing of the races, or miscegenation.
George Fitzhugh of Virginia defended slavery by attacking the North’s free- labor economy and society. Gouging capitalists exploited wageworkers unmercifully, Fitzhugh declared, and he contrasted the North’s vicious free-labor system with the humane relations that he said prevailed between masters and slaves because slaves were valuable capital that masters sought to protect. John C. Calhoun, an influential southern politician, declared that in the states where slavery had been abolished, “the condition of the African, instead of being improved, has become worse,” while in the slave states, the Africans “have improved greatly in every respect.”
slave codes Laws enacted in southern states in the 1820s and 1830s that required the total submission of slaves. Attacks by antislavery activists and by slaves convinced southern legislators that they had to do everything in their power to strengthen the institution.
miscegenation Interracial sex. Proslavery spokesmen played on the fears of whites when they suggested that giving blacks equal rights would lead to miscegenation. In reality, slavery led to considerable sexual abuse of black women by their white masters.
The Growing Distinctiveness of the South 3371820–1860
But at the heart of the defense of slavery lay the claim of black inferiority. Black enslavement was both necessary and proper, slavery’s defenders argued, because Africans were lesser beings. Rather than exploitative, slavery was a mass civilizing effort that lifted lowly blacks from barbarism and savagery, taught them disciplined work, and converted them to soul-saving Christianity. According to Virginian Thomas R. Dew, most slaves were grateful. He declared that “the slaves of a good master are his warmest, most constant, and most devoted friends.” (See “Document- ing the American Promise,” pages 338–339.)
African slavery encouraged southern whites to unify around race rather than to divide by class. The grubbiest, most tobacco-stained white man could proudly proclaim his superiority to all blacks and his equality with the most refined southern planter. Georgia attorney Thomas R. R. Cobb observed that every white Southerner “feels that he belongs to an elevated class. It matters not that he is no slaveholder; he is not of the inferior race; he is a freeborn citizen.” Consequently, the “poorest meets the richest as an equal; sits at his table with him; salutes him as a neighbor; meets him in every public assembly, and stands on the same social platform.” In the South, Cobb boasted, “there is no war of classes.” By providing every white Southerner membership in the ruling race, slavery helped whites bridge differences in wealth, education, and culture.
The Plantation Economy. As important as slavery was in unifying white Southerners, only about a quarter of the white population lived in slaveholding families. Most slaveholders owned fewer than five slaves. Only about 12 percent of slaveholders owned twenty or more, the number of slaves that historians consider necessary to distinguish a planter from a farmer. Despite their small numbers, planters dominated the southern economy. In 1860, 52 percent of the South’s slaves
THE FRUITS OF AMALGAMATION In this lithograph from 1839, Edward W. Clay of Philadelphia attacked abolitionists by imagining the miscegenation (also known as “amalgamation”) that would come from emancipation. He drew a beautiful white woman, her two black children, and her dark-skinned, ridiculously overdressed husband, resting his feet in his wife’s lap. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.
planter A substantial landowner who tilled his estate with twenty or more slaves. Planters dominated the social and political world of the South. Their values and ideology influenced the values of all southern whites.
sickness or infirmities of age. Compare his condition with the tenants of the poor houses in the more civilized por- tions of Europe — look at the sick, and the old and infirm slave, on one hand, in the midst of his family and friends, under the kind superintending care of his master and mistress, and compare it with the forlorn and wretched condition of the pauper in the poor house.
SOURCE: John C. Calhoun, “Speech on the Reception of Abolition Petitions, Delivered in the Senate, February 6th, 1837, ” in Speeches of John C. Calhoun, Delivered in the House of Representatives and in the Senate of the United States, edited by Richard K. Cralle (Appleton, 1853), 625–33.
William Harper, Memoir on Slavery, 1837 William Harper — judge, politician, and academic — defended slavery by denouncing abolitionists, particularly the “atrocious philosophy” of “natural equality and inalienable rights” that they used to support their attacks on slavery.
All men are born free and equal. Is it not palpably nearer the truth to say that no man was ever born free, and that no two men were ever born equal? . . . Wealth and poverty, fame or obscurity, strength or weakness, knowl- edge or ignorance, ease or labor, power or subjection, mark the endless diversity in the condition of men. . . .
It is the order of nature and of God, that the being of superior faculties and knowledge, and therefore of supe- rior power, should control and dispose of those who are inferior. It is as much in the order of nature, that men should enslave each other, as that other animals should prey upon each other.
Moralists have denounced the injustice and cruelty which have been practiced towards our aboriginal Indians, by which they have been driven from their native seats and exterminated.
Defending Slavery White Southerners who defended slavery were rationalizing their economic interests and racial privileges, of course, but they also believed what they said about slavery being just, necessary, and godly. Whatever their specifi c arguments, they agreed with the Charleston Mercury that without slavery, the South would become a “most magnifi cent jungle.”
Documenting the American Promise
DOCUMENT 1
John C. Calhoun, Speech before the U.S. Senate, 1837 When abolitionists began to denounce slavery as sinful and odious, John C. Calhoun, the South’s leading proslavery politician, rose to defend the institution as “a positive good.” Calhoun devoted part of his speech to the argument that enslavement benefited the slaves themselves.
Be it good or bad, it [slavery] has grown up with our society and institutions, and is so interwoven with them, that to destroy it would be to destroy us as a people. But let me not be understood as admitting, even by implication, that the existing relations between the two races in the slaveholding States is an evil: far otherwise; I hold it to be a good. . . . I appeal to facts. Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condi- tion so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually. It came to us in a low, degraded, and savage condition, and in the course of a few generations, it has grown up under the fostering care of our institutions, reviled they have been, to its present comparatively civilized condition. This, with the rapid increase of numbers, is conclusive proof of the general happiness of the race, in spite of all the exagger- ated tales to the contrary. . . .
I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good — a positive good. . . .
I may say with truth, that in few countries so much is left to the share of the laborer, and so little exacted from him, or where there is more kind attention paid to him in
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DOCUMENT 2
DOCUMENT 3
Thornton Stringfellow, “The Bible Argument: or, Slavery in the Light of Divine Revelation,” 1856 Reverend Thornton Stringfellow, a Baptist minister from Virginia, defended human bondage based on his reading of the Bible. He makes a case that Jesus himself approved of the relationship between master and slave.
Jesus Christ recognized this institution [slavery] as one that was lawful among men, and regulated its
relative duties. . . . I affirm then, first, (and no man denies,) that Jesus Christ has not abolished slavery by a prohibitory command: and second, I affirm, he has intro- duced no new moral principle which can work its destruction, under the gospel dispensation; and that the principle relied on for this purpose, is a fundamental principle of the Mosaic law, under which slavery was instituted by Jehovah himself. . . .
To the church at Colosse . . . Paul in his letter to them, recognizes the three relations of wives and husbands, parents and children, servants and mas- ters, as relations existing among the members . . . and to the servants and masters he thus writes: “Servants obey in all things your masters, according to the flesh: not with eye service, as men pleasers, but in singleness of heart, fearing God: and whatso- ever you do, do it heartily, as to the Lord and not unto men; knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance, for ye serve the Lord Christ. . . . Masters give unto your servants that which is just and equal, knowing that you also have a master in heaven.”
SOURCE: Slavery Defended: The Views of the Old South by Eric L. McKitrick, editor. Published by Prentice-Hall, 1963. Reprinted with permission. Cotton Is King and Pro-Slavery Arguments by Thornton Stringfellow (Pritchard, Abbott & Loomis, 1860), 459–546.
Questions for Analysis and Debate 1 According to John C. Calhoun, what were slavery’s chief benefits for blacks? How did his
proslavery convictions shape his argument?
2 Why do you suppose William Harper interjected Americans’ treatment of Indians into his defense of slavery?
3 According to Thornton Stringfellow, the Bible instructs both masters and slaves about their duties. What are their respective obligations?
CONNECT TO THE BIG IDEA C What were the underlying motives behind the defense of slavery?
339
. . . No doubt, much fraud and injustice has been practiced in the circumstances and manner of their removal. Yet who has contended that civilized man had no moral right to possess himself of the country? That he was bound to leave this wide and fertile continent, which is capable of sustaining uncounted myriads of a civilized race, to a few roving and ignorant barbarians? Yet if any thing is certain, it is certain that there were no means by which he could possess the country, without exterminating or enslaving them. Slave and civilized man cannot live together, and the savage can only be tamed by being enslaved or by having slaves.
SOURCE: William Harper, Memoir of Slavery (J. S. Burges, 1838).
340 CHAPTER 13 The Slave South 1820–1860
lived and worked on plantations. Plantation slaves produced more than 75 per- cent of the South’s export crops, the backbone of the region’s economy.
The South’s major cash crops — tobacco, sugar, rice, and cotton — grew on plan- tations (Map 13.2). Tobacco, the original plantation crop in North America, had shifted westward in the nineteenth century from the Chesapeake to Tennessee and Kentucky. Large-scale sugar production began in 1795, when Étienne de Boré built a modern sugar mill in what is today New Orleans, and sugar plantations were con- fined almost entirely to Louisiana. Commercial rice production began in the seven-
teenth century, and like sugar, rice was confined to a small geographic area, a narrow strip of coast stretching from the Carolinas into Georgia.
But by the nineteenth century, cotton reigned as king of the South’s plan- tation crops. Cotton became commercially significant in the 1790s after the invention of a new cotton gin by Eli Whitney (see chapter 9). Cotton was relatively easy to grow and took little capital to get started — just enough for land, seed, and simple tools. Thus, small farmers as well as planters grew
cotton. But planters, whose extensive fields were worked by gangs of slaves, produced three-quarters of the South’s cotton, and cotton made planters rich.
MAP 13.2 THE AGRICULTURAL ECONOMY OF THE SOUTH, 1860 Cotton dominated the South’s agricultural economy, but the region grew a variety of crops and was largely self-sufficient in foodstuffs.
READING THE MAP: In what type of geographic areas were rice and sugar grown? After cotton, what crop commanded the greatest agricultural area in the South? In which region of the South was this crop predominantly found?
CONNECTIONS: What role did the South play in the U.S. economy in 1860? How did the economy of the South differ from that of the North?
Map Activity
0 75 150 kilometers
0 75 150 miles
Corn
Cotton
Tobacco
Hemp
Lumber
Rice
Sugar
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S
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Gulf of Mex ico AT L A N T I C
O C E A N
Ohio R.
Red R.
Arkansas R.
Savannah R.
Tennessee R.
Cu mberland R.
M iss
iss ip
pi R
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M issouri R.
25°N
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95°W 90°W 85°W
80˚W
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FLORIDA
SOUTH CAROLINA
GEORGIA ALABAMA
LOUISIANA
ARKANSAS
MISSISSIPPI
TENNESSEE NORTH CAROLINA
VIRGINIA
KENTUCKY
TEXAS
INDIAN TERRITORY
KANSAS TERRITORY
MISSOURI
ILLINOIS INDIANA OHIO MD.
N.J. PA.
DEL.
Atlanta
Nashville
Richmond
Raleigh
Savannah
St. Augustine
Charleston
Memphis
Knoxville
New Orleans
Natchez Montgomery
Little Rock
Mobile
Houston
Frankfort
Wilmington
ers
es
AT L A N T I C O C E A N
25°NN
80˚W˚W FLORFLORFLOLO IDAIDAD
plantation Large farm worked by twenty or more slaves. Although small farms were more numerous, plantations produced more than 75 percent of the South’s export crops.
The Growing Distinctiveness of the South 3411820–1860
Plantation slavery also enriched the nation. By 1840, cotton accounted for more than 60 percent of American exports. Most of the cotton was shipped to Great Britain, the world’s largest manufacturer of cotton textiles. Much of the profit from the sale of cotton overseas returned to planters, but some went to northern middlemen who bought, sold, insured, warehoused, and shipped cotton to the mills in Great Britain. As one New York merchant observed, “Cotton has enriched all through whose hands it has passed.” As middlemen invested their profits in the booming northern economy, industrial develop- ment received a burst of much-needed capital. Furthermore, southern planta- tions benefited northern industry by providing an important market for textiles, agricultural tools, and other manufactured goods.
The economies of the North and South steadily diverged. While the North developed a mixed economy — agriculture, commerce, and manufacturing — the South remained overwhelmingly agricultural. Year after year, planters funneled the profits they earned from land and slaves back into more land and more slaves. With its capital flowing into agriculture, the South did not develop many factories. By 1860, only 10 percent of the nation’s industrial workers lived in the South. Some cotton mills sprang up, but the region that produced 100 percent of the nation’s cotton manufactured less than 7 percent of its cotton textiles.
Without significant economic diversification, the South developed fewer cities than the North and West. In 1860, it was the least urban region in the country. Whereas nearly 37 percent of New England’s population lived in cities, less than 12 percent of Southerners were urban dwellers. Because the South had so few cities and industrial jobs, it attracted small numbers of European immigrants. Seeking eco- nomic opportunity, not competition with slaves (whose labor would keep wages low), immigrants steered northward. In 1860, 13 percent of all Americans were born abroad. But in nine of the fifteen slave states, only 2 percent or less of the population was foreign-born.
STEAMBOATS AND COTTON IN NEW ORLEANS, CA. 1858 Smokestacks of dozens of steamboats overlook hundreds of bales of cotton at the foot of Canal Street. This photograph by Jay Dearborn Edwards captures something of the magnitude of the cotton trade in the South’s largest city and major port. Few Southerners doubted that cotton was king. Historic New Orleans Collection, Accession no. 1985.238.
Less than 10%
10–19%
20–29%
More than 30%
IMMIGRANTS AS A PERCENTAGE OF STATE
POPULATIONS, 1860
342 CHAPTER 13 The Slave South 1820–1860
Northerners claimed that slavery was a backward labor system, and compared with Northerners, Southerners invested less of their capital in industry, transporta- tion, and public education. But planters’ pockets were never fuller than in the 1850s. Planters’ decisions to reinvest in agriculture ensured the momentum of the plantation economy and the political and social relationships rooted in it.
Masters and Mistresses in the Big House Nowhere was the contrast between northern and southern life more vivid than on the plantations of the South. A plantation typically included a “big house,” where the plantation owner and his family lived, and a slave quarter. Near the big house
were the kitchen, storehouse, smokehouse (for curing and preserving meat), and hen coop. More distant were the barns, toolsheds, artisans’ workshops, and overseer’s house. Large plantations sometimes had an infirmary and a chapel for slaves. Depending on the crop, there was also a tobacco shed, a rice mill, a sugar refinery, or a cotton gin house. Lavish or plain, plantations everywhere had an underlying similarity.
The plantation was the home of masters, mistresses, and slaves. A hierarchy of rigid roles and duties governed their relationships. Presiding was the master, who by law ruled his wife, children, and slaves as dependents under his dominion and protection.
Paternalism and Male Honor. Whereas smaller planters supervised the labor of their slaves themselves, larger planters hired overseers who went to the fields with the slaves, leaving the planters free to concentrate on marketing, finance, and the general affairs of the plantation. Planters also found time to escape to town to discuss cotton prices, to the courthouse and legislature to debate politics, and to the woods to hunt and fish.
Increasingly, planters characterized their mastery in terms of what they called “Christian guardianship” and what historians have called paternalism. The concept of paternalism denied that the form of slavery practiced in the South was brutal and exploita- tive. Instead, paternalism claimed that plantations benefited all. In exchange for the slaves’ work and obedience, masters provided basic care and necessary guidance for a childlike, dependent people. In 1814, Thomas Jefferson captured the essence of the advancing ideal: “We should endeavor, with those whom fortune has thrown on our hands, to feed & clothe them well, protect them from ill usage, require such reasonable labor only as is performed voluntarily by freemen, and be led by no repugnancies to abdicate them, and our duties to them.” A South Carolina rice planter insisted, “I manage them as my children.”
Paternalism was part propaganda and part self-delusion. But it was also eco- nomically shrewd. Masters increasingly recognized slaves as valuable assets, particu- larly after the nation closed its external slave trade in 1808 and the cotton boom stimulated the demand for slaves. The expansion of the slave labor force could come only from natural reproduction. As one slave owner declared in 1849, “It behooves those who own them to make them last as long as possible.”
One consequence of paternalism and economic self-interest was a small improvement in slaves’ welfare. Diet improved, although nineteenth-century slaves still ate mainly fatty pork and cornmeal. Housing improved, although the cabins
Why did the ideology of paternalism gain currency among planters in the nineteenth century?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
paternalism The theory of slavery that emphasized reciprocal duties and obligations between masters and their slaves, with slaves providing labor and obedience and masters providing basic care and direction. Whites employed the concept of paternalism to deny that the slave system was brutal and exploitative.
Masters and Mistresses in the Big House 3431820–1860
still had cracks large enough, slaves said, for cats to slip through. Clothing improved, although slaves seldom received much more than two crude outfits a year and perhaps a pair of cheap shoes. Workdays remained sunup to sundown, but most planters ceased the colonial practice of punishing slaves by branding and mutilation.
Paternalism should not be mistaken for “Ol’ Massa’s” kindness and good- will. It encouraged better treatment because it made economic sense to provide at least minimal care for valuable slaves. Nor did paternalism require that planters put aside their whips. State laws gave masters nearly “uncontrolled authority over the body” of the slave, according to one North Carolina judge, and whipping remained planters’ basic form of coercion.
Paternalism never won universal acceptance among planters, but by the nineteenth century it had become a kind of communal standard. With its notion that slavery imposed on masters a burden and a duty, paternalism provided slaveholders with a means of rationalizing their rule. But it also provided some slaves with leverage in controlling the conditions of their lives. Slaves learned to manipulate the slaveholder’s need to see himself as a good master. To avoid a reputation as a cruel tyrant, planters sometimes negotiated with slaves, rather than just resorting to the whip. Masters sometimes granted slaves small garden plots in which they could work for themselves after working all day in the fields, or they gave slaves a few days off and a dance when they had gathered the last of the cotton.
Virginia statesman Edmund Randolph argued that slavery created in white southern men a “quick and acute sense of personal liberty” and a “disdain for every abridgement of personal independence.” Indeed, prickly individualism and aggres- sive independence became crucial features of the southern concept of honor. Social
SOUTHERN MAN WITH CHILDREN AND THEIR MAMMY Obviously prosperous and looking like a man accustomed to giving orders and being obeyed, this patriarch poses around 1848 with his young daughters and their nurse. The absent mother may be dead, and her death might account for the inclusion of the African American domestic servant in the family circle. Collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, CA.
344 CHAPTER 13 The Slave South 1820–1860
standing, political advancement, and even self-esteem rested on an honorable repu- tation. Defending honor became a male passion. Andrew Jackson’s mother report- edly told her son, “Never tell a lie, nor take what is not your own, nor sue anybody for slander or assault and battery. Always settle them cases yourself. ”
Southerners also expected an honorable gentleman to be a proper patriarch. Nowhere in America was masculine power more accentuated. The master’s absolute dominion sometimes led to miscegenation. Laws prohibited interracial sex, but as long as slavery gave white men extraordinary power, slave women were forced to submit to the sexual demands of the men who owned them.
In time, as the children of one elite family married the children of another, ties of blood and kinship, as well as ideology and economic interest, linked planters to one another. Aware of what they shared as slaveholders, planters worked together to defend their common interests. The values of the big house — slavery, honor, male domina- tion — washed over the boundaries of plantations and flooded all of southern life.
The Southern Lady and Feminine Virtues. Like their northern counterparts, southern ladies were expected to possess the feminine virtues of piety, purity, chas- tity, and obedience within the context of marriage, motherhood, and domesticity. Countless toasts praised the southern lady as the perfect complement to her hus- band, the commanding patriarch. She was physically weak, “formed only for the less laborious occupations,” and thus dependent on male protection. To gain this protec- tion, she exhibited modesty and delicacy, possessed beauty and grace, and cultivated refinement and charm.
Chivalry — the South’s romantic ideal of male-female relationships — glorified the lady while it subordinated her. Chivalry’s underlying assumptions about the weakness of women and the protective authority of men resembled the paternalistic defense of slavery. Just as the slaveholder’s mastery was written into law, so too were the paramount rights of husbands. Married women lost almost all their property rights to their husbands. Women throughout the nation found divorce difficult, but southern women found it almost impossible.
Daughters of planters confronted chivalry’s demands at an early age. At their private boarding schools, they learned to be southern ladies, reading literature, learning languages, and studying the appropriate drawing-room arts. Elite women began courting young and married early. Kate Carney exaggerated only slightly when she despaired in her diary: “Today, I am seventeen, getting quite old, and am not married.” Yet marriage meant turning their fates over to their husbands and making enormous efforts to live up to their region’s lofty ideal.
Proslavery advocates claimed that slavery freed white women from drudgery. Surrounded “by her domestics,” declared Thomas R. Dew, “she ceases to be a mere beast of burden” and “becomes the cheering and animating center of the family circle.” In reality, however, having servants required the plantation mistress to work long hours. She managed the big house, directly supervising as many as a dozen slaves. But unlike her husband, the mistress had no overseer. All house servants answered directly to her. She assigned them tasks each morning, directed their work throughout the day, and punished them when she found fault.
chivalry The South’s romantic ideal of male-female relationships. Chivalry’s underlying assumptions about the weakness of white women and the protective authority of men resembled the paternalistic defense of slavery.
Masters and Mistresses in the Big House 3451820–1860
Whereas masters used their status as slaveholders as a springboard into public affairs, mistresses’ lives were circumscribed by the plantation. Masters left when they pleased, but mistresses needed chaperones to travel. When they could, they went to church, but women spent most days at home, where they often became lonely. In 1853, Mary Kendall wrote how much she enjoyed her sister’s letter: “For about three weeks I did not have the pleasure of seeing one white female face, there being no white family except our own upon the plantation.”
No feature of plantation life generated more anguish among mistresses than miscegenation. Mary Boykin Chesnut of Camden, South Carolina, confided in her diary, “Ours is a monstrous system, a wrong and iniquity. Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattos one sees in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she seems to think drop from the clouds.”
But most planters’ wives, including Chesnut, accepted slavery. After all, the privileged life of a mistress rested on slave labor as much as a master’s did. Mistresses enjoyed the rewards of their class and race. But these rewards came at a price. Still, the heaviest burdens of slavery fell not on those who lived in the big house, but on those who toiled to support them.
Visual Activity
THE PRICE OF BLOOD This 1868 painting by T. S. Noble depicts a transaction between a slave trader and a rich planter. The trader nervously pretends to study the contract, while the planter waits impatiently for the completion of the sale. The planter’s mulatto son, who is being sold, looks away. The children of white men and slave women were property and could be sold by the father/master. Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA.
READING THE IMAGE: Who is absent from the painting, and what does this suggest about the tragedy of miscegenation?
CONNECTIONS: The white, male planter represented the pinnacle of southern society. How did white women, black men, and black women fit into this strict hierarchy?
346 CHAPTER 13 The Slave South 1820–1860
Slaves in the Quarter On most plantations, only a few hundred yards separated the big house and the slave quarter. But the distance was great enough to provide slaves with some privacy. Out of eyesight and earshot of the big house, slaves drew together and built lives of their own. They created families, worshipped God,
and developed an African American community and culture. Individually and collectively, slaves found ways to resist their bondage.
Despite the rise of plantations, almost half of the South’s slaves lived and worked elsewhere. Most labored on small farms, where they wielded a hoe alongside another slave or two and perhaps their master. But by 1860, almost half a million slaves (one in eight) did not work in agriculture at all. Some lived in towns and cities, where they worked as domestics, day laborers, bakers, barbers, tailors, and more. Other slaves, far from urban centers, toiled as fishermen, lumbermen, railroad workers, and deckhands on riverboats. Slaves could also be found in most of the South’s factories. Nevertheless, a majority of slaves (52 percent) counted plantations as their workplaces and homes.
Work. Whites enslaved blacks for their labor, and all slaves who were capable of pro- ductive labor worked. Former slave Carrie Hudson recalled that children who were “knee high to a duck” were sent to the fields to carry water to thirsty workers or to protect ripening crops from hungry birds. Others helped in the slave nursery, caring for children even younger than themselves, or in the big house, where they swept floors or shooed flies in the dining room. When slave boys and girls reached the age of eleven or twelve, masters sent most of them to the fields. After a lifetime of labor, old women left the fields to care for the small children and spin yarn, and old men moved on to mind livestock and clean stables.
The overwhelming majority of plantation slaves worked as field hands. Planters sometimes assigned men and women to separate gangs, the women working at lighter tasks and the men doing the heavy work of clearing and breaking the land. But women also did heavy work. “I had to work hard,” Nancy Boudry remembered, and “plow and go and split wood just like a man.” The backbreaking labor and the monotonous routines caused one ex-slave to observe that the “history of one day is the history of every day.”
A few slaves (about one in ten) became house servants. Nearly all of those (nine out of ten) were women. They cooked, cleaned, babysat, washed clothes, and did the dozens of other tasks the master and mistress required. House servants were constantly on call, with no time that was entirely their own. Since no servant could please con- stantly, most bore the brunt of white frustration and rage. Ex-slave Jacob Branch of Texas remembered, “My poor mama! Every washday old Missy give her a beating.”
Even rarer than house servants were skilled artisans. In the cotton South, no more than one slave in twenty (almost all men) worked in a skilled trade. Most were blacksmiths and carpenters, but slaves also worked as masons, mechanics, millers, and shoemakers. Skilled slave fathers took pride in teaching their crafts to their sons. “My pappy was one of the black smiths and worked in the shop,” John Mathews remembered. “I had to help my pappy in the shop when I was a child and I learnt how to beat out the iron and make wagon tires, and make plows.”
What types of resistance did slaves participate in, and why did slave resistance rarely take the form of rebellion?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Slaves in the Quarter 3471820–1860
Rarest of all slave occupations was that of slave driver. Probably no more than one male slave in a hundred worked in this capacity. These men were well named, for their primary task was driving other slaves to work harder in the fields. In some drivers’ hands, the whip never rested. Ex-slave Jane Johnson of South Carolina called her driver the “meanest man, white or black, I ever see.” But other drivers showed all the restraint they could. “Ole Gabe didn’t like that whippin’ business,” West Turner of Virginia remembered. “When Marsa was there, he would lay it on ’cause he had to. But when old Marsa wasn’t lookin’, he never would beat them slaves.”
Normally, slaves worked from what they called “can to can’t,” from “can see” in the morning to “can’t see” at night. Even with a break at noon for a meal and rest, it made for a long day. For slaves, Lewis Young recalled, “work, work, work, ’twas all they do.”
Family and Religion. From dawn to dusk, slaves worked for the master, but at night and all day Sunday and usually Saturday afternoon, slaves were left largely to themselves. Bone tired perhaps, they nonetheless used the time to develop and enjoy what mattered most to them.
Though severely battered, the black family survived slavery. Young men and women in the quarter fell in love, married, and set up housekeeping in cabins of their own. But no laws recognized slave marriage, and there- fore no master was legally obligated to honor the bond. While plantation records show that some slave marriages were long-lasting, the massive deportation associated with the Second Middle Passage destroyed hundreds of thousands of slave families.
In 1858, a slave named Abream Scriven wrote to his wife, who lived on a neighboring plantation in South Carolina. “My dear wife,” he began, “I take the pleasure of writing you . . . with much regret to inform you I am Sold to man by the name of Peterson, a Treader and Stays in New Orleans.” Before he left for Louisiana, Scriven asked his wife to “give my love to my father and mother and tell them good Bye for me. And if we do not meet in this world I hope to meet in heaven. . . . My dear wife for you and my children my pen cannot express the griffe I feel to be parted from you all.” He closed with words no master would have permitted in a slave’s marriage vows: “I remain your truly husband until Death.” The letter makes clear Scriven’s love for his family; it also demonstrates slavery’s massive assault on family life in the quarter.
Masters sometimes permitted slave families to work on their own, “overwork,” as it was called. In the evenings and on Sundays, they tilled gardens, raised pigs and fowl, and chopped wood, selling the products in the market for a little pocket change. “Den each fam’ly have some chickens and sell dem and de eggs and maybe go huntin’ and sell de
SLAVE CABIN, CA. 1860 This crude cabin outside Savannah, Georgia, was about fifteen feet square, with a dirt floor, shingled roof, and no glass. As one slave observed, “The wind and rain would come in and the smoke will not go out.” Collection of the New-York Historical Society.
348 CHAPTER 13 The Slave South 1820–1860
hides and git some money,” a former Alabama slave remembered. “Den us buy what am Sunday clothes with dat money, sech as hats and pants and shoes and dresses.”
Religion also provided slaves with a refuge and a reason for living. In the nine- teenth century, evangelical Baptists and Methodists had great success in converting slaves from their African beliefs. Planters promoted Christianity in the quarter because they believed that the slaves’ salvation was part of the obligation of paternalism; they also hoped that religion would make slaves more obedient. South Carolina slaveholder Charles Colcock Jones, the leading missionary to the slaves, instructed them “to count their Masters ‘worthy of all honour,’ as those whom God has placed over them in this world.” But slaves laughed up their sleeves at such messages. “That old white preacher just was telling us slaves to be good to our masters,” one ex-slave said with a chuckle. “We ain’t cared a bit about that stuff he was telling us ’cause we wanted to sing, pray, and serve God in our own way.”
Meeting in their cabins or secretly in the woods, slaves created an African American Christianity that served their needs, not the masters’. Laws prohibited teaching slaves to read, but a few could read enough to struggle with the Bible. They interpreted the Christian message themselves. Rather than obedience, their faith emphasized justice. Slaves believed that God kept score and that the accounts of this world would be settled in the next. But the slaves’ faith also spoke to their experiences in this world. In the Old Testament, they discovered Moses, who delivered his people from slavery, and in the New Testament, they found Jesus, who offered salvation to all. Jesus’ message of equality provided a potent antidote to the planters’ claim that blacks were an inferior people whom God condemned to slavery.
Christianity did not entirely drive out traditional African beliefs. Even slaves who were Christians sometimes continued to believe that conjurers, witches, and spirits pos- sessed the power to injure and protect. Moreover, slaves’ Christian music, preaching, and rituals reflected the influence of Africa, as did many of their secular activities, such as wood carving, quilt making, dancing, and storytelling. But by the mid-nineteenth century, black Christianity had assumed a central place in slaves’ quest for freedom. In the words of one spiritual, “O my Lord delivered Daniel / O why not deliver me too?”
Resistance and Rebellion. Slaves did not suffer slavery passively. They were, as whites said, “troublesome property.” Slaves understood that accommodation to what they could not change was the price of survival, but in a hundred ways they protested their bondage. Theoretically, the master was all-powerful and the slave powerless. But sustained by their families, religion, and community, slaves engaged in day-to-day resistance against their enslavers.
The spectrum of slave resistance ranged from mild to extreme. Telling a pointed story by the fireside in a slave cabin was probably the mildest form of protest. But when the weak got the better of the strong, as they did in tales of Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox (Br’er is a contraction of Brother), listeners could enjoy the thrill of a vicarious victory over their masters. Protest in the fields was riskier and included putting rocks in their cotton bags before having them weighed, feigning illness, and pretending to be so thick- headed that they could not understand the simplest instruction. Slaves broke so many hoes that owners outfitted the tools with oversized handles. Slaves so mistreated the work
The Plain Folk 3491820–1860
animals that masters switched from horses to mules, which could absorb more abuse. Although slaves worked hard in the master’s fields, they also sabotaged his interests.
Running away was a common form of protest, but except along the borders with northern states and with Mexico, escape to freedom was almost impossible. Most runaways could hope only to escape for a few days. They sought tem- porary respite from hard labor or avoided punishment, and their “lying out,” as it was known, usually ended when the runaway, worn-out and ragged, gave up or was finally chased down by slave-hunting dogs.
Although resistance was common, outright rebellion — a violent assault on slavery by large numbers of slaves — was very rare. Conditions gave rebels almost no chance of success. By 1860, whites in the South outnumbered blacks two to one and were heavily armed. Moreover, communication between plantations was difficult, and the South pro- vided little protective wilderness into which rebels could retreat and defend themselves. Rebellion, as Nat Turner’s experience showed (see pages 332–333), was virtual suicide.
Despite steady resistance and occasional rebellion, slaves did not have the power to end their bondage. Slavery thwarted their hopes and aspirations. It broke some and crippled others. But slavery’s destructive power had to contend with the resil- iency of the human spirit. Slaves fought back physically, culturally, and spiritually. Not only did they survive bondage, but they also created in the quarter a vibrant African American culture that buoyed them up during long hours in the fields and brought them joy and hope in the few hours they had to themselves.
The Plain Folk Most whites in the South did not own slaves, not even one. In 1860, more than six million of the South’s eight million whites lived in slaveless households. Some slaveless whites lived in cities and worked as artisans, mechanics, and traders. Others lived in the country and worked as storekeepers, parsons, and schoolteachers. But most “plain folk” were small farmers. Perhaps three out of four were yeomen, small farmers who owned their own land. As in the North, farm ownership provided a family with an economic foundation, social respectability, and political standing. Unlike their north- ern counterparts, however, southern yeomen lived in a region whose economy and society were increasingly dominated by unfree labor.
FREEDOM PAPER This legal document attests to the free status of the Reverend John F. Cook of Washington, D.C., his daughter Mary, and his son George. Cook was a free black man who kept his “freedom paper” in this watertight tin, which he probably carried with him at all times. Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.
Why did the lives of plantation-belt yeomen and upcountry yeomen diverge?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
yeomen Farmers who owned and worked on their own small plots of land. Yeomen living within the plantation belt were more dependent on planters than were yeomen in the upcountry, where small farmers dominated.
350 CHAPTER 13 The Slave South 1820–1860
In an important sense, the South had more than one white yeomanry. The huge southern landscape provided space enough for two yeoman societies, sepa- rated roughly along geographic lines. Yeomen throughout the South had much in common, but the life of a small farm family in the cotton belt — the flatlands that spread from South Carolina to Texas — differed from the life of a family in the upcountry — the area of hills and mountains. And some rural slaveless whites were not yeomen; they owned no land at all and were sometimes desperately poor.
Plantation-Belt Yeomen. Plantation-belt yeomen lived within the orbit of the planter class. Small farms outnumbered plantations in the plantation belt, but they were dwarfed in importance. Small farmers grew mainly food crops, par- ticularly corn, and produced only a few 400-pound bales of cotton each year. Large
planters measured their crop in hundreds of bales. Small farmers’ cotton tied them to planters. Unable to afford cotton gins or baling presses of their own, they relied on slave owners to gin and bale their cotton. With no link to merchants in the port cities, plantation- belt yeomen also turned to better-connected planters to ship and sell their cotton.
A network of relationships laced small farmers and planters together. Planters hired out surplus slaves to ambitious yeomen who wanted to expand cotton produc- tion. They sometimes chose overseers from among the sons of local farm families. Plantation mistresses occasionally nursed ailing neighbors. Family ties could span class lines, making planter and yeoman kin as well as neighbors. Yeomen helped police slaves by riding in slave patrols, which nightly scoured country roads to make certain that no slaves were moving about without permission. On Sundays, planta- tion dwellers and plain folk came together in church to worship.
Plantation-belt yeomen may have envied, and at times even resented, wealthy slaveholders, but small farmers learned to accommodate. Planters made accommoda- tion easier by going out of their way to behave as good neighbors and avoid direct exploitation of slaveless whites in their community. As a consequence, rather than rag- ing at the oppression of the planter regime, the typical plantation-belt yeoman sought entry into it. He dreamed of adding acreage to his farm, buying a few slaves of his own, and retiring from exhausting field work.
Upcountry Yeomen. By contrast, the hills and mountains of the South resisted the spread of slavery and plantations. In the western parts of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina; in northern Georgia and Alabama; and in eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, the higher elevation, colder climate, rug- ged terrain, and poor transportation made it difficult for commercial agricul- ture to make headway. As a result, yeomen dominated, and planters and slaves were scarce.
All members of the upcountry farm family worked, their tasks depending on their sex and age. Husbands labored in the fields, and with their sons they cleared, plowed, planted, and cultivated primarily food crops — corn, wheat, beans, sweet potatoes, and perhaps some fruit. Women and their daughters labored in and about the cabin. One upcountry farmer remembered that his mother “worked in the house cooking, spinning, weaving [and doing] patchwork.” Women also tended the vegetable garden, kept a cow and some chickens, preserved food,
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UPCOUNTRY OF THE SOUTH
plantation belt Flatlands that spread from South Carolina to east Texas and were dominated by large plantations.
upcountry The hills and mountains of the South whose higher elevation, colder climate, rugged terrain, and poor transportation made the region less hospitable than the flatlands to slavery and large plantations.
The Plain Folk 3511820–1860
cleaned their homes, fed their families, and cared for their children. Male and female tasks were equally crucial to the farm’s success, but as in other white southern households, the male patriarch ruled the domestic sphere.
The typical upcountry yeoman also grew a little cotton or tobacco, but food pro- duction was more important than cash crops. Not much currency changed hands in the upcountry. Barter was common. A yeoman might trade his small cotton or tobacco crop to a country store owner for a little salt, bullets, needles, and nails, or swap extra sweet potatoes for a plow from a blacksmith or for leather from a tanner. Networks of exchange and mutual assistance tied individual homesteads to the larger community. Farm families joined together in logrolling, house and barn raising, and cornhusking.
Even the hills had some plantations and slaves, but the few upcountry folks who owned slaves usually had only two or three. As a result, slaveholders had much less social and economic power, and yeomen had more. But the upcountry did not oppose slavery. As long as plain folk there were free to lead their own lives, they defended slavery and white supremacy just as staunchly as other white Southerners.
Poor Whites. The majority of slaveless white Southerners were hardworking, land- holding small farmers, but Northerners held a different image of this group. They believed that slavery had condemned most whites to poverty and backwardness. One antislavery advocate charged that the South harbored three classes: “the slaves on whom devolves all the regular industry, the slaveholders who reap all the fruits, and an idle and lawless rabble who live dispersed over vast plains little removed from absolute barba- rism.” Critics called this third class a variety of derogatory names: hillbillies, crackers, rednecks, and poor white trash. According to critics, poor whites were not just whites who were poor. They were also supposedly ignorant, diseased, and degenerate.
Contrary to northern opinion, only about one in four nonslaveholding rural white men was landless and very poor. Some worked as tenants, renting land and struggling to make a go of it. Others survived by herding pigs and cattle. And still others worked for meager wages, ditching, mining, logging, and laying track for railroads.
Some poor white men earned reputations for mayhem and violence. One visitor claimed that a “bowie-knife was a universal, and a pistol a not at all unusual companion.” Edward Isham, an illiterate roustabout, spent about as much time fighting as he did working. When he wasn’t engaged in ear-biting, eye-gouging free-for-alls, he gambled, drank, stole, had run-ins with the law, and in 1860 murdered a respected slaveholder, for which he was hanged.
Unlike Isham, most poor white men worked hard and dreamed of becoming yeomen. The Lipscomb family illustrates the possibility of upward mobility. In 1845, Smith and Sally Lipscomb and their children abandoned their worn-out land in South Carolina for Benton County, Alabama. “Benton is a mountainous country but ther is a heep of good levil land to tend in it,” Smith wrote back to his brother. Alabama, Smith said, “will be better for the rising generation if not for ourselves but I think it will be the best for us all that live any length of time.”
Because they had no money to buy land, they squatted on seven unoccupied acres. With the help of neighbors, they built a 22-by-24-foot cabin, a detached kitchen, and two stables. In the first year, Smith and his sons produced several bales of cotton and enough
352 CHAPTER 13 The Slave South 1820–1860
food for the table. The women worked just as hard in the cabin, and Sally contributed to the family’s income by selling homemade shirts and socks. In time, the Lipscombs bought land and joined the Baptist church, completing their transformation to respectable yeomen.
Many poor whites succeeded in climbing the economic ladder, but in the 1850s upward mobility slowed. The cotton boom of that decade caused planters to expand their operations, driving the price of land beyond the reach of poor families. Whether they gained their own land or not, however, poor whites shared common cultural traits with yeoman farmers.
The Culture of the Plain Folk. The lives of most plain folk revolved around farms, family, a handful of neighbors, the local church, and perhaps a country store. Work occu- pied most hours, but plain folk still found time for pleasure. “Dancing they are all fond of, ” a visitor to North Carolina discovered, “especially when they can get a fiddle, or bagpipe.” But the most popular pastimes of men and boys were fishing and hunting. A traveler in Mississippi recalled that his host sent “two of his sons, little fellows that looked almost too small to shoulder a gun,” for food. “One went off towards the river and the other struck into the forest, and in a few hours we were feasting on delicious venison, trout and turtle.”
Plain folk did not have much “book learning.” Private academies charged fees that yeomen could not afford, and public schools were scarce. Although most people managed to pick up the “three R’s,” approximately one southern white man in five was illiterate in 1860, and the rate for white women was even higher. “People here prefer talking to reading,” a Virginian remarked. Telling stories, reciting ballads, and singing hymns were important activities in yeoman culture.
Plain folk spent more hours in revival tents than in classrooms. Preachers spoke day and night to save souls. Baptists and Methodists adopted revivalism most readily and by midcentury had become the South’s largest religious groups. By emphasizing free choice and individual worth, the plain folk’s religion was hopeful and affirming.
CAMP MEETING, MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY Camp meetings, or revivals, were a key feature of southern evangelical Christianity. Many preachers were itinerants who spoke wherever they could draw a crowd. Here an earnest clergyman preaches his message in an open field to an audience that includes both the reverent and the not-so-reverent. Private Collection/Picture Research
Consultants & Archives.
Black and Free: On the Middle Ground 3531820–1860
Hymns and spirituals provided guides to right and wrong — praising humility and steadfastness, condemning drunkenness and profanity. Above all, hymns spoke of the eventual release from worldly sorrows and the assurance of eternal salvation.
Black and Free: On the Middle Ground All white Southerners — slaveholders and slaveless alike — considered themselves superior to all blacks. But not every black Southerner was a slave. In 1860, some 260,000 (approx- imately 6 percent) of the region’s 4.1 million African Americans were free. What is surprising is not that their numbers were small but that they existed at all. According to proslavery thinking, blacks were supposed to be slaves; only whites were supposed to be free. Blacks who were free stood out, and whites made them targets of oppression. But a few found success despite the restrictions placed on them by white Southerners.
Precarious Freedom. The population of free blacks swelled after the Revolu- tionary War, when the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence, the egalitarian message of evangelical Protestantism, and a depression in the tobacco economy led to a brief flurry of emancipation — the act of freeing from slavery. The soaring numbers of free blacks worried white Southerners, who, because of the cotton boom, wanted more slaves, not more blacks who were free.
In the 1820s and 1830s, state legislatures stemmed the growth of the free black population and shrank the liberty of those blacks who had gained their freedom. New laws denied masters the right to free their slaves. Other laws subjected free blacks to special taxes, prohibited them from interstate travel, denied them the right to have schools and to participate in politics, and required them to carry “freedom papers” to prove they were not slaves. Increasingly, whites subjected free blacks to the same laws as slaves. Free blacks could not testify under oath in a court of law or serve on juries. “Free negroes belong to a degraded caste of society,” a South Carolina judge said in 1848. “They are in no respect on a perfect equality with the white man. . . . They ought, by law, to be compelled to demean themselves as inferiors.”
Laws confined most free African Americans to poverty and dependence. Typically, free blacks were rural, uneducated, unskilled agricultural laborers and domes- tic servants who had to scramble to survive. Opportunities of any kind — for work, edu- cation, or community — were slim. Planters believed that free blacks set a bad example for slaves, subverting the racial subordination that was the essence of slavery.
Whites feared that free blacks might lead slaves in rebellion. In 1822, whites in Charleston accused Denmark Vesey, a free black carpenter, of conspiring with planta- tion slaves to slaughter Charleston’s white inhabitants. The authorities rounded up scores of suspects, who, prodded by torture and the threat of death, implicated others in a “plot to riot in blood, outrage, and rapine.” Although the city fathers never found any weapons and Vesey and most of the accused steadfastly denied the charges of conspiracy, officials hanged thirty-five black men, including Vesey, and banished another thirty-seven blacks from the state.
Why did many state legislatures pass laws restricting free blacks’ rights in the 1820s and 1830s?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
free black An African American who was not enslaved. Southern whites worried about the increasing numbers of free blacks. In the 1820s and 1830s, state legislatures stemmed the growth of the free black population and shrank the liberty of free blacks.
354 CHAPTER 13 The Slave South 1820–1860
Achievement despite Restrictions. Despite increasingly harsh laws and stepped-up persecution, free African Americans made the most of the advantages their status offered. Unlike slaves, free blacks could legally marry and pass on their heritage of freedom to their children. Freedom also meant that they could choose occupations and own property. For most, however, these economic rights proved only theoretical, for a majority of the South’s free blacks remained propertyless.
Still, some free blacks escaped the poverty and degradation whites thrust on them. Particularly in the South’s cities, a free black elite emerged. Consisting of light- skinned African Americans, they worked at skilled trades, as tailors, carpenters, mechanics, and the like. They operated schools for their children and traveled in and out of their states, despite laws forbidding both activities. They worshipped with whites (in separate seating) and lived scattered about in white neighborhoods, not in ghettos. And some owned slaves. Of the 3,200 black slaveholders (barely 1 percent of the free black population), most owned only a few family members whom they could not legally free. Others owned slaves in large numbers and exploited them for labor.
One such free black slave owner was William Ellison of South Carolina. Born a slave in 1790, Ellison bought his freedom in 1816 and set up business as a cotton gin maker, a trade he had learned as a slave. By 1835, he was prosperous enough to purchase the home of a former governor of the state. By the time of his death in 1861, he had become a cotton planter, with sixty-three slaves and an 800-acre plantation.
Most free blacks neither became slaveholders nor sought to raise a slave rebellion, as whites accused Denmark Vesey of doing. Rather, most free blacks simply tried to preserve their freedom, which was under increasing attack. Unlike blacks in the North whose free- dom was secure, free blacks in the South clung to a precarious freedom by seeking to impress whites with their reliability, economic contributions, and good behavior.
The Politics of Slavery By the mid-nineteenth century, all southern white men — planters and plain folk — and no southern black men, even those who were free, could vote. The nonslaveholding white majority wielded less political power than their numbers indi-
cated. The slaveholding white minority wielded more. With a well-developed sense of class interest, slaveholders engaged in party politics, campaigns, and officeholding, and as a result they received significant benefits from state governments. Nonslaveholding whites were concerned mainly with preserving their liberties and keeping their taxes low. They asked government for little of an economic nature, and they received little.
Slaveholders sometimes worried about nonslaveholders’ loyalty to slavery, but most whites accepted the planters’ argument that the existing social order served all Southerners’ interests. Slavery rewarded every white man — no matter how poor — with membership in the South’s white ruling race. It also provided the means by which non- slaveholders might someday advance into the ranks of the planters. White men in the South argued furiously about many things, but they agreed that they should take land from Indians, promote agriculture, uphold white supremacy and masculine privilege, and defend slavery from its enemies.
How did planters retain political power in a democratic system?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
The Politics of Slavery 3551820–1860
The Democratization of the Political Arena. In the first half of the nine- teenth century, Southerners eliminated the wealth and property requirements that had once restricted political participation. Most southern states also removed the property requirements for holding state offices. To be sure, undemocratic features lingered. Plantation districts still wielded disproportionate power in several state legislatures. Nevertheless, southern politics took place within an increasingly democratic political structure, as it did elsewhere in the nation.
White male suffrage ushered in an era of vigorous electoral competition in the South. Eager voters rushed to the polls to exercise their new rights. Candidates criss- crossed their electoral districts, treating citizens to barbecues and bands, rum and races, as well as stirring oratory. In the South, it seemed, “everybody talked politics everywhere,” even the “illiterate and shoeless.”
As politics became aggressively democratic, it also grew fiercely partisan. From the 1830s to the 1850s, Whigs and Democrats battled for the electorate’s favor. Both parties presented themselves as the plain white folk’s best friend. All candidates declared their allegiance to republican equality and pledged themselves to defend the people’s liberty. And each party sought to portray the other as a collection of rich, snobbish, selfish men who had antidemocratic designs up their silk sleeves.
Planter Power. Whether Whig or Democrat, southern officeholders were likely to be slave owners. By 1860, the percentage of slave owners in state legislatures ranged from 41 percent in Missouri to nearly 86 percent in North Carolina. Legislators not only tended to own slaves; they also often owned large numbers. The percentage of planters (individuals with twenty or more slaves) in southern legislatures in 1860 ranged from 5.3 percent in Missouri to 55.4 percent in South Carolina. Even in North Carolina, where only 3 percent of the state’s white families belonged to the planter class, more than 36 percent of state legislators were planters. Almost everywhere non- slaveholders were in the majority, but plain folk did not throw the planters out of office.
Upper-class dominance of southern politics reflected the elite’s success in per- suading the yeoman majority that what was good for slaveholders was also good for plain folk. In reality, the South had, on the whole, done well by common white men. Most had farms of their own. They participated as equals in a democratic political system. They enjoyed an elevated social status, above all blacks and in theory equal to all other whites. They commanded patriarchal authority over their households. And as long as slavery existed, they could dream of joining the planter class. Slaveless white men found much to celebrate in the slave South.
Most slaveholders took pains to win the plain folk’s trust and to nurture their respect. One nonslaveholder told his wealthy neighbor that he had a bright political future because he never thought himself “too good to sit down & talk to a poor man.” Mary Boykin Chesnut complained about the fawning attention her husband, a U.S. sena- tor from South Carolina, showed to poor men, including one who had “mud sticking up through his toes.” Smart candidates found ways to convince wary plain folk of their democratic convictions and egalitarian sentiments, whether they were genuine or not. Walter L. Steele, who ran for a seat in the North Carolina legislature in 1846, detested campaigning for votes, but he learned, he said, to speak with a “candied tongue.”
356 CHAPTER 13 The Slave South 1820–1860
In addition to politics, slaveholders defended slavery in other ways. In the 1830s, Southerners decided that slavery was too important to debate. “So interwoven is [slavery] with our interest, our manners, our climate and our very being,” one man declared in 1833, “that no change can ever possibly be effected without a civil commo- tion from which the heart of a patriot must turn with horror.” Powerful whites dis- missed slavery’s critics from college faculties, drove them from pulpits, and hounded them from political life. Sometimes antislavery Southerners fell victim to vigilantes and mob violence. One could defend slavery; one could even delicately suggest mild reforms. But no Southerner could any longer safely call slavery evil or advocate its destruction.
In the South, therefore, the rise of the common man occurred alongside the continuing, even growing, power of the planter class. Rather than pitting slaveholders against nonslaveholders, elections remained an effective means of binding the region’s whites together. Elections affirmed the sovereignty of white men, whether planter or plain folk, and the subordination of African Americans. Those twin themes played well among white women as well. Though unable to vote, white women supported equality for whites and slavery for blacks. In the antebellum South, the politics of slavery helped knit together all of white society.
Conclusion: A Slave Society By the early nineteenth century, northern states had either abolished slavery or put it on the road to extinction, while southern states were building the largest slave society in the New World. Regional differences increased over time, not merely because the South became more and more dominated by slavery, but also because developments in the North rapidly propelled it in a very different direction.
By 1860, one-third of the South’s population was enslaved. Bondage saddled blacks with enormous physical and spiritual burdens: hard labor, harsh treatment, bro- ken families, and, most important, the denial of freedom itself. Although degraded and exploited, they were not defeated. Out of African memories and New World realities, blacks created a life-affirming African American culture that sustained and strengthened them. Their families, religion, and community provided defenses against white racism and power. Defined as property, they refused to be reduced to things. Perceived as inferior beings, they rejected the notion that they were natural slaves.
The South was not merely a society with slaves; it had become a slave society. Slavery shaped the region’s economy, culture, social structure, and politics. Whites south of the Mason-Dixon line believed that racial slavery was necessary and just. By making all blacks a pariah class, all whites gained a measure of equality and harmony.
Many features of southern life helped to confine class tensions among whites: the wide availability of land, rapid economic mobility, the democratic nature of political life, the patriarchal power among all white men, and, most of all, slavery and white supremacy. All stress along class lines did not disappear, however, and anxious slave- holders continued to worry that yeomen would defect from the proslavery consensus. But during the 1850s, white Southerners’ near - universal acceptance of slavery would increasingly unite them in political opposition to their northern neighbors.
1 How did cotton’s profitability shape the South’s antebellum development?
2 How did southern white legislators and intellectuals attempt to strengthen the institution of slavery in the 1820s? What prompted them to do this?
3 By 1860 legislative power was largely concentrated in the hands of slave- holders. Why were slaveholders politically dominant?
MAKING CONNECTIONS
1 Why did the nineteenth-century southern economy remain primarily agricultural? (pp. 334–342)
2 Why did the ideology of paternalism gain currency among planters in the nineteenth century? (pp. 342–345)
3 What types of resistance did slaves participate in, and why did slave resistance rarely take the form of rebellion? (pp. 346–349)
4 Why did the lives of plantation-belt yeomen and upcountry yeomen diverge? (pp. 349–353)
5 Why did many state legislatures pass laws restricting free blacks’ rights in the 1820s and 1830s? (pp. 353–354)
6 How did planters retain political power in a democratic system? (pp. 354–356)
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
Mason-Dixon line (p. 335)
cotton kingdom (p. 335)
slave codes (p. 336)
miscegenation (p. 336)
planter (p. 337)
plantation (p. 340)
KEY TERMS
paternalism (p. 342)
chivalry (p. 344)
yeomen (p. 349)
plantation belt (p. 350)
upcountry (p. 350)
free black (p. 353)
Chapter Review MAKE IT STICK
Go to LearningCurve: See what you know. Then review the key terms and answer the questions.
LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com /roarkconcise
357
STUDENT SITE @ bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
G rizzled, gnarled, and fifty-nine years old, John Brown had for decades lived like a nomad, hauling his large family of twenty children back and forth across six states as he tried farming, raising sheep, selling wool, and running a tannery. But failure dogged him. Failure, however, had not budged his conviction that slavery was wrong and ought to be destroyed. In the wake of the fighting that erupted over the
future of slavery in Kansas in the 1850s, his beliefs turned violent. On May 24, 1856, he led an eight-man antislavery posse in the midnight slaughter of five allegedly proslavery men at Pottawatomie, Kansas. He told Mahala Doyle,
whose husband and two oldest sons he killed, that if a man stood between him and what he thought right, he would
take that man’s life as calmly as he would eat breakfast.
358
The House Divided, 1846–1861
JOHN BROWN’S PIKES Scorning what he called “milk-and-water” abolitionists who only talked
about slavery, John Brown in 1859 brought his abolitionist war to Harpers Ferry, Virginia. He carried with him 950 pikes—deadly spears made by a
Connecticut blacksmith, which he expected to put into the hands of rebelling slaves. Violence like this between antislavery and proslavery forces had erupted
earlier in the decade in Kansas. Chicago Historical Museum.
The Bitter Fruits of War (pp. 360–364)
The Sectional Balance Undone (pp. 365–370)
Realignment of the Party System (pp. 370–374)
Freedom under Siege (pp. 374–379)
The Union Collapses (pp. 379–383)
Conclusion: Slavery, Free Labor, and the Failure of Political Compromise (pp. 383–384)
14
CHAPTER OUTLINE QUICK START
Quickly learn what is important in this chapter by doing the following:
• READ the Chapter Outline to see how the chapter is organized. • SKIM the Chronology on the next page to see what will be covered.
When you are ready, read the chapter and the Essential Questions for each section. Then use the Chapter Review to check what you know.
1846–1861
1820 Missouri Compromise.
1846 Wilmot Proviso introduced.
1847 Wilmot Proviso defeated in Senate.
“Popular sovereignty” compromise offered.
1848 Free-Soil Party founded. Zachary Taylor elected
president.
1849 California gold rush.
1850 Taylor dies; Vice President Millard Fillmore becomes president.
Compromise of 1850 becomes law.
1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin published. Franklin Pierce elected
president.
1853 Gadsden Purchase.
1854 American (Know-Nothing) Party emerges.
Kansas-Nebraska Act. Republican Party founded.
1856 “Bleeding Kansas.” “Sack of Lawrence.” Pottawatomie massacre. James Buchanan elected
president.
1857 Dred Scott decision. Congress rejects Lecompton
constitution. Panic of 1857.
1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates; Douglas wins Senate seat.
1859 John Brown raids Harpers Ferry.
1860 Abraham Lincoln elected president.
South Carolina secedes from Union.
1861 Six other Lower South states secede.
Confederate States of America formed.
After the killings, Brown slipped out of Kansas and reemerged in the East, where for thirty months he begged money to support his vague plan for military operations against slavery. On the night of October 16, 1859, Brown took his war against slavery into the South. With only twenty-one men, including five African Americans, he invaded Harpers Ferry, Virginia. His band seized the town’s armory and rifle works, but the invaders were immediately surrounded. When Brown refused to surrender, federal troops under Colonel Robert E. Lee charged with bayonets. Although a few of Brown’s raiders escaped, federal forces killed ten of his men (including two of his sons) and captured seven, among them Brown.
“When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm,” Brown predicted a few months before the raid. As slaves rushed to Harpers Ferry, Brown said, he would arm them with the pikes he carried with him and with weapons stolen from the armory. They would then fight a war of liberation. Brown, however, neglected to inform the slaves when he had arrived in Harpers Ferry, and the few who knew of his arrival wanted nothing to do with his enterprise. “It was not a slave insurrection,” Abraham Lincoln observed. “It was an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in which the slaves refused to participate. In fact, it was so absurd that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough it could not succeed.”
White Southerners viewed Brown’s raid as proof that Northerners actively sought to incite slaves in bloody rebellion. Sectional tension was as old as the Constitution, but hostility had escalated with the outbreak of war with Mexico in May 1846 (see chapter 12). Only three months after the war began, national expansion and the slavery issue intersected when Representative David Wilmot introduced a bill to prohibit slavery in any territory that might be acquired as a result of the war. After that, the problem of slavery in the territories became the principal wedge that divided the nation.
“Mexico is to us the forbidden fruit,” South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun declared at the war’s outset. “The penalty of eating it [is] to subject our institutions to political death.” For a decade and a half, the slavery issue intertwined with the fate of former Mexican land, poisoning the national political debate. Slavery proved
CHRONOLOGY
360 CHAPTER 14 The House Divided 1846–1861
powerful enough to transform party politics into sectional politics. Sectional politics encouraged the South’s separatist impulses. Southern separatism, a
fitful tendency before the Mexican-American War, gained strength with each confrontation. The era began with a
crisis of union and ended with the Union in even graver peril. As Abraham Lincoln predicted in 1858, “A house divided
against itself cannot stand.”
The Bitter Fruits of War Victory in the Mexican-American War brought vast new territories in the West into the United States. The gold rush of 1849 transformed the sleepy frontier of California into a booming economy (see chapter 12). The 1850s witnessed
new “rushes,” for gold in Colorado and silver in Nevada’s Comstock Lode. The phe- nomenal economic growth of the West demanded the attention of the federal gov- ernment, but it quickly became clear that Northerners and Southerners had very different visions of the West, particularly the place of slavery in its future. From 1846, when it first appeared that the war with Mexico might mean new territory for the United States, politicians battled over whether to ban slavery from former Mexican land or permit it to expand to the Pacific. In 1850, Congress patched together a plan that Americans hoped would last.
The Wilmot Proviso and the Expansion of Slavery. Most Americans agreed that the Constitution left the issue of slavery to the individual states to decide. Northern states had done away with slavery, while southern states had retained it. But what about slavery in the nation’s territories? The Constitution states that “Congress shall have power to . . . make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory . . . belonging to the United States.” The debate about slavery, then, turned toward Congress.
The spark for the national debate appeared in August 1846 when a Democratic representative from Pennsylvania, David Wilmot, proposed that Congress bar slavery
JOHN BROWN In this 1859 photograph, John Brown appears respectable, but contemporaries debated his mental state and moral character, and the debate still rages. Critics argue that he was a bloody terrorist, a religious fanatic who believed that he was touched by God for a great purpose. Admirers see a selfless hero, a shrewd political observer who recognized that only violence would end slavery in America. Library of Congress.
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Why did responses to the Wilmot Proviso split along sectional rather than party lines?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
The Bitter Fruits of War 3611846–1861
from all lands acquired in the war with Mexico. The Mexicans had abolished slavery in their country, and Wilmot declared, “God forbid that we should be the means of planting this institution upon it.”
Regardless of party affiliation, Northerners lined up behind the Wilmot Proviso. Many supported free soil, by which they meant territory in which slavery would be prohibited, because they wanted to preserve the West for free labor, for hardworking, self-reliant free men, not for slaveholders and slaves. But support also came from those who were simply anti-South. New slave territories would eventually mean new slave states. Wilmot himself said his proposal would blunt “the power of slaveholders” in the national government.
Additional support for free soil came from Northerners who were hostile to blacks and wanted to reserve new land for whites. Wilmot himself blatantly encouraged racist support when he declared, “I would preserve for free white labor a fair country, a rich inheritance, where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.” It is no wonder that some called the Wilmot Proviso the “White Man’s Proviso.”
The thought that slavery might be excluded in the territories outraged white Southerners. Like Northerners, they regarded the West as a ladder for economic and social opportunity. They also believed that the exclusion of slavery was a slap in the face to southern veterans of the Mexican-American War. “When the war-worn sol- dier returns home,” one Alabaman asked, “is he to be told that he cannot carry his property to the country won by his blood?” In addition, southern leaders also sought to maintain political parity with the North to protect the South’s interests, especially slavery. The need seemed especially urgent in the 1840s, when the North’s population and wealth were booming. James Henry Hammond of South Carolina predicted that ten new states would be carved from the acquired Mexican land. If free soil won, the North would “ride over us roughshod” in Congress, he claimed. “Our only safety is in equality of power.”
Because Northerners had a majority in the House, they easily passed the Wilmot Proviso. In the Senate, however, where slave states outnumbered free states fifteen to fourteen, Southerners defeated it in 1847. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Caro- lina denied that Congress had the constitutional authority to exclude slavery from the nation’s territories. He argued that because the territories were the “joint and common property” of all the states, Congress could not bar citizens of one state from migrating with their property (including slaves) to the territories. Whereas Wilmot demanded that Congress slam shut the door to slavery, Calhoun called on Congress to hold the door wide open.
In 1847, Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan offered a compromise through the doc- trine of popular sovereignty, by which the people who settled the territories would decide for themselves slavery’s fate. This solution, Cass argued, sat squarely in the American tradition of democracy and local self-government. Popular sovereignty’s most attractive feature was its ambiguity about the precise moment when settlers could determine slavery’s fate. Northern advocates believed that the decision on slav- ery could be made as soon as the first territorial legislature assembled. With free-soil majorities likely because of the North’s greater population, they would shut the door
Wilmot Proviso Proposal put forward by Representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania in August 1846 to ban slavery in territory acquired from the Mexican-American War. The proviso enjoyed widespread support in the North, but Southerners saw it as an attack on their interests.
free labor Term referring to work conducted free from constraint and according to the laborer’s own inclinations and will. The ideal of free labor lay at the heart of the North’s argument that slavery should not be extended into the western territories.
popular sovereignty The idea that government is subject to the will of the people. Applied to the territories, popular sovereignty meant that the residents of a territory should determine, through their legislatures, whether to allow slavery.
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MEXICAN CESSION, 1848
362 CHAPTER 14 The House Divided 1846–1861
to slavery immediately. Southern supporters believed that popular sovereignty guar- anteed that slavery would be unrestricted throughout the entire territorial period. Only when settlers in a territory drew up a constitution and applied for statehood could they decide the issue of slavery. By then, slavery would have sunk deep roots. As long as the matter of timing remained vague, popular sovereignty gave hope to both sides.
When Congress ended its session in 1848, no plan had won a majority in both houses. Northerners who demanded no new slave territory anywhere, ever, and Southerners who demanded entry for their slave property into all territories, or else, staked out their extreme positions. Unresolved in Congress, the territorial question naturally became an issue in the presidential election of 1848.
The Election of 1848. When President Polk chose not to seek reelection, the Democratic convention nominated Lewis Cass of Michigan, the man most closely associated with popular sovereignty. The Whigs nominated a Mexican-American
War hero, General Zachary Taylor. The Whigs declined to adopt a party platform, betting that the combination of a military hero and total silence on the slavery issue would unite their divided party. Taylor, who owned more than one hundred slaves on plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana, was hailed by Georgia politician Robert Toombs as a “Southern man, a slaveholder, a cotton planter.”
Antislavery Whigs balked. Senator Charles Sumner called for a major political realignment, “one grand Northern party of Freedom.” In the summer of 1848, antislavery Whigs and antislavery Democrats founded the Free-Soil Party, nominating a Democrat, Martin Van Buren, for presi-
dent and a Whig, Charles Francis Adams, for vice president. The platform boldly pro- claimed, “Free soil, free speech, free labor, and free men.”
The November election dashed the hopes of the Free- Soilers. They did not carry a single state. Taylor won the all- important electoral vote 163 to 127, carrying eight of the fifteen slave states and seven of the fifteen free states (Map 14.1). (Wisconsin had entered the Union earlier in 1848 as the fifteenth free state.) Northern voters were not yet ready for Sumner’s “one grand Northern party of Freedom,” but the struggle over slavery in the territories had shaken the major parties badly.
Debate and Compromise. Believing that he could avoid further sectional strife if California and New Mexico skipped the territorial stage, new president Zachary Taylor encouraged the settlers to apply for admission to the Union as states. Pre- dominantly antislavery, the settlers began writing free-state constitutions. “For the first time,” Mississippian Jefferson Davis lamented, “we are about permanently to destroy the bal- ance of power between the sections.”
Candidate Popular
Vote Percent of
Popular Vote Electoral
Vote Zachary Taylor (Whig)
163
127
0
1,360,099
1,220,544
291,263
47.4
42.5
10.1
Lewis Cass (Democrat)
Martin Van Buren (Free-Soil)
6 9 10
9
11 13
12
9 12 23
26
9
17 3 7 6 4
126 6
7
6
8
36
4
3
4
4
3
5
MAP 14.1 THE ELECTION OF 1848
The Bitter Fruits of War 3631846–1861
Congress convened in December 1849, beginning one of the most contentious and most significant sessions in its history. President Taylor urged Congress to admit California as a free state immediately and to admit New Mexico, which lagged behind a few months, as soon as it applied. Southerners exploded. A North Carolinian declared that Southerners who would “consent to be thus degraded and enslaved, ought to be whipped through their fields by their own negroes.”
Into this rancorous scene stepped Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, who offered a series of resolutions meant to answer and balance “all questions in controversy between the free and slave states, growing out of the sub- ject of slavery.” Admit California as a free state, he pro- posed, but organize the rest of the Southwest without restrictions on slavery. Require Texas to abandon its claim to parts of New Mexico, but compensate it by assuming its preannexation debt. Abolish the domestic slave trade in Washington, D.C., but confirm slavery itself in the nation’s capital. Affirm Congress’s lack of authority to interfere with the interstate slave trade, and enact a more effective fugitive slave law.
Both antislavery advocates and “fire-eaters” (as radi- cal Southerners who urged secession from the Union were called) savaged Clay’s plan. Senator Salmon P. Chase of Ohio ridiculed it as “sentiment for the North, substance for the South.” Senator Henry S. Foote of Mississippi denounced it as more offensive to the South than the speeches of abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Douglass combined. The most ominous response came from John C. Calhoun, who argued that the fragile political unity of North and South depended on continued equal representation in the Sen- ate, which Clay’s plan for a free California destroyed. “As things now stand,” he said in February 1850, the South “cannot with safety remain in the Union.”
Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster then addressed the Senate. Like Clay, Webster defended compromise. He told Northerners that the South had legitimate complaints, but he told Southerners that secession from the Union would mean civil war. He argued that the Wilmot Proviso’s ban on slavery in the territories was unnec- essary because the harsh climate effectively prohibited the expansion of cotton and slaves into the new American Southwest. “I would not take pains uselessly to reaf- firm an ordinance of nature, nor to reenact the will of God,” Webster declared.
Free-soil forces recoiled from what they saw as Webster’s desertion. Senator William H. Seward of New York responded that Webster’s and Clay’s compromise with slavery was “radically wrong and essentially vicious.” He rejected Calhoun’s argument
HENRY CLAY OFFERING HIS CALIFORNIA COMPROMISE TO THE SENATE ON 5 FEBRUARY 1850 Artist Peter F. Rothermel captures the high intensity of the seventy-three-year-old Kentuckian’s last significant political act. Citizens who packed the galleries of the U.S. Senate had come to hear the renowned orator explain that his package of compromises required mutual concessions from both North and South but no sacrifice of “great principle” from either. Friends called his performance the “crowning grace to his public life.” The Granger Collection, NYC.
364 CHAPTER 14 The House Divided 1846–1861
that Congress lacked the constitutional authority to exclude slavery from the territo- ries. In any case, Seward said, there was a “higher law than the Constitution” — the law of God — to ensure freedom in all the public domain. Claiming that God was a Free-Soiler did nothing to cool the superheated political atmosphere.
In May 1850, the Senate considered a bill that joined Clay’s resolutions into a single comprehensive package. Clay bet that a majority of Congress wanted compromise and that the members would vote for the package. But the omnibus strategy backfired. Free- Soilers and proslavery Southerners voted down the comprehensive plan.
Fortunately for those who favored a settlement, Senator Stephen A. Douglas, a rising Democratic star from Illinois, broke the bill into its parts and skillfully ushered each through Congress. The agreement Douglas won in September 1850 was very much the one Clay had proposed in January. California entered the Union as a free state. New Mexico and Utah became territories where slavery would be decided by popular sovereignty. Texas accepted its boundary with New Mexico and received $10 million from the federal government. Congress ended the slave trade in the District of Columbia but enacted a more stringent fugitive slave law. In September, Millard Fillmore, who had become president when Zachary Taylor died in July, signed into law each bill, collectively known as the Compromise of 1850 (Map 14.2). The nation breathed a sigh of relief, for the Compromise preserved the Union and peace for the moment.
Compromise of 1850 Laws passed in 1850 meant to resolve the dispute over the spread of slavery in the territories. Key elements included the admission of California as a free state and the Fugitive Slave Act. The Compromise soon unraveled.
CALIF. 1850
TEXAS
INDIAN TERR.
UNORGANIZED TERRITORY
MINNESOTA TERRITORY
1849
OREGON TERRITORY
1848
UTAH TERRITORY 1850
NEW MEXICO TERRITORY
1850 ARK.
LA.
MISS. ALA.
TENN.
KY.
FLA.
GA.
S.C.
N.C.
VIRGINIA
PA.
N.Y.
VT.
N.H.
MAINE
MASS.
CONN. R.I.
N.J. DEL. MD.
MO.
IOWA
WIS.
ILL. IND. OHIO
MICH.
District of Columbia
Free state or territory
Slave state Slave trade ended
Opened to slavery by principle of popular sovereignty
MAP 14.2 THE COMPROMISE OF 1850 The patched-together sectional agreement was both clumsy and unstable. Few Americans — in either North or South — supported all five parts of the Compromise.
The Sectional Balance Undone 3651846–1861
The Sectional Balance Undone The Compromise of 1850 began to come apart almost immediately. The implementation of the Fugitive Slave Act brought the horrors of slavery into the North. Moreover, millions of Northerners who never saw a runaway slave confronted slavery through Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel that vividly depicts the brutality of the South’s “peculiar institution.” Congress did its part to undo the Compromise as well. Four years after Congress stitched the sec- tional compromise together, it ripped the threads out. With the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, it again posed the question of slavery in the territories, the deadliest of all sectional issues.
The Fugitive Slave Act. The issue of runaway slaves was as old as the Constitu- tion, which contained a provision for the return of any “person held to service or labor in one state” who escaped to another. In 1793, a federal law gave muscle to the provision by authorizing slave owners to enter other states to recapture their slave property. Proclaiming the 1793 law a license to kidnap free blacks, northern states in the 1830s began passing “personal liberty laws” that provided fugitives with some protection.
Some northern communities also formed vigilance committees to help runaways. Each year, a few hundred slaves escaped into free states and found friendly northern “conductors” who put them aboard the underground railroad, which was not a railroad at all but a series of secret “stations” (hideouts) on the way to Canada.
Furious about northern interference, Southerners in 1850 insisted on the stricter fugitive slave law that was part of the Compromise. According to the Fugitive Slave Act, to seize an alleged slave, a slaveholder simply had to appear before a commissioner and swear that the runaway was his. The commissioner earned $10 for every individual returned to slavery but only $5 for those set free. Most galling to Northerners, the law stipulated that all citizens were expected to assist officials in apprehending runaways.
In Boston in February 1851, an angry crowd overpowered federal marshals and snatched a runaway named Shadrach from a courtroom, put him on the underground railroad, and whisked him off to Canada. Three years later, when another Boston crowd rushed the courthouse in a failed attempt to rescue runa- way Anthony Burns, a guard was shot dead. To white Southerners, it seemed that fanatics of the “higher law” creed had whipped Northerners into a frenzy of mas- sive resistance.
Actually, the overwhelming majority of fugitives claimed by slaveholders were reenslaved peacefully. But brutal enforcement of the unpopular law had a radicaliz- ing effect in the North, particularly in New England. To Southerners, it seemed that Northerners had betrayed the Compromise. “The continued existence of the United States as one nation,” warned the Southern Literary Messenger, “depends upon the full and faithful execution of the Fugitive Slave Bill.”
Uncle Tom’s Cabin Enormously popular antislavery novel written by Harriet Beecher Stowe and published in 1852. It helped to solidify northern sentiment against slavery and to confirm white Southerners’ sense that no sympathy remained for them in the free states.
Why did the Fugitive Slave Act provoke such strong opposition in the North?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
. Fugitive Slave Act A law included in the Compromise of 1850 to help attract southern support for the legislative package. Its strict provisions for capturing runaway slaves provoked outrage in the North and intensified antislavery sentiment in the region.
366 CHAPTER 14 The House Divided 1846–1861
Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The spectacle of shackled African Americans being herded south seared the conscience of every Northerner who witnessed such a scene. But even more Northerners were turned against slavery by a novel. Harriet Beecher Stowe, a white Northerner who had never set foot on a plantation, made the South’s slaves into flesh- and-blood human beings almost more real than life.
A member of a famous clan of preachers, teachers, and reformers, Stowe despised the slave catchers and wrote to expose the sin of slavery. Published as a book in 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life among the Lowly became a blockbuster hit, selling 300,000 copies in its first year and more than 2 mil- lion copies within ten years. Stowe’s characters leaped from the page. Here was the gentle slave Uncle Tom, a Christian saint who forgave those who beat him to death; the coura- geous slave Eliza, who fled with her child across the frozen Ohio River; and the fiendish overseer Simon Legree, whose Louisiana plantation was a nightmare of torture and death.
Stowe aimed her most powerful blows at slavery’s destructive impact on the family. Her character Eliza suc- ceeds in keeping her son from being sold away, but other mothers are not so fortunate. When told that her infant has been sold, Lucy drowns herself. Driven half mad by the sale of a son and daughter, Cassy decides “never again [to] let a child live to grow up!” She gives her third child an opiate and watches as “he slept to death.” Northerners shed tears and sang praises to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
What Northerners accepted as truth, Southerners denounced as slander. The Virginian George F. Holmes proclaimed Stowe a member of the “Woman’s Rights” and “Higher Law” schools and dismissed the novel as a work
of “intense fanaticism.” Although it is impossible to measure precisely the impact of a novel on public opinion, Uncle Tom’s Cabin clearly helped to crystallize northern sentiment against slavery and to confirm white Southerners’ suspicion that they no longer received any sympathy in the free states.
Other writers — ex-slaves who knew life in slave cabins firsthand — also produced stinging indictments of slavery. Solomon Northup’s compelling Twelve Years a Slave (1853) sold 27,000 copies in two years, and the powerful Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, as Told by Himself (1845) eventually sold more than 30,000 copies. But no work touched the North’s conscience as did the novel by a free white woman. A decade after its publication, when Stowe visited Abraham Lincoln at the White House, he reportedly said, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.”
The Kansas-Nebraska Act. As the 1852 election approached, the Democrats and Whigs sought to close the sectional rifts that had opened within their parties.
UNCLE TOM’S CABIN POSTER After Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s outraged sister-in-law told her, “Now Hattie, if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that will make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.” This poster advertising the novel Stowe wrote calls it “The Greatest Book of the Age.” The novel fueled the growing antislavery crusade. The Granger Collection, NYC.
The Sectional Balance Undone 3671846–1861
For their presidential nominee, the Democrats turned to Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire. Pierce’s well-known sympathy with southern views on public issues caused his northern critics to include him among the “doughfaces,” northern men malleable enough to champion southern causes. The Whigs chose another Mexican- American War hero, General Winfield Scott of Virginia. But the Whigs’ northern and southern factions were hopelessly divided, and the Democrat Pierce carried twenty-seven states to Scott’s four and won the electoral college vote 254 to 42 (see Map 14.4, page 372). The Free-Soil Party lost almost half of the voters who had turned to it in the tumultuous political atmosphere of 1848.
Eager to leave the sectional controversy behind, the new president turned swiftly to foreign expansion. Manifest destiny remained robust. (See “Beyond America’s Borders,” pages 368–369.) Pierce’s major objective was Cuba, but when antislavery Northerners blocked Cuba’s acquisition to keep more slave territory from entering the Union, he turned to Mexico. In 1853, diplomat James Gadsden negotiated a $10 million purchase of some 30,000 square miles of land in present-day Arizona and New Mexico. The Gadsden Purchase furthered the dream of a transcontinental railroad to California and Pierce’s desire for a southern route through Mexican territory. Talk of a railroad ignited rivalries in cities from New Orleans to Chicago as they maneuvered to become the eastern terminus. Inevitably in the 1850s, the contest for a transcontinental railroad became a sectional struggle over slavery.
Illinois’s Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas badly wanted the transconti- nental railroad for Chicago. Any railroad that ran west from Chicago would pass through a region that Congress in 1830 had designated a “permanent” Indian reserve (see chapter 11). Douglas proposed giving this vast area between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains an Indian name, Nebraska, and then throwing the Indians out. Once the region achieved territorial status, whites could survey and sell the land, establish a civil government, and build a railroad.
Nebraska lay within the Louisiana Purchase and, according to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, was closed to slavery (see chapter 10). Douglas needed south- ern votes to pass his Nebraska legislation, but Southerners had no incentive to create another free territory or to help a northern city win the transcontinental railroad. Southerners, however, agreed to help if Congress organized Nebraska according to popular sovereignty. That meant giving slavery a chance in Nebraska Territory and reopening the dangerous issue of slavery expansion.
In January 1854, Douglas introduced his bill to organize Nebraska Territory, leaving to the settlers themselves the decision about slavery. At southern insistence, Douglas added an explicit repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Free-Soilers branded Douglas’s plan “a gross violation of a sacred pledge” and an “atrocious plot” to transform free land into a “dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.”
Undaunted, Douglas skillfully shepherded the explosive bill through Congress in May 1854. Nine-tenths of the southern members (Whigs and Democrats) and half of the northern Democrats cast votes in favor of the bill. Like Douglas, most northern supporters believed that popular sovereignty would make Nebraska free territory.
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GADSDEN PURCHASE, 1853
FILIBUSTERING IN NICARAGUA In this image of a pitched battle in Nicaragua in 1856, Costa Ricans on foot fight American filibusters on horseback. Costa Rican soldiers and their Central American allies defeated William Walker’s filibusters in 1857. The Pierce administration had already extended diplomatic recognition to Walker’s regime, and white Southerners had cheered Walker’s attempt to “introduce civilization” in Nicaragua and to develop its resources “with slave labor.” London Illustrated Times, May 24, 1856.
Filibusters: The Underside of Manifest Destiny
Beyond America’s Borders
Each year, the citizens of Caborca, a small town in the northern state of Sonora, Mexico, celebrate the defeat there in 1857 of an American army. The invaders did not wear the uniform of the U.S. Army, but instead marched as the private “Arizona Colonization Company,” under the command of Henry A. Crabb, a Mississippian who had followed the gold rush to California. When the governor of Sonora faced an insurrection, he invited Crabb to help him repress his enemies in exchange for mineral rights and land.
Crabb marched his band of sixty-eight heavily armed ex-miners south from Los Angeles, but by the time the Americans arrived, the governor had put down the insur- gency, and the Mexicans turned on the American invaders. Every American except one died either in battle or at the hands of Mexican firing squads. Crabb’s head was pre- served in alcohol and placed on display as a symbol of victory.
Henry Crabb was one of thousands of American adventurers, known as “filibusters” (from the Spanish filibustero, meaning “freebooter” or “pirate”), who in the mid-nineteenth century joined private armies that invaded foreign countries throughout the Western Hemisphere. Although these expeditions violated the U.S. Neutrality Act of 1818, private American armies attacked Canada, Mexico, Ecuador, Honduras, Cuba, and Nicaragua and planned invasions of places as far away as the Hawai’ian kingdom. The federal government usually cracked down on filibusters, fearing that private invasions would jeopar- dize legitimate diplomatic efforts to promote trade and acquire territory.
Men joined filibustering expeditions for reasons that ranged from personal gain to validating manhood. Many saw themselves as carrying on the work of manifest des- tiny, extending America’s reach beyond Texas, California, and Oregon, the prizes of the 1830s and 1840s. In addition,
368
1846–1861
during the 1840s and 1850s, when Northerners insisted on containing slavery’s spread to the North and West, Southerners became filibusters to expand slavery south beyond the U.S. border. A leading proslavery ideologue, George Fitzhugh, defended filibustering through historical comparison: “They who condemn the modern filibuster . . . must also condemn the discoverers and settlers of America, of the East Indies of Holland, and of the Indian and Pacific Oceans.”
One of the most vigorous filibusters to appeal to southern interests was Narciso López, a Venezuelan- born Cuban who dedicated himself to the liberation of Cuba from Spanish rule. López claimed that Spain was planning to free Cuba’s slaves, and he told Southerners that “self-preservation” demanded that they seize the island. In 1851, after gaining the support of Governor John Quitman of Mississippi, López and his army invaded Cuba. The Spaniards crushed the invasion, kill- ing 200 filibusters, shipping 160 prisoners to Spain, executing 50 invaders by firing squad, and publicly gar- roting López. John Quitman gathered another army of several thousand, but federal authorities intervened and ended the threat to Cuba.
The most successful of all filibusters was William Walker of Tennessee, a restless adventurer who longed for an empire of his own south of the border. In May 1855, Walker and an army of fifty-six men sailed from San Francisco to the west coast of Nicaragua. Two thou- sand reinforcements and a civil war in Nicaragua gave
Walker his victory. He had himself proclaimed presi- dent, legalized slavery, and called on Southerners to come raise cotton, sugar, and coffee in “a magnificent country.” Walker’s regime survived only until 1857, when a coalition of Central American countries sent Walker packing. Walker doggedly launched four other attacks on Nicaragua, but in 1860 Honduran forces captured and shot him.
Filibustering had lost steam by the time of the U.S. Civil War, but the Confederacy paid a diplomatic price for its association with filibustering. The Guatemalan minis- ter Antonio José de Irisarri declared that there was “no foreign Nation which can have less cause for sympathy with the enemies of the American Union, than the Republics of Central America, because from the Southern States were set on foot those filibustering expeditions.” No Central American nation recognized Confederate independence.
The peoples of Central America and the Caribbean, like the inhabitants of Sonora, still harbor bitter memo- ries of filibusters’ private wars of imperialism and honor those who fought off American advances. In 1951, on the centennial of López’s invasion, Cubans erected a monument at the very spot where his ill-fated army came ashore. Costa Ricans celebrate Juan Santamaria as their national martyr for his courage in battling William Walker. Memories of the invasions by nineteenth- century filibusters set the stage for anti-American senti- ment in Latin America that lingers to this day.
America in a Global Context 1 How did supporters of filibustering justify the practice?
2 What was the relationship between filibustering and sectional politics in the United States in the 1840s and 1850s?
3 Why would an expansionist-minded U.S. government frown on filibustering?
CONNECT TO THE BIG IDEA C How did filibustering reflect the growing divide between the interests of free and slave states?
369
370 CHAPTER 14 The House Divided 1846–1861
MAP 14.3 THE KANSAS- NEBRASKA ACT, 1854 Americans hardly thought twice about dispossessing the Indians of land guaranteed them by treaty, but many worried about the outcome of repealing the Missouri Compromise and opening up the region to slavery.
READING THE MAP: How many slave states and how many free states does the map show? Estimate the percentage of new territory likely to be settled by slaveholders.
CONNECTIONS: Who would be more likely to support changes in government legislation to discontinue the Missouri Compromise — slaveholders or free-soil advocates? Why?
Map Activity
Free state or territory
Slave state or territory
Voters to decide on allowing slavery, Compromise of 1850 Voters to decide on allowing slavery, Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854
CALIF.
TEXAS
INDIAN TERR.
MINNESOTA TERRITORY
OREGON TERRITORY
WASHINGTON TERRITORY
NEW MEXICO TERRITORY
UTAH TERRITORY
ARK.
LA.
MISS. ALA.
TENN.
KY.
FLA.
GA.
S.C.
N.C.
VA.
PA.
N.Y.
VT.
N.H.
MAINE
MASS.
CONN.
R.I.
N.J.
DEL.
MD.
MO.
IOWA
WIS.
ILL. IND. OHIO
MICH.
NEBRASKA TERRITORY
KANSAS TERRITORY
The Kansas-Nebraska Act divided the huge territory in two: Nebraska and Kansas (Map 14.3). With this act, the government pushed the Plains Indians farther west, making way for farmers and railroads.
Realignment of the Party System Since the early 1830s, Whigs and Democrats had orga- nized and channeled political conflict in the nation. This party system dampened sectionalism and strengthened
the Union. To achieve national political power, the Whigs and Democrats had to retain their strength in both the North and the South. Strong northern and southern wings required that each party compromise and find positions acceptable to both sections.
The Kansas-Nebraska controversy shattered this stabilizing political system. In place of two national parties with bisectional strength, the mid-1850s witnessed the development of one party heavily dominated by one section and another party entirely limited to the other section. Rather than “national” parties, the country had what one critic disdainfully called “geographic” parties, a development that thwarted political compromise between the sections.
Kansas-Nebraska Act 1854 law that divided Indian territory into Kansas and Nebraska, repealed the Missouri Compromise, and left the new territories to decide the issue of slavery on the basis of popular sovereignty. The law led to bloody fighting in Kansas.
Why did the Whig Party disintegrate in the 1850s?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Realignment of the Party System 3711846–1861
The Old Parties: Whigs and Democrats. As early as the Mexican- American War, members of the Whig Party had clashed over the future of slavery in annexed Mexican lands. By 1852, the Whig Party could please its proslavery southern wing or its antislavery northern wing but not both. The Whigs’ miserable showing in the elec- tion of 1852 made it clear that they were no longer a strong national party. By 1856, after more than two decades of contesting the Democrats, they were hardly a party at all (Map 14.4).
The collapse of the Whig Party left the Democrats as the country’s only national party. Popular sovereignty provided a doctrine that many Democrats could support. Even so, popular sovereignty very nearly undid the party. When Stephen Douglas applied the doctrine to the part of the Louisiana Purchase where slavery had been barred, he divided northern Democrats and destroyed the dominance of the Demo- cratic Party in the free states. After 1854, the Democrats were a southern-dominated party. Still, gains in the South more than balanced Democratic losses in the North, and during the 1850s Democrats elected two presidents and won majorities in Con- gress in almost every election.
The breakup of the Whigs and the disaffection of many northern Democrats set millions of Americans politically adrift. As they searched for new political harbors, Americans found that the death of the old party system created a multitude of fresh political alternatives.
The New Parties: Know-Nothings and Republicans. Dozens of new political organizations vied for voters’ attention. Out of the confusion, two emerged as true contenders. One grew out of the slavery controversy, a coalition of indignant antislavery Northerners. The other arose from an entirely different split in American society, between native Protestants and Roman Catholic immigrants.
The wave of immigrants that arrived in America from 1845 to 1855 produced a nasty backlash among Protestant Americans, who feared that the Republic was about to drown in a sea of Roman Catholics from Ireland and Germany (see Figure 12.1, page 311). Nativists (individuals who were anti-immigrant) began to organize, first into secret fraternal societies and then in 1854 into a political party. Recruits swore never to vote for either foreign-born or Roman Catholic candidates and not to reveal any information about the organization. When questioned, they said, “I know nothing.” Officially, they were the American Party, but most Americans called them Know-Nothings.
The Know-Nothings enjoyed dazzling success in 1854 and 1855. They captured state legislatures throughout the nation and claimed dozens of seats in Congress. Dem- ocrats and Whigs described the Know-Nothings’ phenomenal record as a “tornado,” a “hurricane,” and “a freak of political insanity.” But by 1855, an observer might reason- ably have concluded that the Know-Nothings had emerged as the successor to the Whigs.
The Know-Nothings were not the only new party making noise, however. One of the new antislavery organizations provoked by the Kansas-Nebraska Act called itself the Republican Party. The Republicans attempted to unite all those who opposed the extension of slavery into any territory of the United States.
The Republican creed tapped into the basic beliefs and values of Northerners. Slavery, Republicans believed, degraded the dignity of white labor by associating
Republican Party Antislavery party formed in 1854 following passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The Republicans attempted to unite all those who opposed the extension of slavery into any territory of the United States.
372 CHAPTER 14 The House Divided 1846–1861
MAP 14.4 POLITICAL REALIGNMENT, 1848–1860 In 1848, slavery and sectionalism began taking their toll on the country’s party system. The Whig Party was an early casualty. By 1860, national parties — those that contended for votes in both North and South — had been replaced by regional parties.
READING THE MAP: Which states did the Democrats pick up in 1852 compared to 1848? Which of these states did the Democrats lose in 1856? Compare the general geographic location of the states won by the Republicans in 1856 versus those won in 1860.
CONNECTIONS: In the 1860 election, which party benefited the most from the western and midwestern states added to the Union since 1848? Why do you think these states chose to back this party?
Map Activity
Candidate Popular
Vote Percent of
Popular Vote Electoral
Vote James Buchanan (Democrat) 174
114
1,838,169
1,341,264
45.3
33.1John C. Frémont(Republican)
874,5348 21.6Millard Fillmore(American)
Candidate Popular
Vote Percent of
Popular Vote Electoral
Vote Zachary Taylor (Whig) 163
127
0
1,360,099
1,220,544
47.4
42.5Lewis Cass(Democrat)
291,263 10.1Martin Van Buren(Free-Soil)
Candidate Popular
Vote Percent of
Popular Vote Electoral
Vote Franklin Pierce (Democrat) 254
42
5
1,601,274
1,386,580
50.9
44.1Winfield Scott(Whig)
155,825 5.0John P. Hale(Free-Soil)
1848 1852
1856 1860
Candidate Popular
Vote Percent of
Popular Vote Electoral
Vote Abraham Lincoln (Republican) 180
72
1,866,452
847,953
39.9
18.1John C. Breckinridge(Southern Democrat)
590,63139 12.6John Bell(Constitutional Union)
1,375,15712 29.4Stephen A. Douglas(Northern Democrat)
9
66 36
26
12
6 4
7 38
17
11 9
10
3
23
5 4
129
12 13
96 6
3
7
4
4
8
55 35
27
13
6 4
7 38
15
10 8
10
3
23
6 5
1311
12 12
97 6
4
9
4
4
4
8
55 35
27
13
6 4
7 38
15
10 8
10
3
23
6 5
1311
12 12
97 6
4
9
4
4
4
8
55 35
27
13
6 4
3 4
3 8
15
10 8
10
3
23
6 5
1311
12 12
97 6
4
9
4
4
4
4
3
OREGON TERR.
UTAH TERRITORY
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MEXICAN CESSION
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INDIAN. TERR.
UNORG. TERR.
NEBRASKA TERR.
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UTAH TERRITORY
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KANSAS TERR.
INDIAN TERR.
INDIAN TERR.
Realignment of the Party System 3731846–1861
work with blacks and servility. As evidence, they pointed to the South, where, one Republican claimed, nonslaveholding whites “retire to the outskirts of civilization, where they live a semi-savage life, sinking deeper and more hopelessly into barbarism with every succeeding generation.” Republicans warned that the insatiable slavehold- ers of the South, whom antislavery Northerners called the “Slave Power,” were con- spiring through their control of the Democratic Party to expand slavery, subvert liberty, and undermine the Constitution.
Only by restricting slavery to the South, Republicans believed, could free labor flourish elsewhere. In the North, one Republican declared in 1854, “every man holds his fortune in his own right arm; and his position in society, in life, is to be tested by his own individual character.” Without slavery, western territories would provide vast economic opportunity for free men. Powerful images of liberty and opportunity attracted a wide range of Northerners to the Republican cause.
Women as well as men rushed to the new Republican Party. Indeed, three women helped found the party in Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1854. Although they could not vote and suffered from other legal handicaps, women nevertheless partici- pated in partisan politics by writing campaign literature, marching in parades, giving speeches, and lobbying voters. Women’s antislavery fervor attracted them to the Republican Party, and participation in party politics in turn nurtured the woman’s rights movement. Susan B. Anthony, who attended Republican meetings throughout the 1850s, found that her political activity made her disfranchisement all the more galling. She and other women in the North worked on behalf of anti- slavery and woman suffrage and the right of married women to control their own property.
The Election of 1856. The election of 1856 revealed that the Republicans had become the Democrats’ main challenger, and slavery in the territories, not nativism, was the election’s principal issue. When the Know-Nothings insisted on a platform that endorsed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, most of the Northerners walked out, and the party came apart. The few Know-Nothings who remained nominated ex- president Millard Fillmore.
The Republican platform focused mostly on “making every territory free.” When they labeled slavery a “relic of barbarism,” they signaled that they had written off the South. For president, they nominated the soldier and California adventurer John C. Frémont. Frémont lacked political credentials, but his wife, Jessie Frémont, the daughter of Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, knew the political map well. Though careful to maintain a proper public image, the vivacious young mother and antislavery zealot helped attract voters and draw women into politics.
The Democrats, successful in 1852 in bridging sectional differences by nomi- nating a northern man with southern principles, chose another “doughface,” James Buchanan of Pennsylvania. They portrayed the Republicans as extremists (“Black Republican Abolitionists”) whose support for the Wilmot Proviso risked pushing the South out of the Union.
The Democratic strategy carried the day for Buchanan, who won 174 electoral votes against Frémont’s 114 and Fillmore’s 8 (see Map 14.4, page 372). But the big
374 CHAPTER 14 The House Divided 1846–1861
news was that the Republicans, despite being a brand-new party, carried all but five of the states north of the Mason-Dixon line. Sec-
tionalism had fashioned a new party system, one that spelled danger for the Democrats and the Republic. Indeed, war had already broken out between proslavery and antislavery forces in distant Kansas Territory.
Freedom under Siege Events in Kansas Territory in the mid-1850s underscored the Republicans’ contention that the slaveholding South presented a profound threat to “free soil, free labor, and free men.” Kansas reeled with violence that Republicans argued was southern in origin. Republicans also pointed to the
brutal beating by a Southerner of a respected northern senator on the floor of Con- gress. Even the Supreme Court, in the Republicans’ view, reflected the South’s drive toward minority rule and tyranny. Then, in 1858, the issues dividing North and South received an extraordinary hearing in a senatorial contest in Illinois, when the nation’s foremost Democrat debated a resourceful Republican.
“Bleeding Kansas.” Three days after the House of Representatives approved the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, Senator William H. Seward of New York boldly challenged the South. “Come on then, Gentlemen of the Slave States,” he cried, “since there is no escaping your challenge, I accept it in behalf of the cause of freedom. We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side which is stronger in numbers as it is in right.” Because of Stephen Douglas, popular sovereignty would determine whether Kansas became slave or free.
Emigrant aid societies sprang up to promote settlement from free states or slave states. Missourians, already bordered on the east by the free state of Illinois and on
JOHN AND JESSIE FRÉMONT POSTER The election of 1856 marked the first time a candidate’s wife appeared on campaign items. Jessie Benton Frémont helped plan her husband’s campaign, coauthored his election biography, and drew northern women into political activity as never before. “What a shame that women can’t vote!” declared abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. “We’d carry ‘our Jessie’ into the White House on our shoulders, wouldn’t we.” Museum of American Political Life.
Why did the Dred Scott decision strengthen northern suspicions of a “Slave Power” conspiracy?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Freedom under Siege 3751846–1861
the north by the free state of Iowa, especially thought it important to secure Kansas for slavery. Thousands of rough frontiersmen, egged on by Missouri senator David Rice Atchison, invaded Kansas. “There are eleven hundred coming over from Platte County to vote,” Atchison reported, “and if that ain’t enough we can send five thousand — enough to kill every God-damned aboli- tionist in the Territory.” Not surprisingly, proslavery candidates swept the ter- ritorial elections in November 1854. When Kansas’s first territorial legislature met, it enacted a raft of proslavery laws. Ever-pliant President Pierce endorsed the work of the fraudulently elected legislature. Free-soil Kansans did not. They elected their own legislature, which promptly banned both slaves and free blacks from the territory. Organized into two rival governments and armed to the teeth, Kansans verged on civil war.
Fighting broke out on the morning of May 21, 1856, when several hun- dred proslavery men raided the town of Lawrence, the center of free-state settlement. The “Sack of Lawrence,” as free-soil forces called it, inflamed northern opinion. Elsewhere in Kansas, news of events in Lawrence provoked John Brown, a free-soil settler, to announce that “it was better that a score of bad men should die than that one man who came here to make Kansas a Free State should be driven out” and to lead the posse that massacred five allegedly proslavery settlers along Pottawatomie Creek (see pages 358 –359). After that, guerrilla war engulfed the territory.
Just as “Bleeding Kansas” gave the fledgling Republican Party fresh ammuni- tion for its battle against the Slave Power, so too did an event that occurred in the national capital. In May 1856, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts delivered a speech titled “The Crime against Kansas,” which included a scalding personal attack on South Carolina senator Andrew P. Butler. Preston Brooks, a young South Carolina member of the House and a kinsman of Butlers, felt compelled to defend the honor of
Major violent outbreak
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Pottawatomie Creek May 24, 1856
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ARMED SETTLERS NEAR LAWRENCE, KANSAS Armed with rifles, knives, swords, and pistols, these tough antislavery men gathered for a photograph near the free-soil town of Lawrence in 1856. Equally well-armed proslavery men attacked and briefly occupied Lawrence that same year. Kansas State Historical Society.
“BLEEDING KANSAS,” 1850s
“Bleeding Kansas” Term for the bloody struggle between proslavery and antislavery factions in Kansas following its organization in the fall of 1854. Corrupt election tactics led to a proslavery victory, but free-soil Kansans established a rival territorial government, and violence quickly ensued.
376 CHAPTER 14 The House Divided 1846–1861
his aged relative. On May 22, Brooks entered the Senate, where he found Sumner working at his desk. He beat Sum- ner over the head with his cane until Sumner lay bleeding and unconscious on the floor. Brooks resigned his seat in the House, only to be promptly reelected. In the North, the southern hero became an arch-villain. Like “Bleeding Kansas,” “Bleeding Sumner” provided the Republican Party with a potent symbol of the South’s “twisted and violent civilization.”
The Dred Scott Decision. Political debate over slavery in the territories became so heated in part because the Constitution lacked precision on the issue. In 1857, in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford, the Supreme Court announced its understanding of the meaning of the Con- stitution regarding slavery in the territories. The Court’s decision demonstrated that it enjoyed no special immu- nity from the sectional and partisan passions that were convulsing the land.
In 1833, an army doctor bought the slave Dred Scott in St. Louis, Missouri, and took him as his personal ser- vant to Fort Armstrong, Illinois, and then to Fort Snelling in Wisconsin Territory. Back in St. Louis in 1846, Scott, with the help of white friends, sued to prove that he and his family were legally entitled to their freedom. Scott argued that living in Illinois, a free state, and Wisconsin, a free territory, had made his family free and that they remained free even after returning to Missouri, a slave state.
In 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who hated Republicans and detested racial equality, wrote the Court’s Dred Scott decision. First, the Court ruled that Scott could not legally claim violation of his constitutional rights because he was not a citizen of the United States. When the Constitution was written, Taney said, blacks “were regarded as beings of an inferior order . . . so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Second, the laws of Dred Scott’s home state, Missouri, determined his status, and thus his travels in free areas did not make him free. Third, Congress’s power to make “all needful rules and regulations” for the territories did not include the right to prohibit slavery. The Court explicitly declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, even though it had already been voided by the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
The Taney Court’s extreme proslavery decision outraged Republicans. By deny- ing the federal government the right to exclude slavery in the territories, it cut the legs out from under the Republican Party. Moreover, as the New York Tribune lamented, the decision cleared the way for “all our Territories . . . to be ripened into Slave States.” Particularly frightening to African Americans in the North was the Court’s declaration that free blacks were not citizens and had no rights.
Dred Scott decision 1857 Supreme Court decision that ruled the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. The Court ruled against slave Dred Scott, who claimed travels with his master into free states made him and his family free. The decision also denied the federal government the right to exclude slavery in the territories and declared that African Americans were not citizens.
DRED SCOTT This portrait of Dred Scott was painted in 1857, the year of the Supreme Court’s decision. African Americans in the North were particularly alarmed by the Court’s ruling. Although the Court rejected his suit, he gained his freedom in May 1857 when a white man purchased and freed Scott and his family. Collection of the New-York Historical Society.
Freedom under Siege 3771846–1861
In a seven-to-two decision, the Court validated an extreme statement of the South’s territorial rights. John C. Calhoun’s claim that Congress had no authority to exclude slavery became the law of the land. White Southerners cheered, but the Dred Scott decision actually strengthened the young Republican Party. Indeed, that “outrageous” decision, one Republican argued, was “the best thing that could have happened,” for it provided powerful evidence of the Republicans’ claim that a hostile “Slave Power” conspired against northern liberties.
Prairie Republican: Abraham Lincoln. By reigniting the sectional flames, the Dred Scott case provided Republican politicians with fresh challenges and fresh opportunities. Abraham Lincoln had long since put behind him his hardscrabble log-cabin beginnings in Kentucky and Indiana. Now living in Springfield, Illinois, he earned good money as a lawyer, but politics was his life. “His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest,” observed his law partner William Herndon. Lincoln had served as a Whig in the Illinois state legislature and in the House of Representatives, but he had not held public office since 1849.
Convinced that slavery was a “monstrous injustice,” a “great moral wrong,” and an “unqualified evil to the negro, the white man, and the State,” Lincoln condemned the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 for giving slavery a new life and in 1856 joined the Republican Party. He accepted that the Constitution permitted slavery in those states where it existed, but he believed that Congress could contain its spread. Penned in, Lincoln believed, plantation slavery would wither, and in time Southerners would end slavery themselves.
Lincoln held what were, for his times, moderate racial views. Although he denounced slavery and defended black humanity, he also viewed black equality as impractical and unachievable. “Negroes have natural rights . . . as other men have,” he said, “although they cannot enjoy them here.” Insurmountable white prejudice made it impossible to extend full citizenship to blacks in America, he believed. In Lincoln’s mind, social stability and black progress required that slavery end and that blacks leave the country.
Lincoln envisioned the western territories as “places for poor people to go to, and better their conditions.” But slavery’s expansion threatened free men’s basic right to succeed. The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott decision persuaded him that slaveholders were engaged in a dangerous conspiracy to nationalize slavery. The next step, Lincoln warned, would be “another Supreme Court decision, declaring that the Constitution of the United States does not permit a State to exclude slavery from its limits.” Unless the citizens of Illinois woke up, he warned, the Supreme Court would make “Illinois a slave State.”
In Lincoln’s view, the nation could not “endure, permanently half slave and half free.” Either opponents of slavery would arrest its spread and place it on the “course of ultimate extinction,” or its advocates would see that it became legal in “all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.” Lincoln’s convictions that slavery was wrong and that Congress must stop its spread formed the core of the Republican ideology. In 1858, Republicans in Illinois chose him to challenge the nation’s premier Democrat, who was seeking reelection to the U.S. Senate.
378 CHAPTER 14 The House Divided 1846–1861
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates. When Stephen Douglas learned that the Republican Abraham Lincoln would be his opponent for the Senate, he observed: “He is the strong man of the party — full of wit, facts, dates — and the best stump speaker, with his droll ways and dry jokes, in the West. He is as honest as he is shrewd, and if I beat him my victory will be hardly won.”
Not only did Douglas have to contend with a formidable foe, but the previous year, the nation’s economy had experienced a sharp downturn. Prices had plum- meted, thousands of businesses had failed, and many were unemployed. As a Demo- crat, Douglas had to go before the voters as a member of the party whose policies stood accused of causing the panic of 1857.
Douglas’s response to another crisis in 1857, however, helped shore up his standing in Illinois. Proslavery forces in Kansas met in the town of Lecompton, drafted a proslavery constitution, and applied for statehood. Everyone knew that Free-Soilers outnumbered proslavery settlers, but President Buchanan instructed Congress to admit Kansas as the sixteenth slave state. Senator Douglas broke with the Democratic administration and denounced the Lecompton constitution; Congress killed the Lecompton bill. (When Kansans reconsidered the Lecompton constitution in an honest election, they rejected it six to one. Kansas entered the Union in 1861 as a free state.) By denouncing the fraudulent proslavery constitution, Douglas declared his independence from the South and, he hoped, made himself acceptable at home.
A relative unknown and a decided underdog in the Illinois election, Lincoln challenged Douglas to debate him face-to-face. The two met in seven communities for what would become a legendary series of debates. Thousands stood straining to hear the two men debate the crucial issues of the age — slavery and freedom.
Lincoln badgered Douglas with the question of whether he favored the spread of slavery. He tried to force Douglas into the damaging admission that the Supreme Court had repudiated Douglas’s own territorial solution, popular sovereignty. At Freeport, Illinois, Douglas admitted that settlers could not now pass legislation barring slavery, but he argued that they could ban slavery just as effectively by not passing protective laws, such as those found in slave states. Southerners con- demned Douglas’s “Freeport Doctrine” and charged him with trying to steal the victory they had gained with the Dred Scott decision. Lincoln chastised his oppo- nent for his “don’t care” attitude about slavery, for “blowing out the moral lights around us.”
Douglas worked the racial issue. He called Lincoln an abolitionist and an egal- itarian enamored of “our colored brethren.” Put on the defensive, Lincoln reaf- firmed his faith in white rule: “I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black race.” But unlike Douglas, Lincoln was no negrophobe. He tried to steer the debate back to what he considered the true issue: the morality and future of slavery. “Slavery is wrong,” Lincoln repeated, because “a man has the right to the fruits of his own labor.”
As Douglas predicted, the election was hard-fought and closely contested. Until the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, citizens voted for state
Lincoln-Douglas debates Series of debates on the issue of slavery and freedom between Democrat Stephen Douglas and Republican Abraham Lincoln, held as part of the 1858 Illinois senatorial race. Douglas won the election, but the debates helped catapult Lincoln to national attention.
The Union Collapses 3791846–1861
legislators, who in turn selected U.S. senators. Since Democrats won a slight majority in the Illinois legislature, the members returned Douglas to the Senate. But the Lincoln-Douglas debates thrust Lincoln, the prairie Republican, into the national spotlight.
The Union Collapses From the Republican perspective, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, “Bleeding Kansas” the Brooks-Sumner affair, the Dred Scott decision, and the Lecompton constitution amounted to irrefutable evidence of the South’s aggressive promo- tion of slavery. White Southerners, of course, saw things differently. They were the ones who were under siege, they declared. They believed that Northerners were itching to use their numerical advantage to attack slavery, and not just in the ter- ritories. Republicans had made it clear that they were unwilling to accept the Dred Scott ruling as the last word on the issue of slavery expansion. And John Brown’s attempt to incite a slave insurrection in Virginia in 1859 proved that Northerners would do anything to end slavery.
Talk of leaving the Union had been heard for years, but until the final crisis, Southerners had used secession as a ploy to gain concessions within the Union, not to destroy it. Then the 1850s delivered powerful blows to Southerners’ confidence that they could remain in the Union and protect slavery. When the Republican Party won the White House in 1860, many Southerners concluded that they would have to leave.
The Aftermath of John Brown’s Raid. For his attack on Harpers Ferry, John Brown stood trial for treason, murder, and incitement of slave insurrection. “To hang a fanatic is to make a martyr of him and fledge another brood of the same sort,” cautioned one newspaper, but on December 2, 1859, Virginia executed Brown. In life, he was a ne’er-do-well, but, as the poet Stephen Vincent Benét observed, “he knew how to die.” Brown told his wife that he was “determined to make the utmost possible out of a defeat.” He told the court: “If it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of . . . millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done.”
After Brown’s execution, Americans across the land contemplated the meaning of his life and death. Some Northerners celebrated his “splendid martyrdom.” Ralph Waldo Emerson likened Brown to Christ when he declared that Brown made “the gallows as glorious as the cross.” Most Northerners did not advocate bloody rebel- lion, however. Like Lincoln, they concluded that Brown’s noble antislavery ideals could not “excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason.”
Still, when northern churches marked John Brown’s hanging with tolling bells, hymns, and prayer vigils, white Southerners contemplated what they had in common
Why did some southern states secede immediately after Lincoln’s election?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
380 CHAPTER 14 The House Divided 1846–1861
with people who “regard John Brown as a martyr and a Christian hero, rather than a murderer and robber.” Georgia senator Robert Toombs announced solemnly that Southerners must “never permit this Federal government to pass into the traitorous hands of the black Republican party.”
Republican Victory in 1860. When the Democrats converged on Charleston for their convention in April 1860, fire-eating Southerners denounced Stephen Douglas and demanded a platform that included federal protection of slavery in the territories. When the delegates approved a platform with popular sovereignty, repre- sentatives from the entire Lower South and Arkansas stomped out of the convention. The remaining Democrats adjourned to meet a few weeks later in Baltimore, where they nominated Douglas for president.
When bolting southern Democrats reconvened, they approved a platform with a federal slave code and nominated Vice President John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. Southern moderates, however, refused to support Breckinridge. They formed the Constitutional Union Party to provide voters with a Unionist choice. Instead of
The grandparents of Horace Pippin, a Pennsylvania artist, were slaves. His grandmother witnessed the hanging of John Brown, and this painting recalls the scene she so often described to him. Pippin used a muted palette to establish the bleak setting, but he also managed to convey its striking intensity. Historically accurate, the painting depicts Brown tied and sitting erect on his coffin, passing resolutely before the silent, staring white men. The black woman in the lower right corner presumably is Pippin’s grandmother. Romare Bearden, another African American artist, recalled the central place of John Brown in black memory: “Lincoln and John Brown were as much a part of the actuality of the Afro- American experience, as were the domino games and the hoe cakes for Sunday morning breakfast. I vividly recall the yearly commemorations for John Brown.” Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia. John Lambert Fund.
READING THE IMAGE: What was the artist trying to convey about the tone of John Brown’s execution? According to the painting, what were the feelings of those gathered to witness the event?
CONNECTIONS: How did Brown’s trial and execution contribute to the growing split between North and South?
Visual Activity
JOHN BROWN GOING TO HIS HANGING, BY HORACE PIPPIN, 1942
The Union Collapses 3811846–1861
adopting a platform and confronting the slavery question, the Constitutional Union Party merely approved a vague resolu- tion pledging “to recognize no political principle other than the Constitution . . . the Union . . . and the Enforcement of the Laws.” For president, they nominated former senator John Bell of Tennessee.
The Republicans smelled victory, but they needed to carry nearly all the free states to win. To make their party more appealing, they expanded their platform beyond antislavery. They hoped that free homesteads, a protective tariff, a trans- continental railroad, and a guarantee of immigrant political rights would provide an agenda broad enough to unify the North. While reasserting their commitment to stop the spread of slavery, they also denounced John Brown’s raid as “among the gravest of crimes” and confirmed the security of slavery in the South.
The foremost Republican, William H. Seward, had made enemies with his radical “higher law” doctrine, which claimed that there was a higher moral law than the Constitution, and with his “irrepressible conflict” speech, in which he declared that North and South were fated to collide. Lincoln, however, since bursting onto the national scene in 1858 had demonstrated his clear purpose, good judgment, and solid Republican creden- tials. That, and his residence in Illinois, a crucial state, made him attractive to the party. On the third ballot, the delegates chose Lincoln. Defeated by Douglas in a state contest less than two years earlier, Lincoln now stood ready to take him on for the presidency.
The election of 1860 was like none other in American politics. It took place in the midst of the nation’s severest crisis. Four major candidates crowded the presidential field. Rather than a four-cornered contest, however, the election broke into two contests, each with two candidates. In the North, Lincoln faced Douglas; in the South, Breckinridge confronted Bell. So outrageous did Southerners consider the Republican Party that they did not even permit Lincoln’s name to appear on the ballot in ten of the fifteen slave states.
On November 6, 1860, Lincoln swept all of the eighteen free states except New Jersey, which split its electoral votes between him and Douglas. Although Lincoln received only 39 percent of the popular vote, he won easily in the elec- toral college with 180 votes, 28 more than he needed for victory (Map 14.5). Lincoln did not win because his opposition was splintered. Even if the votes of his three opponents had been combined, Lincoln still would have won. He won because his votes were concentrated in the free states, which contained a majority of electoral votes. Ominously, however, Breckinridge, running on a southern- rights platform, won the entire Lower South, plus Delaware, Maryland, and North Carolina.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN While in New York City to give a political address, Lincoln had this dignified photograph taken by Mathew Brady. “While I was there I was taken to one of the places where they get up such things,” Lincoln explained, sounding more innocent than he was, “and I suppose they got my shadow, and can multiply copies indefinitely.” Multiply they did. From the Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection, courtesy of the Allen County
Public Library and Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites.
382 CHAPTER 14 The House Divided 1846–1861
Secession Winter. Anxious Southerners immediately began debating what to do. Although Breckinridge had car- ried the South, a vote for “southern rights” was not necessarily a vote for secession. Besides, slightly more than half of the Southerners who had voted had cast ballots for Douglas and Bell, two stout defenders of the Union.
Southern Unionists tried to calm the fears that Lincoln’s election triggered. Former congressman Alexander Stephens of Georgia asked what Lincoln had done to justify something as extreme as secession. Had he not promised to respect slav- ery where it existed? In Stephens’s judgment, secession might lead to war, which would loosen the hinges of southern society and possibly even open the door to slave insurrection. “Revolutions are much easier started than controlled,” he warned. “I consider slavery much more secure in the Union than out of it.”
Secessionists emphasized the dangers of delay. “Mr. Lincoln and his party assert that this doctrine of equality
applies to the negro,” former Georgia governor Howell Cobb declared, “and neces- sarily there can exist no such thing as property in our equals.” Lincoln’s election without a single electoral vote from the South meant that Southerners were no longer able to defend themselves within the Union, Cobb argued. Why wait, he asked, for abolitionists to attack? As for war, there would be none. The Union was a voluntary compact, and Lincoln would not coerce patriotism. If Northerners did resist with force, secessionists argued, one southern woodsman could whip five of Lincoln’s greasy mechanics.
For all their differences, southern whites agreed that they had to defend slavery. John Smith Preston of South Carolina spoke for the overwhelming majority when he declared, “The South cannot exist without slavery.” They disagreed about whether the mere presence of a Republican in the White House made it necessary to exercise what they considered a legitimate right to secede.
South Carolina seceded from the Union on December 20, 1860. By February 1861, the six other Lower South states followed in South Carolina’s footsteps. In general, slaveholders spearheaded secession, while nonslaveholders in the Piedmont and mountain counties, where slaves were relatively few, displayed the greatest attachment to the Union. In February, representatives from South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas met in Montgomery, Alabama, where they created the Confederate States of America. Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis became president, and Alexander Stephens of Georgia, who had spo- ken so eloquently about the dangers of revolution, became vice president. In March 1861, Stephens declared that the Confederacy’s “cornerstone” was “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the supe- rior race, is his natural and moral condition.”
Lincoln’s election had split the Union. Now secession split the South. Seven slave states seceded during the winter, but the eight slave states of the Upper South rejected secession, at least for the moment. The Upper South had a smaller stake in
Confederate States of America Government formed by Lower South states on February 7, 1861, following their secession from the Union. Secessionists argued that the election of a Republican to the presidency imperiled slavery and the South no longer had political protection within the Union.
Candidate Popular
Vote Percent of
Popular Vote Electoral
Vote Abraham Lincoln (Republican)
John C. Breckinridge (Southern Democrat)
Stephen A. Douglas (Northern Democrat)
John Bell (Constitutional Union)
180
72
12
39 12.6
1,866,452
847,953
39.9
18.1
590,631
1,375,157 29.4
7 9 10
8
10 12
12
11 13 23
27
8
15 3 3 4 6
4
135 5
9
6
8
35
4
4
4
5
3
6 3
4
4
MAP 14.5 THE ELECTION OF 1860
Conclusion: Slavery, Free Labor, and the Failure of Political Compromise 3831846–1861
slavery. Barely half as many white families in the Upper South held slaves (21 percent) as in the Lower South (37 percent). Slaves represented twice as large a percentage of the population in the Lower South (48 percent) as in the Upper South (23 percent). Consequently, whites in the Upper South had fewer fears that Republican ascendancy meant economic catastrophe, social chaos, and racial war. Lincoln would need to do more than just be elected to provoke them into secession.
The nation had to wait until March 4, 1861, when Lincoln took office, to see what he would do. He chose to stay in Springfield after his election and to say nothing. “Lame-duck” president James Buchanan sat in Washing- ton and did nothing. Congress’s efforts at cobbling together a peace-saving compromise came to nothing.
Lincoln began his inaugural address with reassurances to the South. He had “no lawful right” to interfere with slavery where it existed, he declared again, adding for emphasis that he had “no inclination to do so.” Conciliatory about slavery, Lincoln proved inflexible about the Union. The Union, he declared, was “per- petual.” Secession was “anarchy” and “legally void.” The Constitution required him to execute the law “in all the States.”
The decision for war or peace rested in the South’s hands, Lincoln said. “You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath regis- tered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect, and defend’ it.”
Conclusion: Slavery, Free Labor, and the Failure of Political Compromise As their economies, societies, and cultures diverged in the nineteenth century, Northerners and Southerners expressed different concepts of the American promise and the place of slavery within it. Their differences crystallized into political form in 1846 when David Wilmot proposed banning slavery in any ter- ritory won in the Mexican-American War. “As if by magic,” a Boston newspaper observed, “it brought to a head the great question that is about to divide the American people.” Discovery of gold and other precious metals in the West added urgency to the controversy over slavery in the territories. Congress attempted to address the issue with the Compromise of 1850, but the Fugitive Slave Act and the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin hardened northern senti- ments against slavery and confirmed southern suspicions of northern ill will. The bloody violence that erupted in Kansas in 1856 and the incendiary Dred Scott decision in 1857 further eroded hope for a solution to this momentous question.
WIS. MINN.
IOWA
T E X A S
ARK.
LA. MISS.
ALA. GA.
FLA.
S.C.
N.C. TENN.
KY.MO.KANS. VA.
N.Y.
PA.
OHIO IND.ILL. MD.
DAKOTA TERRITORY
NEBR. TERRITORY
COLO. TERR.
N. MEX. TERR.
INDIAN TERR.
MICH.
SECESSION OF THE LOWER SOUTH, DECEMBER 1860–
FEBRUARY 1861
384 CHAPTER 14 The House Divided 1846–1861
During the extended crisis of the Union that stretched from 1846 to 1861, the slavery question intertwined with national politics. The traditional Whig and Democratic parties struggled to hold together as new parties, most notably the Republican Party, emerged. Politicians fixed their attention on the expansion of slavery, but from the beginning Americans recognized that the controversy had less to do with slavery in the territories than with the future of slavery in the nation.
For more than seventy years, statesmen had found compromises that accepted slavery and preserved the Union. But as each section grew increasingly committed to its labor system, Americans discovered that accommodation had limits. In 1859, John Brown’s militant antislavery pushed white Southerners to the edge. In 1860, Lincoln’s election convinced whites in the Lower South that slavery and the society they had built on it were at risk in the Union, and they seceded. But it remained to be seen whether disunion would mean war.
1846–1861
1 Compromise between slave and free states collapsed with secession. Why did compromise fail at this moment?
2 In the 1850s, many Americans supported popular sovereignty as the best solution to the explosive question of slavery in the western territories. Why was this solution so popular, and why did it ultimately prove inadequate?
3 What caused the realignment of the two-party system in the 1840s and 1850s? How did this contribute to the coming of the Civil War?
4 Abraham Lincoln believed that he had staked out a moderate position on the question of slavery. Why, then, did some southern states determine that his election necessitated secession?
MAKING CONNECTIONS
1 Why did responses to the Wilmot Proviso split along sectional rather than party lines? (pp. 360–364)
2 Why did the Fugitive Slave Act provoke such strong opposition in the North? (pp. 365–370)
3 Why did the Whig Party disintegrate in the 1850s? (pp. 370–374)
4 Why did the Dred Scott decision strengthen northern suspicions of a “Slave Power” conspiracy? (pp. 374–379)
5 Why did some southern states secede immediately after Lincoln’s election? (pp. 379–383)
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
Wilmot Proviso (p. 361)
free labor (p. 361)
popular sovereignty (p. 361)
Compromise of 1850 (p. 364)
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (p. 365)
Fugitive Slave Act (p. 365)
KEY TERMS
Kansas-Nebraska Act (p. 370)
Republican Party (p. 371)
“Bleeding Kansas” (p. 375)
Dred Scott decision (p. 376)
Lincoln-Douglas debates (p. 379)
Confederate States of America (p. 382)
Chapter Review MAKE IT STICK
Go to LearningCurve: See what you know. Then review the key terms and answer the questions.
LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com /roarkconcise
385 STUDENT SITE @ bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
On the night of September 21, 1862, in Wilmington, North Carolina, twenty-four-year-old William Gould and seven other runaway slaves crowded into a small boat on the Cape Fear River. They rowed hard throughout the night, reaching the Atlantic Ocean by dawn. They made for the Union navy patrolling offshore. At 10:30 that morning, the USS Cambridge took the men aboard. Astonishingly, on that same day President Abraham Lincoln revealed his intention to issue a proclamation of emancipation freeing the slaves in the Confederate states. Although Gould
was not legally free, the U.S. Navy needed sailors and cared little about the formal status of runaway slaves. Within days, all eight
runaways became sailors in the U.S. Navy. William Gould could read and write, and he began
keeping a diary. In some ways, Gould’s naval experience looked like that of a white sailor. He found duty on a ship in the blockading squadron both boring and exhilarating, as days of tedious work were occasionally interrupted by a moment of “daring exploit.”
The Crucible of War, 1861–1865
“And the War Came” (pp. 388–390)
The Combatants (pp. 391–394)
Battling It Out, 1861–1862 (pp. 394–399)
Union and Freedom (pp. 400–403)
The South at War (pp. 403–408)
The North at War (pp. 408–411)
Grinding Out Victory, 1863–1865 (pp. 411–415)
Conclusion: The Second American Revolution (p. 416)
15
CHAPTER OUTLINE QUICK START
Quickly learn what is important in this chapter by doing the following:
• READ the Chapter Outline to see how the chapter is organized. • SKIM the Chronology on the next page to see what will be covered.
When you are ready, read the chapter and the Essential Questions for each section. Then use the Chapter Review to check what you know.
UNION PARADE DRUM Drums got soldiers up in the morning; signaled them to report for breakfast, roll call, and guard duty; and announced lights out. The most important use of drums was on the battlefield, where they communicated orders from commanding officers to their troops. The life of a drummer seemed glorious, and boys as young as ten eagerly
served in northern units. Photo courtesy Allan Katz Americana, Woodbridge, CT. 386
But Gould’s Civil War experience was shaped by his race. Like most black men in the Union military, he saw service as an opportu- nity to fight slavery. Gould linked union and freedom, “the holiest of all causes.” Gould witnessed a number of ugly racial incidents, however. When a black regiment came aboard, “they were treated verry rough by the crew,” he said. The white sailors “refused to let them eat off the mess pans and called them all kinds of names[;] . . . in all they was treated shamefully.”
Still, Gould was proud of his service in the navy and monitored the progress of racial equality during the war. In March 1865, he celebrated the “passage of an amendment of the Con[sti]tution prohibiting slavery througho[ut] the United States.” And a month later, he thrilled to the “Glad Tidings that the Stars and Stripe[s] had been planted over the Capital of the D — nd Confederacy by the invincible Grant.” He added, we must not forget the “Mayrters to the cau[se] of Right and Equality.”
But for the first eighteen months of the war, federal soldiers officially fought only to uphold the Constitution and preserve the nation. Only with the Emancipation Proclamation did the northern war effort take on a dual purpose: to save the Union and to free the slaves.
Even if the Civil War had not touched slavery, the conflict still would have transformed America. As the world’s first modern war, it mobilized the entire populations of North and South, harnessed the productive capacities of both economies, and produced battles that fielded 200,000 soldiers and created casualties in the tens of thou- sands. The carnage lasted four years and cost the nation at least 620,000 lives. The war helped mold the modern American nation- state, and the federal government emerged with new power and responsibility over national life. The war encouraged industrialization. It tore families apart and pushed women into new work and roles. But because the war ended slavery, it had truly revolutionary meaning.
Recalling the Civil War years, Frederick Douglass said, “It is something to couple one’s name with great occasions.” It was something — for William Gould and millions of other Americans. Whether they fought for the Confederacy or the Union, whether they labored behind the lines to supply Yankee or rebel soldiers, whether they prayed for the safe return of Northerners or Southerners, all Americans endured the crucible of war. But the war affected no group more than the 4 million African Americans who saw its beginning as slaves and emerged as free people.
CHRONOLOGY
1861 Attack on Fort Sumter. Four Upper South states
join Confederacy. First battle of Bull Run
(Manassas). First Confiscation Act.
1862 Grant captures Fort Henry and Fort Donelson.
Battle of Glorieta Pass. Battle of Pea Ridge. Battle of Shiloh. Confederate Congress
authorizes draft. Homestead Act. Virginia peninsula
campaign. Second Confiscation Act. Militia Act. Battle of Antietam.
1863 Emancipation Proclamation. National Banking Act. Congress authorizes draft. Fall of Vicksburg to Union
forces. Lee defeated at battle of
Gettysburg. New York City draft riots.
1864 Grant appointed Union general in chief.
Wilderness campaign. Fall of Atlanta. Lincoln reelected. Fall of Savannah.
1865 Fall of Petersburg and Richmond.
Lee surrenders to Grant. Lincoln assassinated; Vice
President Andrew Johnson becomes president.
388 CHAPTER 15 The Crucible of War 1861–1865
“And the War Came” Abraham Lincoln faced the worst crisis in the history of the nation: disunion. He revealed his strategy to save the Union in his inaugural address on March 4, 1861. He was firm yet conciliatory. First, he denied the right of seces-
sion and sought to stop its spread by avoiding any act that would push the skittish Upper South (North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and Arkansas) out of the Union. Second, he sought to reassure the seceding Lower South (South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas) that the Republicans would not abolish slavery. Lincoln believed that Unionists there would assert themselves and overturn the secession decision.
His counterpart, Jefferson Davis, fully intended to establish the Confederate States of America as an independent republic. To achieve permanence, Davis had to sustain the secession fever that had carried the Lower South out of the Union. Even if the Lower South held firm, however, the Confederacy would remain weak without addi- tional states. Davis watched for opportunities to add new stars to the Confederate flag.
THE CREW OF THE USS HUNCHBACK African Americans served as sailors in the federal military long before they were permitted to become soldiers. They initially served only as coal heavers, cooks, and stewards, but within a year some black sailors joined their ships’ gun crews. The Hunchback was one of the Union’s innovative ironclad ships. National Archives.
Why did both the Union and the Confederacy consider control of the border states crucial?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
“And the War Came” 3891861–1865
Both men wanted to achieve their objectives peacefully. As Lincoln later observed, “Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.”
Attack on Fort Sumter. Major Robert Anderson and some eighty U.S. soldiers occupied Fort Sumter, which was perched on a tiny island at the entrance to Charles- ton harbor in South Carolina. Lincoln decided to hold the fort, but Anderson and his men were running dangerously short of food. In early April 1861, Lincoln authorized a peaceful expedition to bring supplies, but not military reinforcements, to the fort. The president understood that he risked war, but his plan honored his inaugural promises to defend federal property and to avoid using military force unless first attacked. Masterfully, Lincoln had shifted the fateful decision of war or peace to Jefferson Davis.
On April 9, Davis and his cabinet met to consider the situation in Charleston harbor. Davis argued for military action, but his secretary of state, Robert Toombs of Georgia, replied: “Mr. President, at this time it is suicide, murder, and will lose us every friend at the North. You will wantonly strike a hornet’s nest which extends from mountain to ocean, and legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death.” But Davis ordered Confederate troops in Charleston to take the fort before the relief expedition arrived. Thirty-three hours of bombardment on April 12 and 13 reduced the fort to rubble. On April 14, Major Anderson offered his surrender and lowered the U.S. flag. The Confederates had Fort Sumter, but they also had war.
On April 15, when Lincoln called for 75,000 militiamen to serve for ninety days to put down the rebellion, several times that number rushed to defend the flag. Ste- phen A. Douglas, the recently defeated Democratic candidate for president, pledged his support and noted, “There can be no neutrals in this war, only patriots — or traitors.”
The Upper South Chooses Sides. The Upper South faced a horrendous choice: either to fight against the Lower South or to fight against the Union. Many who only months earlier had rejected secession now embraced the Confederacy. Thousands felt betrayed, believing that Lincoln had promised to achieve a peaceful reunion by waiting patiently for Unionists to retake power in the seceding states. It was a “politician’s war,” one man declared, but he conceded that “this is no time now to discuss the causes, but it is the duty of all who regard Southern institutions of value to side with the South, make common cause with the Confederate States and sink or swim with them.”
Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina joined the Confederacy (Map 15.1). But in the border states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, Unionism triumphed. Only in Delaware, where slaves accounted for less than 2 per- cent of the population, was the victory easy. In Maryland, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, essentially setting aside constitutional guarantees that protect
Fort Sumter Union fort on an island at the entrance to Charleston harbor in South Carolina. After Confederate leaders learned President Lincoln intended to resupply Fort Sumter, Confederate forces attacked the fort on April 12, 1861, thus marking the start of the Civil War.
390 CHAPTER 15 The Crucible of War 1861–1865
citizens from arbitrary arrest and detention, and he ordered U.S. troops into Balti- more. Maryland’s legislature rejected secession.
The struggle turned violent in the West. In Missouri, Unionists won a narrow victory, but southern-sympathizing guerrilla bands roamed the state for the dura- tion of the war, terrorizing civilians and soldiers alike. In Kentucky, Unionists also narrowly defeated secession, but the prosouthern minority claimed otherwise.
Lincoln understood that the border states — particularly Kentucky — contained indispensable resources, population, and wealth and also controlled major rivers and railroads. “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game,” Lincoln said. “Kentucky gone, we can not hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. These all against us, . . . we would as well consent to separation at once.”
In the end, only eleven of the fifteen slave states joined the Confederate States of America. Moreover, the four seceding Upper South states contained significant numbers of people who felt little affection for the Confederacy. Dissatisfaction was so rife in the western counties of Virginia that in 1863 citizens there voted to create the separate state of West Virginia, loyal to the Union. Still, the acquisi- tion of four new states greatly strengthened the Confederacy’s drive for national independence.
Seceded before fall of Fort Sumter Seceded after fall of Fort Sumter
Slave state loyal to Union
Free state
Territory
Order of secession1
CALIF.
OREGON WIS.
MINN.
IOWA
T E X A S 7
ARK. 9
LA. 6
MISS. 2
ALA. 4 GA.
5
FLA. 3
S.C. 1
N.C. 11
TENN. 10
KY.MO.KANSAS
VA. 8
ME.VT.
N.H. MASS.
N.Y.
PA. N.J.
CONN.
R.I.
OHIO
MICH.
IND.ILL. MD.
DEL.
WASHINGTON TERRITORY
DAKOTA TERRITORY
NEBRASKA TERR.NEVADA TERR.
UTAH TERR. COLORADO
TERR.
NEW MEXICO TERRITORY
INDIAN TERR.
MAP 15.1 SECESSION, 1860–1861 After Lincoln’s election, the fifteen slave states debated what to do. Seven states quickly left the Union, four left after the firing on Fort Sumter, and four remained loyal to the Union.
The Combatants 3911861–1865
The Combatants Only slaveholders had a direct economic stake in preserv- ing slavery, but most whites in the Confederacy defended the institution, the way of life built on it, and the Confeder- ate nation. The degraded and subjugated status of blacks elevated the status of the poorest whites. “It is enough that one simply belongs to the superior and ruling race, to secure consideration and respect.” Moreover, Yankee “aggression” was no longer a mere threat; it was real and at the South’s door.
For Northerners, the South’s failure to accept the democratic election of a presi- dent and its firing on the nation’s flag challenged the rule of law, the authority of the Constitution, and the ability of the people to govern themselves. As an Indiana sol- dier told his wife, a “good government is the best thing on earth. Property is nothing without it, because it is not protected; a family is nothing without it, because they cannot be educated.”
Northerners and Southerners rallied behind their separate flags, fully convinced that they were in the right and that God was on their side. Yankees took heart from their superior power, but the rebels believed they had advantages that nullified every northern strength. Both sides mobilized swiftly in 1861, and each devised what it believed would be a winning military and diplomatic strategy.
How They Expected to Win. The balance sheet of northern and southern resources reveals enormous advantages for the Union (Figure 15.1). The twenty-three states remaining in the Union had a population of 22.3 million; the eleven Confederate states had a population of only 9.1 million, of whom 3.67 million (40 percent) were slaves. The North’s economic advantages were even more overwhelming. Yet Southerners expected to win — for some good reasons — and they came very close to doing so.
Southerners knew they bucked the military odds, but hadn’t the liberty-loving colonists in 1776 also done so? “Britain could not conquer three million,” a Louisi- anan proclaimed, and “the world cannot conquer the South.” How could anyone doubt the outcome of a contest between lean, hard, country-born rebel warriors defending family, property, and liberty, and soft, flabby, citified Yankee mechanics waging an unconstitutional war?
The South’s confidence also rested on its belief that northern prosperity depended on the South’s cotton. Without cotton, New England textile mills would stand idle. Without planters purchasing northern manufactured goods, northern factories would drown in their own unsold surpluses. And without the foreign exchange earned by the overseas sales of cotton, the financial structure of the entire Yankee nation would collapse.
Cotton would also make Europe a powerful ally of the Confederacy, Southerners reasoned. Of the 900 million pounds of cotton Britain imported annually, more than 700 million pounds came from the American South. If the supply was interrupted, sheer economic need would make Britain (and perhaps France) a Confederate ally. And because the British navy ruled the seas, the North would find Britain a formidable foe.
Why did the South believe it could win the war despite numerical disadvantages?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
392 CHAPTER 15 The Crucible of War 1861–1865
The Confederacy devised a military strategy to exploit its advantages and mini- mize its limitations. It recognized that a Union victory required the North to defeat and subjugate the South, but a Confederate victory required only that the South stay at home, blunt invasions, avoid battles that risked annihilating its army, and outlast the North’s will to fight. When an opportunity presented itself, the South would strike the invaders. Like the American colonists, the South could win independence by not losing the war.
The Lincoln administration countered with a strategy designed to take advantage of its superior resources. Lincoln declared a naval blockade of the Con- federacy to deny it the ability to sell cotton abroad, giving the South far fewer dollars to pay for war goods. Lincoln also ordered the Union army into Virginia, at the same time planning a march through the Mississippi valley that would cut the Confederacy in two.
Lincoln and Davis Mobilize. Mobilization required effective political leadership, and at first glance the South appeared to have the advantage. Jefferson Davis brought to the Confederate presidency a distinguished political career, including experience in the U.S. Senate. He was also a West Point graduate, a combat veteran and authentic hero of the Mexican-American War, and a former secretary of war. Dignified and ramrod straight, with “a jaw sawed in steel,” Davis appeared to be everything a nation could want in a wartime leader.
FIGURE 15.1 RESOURCES OF THE UNION AND THE CONFEDERACY The Union’s enormous statistical advantages failed to convince Confederates that their cause was doomed.
Union
Confederacy
Total population
Free males
Wealth produced
Industrial workers
Factory production
Textile production
Firearms production
Railroad mileage
Iron production
Coal production
Livestock
Farm acreage
Wheat
Corn
Cotton
Merchant ship tonnage
Naval ship tonnage
2.4 to 1
4.3 to 1
3 to 1
11.5 to 1
10.1 to 1
13.3 to 1
32.3 to 1
2.4 to 1
15.7 to 1
32.3 to 1
1.5 to 1
3 to 1
4.3 to 1
2 to 1
1 to 24
9 to 1
24 to 196% 4%
90% 10%
4% 96%
67% 33%
81% 19%
75% 25%
60% 40%
97% 3%
94% 6%
71% 29%
97% 3%
93% 7%
91% 9%
92% 8%
75% 25%
81% 19%
71% 29%
The Combatants 3931861–1865
By contrast, Abraham Lincoln brought to the White House one lackluster term in the House of Representatives and almost no administrative experience. His sole brush with anything military was as a captain in the militia in the Black Hawk War, a brief struggle in Illinois in 1832 in which whites expelled the last Indians from the state. The lanky, disheveled Illinois lawyer-politician looked anything but military or presidential in his bearing.
Davis, however, proved to be less than he appeared. Although he worked hard, he had no gift for military strategy yet intervened often in military affairs. He was an even less able political leader. Quarrelsome and proud, he had an acid tongue that made enemies the Confederacy could ill afford.
With Lincoln, the North got far more than met the eye. He proved himself a master politician and a superb leader. When forming his cabinet, Lincoln appointed the ablest men, no matter that they were often his chief rivals and critics. He appointed Salmon P. Chase secretary of the treasury, knowing that Chase had pres- idential ambitions. As secretary of state, he chose his chief opponent for the Republican nomination in 1860, William H. Seward. Despite his civilian back- ground, Lincoln displayed an innate understanding of military strategy. No one was more crucial in mapping the Union war plan.
Lincoln and Davis began gathering their armies. Confederates had to build almost everything from scratch, and Northerners had to channel their superior numbers and industrial resources to war. On the eve of the war, the federal army numbered only 16,000 men. One-third of the officers followed the example of the Virginian Robert E. Lee, resigning their commissions and heading south. The U.S. Navy was in better shape. Forty-two ships were in service, and a large merchant marine would in time provide more ships and sailors for the Union cause.
The Confederacy made prodigious efforts to supply its armies, but even when factories produced what soldiers needed, southern railroads often could not deliver the goods. And each year, more railroads were captured, destroyed, or left in disrepair. Food production proved less of a problem, but food sometimes rotted before it reached the soldiers. The one bright spot was the Confederacy’s Ordnance Bureau, headed by Josiah Gorgas. In April 1864, Gorgas proudly observed: “Where three years ago we were not making a gun, a pistol nor a sabre, no shot nor shell . . . we now make all these in quantities to meet the demands of our large armies.”
Recruiting and supplying huge armies required enormous new revenues. At first, the Union and the Confederacy sold war bonds, which essentially were loans
THE MINIÉ BALL None of the Union army’s weaponry proved more vital than a French innovation by Captain Claude Minié. In 1848, Minié created an inch-long bullet that was rammed down a rifle barrel and would spin as it left the muzzle. The spin gave the bullet greater distance and accuracy than bullets fired from smoothbore weapons. Bullets caused more than 90 percent of battle wounds. Picture Research Consultants & Archives.
394 CHAPTER 15 The Crucible of War 1861–1865
from patriotic citizens. In addition, both sides turned to taxes. Eventually, both began printing paper money. Inflation soared, but the Confederacy suffered more because it financed a greater part of its wartime costs through the printing press. Prices in the Union rose by about 80 percent during the war, while inflation in the Confederacy topped 9,000 percent.
Within months of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, both sides found men to fight and ways to supply them. But the underlying strength of the northern economy gave the Union the decided advantage. With their military and industrial muscles beginning to ripple, Northerners became itchy for action that would smash the rebellion. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune began to chant: “Forward to Richmond! Forward to Richmond!”
Battling It Out, 1861–1862 During the first year and a half of the war, armies fought major campaigns in both the East and the West. While the eastern campaign was more dramatic, Lincoln had trouble finding a capable general, and the fighting ended
in a stalemate. Battles in the West proved more decisive. Union general Ulysses S. Grant won important victories in Kentucky and Tennessee. As Yankee and rebel armies pounded each other on land, the navies fought on the seas and on the riv- ers of the South. In Europe, Confederate and U.S. diplomats competed for advan- tage in the corridors of power. All the while, casualty lists on both sides reached appalling lengths.
Stalemate in the Eastern Theater. In the summer of 1861, Lincoln ordered the 35,000 Union troops assembling outside Washington to attack the 20,000 Con- federates defending Manassas, a railroad junction in Virginia about thirty miles southwest of Washington. On July 21, the army forded Bull Run, a branch of the Potomac River, and engaged the southern forces (Map 15.2). But fast-moving south- ern reinforcements blunted the Union attack and then counterattacked. What began as an orderly Union retreat turned into a panicky stampede.
By Civil War standards, the casualties (wounded and dead) at the battle of Bull Run (or Manassas, as Southerners called the battle) were light, about 2,000 Con- federates and 1,600 Federals. The significance of the battle lay in the lessons North- erners and Southerners drew from it. For Southerners, it confirmed the superiority of rebel fighting men and the inevitability of Confederate nationhood. While victory fed southern pride, defeat sobered Northerners. It was a major setback, admitted the New York Tribune, but “let us go to work, then, with a will.” Within four days of the disaster, the president authorized the enlistment of 1 million men for three years.
Lincoln also appointed the young George B. McClellan commander of the newly named Army of the Potomac. Having graduated from West Point second in his class, the thirty-four-year-old McClellan believed that he was a great soldier and that Lincoln was a dunce, the “original Gorilla.” A superb administrator and
Why did the Confederacy’s bid for international support fail?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
battle of Bull Run (Manassas) First major battle of the Civil War, fought at a railroad junction in northern Virginia on July 21, 1861. The Union suffered a sobering defeat, while the Confederates felt affirmed in their superiority and the inevitability of Confederate nationhood.
Battling It Out, 1861–1862 3951861–1865
organizer, McClellan energetically whipped his dispirited soldiers into shape, but for all his energy, McClellan lacked decisiveness. Lincoln wanted a general who would advance, take risks, and fight, but McClellan went into winter quarters. “If General McClellan does not want to use the army I would like to borrow it,” Lincoln declared in frustration.
MAP 15.2 THE CIVIL WAR, 1861–1862 While most eyes were focused on the eastern theater, especially the ninety-mile stretch of land between Washington, D.C., and the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, Union troops were winning strategic victories in the West.
READING THE MAP: In which states did the Confederacy and the Union each win the most battles during this period? Which side used or followed water routes most for troop movements and attacks?
CONNECTIONS: Which major cities in the South and West fell to Union troops in 1862? Which strategic area did those Confederate losses place in Union hands? How did this outcome affect the later movement of troops and supplies?
Map Activity
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396 CHAPTER 15 The Crucible of War 1861–1865
Finally, in May 1862, McClellan launched his long-awaited offensive. He transported his highly polished army, now 130,000 strong, to the mouth of the James River and began slowly moving up the Yorktown peninsula toward Richmond. When he was within six miles of the Confederate capital, General Joseph Johnston hit him like a hammer. In the assault, Johnston was wounded and was replaced by Robert E. Lee, who would become the South’s most cel- ebrated general. Lee named his command the Army of Northern Virginia.
The contrast between Lee and McClellan could hardly have been greater. McClellan brimmed with conceit; Lee was courteous and reserved. On the battlefield, McClellan grew timid and irresolute, and Lee became audaciously, even recklessly, aggressive. And Lee had at his side in the peninsula campaign military men of real talent: Thomas J. Jackson, nicknamed “Stonewall” for holding the line at Manassas, and James E. B. (“Jeb”) Stuart, a dashing twenty- nine-year-old cavalry commander who rode circles around Yankee troops.
Lee’s assault initiated the Seven Days Battle (June 25–July 1) and began McClellan’s march back down the peninsula. By the time McClellan reached safety, 30,000 men from both sides had died or been wounded. Although South- erners suffered twice the casualties of Northerners, Lee had saved Richmond. Lincoln fired McClellan and replaced him with General John Pope.
In August, north of Richmond, at the second battle of Bull Run, Lee’s smaller army battered Pope’s forces and sent them scurrying back to Washington. Lincoln ordered Pope to Minnesota to pacify the Indians and restored McClellan to command.
Believing that he had the enemy on the run, Lee pushed his army across the Potomac and invaded Maryland. A victory on northern soil would dislodge Mary- land from the Union, Lee reasoned, and might even cause Lincoln to sue for peace. On September 17, 1862, McClellan’s forces engaged Lee’s army at Antietam Creek (see Map 15.2). With “solid shot . . . cracking skulls like eggshells,” according to one observer, the armies went after each other. At Miller’s Cornfield, the firing was so intense that “every stalk of corn in the . . . field was cut as closely as could have been done with a knife.” By nightfall, 6,000 men lay dead or dying on the battle- field, and 17,000 more had been wounded. The battle of Antietam would be the bloodiest day of the war and sent the battered Army of Northern Virginia limping back home. McClellan claimed to have saved the North, but Lincoln again removed him from command of the Army of the Potomac and appointed General Ambrose Burnside.
Though bloodied, Lee found an opportunity in December to punish the enemy at Fredericksburg, Virginia, where Burnside’s 122,000 Union troops faced 78,500 Confederates dug in behind a stone wall on the heights above the Rappahannock River. Half a mile of open ground separated the armies. “A chicken could not live on that field when we open on it,” a Confederate artillery officer predicted. Yet Burnside ordered a frontal assault. When the shooting ceased, the Federals counted nearly 13,000 casualties, the Confederates fewer than 5,000. The battle of Fredericksburg was one of the Union’s worst defeats. As 1862 ended, the North seemed no nearer to ending the rebellion than it had been when the war began. Rather than checkmate, military struggle in the East had reached stalemate.
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battle of Antietam Battle fought in Maryland on September 17, 1862, between the Union forces of George McClellan and Confederate troops of Robert E. Lee. The battle, a Union victory that left 6,000 dead and 17,000 wounded, was the bloodiest day of the war.
Battling It Out, 1861–1862 3971861–1865
Union Victories in the Western Theater. While most eyes focused on events in the East, the decisive early encounters of the war were taking place between the Appalachian Mountains and the Ozarks (see Map 15.2). Confederates wanted Missouri and Kentucky, states they claimed but did not control. Federals wanted to split Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas from the Confederacy by taking control of the Mississippi River and to occupy Tennessee, one of the Confederacy’s main producers of food, mules, and iron — all vital resources.
Before Union forces could march on Tennessee, they needed to secure Missouri to the west. Union troops swept across Missouri to the border of Arkansas, where in March 1862 they encountered a 16,000-man Confederate army, which included three regiments of Indians from the so-called Five Civilized Tribes — the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Seminole, and Cherokee. The Union victory at the battle of Pea Ridge left Missouri free of Confederate troops, but guer- rilla bands led by the notorious William Clarke Quantrill and “Bloody Bill” Anderson burned, tortured, scalped, and murdered Union civilians and soldiers until the final year of the war.
Even farther west, Confederate armies sought to fulfill Jefferson Davis’s vision of a slaveholding empire stretching all the way to the Pacific. Both sides recognized the immense value of the gold and silver mines of California, Nevada, and Colorado. And both sides bolstered their armies in the South- west with Mexican Americans. A quick strike by Texas troops took Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the winter of 1861–62. Then in March 1862, a band of Colo- rado miners ambushed and crushed southern forces at Glorieta Pass, outside Santa Fe, effectively ending dreams of a Confederate empire beyond Texas.
THE DEAD OF ANTIETAM In October 1862, photographer Mathew Brady opened an exhibition that presented the battle of Antietam as the soldiers saw it. A New York Times reporter observed, “Mr. Brady has done something to bring to us the terrible reality and earnestness of the war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door - yards and along [our] streets, he had done something very like it.” Library of Congress.
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398 CHAPTER 15 The Crucible of War 1861–1865
The principal western battles took place in Tennessee, where General Ulysses S. Grant emerged as the key northern commander. Grant, a West Point graduate
who served in Mexico, was a thirty-nine-year-old dry-goods clerk in Galena, Illinois, when the war began. Gentle at home, he became pugnacious on the battlefield. “The art of war is simple,” he said. “Find out where your enemy is, get at him as soon as you can and strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.” Grant’s philosophy of war as attrition would take a huge toll in human life, but it played to the North’s superiority in man- power. Later, to critics who wanted the president to sack Grant because of his drinking, Lincoln would say, “I can’t spare this man. He fights.”
In February 1862, operating in tandem with U.S. Navy gunboats, Grant captured Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and Fort Donelson on the Cum- berland (see Map 15.2). Defeat forced the Confederates to withdraw from all of Ken- tucky and most of Tennessee, but Grant followed.
On April 6, General Albert Sidney Johnston’s army surprised Grant at Shiloh Church in Tennessee. Union troops were badly mauled the first day, but Grant remained cool and brought up reinforcements throughout the night. The next morning, the Union army counterattacked, driving the Confederates before it. The battle of Shiloh was terribly costly to both sides; there were 20,000 casualties, among them General Johnston. Grant later said that after Shiloh he “gave up all idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest.”
Although no one knew it at the time, Shiloh ruined the Confederacy’s bid to control the theater of operations in the West. The Yankees quickly captured the stra- tegic town of Corinth, Mississippi; the river city of Memphis; and the South’s largest city, New Orleans. By the end of 1862, the far West and most — but not all — of the Mississippi valley lay in Union hands. At the same time, the outcome of the struggle in another theater of war was also becoming clearer.
The Atlantic Theater. When the war began, the U.S. Navy’s blockade fleet consisted of about three dozen ships to patrol more than 3,500 miles of south- ern coastline, and rebel merchant ships were able to slip in and out of southern ports nearly at will. Taking on cargoes in the Caribbean, sleek Confederate blockade runners brought in vital supplies — guns and medicine. But with the U.S. Navy commissioning a new blockader almost weekly, the naval fleet even- tually numbered 150 ships on duty, and the Union navy dramatically improved its score.
Unable to build a conventional navy equal to the expanding U.S. fleet, the Con- federates experimented with a radical new maritime design: the ironclad warship. At Norfolk, Virginia, the wooden hull of the Merrimack was layered with two-inch- thick armor plate. Rechristened Virginia, the ship steamed out in March 1862 and sank two wooden federal ships (see Map 15.2). When the Virginia returned to finish off the federal blockaders the next morning, it was challenged by the Monitor, a fed- eral ironclad of even more radical design, topped with a revolving turret holding two eleven-inch guns. On March 9, the two ships hurled shells at each other for two hours, but the battle ended in a draw.
battle of Shiloh Battle at Shiloh Church, Tennessee, on April 6–7, 1862, between Albert Sidney Johnston’s Confederate forces and Ulysses S. Grant’s Union army. The Union army ultimately prevailed, though at great cost to both sides. Shiloh ruined the Confederacy’s bid to control the war in the West.
Battling It Out, 1861–1862 3991861–1865
The Confederacy never found a way to break the Union blockade despite exploring many naval innovations, including a new underwater vessel — the submarine. By 1865, the blockaders were intercepting about half of the southern ships attempting to break through. The Union navy, a southern naval officer observed, “shut the Confederacy out from the world, deprived it of supplies, weak- ened its military and naval strength.” The Con- federacy was sealed off, with devastating results.
International Diplomacy. What the Confederates could not achieve on the seas, they sought to achieve through interna- tional diplomacy. They based their hope for European intervention on King Cotton. In theory, cotton-starved European nations would have no choice but to break the Union blockade and recognize the Confederacy. Southern hopes were not unreasonable, for at the height of the “cotton famine” in 1862, when 2 million British workers were unem- ployed, Britain tilted toward recognition. Along with several other European nations, Britain granted the Confederacy “belligerent” status, which enabled it to buy goods and build ships in European ports. But no country challenged the Union blockade or recognized the Confed- erate States of America as a nation, a bold act that probably would have drawn that country into war.
King Cotton diplomacy failed for several reasons. A bumper cotton crop in 1860 meant that the warehouses of British textile manufacturers bulged with surplus cotton throughout 1861. In 1862, when a cotton shortage did occur, European man- ufacturers found new sources in India, Egypt, and elsewhere. In addition, the devel- opment of a brisk trade between the Union and Britain — British war materiel for American grain and flour — helped offset the decline in textiles and encouraged Britain to remain neutral.
Europe’s temptation to intervene disappeared for good in 1862. Union military successes in the West made Britain and France think twice about linking their fates to the struggling Confederacy. Moreover, in September 1862, Lincoln announced a new policy that made an alliance with the Confederacy an alliance with slavery — a commitment the French and British, who had outlawed slavery in their empires and looked forward to its eradication worldwide, were not willing to make. After 1862, the South’s cause was linked irrevocably with slavery and reaction, and the Union’s cause was linked with freedom and democracy. The Union, not the Confederacy, had won the diplomatic stakes.
TABLE 15.1 MAJOR BATTLES OF THE CIVIL WAR, 1861–1862
April 12–13, 1861 Attack on Fort Sumter
July 21, 1861 First battle of Bull Run (Manassas)
February 6, 1862 Battle of Fort Henry
February 16, 1862 Battle of Fort Donelson
March 6–8, 1862 Battle of Pea Ridge
March 9, 1862 Battle of the Merrimack (the Virginia) and the Monitor
March 26, 1862 Battle of Glorieta Pass
April 6–7, 1862 Battle of Shiloh
May–July 1862 McClellan’s peninsula campaign
June 6, 1862 Fall of Memphis
June 25–July 1, 1862 Seven Days Battle
August 29–30, 1862 Second battle of Bull Run (Manassas)
September 17, 1862 Battle of Antietam
December 13, 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg
Union blockade The United States’ use of its navy to patrol the southern coastline to restrict Confederate access to supplies. Over time, the blockade became increasingly effective and succeeded in depriving the Confederacy of vital supplies.
King Cotton diplomacy Confederate diplomatic strategy built on the hope that European nations starving for cotton would break the Union blockade and recognize the Confederacy. This strategy failed as Europeans held stores of surplus cotton and developed new sources outside the South.
400 CHAPTER 15 The Crucible of War 1861–1865
Union and Freedom For a year and a half, Lincoln insisted that the North fought strictly to save the Union and not to abolish slav- ery. Nevertheless, the war for union became a war for African American freedom. Each month the conflict
dragged on, it became clearer that the Confederate war machine depended heavily on slavery. Rebel armies used slaves to build fortifications, haul materiel, tend horses, and perform camp chores. On the southern home front, slaves labored in ironworks and shipyards, and they grew the food that fed both soldiers and civil- ians. Slavery undergirded the Confederacy as certainly as it had the Old South. Union military commanders and politicians alike gradually realized that to defeat the Confederacy, the North would have to destroy slavery. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation began the work, and soon African Americans flooded into the Union army, where they fought against the Confederacy and for black freedom.
From Slaves to Contraband. Lincoln detested human bondage, but as presi- dent he felt compelled to act prudently in the interests of the Union. He doubted his right under the Constitution to tamper with the “domestic institutions” of any state, even states in rebellion. An astute politician, Lincoln worked within the tight limits of public opinion. The issue of black freedom was particularly explosive in the loyal border states, where slaveholders threatened to jump into the arms of the Confed- eracy at even the hint of emancipation.
Black freedom also raised alarms in the free states. The Democratic Party gave notice that adding emancipation to the goal of union would make the war strictly a Republican affair. Moreover, many white Northerners were not about to risk their lives to satisfy what they considered abolitionist “fanaticism.” “We Won’t Fight to Free the Nigger,” one popular banner read. They feared that emancipation would propel “two or three million semi-savages” northward, where they would crowd into white neighborhoods, compete for white jobs, and mix with white “sons and daughters.”
Yet proponents of emancipation pressed Lincoln as relentlessly as did the anti- emancipation forces. Abolitionists argued that by seceding, Southerners had for- feited their right to the protection of the Constitution and that Lincoln could — as the price of their treason — legally confiscate their property in slaves. When Lincoln refused, abolitionists scalded him. Frederick Douglass labeled him “the miserable tool of traitors and rebels.”
The Republican-dominated Congress declined to leave slavery policy entirely in President Lincoln’s hands. In August 1861, Congress approved the Confiscation Act, which allowed the seizure of any slave employed directly by the Confederate mili- tary. It also fulfilled the free-soil dream of prohibiting slavery in the territories and abolished slavery in Washington, D.C. Democrats and border-state representatives voted against even these mild measures.
Slaves, not politicians, became the most insistent force for emancipation. By escaping their masters by the tens of thousands and running away to Union lines, they forced slavery on the North’s wartime agenda. Runaways made Northerners
Why did the Union change policy in 1863 to allow black men to serve in the army?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
1861–1865 Union and Freedom 401
answer a crucial question: Were the runaways now free, or were they still slaves who, according to the fugitive slave law, had to be returned to their masters? At first, Yan- kee military officers sent the fugitives back. But Union armies needed laborers, and at Fort Monroe, Virginia, General Benjamin F. Butler called them contraband of war, meaning “confiscated property,” and put them to work. Congress made Butler’s prac- tice national policy in March 1862 when it forbade returning fugitive slaves to their masters. Slaves were still not legally free, but there was a tilt toward emancipation.
Lincoln’s policy of noninterference with slavery gradually crumbled. To calm Northerners’ racial fears, Lincoln offered colonization, the deportation of African Americans from the United States to Haiti, Panama, or elsewhere. Congress voted a small amount of money to underwrite colonization, but practical limitations and stiff black opposition sank the scheme.
While Lincoln was developing his own antislavery initiatives, he snuffed out actions that he believed would jeopardize northern unity. He was particularly alert to Union commanders who tried to dictate slavery policy from the field. In August 1861, when John C. Frémont, former Republican presidential nominee and now commander of federal troops in Missouri, freed the slaves belonging to Missouri rebels, Lincoln forced the general to revoke his edict. The following May, when Gen- eral David Hunter freed the slaves in Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida, Lincoln countermanded his order. Events moved so rapidly, however, that Lincoln found it impossible to control federal policy on slavery.
From Contraband to Free People. On August 22, 1862, Lincoln replied to an angry abolitionist who demanded that he attack slavery. “My paramount objective in this struggle is to save the Union,” Lincoln said, “and is not either to save or destroy
HUMAN CONTRABAND These refugees from slavery crossed the Rappahannock River in Virginia in August 1862 to seek sanctuary with a federal army. Most slaves fled with little more than the clothes on their backs, but not all escaped slavery empty-handed. The oxen, horse, wagon, and goods seen here could have been purchased during slavery, “borrowed” from the former master, or gathered during flight. Library of Congress.
contraband of war General Benjamin F. Butler’s term for runaway slaves, who were considered confiscated property of war, not fugitives, and put to work in the Union army. This policy proved to be a step on the road to emancipation.
402 CHAPTER 15 The Crucible of War 1861–1865
slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” At first glance, Lincoln seemed to restate his old position that union was the North’s sole objective. Instead, Lincoln announced that slavery was no longer untouchable and that he would emancipate every slave if doing so would preserve the Union.
By the summer of 1862, events were tumbling rapidly toward emancipation. On July 17, Congress adopted the second Confiscation Act. The first had confiscated slaves employed by the Confederate military; the second declared all slaves of rebel masters “forever free of their servitude.” In theory, this breathtaking measure freed most Confederate slaves, for slaveholders formed the backbone of the rebellion. Congress had traveled far since the war began.
Lincoln had, too. By the summer of 1862, the president had come to believe that emancipation was “a military necessity, absolutely essential to the preservation of the Union.” In September, he announced his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation that promised to free all the slaves in the seceding states on January 1, 1863. The limi- tations of the proclamation — it exempted the loyal border states and the Union- occupied areas of the Confederacy — caused some to ridicule the act. The Times (London) observed cynically, “Where he has no power Mr. Lincoln will set the negroes free, where he retains power he will consider them as slaves.” But Lincoln had no power to free slaves in loyal states, and invading Union armies would liberate slaves in the Confederacy as they advanced.
By presenting emancipation as a “military necessity,” Lincoln hoped to disarm his conservative critics. Emancipation would deprive the Confederacy of valuable slave laborers, shorten the war, and thus save lives. Democrats, however, fumed that the “shrieking and howling abolitionist faction” had captured the White House and made it “a nigger war.” Democrats gained thirty-four congressional seats in the November 1862 elections. House Democrats quickly proposed a resolution brand- ing emancipation “a high crime against the Constitution.” The Republicans, who maintained narrow majorities in both houses of Congress, barely beat it back.
As promised, on New Year’s Day 1863, Lincoln issued the final Emancipation Proclamation. In addition to freeing the slaves in the rebel states, the Emancipation Proclamation also committed the federal government to the fullest use of African Americans to defeat the Confederate enemy.
The War of Black Liberation. Even before Lincoln proclaimed emancipation a Union war aim, African Americans in the North had volunteered to fight. But the War Department, doubtful of blacks’ abilities and fearful of white reaction to serving side by side with them, refused to make black men soldiers. Instead, the army employed black men as manual laborers; black women sometimes found employ- ment as laundresses and cooks. The navy, however, accepted blacks from the outset, including runaway slaves such as William Gould (see pages 386–387).
As Union casualty lists lengthened, Northerners gradually and reluctantly turned to African Americans to fill the army’s blue uniforms. With the Militia Act of July 1862, Congress authorized enrolling blacks in “any military or naval service for which they may be found competent.” After the Emancipation Proclamation,
Emancipation Proclamation President Lincoln’s proclamation issued on January 1, 1863, declaring all slaves in Confederate- controlled territory free. The proclamation made the Civil War a war to free slaves though its limitations— exemptions for loyal border states and Union-occupied areas of the Confederacy— made some ridicule the act.
The South at War 4031861–1865
whites — like it or not — were fighting and dying for black freedom, and few insisted that blacks remain out of harm’s way behind the lines. Indeed, whites insisted that blacks share the danger, especially after March 1863, when Congress resorted to the draft to fill the Union army.
The military was far from color-blind. The Union army established segregated black regiments, paid black soldiers $10 per month rather than the $13 it paid whites, refused blacks the opportunity to become commissioned officers, punished blacks as if they were slaves, and assigned blacks to labor battalions rather than to combat units. Still, when the war ended, 179,000 African American men had served in the Union army.
In time, whites allowed blacks to put down their shovels and to shoulder rifles. At the battles of Port Hudson and Milliken’s Bend on the Mississippi River and at Fort Wagner in Charleston harbor, black courage under fire finally dispelled notions that African Americans could not fight. More than 38,000 black soldiers died in the Civil War, a mortality rate that was higher than that of white troops. Blacks played a crucial role in the triumph of the Union and the destruction of slavery in the South.
The South at War By seceding, Southerners brought on themselves a fire- storm of unimaginable fury. Monstrous losses on the bat- tlefield nearly bled the Confederacy to death. Southerners on the home front also suffered, even at the hands of their own government. Efforts by the Davis administration in Richmond to centralize power in order to fight the war convinced some men and women that the Confed- eracy had betrayed them. They charged Richmond with tyranny when it impressed goods and slaves and drafted men into the army. War also meant severe economic deprivation. Shortages and inflation hurt everyone, some more than others. By 1863, unequal suffering meant that planters and yeomen who had stood together began to drift apart. Most disturbing of all, slaves became open participants in the destruction of slavery and the Confederacy.
Revolution from Above. As a Confederate general observed, Southerners were engaged in a total war “in which the whole population and the whole production . . . are to be put on a war footing, where every institution is to be made auxiliary to war.” Jefferson Davis faced the task of building an army and a navy from almost nothing, supplying them from factories that were scarce and anemic, and paying for it all from a treasury that did not exist. Finding eager soldiers proved easiest. Hundreds of officers defected from the U.S. Army, and hundreds of thousands of eager young rebels volunteered to follow them.
The Confederacy’s economy and finances proved tougher problems. Because of the Union blockade, the government had no choice but to build an industrial sector itself. Government-owned clothing and shoe factories, mines, arsenals, and powder works sprang up. The government also harnessed private companies, such as the huge Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, to the war effort. Paying for the war became the
How did wartime hardship in the South contribute to class friction?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
404 CHAPTER 15 The Crucible of War 1861–1865
most difficult task. A flood of paper money caused debilitating inflation. By Christ- mas 1864, a Confederate soldier’s monthly pay no longer bought a pair of socks. The Confederacy manufactured much more than most people imagined possible, but it never produced all that the South needed.
Richmond’s war-making effort brought unprecedented government intrusion into the private lives of Confederate citizens. In April 1862, the Confederate Con- gress passed the first conscription (draft) law in American history. All able-bodied white males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five (later seventeen and fifty) were liable to serve in the rebel army. The government adopted a policy of impress- ment, which allowed officials to confiscate food, horses, wagons, and whatever else they wanted from private citizens and to pay for them at below-market rates. After March 1863, the Confederacy legally impressed slaves, employing them as military laborers.
Richmond’s centralizing efforts ran head-on into the South’s traditional values of states’ rights and unfettered individualism. Southerners lashed out at what Geor- gia governor Joseph E. Brown denounced as the “dangerous usurpation by Congress of the reserved right of the States.” Richmond and the states struggled for control of money, supplies, and soldiers, with damaging consequences for the war effort.
Soldiers of the Seventh Tennessee Cavalry pose with their slaves. Many slaveholders took “body servants” with them to war. These slaves cooked, washed, and cleaned for the white soldiers. In 1861, James H. Langhorne reported to his sister: “Peter . . . is charmed with being with me & ‘being a soldier.’ I gave him my old uniform overcoat & he says he is going to have his picture taken . . . to send to the servants.” Do you think Peter was “puttin’ on ol’ massa” or just glad to be free of plantation labor? Collection of Paul Beeder.
READING THE IMAGE: What can we glean from this image about a Confederate soldier’s life in the military?
CONNECTIONS: This ambrotype likely was not taken for any purpose other than to capture the camaraderie of four southern cavalrymen, yet the inclusion of the two slaves speaks volumes. What are the possible ramifications of slaveholders bringing “body servants” to war?
Visual Activity CONFEDERATE SOLDIERS AND THEIR SLAVES
ry pose with ody servants” washed, 61, er: e
as o ern o slaves ramifications of to war?
LAVES
The South at War 4051861–1865
Hardship Below. Hardships on the home front fell most heavily on the poor. The draft stripped yeoman farms of men, leaving the women and children to grow what they ate. Government agents took 10 percent of harvests as a “tax-in-kind” on agriculture. Like inflation, shortages afflicted the entire population, but the rich lost luxuries while the poor lost necessities. In the spring of 1863, bread riots broke out in a dozen cities and villages across the South. In Richmond, a mob of nearly a thou- sand hungry women broke into shops and took what they needed.
“Men cannot be expected to fight for the Government that permits their wives & children to starve,” one Southerner observed. Although a few wealthy individuals shared their bounty and the Confederate and state governments made efforts at social welfare, every attempt fell short. When the war ended, one-third of the soldiers had already gone home. A Mississippi deserter explained, “We are poor men and are will- ing to defend our country but our families [come] first.” (See “Documenting the American Promise,” pages 406–407.)
Yeomen perceived a profound inequality of sacrifice. They called it “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” The draft law permitted a man who had money to hire a substitute to take his place. Moreover, the “twenty-Negro law” exempted one white man on every plantation with twenty or more slaves. The government intended this law to provide protection for white women and to see that slaves tended the crops, but yeomen perceived it as rich men evading military service. A Mississippian complained that stay-at-home planters sent their slaves into the fields to grow cotton while in plain view “poor soldiers’ wives are plowing with their own hands to make a subsistence for themselves and children — while their husbands are suffering, bleeding and dying for their country.” In fact, most slaveholders went off to war, but the extreme suffering of common folk and the relative immunity of planters increased class friction.
The Richmond government hoped that the crucible of war would mold a region into a nation. Officials actively promoted Confederate nationalism to “excite in our citi- zens an ardent and enduring attachment to our Government and its institutions.” Cler- gymen assured their congregations that God had blessed slavery and the new nation. Jefferson Davis claimed that the Confederacy was part of a divine plan and asked citi- zens to observe national days of fasting and prayer. But these efforts failed to win over thousands of die-hard Unionists, and animosity between yeomen and planters increased. The war also threatened to rip the southern social fabric along its racial seam.
The Disintegration of Slavery. The legal destruction of slavery was the prod- uct of presidential proclamation, congressional legislation, and eventually constitu- tional amendment, but the practical destruction of slavery was the product of war, what Lincoln called war’s “friction and abrasion.” Slaves took advantage of the upheaval to reach for freedom. Some half a million of the South’s 4 million slaves ran away to Union military lines. More than 100,000 runaways took up arms as federal soldiers and sailors and attacked slavery directly. Other men and women stayed in the slave quarter, where they staked their claim to more freedom.
War disrupted slavery in a dozen ways. Almost immediately, it called the master away, leaving the mistress to assume responsibility for the plantation. But mistresses could not maintain traditional standards of slave discipline in wartime, and the balance
You don’t know how glad I would be if I was just thar with you this morning to see the sun rise over the hills in Virginia again[,] for everry thing seames so sad and desolate here this morning; it seames like the absens of dear friends and the pres ent condition of things has brought deep refletion and sadnes upon everry heart, and [men] are growing weary and getting out of heart and leaving the Army everry day. I cant tell wheather it will be for the better or wheather it will make things wors: but I hope it is a way god has pro- vided to bring this war and time of sorrow to an end and to give us pease in our land again: Thoug I believe the south first started on a just course but our own wicked- ness and disobedians has brought us to what we are and I firmly believe wee will be bound to give up to sub- jugation[.] I don’t think the south will stand much longer, and I am sorrow to say it for wee will be a ruined people while time ma [may] last, but wee ought to submit to any thing to have this awwful war ended.
SOURCE: CLC02715.067 Christian M. Epperly, [A Confederate Assessment of War], August 15, 1863. (Courtesy of The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.)
Home and Country Christian Marion Epperly and his wife, Mary Epperly, lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Although neither was an ardent secessionist, Marion entered the Confederate army as a private early in 1862. He hated army life and longed for his wife and children. Mary was equally heartsick without Marion. Despite their limited schooling, the couple’s letters reveal how plain folks wrestled with the tangled issues of loyalty and obligation.
Documenting the American Promise
DOCUMENT 1
Letter from Chickahominy Creek, Virginia, May 16, 1862 During the peninsula campaign in Virginia, as Union general George B. McClellan was approaching the Confederate capital of Richmond, Marion wrote to Mary from near the action.
I think the people will be bound to suffer for some-thing to eat[;] the grain is all destroid and nearly all the fenses is burnt up from yorktown to Richmond: it looks distressing just to travel along the road: the wheat up waist hi some of it and horses and cattle has eat the most of it to the ground and I think the yankees will make a finish of the ballans [balance] that is left but the[y] cant doo much more damage than our army did[;] our own men killed all the cattle and hogs & sheep that the farmers had[,] even took ther chickens[;] every thing is totally destroid in this part of the State. . . .
I hope and pray this awful war will soon come to a close some way or another[,] any way to get pease in the world wonst more[;] it seems to me I had drather be at home and live on bred and water than to have this war hanging over us but I pray god pease will soon be made[.] I dont think the war can last long.
SOURCE: CLC02715.011 Christian M. Epperly to Mary Epperly, May 16–17, 1862. (Courtesy of The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.)
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DOCUMENT 2
DOCUMENT 3
Letter from Camp near Bells Bridge, Tennessee, August 15, 1863 By the summer of 1863, Marion’s regiment had moved to Tennessee, where he notices increasing war-weariness, desertions, and disillusionment with the Confederacy.
Letter from Floyd County, Virginia, August 16, 1863 Mary longs for peace and argues that desertion will end the war.
Oh how much beter satisfied would I be if you was just hear with me this beatiful Sabath morning. I feel as if my troubles on earth would all be over if you was just at home to stay wonst more[,] but god sent it upon us and we will have to bear with it the best we can but I do pray that he may soon end this destressing time some way[.] I would be willing for it to end most any way just so it would end[.] Dear Marion I think if the
DOCUMENT 4
head men dont soon end this war that the soldiers will for they are runing way from down east by hundreds[;] they was five hundard went through hear last weak and well armed and they say they wont go back any more and I dont blame them for it[.] I wish they would all run- away and these head men would be oblige to fight it out but as long as they can stay at home and speculate off of the poor soulders they dont care how long the war lasts[.] Serious Smith wrote a leter the 9 of this month and he wrote that they had to pay 15 dolars for a bushel of taters . . . how can the poor soulders make out and only get a leven [eleven] dolars a month[?]
SOURCE: CLC02715.069 Mary M. Epperly to C.M. Epperly, August 16, 1863. (Courtesy of The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.)
verry tired of this war and the way it is carried on[.] I think wee all have stud it about as long as we can unless our leading men dos a heap better than they ever have yet: if they wer God fearing men I would think wee would prosper but so long as they [seek] the Bottom of a Whiskey Barl and frolick around bad places just so long we will hafto fight and suffer. . . . we was all Born in a free land and I think wee ought to stil be free and not be bound down wors than slaves[;] we wonst had a union and was living happy and had all man can wish for[;] now we are cut off from that union and what are wee nothing but a ruend people as long as we shal live . . . dissatisfaction and wicked- ness all over the south[;] may God show us our errors and put us in the rite way and Bring us Back to our old union again.
Despite his doubts about the Confederacy and continued affection for the Union, Marion left the army without authorization only once, and after a few weeks at home in 1863, he returned to his regiment. Like many disillusioned soldiers, he fought in the rebel army to the very end.
SOURCE: CLC02715.087 Christian M. Epperly to Mary Epperly, March 25, 1864. (Courtesy of The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.)
Questions for Analysis and Debate 1 How does Marion contrast life in the Union with life in the Confederacy?
2 In what ways does the Epperlys’ perspective on the Confederacy reflect their social position as plain folk in Virginia society?
3 Marion makes clear why he had such affection for his home; he is much less clear about why he fought for the Confederacy. What might some of his reasons have been?
CONNECT TO THE BIG IDEA C How did class issues divide southern soldiers during the Civil War?
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Letter from Outskirts of Dalton, Georgia, March 25, 1864 As his regiment is backing toward Atlanta, trying to fend off Sherman, Marion considers what has gone wrong with the Confederacy.
I dont think it will last much longer if the souldiers doo what they say they will doo[;] they are all
408 CHAPTER 15 The Crucible of War 1861–1865
of power shifted. Slaves got to the fields late, worked indifferently, and quit early. Some slaveholders responded violently; most saw no alternative but to strike bargains — offer- ing gifts or part of the crop — to keep slaves at home and at work. Slaveholders had believed that they “knew” their slaves, but they learned that they did not. When the war began, a North Carolina woman praised her slaves as “diligent and respectful.” When it ended, she said, “As to the idea of a faithful servant, it is all a fiction.”
The North at War Although little fighting took place on northern soil, almost every family had a son, husband, father, or brother in uni- form. Moreover, total war blurred the distinction between home front and battlefield. As in the South, men marched
off to fight, but preserving the country was also women’s work. For civilians as well as soldiers, for women as well as men, war was transforming.
The need to build and fuel the Union war machine strengthened the federal government and boosted the economy. The Union sent nearly 2 million men into the military and still increased production in almost every area. But because the rewards and burdens of patriotism were distributed unevenly, the North experienced sharp, even violent, divisions. Workers confronted employers, whites confronted blacks, and Democrats confronted Republicans. Still, Northerners on the home front remained fervently attached to the Union.
Why was the U.S. Congress able to pass such a bold legislative agenda during the war?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
ARMY HORSE ARTILLERY, 1860–1865 Seen here in Virginia, a powerful battery of Union field artillery moves forward to assist infantry units. Each cannon required more than a dozen men and many horses to service it. Assignment to an artillery battery was dangerous for man and beast. Life expectancy for an artillery horse was less than eight months, and it is estimated that 1.5 million horses died in the war. © Bettmann/Corbis.
The North at War 4091861–1865
The Government and the Economy. When the war began, the United States had no national banking system, no national currency, and no federal income tax. But the secession of eleven slave states cut the Democrats’ strength in Congress in half and destroyed their capacity to resist Republican economic programs. The Legal Tender Act of February 1862 created a national currency, paper money that Northerners called “green- backs.” With the passage of the National Banking Act in February 1863, Congress estab- lished a system of national banks that by the 1870s had largely replaced the antebellum system of decentralized state banks. Congress also enacted a series of sweeping tax laws.
The Republicans’ wartime legislation also aimed at integrating the West into the Union. In May 1862, Congress approved the Homestead Act, which offered 160 acres of public land to settlers who would live and labor on it. The Homestead Act bolstered western loyalty and in time resulted in more than a million new farms. The Pacific Railroad Act in July 1862 provided massive federal assistance for building a transcontinental railroad that ran from Omaha to San Francisco when completed in 1869. Congress further bound East and West by subsidizing the Pony Express mail service and a transcontinental telegraph.
Congress also created the Department of Agriculture and passed the Land- Grant College Act (also known as the Morrill Act after its sponsor, Representative Justin Morrill of Vermont), which set aside public land to support universities that emphasized “agriculture and mechanical arts.” The Lincoln administration immea- surably strengthened the North’s effort to win the war, but its ideas also permanently changed the nation.
Women and Work at Home and at War. More than a million farm men were called to the military, and farm women added men’s chores to their own. “I met more women driving teams on the road and saw more at work in the fields than men,” a visitor to Iowa reported in the fall of 1862. Rising production testified to their success in plowing, planting, and harvesting. Rapid mechanization assisted farm women in their new roles. Cyrus McCormick sold 165,000 of his reapers dur- ing the war years. The combination of high prices for farm products and increased production ensured that war and prosperity joined hands in the rural North.
In cities, women stepped into jobs vacated by men, particularly in manufactur- ing, and also into essentially new occupations such as government secretaries and clerks. The number of women working for wages rose 40 percent during the war. As more and more women entered the workforce, employers cut wages. In 1864, New York seamstresses working fourteen-hour days earned only $1.54 a week. Urban workers resorted increasingly to strikes to wrench decent salaries from their employers, but their protests rarely succeeded.
Most middle-class white women stayed home and contributed to the war effort in traditional ways. They sewed, wrapped bandages, and sold homemade goods at local fairs to raise money to aid the soldiers. Other women expressed their patriotism in an untraditional way. Defying prejudices about female delicacy, thousands of women on both sides volunteered to nurse the wounded. Many northern female volunteers worked through the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a huge civilian organization that bought and dis- tributed clothing, food, and medicine, recruited doctors and nurses, and buried the dead.
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Some volunteers went on to become paid military nurses. Dorothea Dix, well known for her efforts to reform insane asylums, was named superintendent of female nurses in April 1861. By 1863 some 3,000 nurses served under her. Most nurses worked in hospitals behind the battle lines, but some, like Clara Barton, who later founded the American Red Cross, worked in battlefield units. Women who served in the war went on to lead the postwar movement to establish training schools for female nurses.
Politics and Dissent. At first, the bustle of economic and military mobilization seemed to silence politics, but bipartisan unity did not last. Within a year, Demo- crats were labeling the Republican administration a “reign of terror” and denounc- ing as unconstitutional Republican policies expanding federal power, subsidizing private business, and emancipating the slaves. In turn, Republicans were calling Democrats the party of “Dixie, Davis, and the Devil.”
When the Republican-dominated Congress enacted the draft law in March 1863, Democrats had another grievance. The law required that all men between the ages of twenty and forty-five enroll and make themselves available for a lottery that would decide who went to war. It also allowed a draftee to hire a substitute or simply to pay a $300 fee and get out of his military obligation. As in the South, common folk could be heard chanting, “A rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”
Linking the draft and emancipation, Democrats argued that Republicans employed an unconstitutional means (the draft) to achieve an unconstitutional end (emancipation). In the summer of 1863, antidraft, antiblack mobs went on rampages
WOMEN DOING LAUNDRY FOR FEDERAL SOLDIERS, CA. 1861 Some northern women were forced by their desperate financial circumstances to wash soldiers’ dirty clothes to make a living. Army camps were difficult places for “respectable” women to work. One Union soldier discouraged his wife even from visiting, noting, “It is not a fit place for any woman, for there is all kinds of talk, songs and everything not good for them 2 hear.” © Bettmann/Corbis.
Grinding Out Victory, 1863–1865 4111861–1865
in northern cities. In July in New York City, Democratic Irish workingmen — crowded into filthy tenements, gouged by inflation, enraged by the draft, and dead set against fighting to free blacks — erupted in four days of rioting. The New York City draft riots killed at least 105 people, most of them black.
Lincoln called Democratic opposition to the war “the fire in the rear” and believed that it was even more threatening to national survival than were Confeder- ate armies. The antiwar wing of the Democratic Party, the Peace Democrats — whom some called “Copperheads,” after the poisonous snake — found their chief spokes- man in Ohio congressman Clement Vallandigham. Vallandigham demanded: “Stop fighting. Make an armistice. . . . Withdraw your army from the seceding States.”
In September 1862, in an effort to stifle opposition to the war, Lincoln placed under military arrest any person who discouraged enlistments, resisted the draft, or engaged in “disloyal” practices. Before the war ended, his administration imprisoned nearly 14,000 individuals, most in the border states. The administration’s heavy- handed tactics suppressed free speech, but the campaign fell short of a reign of ter- ror, for the majority of the prisoners were not northern Democratic opponents but Confederates, blockade runners, and citizens of foreign countries, and most of those arrested gained quick release. Still, the administration’s net did capture Vallandigham, who was arrested, convicted of treason, and banished.
Grinding Out Victory, 1863–1865 In the early months of 1863, the Union’s prospects looked bleak, and the Confederate cause stood at high tide. Then, in July 1863, the tide began to turn. The military man most responsible for this shift was Ulysses S. Grant. Elevated to supreme command in 1864, Grant knit together a powerful war machine that integrated a sophisticated command structure, modern technology, and com- plex logistics and supply systems. Grant’s plan was simple: Killing more of the enemy than he killed of you equaled “the complete over-throw of the rebellion.”
The North ground out the victory battle by bloody battle. Still, Southern- ers were not deterred. The fighting escalated in the last two years of the war. As national elections approached in the fall of 1864, Lincoln expected a war- weary North to reject him. Instead, northern voters declared their willingness to continue the war in the defense of the ideals of union and freedom. Lincoln lived to see victory, but only days after Lee surrendered, the president died from an assassin’s bullet.
Vicksburg and Gettysburg. Vicksburg, Mississippi, situated on the east- ern bank of the Mississippi River, stood between Union forces and complete control of the river. In May 1863, Union forces under Grant laid siege to the city in an effort to starve out the enemy. As the siege of Vicksburg dragged on, civilians ate mules and rats to survive. After six weeks, on July 4, 1863, nearly 30,000 rebels marched out of Vicksburg, stacked their arms, and
Why were the siege of Vicksburg and the battle of Gettysburg crucial to the outcome of the war?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
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New York City draft riots Four days of rioting in New York City in July 1863 triggered by efforts to enforce the military draft. Democratic Irish workingmen, suffering economic hardship, infuriated by the draft, and opposed to emancipation, killed at least 105 people, most of them black.
siege of Vicksburg Six-week siege by General Grant intended to starve out Vicksburg. On July 4, 1863, the 30,000 Confederate troops holding the city surrendered. The victory gave the Union control of the Mississippi River and, together with Gettysburg, marked a major turning point of the war.
412 CHAPTER 15 The Crucible of War 1861–1865
surrendered unconditionally. A Yankee captain wrote home to his wife: “The backbone of the Rebellion is this day broken. The Confederacy is divided. . . . Vicksburg is ours. The Mississippi River is opened, and Gen. Grant is to be our next President.”
On the same Fourth of July, word arrived that Union forces had crushed General Lee at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (Map 15.3). Emboldened by his victory at Chancellorsville in May, Lee and his 75,000-man army had invaded Pennsyl- vania. On June 28, Union forces under General George G. Meade intercepted the Confederates at the small town of Gettysburg, where Union soldiers occu- pied the high ground. In three days of furious fighting, the Confederates failed to dislodge the Federals. The battle of Gettysburg cost Lee more than one- third of his army — 28,000 casualties. “It’s all my fault,” he lamented. On the night of July 4, 1863, he marched his battered army back to Virginia.
The twin disasters at Vicksburg and Gettysburg proved to be the turning point of the war. The Confederacy could not replace the nearly 60,000 soldiers who were captured, wounded, or killed. It is hindsight, however, that permits us to see the pair of battles as decisive. At the time, the Confederacy still con- trolled the heartland of the South, and Lee still had a vicious sting. War- weariness threatened to erode the North’s will to win before Union armies could destroy the Confederacy’s ability to go on.
Grant Takes Command. In September 1863, Union general William Rose- crans placed his army in a dangerous situation in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he had retreated after defeat at the battle of Chickamauga (see Map 15.3). Rebels surrounded the disorganized bluecoats and threatened to starve them into sub-
mission. Grant, now commander of Union forces between the Mississippi River and the Appalachians, arrived in nearby Chattanooga in October. Within weeks, he opened an effective supply line, broke the siege, and routed the Confederate army. The victory at Chattanooga on November 25 opened the door to Georgia. In March 1864, Lincoln asked Grant to come east to become the general in chief of all Union armies.
In Washington, General Grant implemented his grand strategy for a war of attrition. He ordered a series of simultaneous assaults from Virginia all the way to Louisiana. Two actions proved particularly significant. In one, General William Tecumseh Sherman, whom Grant appointed his successor to command the western armies, plunged southeast toward Atlanta. In the other, Grant, who took control of the Army of the Potomac, went head-to-head with Lee in Virginia in May and June of 1864.
The fighting between Grant and Lee was particularly savage. At the battle of the Wilderness, where a dense tangle of forest often made it impossible to see more than ten paces, the armies pounded away at each other until approximately 18,000 Yankees and 11,000 rebels had fallen. At Spotsylvania Court House, frenzied men fought hand to hand for eighteen hours in the rain. One veteran remembered men “piled upon each other in some places four layers deep, exhibiting every ghastly phase of mutilation.” Spotsylvania cost Grant another 18,000 casualties and Lee 10,000. Grant kept moving and attacked Lee again at Cold Harbor, where he suf- fered 13,000 additional casualties to Lee’s 5,000.
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battle of Gettysburg Battle fought at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (July 1–3, 1863), between Union forces under General Meade and Confederate forces under General Lee. The Union emerged victorious, and Lee lost more than one-third of his men. Together with Vicksburg, Gettysburg marked a major turning point in the war.
Grinding Out Victory, 1863–1865 4131861–1865
Twice as many Union soldiers as rebel soldiers died in four weeks of fighting in Virginia, but because Lee had only half as many troops as Grant, his losses were equivalent to Grant’s. Grant knew that the South could not replace the losses. Moreover, the campaign carried Grant to the outskirts of Petersburg, just south of Richmond, where he abandoned the costly tactic of the frontal assault and began a siege that immobilized both armies and dragged on for nine months.
Map Activity
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MAP 15.3 THE CIVIL WAR, 1863–1865 Ulysses S. Grant’s victory at Vicksburg divided the Confederacy at the Mississippi River. William Tecumseh Sherman’s march from Chattanooga to Savannah divided it again. In northern Virginia, Robert E. Lee fought fiercely, but Grant’s larger, better-supplied armies prevailed.
READING THE MAP: Describe the difference between Union and Confederate naval capacity. Were the battles shown on the map fought primarily in Union-controlled or in Confederate-controlled territory? (Look at the land areas on the map.)
CONNECTIONS: Did former slaves serve in the Civil War? If so, on which side(s), and what did they do?
414 CHAPTER 15 The Crucible of War 1861–1865
Simultaneously, Sherman invaded Georgia. Skillful maneuvering, constant skirmishing, and one pitched battle, at Kennesaw Mountain, brought Sherman to Atlanta, which fell on September 2. Intending to “make Georgia howl,” Sherman marched out of Atlanta on November 15 with 62,000 battle-hardened veterans, heading for Savannah, 285 miles away on the Atlantic coast. One veteran remem- bered, “[We] destroyed all we could not eat, stole their niggers, burned their cotton & gins, spilled their sorghum, burned & twisted their R. Roads and raised Hell generally.” Sherman’s March to the Sea aimed at destroying the will of white Southerners to continue the war. A few weeks earlier, General Philip H. Sheridan had carried out his own scorched-earth campaign in the Shenandoah Valley. When Sherman’s troops entered an undefended Savannah in mid-December, the general telegraphed Lincoln that he had “a Christmas gift” for him. A month earlier, Union voters had bestowed on the president an even greater gift.
The Election of 1864. In the summer of 1864, with Sherman temporarily checked outside Atlanta and Grant bogged down in the siege of Petersburg, the Democratic Party smelled victory in the fall elections. Lincoln himself concluded, “It seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be re-elected.”
The Democrats were badly divided, however. Peace Democrats insisted on an armistice, while “war” Democrats supported the conflict but opposed Republican means of fighting it. The party tried to paper over the chasm by nominating a war candidate, General George McClellan, but adopting a peace platform that demanded that “immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities.” Republicans denounced the peace plank as a cut-and-run plan that “virtually proposed to surrender the country to the rebels in arms against us.”
THE DEAD LINE, BY ROBERT SNEDEN, ANDERSONVILLE PRISON, 1864 Union soldier Robert Sneden arrived at Andersonville in February 1864. Soon the sixteen and a half acres were crammed with 33,000 Union prisoners. Sneden sketched this scene of a man being shot by a guard while trying to take part of a fence (the “dead line” that prisoners could not cross) for firewood. More than 13,000 prisoners perished at Andersonville. © 1996, Lora Robbins Collection of
Virginia Art, Virginia Historical Society.
Sherman’s March to the Sea Military campaign from September through December 1864 in which Union forces under General Sherman marched from Atlanta, Georgia, to the coast at Savannah. Carving a path of destruction as it progressed, Sherman’s army aimed at destroying white Southerners’ will to continue the war.
Grinding Out Victory, 1863–1865 4151861–1865
The capture of Atlanta in September turned the political tide in favor of the Repub- licans. Lincoln received 55 percent of the pop- ular vote, but his electoral margin was a whopping 212 to McClellan’s 21. Lincoln’s party won a resounding victory, one that gave him a mandate to continue the war until slav- ery and the Confederacy were dead.
The Confederacy Collapses. As 1865 dawned, military disaster littered the Confeder- ate landscape. With the destruction of John B. Hood’s army at Nashville in December 1864, the interior of the Confederacy lay in Yankee hands (see Map 15.3). Sherman’s troops, resting momentarily in Savannah, eyed South Carolina hungrily. Farther north, Grant had Lee’s army pinned down in Petersburg, a few miles from Richmond.
Some Confederates turned their backs on the rebellion. News from the battlefield made it difficult not to conclude that the Yan- kees had beaten them. Soldiers’ wives begged their husbands to return home to keep their families from starving, and the stream of deserters grew dramatically. Still, white Southerners had demonstrated a remarkable endurance for their cause. Half of the 900,000 Confederate soldiers had been killed or wounded, and ragged, hungry women and children had sacrificed throughout one of the bloodiest wars then known to history.
The end came with a rush. On February 1, 1865, Sherman’s troops stormed out of Savannah into South Carolina, the “cradle of the Confederacy.” In Virginia, Lee abandoned Petersburg on April 2, and Richmond fell on April 3. Grant pursued Lee until he surrendered on April 9, 1865, at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. Grant offered generous peace terms. He allowed Lee’s men to return home and to keep their horses to help “put in a crop to carry themselves and their families through the next winter.” With Lee gone, the remaining Confederate armies lost hope and gave up within two weeks. After four years, the war was over.
No one was more relieved than Lincoln, but his celebration was restrained. He told his cabinet that his postwar burdens would weigh almost as heavily as those of wartime. Seeking a distraction, Lincoln attended Ford’s Theatre on the evening of Good Friday, April 14, 1865. John Wilkes Booth, an actor with southern sympathies, slipped into the president’s box and shot Lincoln, who died the next morning. Vice President Andrew Johnson became president. The man who had led the nation through the war would not lead it during the postwar search for a just peace.
TABLE 15.2 MAJOR BATTLES OF THE CIVIL WAR, 1863–1865
May 1–4, 1863 Battle of Chancellorsville
July 1–3, 1863 Battle of Gettysburg
July 4, 1863 Fall of Vicksburg
September 16–20, 1863 Battle of Chickamauga
November 23–25, 1863 Battle of Chattanooga
May 5–7, 1864 Battle of the Wilderness
May 7–19, 1864 Battle of Spotsylvania Court House
June 3, 1864 Battle of Cold Harbor
June 27, 1864 Battle of Kennesaw Mountain
September 2, 1864 Fall of Atlanta
November–December 1864 Sheridan sacks Shenan- doah Valley Sherman’s March to the Sea
December 15–16, 1864 Battle of Nashville
December 22, 1864 Fall of Savannah
April 2–3, 1865 Fall of Petersburg and Richmond
April 9, 1865 Lee surrenders at Appomattox Court House
416 CHAPTER 15 The Crucible of War 1861–1865
Conclusion: The Second American Revolution A transformed nation emerged from the crucible of war. Antebellum America was decentralized politically and loosely integrated economically. To bend the resources of the country to a Union victory, Congress enacted legislation that reshaped the nation’s political and economic character. It created a transcontinental railroad and miles of telegraph lines to bind the West to the rest of the nation. The massive changes brought about by the war — the creation of a national government, a national economy, and a national spirit — led one historian to call the American Civil War the “Second American Revolution.”
The Civil War also had a profound effect on individual lives. Millions of men put on blue or gray uniforms and fought and suffered for what they passionately believed was right. The war disrupted families, leaving women at home with additional responsibilities and giving others wartime work in factories, offices, and hospitals. It offered blacks new and more effective ways to resist slavery and agitate for equality.
The war devastated the South. Three-fourths of southern white men of military age served in the Confederate army, and half of them were wounded or killed or died of disease. The war destroyed two-fifths of the South’s livestock, wrecked half of the farm machinery, and blackened dozens of cities and towns. The struggle also cost the North a heavy price: 360,000 lives. But rather than devastating the land, the war set the countryside and cities humming with business activity. The radical shift in power from South to North signaled a new direction in American development: the long decline of agriculture and the rise of industrial capitalism.
Most revolutionary of all, the war ended slavery. Ironically, the South’s war to preserve slavery destroyed it. Nearly 200,000 black men, including ex-slave William Gould, dedicated their wartime service to its eradication. Because slavery was both a labor and a racial system, the institution was entangled in almost every aspect of southern life. Slavery’s uprooting inevitably meant fundamental change. But the full meaning of abolition remained unclear in 1865, and the status of ex-slaves would be the principal task of reconstruction.
1 Despite loathing slavery, Lincoln embraced emancipation as a war objec- tive late and with great caution. Why?
2 In addition to restoring the Union and ending slavery, what other major changes did the war produce on the home front and in the nation’s capital? In your answer, discuss economic, governmental, and social develop- ments, being attentive to regional variations.
MAKING CONNECTIONS
1 Why did both the Union and the Confederacy consider control of the border states crucial? (pp. 388–390)
2 Why did the South believe it could win the war despite numerical disadvantages? (pp. 391–394)
3 Why did the Confederacy’s bid for international support fail? (pp. 394–399)
4 Why did the Union change policy in 1863 to allow black men to serve in the army? (pp. 400–403)
5 How did wartime hardship in the South contribute to class friction? (pp. 403–408)
6 Why was the U.S. Congress able to pass such a bold legislative agenda during the war? (pp. 408–411)
7 Why were the siege of Vicksburg and the battle of Gettysburg crucial to the outcome of the war? (pp. 411–415)
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
Fort Sumter (p. 389)
battle of Bull Run (Manassas) (p. 394)
battle of Antietam (p. 396)
battle of Shiloh (p. 398)
Union blockade (p. 399)
King Cotton diplomacy (p. 399)
KEY TERMS
contraband of war (p. 401)
Emancipation Proclamation (p. 402)
New York City draft riots (p. 411)
siege of Vicksburg (p. 411)
battle of Gettysburg (p. 412)
Sherman’s March to the Sea (p. 414)
Chapter Review MAKE IT STICK
Go to LearningCurve: See what you know. Then review the key terms and answer the questions.
LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com /roarkconcise
417STUDENT SITE @ bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
In 1856, John Rapier, a free black barber in Florence, Alabama, urged his four freeborn sons to flee the increasingly repressive and dangerous South. James T. Rapier chose Canada, where he went to live with his uncle in a largely black community and studied Greek and Latin in a log schoolhouse. In a letter to his father, he vowed, “I will endeavor to do my part in solving the problems [of African Americans] in my native land.”
The Union victory in the Civil War gave James Rapier the opportunity to redeem his pledge. In 1865, after more than eight years of exile, the
twenty-seven-year-old Rapier returned to Alabama, where he pre- sided over the first political gathering of former slaves
in the state. He soon discovered, however, that Alabama’s whites found it agonizingly difficult to accept defeat and black freedom. They responded to
418
Reconstruction, 1863–1877
CARPETBAG A carpetbag was a nineteenth-century suitcase made from carpet. The term carpetbagger was a derogatory name for rootless and penniless adventurers. Critics of Republican administrations in the South hurled the name “carpetbaggers” at white Northerners who moved south during Reconstruction. Nancy Gewirz/Antique Textile Resource.
Wartime Reconstruction (pp. 420–425)
Presidential Reconstruction (pp. 426–429)
Congressional Reconstruction (pp. 429–434)
The Struggle in the South (pp. 434–439)
Reconstruction Collapses (pp. 440–445)
Conclusion: “A Revolution But Half Accomplished” (p. 446)
16
CHAPTER OUTLINE QUICK START
Quickly learn what is important in this chapter by doing the following:
• READ the Chapter Outline to see how the chapter is organized. • SKIM the Chronology on the next page to see what will be covered.
When you are ready, read the chapter and the Essential Questions for each section. Then use the Chapter Review to check what you know.
1863–1877
1863 Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction.
1864 Lincoln refuses to sign Wade-Davis bill.
1865 Freedmen’s Bureau established.
Lincoln assassinated; Andrew Johnson becomes president.
Black codes enacted. Thirteenth Amendment
becomes part of Constitution.
1866 Congress approves Fourteenth Amendment.
Civil Rights Act. American Equal Rights
Association founded. Ku Klux Klan founded.
1867 Military Reconstruction Act. Tenure of Office Act.
1868 Impeachment trial of President Johnson.
Ulysses S. Grant elected president.
1869 Congress approves Fifteenth Amendment.
1871 Ku Klux Klan Act.
1872 Liberal Party formed. President Grant reelected.
1873 Economic depression sets in. Slaughterhouse cases. Colfax massacre.
1874 Democrats win majority in House of Representatives.
1875 Civil Rights Act.
1876 United States v. Cruikshank.
1877 Rutherford B. Hayes becomes president; Reconstruction era ends.
the revolutionary changes under the banner “White Man — Right or Wrong — Still the White Man!”
During the elections of 1868, when Rapier and other Alabama blacks vigorously supported the Republican ticket, the recently organized Ku Klux Klan went on a bloody rampage. A mob of 150 outraged whites scoured Rapier’s neighborhood seeking four black politicians they claimed were trying to “Africanize Alabama.” They caught and hanged three, but the “nigger carpetbagger from Canada” escaped. After briefly considering fleeing the state, Rapier decided to stay and fight.
In 1872, Rapier won election to the House of Representatives, where he joined six other black congressmen in Washington, D.C. Defeated for reelection in 1874 in a campaign marked by ballot-box stuffing, Rapier turned to cotton farming. But persistent black poverty and unrelenting racial violence convinced him that blacks could never achieve equality and prosperity in the South. He purchased land in Kansas and urged Alabama’s blacks to escape with him. In 1883, however, before he could leave Alabama, Rapier died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-five.
Union general Carl Schurz had foreseen many of the troubles Rapier encountered in the postwar South. In 1865, Schurz concluded that the Civil War was “a revolution but half accomplished.” Northern victory had freed the slaves, he observed, but it had not changed former slaveholders’ minds about blacks’ unfitness for freedom. Left to themselves, whites would “introduce some new system of forced labor, not perhaps exactly slavery in its old form but some- thing similar to it.” To defend their freedom, Schurz concluded, blacks would need federal protection, land of their own, and voting rights. Until whites “cut loose from the past, it will be a dangerous experi- ment to put Southern society upon its own legs.”
As Schurz understood, the end of the war did not mean peace. Indeed, the nation entered one of its most turbulent eras — Reconstruction. Answers to the era’s central questions — about the defeated South’s status within the Union and the meaning of freedom for ex-slaves — came not only from Washington, D.C., where the federal government played an active role, but also from the state legislatures and county seats of the South, where blacks eagerly participated in politics. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution strengthened the claim of African Americans to
CHRONOLOGY
420 CHAPTER 16 Reconstruction 1863–1877
equal rights. The struggle also took place on the South’s farms and plantations, where former slaves sought to become free workers while former slaveholders clung to
the Old South. A small band of white women joined in the struggle for racial equality, and soon their crusade broad-
ened to include gender equality. Their attempts to secure voting rights for women were thwarted, however, just as were
the effort of blacks and their allies to secure racial equality. In the contest to determine the consequences of Confederate defeat and
emancipation, white Southerners prevailed.
Wartime Reconstruction Reconstruction did not wait for the end of war. As the odds of a northern victory increased, thinking about reunifica- tion quickened. Immediately, a question arose: Who had authority to devise a plan for reconstructing the Union?
President Abraham Lincoln firmly believed that reconstruction was a matter of executive responsibility. Congress just as firmly asserted its jurisdiction. Fueling the argument were significant differences about the terms of reconstruction. In their eagerness to formulate a plan for political reunification, neither Lincoln nor Con- gress gave much attention to the South’s land and labor problems. But as the war rapidly eroded slavery and traditional plantation agriculture, Yankee military commanders in the Union-occupied areas of the Confederacy had no choice but to oversee the emergence of a new labor system. Freedmen’s aspirations played little role in the plans that emerged.
“To Bind Up the Nation’s Wounds.” As early as 1863, Lincoln began con- templating how “to bind up the nation’s wounds” and achieve “a lasting peace.” While deep compassion for the enemy guided his thinking about peace, his plan for recon- struction aimed primarily at shortening the war and ending slavery.
JAMES T. RAPIER In 1874, when Representative James T. Rapier spoke before Congress
on behalf of a civil rights bill, he described the humiliation of being denied service at inns all along his route from Montgomery to Washington. Elsewhere in the world, he said, class and religion were invoked to defend discrimination. But in America, “our distinction is color.” Alabama Department of Archives and History.
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Why did Congress object to Lincoln’s wartime plan for reconstruction?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Wartime Reconstruction 4211863–1877
Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction in December 1863 set out his terms. He offered a full pardon, restoring property (except slaves) and political rights, to most rebels willing to renounce secession and to accept emancipation. When 10 percent of a state’s voting popula- tion had taken an oath of allegiance, the state could organize a new government and be readmitted into the Union. Lincoln’s plan did not require ex-rebels to extend social or political rights to ex-slaves, nor did it anticipate a program of long-term federal assistance to freedmen. Clearly, the president looked forward to the rapid, forgiving restoration of the broken Union.
Lincoln’s easy terms enraged abolitionists such as Wendell Phillips of Boston, who charged that the president “makes the negro’s freedom a mere sham.” He “is willing that the negro should be free but seeks nothing else for him.” Phillips and other northern radicals called instead for a thorough overhaul of southern society. Their ideas proved to be too drastic for most Republicans during the war years, but Congress agreed that Lincoln’s plan was inadequate.
In July 1864, Congress put forward a plan of its own. Congressman Henry Winter Davis of Maryland and Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio jointly sponsored a bill that demanded that at least half of the voters in a conquered rebel state take the oath of allegiance before reconstruction could begin. The Wade-Davis bill also banned almost all ex-Confederates from participating in the drafting of new state
r t n -
WARTIME RECONSTRUCTION This cartoon from the presidential campaign of 1864 shows the “Rail Splitter” Abraham Lincoln leveraging the broken nation back together while his running mate, Andrew Johnson, who once was a tailor by trade, stitches the Confederate states securely back into the Union. Optimism that the task of reconstructing the nation after the war would be both quick and easy shines through the cartoon. The Granger Collection, NYC.
422 CHAPTER 16 Reconstruction 1863–1877
constitutions. Finally, the bill guaranteed the equality of freedmen before the law. When Lincoln refused to sign the bill and let it die, Wade and Davis charged the president with usurpation of power.
Undeterred, Lincoln continued to nurture the formation of loyal state gov- ernments under his own plan. Four states — Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Virginia — fulfilled the president’s requirements, but Congress refused to seat representatives from the “Lincoln states.” In his last public address in April 1865, Lincoln defended his plan but for the first time expressed publicly his endorse- ment of suffrage for southern blacks, at least “the very intelligent, and . . . those who serve our cause as soldiers.” The announcement demonstrated that Lincoln’s thinking about reconstruction was still evolving. Four days later, he was dead.
Land and Labor. Of all the problems raised by the North’s victory in the war, none proved more critical than the South’s transition from slavery to free labor. As federal armies invaded and occupied the Confederacy, hundreds of thousands of slaves became free workers. In addition, Union armies controlled vast territories in the South where legal title to land had become unclear. The Confiscation Acts passed during the war punished “traitors” by taking away their property. The question of what to do with federally occupied land and how to organize labor on it engaged ex-slaves, ex-slaveholders, Union military commanders, and federal government officials long before the war ended.
In the Mississippi valley, occupying federal troops announced a new labor code. It required landholders to give up whipping, to sign contracts with ex-slaves, and to pay wages. The code required black laborers to enter into contracts, work dili- gently, and remain subordinate and obedient. Military leaders clearly had no inten- tion of promoting a social or economic revolution. The effort resulted in a hybrid system that one contemporary called “compulsory free labor,” something that satis- fied no one.
Planters complained because the new system fell short of slavery. Blacks could not be “transformed by proclamation,” a Louisiana sugar planter declared. Without the right to whip, he argued, the new labor system did not have a chance. Either Union soldiers must “compel the negroes to work,” or the planters themselves must “be authorized and sustained in using force.”
African Americans found the new regime too reminiscent of slavery to be called free labor. Its chief deficiency, they believed, was the failure to provide them with land of their own. Freedmen believed they had a moral right to land because they and their ancestors had worked it without compensation for more than two centuries. “What’s the use of being free if you don’t own land enough to be buried in?” one man asked. Several wartime developments led freedmen to believe that the federal government planned to undergird black freedom with landownership.
In January 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman set aside part of the coast south of Charleston for black settlement. By June 1865, some 40,000 freedmen sat on 400,000 acres of “Sherman land.” In addition, in March 1865, Congress passed a bill
Wartime Reconstruction 4231863–1877
establishing the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. The Freedmen’s Bureau, as it was called, distributed food and clothing to destitute Southerners and eased the transition of blacks from slaves to free persons. Congress also authorized the agency to divide abandoned and confiscated land into 40-acre plots, to rent them to freedmen, and eventually to sell them “with such title as the United States can convey.” By June 1865, the Bureau had situated nearly 10,000 black families on a half million acres abandoned by fleeing planters. Other ex-slaves eagerly anticipated farms of their own.
Despite the flurry of activity, wartime reconstruction failed to produce agree- ment about whether the president or Congress had the authority to devise policy or what proper policy should be.
The African American Quest for Autonomy. Ex-slaves never had any doubt about what they wanted from freedom. They had only to contemplate what they had been denied as slaves. (See “Documenting the American Promise,” pages 424–425.) Slaves had to remain on their plantations; freedom allowed blacks to see what was on
Freedmen’s Bureau Government organization created in March 1865 to distribute food and clothing to destitute Southerners and to ease the transition of slaves to free persons. Early efforts by the Freedmen’s Bureau to distribute land to the newly freed blacks were later overturned by President Johnson.
HARRY STEPHENS AND FAMILY, 1866, AND SAMUEL DOVE AD, 1865 Dressed in their Sunday best, this Virginia family sits proudly for a photograph. Many black families were not as fortunate as the Stephens family. Separated by slavery or war, former slaves desperately sought news of missing family members through newspaper advertisements like the one posted by Samuel Dove in August 1865. We do not know whether he succeeded in locating his mother, brother, and sisters. © Chicago History Museum, USA/ Bridgeman Images.
424 CHAPTER 16 Reconstruction 1863–1877
The Meaning of Freedom Although the Emancipation Proclamation in and of itself did not free any slaves, it trans- formed the character of the war. Black people resolutely focused on the possibilities of freedom.
Documenting the American Promise
DOCUMENT 1 DOCUMENT 2
Letter from John Q. A. Dennis to Edwin M. Stanton, July 26, 1864 John Q. A. Dennis, formerly a slave in Maryland, wrote to ask Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton for help in reuniting his family.
Boston. Dear Sir I am Glad that I have the Honour to Write you a few line I have been in troble for about four yars my Dear wife was taken from me Nov 19th 1859 and left me with three Children and I being a Slave At the time Could Not do Anny thing for the poor little Children for my master it was took me Carry me some forty mile from them So I Could Not do for them and the man that they live with half feed them and half Cloth them & beat them like dogs & when I was admitted to go to see them it use to brake my heart & Now I say again I am Glad to have the honour to write to you to see if you Can Do Anny thing for me or for my poor little Children I was keap in Slavy untell last Novr 1863. then the Good lord sent the Cornel borne [federal colonel William Birney?] Down their in Marland in worsester Co So as I have been recently freed I have but letle to live on but I am Striveing Dear Sir but what I went too know of you Sir is it possible for me to go & take my Children from those men that keep them in Savery if it is possible will you pleas give me a permit from your hand then I think they would let them go. . . . I want get the little Children out of Slavery. . . .
SOURCE: Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, ser. 1, vol. 1, The Destruction of Slavery, 386, edited by Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland. Copyright © 1985. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
Report from Reverend A. B. Randall, February 28, 1865 A. B. Randall, the white chaplain of a black regiment stationed in Little Rock, Arkansas, affirmed the importance of legal marriage to freed slaves and emphasized their conviction that emancipation was only the first step toward full freedom.
Weddings, just now, are very popular, and abundant among the Colored People. They have just learned, of the Special Order No. 15. of Gen Thomas [Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas] by which, they may not only be lawfully married, but have their Marriage Certificates, Recorded; in a book furnished by the Government. . . . I have married, during the month, at this Post; Twenty five couples; mostly, those, who have families; & have been living together for years. . . . The Colord People here, generally consider, this war not only; their exodus, from bondage; but the road, to Responsibility; Competency; and an honorable Citizenship — God grant that their hopes and expectations may be fully realized.
SOURCE: Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, ser. 2, vol. 1, The Black Military Experience, 712, edited by Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland. Copyright © 1982. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
Wartime Reconstruction 4251863–1877
DOCUMENT 3
Petition “to the Union Convention of Tennessee Assembled in the Capitol at Nashville,” January 9, 1865 In January 1865, black Tennesseans petitioned a convention of white Unionists debating the reorga- nization of state government.
We the undersigned petitioners, American citizens of African descent, natives and residents of Tennes- see, and devoted friends of the great National cause, do most respectfully ask a patient hearing of your honorable body in regard to matters deeply affecting the future con- dition of our unfortunate and long suffering race. . . .
In the contest between the nation and slavery, our unfortunate people have sided, by instinct, with the former. . . . We will work, pray, live, and, if need be, die for the Union, as cheerfully as ever a white patriot died for his country. The color of our skin does not lessen in the least degree, our love either for God or for the land of our birth. . . .
We know the burdens of citizenship, and are ready to bear them. We know the duties of the good citizen, and are ready to perform them cheerfully, and would ask to be put in a position in which we can discharge them more effectually. . . .
This is a democracy — a government of the people. It should aim to make every man, without regard to the color of his skin, the amount of his wealth, or the character
of his religious faith, feel personally interested in its wel- fare. Every man who lives under the Government should feel that it is his property, his treasure, the bulwark and defence of himself and his family. . . .
This is not a Democratic Government if a numerous, law-abiding, industrious, and useful class of citizens, born and bred on the soil, are to be treated as aliens and enemies, as an inferior degraded class, who must have no voice in the Government which they support, protect and defend, with all their heart, soul, mind, and body, both in peace and war. . . .
The possibility that the negro suffrage proposition may shock popular prejudice at first sight, is not a con- clusive argument against its wisdom and policy. No proposition ever met with more furious or general oppo- sition than the one to enlist colored soldiers in the United States army. The opponents of the measure exclaimed on all hands that the negro was a coward; that he would not fight; that one white man, with a whip in his hand could put to flight a regiment of them. . . . Yet the colored man has fought so well. . . .
The Government has asked the colored man to fight for its preservation and gladly has he done it. It can afford to trust him with a vote as safely as it trusted him with a bayonet.
SOURCE: Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, ser. 2, vol. 1, The Black Military Experience, 811–16, edited by Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland. Copyright © 1982. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
Questions for Analysis and Debate 1 How does John Q. A. Dennis interpret his responsibility as a father?
2 Why do you think ex-slaves wanted their marriages legalized?
3 Why, according to petitioners to the Union Convention of Tennessee, did blacks deserve voting rights?
CONNECT TO THE BIG IDEA C How did ex-slaves embrace freedom following the Civil War?
426 CHAPTER 16 Reconstruction 1863–1877
the other side of the hill. Slaves had to be at work in the fields by dawn; freedom permit- ted blacks to sleep through a sunrise. Freedmen also tested the etiquette of racial sub- ordination. “Lizzie’s maid passed me today when I was coming from church without speaking to me,” huffed one plantation mistress.
To whites, emancipation looked like pure anarchy. Blacks, they said, had reverted to their natural condition: lazy, irresponsible, and wild. Actually, former slaves were experimenting with freedom, but they could not long afford to roam the countryside, neglect work, and casually provoke whites. Soon, most were back at work in whites’ kitchens and fields.
But they continued to dream of land and economic independence. “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land,” one former slave declared in 1865, “and turn it and till it by our own labor.” Freedmen also wanted to learn to read and write. “I wishes the Childern all in School,” one black veteran asserted. “It is beter for them then to be their Surveing a mistes [mistress].”
The restoration of broken families was another persistent black aspiration. Thousands of freedmen took to the roads in 1865 to look for kin who had been sold away or to free those who were being held illegally as slaves. A black soldier from Missouri wrote his daughters that he was coming for them. “I will have you if it cost me my life,” he declared. “Your Miss Kitty said that I tried to steal you,” he told them. “But I’ll let her know that god never intended for a man to steal his own flesh and blood.” And he swore that “if she meets me with ten thousand soldiers, she [will] meet her enemy.”
Independent worship was another continuing aspiration. African Americans greeted freedom with a mass exodus from white churches, where they had been required to worship when slaves. Some joined the newly established southern branches of all-black northern churches, such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Others formed black versions of the major southern denominations, Baptists and Methodists.
Presidential Reconstruction Abraham Lincoln died on April 15, 1865, just hours after John Wilkes Booth shot him at a Washington, D.C., theater. Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase immediately administered the oath of office to Vice President Andrew Johnson of
Tennessee. Congress had adjourned in March and would not reconvene until December. Throughout the summer and fall, Johnson drew up and executed a plan of reconstruction without congressional advice.
Congress returned to the capital in December to find that, as far as the president and former Confederates were concerned, reconstruction was completed. Most Republicans, however, thought Johnson’s plan made far too few demands of ex-rebels. They claimed that Johnson’s leniency had acted as midwife to the rebirth of the Old South, that he had achieved political reunification at the cost of black freedom. Republicans in Congress then proceeded to dismantle Johnson’s program and sub- stitute a program of their own.
How did the North respond to the passage of black codes in the southern states?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Presidential Reconstruction 4271863–1877
Johnson’s Program of Reconciliation. Born in 1808 in Raleigh, North Carolina, Andrew Johnson was the son of illiterate parents. Self-educated and ambi- tious, Johnson moved to Tennessee, where he built a career in politics championing the South’s common white people and assailing its “illegitimate, swaggering, bastard, scrub aristocracy.” The only senator from a Confederate state to remain loyal to the Union, Johnson held the planter class responsible for secession.
A Democrat all his life, Johnson occupied the White House only because the Republican Party in 1864 had needed a vice presidential candidate who would appeal to loyal, Union-supporting Democrats. Johnson vigorously defended states’ rights (but not secession) and opposed Republican efforts to expand the power of the federal government. A steadfast supporter of slavery, Johnson had owned slaves until 1862, when Tennessee rebels, angry at his Unionism, confiscated them. When he grudgingly accepted emancipation, it was more because he hated planters than sympathized with slaves. “Damn the negroes,” he said. “I am fighting those traitorous aristocrats, their masters.” The new president harbored unshakable racist convic- tions. Africans, Johnson said, were “inferior to the white man in point of intellect — better calculated in physical structure to undergo drudgery and hardship.”
Like Lincoln, Johnson stressed the rapid restoration of civil government in the South. Like Lincoln, he promised to pardon most, but not all, ex-rebels. Johnson recognized the state governments created by Lincoln but set out his own require- ments for restoring the other rebel states to the Union. All that the citizens of a state had to do was to renounce the right of secession, deny that the debts of the Confed- eracy were legal and binding, and ratify the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, which became part of the Constitution in December 1865.
Johnson also returned all confiscated and abandoned land to pardoned ex- Confederates, even if it was in the hands of freedmen. Reformers were shocked. Instead of punishing planters as he had promised, Johnson canceled the promising beginnings made by General Sherman and the Freedmen’s Bureau to settle blacks on land of their own. As one freedman observed, “Things was hurt by Mr. Lincoln getting killed.”
White Southern Resistance and Black Codes. In the summer of 1865, delegates across the South gathered to draw up the new state constitutions required by Johnson’s plan of reconstruction. They refused to accept even the president’s mild requirements. Refusing to renounce secession, the South Carolina and Georgia conventions merely “repudiated” their secession ordinances, preserving in principle their right to secede. South Carolina and Mississippi refused to disown their Con- federate war debts. Mississippi rejected the Thirteenth Amendment. Despite this defiance, Johnson did nothing. White Southerners began to think that by standing up for themselves they could shape the terms of reconstruction.
New state governments across the South adopted a series of laws known as black codes, which made a travesty of black freedom. The codes sought to keep ex-slaves subordinate to whites by subjecting them to every sort of discrimination. Several states made it illegal for blacks to own a gun. Mississippi made insulting gestures and language by blacks a criminal offense. The codes barred blacks from jury duty. Not a single southern state granted any black the right to vote.
black codes Laws passed by state governments in the South in 1865 that sought to keep ex-slaves subordinate to whites. At the core of the black codes lay the desire to force freedmen back to the plantations.
428 CHAPTER 16 Reconstruction 1863–1877
At the core of the black codes, however, lay the matter of labor. Legislators sought to hustle freedmen back to the plantations. Whites were almost universally opposed to black landownership, and South Carolina attempted to limit blacks to either farmwork or domestic service by requiring them to pay annual taxes of $10 to $100 to work in any other occupation. Mississippi declared that blacks who did not possess written evidence of employment could be declared vagrants and be subject to involuntary plantation labor. Under so-called apprenticeship laws, courts bound thousands of black children — orphans and others whose parents they deemed un - able to support them — to work for planter “guardians.”
Johnson, a staunch defender of states’ rights and white supremacy, refused to intervene. He also recognized that his do-nothing response offered him political advantage. A conservative Tennessee Democrat at the head of a northern Repub- lican Party, he had begun to look southward for political allies. By pardoning powerful whites, by accepting governments even when they failed to satisfy his minimal demands, and by acquiescing in the black codes, he won useful southern friends.
In the fall elections of 1865, white Southerners dramatically expressed their mood. To represent them in Congress, they chose former Confederates. Of the eighty senators and representatives they sent to Washington, fifteen had served in the Confederate army, ten of them as generals. Another sixteen had served in civil and judicial posts in the Confederacy. Nine others had served in the Confederate Congress. One — Alexander Stephens — had been vice president of the Confederacy. As one Georgian remarked, “It looked as though Richmond had moved to Washington.”
Expansion of Federal Authority and Black Rights. Southerners had blundered monumentally. They had assumed that what Andrew Johnson was willing to accept, Republicans would accept as well. But southern intransigence compelled even moderates to conclude that ex-rebels were a “generation of vipers,” still untrust- worthy and dangerous. The black codes became a symbol of southern intentions to “restore all of slavery but its name.” “We tell the white men of Mississippi,” the Chicago Tribune roared, “that the men of the North will convert the State of Mississippi into a frog pond before they will allow such laws to disgrace one foot of the soil in which the bones of our soldiers sleep and over which the flag of freedom waves.”
The moderate majority of the Republican Party wanted only assurance that slavery and treason were dead. They did not champion black equality, the confisca- tion of plantations, or black voting, as did the radical minority within the party. But southern obstinacy had succeeded in forging unity (at least temporarily) among Republican factions. In December 1865, Republicans refused to seat the southern representatives elected in the fall elections. Rather than accept Johnson’s claim that the “work of restoration” was done, Congress challenged his executive power.
Republican senator Lyman Trumbull declared that the president’s policy meant that an ex-slave would “be tyrannized over, abused, and virtually reenslaved without some legislation by the nation for his protection.” Early in 1866, the moderates pro- duced two bills that strengthened the federal shield. The first, the Freedmen’s Bureau bill, prolonged the life of the agency established by the previous Congress. Arguing that the Constitution never contemplated a “system for the support of indigent
Congressional Reconstruction 4291863–1877
persons,” President Andrew Johnson vetoed the bill. Congress failed by a narrow margin to override the president’s veto.
The moderates designed their second measure, what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1866, to nullify the black codes by affirming African Americans’ rights to “full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property as is enjoyed by white citizens.” The act required the end of racial dis- crimination in state laws and represented an extraordinary expansion of black rights and federal authority. The president argued that the civil rights bill amounted to “unconstitutional invasion of states’ rights” and vetoed it.
In April 1866, an incensed Republican Party again pushed the civil rights bill through Congress and overrode the presidential veto. In July, it passed another Freedmen’s Bureau bill and overrode Johnson’s veto. For the first time in American history, Congress had overridden presidential vetoes of major legislation. As a wor- ried South Carolinian observed, Johnson had succeeded in uniting the Republicans and probably touched off “a fight this fall such as has never been seen.”
Congressional Reconstruction By the summer of 1866, President Andrew Johnson and Congress had dropped their gloves and stood toe-to-toe in a bare-knuckle contest unprecedented in American history. Johnson made it clear that he would not budge on either
RECONSTRUCTION CARTOON This 1865 cartoon pokes fun at two Richmond ladies as they pass by a Union officer on their way to receive free government rations. One says sourly to the other, “Don’t you think that Yankee must feel like shrinking into his boots before such high- toned Southern ladies as we?” Just a step behind is a smiling black woman, who obviously views the Yankee through different eyes. The New York Public Library. Art
Resource, NYC.
Civil Rights Act of 1866 Legislation passed by Congress in 1866 that nullified the black codes and affirmed that black Americans should have equal benefit of the law. This expansion of black rights and federal authority drew a veto from President Johnson, which Congress later overrode.
Why did Johnson urge the southern states to reject the Fourteenth Amendment?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
430 CHAPTER 16 Reconstruction 1863–1877
constitutional issues or policy. Moderate Republicans responded by amending the Constitution. But the obstinacy of Johnson and white Southerners pushed Republi- can moderates ever closer to the radicals and to acceptance of additional federal intervention in the South. Congress also voted to impeach the president. In time, Congress debated whether to make voting rights color-blind, while women sought to make voting sex-blind as well.
The Fourteenth Amendment and Escalating Violence. In June 1866, Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and two years later the states ratified it. The most important provisions of this complex amend- ment made all native-born or naturalized persons American citizens and prohibited states from abridging the “privileges and immunities” of citizens, depriving them of “life, liberty, or property without due process of law,” and denying them “equal pro- tection of the laws.” By making blacks national citizens, the amendment provided a national guarantee of equality before the law. In essence, it protected blacks against violation by southern state governments.
The Fourteenth Amendment also dealt with voting rights. It gave Congress the right to reduce the congressional representation of states that withheld suffrage from some of its adult male population. In other words, white Southerners could either allow black men to vote or see their representation in Washington slashed.
The Fourteenth Amendment’s suffrage provisions ignored the small band of women who had emerged from the war demanding “the ballot for the two disen- franchised classes, negroes and women.” Founding the American Equal Rights Asso- ciation in 1866, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton lobbied for “a govern- ment by the people, and the whole people; for the people and the whole people.” They felt betrayed when their old antislavery allies refused to work for their goals. “It was the Negro’s hour,” Frederick Douglass explained. Senator Charles Sumner sug- gested that woman suffrage could be “the great question of the future.”
The Fourteenth Amendment provided for punishment of any state that excluded voters on the basis of race but not on the basis of sex. The amend-
ment also introduced the word male into the Constitution when it referred to a citizen’s right to vote. Stanton predicted that “if that word
‘male’ be inserted, it will take us a century at least to get it out.”
Fourteenth Amendment Constitutional amendment passed in 1866 that made all native-born or naturalized persons U.S. citizens and prohibited states from abridging the rights of national citizens. The amendment hoped to provide guarantee of equality before the law for black citizens.
ELIZABETH CADY STANTON AND SUSAN B. ANTHONY, 1870 Outspoken suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton (left) and Susan B. Anthony (right) were veteran reformers who advocated, among other things, better working conditions for labor, married women’s property rights, liberalization of divorce laws, and women’s admission into colleges and trade schools. Their
passion for other causes led some conservatives to oppose women’s political rights because they equated the suffragist
cause with radicalism in general. © Bettmann/Corbis.
The Fou excluded
ment refe
‘m
p wo
cau
Congressional Reconstruction 4311863–1877
Tennessee approved the Fourteenth Amendment in July, and Congress promptly welcomed the state’s representatives and senators back. Had President Johnson coun- seled other southern states to ratify this relatively mild amendment, they might have listened. Instead, Johnson advised Southerners to reject the Fourteenth Amendment and to rely on him to trounce the Republicans in the fall congressional elections.
Johnson had decided to make the Fourteenth Amendment the overriding issue of the 1866 elections and to gather its white opponents into a new conservative party, the National Union Party. The president’s strategy suffered a setback when whites in several southern cities went on rampages against blacks. Mobs killed thirty-four blacks in New Orleans and forty-six blacks in Memphis. The slaughter shocked Northerners and renewed skepticism about Johnson’s claim that southern whites could be trusted. “Who doubts that the Freedmen’s Bureau ought to be abolished forthwith,” a New Yorker observed sarcastically, “and the blacks remitted to the paternal care of their old masters, who ‘understand the nigger, you know, a great deal better than the Yankees can.’ ”
The 1866 elections resulted in an overwhelming Republican victory. Johnson had bet that Northerners would not support federal protection of black rights and that a racist backlash would blast the Republican Party. But the war was still fresh in northern minds, and as one Republican explained, southern whites “with all their intelligence were traitors, the blacks with all their ignorance were loyal.”
Radical Reconstruction and Military Rule. When Johnson continued to urge Southerners to reject the Fourteenth Amendment, every southern state except Tennessee voted it down. “The last one of the sinful ten,” thundered Representative
MEMPHIS RIOTS, MAY 1866 South Memphis, pictured in this lithograph from Harper’s Weekly, was a shantytown where the families of black soldiers stationed at nearby Fort Pickering lived. The army commander refused to send troops to protect soldiers’ families and property in early May 1866 when white mobs ran wild. The Granger Collection, NYC.
432 CHAPTER 16 Reconstruction 1863–1877
James A. Garfield of Ohio, “has flung back into our teeth the magnanimous offer of a generous nation.” After the South rejected the moderates’ program, the radicals seized the initiative.
Each act of defiance by southern whites had boosted the standing of the radicals within the Republican Party. Radicals such as Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner and Pennsylvania representative Thaddeus Stevens united in demanding civil and political equality. Southern states were “like clay in the hands of the potter,” Stevens declared in January 1867, and he called on Congress to begin reconstruction all over again.
In March 1867, Congress overturned the Johnson state governments and initi- ated military rule of the South. The Military Reconstruction Act (and three subse- quent acts) divided the ten unreconstructed Confederate states into five military districts. Congress placed a Union general in charge of each district and instructed him to “suppress insurrection, disorder, and violence” and to begin political reform.
After the military had completed voter registration, which would include black men, voters in each state would elect delegates to conventions that would draw up new state constitutions. Each constitution would guarantee black suffrage. When the voters of each state had approved the constitution and the state legislature had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, the state could submit its work to Congress. If Congress approved, the state’s senators and representatives could be seated, and political reunification would be accomplished.
Radicals proclaimed the provision for black suffrage “a prodigious triumph,” for it extended far beyond the limited suffrage provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. When combined with the disfranchisement of thousands of ex- rebels, it promised to cripple any neo-Confederate resurgence and guarantee
Republican state governments in the South. Despite its bold suffrage provision, the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867 dis-
appointed those who also advocated the confiscation of southern plantations and their redistribution to ex-slaves. Thaddeus Stevens agreed with the freedman who said, “Give us our own land and we take care of ourselves, but without land, the old masters can hire us or starve us, as they please.” But most Republicans believed they had pro- vided blacks with what they needed: equal legal rights and the ballot. If blacks were to get land, they would have to gain it themselves.
Declaring that he would rather sever his right arm than sign such a formula for “anarchy and chaos,” Andrew Johnson vetoed the Military Reconstruction Act, but Congress overrode his veto. With the passage of the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, congressional reconstruction was virtually completed. Congress left whites owning most of the South’s land but, in a departure that justified the term radical recon- struction, had given black men the ballot.
Impeaching a President. Despite his defeats, Andrew Johnson had no inten- tion of yielding control of reconstruction. In a dozen ways, he sabotaged Congress’s will and encouraged southern whites to resist. He issued a flood of pardons, waged war against the Freedmen’s Bureau, and replaced Union generals eager to enforce Congress’s Reconstruction Acts with conservative officers eager to defeat them.
Military Reconstruction Act Congressional act of March 1867 that initiated military rule of the South. Congressional reconstruction divided the ten unreconstructed Confederate states into five military districts, each under the direction of a Union general. It also established the procedure by which unreconstructed states could reenter the Union.
TEXAS
INDIAN TERR. ARK.
LA. MISS.
ALA.
TENN.
KY.
FLA.
GA. S.C.
N.C.
VA. W. VA.
PENN.
MD.KANS. MO.
ILL. IND. OHIO
N. MEX. TERR.
COLO. TERR.
NEBR. IOWA
WIS. MICH.
N.Y.WYO. TERR.
DAKOTA TERR.
MINN.
MONT. TERR.
VT.
11
2
3
4
5
RECONSTRUCTION MILITARY DISTRICTS
Congressional Reconstruction 4331863–1877
Johnson claimed that he was merely defending the “violated Constitution.” At bottom, however, the president subverted congressional reconstruction to protect southern whites from what he considered the horrors of “Negro domination.”
Radicals argued that Johnson’s abuse of constitutional powers and his failure to fulfill constitutional obligations to enforce the law were impeachable offenses. According to the Constitution, the House of Representatives can impeach and the Senate can try any federal official for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” But moderates interpreted the Constitution to mean violation of criminal statutes. As long as Johnson refrained from breaking the law, impeachment (the process of formal charges of wrongdoing against the president or other federal official) remained stalled.
Then in August 1867, Johnson suspended Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton from office. As required by the Tenure of Office Act, which demanded the approval of the Senate for the removal of any government official who had been appointed with Senate approval, the president requested the Senate to consent to Stanton’s dismissal. When the Senate balked, Johnson removed Stanton anyway. “Is the Presi- dent crazy, or only drunk?” asked a dumbfounded Republican moderate. “I’m afraid his doings will make us all favor impeachment.”
News of Johnson’s open defiance of the law convinced every Repub- lican in the House to vote for a resolution impeaching the president. Supreme Court chief justice Salmon Chase presided over the Senate trial, which lasted from March until May 1868. When the vote came, thirty- five senators voted guilty and nineteen not guilty. The impeachment forces fell one vote short of the two-thirds needed to convict.
After his trial, Johnson called a truce, and for the remaining ten months of his term, congressional reconstruction proceeded unhindered by presidential interference. Without interference from Johnson, Congress revisited the suffrage issue.
The Fifteenth Amendment and Women’s Demands. In February 1869, Republicans passed the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibited states from depriving any citizen of the right to vote because of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 already required black suffrage in the South; the Fifteenth Amendment extended black voting nationwide.
Some Republicans, however, found the final wording of the Fifteenth Amend- ment “lame and halting.” Rather than absolutely guaranteeing the right to vote, the amendment merely prohibited exclusion on grounds of race. The distinction would prove to be significant. In time, white Southerners would devise tests of literacy and property and other apparently nonracial measures that would effectively disfran- chise blacks yet not violate the Fifteenth Amendment. But an amendment that fully guaranteed the right to vote courted defeat outside the South. Rising antiforeign sentiment — against the Chinese in California and European immigrants in the Northeast — caused states to resist giving up total control of suffrage requirements. In March 1870, after three-fourths of the states had ratified it, the Fifteenth Amend- ment became part of the Constitution.
Fifteenth Amendment Constitutional amendment passed in February 1869 prohibiting states from depriving any citizen of the right to vote because of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” It extended black suffrage nationwide. Woman suffrage advocates were disappointed the amendment failed to extend voting rights to women.
434 CHAPTER 16 Reconstruction 1863–1877
Woman suffrage advocates, however, were sorely disappointed with the Fifteenth Amendment’s failure to extend voting rights to women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony condemned the Republicans’ “negro first” strategy and pointed out that women remained “the only class of citizens wholly unrepresented in the govern- ment.” The Fifteenth Amendment severed the early feminist movement from its abo- litionist roots. Over the next several decades, feminists established an independent suffrage crusade that drew millions of women into political life.
Republicans took enough satisfaction in the Fifteenth Amendment to promptly scratch the “Negro question” from the agenda of national politics. Even that stead- fast crusader for equality Wendell Phillips concluded that the black man now held “sufficient shield in his own hands. . . . Whatever he suffers will be largely now, and in future, his own fault.” Northerners had no idea of the violent struggles that lay ahead.
The Struggle in the South Northerners believed they had discharged their responsi- bilities with the Reconstruction Acts and the amendments to the Constitution, but Southerners knew that the battle had just begun. Black suffrage established the foundation
for the rise of the Republican Party in the South. Gathering together outsiders and outcasts, southern Republicans won elections, wrote new state constitutions, and formed new state governments.
Challenging the established class for political control was dangerous business. Equally dangerous were the confrontations that took place on southern farms and plantations, where blacks sought to give fuller meaning to their newly won legal and political equality. Freedom remained contested territory, and Southerners fought pitched battles with one another to determine the contours of their new world.
Freedmen, Yankees, and Yeomen. African Americans made up the major- ity of southern Republicans. After gaining voting rights in 1867, nearly all eligible black men registered to vote as Republicans. “It is the hardest thing in the world to keep a negro away from the polls,” observed an Alabama white man. Southern blacks did not all have identical political priorities, but they united in their desire for educa- tion and equal treatment before the law.
Northern whites who made the South their home after the war were a second element of the South’s Republican Party. Conservative white Southerners called them carpetbaggers, opportunists who stuffed all their belongings in a single carpet-sided suitcase and headed south to “fatten on our misfortunes.” But most Northerners who moved south were young men who looked upon the South as they did the West — as a promising place to make a living. Northerners in the southern Republican Party supported programs that encouraged vigorous economic develop- ment along the lines of the northern free-labor model.
carpetbaggers Southerners’ pejorative term for northern migrants who sought opportunity in the South after the Civil War. Northern migrants formed an important part of the southern Republican Party.
What brought the elements of the South’s Republican coalition together?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
The Struggle in the South 4351863–1877
Southern whites made up the third element of the South’s Republican Party. Approximately one out of four white Southerners voted Republican. The other three condemned the one who did as a traitor to his region and his race and called him a scalawag, a term for runty horses and low-down, good-for- nothing rascals. Yeoman farmers accounted for the majority of southern white Republicans. Some were Unionists who emerged from the war with bitter memories of Confederate persecu- tion. Others were small farmers who wanted to end state governments’ favoritism toward plantation owners. Yeomen supported initiatives for public schools and for expanding economic opportunity in the South.
The South’s Republican Party, then, was made up of freedmen, Yankees, and yeomen — an improbable coalition. The mix of races, regions, and classes inevitably meant friction as each group maneuvered to define the party. But Reconstruction represents an extraordinary moment in American politics: Blacks and whites joined together in the Republican Party to pursue political change. Formally, of course, only men participated in politics — casting ballots and holding offices — but white and black women also played a part in the political struggle by joining in parades and rallies, attending stump speeches, and even campaigning.
Most whites in the South condemned southern Republicans as illegitimate and felt justified in doing whatever they could to stamp them out. Violence against blacks — the “white terror” — took brutal institutional form in 1866 with the forma- tion in Tennessee of the Ku Klux Klan, a social club of Confederate veterans that quickly developed into a paramilitary organization supporting Democrats. The Klan went on a rampage of violence to defeat Republicans and restore white supremacy. Rapid demobilization of the Union army after the war left only twenty thousand troops to patrol the entire South. Without effective military protection, southern Republicans had to take care of themselves.
Republican Rule. In the fall of 1867, southern states held elections for delegates to state constitutional conventions, as required by the Reconstruction Acts. About 40 percent of the white electorate stayed home because they had been disfranchised or because they had decided to boycott politics. Republicans won three-fourths of the seats. About 15 percent of the Republican delegates to the conventions were Northerners who had moved south, 25 percent were African Americans, and 60 percent were white Southerners. As a British visitor observed, the delegate elections reflected “the mighty revolution that had taken place in America.”
The reconstruction constitutions introduced two broad categories of changes in the South: those that reduced aristocratic privilege and increased democratic equal- ity and those that expanded the state’s responsibility for the general welfare. In the first category, the constitutions adopted universal male suffrage, abolished property qualifications for holding office, and made more offices elective and fewer appointed. In the second category, they enacted prison reform; made the state responsible for caring for orphans, the insane, and the deaf and mute; and exempted debtors’ homes from seizure.
To Democrats, however, these progressive constitutions looked like wild revolu- tion. Democrats were blind to the fact that no constitution confiscated and redistributed
Ku Klux Klan A social club of Confederate veterans that quickly developed into a paramilitary organization supporting Democrats. With too few Union troops in the South to control the region, the Klan went on a rampage of violence to defeat Republicans and restore white supremacy.
scalawag A derogatory term that Southerners applied to southern white Republicans, who were seen as traitors to the South. Most were yeoman farmers.
436 CHAPTER 16 Reconstruction 1863–1877
land, as virtually every former slave wished, or disfranchised ex-rebels wholesale, as most southern Unionists advocated. And they were convinced that the new consti- tutions initiated “Negro domination.” In fact, although 80 percent of Republican vot- ers were black men, only 6 percent of Southerners in Congress during Reconstruc- tion were black (Figure 16.1). The sixteen black men in Congress included exceptional men, such as Representative James T. Rapier of Alabama (see pages 418–420). No state legislature experienced “Negro rule,” despite black majorities in the populations of some states.
Southern voters ratified the new constitutions and swept Republicans into power. When the former Confederate states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress readmitted them. Southern Republicans then turned to a staggering array of problems. Wartime destruction littered the landscape. Making matters worse, racial harassment and reactionary violence dogged Southerners who sought reform. In this desperate context, Republicans struggled to rebuild and reform the region.
Activity focused on three areas — education, civil rights, and economic devel- opment. Every state inaugurated a system of public education. Before the Civil War, whites had deliberately kept slaves illiterate, and planter-dominated governments rarely spent tax money to educate the children of yeomen. By 1875, half of Missis- sippi’s and South Carolina’s eligible children were attending school. Although schools were underfunded, literacy rates rose sharply. Public schools were racially segre- gated, but education remained for many blacks a tangible, deeply satisfying benefit of freedom and Republican rule.
State legislatures also attacked racial discrimination and defended civil rights. Republicans especially resisted efforts to segregate blacks from whites in public
Blacks
Whites
1865–1877
6%
93%
FIGURE 16.1 SOUTHERN CONGRESSIONAL DELEGATIONS, 1865–1877 The statistics contradict the myth of black domination of congressional representation during Reconstruction.
The Struggle in the South 4371863–1877
transportation. Mississippi levied fines and jail terms for owners of railroads and steamboats that pushed blacks into “smoking cars” or to lower decks. But passing color-blind laws was one thing; enforcing them was another. A Mississippian com- plained: “Education amounts to nothing, good behavior counts for nothing, even money cannot buy for a colored man or woman decent treatment and the comforts that white people claim and can obtain.” Despite the laws, segregation — later called Jim Crow — developed at white insistence and became a feature of southern life long before the end of the Reconstruction era.
Republican governments also launched ambitious programs of economic development. They envisioned a South of diversified agriculture, roaring factories, and booming towns. State legislatures chartered scores of banks and industrial companies, appropriated funds to fix ruined levees and drain swamps, and went on a railroad-building binge. These efforts fell far short of solving the South’s eco- nomic troubles, however. Republican spending to stimulate economic growth also meant rising taxes and enormous debt that siphoned funds from schools and other programs.
The southern Republicans’ record, then, was mixed. To their credit, the biracial party adopted an ambitious agenda to change the South. But money was scarce, the Democrats continued their harassment, and factionalism threatened the Republi- can Party from within. Moreover, corruption infected Republican governments.
STUDENTS AT A FREEDMEN’S SCHOOL IN VIRGINIA, CA. 1870S “The people are hungry and thirsty after knowledge,” a former slave observed immediately after the Civil War. African American leader Booker T. Washington remembered “a whole race trying to go to school.” Students at this Virginia school stand in front of their log-cabin classroom reading books. For people long forbidden to learn to read and write, literacy symbolized freedom. Valentine Museum, Cook Collection.
438 CHAPTER 16 Reconstruction 1863–1877
Nonetheless, the Republican Party made headway in its efforts to purge the South of aristocratic privilege and racist oppression. Republican governments had less suc- cess in overthrowing the long-established white oppression of black farm laborers in the rural South.
White Landlords, Black Sharecroppers. Ex-slaves who wished to escape slave labor and ex-masters who wanted to reinstitute old ways clashed repeatedly. Except for having to pay subsistence wages, planters had not been required to offer many concessions to emancipation. They continued to believe that African Americans would not work without coercion. Whites moved quickly to restore as much of slavery as they could get away with.
Ex-slaves resisted every effort to turn back the clock. They believed that land of their own would anchor their economic independence and end planters’ interfer- ence in their personal lives. They could then, for example, make their own decisions about whether women and children would labor in the fields. Indeed, within months after the war, perhaps one-third of black women abandoned field labor to work on chores in their own cabins just as poor white women did. Black women also negoti- ated about work ex-mistresses wanted done in the big house. Hundreds of thousands of black children enrolled in school. But without their own land, ex-slaves had little choice but to work on plantations.
Although forced to return to the planters’ fields, they resisted efforts to restore slavelike conditions. Instead of working for wages, a South Carolinian observed, “the negroes all seem disposed to rent land,” which increased their independence from whites. Out of this tug-of-war between white landlords and black laborers emerged a new system of southern agriculture.
Sharecropping was a compromise that offered something to both ex-masters and ex-slaves but satisfied neither. Under the new system, planters divided their cotton plantations into small farms that freedmen rented, paying with a share of each year’s crop, usually half. Sharecropping gave blacks more freedom than the system of wages and labor gangs and released them from day-to-day supervision by whites. Black families abandoned the old slave quarters and built separate cabins for themselves on the patches of land they rented (Map 16.1). Still, most black families remained dependent on white landlords, who had the power to evict them at the end of each growing season. For planters, sharecropping offered a way to resume agricul- tural production, but it did not allow them to restore the old slave plantation.
Sharecropping introduced the country merchant into the agricultural equa- tion. Landlords supplied sharecroppers with land, mules, seeds, and tools, but
blacks also needed credit to obtain essential food and clothing before they harvested their crops. Under an arrangement called a crop lien, a merchant would advance goods to a sharecropper
in exchange for a lien, or legal claim, on the farmer’s future crop. Some merchants charged exorbitant rates of interest, as much as 60
percent, on the goods they sold. At the end of the growing season, after the landlord had taken half of the farmer’s crop for rent, the merchant took
most of the rest. Sometimes, the farmer did not earn enough to repay the
sharecropping Labor system that emerged in the South during reconstruction. Under this system, planters divided their plantations into small farms that freedmen rented, paying with a share of each year’s crop. Sharecropping gave blacks some freedom, but they remained dependent on white landlords and country merchants.
The Struggle in the South 4391863–1877
1860 Master’s house
Service and farm buildings
Slave quarters
Road
1881 Landlord’s house
Service and farm buildings
Houses of former slaves
Road
W right’s Branch
Little River
B ran
ch
C re
ek
Sy ll’s
Fo rk
W right’s Branch
Little River
Br anc
h
C re
ek
Sy ll’s
Fo rk
Church
School
Gin houseGin house
debt to the merchant, so he would have to borrow more from the merchant and begin the cycle again.
An experiment at first, sharecropping soon dominated the cotton South. Lien merchants forced tenants to plant cotton, which was easy to sell, instead of food crops. The result was excessive production of cotton and falling cotton prices, devel- opments that cost thousands of small white farmers their land and pushed them into the great army of sharecroppers. The new sharecropping system of agriculture took shape just as the political power of Republicans in the South began to buckle under Democratic pressure.
MAP 16.1 A SOUTHERN PLANTATION IN 1860 AND 1881 These maps of the Barrow plantation in Georgia illustrate some of the ways in which ex-slaves expressed their freedom. Freedmen and freedwomen deserted the clustered living quarters behind the master’s house, scattered over the plantation, built family cabins, and farmed rented land. The former Barrow slaves also worked together to build a school and a church.
READING THE MAP: Compare the number and size of the slave quarters in 1860 with the homes of the former slaves in 1881. How do they differ? Which buildings were prominently located along the road in 1860, and which could be found along the road in 1881?
CONNECTIONS: How might the former master feel about the new configuration of buildings on the plantation in 1881? In what ways did the new system of sharecropping replicate the old system of plantation agriculture? In what ways was it different?
Map Activity
440 CHAPTER 16 Reconstruction 1863–1877
Reconstruction Collapses By 1870, after a decade of war and reconstruction, North- erners wanted to put “the southern problem” behind them. Practical business-minded men came to dominate the Republican Party, replacing the band of reformers and
idealists who had been prominent in the 1860s. Civil war hero Ulysses S. Grant suc- ceeded Andrew Johnson as president in 1869 and quickly became an issue himself, proving that brilliance on the battlefield does not necessarily translate into compe- tence in the White House. As northern commitment to defend black freedom eroded, southern commitment to white supremacy intensified. Without northern protection, southern Republicans were no match for the Democrats’ economic coercion, political fraud, and bloody violence. One by one, Republican state gov- ernments fell in the South. The election of 1876 both confirmed and completed the collapse of reconstruction.
Grant’s Troubled Presidency. In 1868, the Republican Party’s presidential nomination went to Ulysses S. Grant, the North’s favorite general. His Democratic opponent, Horatio Seymour of New York, ran on a platform that blasted reconstruc- tion as “a flagrant usurpation of power . . . unconstitutional, revolutionary, and void.” The Republicans answered by “waving the bloody shirt” — that is, they reminded voters that the Democrats were “the party of rebellion.” Grant gained a narrow 309,000-vote margin in the popular vote and a substantial victory (214 votes to 80) in the electoral college (Map 16.2).
Grant was not as good a president as he was a general. The talents he had dem- onstrated on the battlefield — decisiveness, clarity, and resolution — were less
obvious in the White House. Grant sought both justice for blacks and sectional reconciliation. But he surrounded him- self with fumbling kinfolk and old friends from his army days and made a string of dubious appointments that led to a series of damaging scandals. Charges of corruption tainted his vice president, Schuyler Colfax, and brought down two of his cabinet officers. Though never personally implicated in any scandal, Grant was aggravatingly naive and blind to the rot that filled his administration.
In 1872, anti-Grant Republicans bolted and launched the Liberal Party. To clean up the graft and corruption, Lib- erals proposed ending the spoils system, by which victorious parties rewarded loyal workers with public office, and replacing it with a nonpartisan civil service commission that would oversee competitive examinations for appointment to office (as discussed in chapter 18). Liberals also demanded that the federal government remove its troops from the South and restore “home rule” (southern white control). Democrats liked the Liberals’ southern policy and endorsed
How did the Supreme Court undermine the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments?
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Candidate Popular
Vote Percent of
Popular Vote Electoral
Vote Ulysses S. Grant (Republican)
214
80
3,012,833
2,703,249
52.7
47.3Horatio Seymour(Democrat)
Nonvoting states (Reconstruction)
11
16 13 21
26
7
3 7 6 4
125 5
11 7
33
8
8 8
3
5
4
3
3 5
3
7
5 10
8 9
3
6
9
MAP 16.2 THE ELECTION OF 1868
Reconstruction Collapses 4411863–1877
GRANT AND SCANDAL This anti-Grant cartoon by Thomas Nast, the nation’s most celebrated political cartoonist, shows the president falling headfirst into the barrel of fraud and corruption that tainted his administration. During Grant’s eight years in the White House, many members of his administration failed him. Sometimes duped, sometimes merely loyal, Grant stubbornly defended wrongdoers, even to the point of perjuring himself to keep an aide out of jail. Picture Research Consultants & Archives.
READING THE IMAGE: How does Thomas Nast portray President Grant’s role in corruption? According to this cartoon, what caused the problems?
CONNECTIONS: How responsible was President Grant for the corruption that plagued his administration?
Visual Activity
the Liberal presidential candidate, Horace Greeley, the longtime editor of the New York Tribune. The nation, however, still felt enormous affection for the man who had saved the Union and reelected Grant with 56 percent of the popular vote.
Northern Resolve Withers. Although Grant genuinely wanted to see blacks’ civil and political rights protected, he understood that most Northerners had grown weary of reconstruction and were increasingly willing to let southern whites manage their own affairs. Citizens wanted to shift their attention to other issues, especially after the nation slipped into a devastating economic depression in 1873. More than eighteen thousand businesses collapsed, leaving more than a million workers on the streets. Northern businessmen wanted to invest in the South but believed that recur- rent federal intrusion was itself a major cause of instability in the region. Republican leaders began to question the wisdom of their party’s alliance with the South’s lower classes — its small farmers and sharecroppers. One member of Grant’s administra- tion proposed allying with the “thinking and influential native southerners . . . the intelligent, well-to-do, and controlling class.”
442 CHAPTER 16 Reconstruction 1863–1877
Congress, too, wanted to leave reconstruction behind, but southern Republicans made that difficult. When the South’s Republicans begged for federal protection from increasing Klan violence, Congress enacted three laws in 1870 and 1871 that were intended to break the back of white terrorism. The severest of the three, the Ku Klux Klan Act (1871), made interference with voting rights a felony. Federal marshals arrested thousands of Klansmen and came close to destroying the Klan, but they did not end all terrorism against blacks. Congress also passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which boldly outlawed racial discrimination in transportation, public accom- modations, and juries. But federal authorities never enforced the law aggressively, and segregated facilities remained the rule throughout the South.
By the early 1870s, the Republican Party had lost its leading champions of African American rights to death or defeat at the polls. Other Republicans concluded that the quest for black equality was mistaken or hopelessly naive. In May 1872, Congress restored the right of office holding to all but three hundred ex-rebels. Many Republicans had come to believe that traditional white leaders offered the best hope for honesty, order, and prosperity in the South.
Underlying the North’s abandonment of reconstruction was unyielding racial prejudice. Northerners had learned to accept black freedom during the war, but deep- seated prejudice prevented many from accepting black equality. Even the actions they took on behalf of blacks often served partisan political advantage. Northerners gener- ally supported Indiana senator Thomas A. Hendricks’s harsh declaration that “this is a white man’s Government, made by the white man for the white man.”
The U.S. Supreme Court also did its part to undermine reconstruction. The Court issued a series of decisions that significantly weakened the federal government’s ability to protect black Southerners. In the Slaughterhouse cases (1873), the Court distin- guished between national and state citizenship and ruled that the Fourteenth Amend- ment protected only those rights that stemmed from the federal government, such as voting in federal elections and interstate travel. Since the Court decided that most rights derived from the states, it sharply curtailed the federal government’s authority to defend black citizens. Even more devastating, the United States v. Cruikshank ruling (1876) said that the reconstruction amendments gave Congress the power to legislate against discrimination only by states, not by individuals. The “suppression of ordinary crime,” such as assault, remained a state responsibility. The Supreme Court did not declare reconstruction unconstitutional but eroded its legal foundation.
The mood of the North found political expression in the election of 1874, when for the first time in eighteen years the Democrats gained control of the House of Rep- resentatives. As one Republican observed, the people had grown tired of the “negro question, with all its complications, and the reconstruction of Southern States, with all its interminable embroilments.” Reconstruction had come apart. Rather than defend reconstruction from its southern enemies, Northerners steadily backed away from the challenge. By the early 1870s, southern Republicans faced the forces of reaction largely on their own.
White Supremacy Triumphs. Reconstruction was a massive humiliation to most white Southerners. Republican rule meant intolerable insults: Black militiamen
Reconstruction Collapses 4431863–1877
patrolled town streets, black laborers negotiated contracts with former masters, black maids stood up to former mistresses, black voters cast ballots, and black legislators such as James T. Rapier enacted laws. Republican governments in the South attracted more hatred than did any other political regimes in American history. The northern retreat from reconstruction permitted southern Democrats to set things right.
Taking the name Redeemers, Democrats in the South promised to replace “bayonet rule” (a few federal troops continued to be stationed in the South) with “home rule.” They promised that honest, thrifty Democrats would supplant corrupt tax-and-spend Republicans. Above all, Redeemers swore to save southern civilization from a descent into “African barbarism.” As one man put it, “We must render this either a white man’s government, or convert the land into a Negro man’s cemetery.”
Southern Democrats adopted a multipronged strategy to overthrow Republican governments. First, they sought to polarize the parties around color. They went about gathering all the South’s white voters into the Democratic Party, leaving the Republi- cans to depend on blacks, who made up a minority of the population in almost every southern state. To dislodge whites from the Republican Party, Democrats fanned the flames of racial prejudice. A South Carolina Democrat crowed that his party appealed to the “proud Caucasian race, whose sovereignty on earth God has proclaimed.” Local newspapers published the names of whites who kept company with blacks, and neighbors ostracized offenders.
Democrats also exploited the severe economic plight of small white farmers by blaming it on Republican financial policy. Government spending soared during recon- struction, and small farmers saw their tax burden skyrocket. “This is tax time,” a South Carolinian reported. “We are nearly all on our head about them. They are so high & so little money to pay with” that farmers were “selling every egg and chicken they can get.” In 1871, Mississippi reported that one-seventh of the state’s land — 3.3 million acres — had been forfeited for nonpayment of taxes. The small farmers’ economic dis- tress had a racial dimension. Because few freedmen succeeded in acquiring land, they rarely paid taxes. In Georgia in 1874, blacks made up 45 percent of the population but paid only 2 percent of the taxes. From the perspective of a small white farmer, Repub- lican rule meant that he was paying more taxes and paying them to aid blacks.
If racial pride, social isolation, and financial hardship proved insufficient to drive yeomen from the Republican Party, Democrats turned to terrorism. “Night riders” targeted white Republicans as well as blacks for murder and assassination. Whether white or black, a “dead Radical is very harmless,” South Carolina Demo- cratic leader Martin Gary told his followers.
“WHITE MAN’S COUNTRY” This silk ribbon from the 1868 presidential campaign between Republican Ulysses S. Grant and his Democratic opponent, New York governor Horatio Seymour, openly declares the Democrats’ goal of white supremacy. During the campaign, Democratic vice presidential nominee Francis P. Blair Jr. promised that a Seymour victory would restore “white people” to power by declaring the reconstruction governments in the South “null and void.” Collection of Janice L. and David J. Frent.
Redeemers Name taken by southern Democrats who harnessed white rage in order to overthrow Republican rule and black political power and thus, they believed, save southern civilization.
444 CHAPTER 16 Reconstruction 1863–1877
But the primary victims of white violence were black Republicans. Violence esca- lated to an unprecedented ferocity on Easter Sunday in 1873 in tiny Colfax, Louisiana. The black majority in the area had made Colfax a Republican stronghold until 1872, when Democrats turned to intimidation and fraud to win the local election. Republi- cans refused to accept the result and eventually occupied the courthouse in the middle of the town. After three weeks, 165 white men attacked. They overran the Republicans’ defenses and set the courthouse on fire. When the blacks tried to surrender, the whites murdered them. At least 81 black men were slaughtered that day. Although the federal government indicted the attackers, the Supreme Court ruled that it did not have the right to prosecute. And since local whites would not prosecute neighbors who killed blacks, the defendants in the Colfax massacre went free.
Even before adopting the all-out white supremacist tactics of the 1870s, Demo- crats had taken control of the governments of Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. The new campaign brought fresh gains. The Redeemers retook Georgia in 1871, Texas in 1873, and Arkansas and Alabama in 1874. As the state election approached in 1876,
MAP 16.3 THE RECONSTRUCTION OF THE SOUTH Myth has it that Republican rule of the former Confederacy was not only harsh but long. In most states, however, conservative southern whites stormed back into power in months or just a few years. By the election of 1876, Republican governments could be found in only three states, and they soon fell.
READING THE MAP: List in chronological order the readmission of the former Confederate states to the Union. Which states reestablished conservative governments most quickly?
CONNECTIONS: What did the former Confederate states need to do in order to be readmitted to the Union? How did reestablished conservative governments react to reconstruction?
Map Activity
Date of readmission to the Union
Date of reestablishment of conservative government
Former Confederate states
1869
1873
TEXAS 1870/ 1873
INDIAN TERRITORY
ARKANSAS 1868/ 1874
LOUISIANA 1868/1877
MISS. 1870/ 1876
ALABAMA 1868/ 1874
TENNESSEE 1866/1869
KENTUCKY
FLA. 1868/ 1877
GEORGIA 1870/ 1871
SOUTH CAROLINA
1868/ 1876
NORTH CAROLINA 1868/1870
VIRGINIA 1870/1869
W. VA.
DEL.
MD.
KANSAS MISSOURI
ILLINOIS IND. OHIO
NEW MEXICO
TERRITORY
COLORADO
Reconstruction Collapses 4451863–1877
Governor Adelbert Ames appealed to Washington for federal troops to control the violence, only to hear from the attorney general that the “whole public are tired of these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South.” Abandoned, Mississippi Republicans succumbed to the Democratic onslaught in the fall elections. By 1876, only three Republican state gov- ernments survived in the South (Map 16.3).
An Election and a Compromise. The year 1876 witnessed one of the most tumultuous elections in American history. The election took place in November, but not until March 2 of the following year did the nation know who would be inaugurated president on March 4. The Democrats nominated New York’s governor, Samuel J. Tilden, who immediately targeted the corruption of the Grant administration and the “despotism” of Republican reconstruc- tion. The Republicans put forward Rutherford B. Hayes, gov- ernor of Ohio. Privately, Hayes considered “bayonet rule” a mistake but concluded that waving the bloody shirt remained the Republicans’ best political strategy.
On election day, Tilden tallied 4,288,590 votes to Hayes’s 4,036,000. But in the all-important electoral college, Tilden fell one vote short of the majority required for victory. The electoral votes of three states — South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida, the only remaining Republican governments in the South — remained in doubt because both Republicans and Democrats in those states claimed victory. To win, Tilden needed only one of the nineteen contested votes. Hayes had to have all of them.
Congress had to decide who had actually won the elec- tions in the three southern states and thus who would be president. The Constitution provided no guidance for this situation. Moreover, Democrats controlled the House, and Republicans controlled the Senate. Congress created a special electoral commission to arbitrate the disputed returns. All of the commissioners voted their party affiliation, giving every state to the Republican Hayes and putting him over the top in electoral votes (Map 16.4).
Some outraged Democrats vowed to resist Hayes’s victory. Rumors flew of an impending coup and renewed civil war. But the impasse was broken when negotiations behind the scenes resulted in an informal understanding known as the Compromise of 1877. In exchange for a Democratic promise not to block Hayes’s inauguration and to deal fairly with the freedmen, Hayes vowed to refrain from using the army to uphold the remaining Republican regimes in the South and to provide the South with substantial federal subsidies for railroads.
Stubborn Tilden supporters bemoaned the “stolen election” and damned “His Fraud- ulency,” Rutherford B. Hayes. Old-guard radicals such as William Lloyd Garrison denounced Hayes’s bargain as a “policy of compromise, of credulity, of weakness, of subser- viency, of surrender.” But the nation as a whole celebrated, for the country had weathered a grave crisis. The last three Republican state governments in the South fell quickly once Hayes abandoned them and withdrew the U.S. Army. Reconstruction came to an end.
Candidate Popular
Vote Percent of
Popular Vote Electoral
Vote Rutherford B. Hayes (Republican)
185*
184
4,036,298
4,288,590
47.9**
51.0Samuel J. Tilden(Democrat)
*19 electoral votes were disputed. **Percentages do not total 100 because some popular votes went to other parties.
12
21 15 22 29
7
3 9 64
135 5
15
8
35
11
10 11 3
6
5
3
5 5
3
3
8 8*
6 12
8 10 11
4*
7*
10
11
MAP 16.4 THE ELECTION OF 1876
Compromise of 1877 Informal agreement in which Democrats agreed not to block Hayes’s inauguration and to deal fairly with freedmen, and Hayes vowed not to use the army to uphold the remaining Republican regimes in the South and to provide the South with substantial federal subsidies for railroads. The Compromise brought the Reconstruction era to an end.
446 CHAPTER 16 Reconstruction 1863–1877
Conclusion: “A Revolution But Half Accomplished” In 1865, when General Carl Schurz visited the South, he discovered “a revolution but half accomplished.” White Southerners resisted the passage from slavery to free labor, from white racial despotism to equal justice, and from white political monopoly to biracial democracy. The old elite wanted to get “things back as near to slavery as possible,” Schurz reported, while African Americans such as James T. Rapier and some whites were eager to exploit the revolutionary implications of defeat and emancipation.
Although the northern-dominated Republican Congress refused to provide for blacks’ economic welfare, it employed constitutional amendments to require ex- Confederates to accept legal equality and share political power with black men. Conservative southern whites fought ferociously to recover their power and privi- lege. When Democrats regained control of politics, whites used both state power and private violence to wipe out many of the gains of Reconstruction, leading one observer to conclude that the North had won the war but the South had won the peace.
The Redeemer counterrevolution, however, did not mean a return to slavery. Northern victory in the Civil War ensured that ex-slaves no longer faced the auction block and could send their children to school, worship in their own churches, and work independently on their own rented farms. Sharecropping, with all its hard- ships, provided more autonomy and economic welfare than bondage had. It was limited freedom, to be sure, but it was not slavery.
The Civil War and emancipation set in motion the most profound upheaval in the nation’s history. War destroyed the largest slave society in the New World and gave birth to a modern nation-state. Washington increased its role in national affairs, and the victorious North set the nation’s compass toward the expansion of industrial capitalism and the final conquest of the West.
Despite massive changes, however, the Civil War remained only a “half accom- plished” revolution. By not fulfilling the promises the nation seemed to hold out to black Americans at war’s end, Reconstruction represents a tragedy of enormous proportions. The failure to protect blacks and guarantee their rights had enduring consequences. It was the failure of the first reconstruction that made the modern civil rights movement necessary.
1863–1877
1 Why and how did the federal government retreat from defending African Americans’ civil rights in the 1870s?
2 Why was distributing plantation land to former slaves such a controversial policy? Why did Congress reject redistribution as a general policy?
3 After emancipation, how did ex-slaves exercise their new freedoms and how did white Southerners attempt to limit them?
4 How did the identification of the Republican Party with Reconstruction policy affect the party’s political fortunes in the 1870s?
MAKING CONNECTIONS
1 Why did Congress object to Lincoln’s wartime plan for reconstruction? (pp. 420–425)
2 How did the North respond to the passage of black codes in the southern states? (pp. 426–429)
3 Why did Johnson urge the southern states to reject the Fourteenth Amendment? (pp. 429–434)
4 What brought the elements of the South’s Republican coalition together? (pp. 434–439)
5 How did the Supreme Court undermine the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments? (pp. 440–445)
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
Freedmen’s Bureau (p. 423)
black codes (p. 427)
Civil Rights Act of 1866 (p. 429)
Fourteenth Amendment (p. 430)
Military Reconstruction Act (p. 432)
Fifteenth Amendment (p. 433)
KEY TERMS
carpetbaggers (p. 434)
scalawag (p. 435)
Ku Klux Klan (p. 435)
sharecropping (p. 438)
Redeemers (p. 443)
Compromise of 1877 (p. 445)
Chapter Review MAKE IT STICK
Go to LearningCurve: See what you know. Then review the key terms and answer the questions.
LearningCurve bedfordstmartins.com /roarkconcise
447 STUDENT SITE @ bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
Appendix Directory
APPENDIX I
Suggested References A-1
APPENDIX II
Documents A-7 The Declaration of Independence A-7 The Constitution of the United States A-9 Amendments to the Constitution with Annotations
(including the six unratified amendments) A-16
APPENDIX III
Facts and Figures: Government, Economy, and Demographics A-32
Presidential Elections A-32 Presidents, Vice Presidents, and Secretaries
of State A-37 Supreme Court Justices A-39 Federal Spending and the Economy, 1790–2009 A-41 Population Growth, 1630–2010 A-42 Birthrate, 1820–2007 A-42 Life Expectancy, 1900–2007 A-43 Major Trends in Immigration, 1820–2010 A-44
APPENDIX I
CHAPTER 1 Karen Olsen Bruhns and Karen R. Stothert, Women in
Ancient America (1999). Susan Toby Evans, Ancient Mexico and Central America:
Archaeology and Culture History (2008). Brian Fagan, Ancient North America (2005). Kendrick Frazier, People of Chaco: A Canyon and Its
Cultures (1999). Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas
before Columbus (2006). Timothy R. Pauketat, Cahokia: Ancient America’s Greatest
City on the Mississippi (2009).
CHAPTER 2 Laurence Bergreen, Columbus: The Four Voyages (2011). J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and
Spain in America, 1491–1830 (2006). James Horn, A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic
History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke (2010). John L. Kessell, Pueblos, Spaniards, and the Kingdom of
New Mexico (2010). Stuart B. Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance
and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic (2009). David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America
(2009).
CHAPTER 3 S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South
Carolina (2006). Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central
Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas (2007).
Karen Ordahl Kupperman, The Jamestown Project (2009).
Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Free- dom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975).
Christopher L. Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 (2010).
Lorena S. Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607–1763 (2010).
CHAPTER 4 Ned C. Landsman, Crossroads of Empire: The Middle
Colonies in British North America (2010). Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation (2005). Daniel R. Mandell, King Philip’s War: Colonial Expansion,
Native Resistance, and the End of Indian Sovereignty (2010).
Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (2002).
Carola Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in the Age of Revolution, 1640–1661 (2004).
Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America (2004).
CHAPTER 5 Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-
American Slaves (2003). Patrick Griffin, The People with No Name: Ireland’s
Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764 (2001).
David Hancock, Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emer- gence of American Trade and Taste (2009).
Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Low Country (1998).
Randy Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eight- eenth-Century Odyssey (2004).
Daniel Vickers, Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (2005).
A-1
Suggested References
A-2 APPENDIX I. SUGGESTED REFERENCES
CHAPTER 9 Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (2004). Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary
Generation (2000). Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideol-
ogy in Revolutionary America (1997). Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington,
His Slaves, and the Creation of America (2003). Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and
Politics in the Early American Republic (2007).
CHAPTER 10 Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of
Washington Help Build a City and a Government (2000).
Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, Madison and Jefferson (2010).
Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (2009). Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women,
Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (2006).
Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies (2010).
Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005).
CHAPTER 11 Thomas Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work: New
England Lives in the Industrial Revolution (1994). John Lauritz Larson, The Market Revolution in America:
Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good (2009).
Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (2002).
John Ehle, Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation (1997).
Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1845 (2009).
Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart, Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Slavery in the Era of Emanci- pation (2007).
CHAPTER 6 Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War
and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (2001).
T. H. Breen, American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (2010).
Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (2009).
Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (2006).
Alfred F. Young, Liberty Tree: Ordinary People and the American Revolution (2006).
CHAPTER 7 Carol Berkin, Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the
Struggle for America’s Independence (2005). Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declara-
tion of Independence (1997). Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The
Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (2005).
Jack Rakove, Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America (2010).
Ray Raphael, A People’s History of the American Revolu- tion: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Inde- pendence (2001).
CHAPTER 8 Saul Cornell, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and
the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788–1828 (1999).
Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (2007).
Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Con- stitution, 1787–1788 (2011).
Jack N. Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (1996).
Leonard L. Richards, Shays’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle (2002).
Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (2006).
APPENDIX I. SUGGESTED REFERENCES A-3
David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (2005).
Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005).
CHAPTER 15 Ira Berlin et al., eds., Freedom: A Documentary History
of Emancipation, 1861–1867, 5 vols. (1982–2008). Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Sol-
diers, Slavery, and the Civil War (2007). James M. McPherson, The Battle Cry of Freedom: The
Civil War Era (1988). Anne Sarah Rubin, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall
of the Confederacy, 1861–1868 (2005). Nina Silber, Daughters of the Union: Northern Women
Fight the Civil War (2006). Jennifer L. Weber, Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of
Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (2008).
CHAPTER 16 Jane Turner Censer, The Reconstruction of White
Southern Womanhood, 1865–1895 (2003). Michael W. Fitzgerald, Splendid Failure: Postwar Recon-
struction in the American South (2007). John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, In Search
of the Promised Land: A Slave Family in the Old South (2006).
Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (2008).
Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (2000).
Susan Eva O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (2007).
CHAPTER 17 David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American
Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (1995).
Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (2009). David Igler, Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the
Transformation of the Far West, 1850–1920 (2001).
CHAPTER 12 Lori D. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American
Life (2009). Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebel-
lum American Empire (2005). Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of
the California Gold Rush (2000). Robert W. Merry, A Country of Vast Designs: James K.
Polk, the Mexican War, and the Conquest of the American Continent (2009).
David R. Meyer, The Roots of American Industrialization (2003).
Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Ante- bellum North (2002).
CHAPTER 13 Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-
American Slaves (2003). Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade
in American Life (2005). Lacy K. Ford Jr., Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery
Question in the Old South (2009). Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in
the Old South (2007). Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman
Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South (1995).
Michael Perman, Pursuit of Unity: A Political History of the American South (2009).
CHAPTER 14 Charles B. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession
Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (2001).
Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (2001).
Susan-Mary Grant, North over South: Northern Nation- alism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (2000).
Bruce C. Levine, Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of the Civil War (1992).
A-4 APPENDIX I. SUGGESTED REFERENCES
Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1730–1920 (2000).
Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee (2004).
Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (2011).
CHAPTER 18 Rebecca Edwards, New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded
Age, 1865–1905 (2006). Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword among Lions: Ida B. Wells
and the Campaign against Lynching (2008). Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of
Modern America, 1877–1920 (2009). Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America:
Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (anniversary edition, 2009).
Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (2011).
LeeAnn Whites, Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruc- tion, and the Making of the New South (2005).
CHAPTER 19 Gary S. Cross and John K. Walton, The Playful Crowd:
Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century (2005). Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American
Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882 (2004). Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in
the Second Millennium (2002). Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of
Modern America, 1877–1920 (2009). David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The
Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (1987).
David R. Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (2005).
Robert E. Weir, Knights Unhorsed: Internal Conflict in a Gilded Age Social Movement (2000).
CHAPTER 20 Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American
History (rev. ed., 1998). Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead, 1880–1892
(1992).
Walter LaFeber, The American Search for Opportunity, 1865–1913 (1994).
Jackson Lears, The Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (2009).
Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America (2005).
Troy Rondinone, The Great Industrial War: Framing Class Conflict in the Media, 1865–1950 (2010).
CHAPTER 21 Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore
Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (2009). John Milton Cooper, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography
(2009). Maureen A. Flanagan, America Reformed: Progressives
and Progressivisms, 1890s–1920s (2007). Louise W. Knight, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle
for Democracy (2005). Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Mod-
ern America, 1877–1920 (2009). Rebecca J. Mead, How the Vote Was Won: Woman
Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–1914 (2004).
CHAPTER 22 Jean Baker, Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists
(2005). John Milton Cooper, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography
(2009). Thomas Fleming, The Illusion of Victory: America in
World War I (2003). Ernest Freeberg, Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs,
the Great War, and the Right to Dissent (2008). James N. Gregory, Southern Diaspora: How the Great
Migrations of Black and White Southerners Trans- formed America (2005).
Jennifer D. Keene, Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America (2001).
CHAPTER 23 Liz Conor, Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visi-
bility in the 1920s (2004). Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American
Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882 (2004).
APPENDIX I. SUGGESTED REFERENCES A-5
Bruce Cumings, The Korean War (2010). Alonzo L. Hamby, Man of the People: A Life of Harry
S. Truman (1995). Ellen W. Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism
in America (1998). Philippa Strum, Mendez v. Westminster: School Desegre-
gation and Mexican-American Rights (2010).
CHAPTER 27 Glenn C. Altschuler, All Shook Up: How Rock ’n’ Roll
Changed America (2004). Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King
Years, 1954–1963 (1988). Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of
Mass Consumption in Postwar America (2003). Jim Newton, Eisenhower: The White House Years (2011). Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal
Policy, Economic Development, and the Transforma- tion of the South, 1938–1980 (1994).
Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (2008).
CHAPTER 28 Sara Evans, Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America
at Century’s End (2003). Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided:
The Civil War of the 1960s (2011). Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and
African American Identity (2005). Carlos Muñoz, Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano
Movement (2007). Randall B. Woods, LBJ: Architect of American Ambition
(2006).
CHAPTER 29 Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy,
Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (2008).
Frederick Downs, The Killing Zone: My Life in the Viet- nam War (1978).
Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, All You Need Is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s (1998).
Mark Atwood Lawrence, The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (2010).
Steve Fraser, Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street (2005).
William E. Leuchtenburg, Herbert Hoover: 31st Presi- dent, 1929–1933 (2009).
Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (2010).
Steven Watts, People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (2005).
CHAPTER 24 Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers
in Chicago, 1919–1939 (1990). Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural His-
tory of the Great Depression (2010). Jennifer Klein, For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and
the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State (2003).
William Edward Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (2009).
Joseph E. Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conserva- tism (2009).
Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade against the New Deal (2010).
CHAPTER 25 Antony Beevor, The Second World War (2012). John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the
Pacific War (1986). Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939–1945
(2011). Arthur Herman, Freedom’s Forge: How American Busi-
ness Produced Victory in World War II (2012). John W. Jeffries, Wartime America: The World War II
Home Front (1996). Peter Schrijvers, The GI War against Japan: American
Soldiers in Asia and the Pacific during World War II (2002).
CHAPTER 26 Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, The GI Bill:
The New Deal for Veterans (2009). Campbell Craig and Fredric Logevall, America’s Cold
War: The Politics of Insecurity (2009).
A-6 APPENDIX I. SUGGESTED REFERENCES
Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (2010).
CHAPTER 31 John F. Harris, The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White
House (2005). Seth G. Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s
War in Afghanistan (2009). George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (2005). Richard A. Posner, A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of
’08 and the Descent into Depression (2009). David M. Reimers, Other Immigrants: The Global Origins
of the American People (2005). Julian E. Zelizer, ed., The Presidency of George W. Bush:
A First Historical Assessment (2010).
Margaret Macmillan, Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World (2007).
Tom Wells, The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam (2005).
CHAPTER 30 David Crist, The Twilight War: The Secret History of
America’s Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (2012). Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots
Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (2005). Linda Hirshman, Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolu-
tion (2012). J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent De -
cade in the Lives of Three American Families (1986). Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008
(2008).
Documents
APPENDIX II
A-7
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE In Congress, July 4, 1776, THE UNANIMOUS DECLARATION OF THE THIRTEEN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA When in the course of human events, it becomes neces- sary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of man- kind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the gov- erned; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established, should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown, that man- kind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are suffer- able, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies, and such is now the necessity which con- strains them to alter their former systems of govern- ment. The history of the present King of Great Britain is
a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having, in direct object, the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world: He has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and, when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other laws for the accom- modation of large districts of people, unless those peo- ple would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature; a right inestimable to them, and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the deposi- tory of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly for opposing, with manly firmness, his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused, for a long time after such dissolu- tions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legisla- tive powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the mean-time exposed to all the danger of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose, obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners, refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the condi- tions of new appropriations of lands.
He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.
A-8 APPENDIX II. DOCUMENTS
He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies, without the consent of our legislature.
He has affected to render the military independent of, and superior to, the civil power.
He has combined, with others, to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowl- edged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them by a mock trial, from punish- ment, for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world: For imposing taxes on us without our consent: For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefit of
trial by jury: For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pre-
tended offences: For abolishing the free system of English laws in a
neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries, so as to ren- der it at once an example and fit instrument for introduc- ing the same absolute rule into these colonies:
For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering, fundamentally, the powers of our governments:
For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection, and waging war against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is, at this time, transporting large armies of for- eign mercenaries to complete the works of death, deso- lation, and tyranny, already begun, with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civi- lized nation.
He has constrained our fellow citizens, taken cap- tive on the high seas, to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends, and breth- ren, or to fall themselves by their hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.
In every stage of these oppressions, we have petitioned for redress; in the most humble terms; our repeated peti- tions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them, from time to time, of attempts made by their legislature to extend an unwarrant- able jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them, by the ties of our common kin- dred, to disavow these usurpations, which would inevita- bly interrupt our connections and correspondence. They, too, have been deaf to the voice of justice and consanguin- ity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our separation, and hold them as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace, friends.
We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in general Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states: that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved; and that, as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, con- clude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And, for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Provi- dence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our for- tunes, and our sacred honor.
The foregoing Declaration was, by order of Con- gress, engrossed, and signed by the following members:
THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES A-9
JOHN HANCOCK
New Hampshire Josiah Bartlett William Whipple Matthew Thornton
Massachusetts Bay Samuel Adams John Adams Robert Treat Paine Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island Stephen Hopkins William Ellery
Connecticut Roger Sherman Samuel Huntington
William Williams Oliver Wolcott
New York William Floyd Phillip Livingston Francis Lewis Lewis Morris
New Jersey Richard Stockton John Witherspoon Francis Hopkinson John Hart Abraham Clark
Pennsylvania Robert Morris Benjamin Rush Benjamin Franklin John Morton
George Clymer James Smith George Taylor James Wilson George Ross Delaware Caesar Rodney George Read Thomas M’Kean Maryland Samuel Chase William Paca Thomas Stone Charles Carroll, of Carrollton North Carolina William Hooper Joseph Hewes John Penn
South Carolina Edward Rutledge Thomas Heyward, Jr. Thomas Lynch, Jr. Arthur Middleton
Virginia George Wythe Richard Henry Lee Thomas Jefferson Benjamin Harrison Thomas Nelson, Jr. Francis Lightfoot Lee Carter Braxton
Georgia Button Gwinnett Lyman Hall George Walton
Resolved, That copies of the Declaration be sent to the several assemblies, conventions, and committees, or councils of safety, and to the several commanding
officers of the continental troops; that it be proclaimed in each of the United States, at the head of the army.
THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES1
Agreed to by Philadelphia Convention, September 17, 1787. Implemented March 4, 1789.
Preamble We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Article I Section 1 All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives.
Section 2 The House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen every second year by
the people of the several States, and the electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State Legislature.
No person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the age of twenty-five years, and been seven years a citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.
Representatives and direct taxes shall be appor- tioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other persons. The actual enumeration shall be made within three years after the first meeting of the Congress
1Passages no longer in effect are in italic type.
A-10 APPENDIX II. DOCUMENTS
of the United States, and within every subsequent term of ten years, in such manner as they shall by law direct. The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand, but each State shall have at least one Representative; and until such enumeration shall be made, the State of New Hampshire shall be entitled to choose three, Massachusetts eight, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations one, Connecticut five, New York six, New Jersey four, Pennsylvania eight, Delaware one, Maryland six, Virginia ten, North Carolina five, South Carolina five, and Georgia three.
When vacancies happen in the representation from any State, the Executive authority thereof shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies.
The House of Representatives shall choose their Speaker and other officers; and shall have the sole power of impeachment.
Section 3 The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the legislature thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote.
Immediately after they shall be assembled in conse- quence of the first election, they shall be divided as equally as may be into three classes. The seats of the Senators of the first class shall be vacated at the expiration of the second year, of the second class at the expiration of the fourth year, and of the third class at the expiration of the sixth year, so that one-third may be chosen every second year; and if vacancies happen by resignation or otherwise, during the recess of the legislature of any State, the Executive thereof may make temporary appointments until the next meeting of the legislature, which shall then fill such vacancies.
No person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the age of thirty years, and been nine years a citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.
The Vice-President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no vote, unless they be equally divided.
The Senate shall choose their other officers, and also a President pro tempore, in the absence of the Vice- President, or when he shall exercise the office of Presi- dent of the United States.
The Senate shall have the sole power to try all impeachments. When sitting for that purpose, they shall be on oath or affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: and no person shall be convicted without the concurrence of two-thirds of the members present.
Judgment in cases of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from the office, and disqualifi- cation to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States: but the party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment, according to law.
Section 4 The times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives shall be pre- scribed in each State by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regu- lations, except as to the places of choosing Senators.
The Congress shall assemble at least once in every year, and such meeting shall be on the first Monday in December, unless they shall by law appoint a different day.
Section 5 Each house shall be the judge of the elec- tions, returns and qualifications of its own members, and a majority of each shall constitute a quorum to do business; but a smaller number may adjourn from day to day, and may be authorized to compel the attendance of absent members, in such manner, and under such penalties, as each house may provide.
Each house may determine the rules of its proceed- ings, punish its members for disorderly behavior, and with the concurrence of two-thirds, expel a member.
Each house shall keep a journal of its proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such parts as may in their judgment require secrecy; and the yeas and nays of the members of either house on any question shall, at the desire of one-fifth of those present, be entered on the journal.
Neither house, during the session of Congress, shall, without the consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other place than that in which the two houses shall be sitting.
Section 6 The Senators and Representatives shall receive a compensation for their services, to be ascer- tained by law and paid out of the treasury of the
THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES A-11
United States. They shall in all cases except treason, felony and breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest during their attendance at the session of their respective houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any speech or debate in either house, they shall not be questioned in any other place.
No Senator or Representative shall, during the time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil office under the authority of the United States, which shall have been created, or the emoluments whereof shall have been increased, during such time; and no person holding any office under the United States shall be a member of either house during his continuance in office.
Section 7 All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may pro- pose or concur with amendments as on other bills.
Every bill which shall have passed the House of Rep- resentatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a law, be presented to the President of the United States; if he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it with objections to that house in which it shall have originated, who shall enter the objections at large on their journal, and proceed to reconsider it. If after such reconsidera- tion two-thirds of that house shall agree to pass the bill, it shall be sent, together with the objections, to the other house, by which it shall likewise be reconsidered, and, if approved by two-thirds of that house, it shall become a law. But in all such cases the votes of both houses shall be determined by yeas and nays, and the names of the per- sons voting for and against the bill shall be entered on the journal of each house respectively. If any bill shall not be returned by the President within ten days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the same shall be a law, in like manner as if he had signed it, unless the Congress by their adjournment prevent its return, in which case it shall not be a law.
Every order, resolution, or vote to which the con- currence of the Senate and House of Representatives may be necessary (except on a question of adjournment) shall be presented to the President of the United States; and before the same shall take effect, shall be approved by him, or being disapproved by him, shall be repassed by two-thirds of the Senate and House of Representa- tives, according to the rules and limitations prescribed in the case of a bill.
Section 8 The Congress shall have power To lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises,
to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
To borrow money on the credit of the United States; To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and
among the several States, and with the Indian tribes; To establish an uniform rule of naturalization, and
uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States;
To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures;
To provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the United States;
To establish post offices and post roads; To promote the progress of science and useful arts
by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
To constitute tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court;
To define and punish piracies and felonies commit- ted on the high seas and offences against the law of nations;
To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;
To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years;
To provide and maintain a navy; To make rules for the government and regulation of
the land and naval forces; To provide for calling forth the militia to execute
the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions;
To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserv- ing to the States respectively the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia accord- ing to the discipline prescribed by Congress;
To exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatso- ever, over such district (not exceeding ten miles square)
A-12 APPENDIX II. DOCUMENTS
as may, by cession of particular States, and the accep- tance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States, and to exercise like authority over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the State, in which the same shall be, for erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dock-yards, and other needful buildings;—and
To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.
Section 9 The migration or importation of such persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight; but a tax or duty may be imposed on such importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each person.
The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or inva- sion the public safety may require it.
No bill of attainder or ex post facto law shall be passed.
No capitation, or other direct, tax shall be laid, unless in proportion to the census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken.
No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any State.
No preference shall be given by any regulation of commerce or revenue to the ports of one State over those of another; nor shall vessels bound to, or from, one State be obliged to enter, clear, or pay duties in another.
No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law; and a regular statement and account of the receipts and expenditures of all public money shall be published from time to time.
No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States: and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.
Section 10 No State shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation; grant letters of marque and reprisal;
coin money; emit bills of credit; make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts; pass any bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing the obli- gation of contracts, or grant any title of nobility.
No State shall, without the consent of Congress, lay any imposts or duties on imports or exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing its inspection laws: and the net produce of all duties and imposts, laid by any State on imports or exports, shall be for the use of the treasury of the United States; and all such laws shall be subject to the revision and control of the Congress.
No State shall, without the consent of Congress, lay any duty of tonnage, keep troops, or ships of war in time of peace, enter into any agreement or compact with another State, or with a foreign power, or engage in war, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as will not admit of delay.
Article II Section 1 The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his office during the term of four years, and, together with the Vice-President, chosen for the same term, be elected as follows:
Each State shall appoint, in such manner as the leg- islature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress; but no Senator or Representative, or person holding an office of trust or profit under the United States, shall be appointed an elector.
The electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by ballot for two persons, of whom one at least shall not be an inhabitant of the same State with them- selves. And they shall make a list of all the persons voted for, and of the number of votes for each; which list they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of government of the United States, directed to the Presi- dent of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates, and the votes shall then be counted. The person having the greatest number of votes shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed; and if there be
THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES A-13
more than one who have such majority, and have an equal number of votes, then the House of Representa- tives shall immediately choose by ballot one of them for President; and if no person have a majority, then from the five highest on the list said house shall in like man- ner choose the President. But in choosing the President the votes shall be taken by States, the representation from each State having one vote; a quorum for this pur- pose shall consist of a member or members from two- thirds of the States, and a majority of all the States shall be necessary to a choice. In every case, after the choice of the President, the person having the greatest number of votes of the electors shall be the Vice-President. But if there should remain two or more who have equal votes, the Senate shall choose from them by ballot the Vice-President.
The Congress may determine the time of choosing the electors, and the day on which they shall give their votes; which day shall be the same throughout the United States.
No person except a natural-born citizen, or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of Presi- dent; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty-five years, and been fourteen years a resident within the United States.
In cases of the removal of the President from office or of his death, resignation, or inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said office, the same shall devolve on the Vice-President, and the Congress may by law provide for the case of removal, death, resignation, or inability, both of the President and Vice-President, declaring what officer shall then act as President, and such officer shall act accordingly, until the disability be removed, or a President shall be elected.
The President shall, at stated times, receive for his services a compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that period any other emolument from the United States, or any of them.
Before he enter on the execution of his office, he shall take the following oath or affirmation:—“I do sol- emnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of the President of the United States, and will to
the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.’’
Section 2 The President shall be commander in chief of the army and navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several States, when called into the actual service of the United States; he may require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices, and he shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.
He shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two- thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nom- inate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public minis- ters and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States, whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by law: but Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments.
The President shall have power to fill up all vacan- cies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session.
Section 3 He shall from time to time give to the Con- gress information of the state of the Union, and recom- mend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordi- nary occasions, convene both houses, or either of them, and in case of disagreement between them, with respect to the time of adjournment, he may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper; he shall receive ambassadors and other public ministers; he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and shall com- mission all the officers of the United States.
Section 4 The President, Vice-President and all civil officers of the United States shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and on conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.
A-14 APPENDIX II. DOCUMENTS
Article III Section 1 The judicial power of the United States shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The judges, both of the Supreme and infe- rior courts, shall hold their offices during good behav- ior, and shall, at stated times, receive for their services a compensation which shall not be diminished during their continuance in office.
Section 2 The judicial power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority; — to all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and con- suls; — to all cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdic- tion; — to controversies to which the United States shall be a party; — to controversies between two or more States; — between a State and citizens of another State; — between citizens of different States; — between citizens of the same State claiming lands under grants of differ- ent States, and between a State, or the citizens thereof, and foreign states, citizens or subjects.
In all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in which a State shall be party, the Supreme Court shall have original jurisdic- tion. In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations, as the Congress shall make.
The trial of all crimes, except in cases of impeach- ment, shall be by jury; and such trial shall be held in the State where said crimes shall have been committed; but when not committed within any State, the trial shall be at such place or places as the Congress may by Law have directed.
Section 3 Treason against the United States shall con- sist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.
The Congress shall have power to declare the pun- ishment of treason, but no attainder of treason shall
work corruption of blood, or forfeiture except during the life of the person attainted.
Article IV Section 1 Full faith and credit shall be given in each State to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general laws prescribe the manner in which such acts, records, and proceedings shall be proved, and the effect thereof.
Section 2 The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States.
A person charged in any State with treason, felony, or other crime, who shall flee from justice, and be found in another State, shall on demand of the executive authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having jurisdiction of the crime.
No Person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in conse- quence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.
Section 3 New States may be admitted by the Con- gress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the consent of the leg- islatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.
The Congress shall have power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the United States; and nothing in this Constitution shall be so con- strued as to prejudice any claims of the United States, or of any particular State.
Section 4 The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on application of the legislature, or of the executive (when the legislature cannot be convened), against domestic violence.
THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES A-15
Article V The Congress, whenever two-thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two-thirds of the several States, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitu- tion, when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States, or by conventions in three-fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress; provided that no amend- ments which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and that no State, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.
Article VI All debts contracted and engagements entered into, before the adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation.
This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties
made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.
The Senators and Representatives before men- tioned, and the members of the several State legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by oath or affirmation to support this Constitution; but no reli- gious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.
Article VII The ratification of the conventions of nine States shall be sufficient for the establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the same.
Done in convention by the unanimous consent of the States present, the seventeenth day of September in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-seven and of the Independence of the United States of America the twelfth. In witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names.
New Hampshire John Langdon Nicholas Gilman
Massachusetts Nathaniel Gorham Rufus King
Connecticut William Samuel Johnson Roger Sherman
New York Alexander Hamilton
New Jersey William Livingston David Brearley William Paterson Jonathan Dayton
Pennsylvania Benjamin Franklin Thomas Mifflin Robert Morris George Clymer Thomas FitzSimons Jared Ingersoll James Wilson Gouverneur Morris
Delaware George Read Gunning Bedford, Jr. John Dickinson Richard Bassett Jacob Broom
Maryland James McHenry Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer Daniel Carroll
Virginia John Blair James Madison, Jr.
North Carolina William Blount Richard Dobbs Spaight Hugh Williamson
South Carolina John Rutledge Charles Cotesworth Pinckney Charles Pinckney Pierce Butler
Georgia William Few Abraham Baldwin
GEORGE WASHINGTON President and Deputy from Virginia
A-16 APPENDIX II. DOCUMENTS
AMENDMENTS TO THE CONSTITUTION WITH ANNOTATIONS (including the six unratified amendments)
• IN THEIR EFFORT TO GAIN Antifederalists’ support for the Constitution, Federalists frequently pointed to the inclusion of Article 5, which provides an orderly method of amending the Constitution. In contrast, the Articles of Confederation, which were universally rec- ognized as seriously flawed, offered no means of amendment. For their part, Antifederalists argued that the amendment process was so “intricate” that one might as easily roll “sixes an hundred times in succes- sion” as change the Constitution.
The system for amendment laid out in the Consti- tution requires that two-thirds of both houses of Con- gress agree to a proposed amendment, which must then be ratified by three-quarters of the legislatures of the states. Alternatively, an amendment may be proposed by a convention called by the legislatures of two-thirds of the states. Since 1789, members of Congress have pro- posed thousands of amendments. Besides the seventeen amendments added since 1789, only the six “unratified” ones included here were approved by two-thirds of both houses and sent to the states for ratification.
Among the many amendments that never made it out of Congress have been proposals to declare dueling, divorce, and interracial marriage unconstitutional as well as proposals to establish a national university, to acknowl- edge the sovereignty of Jesus Christ, and to prohibit any person from possessing wealth in excess of $10 million.2
Among the issues facing Americans today that might lead to constitutional amendment are efforts to balance the federal budget, to limit the number of terms elected officials may serve, to limit access to or prohibit abortion, to establish English as the official language of the United States, and to prohibit flag burning. None of these proposed amendments has yet garnered enough support in Congress to be sent to the states for ratification.
Although the first ten amendments to the Consti- tution are commonly known as the Bill of Rights, only Amendments 1–8 actually provide guarantees of indi- vidual rights. Amendments 9 and 10 deal with the
structure of power within the constitutional system. The Bill of Rights was promised to appease Antifederalists who refused to ratify the Constitution without guaran- tees of individual liberties and limitations to federal power. After studying more than two hundred amend- ments recommended by the ratifying conventions of the states, Federalist James Madison presented a list of sev- enteen to Congress, which used Madison’s list as the foundation for the twelve amendments that were sent to the states for ratification. Ten of the twelve were adopted in 1791. The first on the list of twelve, known as the Reapportionment Amendment, was never adopted (see page A-20). The second proposed amendment was adopted in 1992 as Amendment 27 (see page A-31).
Amendment I Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to peti- tion the government for a redress of grievances.
• • •
• The First Amendment is a potent symbol for many Americans. Most are well aware of their rights to free speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion and their rights to assemble and to petition, even if they cannot cite the exact words of this amendment.
The First Amendment guarantee of freedom of religion has two clauses: the “free exercise clause,” which allows individuals to practice or not practice any religion, and the “establishment clause,” which prevents the federal government from discriminating against or favoring any particular religion. This clause was designed to create what Thomas Jefferson referred to as “a wall of separation between church and state.” In the 1960s, the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment prohibits prayer (see Engel v. Vitale, online) and Bible reading in public schools.
2Richard B. Bernstein, Amending America (New York: Times Books, 1993), 177–81.
AMENDMENTS TO THE CONSTITUTION WITH ANNOTATIONS A-17
Although the rights to free speech and freedom of the press are established in the First Amendment, it was not until the twentieth century that the Supreme Court began to explore the full meaning of these guar- antees. In 1919, the Court ruled in Schenck v. United States (online) that the government could suppress free expression only where it could cite a “clear and present danger.” In a decision that continues to raise controversies, the Court ruled in 1990, in Texas v. Johnson, that flag burning is a form of symbolic speech protected by the First Amendment.
Amendment II A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
• • •
• Fear of a standing army under the control of a hostile government made the Second Amendment an impor- tant part of the Bill of Rights. Advocates of gun owner- ship claim that the amendment prevents the government from regulating firearms. Proponents of gun control argue that the amendment is designed only to protect the right of the states to maintain militia units.
In 1939, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Miller that the Second Amendment did not protect the right of an individual to own a sawed-off shotgun, which it argued was not ordinary militia equipment. Since then, the Supreme Court has refused to hear Second Amendment cases, while lower courts have upheld firearms regulations. Several justices cur- rently on the bench seem to favor a narrow interpreta- tion of the Second Amendment, which would allow gun control legislation. The controversy over the impact of the Second Amendment on gun owners and gun control legislation will certainly continue.
Amendment III No soldier shall, in time of peace, be quartered in any house without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
• • •
• The Third Amendment was extremely important to the framers of the Constitution, but today it is nearly forgotten. American colonists were especially outraged that they were forced to quarter British troops in the years before and during the American Revolution. The philosophy of the Third Amendment has been viewed by some justices and scholars as the foundation of the modern constitutional right to privacy. One example of this can be found in Justice William O. Douglas’s opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut (online).
Amendment IV The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no war- rants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
• • •
• In the years before the Revolution, the houses, barns, stores, and warehouses of American colonists were ransacked by British authorities under “writs of assis- tance” or general warrants. The British, thus empow- ered, searched for seditious material or smuggled goods that could then be used as evidence against colonists who were charged with a crime only after the items were found. The first part of the Fourth Amend- ment protects citizens from “unreasonable” searches and seizures.
The Supreme Court has interpreted this protec- tion as well as the words search and seizure in differ- ent ways at different times. At one time, the Court did not recognize electronic eavesdropping as a form of search and seizure, though it does today. At times, an “unreasonable” search has been almost any search carried out without a warrant, but in the two decades before 1969, the Court sometimes sanctioned war- rantless searches that it considered reasonable based on “the total atmosphere of the case.”
The second part of the Fourth Amendment defines the procedure for issuing a search warrant and states the requirement of “probable cause,” which is generally viewed as evidence indicating that a suspect has committed an offense.
A-18 APPENDIX II. DOCUMENTS
The Fourth Amendment has been controversial because the Court has sometimes excluded evidence that has been seized in violation of constitutional standards. The justification is that excluding such evidence deters violations of the amendment, but doing so may allow a guilty person to escape punishment.
Amendment V No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or other- wise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indict- ment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.
• • •
• The Fifth Amendment protects people against govern- ment authority in the prosecution of criminal offenses. It prohibits the state, first, from charging a person with a serious crime without a grand jury hearing to decide whether there is sufficient evidence to support the charge and, second, from charging a person with the same crime twice. The best-known aspect of the Fifth Amendment is that it prevents a person from being “compelled . . . to be a witness against himself.” The last clause, the “takings clause,” limits the power of the government to seize property.
Although invoking the Fifth Amendment is popu- larly viewed as a confession of guilt, a person may be innocent yet still fear prosecution. For example, during the Red-baiting era of the late 1940s and 1950s, many people who had participated in legal activities that were associated with the Communist Party claimed the Fifth Amendment privilege rather than testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee because the mood of the times cast those activities in a negative light. Since “taking the Fifth” was viewed as an admis- sion of guilt, those people often lost their jobs or became unemployable. (See chapter 26.) Nonetheless, the right to protect oneself against self-incrimination plays an
important role in guarding against the collective power of the state.
Amendment VI In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the wit- nesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assis- tance of counsel for his defence.
• • •
• The original Constitution put few limits on the gov- ernment’s power to investigate, prosecute, and punish crime. This process was of great concern to the early Americans, however, and of the twenty-eight rights specified in the first eight amendments, fifteen have to do with it. Seven rights are specified in the Sixth Amendment. These include the right to a speedy trial, a public trial, a jury trial, a notice of accusation, con- frontation by opposing witnesses, testimony by favor- able witnesses, and the assistance of counsel.
Although this amendment originally guaranteed these rights only in cases involving the federal govern- ment, the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment began a process of applying the protections of the Bill of Rights to the states through court cases such as Gideon v. Wainwright (online).
Amendment VII In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury shall be other- wise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.
• • •
• This amendment guarantees people the same right to a trial by jury as was guaranteed by English common law in 1791. Under common law, in civil trials (those involving money damages) the role of the judge was to
AMENDMENTS TO THE CONSTITUTION WITH ANNOTATIONS A-19
settle questions of law and that of the jury was to settle questions of fact. The amendment does not specify the size of the jury or its role in a trial, however. The Supreme Court has generally held that those issues be determined by English common law of 1791, which stated that a jury consists of twelve people, that a trial must be conducted before a judge who instructs the jury on the law and advises it on facts, and that a ver- dict must be unanimous.
Amendment VIII Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
• • •
• The language used to guarantee the three rights in this amendment was inspired by the English Bill of Rights of 1689. The Supreme Court has not had a lot to say about “excessive fines.” In recent years, it has agreed that, despite the provision against “excessive bail,” persons who are believed to be dangerous to others can be held without bail even before they have been convicted.
Although opponents of the death penalty have not succeeded in using the Eighth Amendment to achieve the end of capital punishment, the clause regarding “cruel and unusual punishments” has been used to prohibit capital punishment in certain cases (see Furman v. Georgia, online) and to require improved conditions in prisons.
Amendment IX The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
• • •
• Some Federalists feared that inclusion of the Bill of Rights in the Constitution would allow later generations of interpreters to claim that the people had surrendered any rights not specifically enumerated there. To guard against this, Madison added language that became the Ninth Amendment. Interest in this heretofore largely ignored amendment revived in 1965 when it was used in a concurring opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut
(online). While Justice William O. Douglas called on the Third Amendment to support the right to privacy in deciding that case, Justice Arthur Goldberg, in the con- curring opinion, argued that the right to privacy regard- ing contraception was an unenumerated right that was protected by the Ninth Amendment.
In 1980, the Court ruled that the right of the press to attend a public trial was protected by the Ninth Amendment. While some scholars argue that modern judges cannot identify the unenumerated rights that the framers were trying to protect, others argue that the Ninth Amendment should be read as providing a constitutional “presumption of liberty” that allows people to act in any way that does not vio- late the rights of others.
Amendment X The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
• • •
• The Antifederalists were especially eager to see a “reserved powers clause” explicitly guaranteeing the states control over their internal affairs. Not surpris- ingly, the Tenth Amendment has been a frequent bat- tleground in the struggle over states’ rights and federal supremacy. Prior to the Civil War, the Democratic Republican Party and Jacksonian Democrats invoked the Tenth Amendment to prohibit the federal govern- ment from making decisions about whether people in individual states could own slaves. The Tenth Amend- ment was virtually suspended during Reconstruction following the Civil War. In 1883, however, the Supreme Court declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconsti- tutional on the grounds that it violated the Tenth Amendment. Business interests also called on the amendment to block efforts at federal regulation.
The Court was inconsistent over the next several decades as it attempted to resolve the tension between the restrictions of the Tenth Amendment and the powers the Constitution granted to Congress to regu- late interstate commerce and levy taxes. The Court upheld the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906), the Meat Inspection Acts (1906 and 1907), and the White
A-20 APPENDIX II. DOCUMENTS
Slave Traffic Act (1910), all of which affected the states, but struck down an act prohibiting interstate shipment of goods produced through child labor. Between 1934 and 1935, a number of New Deal pro- grams created by Franklin D. Roosevelt were declared unconstitutional on the grounds that they violated the Tenth Amendment. (See chapter 24.) As Roosevelt appointees changed the composition of the Court, the Tenth Amendment was declared to have no substan- tive meaning. Generally, the amendment is held to protect the rights of states to regulate internal matters such as local government, education, commerce, labor, and business, as well as matters involving fam- ilies such as marriage, divorce, and inheritance within the state.
Unratified Amendment Reapportionment Amendment (proposed by Congress September 25, 1789, along with the Bill of Rights)
After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Repre- sentative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hun- dred; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.
• • •
• If the Reapportionment Amendment had passed and remained in effect, the House of Representatives today would have more than 5,000 members rather than 435.
Amendment XI [Adopted 1798]
The judicial power of the United States shall not be con- strued to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by
citizens of another State, or by citizens or subjects of any foreign state.
• • •
• In 1793, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Alexan- der Chisholm, executor of the estate of a deceased South Carolina merchant. Chisholm was suing the state of Georgia because the merchant had never been paid for provisions he had supplied during the Revolu- tion. Many regarded this Court decision as an error that violated the intent of the Constitution.
Antifederalists had long feared a federal court sys- tem with the power to overrule a state court.
When the Constitution was being drafted, Federal- ists had assured worried Antifederalists that section 2 of Article 3, which allows federal courts to hear cases “between a State and citizens of another State,” did not mean that the federal courts were authorized to hear suits against a state by citizens of another state or a for- eign country. Antifederalists and many other Americans feared a powerful federal court system because they worried that it would become like the British courts of this period, which were accountable only to the monarch. Furthermore, Chisholm v. Georgia prompted a series of suits against state governments by creditors and suppliers who had made loans during the war.
In addition, state legislators and Congress feared that the shaky economies of the new states, as well as the country as a whole, would be destroyed, especially if loy- alists who had fled to other countries sought reimburse- ment for land and property that had been seized. The day after the Supreme Court announced its decision, a resolution proposing the Eleventh Amendment, which overturned the decision in Chisholm v. Georgia, was introduced in the U.S. Senate.
Amendment XII [Adopted 1804]
The electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same State with themselves; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President, and they shall
AMENDMENTS TO THE CONSTITUTION WITH ANNOTATIONS A-21
make distinct lists of all persons voted for as President, and of all persons voted for as Vice-President, and of the number of votes for each, which lists they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of government of the United States, directed to the President of the Sen- ate;—the President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted;—the person having the greatest number of votes for Presi- dent shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons hav- ing the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representa- tives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by States, the representation from each State having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a mem- ber or members from two-thirds of the States, and a majority of all the States shall be necessary to a choice. And if the House of Representatives shall not choose a President whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of March next follow- ing, then the Vice-President shall act as President, as in the case of the death or other constitutional disability of the President.
The person having the greatest number of votes as Vice-President shall be the Vice-President, if such num- ber be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed; and if no person have a majority, then from the two highest numbers on the list the Senate shall choose the Vice-President; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice. But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice- President of the United States.
• • •
• The framers of the Constitution disliked political par- ties and assumed that none would ever form. Under the original system, electors chosen by the states would each vote for two candidates. The candidate who won the most votes would become president, while the per- son who won the second-highest number of votes
would become vice president. Rivalries between Feder- alists and Antifederalists led to the formation of politi- cal parties, however, even before George Washington had left office. Though Washington was elected unani- mously in 1789 and 1792, the elections of 1796 and 1800 were procedural disasters because of party maneuvering (see chapters 9 and 10). In 1796, Federalist John Adams was chosen as president, and his great rival, the Antifederalist Thomas Jefferson (whose party was called the Republican Party), became his vice pres- ident. In 1800, all the electors cast their two votes as one of two party blocs. Jefferson and his fellow Repub- lican nominee, Aaron Burr, were tied with 73 votes each. The contest went to the House of Representatives, which finally elected Jefferson after 36 ballots. The Twelfth Amendment prevents these problems by requiring electors to vote separately for the president and vice president.
Unratified Amendment Titles of Nobility Amendment (proposed by Congress May 1, 1810)
If any citizen of the United States shall accept, claim, receive or retain any title of nobility or honor or shall, without the consent of Congress, accept and retain any present, pension, office or emolument of any kind what- ever, from any emperor, king, prince or foreign power, such person shall cease to be a citizen of the United States, and shall be incapable of holding any office of trust or profit under them or either of them.
• • •
• This amendment would have extended Article 1, sec- tion 9, clause 8 of the Constitution, which prevents the awarding of titles by the United States and the accep- tance of such awards from foreign powers without con- gressional consent. Historians speculate that general nervousness about the power of the emperor Napoleon, who was at that time extending France’s empire throughout Europe, may have prompted the proposal. Though it fell one vote short of ratification, Congress and the American people thought the proposal had been ratified, and it was included in many nineteenth- century editions of the Constitution.
A-22 APPENDIX II. DOCUMENTS
The Civil War and Reconstruction Amendments (Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments)
• In the four months between the election of Abraham Lincoln and his inauguration, more than 200 pro- posed constitutional amendments were presented to Congress as part of a desperate attempt to hold the rapidly dissolving Union together. Most of these were efforts to appease the southern states by protecting the right to own slaves or by disfranchising African Americans through constitutional amendment. None were able to win the votes required from Congress to send them to the states. The relatively innocuous Corwin Amendment seemed to be the only hope for preserving the Union by amending the Constitution.
The northern victors in the Civil War tried to restructure the Constitution just as the war had restructured the nation. Yet they were often divided in their goals. Some wanted to end slavery; others hoped for social and economic equality regardless of race; others hoped that extending the power of the ballot box to former slaves would help create a new political order. The debates over the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were bitter. Few of those who fought for these changes were satisfied with the amendments themselves; fewer still were satisfied with their interpretation. Although the amendments put an end to the legal status of slavery, it took nearly a hundred years after the amendments’ passage before most of the descendants of former slaves could begin to experience the economic, social, and political equality the amendments had been intended to provide.
Unratified Amendment Corwin Amendment (proposed by Congress March 2, 1861)
No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institu- tions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.
• • •
• Following the election of Abraham Lincoln, Congress scrambled to try to prevent the secession of the slave- holding states. House member Thomas Corwin of Ohio proposed the “unamendable” amendment in the hope that by protecting slavery where it existed, Con- gress would keep the southern states in the Union. Lin- coln indicated his support for the proposed amend- ment in his first inaugural address. Only Ohio and Maryland ratified the Corwin Amendment before it was forgotten.
Amendment XIII [Adopted 1865]
Section 1 Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2 Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
• • •
• Although President Lincoln had abolished slavery in the Confederacy with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, abolitionists wanted to rid the entire country of slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment did this in a clear and straightforward manner. In February 1865, when the proposal was approved by the House, the gallery of the House was newly opened to black Amer- icans who had a chance at last to see their government at work. Passage of the proposal was greeted by wild cheers from the gallery as well as tears on the House floor, where congressional representatives openly embraced one another.
The problem of ratification remained, however. The Union position was that the Confederate states were part of the country of thirty-six states. There- fore, twenty-seven states were needed to ratify the amendment. When Kentucky and Delaware rejected it, backers realized that without approval from at least four former Confederate states, the amendment would fail. Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson, made ratification of the Thirteenth Amend- ment a condition for southern states to rejoin the
Union. Under those terms, all the former Confederate states except Mississippi accepted the Thirteenth Amendment, and by the end of 1865 the amendment had become part of the Constitution and slavery had been prohibited in the United States.
Amendment XIV [Adopted 1868]
Section 1 All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citi- zens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Section 2 Representatives shall be appointed among the several States according to their respective num- bers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of Electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Rep- resentatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a State, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for par- ticipation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of rep- resentation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
Section 3 No person shall be a Senator or Representa- tive in Congress, or Elector of President and Vice-Presi- dent, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previ- ously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.
Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each house, remove such disability.
Section 4 The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in sup- pressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obli- gations, and claims shall be held illegal and void.
Section 5 The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
• • •
• Without Lincoln’s leadership in the reconstruction of the nation following the Civil War, it soon became clear that the Thirteenth Amendment needed addi- tional constitutional support. Less than a year after Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson was ready to bring the former Confederate states back into the Union with few changes in their governments or poli- tics. Anxious Republicans drafted the Fourteenth Amendment to prevent that from happening. The most important provisions of this complex amend- ment made all native-born or naturalized persons American citizens and prohibited states from abridg- ing the “privileges or immunities” of citizens; depriv- ing them of “life, liberty, or property, without due pro- cess of law”; and denying them “equal protection of the laws.” In essence, it made all ex-slaves citizens and protected the rights of all citizens against violation by their own state governments.
As occurred in the case of the Thirteenth Amend- ment, former Confederate states were forced to ratify the amendment as a condition of representation in the House and the Senate. The intentions of the Four- teenth Amendment, and how those intentions should be enforced, have been the most debated point of con- stitutional history. The terms due process and equal protection have been especially troublesome. Was the amendment designed to outlaw racial segregation? Or was the goal simply to prevent the leaders of the rebel- lious South from gaining political power?
AMENDMENTS TO THE CONSTITUTION WITH ANNOTATIONS A-23
A-24 APPENDIX II. DOCUMENTS
The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment hoped Article 2 would produce black voters who would increase the power of the Republican Party. The fed- eral government, however, never used its power to punish states for denying blacks their right to vote. Although the Fourteenth Amendment had an immedi- ate impact in giving black Americans citizenship, it did nothing to protect blacks from the vengeance of whites once Reconstruction ended. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment was often used to protect business inter- ests and strike down laws protecting workers on the grounds that the rights of “persons,” that is, corpora- tions, were protected by “due process.” More recently, the Fourteenth Amendment has been used to justify school desegregation and affirmative action programs, as well as to dismantle such programs.
Amendment XV [Adopted 1870]
Section 1 The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Section 2 The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
• • •
• The Fifteenth Amendment was the last major piece of Reconstruction legislation. While earlier Reconstruc- tion acts had already required black suffrage in the South, the Fifteenth Amendment extended black vot- ing rights to the entire nation. Some Republicans felt morally obligated to do away with the double stan- dard between North and South since many northern states had stubbornly refused to enfranchise blacks. Others believed that the freedman’s ballot required the extra protection of a constitutional amendment to shield it from white counterattack. But partisan advantage also played an important role in the amendment’s passage, since Republicans hoped that by giving the ballot to northern blacks, they could lessen their political vulnerability.
Many women’s rights advocates had fought for the amendment. They had felt betrayed by the inclu- sion of the word “male” in section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment and were further angered when the pro- posed Fifteenth Amendment failed to prohibit denial of the right to vote on the grounds of sex as well as “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” In this amendment, for the first time, the federal government claimed the power to regulate the franchise, or vote. It was also the first time the Constitution placed limits on the power of the states to regulate access to the franchise. Although ratified in 1870, the amendment was not enforced until the twentieth century.
The Progressive Amendments (Sixteenth–Nineteenth Amendments)
• No amendments were added to the Constitution between the Civil War and the Progressive Era. America was changing, however, in fundamental ways. The rapid industrialization of the United States after the Civil War led to many social and economic problems. Hundreds of amendments were proposed, but none received enough support in Congress to be sent to the states. Some scholars believe that regional differences and rivalries were so strong during this period that it was almost impossible to gain a consensus on a constitutional amendment. During the Progressive Era, however, the Constitution was amended four times in seven years.
Amendment XVI [Adopted 1913]
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
• • •
• Until passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, most of the money used to run the federal government came from customs duties and taxes on specific items, such as liq- uor. During the Civil War, the federal government
AMENDMENTS TO THE CONSTITUTION WITH ANNOTATIONS A-25
taxed incomes as an emergency measure. Pressure to enact an income tax came from those who were concerned about the growing gap between rich and poor in the United States. The Populist Party began campaigning for a graduated income tax in 1892, and support continued to grow. By 1909, thirty-three pro- posed income tax amendments had been presented in Congress, but lobbying by corporate and other special interests had defeated them all. In June 1909, the growing pressure for an income tax, which had been endorsed by Presidents Roosevelt and Taft, finally pushed an amendment through the Senate. The required thirty-six states had ratified the amendment by February 1913.
Amendment XVII [Adopted 1913]
Section 1 The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote. The electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of [voters for] the most numerous branch of the State legislatures.
Section 2 When vacancies happen in the representa- tion of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of such State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacan- cies: Provided, that the Legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by elec- tion as the Legislature may direct.
Section 3 This amendment shall not be so construed as to affect the election or term of any Senator chosen before it becomes valid as part of the Constitution.
• • •
• The framers of the Constitution saw the members of the House as the representatives of the people and the members of the Senate as the representatives of the states. Originally senators were to be chosen by the state legislators. According to reform advocates, however, the growth of private industry and transportation conglomerates during the Gilded Age had created a network of corruption in which wealth and power
were exchanged for influence and votes in the Senate. Senator Nelson Aldrich, who represented Rhode Island in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen- turies, for example, was known as “the senator from Standard Oil” because of his open support of special business interests.
Efforts to amend the Constitution to allow direct election of senators had begun in 1826, but since any proposal had to be approved by the Senate, reform seemed impossible. Progressives tried to gain influence in the Senate by instituting party caucuses and pri- mary elections, which gave citizens the chance to express their choice of a senator who could then be offi- cially elected by the state legislature. By 1910, fourteen of the country’s thirty senators received popular votes through a state primary before the state legislature made its selection. Despairing of getting a proposal through the Senate, supporters of a direct election amendment had begun in 1893 to seek a convention of representatives from two-thirds of the states to propose an amendment that could then be ratified. By 1905, thirty-one of forty-five states had endorsed such an amendment. Finally, in 1911, despite extraordinary opposition, a proposed amendment passed the Senate; by 1913, it had been ratified.
Amendment XVIII [Adopted 1919; repealed 1933 by Amendment XXI]
Section 1 After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intox- icating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof, for beverage purposes, is hereby prohibited.
Section 2 The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appro- priate legislation.
Section 3 This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as provided by the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission thereof to the States by the Congress.
• • •
A-26 APPENDIX II. DOCUMENTS
• The Prohibition Party, formed in 1869, began calling for a constitutional amendment to outlaw alcoholic beverages in 1872. A prohibition amendment was first proposed in the Senate in 1876 and was revived eigh- teen times before 1913. Between 1913 and 1919, another thirty-nine attempts were made to prohibit liquor in the United States through a constitutional amendment. Prohibition became a key element of the progressive agenda as reformers linked alcohol and drunkenness to numerous social problems, including the corruption of immigrant voters. While opponents of such an amend- ment argued that it was undemocratic, supporters claimed that their efforts had widespread public sup- port. The admission of twelve “dry” western states to the Union in the early twentieth century and the spirit of sacrifice during World War I laid the groundwork for passage and ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919. Opponents added a time limit to the amend- ment in the hope that they could thus block ratification, but this effort failed. (See also Amendment XXI.)
Amendment XIX [Adopted 1920]
Section 1 The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
Section 2 Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
• • •
• Advocates of women’s rights tried and failed to link woman suffrage to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Nonetheless, the effort for woman suf- frage continued. Between 1878 and 1912, at least one and sometimes as many as four proposed amend- ments were introduced in Congress each year to grant women the right to vote. While over time women won very limited voting rights in some states, at both the state and federal levels opposition to an amendment for woman suffrage remained very strong. President Woodrow Wilson and other officials felt that the fed- eral government should not interfere with the power of the states in this matter. Others worried that grant- ing suffrage to women would encourage ethnic
minorities to exercise their own right to vote. And many were concerned that giving women the vote would result in their abandoning traditional gender roles. In 1919, following a protracted and often bitter campaign of protest in which women went on hunger strikes and chained themselves to fences, an amend- ment was introduced with the backing of President Wilson. It narrowly passed the Senate (after efforts to limit the suffrage to white women failed) and was adopted in 1920 after Tennessee became the thirty- sixth state to ratify it.
Unratified Amendment Child Labor Amendment (proposed by Congress June 2, 1924)
Section 1 The Congress shall have power to limit, regulate, and prohibit the labor of persons under eighteen years of age.
Section 2 The power of the several States is unim- paired by this article except that the operation of State laws shall be suspended to the extent necessary to give effect to legislation enacted by Congress.
• • •
• Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, alarm over the condition of child workers grew. Opponents of child labor argued that children worked in dangerous and unhealthy conditions, that they took jobs from adult workers, that they depressed wages in certain industries, and that states that allowed child labor had an economic advantage over those that did not. Defenders of child labor claimed that children provided needed income in many fami- lies, that working at a young age developed character, and that the effort to prohibit the practice constituted an invasion of family privacy.
In 1916, Congress passed a law that made it ille- gal to sell goods made by children through interstate commerce. The Supreme Court, however, ruled that the law violated the limits on the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce. Congress then tried to penalize industries that used child labor by taxing such goods. This measure was also thrown out by the courts. In response, reformers set out to amend the
AMENDMENTS TO THE CONSTITUTION WITH ANNOTATIONS A-27
Constitution. The proposed amendment was ratified by twenty-eight states, but by 1925, thirteen states had rejected it. Passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1941, made the amendment irrelevant.
Amendment XX [Adopted 1933]
Section 1 The terms of the President and Vice- President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January, and the terms of Senators and Representatives at noon on the 3rd day of January, of the years in which such terms would have ended if this article had not been rati- fied; and the terms of their successors shall then begin.
Section 2 The Congress shall assemble at least once in every year, and such meeting shall begin at noon on the 3rd day of January, unless they shall by law appoint a different day.
Section 3 If, at the time fixed for the beginning of the term of the President, the President-elect shall have died, the Vice-President-elect shall become President. If a President shall not have been chosen before the time fixed for the beginning of his term, or if the President-elect shall have failed to qualify, then the Vice-President-elect shall act as President until a President shall have quali- fied; and the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President-elect nor a Vice-President- elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice-President shall have qualified.
Section 4 The Congress may by law provide for the case of the death of any of the persons from whom the House of Representatives may choose a President when- ever the right of choice shall have devolved upon them, and for the case of the death of any of the persons from whom the Senate may choose a Vice-President when- ever the right of choice shall have devolved upon them.
Section 5 Sections 1 and 2 shall take effect on the 15th day of October following the ratification of this article.
Section 6 This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Consti- tution by the Legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years from the date of its submission.
• • •
• Until 1933, presidents took office on March 4. Since elections are held in early November and electoral votes are counted in mid-December, this meant that more than three months passed between the time a new president was elected and when he took office. Moving the inauguration to January shortened the transition period and allowed Congress to begin its term closer to the time of the president’s inauguration. Although this seems like a minor change, an amend- ment was required because the Constitution specifies terms of office. This amendment also deals with ques- tions of succession in the event that a president- or vice president-elect dies before assuming office. Section 3 also clarifies a method for resolving a deadlock in the electoral college.
Amendment XXI [Adopted 1933]
Section 1 The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.
Section 2 The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or Possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in viola- tion of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited.
Section 3 This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Consti- tution by conventions in the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission thereof to the States by the Congress.
• • •
• Widespread violation of the Volstead Act, the law enacted to enforce prohibition, made the United States a nation of lawbreakers. Prohibition caused more problems than it solved by encouraging crime, bribery, and corruption. Further, a coalition of liquor and beer
A-28 APPENDIX II. DOCUMENTS
manufacturers, personal liberty advocates, and con- stitutional scholars joined forces to challenge the amendment. By 1929, thirty proposed repeal amend- ments had been introduced in Congress, and the Dem- ocratic Party made repeal part of its platform in the 1932 presidential campaign. The Twenty-first Amend- ment was proposed in February 1933 and ratified less than a year later. The failure of the effort to enforce prohibition through a constitutional amendment has often been cited by opponents to subsequent efforts to shape public virtue and private morality.
Amendment XXII [Adopted 1951]
Section 1 No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other per- son was elected President shall be elected to the office of President more than once. But this article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not pre- vent any person who may be holding the office of Presi- dent, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
Section 2 This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Consti- tution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years from the date of its submission to the States by the Congress.
• • •
• George Washington’s refusal to seek a third term of office set a precedent that stood until 1912, when for- mer president Theodore Roosevelt sought, without success, another term as an independent candidate. Democrat Franklin Roosevelt was the only president to seek and win a fourth term, though he did so amid great controversy. Roosevelt died in April 1945, a few months after the beginning of his fourth term. In 1946, Republicans won control of the House and the Senate, and early in 1947 a proposal for an amendment to
limit future presidents to two four-year terms was offered to the states for ratification. Democratic critics of the Twenty-second Amendment charged that it was a partisan posthumous jab at Roosevelt.
Since the Twenty-second Amendment was adopted, however, the only presidents who might have been able to seek a third term, had it not existed, were Republicans Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, and Democrat Bill Clinton. Since 1826, Congress has entertained 160 proposed amend- ments to limit the president to one six-year term. Such amendments have been backed by fifteen presidents, including Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.
Amendment XXIII [Adopted 1961]
Section 1 The District constituting the seat of Govern- ment of the United States shall appoint in such manner as the Congress may direct: A number of electors of Presi- dent and Vice-President equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives in Congress to which the District would be entitled if it were a State, but in no event more than the least populous State; they shall be in addi- tion to those appointed by the States, but they shall be considered for the purposes of the election of President and Vice-President, to be electors appointed by a State; and they shall meet in the District and perform such duties as provided by the twelfth article of amendment.
Section 2 The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
• • •
• When Washington, D.C., was established as a federal district, no one expected that a significant number of people would make it their permanent and primary residence. A proposal to allow citizens of the district to vote in presidential elections was approved by Congress in June 1960 and was ratified on March 29, 1961.
Amendment XXIV [Adopted 1964]
Section 1 The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or
AMENDMENTS TO THE CONSTITUTION WITH ANNOTATIONS A-29
Vice-President, for electors for President or Vice-President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.
Section 2 The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
• • •
• In the colonial and Revolutionary eras, financial inde- pendence was seen as necessary to political indepen- dence, and the poll tax was used as a requirement for voting. By the twentieth century, however, the poll tax was used mostly to bar poor people, especially south- ern blacks, from voting. While conservatives com- plained that the amendment interfered with states’ rights, liberals thought that the amendment did not go far enough because it barred the poll tax only in national elections and not in state or local elections. The amendment was ratified in 1964, however, and two years later, the Supreme Court ruled that poll taxes in state and local elections also violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Amendment XXV [Adopted 1967]
Section 1 In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice- President shall become President.
Section 2 Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice-President, the President shall nominate a Vice- President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.
Section 3 Whenever the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, and until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary, such powers and duties shall be discharged by the Vice-President as Acting President.
Section 4 Whenever the Vice-President and a major- ity of either the principal officers of the executive
departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representa- tives their written declaration that the President is un - able to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice-President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice-President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department[s] or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Represen- tatives their written declaration that the President is un - able to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in ses- sion. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice-President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; oth- erwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.
• • •
• The framers of the Constitution established the office of vice president because someone was needed to preside over the Senate. The first president to die in office was William Henry Harrison, in 1841. Vice President John Tyler had himself sworn in as presi- dent, setting a precedent that was followed when seven later presidents died in office. The assassination of President James A. Garfield in 1881 posed a new problem, however. After he was shot, the president was incapacitated for two months before he died; he was unable to lead the country, while his vice presi- dent, Chester A. Arthur, was unable to assume leader- ship. Efforts to resolve questions of succession in the event of a presidential disability thus began with the death of Garfield.
A-30 APPENDIX II. DOCUMENTS
In 1963, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy galvanized Congress to action. Vice President Lyndon Johnson was a chain smoker with a history of heart trouble. According to the 1947 Presi- dential Succession Act, the two men who stood in line to succeed him were the seventy-two-year-old Speaker of the House and the eighty-six-year-old president of the Senate. There were serious concerns that any of these men might become incapacitated while serving as chief executive. The first time the Twenty-fifth Amendment was used, however, was not in the case of presidential death or illness, but during the Watergate crisis. When Vice President Spiro T. Agnew was forced to resign following allegations of bribery and tax vio- lations, President Richard M. Nixon appointed House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford vice president. Ford became president following Nixon’s resignation eight months later and named Nelson A. Rockefeller as his vice president. Thus, for more than two years, the two highest offices in the country were held by people who had not been elected to them.
Amendment XXVI [Adopted 1971]
Section 1 The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.
Section 2 The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
• • •
• Efforts to lower the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen began during World War II. Recognizing that those who were old enough to fight a war should have some say in the government policies that involved them in the war, Presidents Eisenhower, Johnson, and Nixon endorsed the idea. In 1970, the combined pres- sure of the antiwar movement and the demographic pressure of the baby boom generation led to a Voting Rights Act lowering the voting age in federal, state, and local elections.
In Oregon v. Mitchell (1970), the state of Ore- gon challenged the right of Congress to determine the
age at which people could vote in state or local elec- tions. The Supreme Court agreed with Oregon. Since the Voting Rights Act was ruled unconstitutional, the Constitution had to be amended to allow passage of a law that would lower the voting age. The amend- ment was ratified in a little more than three months, making it the most rapidly ratified amendment in U.S. history.
Unratified Amendment Equal Rights Amendment (proposed by Congress March 22, 1972; seven-year deadline for ratification extended to June 30, 1982)
Section 1 Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
Section 2 The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
Section 3 This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.
• • •
• In 1923, soon after women had won the right to vote, Alice Paul, a leading activist in the woman suffrage movement, proposed an amendment requiring equal treatment of men and women. Opponents of the pro- posal argued that such an amendment would invali- date laws that protected women and would make women subject to the military draft. After the 1964 Civil Rights Act was adopted, protective workplace legislation was removed anyway.
The renewal of the women’s movement, as a by- product of the civil rights and antiwar movements, led to a revival of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in Congress. Disagreements over language held up con- gressional passage of the proposed amendment, but on March 22, 1972, the Senate approved the ERA by a vote of 84 to 8, and it was sent to the states. Six states ratified the amendment within two days, and by the middle of 1973 the amendment seemed well on its way to adoption, with thirty of the needed thirty-eight states having ratified it. In the mid-1970s, however, a
AMENDMENTS TO THE CONSTITUTION WITH ANNOTATIONS A-31
powerful “Stop ERA” campaign developed. The cam- paign portrayed the ERA as a threat to “family values” and traditional relationships between men and women. Although thirty-five states ultimately ratified the ERA, five of those state legislatures voted to rescind ratification, and the amendment was never adopted.
Unratified Amendment D.C. Statehood Amendment (proposed by Congress August 22, 1978)
Section 1 For purposes of representation in the Congress, election of the President and Vice-President, and article V of this Constitution, the District constitut- ing the seat of government of the United States shall be treated as though it were a State.
Section 2 The exercise of the rights and powers con- ferred under this article shall be by the people of the District constituting the seat of government, and as shall be provided by Congress.
Section 3 The twenty-third article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.
Section 4 This article shall be inoperative, unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Consti- tution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several states within seven years from the date of its submission.
• • •
• The 1961 ratification of the Twenty-third Amendment, giving residents of the District of Columbia the right to vote for a president and vice president, inspired an effort to give residents of the district full voting rights. In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson appointed a mayor and city council; in 1971, D.C. residents were allowed to name a nonvoting delegate to the House; and in 1981, residents were allowed to elect the mayor and city council. Congress retained the right to overrule laws that might affect commuters, the height of federal buildings, and selection of judges and prosecutors. The district’s nonvoting delegate to Congress, Walter Faunt- roy, lobbied fiercely for a congressional amendment
granting statehood to the district. In 1978, a proposed amendment was approved and sent to the states. A number of states quickly ratified the amendment, but, like the ERA, the D.C. Statehood Amendment ran into trouble.
Opponents argued that section 2 created a sepa- rate category of “nominal” statehood. They argued that the federal district should be eliminated and that the territory should be reabsorbed into the state of Mary- land. Although these theoretical arguments were strong, some scholars believe that racist attitudes toward the predominantly black population of the city were also a factor leading to the defeat of the amendment.
Amendment XXVII [Adopted 1992]
No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.
• • •
• While the Twenty-sixth Amendment was the most rapidly ratified amendment in U.S. history, the Twenty-seventh Amendment had the longest journey to ratification. First proposed by James Madison in 1789 as part of the package that included the Bill of Rights, this amendment had been ratified by only six states by 1791. In 1873, however, it was ratified by Ohio to protest a massive retroactive salary increase by the federal government. Unlike later proposed amend- ments, this one came with no time limit on ratification.
In the early 1980s, Gregory D. Watson, a Univer- sity of Texas economics major, discovered the “lost” amendment and began a single-handed campaign to get state legislators to introduce it for ratification. In 1983, it was accepted by Maine. In 1984, it passed the Colorado legislature. Ratifications trickled in slowly until May 1992, when Michigan and New Jersey became the thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth states, respectively, to ratify. This amendment prevents mem- bers of Congress from raising their own salaries with- out giving voters a chance to vote them out of office before they can benefit from the raises.
Facts and Figures: Government, Economy, and Demographics
APPENDIX III
PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS
A-32
Year Candidates Parties Popular Vote
Percentage of Popular
Vote Electoral
Vote
Percentage of Voter
Participation
1789 GEORGE WASHINGTON (Va.)* John Adams Others
69 34 35
1792 GEORGE WASHINGTON (Va.) John Adams George Clinton Others
132 77 50 5
1796 JOHN ADAMS (Mass.) Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Pinckney Aaron Burr Others
Federalist Democratic Republican Federalist Dem. Rep.
71 68
59 30 48
1800 THOMAS JEFFERSON (Va.) Aaron Burr John Adams C. C. Pinckney John Jay
Dem. Rep. Dem. Rep. Federalist Federalist Federalist
73 73 65 64 1
1804 THOMAS JEFFERSON (Va.) C. C. Pinckney
Dem. Rep. Federalist
162 14
1808 JAMES MADISON (Va.) C. C. Pinckney George Clinton
Dem. Rep. Federalist Dem. Rep.
122 47 6
1812 JAMES MADISON (Va.) De Witt Clinton
Dem. Rep. Federalist
128 89
1816 JAMES MONROE (Va.) Rufus King
Dem. Rep. Federalist
183 34
1820 JAMES MONROE (Va.) John Quincy Adams
Dem. Rep. Dem. Rep.
231 1
*State of residence when elected president.
PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS A-33
Year Candidates Parties Popular Vote
Percentage of Popular
Vote Electoral
Vote
Percentage of Voter
Participation
1824 JOHN Q. ADAMS (Mass.) Andrew Jackson William H. Crawford Henry Clay
Dem. Rep. Dem. Rep. Dem. Rep. Dem. Rep.
108,740 153,544 46,618 47,136
30.5 43.1 13.1 13.2
84 99 41 37
26.9
1828 ANDREW JACKSON (Tenn.) John Quincy Adams
Democratic National Republican
647,286 508,064
56.0 44.0
178 83
57.6
1832 ANDREW JACKSON (Tenn.) Henry Clay
John Floyd William Wirt
Democratic National Republican Independent Anti-Mason
687,502 530,189
33,108
55.0 42.4
2.6
219 49
11 7
55.4
1836 MARTIN VAN BUREN (N.Y.) W. H. Harrison Hugh L. White Daniel Webster W. P. Mangum
Democratic Whig Whig Whig Independent
765,483
739,795
50.9
49.1
170 73 26 14 11
57.8
1840 WILLIAM H. HARRISON (Ohio) Martin Van Buren J. G. Birney
Whig Democratic Liberty
1,274,624 1,127,781
7,069
53.1 46.9
234 60
—
78.0
1844 JAMES K. POLK (Tenn.) Henry Clay J. G. Birney
Democratic Whig Liberty
1,338,464 1,300,097
62,300
49.6 48.1 2.3
170 105
—
78.9
1848 ZACHARY TAYLOR (La.) Lewis Cass Martin Van Buren
Whig Democratic Free-Soil
1,360,099 1,220,544
291,263
47.4 42.5 10.1
163 127
—
72.7
1852 FRANKLIN PIERCE (N.H.) Winfield Scott John P. Hale
Democratic Whig Free-Soil
1,601,117 1,385,453
155,825
50.9 44.1 5.0
254 42
—
69.6
1856 JAMES BUCHANAN (Pa.) John C. Frémont Millard Fillmore
Democratic Republican American
1,832,995 1,339,932
871,731
45.3 33.1 21.6
174 114 8
78.9
1860 ABRAHAM LINCOLN (Ill.) Stephen A. Douglas John C. Breckinridge John Bell
Republican Democratic Democratic Union
1,866,452 1,375,157
847,953 590,631
39.8 29.4 18.1 12.6
180 12 72 39
81.2
1864 ABRAHAM LINCOLN (Ill.) George B. McClellan
Republican Democratic
2,213,665 1,805,237
55.1 44.9
212 21
73.8
1868 ULYSSES S. GRANT (Ill.) Horatio Seymour
Republican Democratic
3,012,833 2,703,249
52.7 47.3
214 80
78.1
A-34 APPENDIX III. FACTS AND FIGURES: GOVERNMENT, ECONOMY, AND DEMOGRAPHICS
Year Candidates Parties Popular Vote
Percentage of Popular
Vote Electoral
Vote
Percentage of Voter
Participation
1872 ULYSSES S. GRANT (Ill.) Horace Greeley
Republican Democratic; Liberal Republican
3,597,132 2,834,125
55.6 43.9
286 66
71.3
1876 RUTHERFORD B. HAYES (Ohio) Samuel J. Tilden
Republican Democratic
4,036,298 4,288,590
48.0 51.0
185 184
81.8
1880 JAMES A. GARFIELD (Ohio) Winfield S. Hancock
Republican Democratic
4,454,416 4,444,952
48.5 48.1
214 155
79.4
1884 GROVER CLEVELAND (N.Y.) James G. Blaine
Democratic Republican
4,874,986 4,851,981
48.5 48.3
219 182
77.5
1888 BENJAMIN HARRISON (Ind.) Grover Cleveland
Republican Democratic
5,439,853 5,540,309
47.9 48.6
233 168
79.3
1892 GROVER CLEVELAND (N.Y.) Benjamin Harrison James B. Weaver
Democratic Republican People’s
5,555,426 5,182,690 1,029,846
46.1 43.0 8.5
277 145 22
74.7
1896 WILLIAM McKINLEY (Ohio) William J. Bryan
Republican Democratic- People’s
7,104,779 6,502,925
51.1 47.7
271 176
79.3
1900 WILLIAM McKINLEY (Ohio) William J. Bryan
Republican Dem.- Populist
7,207,923 6,358,133
51.7 45.5
292 155
73.2
1904 THEODORE ROOSEVELT (N.Y.) Alton B. Parker Eugene V. Debs
Republican Democratic Socialist
7,623,486 5,077,911 402,283
57.9 37.6 3.0
336 140
—
65.2
1908 WILLIAM H. TAFT (Ohio) William J. Bryan Eugene V. Debs
Republican Democratic Socialist
7,678,908 6,409,104
420,793
51.6 43.1 2.8
321 162
—
65.4
1912 WOODROW WILSON (N.J.) Theodore Roosevelt William H. Taft Eugene V. Debs
Democratic Progressive Republican Socialist
6,293,454 4,119,538 3,484,980
900,672
41.9 27.4 23.2 6.1
435 88 8
—
58.8
1916 WOODROW WILSON (N.J.) Charles E. Hughes A. L. Benson
Democratic Republican Socialist
9,129,606 8,538,221
585,113
49.4 46.2 3.2
277 254
—
61.6
1920 WARREN G. HARDING (Ohio) James M. Cox Eugene V. Debs
Republican Democratic Socialist
16,143,407 9,130,328
919,799
60.5 34.2 3.4
404 127
—
49.2
1924 CALVIN COOLIDGE (Mass.) John W. Davis Robert M. La Follette
Republican Democratic Progressive
15,725,016 8,386,503 4,822,856
54.0 28.8 16.6
382 136 13
48.9
PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS A-35
Year Candidates Parties Popular Vote
Percentage of Popular
Vote Electoral
Vote
Percentage of Voter
Participation
1928 HERBERT HOOVER (Calif.) Alfred E. Smith Norman Thomas William Z. Foster
Republican Democratic Socialist Communist
21,391,381 15,016,443
881,951 102,991
57.4 40.3 2.3 0.3
444 87 — —
56.9
1932 FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT (N.Y.) Herbert Hoover Norman Thomas
Democratic
Republican Socialist
22,821,857
15,761,841 881,951
57.4
39.7 2.2
472
59 —
56.9
1936 FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT (N.Y.) Alfred M. Landon William Lemke
Democratic
Republican Union
27,751,597
16,679,583 882,479
60.8
36.5 1.9
523
8 —
61.0
1940 FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT (N.Y.) Wendell Willkie
Democratic
Republican
27,244,160
22,305,198
54.8
44.8
449
82
62.5
1944 FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT (N.Y.) Thomas E. Dewey
Democratic
Republican
25,602,504
22,006,285
53.5
46.0
432
99
55.9
1948 HARRY S. TRUMAN (Mo.) Thomas E. Dewey J. Strom Thurmond
Henry A. Wallace
Democratic Republican States’- Rights Democratic Progressive
24,105,695 21,969,170 1,169,021
1,156,103
49.5 45.1 2.4
2.4
303 189 38
—
53.0
1952 DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER (N.Y.) Adlai Stevenson
Republican
Democratic
33,936,252
27,314,992
55.1
44.4
442
89
63.3
1956 DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER (N.Y.) Adlai Stevenson Other
Republican
Democratic —
35,575,420
26,033,066 —
57.6
42.1
457
73 1
60.6
1960 JOHN F. KENNEDY (Mass.) Richard M. Nixon Other
Democratic Republican —
34,227,096 34,108,546
—
49.9 49.6
303 219 15
62.8
1964 LYNDON B. JOHNSON (Texas) Barry M. Goldwater
Democratic Republican
43,126,506 27,176,799
61.1 38.5
486 52
61.7
1968 RICHARD M. NIXON (N.Y.) Hubert H. Humphrey George Wallace
Republican Democratic American Indep.
31,770,237 31,270,533
9,906,141
43.4 42.7 13.5
301 191 46
60.9
A-36 APPENDIX III. FACTS AND FIGURES: GOVERNMENT, ECONOMY, AND DEMOGRAPHICS
Year Candidates Parties Popular Vote
Percentage of Popular
Vote Electoral
Vote
Percentage of Voter
Participation
1972 RICHARD M. NIXON (N.Y.) George S. McGovern Other
Republican Democratic —
47,169,911 29,170,383
—
60.7 37.5
520 17 1
55.2
1976 JIMMY CARTER (Ga.) Gerald R. Ford Other
Democratic Republican —
40,830,763 39,147,793 1,575,459
50.0 48.0 2.1
297 240
—
53.5
1980 RONALD REAGAN (Calif.) Jimmy Carter John B. Anderson Ed Clark
Republican Democratic Independent Libertarian
43,901,812 35,483,820
5,719,722 921,188
51.0 41.0
7.0 1.1
489 49 — —
54.0
1984 RONALD REAGAN (Calif.) Walter Mondale
Republican Democratic
54,455,075 37,577,185
59.0 41.0
525 13
53.1
1988 GEORGE H. W. BUSH (Texas) Michael S. Dukakis
Republican Democratic
47,946,422 41,016,429
54.0 46.0
426 112
50.2
1992 WILLIAM J. CLINTON (Ark.) George H. W. Bush H. Ross Perot
Democratic Republican Independent
44,908,254 39,102,282 19,721,433
43.0 38.0 19.0
370 168
—
55.9
1996 WILLIAM J. CLINTON (Ark.) Robert Dole H. Ross Perot
Democratic Republican Independent
47,401,185 39,197,469 8,085,294
49.2 40.7 8.4
379 159
—
49.0
2000 GEORGE W. BUSH (Texas) Albert Gore Ralph Nader Patrick J. Buchanan
Republican Democratic Green Party —
50,456,062 50,996,862 2,858,843
438,760
47.8 48.4 2.7 0.4
271 267
— —
51.2
2004 GEORGE W. BUSH (Texas) John F. Kerry Other
Republican Democratic —
61,872,711 58,894,584
1,582,185
50.7 48.3
1.3
286 252
—
60.3
2008 BARACK OBAMA (Illinois) John McCain
Democratic Republican
69,456,897 59,934,314
52.9 45.7
365 173
56.8
2012 BARACK OBAMA (Illinois) Willard Mitt Romney
Democratic Republican
65,899,660 60,932,152
51.1 47.2
332 152
—
PRESIDENTS, VICE PRESIDENTS, AND SECRETARIES OF STATE A-37
The Washington Administration (1789–1797) Vice President
Secretary of State
John Adams
Thomas Jefferson Edmund Randolph Timothy Pickering
1789–1797
1789–1793 1794–1795 1795–1797
The John Adams Administration (1797–1801) Vice President
Secretary of State
Thomas Jefferson
Timothy Pickering John Marshall
1797–1801
1797–1800 1800–1801
The Jefferson Administration (1801–1809) Vice President
Secretary of State
Aaron Burr George Clinton
James Madison
1801–1805 1805–1809
1801–1809
The Madison Administration (1809–1817) Vice President
Secretary of State
George Clinton Elbridge Gerry
Robert Smith James Monroe
1809–1813 1813–1817
1809–1811 1811–1817
The Monroe Administration (1817–1825) Vice President
Secretary of State
Daniel Tompkins
John Quincy Adams
1817–1825
1817–1825
The John Quincy Adams Administration (1825–1829) Vice President
Secretary of State
John C. Calhoun
Henry Clay
1825–1829
1825–1829
The Jackson Administration (1829–1837) Vice President
Secretary of State
John C. Calhoun Martin Van Buren
Martin Van Buren Edward Livingston Louis McLane John Forsyth
1829–1833 1833–1837
1829–1831 1831–1833 1833–1834 1834–1837
The Van Buren Administration (1837–1841) Vice President
Secretary of State
Richard M. Johnson
John Forsyth
1837–1841
1837–1841
The William Harrison Administration (1841) Vice President
Secretary of State
John Tyler
Daniel Webster
1841
1841
PRESIDENTS, V ICE PRESIDENTS, AND SECRETARIES OF STATE
The Tyler Administration (1841–1845) Vice President
Secretary of State
None
Daniel Webster Hugh S. Legaré Abel P. Upshur John C. Calhoun
1841–1843 1843 1843–1844 1844–1845
The Polk Administration (1845–1849) Vice President
Secretary of State
George M. Dallas
James Buchanan
1845–1849
1845–1849
The Taylor Administration (1849–1850) Vice President
Secretary of State
Millard Fillmore
John M. Clayton
1849–1850
1849–1850
The Fillmore Administration (1850–1853) Vice President
Secretary of State
None
Daniel Webster Edward Everett
1850–1852 1852–1853
The Pierce Administration (1853–1857) Vice President
Secretary of State
William R. King
William L. Marcy
1853–1857
1853–1857
The Buchanan Administration (1857–1861) Vice President
Secretary of State
John C. Breckinridge
Lewis Cass Jeremiah S. Black
1857–1861
1857–1860 1860–1861
The Lincoln Administration (1861–1865) Vice President
Secretary of State
Hannibal Hamlin Andrew Johnson
William H. Seward
1861–1865 1865
1861–1865
The Andrew Johnson Administration (1865–1869) Vice President
Secretary of State
None
William H. Seward 1865–1869
The Grant Administration (1869–1877) Vice President
Secretary of State
Schuyler Colfax Henry Wilson
Elihu B. Washburne Hamilton Fish
1869–1873 1873–1877
1869 1869–1877
The Hayes Administration (1877–1881) Vice President
Secretary of State
William A. Wheeler
William M. Evarts
1877–1881
1877–1881
A-38 APPENDIX III. FACTS AND FIGURES: GOVERNMENT, ECONOMY, AND DEMOGRAPHICS
The Garfield Administration (1881) Vice President
Secretary of State
Chester A. Arthur
James G. Blaine
1881
1881
The Arthur Administration (1881–1885) Vice President
Secretary of State
None
F. T. Frelinghuysen 1881–1885
The Cleveland Administration (1885–1889) Vice President
Secretary of State
Thomas A. Hendricks
Thomas F. Bayard
1885–1889
1885–1889
The Benjamin Harrison Administration (1889–1893) Vice President
Secretary of State
Levi P. Morton
James G. Blaine John W. Foster
1889–1893
1889–1892 1892–1893
The Cleveland Administration (1893–1897) Vice President
Secretary of State
Adlai E. Stevenson
Walter Q. Gresham Richard Olney
1893–1897
1893–1895 1895–1897
The McKinley Administration (1897–1901) Vice President
Secretary of State
Garret A. Hobart Theodore Roosevelt
John Sherman William R. Day John Hay
1897–1901 1901
1897–1898 1898 1898–1901
The Theodore Roosevelt Administration (1901–1909) Vice President
Secretary of State
Charles Fairbanks
John Hay Elihu Root Robert Bacon
1905–1909
1901–1905 1905–1909 1909
The Taft Administration (1909–1913) Vice President
Secretary of State
James S. Sherman
Philander C. Knox
1909–1913
1909–1913
The Wilson Administration (1913–1921) Vice President
Secretary of State
Thomas R. Marshall
William J. Bryan Robert Lansing Bainbridge Colby
1913–1921
1913–1915 1915–1920 1920–1921
The Harding Administration (1921–1923) Vice President
Secretary of State
Calvin Coolidge
Charles E. Hughes
1921–1923
1921–1923
The Coolidge Administration (1923–1929) Vice President
Secretary of State
Charles G. Dawes
Charles E. Hughes Frank B. Kellogg
1925–1929
1923–1925 1925–1929
The Hoover Administration (1929–1933) Vice President
Secretary of State
Charles Curtis
Henry L. Stimson
1929–1933
1929–1933
The Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration (1933–1945) Vice President
Secretary of State
John Nance Garner Henry A. Wallace Harry S. Truman
Cordell Hull Edward R. Stettinius Jr.
1933–1941 1941–1945 1945
1933–1944 1944–1945
The Truman Administration (1945–1953) Vice President
Secretary of State
Alben W. Barkley
Edward R. Stettinius Jr. James F. Byrnes George C. Marshall Dean G. Acheson
1949–1953
1945
1945–1947 1947–1949 1949–1953
The Eisenhower Administration (1953–1961) Vice President
Secretary of State
Richard M. Nixon
John Foster Dulles Christian A. Herter
1953–1961
1953–1959 1959–1961
The Kennedy Administration (1961–1963) Vice President
Secretary of State
Lyndon B. Johnson
Dean Rusk
1961–1963
1961–1963
The Lyndon Johnson Administration (1963–1969) Vice President
Secretary of State
Hubert H. Humphrey
Dean Rusk
1965–1969
1963–1969
The Nixon Administration (1969–1974) Vice President
Secretary of State
Spiro T. Agnew Gerald R. Ford
William P. Rogers Henry A. Kissinger
1969–1973 1973–1974
1969–1973 1973–1974
The Ford Administration (1974–1977) Vice President
Secretary of State
Nelson A. Rockefeller
Henry A. Kissinger
1974–1977
1974–1977
SUPREME COURT JUSTICES A-39
The Carter Administration (1977–1981) Vice President
Secretary of State
Walter F. Mondale
Cyrus R. Vance Edmund Muskie
1977–1981
1977–1980 1980–1981
The Reagan Administration (1981–1989) Vice President
Secretary of State
George H. W. Bush
Alexander M. Haig George P. Shultz
1981–1989
1981–1982 1982–1989
The George H. W. Bush Administration (1989–1993) Vice President
Secretary of State
J. Danforth Quayle
James A. Baker III
Lawrence S. Eagleburger
1989–1993
1989–1992
1992–1993
The Clinton Administration (1993–2001) Vice President
Secretary of State
Albert Gore
Warren M. Christopher Madeleine K. Albright
1993–2001
1993–1997
1997–2001
The George W. Bush Administration (2001–2009) Vice President
Secretary of State
Richard Cheney
Colin Powell Condoleezza Rice
2001–2009
2001–2005 2005–2009
The Obama Administration (2009– ) Vice President
Secretary of State
Joseph Biden
Hillary Clinton John F. Kerry
2009–
2009–2013 2013–
SUPREME COURT JUSTICES
Name Service Appointed by Name Service Appointed by
John Jay* James Wilson John Blair John Rutledge William Cushing James Iredell Thomas Johnson William Paterson John Rutledge†
Samuel Chase Oliver Ellsworth Bushrod Washington Alfred Moore John Marshall William Johnson Henry B. Livingston Thomas Todd Gabriel Duval Joseph Story Smith Thompson Robert Trimble John McLean Henry Baldwin James M. Wayne
1789–1795 1789–1798 1789–1796 1790–1791 1790–1810 1790–1799 1791–1793 1793–1806 1795 1796–1811 1796–1799 1798–1829 1799–1804 1801–1835 1804–1834 1806–1823 1807–1826 1811–1836 1811–1845 1823–1843 1826–1828 1829–1861 1830–1844 1835–1867
Washington Washington Washington Washington Washington Washington Washington Washington Washington Washington Washington J. Adams J. Adams J. Adams Jefferson Jefferson Jefferson Madison Madison Monroe J. Q. Adams Jackson Jackson Jackson
Roger B. Taney Philip P. Barbour John Catron John McKinley Peter V. Daniel Samuel Nelson Levi Woodbury Robert C. Grier Benjamin R. Curtis John A. Campbell Nathan Clifford Noah H. Swayne Samuel F. Miller David Davis Stephen J. Field Salmon P. Chase William Strong Joseph P. Bradley Ward Hunt Morrison R. Waite John M. Harlan William B. Woods Stanley Matthews Horace Gray
1836–1864 1836–1841 1837–1865 1837–1852 1841–1860 1845–1872 1845–1851 1846–1870 1851–1857 1853–1861 1858–1881 1862–1881 1862–1890 1862–1877 1863–1897 1864–1873 1870–1880 1870–1892 1873–1882 1874–1888 1877–1911 1880–1887 1881–1889 1882–1902
Jackson Jackson Van Buren Van Buren Van Buren Tyler Polk Polk Fillmore Pierce Buchanan Lincoln Lincoln Lincoln Lincoln Lincoln Grant Grant Grant Grant Hayes Hayes Garfield Arthur
*Chief Justices appear in bold type. †Acting Chief Justice; Senate refused to confirm appointment.
A-40 APPENDIX III. FACTS AND FIGURES: GOVERNMENT, ECONOMY, AND DEMOGRAPHICS
Name Service Appointed by Name Service Appointed by
Samuel Blatchford Lucius Q. C. Lamar Melville W. Fuller David J. Brewer Henry B. Brown George Shiras Howell E. Jackson Edward D. White Rufus W. Peckham Joseph McKenna Oliver W. Holmes William R. Day William H. Moody Horace H. Lurton Charles E. Hughes Willis Van Devanter Edward D. White Joseph R. Lamar Mahlon Pitney James C. McReynolds Louis D. Brandeis John H. Clarke William H. Taft George Sutherland Pierce Butler Edward T. Sanford Harlan F. Stone Charles E. Hughes Owen J. Roberts Benjamin N. Cardozo Hugo L. Black Stanley F. Reed Felix Frankfurter William O. Douglas Frank Murphy
1882–1893 1888–1893 1888–1910 1889–1910 1890–1906 1892–1903 1893–1895 1894–1910 1896–1909 1898–1925 1902–1932 1903–1922 1906–1910 1910–1914 1910–1916 1910–1937 1910–1921 1911–1916 1912–1922 1914–1941 1916–1939 1916–1922 1921–1930 1922–1938 1923–1939 1923–1930 1925–1941 1930–1941 1930–1945 1932–1938 1937–1971 1938–1957 1939–1962 1939–1975 1940–1949
Arthur Cleveland Cleveland B. Harrison B. Harrison B. Harrison B. Harrison Cleveland Cleveland McKinley T. Roosevelt T. Roosevelt T. Roosevelt Taft Taft Taft Taft Taft Taft Wilson Wilson Wilson Harding Harding Harding Harding Coolidge Hoover Hoover Hoover F. Roosevelt F. Roosevelt F. Roosevelt F. Roosevelt F. Roosevelt
Harlan F. Stone James F. Byrnes Robert H. Jackson Wiley B. Rutledge Harold H. Burton Frederick M. Vinson Tom C. Clark Sherman Minton Earl Warren John Marshall Harlan William J. Brennan Jr. Charles E. Whittaker Potter Stewart Byron R. White Arthur J. Goldberg Abe Fortas Thurgood Marshall Warren E. Burger Harry A. Blackmun Lewis F. Powell Jr. William H. Rehnquist John Paul Stevens Sandra Day O’Connor William H. Rehnquist Antonin Scalia Anthony M. Kennedy David H. Souter Clarence Thomas Ruth Bader Ginsburg Stephen Breyer John G. Roberts Jr. Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. Sonia Sotomayor Elena Kagan
1941–1946 1941–1942 1941–1954 1943–1949 1945–1958 1946–1953 1949–1967 1949–1956 1953–1969 1955–1971 1956–1990 1957–1962 1958–1981 1962–1993 1962–1965 1965–1969 1967–1991 1969–1986 1970–1994 1972–1988 1972–1986 1975– 1981–2006 1986–2005 1986– 1988– 1990–2009 1991– 1993– 1994– 2005– 2006–
2009– 2010–
F. Roosevelt F. Roosevelt F. Roosevelt F. Roosevelt Truman Truman Truman Truman Eisenhower Eisenhower Eisenhower Eisenhower Eisenhower Kennedy Kennedy L. Johnson L. Johnson Nixon Nixon Nixon Nixon Ford Reagan Reagan Reagan Reagan G. H. W. Bush G. H. W. Bush Clinton Clinton G. W. Bush G. W. Bush
Obama Obama
FEDERAL SPENDING AND THE ECONOMY, 1790–2009 A-41
FEDERAL SPENDING AND THE ECONOMY, 1790–2009
Gross Domestic Product (in billions)
Foreign Trade (in billions) Exports Imports
Federal Surplus/Deficit (in billions)Year
Federal Budget (in billions)
Federal Debt (in billions)
1790 4.03 0.43 0.50 0.09 0.0032 1.64 1800 7.40 1.10 1.41 0.17 0.0010 1.29 1810 10.6 1.02 1.29 0.12 0.0187 0.81 1820 14.4 1.44 1.52 0.37 –0.0078 1.87 1830 22.2 1.62 1.55 0.33 0.2120 1.07 1840 31.5 2.66 2.16 0.48 –0.0977 0.08 1850 49.6 2.95 3.45 0.78 0.0788 1.24 1860 82.1 7.56 6.84 1.19 –0.1340 1.23 1870 112 6.54 6.70 4.50 1.47 34.8 1880 192 15.8 14.1 4.96 1.22 38.9 1890 319 19.3 17.5 6.73 1.80 23.3 1900 423 30.8 19.1 10.7 0.95 26.7 1910 534 30.6 26.2 11.1 –0.29 17.6 1920 688 67.4 45.0 49.8 2.27 189 1930 893 39.3 34.3 33.7 7.22 159 1940 1,167 46.4 85.6 104 –41.50 495 1950 2,006 94.3 82.1 294 –14.30 257 1960 2,831 145 125 629 2.10 291 1970 4,270 270 246 983 –14.30 381 1980 5,839 470 513 1,369 –171 909 1990 8,034 545 686 1,832 –323 3,206 2000 11,226 1,071 1,449 2,041 270 5,269 2009 12,703 1,571 1,946 3,186 –1,280 11,876
NOTE: All figures are in 2005 dollars. SOURCE: Historical Statistics of the U.S., 1789–1945 (1949), Statistical Abstract of the U.S., 1965 (1965), Statistical Abstract of the U.S., 1990 (1990), Statistical Abstract of the U.S., 2011 (2011), and Louis Johnston and Samuel H. Williamson, “What Was the U.S. GDP Then?” MeasuringWorth, 2011, www.measuringworth.org/usgdp.
A-42 APPENDIX III. FACTS AND FIGURES: GOVERNMENT, ECONOMY, AND DEMOGRAPHICS
POPULATION GROWTH, 1630–2010
SOURCE: Historical Statistics of the U.S. (1960), Historical Statistics of the U.S., Colonial Times to 1970 (1975), Statistical Abstract of the U.S., 1996 (1996), Statistical Abstract of the U.S., 2003 (2003), and United States Census (2010).
Year
1630 1640 1650 1660 1670 1680 1690 1700 1710 1720 1730 1740 1750 1760 1770 1780 1790 1800 1810 1820
Population
4,600 26,600 50,400 75,100
111,900 151,500 210,400 250,900 331,700 466,200 629,400 905,600
1,170,800 1,593,600 2,148,100 2,780,400 3,929,214 5,308,483 7,239,881 9,638,453
Percent Increase
— 473.3 89.1 49.0 49.1 35.4 38.9 19.3 32.2 40.5 35.0 43.9 30.0 36.1 34.8 29.4 41.3 35.1 36.4 33.1
Year
1830 1840 1850 1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
Population
12,866,020 17,069,453 23,191,876 31,443,321 39,818,449 50,155,783 62,947,714 75,994,575 91,972,266
105,710,620 122,775,046 131,669,275 150,697,361 179,323,175 203,302,031 226,542,199 248,718,302 281,422,509 308,745,538
Percent Increase
33.5 32.7 35.9 35.6 26.6 26.0 25.5 20.7 21.0 14.9 16.1 7.2 14.5 19.0 13.4 11.4 9.8 13.1 9.7
SOURCE: Data from Historical Statistics of the U.S., Colonial Times to 1970 (1975) and Statistical Abstract of the U.S., 2007 (2007).
BIRTHRATE, 1820–2007
10
18 20
20
30
40
50
60
18 40
18 60
18 80
19 00
19 20
19 40
19 60
19 80
19 90
20 00
20 07
B ir
th s
pe r
th ou
sa nd
55 52
44
40
32
28
19 24
16 1714 14.3
Baby Boom
LIFE EXPECTANCY A-43
SOURCE: Data from Historical Statistics of the U.S., Colonial Times to 1970 (1975) and Statistical Abstract of the U.S., 2007 (2007).
L IFE EXPECTANCY, 1900–2007
Females Males
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
A ge
1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 1990 20072000
48 46
55 54
61
73
67
77
70
79
72
80
74
80
75
65
A-44 APPENDIX III. FACTS AND FIGURES: GOVERNMENT, ECONOMY, AND DEMOGRAPHICS
SOURCE: Data from Historical Statistics of the U.S., Colonial Times to 1970 (1975), Statistical Abstract of the U.S., 1999 (1999), and Statistical Abstract of the U.S., 2011 (2011).
MAJOR TRENDS IN IMMIGRATION, 1820–2010
Northwestern Europe
Western Hemisphere
Other immigration: Africa, Australia, Oceania
Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe
Asia Total immigration
200
400
600
800
1,000
1,200
18 20
18 30
18 40
18 50
18 60
18 70
18 80
18 90
19 00
19 10
19 20
19 30
19 40
19 50
19 60
19 70
19 80
19 90
20 00
20 10
Im m
ig ra
nt s
pe r
de ca
de (t
ho us
an ds
)
Glossary
A Note to Students: For definitions and discussions of words not included here, consult a dictionary and the book’s index, which will point you to topics covered at greater length in the book.
Acoma pueblo revolt Revolt against the Spaniards by Indians living at the Acoma pueblo in 1599. Juan de Oñate violently suppressed the uprising, but the Indians revolted again later that year, after which many Spanish settlers returned to Mexico.
Algonquian Indians People who inhabited the coastal plain of present-day Virginia, near the Chesapeake Bay, when English colonists first settled the region.
Alien and Sedition Acts 1798 laws passed to suppress political dissent. The Sedition Act criminalized conspir- acy and criticism of government leaders. The two Alien Acts extended the waiting period for citizenship and empowered the president to deport or imprison without trial any foreigner deemed a danger.
American Colonization Society An organization dedicated to sending freed slaves and other black Americans to Liberia in West Africa. Although some African Americans cooperated with the move- ment, others campaigned against segregation and discrimination.
American system The practice of manufacturing and then assembling interchangeable parts. A system that spread quickly across American industries, the use of standardized parts allowed American manufacturers to employ cheap unskilled workers.
American Temperance Society Organization founded in 1826 by Lyman Beecher that linked drink- ing with poverty, idleness, ill-health, and violence. Temperance lecturers traveled the country gaining converts to the cause. The temperance movement had considerable success, contributing to a sharp drop in American alcohol consumption.
Antifederalists Opponents of ratification of the Con- stitution. Antifederalists feared that a powerful and distant central government would be out of touch with the needs
of citizens. They also complained that the Constitution failed to guarantee individual liberties in a bill of rights.
antinomians Individuals who believed that Christians could be saved by faith alone and did not need to act in accordance with God’s law as set forth in the Bible. Puritan leaders considered this belief to be a heresy.
Archaic Indians Hunting and gathering peoples that descended from Paleo-Indians and dominated the Americas from 10,000 BP to between 4000 and 3000 BP, approximately.
Articles of Confederation The written document defining the structure of the government from 1781 to 1788 under which the union was a confederation of equal states, with no executive and limited powers, ex- isting mainly to foster a common defense.
Bacon’s Rebellion An unsuccessful rebellion against the colonial government in 1676, led by frontier settler Nathaniel Bacon, that arose when increased violence between Indians and colonists pushing westward was met with government refusal to protect settlers or allow them to settle Indian lands.
Barbados Colonized in the 1630s, this island in the British West Indies became an enormous sugar pro- ducer and a source of wealth for England. The island’s African slaves quickly became a majority of the island’s population despite the deadliness of their work.
battle of Antietam Battle fought in Maryland on September 17, 1862, between the Union forces of George McClellan and Confederate troops of Robert E. Lee. The battle, a Union victory that left 6,000 dead and 17,000 wounded, was the bloodiest day of the war.
battle of Bull Run (Manassas) First major battle of the Civil War, fought at a railroad junction in north- ern Virginia on July 21, 1861. The Union suffered a so- bering defeat, while the Confederates felt affirmed in their superiority and the inevitability of Confederate nationhood.
battle of Bunker Hill Second battle of the Revolu- tionary War, on June 16, 1775, involving a massive British attack on New England militia units on a hill
G-1
G-2 GLOSSARY
Beringia The land bridge between Siberia and Alaska that was exposed by the Wisconsin glaciation, allowing people to migrate into the Western Hemisphere.
Bill of Rights The first ten amendments to the Consti- tution, officially ratified by 1791. The First through Eighth Amendments dealt with individual liberties, and the Ninth and Tenth concerned the boundary between federal and state authority.
Black Death A disease that in the mid-fourteenth cen- tury killed about a third of the European population and left a legacy of increased food and resources for the survivors as well as a sense of a world in precarious balance.
“Bleeding Kansas” Term for the bloody struggle between proslavery and antislavery factions in Kansas following its organization in the fall of 1854. Corrupt election tactics led to a proslavery victory, but free-soil Kansans established a rival territorial government, and violence quickly ensued.
Boston Massacre March 1770 incident in Boston in which British soldiers fired on an American crowd, killing five. The Boston Massacre became a rallying point for colonists who increasingly saw the British government as tyrannical and illegitimate.
burial mounds Earthen mounds constructed by ancient American peoples, especially throughout the gigantic drainage of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, after about 2500 BP and often used to bury important leaders and to enact major ceremonies.
Cahokia The largest ceremonial site in ancient North America located on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River across from present-day St. Louis where thou- sands of inhabitants built hundreds of earthen mounds between about AD 700 and AD 1400.
California gold rush Mining rush initiated by James Marshall’s discovery of gold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in 1848. The hope of striking it rich drew over 250,000 aspiring miners to California between 1849 and 1852 and accelerated the push for statehood.
Calvinism Christian doctrine of Swiss Protestant theo- logian John Calvin. Its chief tenet was predestination, the idea that God had determined which human souls would receive eternal salvation. Despite this, Calvinism promoted strict discipline in daily and religious life.
chiefdom Hierarchical social organization headed by a chief. Archaeologists posit that the Woodland cultures were organized into chiefdoms because the construction
facing Boston. The militiamen finally yielded the hill, but not before inflicting heavy casualties on the British.
battle of Gettysburg Battle fought at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (July 1–3, 1863), between Union forces under General Meade and Confederate forces under General Lee. The Union emerged victorious, and Lee lost more than one-third of his men. Together with Vicksburg, Gettysburg marked a major turning point in the Civil War.
battle of Long Island First major engagement of the new Continental army, defending against 45,000 British troops newly arrived on western Long Island (today Brooklyn). The Continentals retreated, with high casu- alties and many taken prisoner.
battle of New Orleans The final battle in the War of 1812, fought and won by General Andrew Jackson and his militiamen against the much larger British army in New Orleans. The celebrated battle made no difference since the peace had already been negotiated.
battle of Oriskany A punishing defeat for Americans in a ravine named Oriskany near Fort Stanwix in New York in August 1777. German American militia- men aided by allied Oneida warriors were ambushed by Mohawk and Seneca Indians, and 500 on the revolu- tionary side were killed.
battle of Saratoga A multistage battle in New York ending with the decisive defeat and surrender of British general John Burgoyne on October 17, 1777. France was convinced by this victory to throw its official sup- port to the American side in the war.
battle of Shiloh Battle at Shiloh Church, Tennessee, on April 6–7, 1862, between Albert Sidney Johnston’s Confederate forces and Ulysses S. Grant’s Union army. The Union army ultimately prevailed, though at great cost to both sides. Shiloh ruined the Confederacy’s bid to control the war in the West.
battle of Tippecanoe An attack on Shawnee Indians at Prophetstown on the Tippecanoe River in 1811 by American forces headed by William Henry Harrison, Indiana’s territorial governor. The Prophet Tenskwatawa fled with his followers. Tecumseh, his brother, deep- ened his resolve to make war on the United States.
battle of Yorktown October 1781 battle that sealed American victory in the Revolutionary War. American troops and a French fleet trapped the British army un- der the command of General Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia.
GLOSSARY G-3
Virginian George Washington, commander in chief, had the task of turning local militias and untrained vol- unteers into a disciplined army.
contraband of war General Benjamin F. Butler’s term for runaway slaves, who were considered confiscated property of war, not fugitives, and put to work in the Union army. This policy proved to be a step on the road to emancipation.
cotton kingdom Term for the South that reflected the dominance of cotton in the southern economy. Cotton was particularly important in the tier of states from South Carolina west to Texas. Cotton cultivation was the key factor in the growth of slavery.
Creek War Part of the War of 1812 involving the Creek nation in Mississippi Territory and Tennessee militia- men. General Andrew Jackson’s forces gained victory at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814, forcing the Creeks to sign away much of their land.
creoles Children born to Spanish parents in the New World who, with the peninsulares, made up the tiny portion of the population at the top of the colonial social hierarchy.
Declaration of Independence A document con- taining philosophical principles and a list of grievances that declared separation from Britain. Adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, it ended a period of intense debate with moderates still hoping to reconcile with Britain.
Declaratory Act 1766 law issued by Parliament to as- sert Parliament’s unassailable right to legislate for its British colonies “in all cases whatsoever,” putting Americans on notice that the simultaneous repeal of the Stamp Act changed nothing in the imperial powers of Britain.
Democrats Political party that evolved out of the Democratic Republicans after 1834. Strongest in the South and West, the Democrats embraced Andrew Jackson’s vision of limited government, expanded polit- ical participation for white men, and the promotion of an ethic of individualism.
Dred Scott decision 1857 Supreme Court decision that ruled the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. The Court ruled against slave Dred Scott, who claimed travels with his master into free states made him and his family free. The decision also denied the federal gov- ernment the right to exclude slavery in the territories and declared that African Americans were not citizens.
of their characteristic burial mounds likely required one person having command over the labor of others.
chivalry The South’s romantic ideal of male-female rela- tionships. Chivalry’s underlying assumptions about the weakness of white women and the protective authority of men resembled the paternalistic defense of slavery.
Clovis point Distinctively shaped spearhead used by Paleo-Indians and named for the place in New Mexico where the points were first excavated.
Coercive (Intolerable) Acts Four British acts of 1774 meant to punish Massachusetts for the destruction of three shiploads of tea. Known in America as the Intolerable Acts, they led to open rebellion in the northern colonies.
Columbian exchange The transatlantic exchange of goods, people, and ideas that began when Columbus arrived in the Caribbean, ending the age-old separation of the hemispheres.
committees of correspondence A communications network established among towns in Massachusetts and also among colonial capital towns in 1772–1773 to provide for rapid dissemination of news about impor- tant political developments. These committees politi- cized ordinary townspeople, sparking a revolutionary language of rights and duties.
Common Sense Pamphlet written by Thomas Paine in 1776 that laid out the case for independence. In it, Paine rejected monarchy, advocating its replacement with republican government based on the consent of the people. The pamphlet influenced public opinion throughout the colonies.
Compromise of 1850 Laws passed in 1850 meant to resolve the dispute over the spread of slavery in the ter- ritories. Key elements included the admission of California as a free state and the Fugitive Slave Act. The Compromise soon unraveled.
Confederate States of America Government formed by Lower South states on February 7, 1861, fol- lowing their secession from the Union. Secessionists argued that the election of a Republican to the presi- dency imperiled slavery and the South no longer had political protection within the Union.
conquistadors Term, literally meaning “conqueror,” that refers to the Spanish explorers and soldiers who conquered lands in the New World.
Continental army The army created in June 1775 by the Second Continental Congress to oppose the British.
G-4 GLOSSARY
crisis precipitated by the Coercive Acts. The congress produced a declaration of rights and an agreement to impose a limited boycott of trade with Britain.
Fort Sumter Union fort on an island at the entrance to Charleston harbor in South Carolina. After Confederate leaders learned President Lincoln in- tended to resupply Fort Sumter, Confederate forces attacked the fort on April 12, 1861, thus marking the start of the Civil War.
free black An African American who was not enslaved. Southern whites worried about the increasing numbers of free blacks. In the 1820s and 1830s, state legislatures stemmed the growth of the free black population and shrank the liberty of free blacks.
free labor Term referring to work conducted free from constraint and according to the laborer’s own inclina- tions and will. The ideal of free labor lay at the heart of the North’s argument that slavery should not be extended into the western territories.
Fugitive Slave Act A law included in the Compromise of 1850 to help attract southern support for the legisla- tive package. Its strict provisions for capturing runaway slaves provoked outrage in the North and intensified antislavery sentiment in the region.
gradual emancipation A law passed in five northern states that balanced civil rights against property rights by providing a multistage process for freeing slaves, distinguishing persons already alive from those not yet born and providing benchmark dates when freedom would arrive for each group.
Great Awakening Wave of revivals that began in Massachusetts and spread through the colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. The movement emphasized vital reli- gious faith and personal choice. It was characterized by large, open-air meetings at which emotional sermons were given by itinerant preachers.
Halfway Covenant A Puritan compromise established in Massachusetts in 1662 that allowed the unconverted children of the “visible saints” to become “halfway” members of the church and baptize their own children even though they were not full members of the church themselves.
Haitian Revolution The 1791–1804 conflict involv- ing diverse Haitian participants and armies from three European countries. At its end, Haiti became a free, in- dependent, black-run country. The Haitian Revolution fueled fears of slave insurrections in the United States.
Emancipation Proclamation President Lincoln’s proclamation issued on January 1, 1863, declaring all slaves in Confederate-controlled territory free. The proclamation made the Civil War a war to free slaves though its limitations — exemptions for loyal border states and Union-occupied areas of the Confederacy — made some ridicule the act.
Embargo Act of 1807 Act of Congress that prohib- ited U.S. ships from traveling to foreign ports and effectively banned overseas trade in an attempt to deter Britain from halting U.S. ships at sea. The embargo caused grave hardships for Americans engaged in over- seas commerce.
encomienda A system for governing used during the Reconquest and in New Spain. It allowed the Spanish encomendero, or “owner” of a town, to collect tribute from the town in return for providing law and order and encouraging “his” Indians to convert to Christianity.
English Reformation Reform effort initiated by King Henry VIII that included banning the Catholic Church and declaring the English monarch head of the new Church of England but little change in doctrine. Henry’s primary concern was consolidating his political power.
Enlightenment An eighteenth-century philosophical movement that emphasized the use of reason to reeval- uate previously accepted doctrines and traditions. Enlightenment ideas encouraged examination of the world and independence of mind.
Erie Canal Canal finished in 1825, covering 350 miles between Albany and Buffalo and linking the port of New York City with the entire Great Lakes region. The canal turned New York City into the country’s premier commercial city.
Federalists One of the two dominant political groups that emerged in the 1790s. Federalist leaders supported Britain in foreign policy and commercial interests at home. Prominent Federalists included George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams.
feme covert Legal doctrine grounded in British common law that held that a wife’s civic life was subsumed by her husband’s. Married women lacked independence to own property, make contracts, or keep wages earned. The doctrine shaped women’s status in the early Republic.
First Continental Congress September 1774 gath- ering of colonial delegates in Philadelphia to discuss the
GLOSSARY G-5
reimbursement for slaves removed by the British after the Revolution.
Kansas-Nebraska Act 1854 law that divided Indian territory into Kansas and Nebraska, repealed the Missouri Compromise, and left the new territories to decide the issue of slavery on the basis of popular sover- eignty. The law led to bloody fighting in Kansas.
King Cotton diplomacy Confederate diplomatic strategy built on the hope that European nations starv- ing for cotton would break the Union blockade and recognize the Confederacy. This strategy failed as Europeans held stores of surplus cotton and developed new sources outside the South.
King Philip’s War War begun by Metacomet (King Philip), in which the Wampanoag Indians attacked co- lonial settlements in western Massachusetts in 1675. Colonists responded by attacking the Wampanoag and other tribes they believed conspired with them. The colonists prevailed in the brutal war.
Ladies Association A women’s organization in Philadelphia that collected substantial money dona- tions in 1780 to reward Continental soldiers for their service. A woman leader authored a declaration, “The Sentiments of an American Woman,” to justify women’s unexpected entry into political life.
Lewis and Clark expedition 1804–1806 expedition led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark that ex- plored the trans-Mississippi West for the U.S. govern- ment. The expedition’s mission was scientific, political, and geographic.
Lincoln-Douglas debates Series of debates on the issue of slavery and freedom between Democrat Stephen Douglas and Republican Abraham Lincoln, held as part of the 1858 Illinois senatorial race. Douglas won the election, but the debates helped catapult Lincoln to national attention.
Lone Star Republic Independent republic, also known as the Republic of Texas, that was established by a rebellion of Texans against Mexican rule. The victory at San Jacinto in April 1836 helped ensure the region’s independence and recognition by the United States.
Louisiana Purchase 1803 purchase of French ter- ritory west of the Mississippi River that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada. The Louisiana Purchase nearly doubled the size of the United States and opened the way for future American expansion west.
Hartford Convention A secret meeting of New England Federalist politicians held in late 1814 to dis- cuss constitutional changes to reduce the South’s politi- cal power and thus help block policies that injured northern commercial interests.
headright Fifty acres of free land granted by the Virginia Company to planters for each indentured ser- vant they purchased.
House of Burgesses Organ of government in colo- nial Virginia made up of an assembly of representatives elected by the colony’s male inhabitants. It was estab- lished by the Virginia Company and continued by the crown after Virginia was made a royal colony.
hunter-gatherer A way of life that involved hunting game and gathering food from naturally occurring sources, as opposed to engaging in agriculture and ani- mal husbandry. Archaic Indians and their descendants survived in North America for centuries as hunter- gatherers.
impressment A British naval practice of seizing sailors on American ships under the claim they were deserters from the British navy. Some 2,500 British and American men were taken by force into service, a grievance that helped propel the United States to declare war on Britain in 1812.
Incan empire A region under the control of the Incas and their emperor, Atahualpa, that stretched along the western coast of South America and contained more than nine million people and a wealth in gold and silver.
indentured servants Poor immigrants who signed contracts known as indentures, in which they commit- ted to four to seven years of labor in North America in exchange for transportation from England, as well as food and shelter after they arrived in the colony.
Indian Removal Act of 1830 Act that directed the mandatory relocation of eastern tribes to territory west of the Mississippi. Jackson insisted his goal was to save the Indians. Indians resisted the controversial act, but in the end most were forced to comply.
Jamestown The first permanent English settlement in North America, established in 1607 by colonists spon- sored by the Virginia Company.
Jay Treaty 1795 treaty between the United States and Britain, negotiated by John Jay. It secured limited trad- ing rights in the West Indies but failed to ensure timely removal of British forces from western forts and
G-6 GLOSSARY
a free state. The compromise also established Missouri’s southern border as the permanent line dividing slave from free states.
Mormons Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints founded by Joseph Smith in 1830. Most Americans deemed the Mormons heretics. After Smith’s death at the hands of an angry mob in 1844, Brigham Young moved the people to Utah in 1846.
natural increase Growth of population through re- production, as opposed to immigration. In the eigh- teenth century, natural increase accounted for about three-fourths of the American colonies’ population growth.
Navigation Acts English laws passed in the 1650s and 1660s requiring that English colonial goods be shipped through English ports on English ships in order to ben- efit English merchants, shippers, and seamen.
New Jersey Plan Alternative plan drafted by delegates from small states, retaining the confederation’s single- house congress with one vote per state. It shared with the Virginia Plan enhanced congressional powers, in- cluding the right to tax, regulate trade, and use force to stop popular uprisings.
new Negroes Term given to newly arrived African slaves in the colonies. Planters usually maintained only a small number of recent arrivals among their slaves at any given time in order to accelerate their acculturation to their new circumstances.
New Netherland Dutch colony on Manhattan Island. New Amsterdam was its capital and colony headquarters.
New Spain Land in the New World held by the Spanish crown. Spain pioneered techniques of using New World colonies to strengthen the kingdom in Europe and would become a model for other European nations.
New York City draft riots Four days of rioting in New York City in July 1863 triggered by efforts to en- force the military draft. Democratic Irish workingmen, suffering economic hardship, infuriated by the draft, and opposed to emancipation, killed at least 105 people, most of them black.
New York Female Moral Reform Society An organization of religious women inspired by the Second Great Awakening to eradicate sexual sin and male licentiousness. Formed in 1833, it spread to hundreds of auxiliaries and worked to curb male licentiousness, prostitution, and seduction.
Lowell mills Water-powered textile mills constructed along the Merrimack River in Lowell, Massachusetts, that pioneered the extensive use of female laborers. By 1836, the eight mills there employed more than five thousand young women, living in boardinghouses un- der close supervision.
loyalists Colonists who remained loyal to Britain dur- ing the Revolutionary War, probably numbering around one-fifth of the population in 1776. Colonists remained loyal to Britain for many reasons, and loyalists could be found in every region of the country.
manifest destiny Term coined in 1845 by journalist John L. O’Sullivan to justify American expansion. O’Sullivan claimed that it was the nation’s “manifest destiny” to transport its values and civilization west- ward. Manifest destiny framed the American conquest of the West as part of a divine plan.
Marbury v. Madison 1803 Supreme Court case that established the concept of judicial review in finding that parts of the Judiciary Act of 1789 were in conflict with the Constitution. The Supreme Court assumed le- gal authority to overrule acts of other branches of the government.
Mason-Dixon line A surveyor’s mark that had estab- lished the boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania in colonial times. By the 1830s, the boundary divided the free North and the slave South.
mechanical reapers Tools usually powered by horses or oxen that enabled farmers to harvest twelve acres of wheat a day, compared to the two or three acres a day possible with manual harvesting methods.
Mexica An empire that stretched from coast to coast across central Mexico and encompassed as many as 25 million people. Their culture was characterized by steep hierarchy and devotion to the war god Huitzilopochtli.
Middle Passage The crossing of the Atlantic by slave ships traveling from West Africa to the Americas. Slaves were crowded together in extremely unhealthful cir- cumstances, and mortality rates were high.
miscegenation Interracial sex. Proslavery spokesmen played on the fears of whites when they suggested that giving blacks equal rights would lead to miscegenation. In reality, slavery led to considerable sexual abuse of black women by their white masters.
Missouri Compromise 1820 congressional compro- mise engineered by Henry Clay that paired Missouri’s entrance into the Union as a slave state with Maine’s as
GLOSSARY G-7
and masters providing basic care and direction. Whites employed the concept of paternalism to deny that the slave system was brutal and exploitative.
Pennsylvania Dutch Name given by other colonists to German immigrants to the middle colonies; an English corruption of the German term Deutsch. Germans were the largest contingent of migrants from continental Europe to the middle colonies in the eigh- teenth century.
plantation Large farm worked by twenty or more slaves. Although small farms were more numerous, planta- tions produced more than 75 percent of the South’s export crops.
plantation belt Flatlands that spread from South Carolina to east Texas and were dominated by large plantations.
planter A substantial landowner who tilled his estate with twenty or more slaves. Planters dominated the so- cial and political world of the South. Their values and ideology influenced the values of all southern whites.
Pontiac’s Rebellion A coordinated uprising of Native American tribes in 1763 in the Northwest after the end of the Seven Years’ War. The rebellion heightened Britain’s determination to create a boundary between Americans and Indians, embodied in the Proclamation of 1763.
popular sovereignty The idea that government is subject to the will of the people. Applied to the territo- ries, popular sovereignty meant that the residents of a territory should determine, through their legislatures, whether to allow slavery.
predestination Doctrine stating that God determined whether individuals were destined for salvation or damnation before their birth. According to the doc- trine, nothing an individual did during his or her life- time could affect that person’s fate.
presidios Spanish forts built to block Russian advance into California.
Protestant Reformation The reform movement that began in 1517 with Martin Luther’s critiques of the Roman Catholic Church, which precipitated an endur- ing schism that divided Protestants from Catholics.
Pueblo Bonito The largest residential and ceremonial site, containing more than 600 rooms and thirty-five kivas, in the major Anasazi cultural center of Chaco Canyon in present-day New Mexico.
Newburgh Conspiracy A bogus threatened coup staged by Continental army officers and leaders in the congress in 1782–1783, who hoped that a forceful de- mand for military back pay and pensions would create pressure for stronger taxation powers. General Washington defused the threat.
Northwest Ordinance Land act of 1787 that estab- lished a three-stage process by which settled territories would become states. It also banned slavery in the Northwest Territory. The ordinance guaranteed that western lands with white population would not become colonial dependencies.
nullification Theory asserting that states could nullify acts of Congress that exceeded congressional powers. South Carolina advanced the theory of nullification in 1828 in response to an unfavorable federal tariff. A show of force by Andrew Jackson, combined with tariff revisions, ended the crisis.
Oneida community Utopian community organized by John Humphrey Noyes in New York in 1848. Noyes’s opposition to private property led him to denounce marriage as the root of the problem. The community embraced sexual and economic communalism, to the dismay of its mainstream neighbors.
Oregon Trail Route from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon traveled by American settlers starting in the late 1830s. Disease and accidents caused many more deaths along the trail than did Indian attacks, which migrants feared.
Paleo-Indians Archaeologists’ term for the first mi- grants into North America and their descendants who spread across the Americas between 15,000 BP and 13,500 BP, approximately.
panic of 1837 First major economic crisis of the United States that led to several years of hard times from 1837 to 1841. Sudden bankruptcies, contraction of credit, and runs on banks worked hardships nationwide. Causes were multiple and global and not well understood.
partible inheritance System of inheritance in which land was divided equally among sons. By the eighteenth century, this practice in Massachusetts had subdivided plots of land into units too small for subsistence, forc- ing children to move away to find sufficient farmland.
paternalism The theory of slavery that emphasized re- ciprocal duties and obligations between masters and their slaves, with slaves providing labor and obedience
G-8 GLOSSARY
Pueblo Revolt An effective revolt of Pueblo Indians in New Mexico, under the leadership of Popé, against the Spaniards in 1680. Particularly targeting symbols of Christianity, they succeeded in killing two-thirds of Spanish missionaries and driving the Spaniards out of New Mexico.
pueblos Multiunit dwellings, storage spaces, and cere- monial centers — often termed kivas — built by ancient Americans in the Southwest for centuries around AD 1000.
Puritan Revolution English civil war that arose out of disputes between King Charles I and Parliament, which was dominated by Puritans. The conflict began in 1642 and ended with the execution of Charles I in 1649, resulting in Puritan rule in England until 1660.
Puritans Dissenters from the Church of England who wanted a genuine Reformation rather than the partial Reformation sought by Henry VIII. The Puritans’ reli- gious principles emphasized the importance of an indi- vidual’s relationship with God developed through Bible study, prayer, and introspection.
Quakers Epithet for members of the Society of Friends. Their belief that God spoke directly to each individual through an “inner light” and that neither ministers nor the Bible was essential to discovering God’s Word put them in conflict with orthodox Puritans.
Reconquest The centuries-long drive to expel Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula undertaken by the Christian kingdoms of Spain and Portugal. The military victories of the Reconquest helped the Portuguese gain greater access to sea routes.
redemptioners A variant of indentured servants. In this system, a captain agreed to provide passage to Philadelphia, where redemptioners would obtain money to pay for their transportation, usually by selling themselves as servants.
Report on Manufactures A proposal by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in 1791 calling for the federal government to encourage domestic manufac- turers with subsidies while imposing tariffs on foreign imports. Congress initially rejected the measure.
Report on Public Credit Hamilton’s January 1790 report recommending that the national debt be funded — but not repaid immediately — at full value. Hamilton’s goal was to make the new country credit- worthy, not debt-free. Critics of his plan complained that it would benefit speculators.
republicanism A social philosophy that embraced representative institutions (as opposed to monarchy), a citizenry attuned to civic values above private interests, and a virtuous community in which individuals work to promote the public good.
Republican Party Antislavery party formed in 1854 following passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The Republicans attempted to unite all those who opposed the extension of slavery into any territory of the United States.
Republicans One of the two dominant political groups that emerged in the 1790s. Republicans supported the revolutionaries in France and worried about monarchi- cal Federalists at home. Prominent Republicans in- cluded Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.
royal colony A colony ruled by a king or queen and governed by officials appointed to serve the monarchy and represent its interests.
Scots-Irish Protestant immigrants from northern Ireland, Scotland, and northern England. Deteriorating economic conditions in their European homelands contributed to increasing migration to the colonies in the eighteenth century.
second Bank of the United States National bank with multiple branches chartered in 1816 for twenty years. Intended to help regulate the economy, the bank became a major issue in Andrew Jackson’s reelection campaign in 1832, framed in political rhetoric about aristocracy versus democracy.
Second Continental Congress Legislative body that governed the United States from May 1775 through the war’s duration. It established an army, cre- ated its own money, and declared independence once all hope for a peaceful reconciliation with Britain was gone.
Second Great Awakening Unprecedented religious revival in the 1820s and 1830s that promised access to salvation. The Second Great Awakening proved to be a major impetus for reform movements of the era, in- spiring efforts to combat drinking, sexual sin, and slavery.
Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments Declaration issued in 1848 at the first national woman’s rights convention in the United States, which was held in Seneca Falls, New York. The document adopted the style of the Declaration of Independence and demanded equal rights for women, including the franchise.
GLOSSARY G-9
Tainos The Indians who inhabited San Salvador and many Caribbean islands and who were the first people Columbus encountered after making landfall in the New World.
task system A system of labor in which a slave was as- signed a daily task to complete and allowed to do as he wished upon its completion. This system offered more freedom than the carefully supervised gang-labor system.
Tea Act of 1773 British act that lowered the existing tax on tea to entice boycotting Americans to buy it. Resistance to the Tea Act led to the passage of the Coercive Acts and imposition of military rule in Massachusetts.
three-fifths clause Clause in the Constitution that stipulated that all free persons plus “three-fifths of all other Persons” would constitute the numerical base for apportioning both representation and taxation. The clause tacitly acknowledged the existence of slavery in the United States.
Townshend duties British law that established new duties on tea, glass, lead, paper, and painters’ colors im- ported into the colonies. The Townshend duties led to boycotts and heightened tensions between Britain and the American colonies.
Trail of Tears Forced westward journey of Cherokees from their lands in Georgia to present-day Oklahoma in 1838. Despite favorable legal action, the Cherokees endured a grueling 1,200-mile march overseen by fed- eral troops. Nearly a quarter of the Cherokees died en route.
Treaty of Fort Stanwix 1784 treaty with the Iroquois Confederacy that established the primacy of the American confederation (and not states) to negotiate with Indians and resulted in large land cessions in the Ohio Country (northwestern Pennsylvania). Tribes not present at Fort Stanwix disavowed the treaty.
Treaty of Greenville 1795 treaty between the United States and various Indian tribes in Ohio. The United States gave the tribes treaty goods valued at $25,000. In exchange, the Indians ceded most of Ohio to the Americans. The treaty brought only temporary peace to the region.
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo February 1848 treaty that ended the Mexican-American War. Mexico gave up all claims to Texas north of the Rio Grande and ceded New Mexico and California to the United States. The
Separatists People who sought withdrawal from the Church of England. The Pilgrims were Separatists.
Seven Years’ War War (1754–1762) between Britain and France that ended with British domination of North America; known in America as the French and Indian War. Its high expense laid the foundation for conflict that would lead to the American Revolution.
Shays’s Rebellion Uprising (1786–1787) led by farm- ers centered in western Massachusetts. Dissidents protested taxation policies of the eastern elites who controlled the state’s government. Shays’s Rebellion caused leaders throughout the country to worry about the confederation’s ability to handle civil disorder.
Sherman’s March to the Sea Military campaign from September through December 1864 in which Union forces under General Sherman marched from Atlanta, Georgia, to the coast at Savannah. Carving a path of destruction as it progressed, Sherman’s army aimed at destroying White Southerner’s will to continue the war.
siege of Vicksburg Six-week siege by General Grant intended to starve out Vicksburg. On July 4, 1863, the 30,000 Confederate troops holding the city surren- dered. The victory gave the Union control of the Mississippi River and, together with Gettysburg, marked a major turning point of the war.
slave codes Laws enacted in southern states in the 1820s and 1830s that required the total submission of slaves. Attacks by antislavery activists and by slaves convinced southern legislators that they had to do everything in their power to strengthen the institution.
slavery Coerced labor. African slavery became the most important form of coerced labor in the New World in the seventeenth century.
Stamp Act 1765 British law imposing a tax on all paper used for official documents, for the purpose of raising revenue. Widespread resistance to the Stamp Act led to its repeal in 1766.
Stono Rebellion Slave uprising in Stono, South Carolina, in 1739 in which a group of slaves armed themselves, plundered six plantations, and killed more than twenty whites. Whites quickly suppressed the rebellion.
Sugar (Revenue) Act 1764 British law that decreased the duty on French molasses, making it more attractive for shippers to obey the law, and at the same time raised penalties for smuggling. The Sugar Act regulated trade but was also intended to raise revenue.
G-10 GLOSSARY
Virginia Plan Plan drafted by James Madison, pre- sented at the opening of the Philadelphia constitutional convention. Designed as a powerful three-branch gov- ernment, with representation in both houses of the con- gress be to tied to population, this plan eclipsed the voice of small states in national government.
virtual representation The theory that all British subjects were represented in Parliament, whether they had elected representatives in that body or not. American colonists rejected the theory of virtual repre- sentation, arguing that only direct representatives had the right to tax the colonists.
visible saints Puritans who had passed the tests of conversion and church membership and were therefore thought to be among God’s elect.
War Hawks Young men newly elected to the Congress of 1811 who were eager for war against Britain in order to end impressments, fight Indians, and expand into neigh- boring British territory. Leaders included Henry Clay of Kentucky and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina.
Whigs Political party that evolved out of the National Republicans after 1834. With a Northeast power base, the Whigs supported federal action to promote com- mercial development and generally looked favorably on the reform movements associated with the Second Great Awakening.
Whiskey Rebellion July 1794 uprising by farmers in western Pennsylvania in response to enforcement of an unpopular excise tax on whiskey. The federal govern- ment responded with a military presence that caused dissidents to disperse before blood was shed.
Wilmot Proviso Proposal put forward by Representa- tive David Wilmot of Pennsylvania in August 1846 to ban slavery in territory acquired from the Mexican- American War. The proviso enjoyed widespread support in the North, but Southerners saw it as an attack on their interests.
XYZ affair 1797 incident in which American negotia- tors in France were rebuffed for refusing to pay a sub- stantial bribe. The incident led the United States into an undeclared war with France, known as the Quasi-War, which intensified antagonism between Federalists and Republicans.
yeomen Farmers who owned and worked on their own small plots of land. Yeomen living within the plantation belt were more dependent on planters than were yeo- men in the upcountry, where small farmers dominated.
United States agreed to pay Mexico $15 million and to assume American claims against Mexico.
Treaty (Peace) of Paris, 1783 September 3, 1783, treaty that ended the Revolutionary War. The treaty ac- knowledged America’s independence, set its boundar- ies, and promised the quick withdrawal of British troops from American soil. It failed to recognize Indians as players in the conflict.
Treaty of Tordesillas The treaty negotiated in 1494 to delineate land claims in the New World. The treaty drew an imaginary line west of the Canary Islands; land discovered west of the line belonged to Spain, and land to the east belonged to Portugal.
tribute The goods the Mexica collected from conquered peoples, from basic food products to candidates for hu- man sacrifice. Tribute engendered resentment among the Mexica’s subjects, creating a vulnerability the Spaniards would later exploit.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin Enormously popular antislavery novel written by Harriet Beecher Stowe and published in 1852. It helped to solidify northern sentiment against slavery and to confirm white Southerners’ sense that no sympathy remained for them in the free states.
underground railroad Network consisting mainly of black homes, black churches, and black neighborhoods that helped slaves escape to the North by supplying shelter, food, and general assistance.
Union blockade The United States’ use of its navy to patrol the southern coastline to restrict Confederate ac- cess to supplies. Over time, the blockade became in- creasingly effective and succeeded in depriving the Confederacy of vital supplies.
upcountry The hills and mountains of the South whose higher elevation, colder climate, rugged terrain, and poor transportation made the region less hospitable than the flatlands to slavery and large plantations.
Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions 1798 resolu- tions condemning the Alien and Sedition Acts submit- ted to the federal government by the Virginia and Kentucky state legislatures. The resolutions tested the idea that state legislatures could judge the constitution- ality of federal laws and nullify them.
Virginia Company A joint-stock company organized by London investors in 1606 that received a land grant from King James I in order to establish English colonies in North America. Investors hoped to enrich themselves and strengthen England economically and politically.
SPOT ARTIFACT CREDITS CR-1
p. 4 (Anasazi figurine) © Jerry Jacka, 2006; p. 20 (dolls) Collection of the Oakland Museum of California, Gift of Frank K. Mott and Herbert Avery; p. 37 (toucan) Werner Forman/Art Resource, NY; p. 40 (crucifix) Florida Museum of Natural History, Fort Mose Exhibition; p. 45 (skull) Private Collection; p. 55 (pot) Archives, Virginia Department of Historic Resources, Richmond. Photograph by Katherine Wetzel; p. 64 (pipe) Niemeyer Nederlands Tabacologisch Museum; p. 66 (sixpence) Courtesy of Preservation Virginia; p. 84 (bone dice) Courtesy of Preservation Virginia; p. 87 (barrel) Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA; p. 107 (pitcher) © Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association Memorial Hall Museum; p. 111 (Poor Richard’s Almanack) Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society; p. 117 (doll) The Stagville Center, Division of Archives and History, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources; p. 120 (mirror) Photograph courtesy of the Concord Museum, Concord, MA; p. 141 (stamps) Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Library; p. 144 (teapot) Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, USA/Bridgeman Images; p. 155 (frontispiece portrait) Library of Congress; p. 168 (coat) Nichipor Collection/Picture Research Consultants & Archives; p. 175 (currency) Division of Political History, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution; p. 194 (voting box) Courtesy of Independence National Historic Park; p. 200 (penny note) Library of Congress; p. 210 (inkwell) Courtesy of Independence National Historic Park; p. 222 (cotton bales) Picture Research Consultants & Archives; p. 225 (coin) The American
Numismatic Association; p. 232 (shoes) Joël Garnier/ Musée International de la Chaussure, Roman-sur-Isere-France; p. 249 (compass) Division of Political History, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution; p. 252 (headdress) National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (2/1294) Photos by Photo Services; p. 299 (miniature log cabin) Division of Political History, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution; p. 305 (plow) The Granger Collection, New York; p. 306 (telegraph transmitter) Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution; p. 324 (portrait) Collection of the Oakland Museum of California, Gift of Anonymous Donor; p. 340 (cotton gin) Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, Behring Center; p. 343 (shoe) Archaeological Society of Virginia; p. 347 (whip) Louisiana State Museum; p. 362 (ticket) Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society; p. 365 (token) © Collection of the New-York Historical Society; p. 389 (Fort Sumter flag) Confederate Museum, United Daughters of the Confederacy; p. 391 (Confederate flag) Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, Behring Center; p. 393 (Confederate jacket) National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Behring Center; p. 398 (Union jacket) Chicago History Museum; p. 421 (top hat) Division of Political History, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution; p. 433 (impeachment ticket) Collection of Janice L. and David J. Frent; p. 438 (plow) Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
Spot Artifact Credits
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Index
I-1
NOTE ABOUT THE INDEX: Names of individuals appear in boldface. Letters in parentheses following page numbers refer to: (b) boxed feature (i) illustrations, including photographs and artifacts (f) figures, including charts and graphs (m) maps (t) tables
Abenaki people, 18 Abolition movement
African Americans in, 328–29, 329 (i)
antiabolition activities, 295, 296 (i), 297, 337 (i), 375 (i), 375 (m)
Bleeding Kansas, 375 (i), 375 (m) Brown’s (John) raids, 358–59,
379–80, 380 (i) fugitive slaves, assistance to, 330, 365 gag rule, 297 in Jacksonian era (1830s), 294–96 meetings, 329 (i) Republican Party emergence from,
371, 373 underground railroad, 330, 365 Wilmot Proviso, 361 women in, 272–74, 274 (i), 295–96,
366 (i), 373 Abolition of slavery
in early years of independence, 198–99, 199 (m)
Emancipation Proclamation (1863), 387, 400–402
England and France, 399 gradual emancipation, 198–99, 265 in Mexico, 361 in North and West (by 1840s), 310,
329–30 in Northwest Ordinance of 1787, 204 as political issue, 297–98 post–Revolutionary War, 353 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 366 (i)
Academies for women, 261–62, 292 Acoma pueblo
culture of, 16 revolt against Spaniards, 39
Activism. See Revolts, rebellions, resistance; Women activists
AD (date notation), 5 Adams, Abigail
as activist-patriot, 163–64, 169 (i), 245
on voting restrictions for women, 194–95
Adams, Charles Francis, 362 Adams, John
Alien and Sedition Acts and, 239 on Boston Tea Party, 150 cabinet of, 237 election of 1796, 236–37 election of 1800, 239–40 as Federalist, 210 on French Revolution, 232 on New England wealth, 108 as patriot defense attorney, 149 at Second Continental Congress,
160–61 as vice president, 219 on voting restrictions, 195 XYZ affair, 237–38
Adams, John Quincy Adams-Onís Treaty, 267 cabinet of, 268–69 character attacks on, 283 election of 1824, 267–68,
268 (m) election of 1828, 283–84,
284 (m) presidency of, 268–69 as secretary of state, 267
Adams, Louisa Catherine, 267 Adams, Samuel
at First Continental Congress, 152
at Second Continental Congress, 160
on Shays’s Rebellion, 206 tax protests by, 142, 146
Adams-Onís Treaty (1819), 267 Adena culture, 16–17 Advertising, sign making (1800s),
263 (i) Advice books, 291–92 Advice to American Women (Graves),
291 Affluence. See Wealth Africa
European trade with (1400s), 30–31
free slave migration to, 294 human migration from, 5–6 Portuguese exploration, 29 (m),
30 (i), 30–31 slaves from. See African slaves;
Slave trade traditional beliefs, and African
American Christianity, 348 African American equality
black codes nullified (1866), 429 school integration, Massachusetts
(1855), 329 segregation outlawed (1875), 442 and voting rights. See African
Americans and voting rights African American inequality
in armed forces, 387 of free blacks, 310, 329, 353 Reconstruction era, 418–20,
427–29 separate facilities. See African
Americans and segregation
I-2 INDEX
kinship structure among, 117 labor system, advantages of, 72 in middle colonies, 110–11 plantation labor, 30, 69–73, 71 (i) population growth, inhibition of,
69–70 population in southern colonies,
113 (f), 113–14 resistance, acts of, 116–17 as Revolutionary War British
soldiers, 155 runaways, 72 versus servant labor, 72, 110, 116 socializing, white fear of, 72 Spanish importation of (1550s–), 45 task system, 117 trade of. See Slave trade in West Indies, 69–70 white superiority and South, 118 workday of, 116
Aging. See Elderly Agriculture. See also Crops
crop lien system, 438–39 in early years of independence, 222 federal land purchase for, 305 mechanization of, 305 of Native Americans, 12–16, 13 (i),
20, 21 plantation-based. See Plantations sharecropping system, 438–39 small scale. See Farms and farming South, main crops in, 340 (m)
Agriculture Department, creation of, 409 Air pollution, from steamboats, 276 Alabama, Ku Klux Klan in, 419 Alamo, battle of the (1836), 318 Alaska, Native American migration to,
6, 6 (m) Albany Congress, 134–35 Albany Plan of Union, 131, 134–35 Albuquerque, New Mexico, 39 Alcoholic beverages
prohibitions. See Temperance movement
Whiskey Rebellion, 226–27 Algonquian people, 47 (i)
culture of, 18 and John Smith, 50–51 Virginia colony relations, 50–55
Alien and Sedition Acts (1798), 238–39, 288
Allen, Noah, 176 (i) Alliances. See specific alliances Amalgamation. See Miscegenation
(interracial sex)
paternalism and, 342–44 petition for freedom/rights,
196–97 (b) plantation labor. See Southern
slavery punishment/whipping, 343, 347 religion of slaves, 348 runaways. See Fugitive slaves search for families of former, 426 (i) slave drivers, slaves as, 347 slave families, 347–48 slave states, 113–16, 114 (m) in South. See Southern slavery Supreme Court proslavery
decisions, 376–77 three-fifths clause, 209, 265 work of slaves, types of tasks,
346–47 African Americans and voting rights
black suffrage, 420 (i) in early years of independence, 195 Fifteenth Amendment, 433–34 Fourteenth Amendment, 430 Lincoln on, 422 states allowing vote (1860), 329
African Americans and warfare in Civil War, 386–87, 388 (i),
402–3, 404 (i) discrimination/prejudice, 387, 403 segregation of armed forces, 403
African American women, Reconstruction era transition, 438
African American workers free blacks as. See Free blacks wage discrimination, 403
African Methodist Episcopal Church, 423
African slaves African-based slave industry,
102–3 African cultural practices, 117–18 after American Revolution. See
African Americans and slavery Brazilian sugar plantations, 71 (i),
114 (m) in Chesapeake region colonies,
57–58, 71–73 colonial era number of, 104,
105 (m), 108 in Continental army, 165 extreme mistreatment of, 103, 111 first known in colonies, 57 freedom purchased by, 58 indenture of, 58
African Americans as abolitionists, 328–30, 329 (i) equality. See African Americans
and voting rights as former slaves. See African
Americans and slavery; African slaves
inequality. See African American inequality; African Americans and segregation
racism against. See African Americans and racism
African Americans and politics first black congressmen, 419,
420 (i), 436 Republican Party members, 434
African Americans and racism hanging. See Lynching Ku Klux Klan, 419 rampages against blacks, 419,
431 (i), 443–44 segregation as. See African
Americans and segregation African Americans and segregation
in armed forces, 403 Civil Rights Act (1875) prohibition,
442 Jim Crow laws, 437 on public transportation, 436–37 Reconstruction era, 436–37
African Americans and slavery African cultural practices, 348 artisans, slaves as, 117 (i), 346 basic necessities for, 342–43 Civil War and, 404 (i) Confederacy, disintegration in,
405, 408 Confederacy and labor of, 400,
404 (i) cotton production increase and
(1820/1860), 335 (m) defense of, 336–37, 338–39 (b),
354, 356 end of. See Abolition movement;
Abolition of slavery free blacks as slaveholders, 354 freed slaves. See Free blacks Lincoln on, 377–78 living quarters (cabin 1860), 347 (i) mammy with family, 343 (i) marriage, nonlegal, 260, 347 miscegenation (interracial sex),
336, 337 (i) Missouri Compromise and, 265 mulatto children, 345 (i)
INDEX I-3
Annexation, by state. See specific states Antebellum South
Civil War, events leading to, 360–83
Confederacy, birth of, 382–83 as cotton kingdom, 335–36 distinctiveness of, 334, 336 election of 1860 and, 380–81 family in, 342–44 free blacks, 353–54 immigrants in, 341 Mason-Dixon line, 333–35, 335 (m) minority rule/tyranny as motivator,
374 paternalism, 342–44 plain folk of, 349, 352–53 political participation in, 355 poor southern whites, 325–27 proslavery Bleeding Kansas, 374–76 sectional balance, destruction of,
365–71 sectional politics, 360, 370–73,
372 (m) slaveless white population, 349–53 slavery. See Southern slavery urbanization, lack of, 341 Wilmot Proviso opposition, 361 yeomen, 349–52
Anthony, Susan B. Reconstruction era protest, 430,
434 Republican Party participation by,
373 rights advocated by, 430 (i)
Antietam, battle of (1862), 395 (m), 396, 397 (i)
Antifederalists, constitutional convention, position at, 212–13
Anti-immigration. See also individual groups
against Chinese, 324–25 Know-Nothing Party, 371, 373 nativism and, 371 voting rights restrictions, 433
Antinomians, 86 Antislavery movement. See Abolition
movement Apache people, 20 Appeal . . . to the Coloured Citizens of
the World, An (Walker), 295, 333 Appomattox Court House, Virginia,
413 (m), 415 Apprenticeship laws, in black codes,
427 Aragon, 26
American Party. See Know-Nothing Party
American Red Cross, founding of, 410 American Revolution. See
Revolutionary War (1775–1783) American System, 267 American system, of manufacturing,
306 American Temperance Society, 294 American Temperance Union, 294 Americas. See also Central America;
North America; South America ancient (before 1492), 2–17 European exploration of. See
Exploration, Age of naming, 34 native peoples of. See Ancient
Americans; Native Americans Ames, Adelbert, 445 Amish, 109 Amistead, William, 184 Amusement, time for. See Leisure and
entertainment Anasazi people, 15, 20 Ancient Americans, 2–17. See also
Native Americans African and Asian origins of, 5–6 chronology, 3 first arrival, time of, 6 foraging, transition to, 8, 10, 11 Great Basin cultures, 10 hunter-gatherers, Archaic, 8–12 migration to Western Hemisphere,
5–7 mound builders. See Burial
mounds North American cultures of, 9 (m),
11 (m) Pacific coast cultures, 10–11 Paleo-Indians, 6–8 settlements of, 8–12 Southwestern cultures, 12–16 Woodland cultures, 11–12, 12 (i),
16–17 Anderson, “Bloody Bill,” 397 Anderson, Robert, 389 Andersonville prison (1864), 414 (i) Andros, Edmund, 98–99 Anglicans, in Chesapeake region
colonies, 64, 119, 120 Animals. See also Buffalo (bison);
Horses in ancient Americas, 6, 7–8, 10
Annapolis, constitutional convention at, 207
Amendments, constitutional, of Bill of Rights, 220
America, colonies in. See British North America; Dutch colonies; New France; New Spain
American Colonization Society, 294, 329
American Equal Rights Association, 430
American independence (1776–1800), 188–240
Articles of Confederation, 190–93 Bill of Rights, 220 constitutional convention (1787),
207–13 democracy, limits on, 194–95 economic policies, 222–27 feminist ideals during, 234–35 (b) foreign affairs, 231–36 immediate problems, 199–206 land/territories issues, 202–4 land/territories ordinances,
191–92 Native American conflicts,
200–201, 227–31 political parties, 236–40 religions, new denominations, 261 slavery issue, 195–99 stability as urgent task, 218–21 state sovereignty, 193–99 timelines, 189, 217 war debt, 199–200, 223–25 Washington as president, 219–20 women and political ideals,
212, 221 American independence movement
British restrictions leading to, 140–53
citizen-militias, 152, 153–54 colonist protest/protest groups,
141–44, 146–50 committees of correspondence,
149–50 committees of public safety, 153 Common Sense (Paine), 163, 163 (i) Declaration of Independence, 164 First Continental Congress, 152–53 Lexington and Concord, 153–54 nation-building, early years. See
American independence (1776–1800)
representative government, roots of, 67, 125, 128, 144
timeline, 131, 159 American Indians. See Native Americans
I-4 INDEX
Battles. See specific battles, for example, Antietam, battle of (1862)
Bayonet rule, in South, 443 Bearden, Romare, 380 (i) Bear Flag Revolt, 319 Beecher, Catherine, 262 Beecher, Lyman, 294 Bell, John, 381, 382 (m) Benét, Stephen Vincent, 379 Benton, Thomas Hart, 313, 373 Beringia (land bridge), 6, 6 (m) Berkeley, William, 65 (i), 65–67 Bernard, Francis, 142–43, 146, 147 Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 112 (i) Bett, Mum (Elizabeth Freeman), 198,
198 (i) Bibb, Henry, 328 Bible, King James Version, 79 “Bible Argument, The: . . .”
(Stringfellow), 339 Bight of Biafra (West Africa), 102 Bill of Rights, 218. See also specific
amendments amendments of, 220 creation and passage of, 220
Bills of rights (state constitutions), 194 Bison. See Buffalo (bison) Black codes, 427–29 Black Death, 28 Blackfeet people, 20 Black Hawk (Sauk and Fox chief),
286 Black Hawk War (1832), 286, 393 Black market, during Revolution, 175 Blacks, American. See entries under
African Americans Black suffrage. See African Americans
and voting rights Blair, Francis P., Jr., 443 (i) Bleeding Kansas (1850s), 374–76,
375 (m) Bleeding Sumner, 376 Blockade runners, 387, 398 “Bloody shirt, waving the,” 440, 445 Bloomers, feminist clothing, 328 (i) Blue Jacket (Shawnee people), 229 Bluestocking, 262 Board of Trade (England), 128 Boats, of Native Americans, 11, 18 Boleyn, Anne, 79 Bonds, government
in Civil War, 393–94 in Revolutionary War, 205, 223–25 war debt funding by, 223–25
Book of Mormon, The, 316
in Massachusetts, 145–46 in Pennsylvania, 96
Assimilation, of Native Americans, 286–87
Astrolabe, 28 Atahualpa (Incas), 37 Atchison, David Rice, 375 Athapascan people, 20 Atlanta, fall of (1864), 413 (m),
414–15 Atlantic Ocean region
Civil War in, 398–99 exploration, age of, 31–34, 38–39 slave trade in, 114 (m) trade routes (1700s), 107 (m)
Attucks, Crispus, 148 (i), 149 Austin, Stephen F., 318 Ayllón, Lucas Vázquez de, 38 Aztecs. See Mexica people
Bacon, Nathaniel, 66–67 Bacon’s Laws (1676), 67 Bacon’s Rebellion, 66–67 Balboa, Vasco Núñez de, 34 Ball courts, 16, 16 (i) Baltimore, Lord, 64 Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 277 Bancroft, Hubert Howe, 325 Banking, in early years of
independence, 222 Banknotes, 279, 290 Bank of England, panic of 1837 and, 298 Banks
Civil War era legislation, 409 federal. See Banks of the United
States Banks of the United States
capitalizing, 225 charters for, 225, 279 First Bank, 225 Second Bank, 279, 289–90
Baptists, 120, 293 free black groups, 423 plain folk as, 352–53 slave conversions to, 348 women in power, 260–61
Barbados African slave labor, 69–70 and Carolina settlement, 70 (m),
70–71 sugar plantations, 69–70
Barbary Wars (1801–1805), 247 (i), 247–48
Barges, 277 Barton, Clara, 410
Arapaho people, culture of, 313 Arbella (ship), 81 Archaeology, study of, 4–5 Archaic Indians, as hunters and
gatherers, 8–12 Arizona
Gadsden Purchase (1853), 367 Native Americans in, 14–16
Arizona Colonization Company, 368 (b)
Ark (ship), 64 Arkansas, secession from Union, 389 Armed forces. See also Marine Corps;
U.S. Navy African Americans in. See African
Americans and warfare in American war of independence.
See Revolutionary War (1775–1783)
in Civil War, 393, 404, 404 (i) women in. See Women and warfare
Arms and armaments. See Weapons and armaments
Army of Northern Virginia, 396 Army of the Potomac, 394–95, 412 Arnold, Benedict
in Revolutionary War, 166 as traitor, 182–83, 183 (i)
Articles of Confederation (1781–1789), 190–93
directives in, 191, 201, 205 executive departments under, 193,
201 limitations of, 192–93, 199, 206, 209 ratification, 189, 191–92 revision of. See Constitutional
convention (1787) western land issue, 191–92
Artifacts, of Native Americans, 2 (i), 5, 7, 10 (i), 11 (i), 14–15 (i), 21 (i)
Artisans New England colonies, 107 slaves as, 117 (i), 346
Arts. See also Music of Native Americans, 20
Asia. See also specific countries Columbus’s search for, 31–32 human migration from, 5–6 immigrants from. See specific
groups Assassinations. See specific persons Assemblies, colonial
independence movement. See American independence movement
INDEX I-5
and consumerism, 119–20 English exports to colonies, 95, 98,
111, 120 English imports, 102 (i) English restrictions, forms of, 66,
96–97, 125, 140–41, 150–51 fish as export, 87, 107 fur trade, 100, 123, 132 imports, scope of, 107 livestock exports, 107 Manhattan Island purchase, 91 mercantilism as English
stance, 66 merchants, wealth of, 108 middle colonies exports, 95, 97 Molasses Act (1733), 140 Native Americans with colonists,
55, 91, 122–24 Navigation Acts (1650, 1651, 1660),
66, 96–97 New England exports, 87, 97,
107 nonconsumption agreements,
146–47, 147 (i) rice as export, 71, 118 southern colonies exports, 118 Sugar Act (1764), 140–41 taxes, British imposed, 66, 67,
140–41, 145–46 tax revolts by colonists, 131,
145–47 Tea Act (1773), 150 timber as export, 87, 107 tobacco as export, 56, 60–61 (b),
62 (i), 97, 118 Townshend duties, 145–46 wheat as export, 111
Brooks, Preston, 375–76 Brown, Charles Brockden, 234 (i) Brown, John
Harpers Ferry raid by, 358 (i), 359, 379
modern views of, 360 (i) pikes of, 358 (i) Pottawatomie Creek killings by,
358–59, 375 trial and execution of, 379–80,
380 (i) Brown, Joseph E., 404 Brown, William Wells, 329 Bubonic plague. See Black Death Buchanan, James
election of 1856, 373–74 on Lecompton constitution, 378 and southern secession, 383
British zone, 123 (m) burgesses, 55–56, 67 Chesapeake region colonies, 50–74 diversity in, reasons for, 125 economic potential, 53, 66, 105 elite in government positions,
65–66 European zones (1754–1763),
133 (m) House of Burgesses, 55–56, 65–66,
142 independence of. See American
independence movement; Revolutionary War (1775–1783)
mercantilism and trade. See British North America trade
middle colonies, 91–96 Native American cultures in. See
specific colonies Native American issues. See Native
American conflicts New England, 76–91 population growth (1700s), 104–5 population of (1600–1700s), 88 (f) proprietors, 71, 91, 94–96, 125 Puritan governance, 84–85 Quakers, 95–96 religion in. See specific religions representative government, roots
of, 67, 125, 128, 144 Roanoke Island, 47, 47 (m) royal colonies, 55–56, 65–66,
80–81, 99, 125 royal government imposed (1684),
98–99 royal governors, 55–56, 94, 96, 125,
128, 130 self-government, Massachusetts
Bay, 80, 84–85 Seven Years’ War, 132–37 single-house legislature, 96 southern colonies, 113–19 Stamp Act (1765), 141–43 tax revolts by colonists, 131, 141–44 town meetings, 85 unifying elements in, 119–25 voting, forms of, 56, 85 voting and property ownership,
186–87 British North America trade
Atlantic trade (1700s), 107 (m) black market during Revolution, 175 Chesapeake region export crops, 71 Coercive (Intolerable) Acts (1774),
151–52
Books, first printed in America, 76 (i) Boom and bust cycles. See also
Economic decline; Economic growth
Jackson era, 279, 282 Boonesborough, 178 Booth, John Wilkes, 415, 426 Borders
politics and, 123 (m) slave and free states, 265, 266 (m)
Boré, Étienne de, 340 Boston (colonial)
Boston Massacre, 148 (i), 148–49 Boston Tea Party (1773), 150 British goods, boycott of, 146–47 British occupation of, 147–49,
148 (i), 151–52 colonial wealth and trade, 108 Stamp Act protests, 142–44, 143 (i)
Boston Common (1750), 108 (i) Boston Port Act (1774), 151–52 Boundaries. See Borders Bow and arrow, 10, 17, 20 Bowdoin, James, 206 Bowie, James, 318 Boycotts, of British goods (1767–1768),
146–47 BP (years before the present, date
notation), 5 Braddock, Edward, 135, 137 Bradford, William, 80 Brady, Mathew
Civil War photographs, 397 (i) Lincoln portrait by, 381 (i)
Branch, Jacob, 346 Brant, Joseph (Thayendanegea)
on divided authority, 201 as loyalist, 171, 176, 177, 186
Brazil Portuguese exploration/outposts,
33, 40 (m) slave labor, 71 (i), 114 (m) sugar plantations, 71 (i)
Breckinridge, John C., 380–81, 382 (m)
Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox stories, 348 Britain. See entries under England British East India Company, 150 British North America
Albany Plan of Union, 130 assemblies, colonists, 96, 125, 128,
145–46 Bacon’s Laws, 67 British colonial identity, 119, 128 British control attempts, 98–99, 128
I-6 INDEX
Seven Years’ War, 135–36 slavery in, 35, 69–70 slave trade, routes of, 114 (m) Spanish conquest of, 35 sugar plantations, 69–70
Carleton, Guy, 185 Carmel, California, mission in, 124 (i) Carney, Kate, 344 Carolina. See also North Carolina;
South Carolina Charles Town established, 71 export crops of, 71 loyalists in, 170, 170 (m) middle colonies migrants to, 111 Revolutionary War in, 181–82,
182 (m) rice as export, 71, 118 (i), 340 settlement in, 110 (m) West Indies, settlers from, 70 (m),
70–71 Carpetbag, 418 (i) Carpetbaggers, 418 (i), 434 Cartier, Jacques, 46–47 Cartography, 34 Cass, Lewis
election of 1848, 362, 362 (m) popular sovereignty proposal, 361
Castile, 26 Catholics
in England, outlaw of, 78–79 Glorious Revolution, 99 of Irish immigrants, 312 Know-Nothing goals, 371 in Maryland colony, 64 New France, 100 and New Spain. See Missions (New
Spain) Protestant Reformation versus,
45–46 Reconquest, Iberian Peninsula, 27 white Anglo-Saxon prejudice, 371
Catlin, George, 314, 315 (i) Cayuga people, 19 Census, of 1790 and 1800, 224 (i) Central America. See also specific
countries European exploration/outposts,
40 (m) filibusters in, 368–69 (b) Paleo-Indians in, 7
Ceremonies, Native American, 3, 47 (i) Cerro Gordo, Mexico, battle at (1847),
323 Chaco Canyon, 14 (i), 14–15 Chamberlain, W. G., 316 (i)
Mexican cession of (1848), 323, 324 (m), 361 (m)
missions in, 124 (i), 124 (m), 124–25
Native Americans of, 7 (i), 10–11, 11 (m), 20, 318
rancheros in, 318, 325 slavery versus free state issue,
361–64, 363 (i) Spanish exploration of, 38
California Trail, 314 (m), 318 Californios, 325 Calusa people, 38 Calvin, John, 83 Calvinism, 83 Cambridge (ship), 386 Camden, battle of (1780), 181–82,
182 (m), 183 Camp followers, 165, 176 Camp meetings, 292–93, 352 (i) Canada
English exploration, 47 free slave migration to, 155, 185,
199 French exploration/outposts, 46–47 New France, 100, 123 (m), 133 (m) in Revolutionary War, 166–67,
167 (m) Seven Years’ War, 135–36 War of 1812, 257 (m), 257–59
Canals Erie Canal, 277 expansion of system (1840),
275 (m) Canary Islands, Columbus exploration
of, 31–32 Cane Ridge revival meetings, 292–93 Canons, in Civil War, 408 (i) Cape Fear River, 386 Cape of Good Hope, Africa, 30 Cape Verde Islands, 30 Capital of U.S.
in early years of independence, 193, 222
move to Potomac area. See Washington, D.C.
Capitol, British burning of, 258 Caravel, 30, 31 Caribbean region. See also specific
locations British colonies, 69–70 Columbus expeditions, 31 (m),
31–32 French islands. See Guadeloupe;
Martinique
Budget, federal. See Federal budget Buena Vista, Mexico, battle at, 322,
323 Buffalo (bison)
decimation by whites, 314 Native American hunting of, 7–10,
9, 20, 313–14 Bull Run (Manassas)
first battle of (1861), 394, 395 (m) second battle of (1862), 395 (m), 396
Bunker Hill, battle of (1775), 161 (m), 161–63, 162 (i)
Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (Freedmen’s Bureau), 423, 431, 432–33
Burgesses, 55–56, 67 Burgoyne, John, 161, 167 (m), 176–77 Burial mounds
Cahokian, 2–3, 4 (i), 17, 20, 21 Woodland peoples, 12, 16–17, 20
Burns, Anthony, 365 Burnside, Ambrose, 396 Burr, Aaron
election of 1796, 237 election of 1800, 245 on feminist work, 235 (b)
Business organization, incorporation laws, origin of, 279
Butler, Andrew P., 375 Butler, Benjamin F., 401 Byles, Mather, 171, 174
Cabinet. See specific presidents Cabot, John, 33, 47 Cabral, Pedro Álvars, 33 Cabrillo, Juan Rodríguez, 38 Cahokia, burial mounds, 2–3, 4 (i), 17,
20, 21 Caldwell, John, 137 (i) Calef, Robert, 93 (b) Calhoun, John C.
anti–Van Buren rhetoric, 297 defense of slavery, 338 (b) election of 1824, 267–68 nullification and, 288–89 as senator, 289 on slavery, 359, 361, 377 as vice president, 267, 284, 288–89 War of 1812 War Hawk, 256
California Bear Flag Revolt, 318–19 Chinese immigrants in, 324–25 gold rush. See Gold rush
(1849–1852) Mexican-American War in, 322
INDEX I-7
Church of England (Anglican), 64, 79. See also Anglicans
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons). See Mormons
Churubusco, battle of (1847), 323 Circumnavigation of globe, 34 Cities. See also specific cities
in Massachusetts Bay colony, 81 (m) North versus South (1860)
urbanization, 341 railroads as boon to, 306
Citizenship Alien Acts (1798), 238 Fourteenth Amendment and, 430 for free blacks denied, 376 national versus state, 442
City upon a hill, 81–82 Civil liberties
of Bill of Rights, 220 concept, in early years of
independence, 195 Civil rights, riots, Memphis (1866),
431 (i) Civil Rights Act (1866), 429 Civil Rights Act (1875), 442 Civil service system. See Spoils system Civil War (1861–1865), 386–415. See
also Confederacy (South in Civil War); Union (North in Civil War)
African Americans in, 386–87, 388 (i), 402–3, 404 (i)
armed forces in. See specific type, for example, U.S. Navy
Atlantic theater, 398–99 battles (1861–1862), 394–99,
395 (m) battles (1863–1865), 411–14,
413 (m) battles, major, 399 (t), 415 (t) blockades, 386–87, 392, 398–99 casualties in, 396, 412, 415, 416 eastern theater stalemate, 394–96 effects of, 387 Emancipation Proclamation (1863)
during, 400–402 end of, 415 events leading to, 360–83 financing the war, 393–94, 405 Fort Sumter attack, 389 guerrilla warfare, 390, 397 King Cotton diplomacy, 399 military draft, 403, 404, 410–11 mobilization, 392–94
religious affiliation in, 64 royal government, 55–56, 65–66 slave labor, 57–58, 71–73 social inequality in, 64–68, 72 timeline, 51 tobacco, 56–64 Virginia Company, 52–53 voting inequality, 65–66 women in, 62–63
Chesnut, Mary Boykin, 355 Cheyenne people, culture of, 20, 313 Chickamauga, battle of (1863), 412,
413 (m) Chickasaw people
in Confederate army, 397 culture of, 20 resistance to removal, 286, 288
Chiefdoms, 12, 16–17 Chief executive. See Presidency;
President of U.S. Chief justice, first, Supreme Court, 220 Child, Lydia Maria, 374 (i) Child labor
African American slave children, 346
free black children, 428 Children
of African slaves, 116 New England (1670), 89 (i) as workers. See Child labor
China European exploration of, 30–31 immigrants from. See Chinese
immigrants Chinese immigrants
in California gold rush, 324–25 discrimination against, 324–25
Chippewa people cessions of land to U.S. from, 202 culture of, 18
Chivalry, southern men, 344–45 Choctaw people
in Confederate army, 397 culture of, 20 resistance to removal, 286, 288
Christian guardianship, paternalism, 342–44
Christianity. See also specific groups Protestant Reformation, 45–46 slave conversions to, 337, 348 spread of. See Missionaries
Chumash people, 11 Churches
oldest in North America, 86 (i) women in power positions, 260–61
Champlain, Lake, 135, 258 (i) Chancellorsville, battle at (1863), 412,
413 (m) Chapultepec, battle of (1847), 323 Charles I (England), 60, 64, 79, 87, 98 Charles I (Spain). See Charles V (Holy
Roman Empire) Charles II (England), 71, 94, 95, 98, 99 Charleston (colonial era)
founding as Charles Town, 71 nonconsumption agreements, 146 Revolutionary War in, 162 (m),
181, 182 (m) Charleston, South Carolina, Fort
Sumter attack, 389 Charles V (Charles I of Spain, Holy
Roman Emperor), 45–46 Charlottesville, Virginia,
Revolutionary War in, 184 Charter of Privileges (Pennsylvania), 96 Charters, of Virginia Company, 55 Chase, Salmon P., 363, 393, 426, 433 Chattanooga, battle of (1863), 412,
413 (m) Checks and balances, founders’
development of, 208–9 Cherokee people
assimilationism of, 286–87 in Confederate army, 397 deer hide clothing, 288 (i) Trail of Tears, 287 (m)
Chesapeake (ship), 254, 254 (m) Chesapeake region, War of 1812 in,
257 (m), 258 Chesapeake region colonies, 50–74.
See also Carolina; Maryland; Virginia colony
Bacon’s Rebellion in, 66–67 class divisions and inequality in,
64–68 elite in, 65, 65 (i) English colonization, 52–56 export crops, 71 farms, small in, 63–64, 65 indentured servant system, 57–59,
62–63 land/water relationship, 58 (m) Native American conflicts, 54–55,
66–67 Native Americans of, 50, 53, 123 (m) political conflict in, 65–68 poor white, rights of, 72 population (1700), 56 population of colonies in, 86 (f),
113
I-8 INDEX
capital of, 395 (m) collapse of, 415 expectation to win, 391–92 family life, 406–7 (b) financing the war, 393–94, 405 industrial development, 403–4 inflation, 394, 404 King Cotton diplomacy, 399 military draft, 404 mobilization of, 392–94 nationalism in, 405 Native Americans in army of, 397 president of. See Davis, Jefferson repudiation of secession, 427 resources of, 391–92, 392 (f) slave labor for, 400, 404 (i) slavery, disintegration of, 405, 408 states of, 382, 382 (m), 389,
390 (m) supply problems of, 393 Upper South rejection of, 382–83 war debt, 427 yeoman farmers, impact of war,
405 Confederations, of Native Americans,
19, 243, 244, 255 Confiscation Act (1861), 400, 422 Confiscation Act (1862), 402, 422 Congo, Portuguese exploration, 30, 31 Congregationalism, 120 Congress
African Americans, first in, 420 (i), 435, 436, 436 (f)
southern congressional delegations (1865–1877), 436 (f)
Connecticut, gradual emancipation in, 198
Connecticut colony founding of, 87 governor appointment, 125 land sales in, 106
Conquistadors, 37–39 justification of actions, 42–43 (b)
Conscientious objectors, 220 Conscription. See Military draft “Constantia” (Judith Sargent
Murray), 221 Constitutional convention (1787),
207–10 Antifederalist position, 212–13 democracy versus republicanism
at, 209–10 Federalist position, 210–11, 213,
220 meeting place, 207 (i), 207–8
Colonialism in 16th century, 40 (m) in 17th century, 97 (m) Dutch. See Dutch colonies English. See English colonies French. See New France Monroe Doctrine and, 267 in North America. See British
North America; Dutch colonies; New France; New Spain
Spain. See New Spain Colorado
Civil War in, 397 Native Americans in, 14–15
Columbian exchange, 34–35 “Columbia Patriot, A” (Mercy Otis
Warren), 212, 212 (i) Columbus, Christopher, explorations
of, 27, 28 (i), 31 (m), 31–32 Comanche people
Comanchería, 251–53 culture of, 20, 313 territorial strength of, 251–53
Commerce. See Trade Commercial farming. See Agriculture;
Plantations Committees of correspondence,
149–50 Committees of public safety, 153, 189 Common Sense (Paine), 163, 163 (i) Communication
and committees of correspondence, 149–50
and transportation advances, 276 Communication devices, telegraph,
306 Commutation certificates, 200 Compass, 29 Compromise of 1850, 364, 364 (m),
364–65 Fugitive Slave Act (1850) in, 365
Compromise of 1877, 445 Comstock Lode, 360 Concentration policy, 314–15 Concord, battle at (1775), 153–54,
154 (m) Conestoga people, 139 Confederacy (South in Civil War),
403–8 armed forces, 403 battles lost, 396, 397–98, 402,
411–14 battles won, 394, 396–98 belligerent status and trade, 399 birth of, 382–83
Civil War (continued) Native Americans in, 397 resources of North and South in,
391–92, 392 (f) as Second American Revolution,
416 South expectation to win, 391–92 timeline, 387 weapons, 393 (i), 408 (i) in West, 395 (m), 397 (m) western theater, 397–98
Civil wars. See specific countries Clark, George Rogers, 178, 179 (m) Clark, William, 249, 261 Classes, social. See Social class Clay, Edward W., 337 (i) Clay, Henry
-Adams (John Quincy) corrupt bargain, 283
on annexation of Texas, 319–20 election of 1824, 267–68, 268 (m) election of 1844, 319 Missouri Compromise, 264–65,
266 (m) as orator, 283, 363 (i) as secretary of state, 268–69 on slavery in territories, 363, 363 (i) War of 1812 War Hawk, 256
Clermont (steamboat), 276 Cliff dwellings, 15–16 Climate
of ancient Americas, 5–6 warming of, 6–7
Clinton, DeWitt, 257 Clinton, Henry, 161, 181–82 Clothing
Continental army uniform, 158 (i) of Native Americans, 6, 11, 14 (i) nonconsumption agreements,
colonial era, 146–47 production of. See Textile industry of Revolutionary soldiers, 158 (i) of slaves, 343
Cloth production. See Textile industry Clovis culture. See Paleo-Indians Clovis points, 7 Coal mining, 306 Cobb, Howard, 382 Cobb, Thomas R. R., 337 Coercive (Intolerable) Acts (1774),
151–52 Cold Harbor, battle of (1864), 412,
413 (m) Colfax, Schuyler, 440 Colleton, John, 71
INDEX I-9
Crops. See also specific crops of Native Americans, 12, 20, 21 South, main crops in, 340, 340 (m) of Taino people, 32
Crow people, culture of, 20 Cuba
filibuster invasion of, 369 (b) in Seven Years’ War era, 136 Spanish conquest of, 35–36
Cultures, of earliest Americans. See Ancient Americans; Native Americans
Cumberland River region, in Civil War, 398
Currency and money creating, in early years of
independence, 222 gold as (1500s), 26 (i) Revolutionary War era, 175
Daguerreotypes, 278 (i) Daughters of Liberty, 145
nonconsumption boycotts, 146–47, 147 (i), 234
Dave (slave potter), 332 (i) Davis, Henry Winter, 421 Davis, Jefferson
background/activities of, 392–93 Fort Sumter attack order, 389 nationalistic rhetoric of, 405 objectives of, 388, 397 as president of Confederacy, 382 on sectional politics, 362 southern view of, 403
Davis, Paula Wright, 327–28 Dawes, William, 154, 154 (m) Dearborn, Fort, 257 (m) Death of Jane McCrea (Vanderlyn),
177 (i) Debt
federal. See Federal debt; War debt from loans. See Credit financing Spain, in 16th century, 46
Decatur, Stephen, 247–48 “Declaration of Dependence, A,” 171 Declaration of Independence (1776),
164, 195 “Declaration on the Causes and
Necessity of Taking Up Arms, A,” 161
Declaratory Act (1766), 145 Deer
hide clothing, of Cherokee, 288 (i) Native American hunting of,
11, 21
Cotton gin, 222, 340 Cotton production
Civil War cotton famine, 399
as Civil War strategy, 391 cotton belt, 350 (m) in early years of independence,
222 export to England, 399 sharecropping, 439 slave labor, 335–36, 340–41 and slave population increase
(1820/1860), 335 (m) yeoman farmers, 350
Counterblaste to Tobacco, A (pamphlet), 60
Country-born slaves, 116 Courts, highest in U.S. See Supreme
Court Covenant, Puritan, 81, 82, 83, 85 Covenant Chain, 134–35, 137 (i) Cowpens, battle of (1781), 182 (m),
184 Crabb, Henry, 368 (b) Crashes (financial). See Depressions;
Panics Crawford, William H., 267–68,
268 (m) Credit financing
colonial era availability, 120 extensive, dangers of, 282 loans as economic stimulus, 279,
282, 290 loans called and economic panics,
282, 290, 298 of sharecroppers, 438–39
Creek people in Confederate army, 397 culture of, 20 free blacks joined with, 199 resistance to removal, 286, 288 Treaty of New York (1790),
228–29 in War of 1812, 258
Creek War (1813–1814), 258 Creoles, 41 Creole slaves, 116 “Crime against Kansas, The” (Sumner
speech), 375 Criminals, voting restrictions,
264 Croatoan, discovery of word, 47 Crockett, David, 318 Cromwell, Oliver, 87 Crop lien system, 438–39
New Jersey Plan, 208–9 ratification, by states, 211 (m) ratification process, 210–13 three-fifths clause, 209 Virginia Plan, 208
Constitutional Union Party, 380–81, 382 (m)
Constitution of U.S., 206–13 development and ratification. See
Constitutional convention (1787) Constitutions
free-state constitutions, 362–63 Lecompton, 378 Native American, 286 state, 193–94 of United States. See Constitution
of U.S. Consumers, American colonial era, 119 Continental army
Newburgh Conspiracy, 200 in Revolutionary War, 158 (i), 161,
165–66 Continental Association, 153 Continental Congress
First (1774), 152–53 Second (1775), 160–61, 189
Continental drift, 5, 6 (m) Contract labor, for free blacks, 422–23,
428 Coode, John, 99 Cook, James F., 349 (i) Cook, John F., George, and Mary,
349 (i) Copperheads, 411 Corinth, Mississippi, in Civil War,
395 (m), 398 Corn (maize)
Jamestown survival on, 53 of Native Americans, 12, 14–15, 18,
19, 20 of Taino people, 32, 34 (i)
Cornplanter (Seneca chief), 201 (i) Cornstalk (Shawnee chief), 178 Cornwallis, Charles, 181, 183–84 Coronado, Francisco Vásquez de, 38 Corporations, federal support of, 279 Corruption
presidential. See specific presidents Revolutionary War era, 175, 177
Cortés, Hernán, 35–37 Cotton
export to England, 341, 391 tariffs, negative impact, 288 trade, port of New Orleans,
341 (i)
I-10 INDEX
Doyle, Mahala, 358 Draft, military. See Military draft Dred Scott decision (1857), 376–77 Drinker, Elizabeth, 235 (b) Drought, Anasazi culture
disappearance, 16 Duke of York. See James II (Duke of
York, England) Dummy board, 104 (i) Dunmore (Lord), 155 Duquesne, Fort, 135, 138 Dürer, Albrecht, 46 Dutch colonies
at New Amsterdam, 94 (i) New Netherland, 91, 94
Dutch East India Company, 91 Dutch immigrants, colonial era,
105 (m) Dutch Reformed Church, 94
Earth circumnavigation of, 34 as sphere, Columbus belief, 31
East (region) abolition movement in, 295 Civil War in, 395 (m) Civil War stalemate in, 394–96 colonies of. See Middle colonies;
New England colonies Eastern Hemisphere, sea routes to
West and, 34 Eastern Woodland cultures. See
Woodland peoples East Indies
European exploration for, 31–32, 34 Portuguese exploration and
trade, 31 Eaton, William, 248 Economic decline. See Depressions;
Inflation; Panics; Unemployment Embargo Act (1807) and, 254
Economic growth in early years of independence, 222 and elite, legal foundation, 279 and free-labor system, 311 Hamilton’s stimulus plan, 217,
222–27 industrial evolution (1840–1850s),
304–8 under Jackson (1830s), 282, 290 manifest destiny goal of, 313 and plantation production,
341–42 railroads and, 306–8 Reconstruction era South, 437
Discovery (ship), 53 Discrimination and prejudice. See also
Racism against African Americans. See
African American inequality against free blacks, 310, 329, 353,
354 against immigrants. See
Anti-immigration against women. See Gender
inequality Diseases. See also Epidemics
in Columbian exchange, 35 Disfranchisement, property ownership
rules, 194 Dissent. See Revolts, rebellion,
resistance District of Columbia. See Washington,
D.C. Diversity
and migrant groups. See entries under Immigrants
in New Netherland, 91, 94 Pennsylvania colony, 95–96
Divorce recognition by 1820, 260 southern women, restriction of,
344 Dix, Dorothea, 410 Domesticity, separate spheres concept,
291–92 Domestic servants
Irish immigrants as, 312 women as, 104 (i), 292
Dominion of New England, 98–99 Donelson, Fort, capture of (1862),
395 (m), 398 Doughfaces, 367, 373 Douglas, Stephen A., 382 (m)
on Civil War, 389 Compromise of 1850 and, 364 election of 1860, 378, 380–81,
382 (m) Freeport Doctrine of, 378 Kansas-Nebraska Act, 367–68, 370,
371, 374 Lincoln debate, 378–79
Douglass, Frederick, 329, 329 (i) on African Americans in Civil
War, 387 on Fourteenth Amendment, 430 on Lincoln and emancipation,
400 Dove (ship), 64 Dove, Samuel, 426 (i)
Deere, John, 305 Deficit, in federal budget. See Federal
debt Deforestation, and steamboat wood
fuel, 276 de Gouges, Olympe, 234 (b), 235 (b) Deism, 120–21 Delany, Martin R., 329 Delaware (Lenni Lenape) people
cessions of land to U.S. from, 202 Fallen Timbers, battle of, 228–29 Fort Wayne Treaty, 256 as loyalists, 171 of Manhattan Island, 94 (i) Quaker peace policy with, 95 in Revolutionary War, 179 (m) and Seven Years’ War, 134
Delaware, Maryland partial emancipation in, 198–99 secession rejected by, 389
Delaware colony, geographic extent (1600s), 91 (m)
Delaware River region, 91 (m), 168 Democracy
antebellum South, 355 excess, founders’ control of,
209–10 Jacksonian agenda, 284–85 republicanism versus, 209–10
Democratic Party antebellum era, 355, 367, 371 evolution of, 283 Jacksonian era origin of, 283 Peace Democrats, 414–15 realignment (1848–1860), 372 (m) Reconstruction era, 435–36, 442–45 Redeemers, 443–45
Democratic Republicans, 283 Dennis, John Q. A., 424 (b) Depressions. See also Panics
of 1873, 441 Desegregation. See African American
equality De Soto, Hernando, 38 Detroit, Fort, 139, 179 (m), 204 (i) Dew, Thomas R., 333, 337, 344 Dias, Bartolomeu, 30 Dickinson, John
as moderate, 160, 163, 164 at Second Continental Congress,
160, 161 on Townshend duties, 145
Dinwiddie, Robert, 134 Diplomacy. See also Foreign policy
King Cotton, in Civil War, 399
INDEX I-11
Seven Years’ War, 132–37 slavery abolished in, 399 War of 1812, 243–44, 256–59, 257 (m)
English colonies in America. See British North
America compared to Spanish colonies, 73 royal government, 55–56 in West Indies, 69–70
English Reformation, 78–79 Enlightenment, 121 Entertainment. See Leisure and
entertainment Environment
of Native Americans, 5–8, 10–11, 21 physical alteration and progress,
308–9 (b) Environmental hazards
drought and Anasazi culture, 16 steamboat use and, 276
Epidemics. See also specific diseases Black Death, 28 from Columbian exchange, 35 and Native American depopula-
tion, 35, 45, 55, 82, 125, 162 Epperly, Marion and Mary, 406–7 (b) Equality, women. See Gender
equality Equiano, Olaudah, 115, 115 (i), 121 Erie, Lake, 135, 258 Erie Canal
construction of, 276 (i) route of, 275 (m)
Ethiopian Regiment, 155 Ethnic minorities. See entries under
Immigrants; specific groups Europe. See also specific countries
ancient humans in, 6 Civil War (U.S.) and, 394, 399 immigrants from. See specific
groups New World, exploration of. See
Exploration, Age of North American influence of,
138 (m) Protestant Reformation, 45–46 trade routes (1400s), 29 (m)
Evangelicals. See Revivals, religious Everett, Sarah, 315 Executive departments, under Articles
of Confederation, 193, 201 Expansionism
filibusters, 368–69 (b) Monroe Doctrine, 265–67 into West. See Western expansion
election of 1876, 445 (m) founders’ development of, 209
Electoral commission, for 1876 election, 445
Elites. See also Wealth in Chesapeake region colonies, 65 at constitutional convention, 208 economic potential, increasing, 279 favored by Constitution, 210–12, 214 Federalists as, 210–11 free blacks as, 354 in New Spain, 41 in southern politics, 355–56
Elizabeth I (England), 79, 79 (i) Ellison, William, 354 Emancipation of slaves. See Abolition
of slavery Emancipation Proclamation (1863),
387, 400–402 limitations of, 402, 419–20
Embargo, on British goods (1807), 254 Embargo Act (1807), 254 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 326, 379 Emigrant aid societies, 374–75 Eminent domain laws, 279 Empires
British. See English colonies of Mexica, 21–23
Employment growth and market revolution
(1815–1840), 276 job loss. See Unemployment of women. See Women workers
Encomenderos, 39 Encomienda system, 39–41 l’Enfant, Pierre, 216 (i) England
in age of exploration, 47 colonial era immigrants from, 104,
105 (m) colonies of. See English colonies cotton exports from South to, 341,
391, 399 English Reformation, 78–79 exploration of New World, 33, 47 feminist movement, 235 (b) Glorious Revolution, 99–100 immigrants from. See English
immigrants impressment of American sailors,
254, 259 Jay Treaty, terms of, 232–33 Protestantism in, 79 Puritanism, 78–79 Puritan Revolution, 87
surplus and, 290 and westward movement. See
Western expansion Economy
in Civil War, 394, 409 colonial trade-based. See British
North America trade cotton kingdom, antebellum
South, 335–36 downturns. See Economic decline family system of, 515 free-labor, 310–12 growth of. See Economic growth Hamilton’s actions, 217, 222–27 home-based, colonial era, 146–147 market revolution (1815–1840),
274–82 manipulation, boom-and-bust
cycles and, 480 New Spain encomienda system,
39–41 plantation-based. See Plantations Republicans and business interests,
480, 494 service-based, 839
Edenton, North Carolina, women protesters in, 147 (i)
Education. See also Schools for free blacks, 423, 436, 437 (i) Sunday school movement, 293 (i) university. See Higher education;
Universities and colleges for women. See Women and
education Edwards, Jay Dearborn, 341 (i) Edwards, Jonathan, 121 Egypt, cotton exports from, 399 Eighth Amendment, 220 Elastic clause, 210 Elderly, African American slaves,
346 Elect (Puritan saints), 83 Elections
presidential. See Presidential elections
right to vote. See Voting rights of senators, 378–79
Electoral college election of 1796, 237 election of 1800, 245 election of 1824, 268, 268 (m) election of 1828, 284 (m) election of 1848, 362, 362 (m) election of 1860, 382 (m) election of 1868, 440 (m)
I-12 INDEX
Five Civilized Tribes, 397 Florida
Jackson (Andrew) invasion of, 266–67
New Spain missions, 68–69 secession from Union, 382 Spanish exploration/outposts in,
38–39 statehood of, 267
Floyd, Kitty, 190 (i) Folsom culture, 9–10 Folsom points, 9 Foods
agricultural. See Crops in Columbian exchange, 35 of Native Americans, 12, 15, 20, 21 slaves, diet of, 342–43
Foote, Henry S., 363 Foraging, by Native Americans, 8,
10, 21 Force Bill (1833), 289 Foreign Miners’ Tax Law (1850), 324 Foreign policy. See also individual
presidents and policies in early years of independence,
236–40 Forts. See also specific forts
along Oregon Trail, 314 Native American attacks on, 139,
139 (m) in Seven Years’ War era, 133 (m),
134 (m), 135 Forty-niners, 324–25 Fourier, Charles, 326 Fourierist phalanxes, 326 Fourteenth Amendment
provisions of, 430 ratification by southern states, 431,
436 woman suffrage excluded from, 430
Fourth Amendment, 220 France
in eastern North America, 123 (m) exploration of New World, 46–47 feminist movement, 234–35 (b) French Revolution, 231–32 Haiti, loss as colony, 233, 236, 249 Louisiana Purchase and, 249 Quasi-War with, 238 Revolutionary War support by, 164,
178–80, 184 in Seven Years’ War, 138 (m) Seven Years’ War, 132–37 slavery abolished in, 399 XYZ affair, 237–38
women, during Civil War, 409 by yeomen, 65, 349–52
Federal budget, surplus, Jackson (Andrew) and, 290
Federal debt funding versus payoff, 223–25 from wars. See War debt
Federal government budget of. See Federal budget founders’ development of, 208–10 pro-business policies, 279
Federal Hall (New York City), 216 (i) Federalist Papers, 213, 220 Federalists
on Alien and Sedition Acts, 238 constitutional convention, position
at, 210–11, 213, 220 decline of party, 259, 262–63 election of 1796, 236–37 Hartford Convention and, 259 prominent members, 210, 216, 218,
237 War of 1812 opposition by, 244
Federal regulation, interstate commerce, first attempt, 276
Feme covert (covered woman) doctrine, 260
Feminism. See Women’s movement Ferdinand (Spain), 26 (i), 26–27,
28 (i), 31–32, 42–43 (b) Fictive kin, African slaves, 117 Fifteenth Amendment, 433–34
provisions of, 433 woman suffrage excluded from,
433–34 Fifth Amendment, 220 Filibusters, expeditions of, 368–69 (b) Fillmore, Millard
Know-Nothing nomination of, 373 as president, 364
Finney, Charles Grandison, 293 Fire, Native American use of, 21 Fire-eaters (radical southerners), 363, 380 Fire starter, 15 (i) First Amendment, 220 First Bank of the United States
establishment of, 225 expiration of charter, 279
First Continental Congress (1774), 152–53
Fishing and fishing industry by Native Americans, 10 (i), 10–11,
18, 20 in New England, 87
Fitzhugh, George, 336, 369 (b)
Exploration, Age of, 28–48 of Africa, 30–31 of Canada, 46–47 chronology, 27 Columbian exchange, 34–35 Columbus expeditions, 27, 28 (i),
31 (m), 31–32 by England, 33, 47 European routes, 31 (m), 33 (m) by France, 46–47 globe, circumnavigation of, 34 impetus for, 28–29 by Portuguese, 29 (m), 29–31, 30 (i) of South America, 33 by Spain, 33–46 Treaty of Tordesillas, 32
Exports British colonies in America. See
British North America trade in early years of independence,
222 Extinction, of ancient mammoths, 7–8
Factories, textile. See Textile industry Fallen Timbers, battle of (1794),
230–31, 245 Families
of African American slaves, 347–48 of African slaves, 116, 117 Civil War and, 406–7 (b) of free blacks, 423, 424–25 (b), 426 (i) of loyalist/traitors, 171–73 Mexican, 322 (i) middle colonial arrivals, 110 New England colonial arrivals, 82,
89 (i) of planters, 343 (i) poor southern whites, 351–52 separate spheres concept, 291 (i),
291–92 slave families, 347–48 southern, mammy in, 343 (i) southern plantation family, 342–45 wagon trains westward, 315, 316 (i) of yeomen, 350–51
Farms and farming in Chesapeake region colonies,
63–64, 65 large-scale. See Agriculture mechanization of, 305 (i), 409 in middle colonies, 110–11, 112 (i) of Native Americans, 12–16, 13 (i),
20, 21 in New England colonies, 106 by squatters, 305
INDEX I-13
Fur trade colonial competition, 123 New France, 100, 132
Gabriel’s Rebellion (1800), 245 Gadsden, James, 367 Gadsden Purchase (1853), 367, 367 (m) Gage, Thomas, 151, 152, 154, 161 Gag rule, on abolitionists, 297 Galloway, Joseph, 152 Gama, Vasco da, 30–31 Gansevoort, Peter, 158 (i) Garfield, James A., 432 Garnet, Henry Highland, 329 Garrison, William Lloyd
as abolitionist, 273, 363 on Hayes election, 445 newspaper of, 333
Gary, Martin, 443 Gaspée (ship), 149 Gates, Horatio, 177, 177 (i), 181 Gender equality, in church leadership
(by 1820s), 260–61 Gender inequality
in early years of independence, 260 feme covert (covered woman)
doctrine, 260 inheritance, exclusion from, 106,
260 movement against. See Women’s
movement property ownership restrictions,
344 separate spheres concept, 291 (i),
291–92 voting restrictions, 194–95, 260, 264 wage discrimination, 409
General Court (Massachusetts), 84–85 General welfare clause, 226 Genoa, Italy, 28 Gentry, wealth, colonial South, 118–19 Geographic mobility, free labor and,
311 Geographic parties. See Sectional
politics Geographic revolution, in age of
exploration, 33–35 George III (England), 140, 145, 160 Georgia
Civil War in, 412, 414 Native American removal issue,
287–88 Reconstruction era defiance, 427 secession from Union, 382 Spanish exploration of, 38
Freedmen’s Bureau Acts (1865 and 1866), 428–29
Freedom papers, 349 (i), 353 Free labor, 310–12
African Americans, Reconstruction era, 422–23, 428
compulsory for free blacks, 422, 428
and economic growth, 311 gold rush, Chinese immigrants,
324–25 ideal, elements of, 310 immigrant laborers, 311–12 Republican Party view, 373 southern attacks on, 336
Freeman, Elizabeth (Mum Bett), 198, 198 (i)
Freeport Doctrine, 378 Free-soil doctrine, 361, 402 Free-Soil Party, 362, 367 Free-soil settlers, in Kansas, 375 (i) Free speech
gag rules, 297 suppression in Civil War, 411
Free states Compromise of 1850, 364 (m) versus popular sovereignty issue,
361–64, 374–75 Freewill Baptists, 261 Frémont, Jessie Benton, 373, 374 (i) Frémont, John C., 318–19, 373,
374 (i), 401 French and Indian War. See Seven
Years’ War French Revolution, 231–32 Frobisher, Martin, 47 Frontier
movement into. See Western expansion
in Revolutionary War, 177–78 Fugitive Slave Act (1850), 365 Fugitive slaves
Chesapeake region colonies, 72 in Civil War, 386–87 escape, difficulty of, 349 flight from Confederacy to Union,
400–401, 401 (i), 405 laws related to, 365 in Northwest Ordinance of 1787,
204 underground railroad and, 330, 365
Fulton, Robert, 276 Fundamental Constitution of
Carolina, 71 Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, 87
Franklin, Benjamin Albany Plan of Union, 135 at constitutional convention, 208 philosophical stance, 121, 137, 141,
190 (i) publications of, 111 (i), 111–12 at Second Continental Congress,
160 son as loyalist, 172–73 (b)
Franklin, William, 172–73 (b) Fredericksburg, battle of (1862), 396 Free blacks
antebellum South, 353–54 autonomy and freedom, quest for,
423, 424–25 (b) black codes, 427–29 child labor, 428 in Civil War, 386–87 in colonial protests, 148 (i), 149 in Continental army, 165, 165 (i) discrimination against, 310, 329,
354 Dred Scott decision, 376 (i),
376–77 in early years of independence,
198–99, 199 (m) education for, 423, 436, 437 (i) elite class, 354 Freedmen’s Bureau for, 423,
428–29 freedom papers of, 349 (i), 353 labor code, Reconstruction era,
422–23, 428 marriage, legal, 424 (b) migration out of America, 155, 185,
199, 294 as non-citizens, 376 poverty of, 311 purchase of freedom, 58, 354 Reconstruction era inequality,
418–20, 427–29 religious worship, 423 in Republican Party, 434–35 restrictions, legal, 353 as Revolutionary War British
soldiers, 155, 181, 185 search for families by, 423, 426 (i) sharecropping, 438–39, 439 (m) Sherman land for, 422–23, 427 as slaveholders, 354 voting rights, 195 voting rights, Lincoln on, 422 white fears about, 353, 400 women, role transition for, 438
Freedmen’s Bureau, 423, 428–29, 432
I-14 INDEX
as Federalist, 210, 216, 218 Federalist Papers, 213 as treasury secretary, 216, 217, 220 in Whiskey Rebellion, 226–27
Hammond, James Henry, 361 Hancock, John, Stamp Act protest, 140 Hannastown, Pennsylvania, 179 (m) Hard money. See Gold; Silver Harmar, Josiah, 229 Harper, William, defense of slavery,
338–39 (b) Harpers Ferry, Brown’s raid on, 358 (i),
359, 379 Harrison, William Henry
election of 1840, 299 sudden death of, 319 on Tecumseh, 243 Tippecanoe, battle of, 256
Hartford, Connecticut, 87 Hartford Convention (1814), 259 Hartford Seminary, 262 Hayes, Rutherford B., election of
1876, 445 Headrights, 56, 57 Hemings, Sally, 246 (i) Hendrick (Mohawk chief), 134–35,
136 (i) Hendricks, Thomas A., 442 Henry, Fort, 179 (m)
capture of (1862), 395 (m), 398 Henry, Patrick, 130 (i)
and committees of correspondence, 149
at constitutional convention, 213 at First Continental Congress, 152–53 Stamp Act protest, 142
Henry the Navigator (Portugal), 30 Henry VII (England), 33 Henry VIII (England), 78–79 Herndon, William, 377 Hessians, 166, 174, 176 Hickory Clubs, 283 Higher education. See also Universities
and colleges increase in (1830s), 292 and women. See Women and
education Higher law doctrine, 365, 381 Highways. See Roads and highways Hill, Aaron (Mohawk chief), 201 Hillsborough (Lord), 146 Hispaniola, Haitian Revolution, 233, 236 History and historiography,
archaeological study, 4–5 Hohokam people, 14–15, 20
Reconstruction and, 440–42 warfare, view of, 398
Grasse, Comte de, 184 Graves, A. J., Mrs., 291 Great Awakening
First, 121, 122 (i) Second, 292–93
Great Basin cultures, 10, 18–20 Great Britain. See entries under
England Great Compromise, 208 Great Lakes region
Erie Canal link to, 277 Native Americans of, 18–19,
138–39 in Seven Years’ War, 135
Great Plains, Native Americans of, 9–10, 18–20
Great Salt Lake, 316 Greeley, Horace, 394, 441 Greenbacks, 409 Greenville, Treaty of (1795), 231,
231 (i) Grenville, George, 140 (i), 140–41 Grimké, Angelina, 272–74, 274 (i),
295–96 Grimké, Sarah, 272–74, 274 (i),
295–96 Grinding stones, 8, 15 (i) Griswold, Roger, 239 (i) Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of (1848),
323 Guadeloupe, 138 (m)
in Seven Years’ War, 135 Guerrilla warfare
in Bleeding Kansas incident, 375 in Civil War, 390, 397 in Revolutionary War, 183
Gutenberg, Johannes, 29
Habeas corpus, Lincoln suspension of, 389–90
Haires, Francis, 62 Haiti, as republic, 233, 236 Haitian Revolution, 233, 233 (m), 236 Hakluyt, Richard, 53 Halfway Covenant, 89 Hamilton, Alexander, 218 (i)
background/activities of, 216–18 at constitutional convention, 207,
212, 213 economy, actions related to, 217,
222–27 election of 1796 influence, 237 enemies of, 217–18
Georgia colony, in Revolutionary War, 181, 182 (m)
German immigrants colonial era, 104, 105 (m), 109–10 pre–Civil War wave of (1840–1860),
311–12 U.S. areas settled by, 312
German Reformed Church, 109 Germany, immigrants from. See
German immigrants Gettysburg, battle of (1863), 412,
412 (m), 413 (m) Ghent, Treaty of (1814), 259 Gilbert, Humphrey, 44 Glaciers, 6–8 Globalization, and migration. See
Immigration; Migration Global warming, 8 Glorieta Pass, battle at (1862), 397,
397 (m) Glorious Revolution (England),
99–100 Godspeed (ship), 53 Godwin, William, 235 (b) Gold
as currency (1500s), 26 (i) as hard money, 225 Spanish conquest for, 36–37
Gold Coast, 114 (m) Gold rush (1849–1852)
Chinese immigrant workers, 324–25
gold nugget discoveries, 302 (i) individual efforts in, 325 (i) miners, hardships to, 324
Goliad, massacre at (1836), 318 Gorgas, Josiah, 393 Gould, William, 386–87, 402, 416 Governance, colonial. See specific
colonies Government of U.S. See Federal
government Governors, royal, colonial era, 55–56,
94, 96, 125, 128, 130 Gradual emancipation, 198–99, 265 Grain, crops of. See specific grain Grandees, 67, 69, 72 Grant, Ulysses S.
background/activities of, 398 in Civil War, 394, 398, 411–13,
413 (m) corruption and, 440–41, 441 (i) election of 1868, 440, 440 (m),
443 (i) election of 1872, 441
INDEX I-15
Indian policy. See Native American policy
Indian Removal Act (1830), 285–87 Indians
Columbus use of word, 32 origin and cultures. See Ancient
Americans; Native Americans Indian Territory
location of, 287 (m), 288 Trail of Tears, 287 (m)
Indigenous people. See Ancient Americans; Native Americans
Indigo, 71, 118 Individualism, as Democratic Party
ethic, 284 Industrialization
industrial evolution (1840–1850s), 304–5
railroads and, 306–7 Industrial revolution, 305 Inequality. See African American
inequality; Gender inequality; Social inequality
Inflation in Civil War, 394, 404 Jacksonian era, 290
Inheritance partible, 106 women excluded from, 106, 260 women included, in France, 234
Intellectual thought Enlightenment, 121 transcendentalists and, 326 utopians and, 326–27
Intermarriage Native American–white, 286 in New Spain, 41 New Spain, mixed-race, 44 (i)
Interstate commerce, first regulatory attempt (1830s), 276
Intolerable (Coercive) Acts (1774), 151–52
Inventions. See Mechanization and technology
Ireland, immigrants from. See Irish immigrants
Irisarri, Antonio José, 369 (b) Irish immigrants
canal builders, 276 (i) colonial era, 104, 105 (m) discrimination against, 312 in free-labor system, 312 Know-Nothing goals, 371 pre–Civil War wave of (1840–1860),
312
as loyalist, 130–31, 147, 151 (i) as Massachusetts governor, 130–31
Hymns and spirituals, 353
Iberian Peninsula. See Portugal; Spain Illiteracy, of plain folk, 352 Illness. See Diseases; Epidemics Immigrants. See also specific groups
colonial era, 104, 105 (m), 109–10 as percentage of state populations
(1860), 341 (m) as workers. See Immigrant workers
Immigrant workers. See also specific ethnic groups
canal builders, 276 (i) as domestic servants, 312 in free-labor system, 311–12 as miners, 324–25 women as, 312
Immigration anti-immigration position. See
Anti-immigration pre–Civil War wave of (1840–1860),
311 (f), 311–12 to South (antebellum), 341 waves of, 311–12
Impartial Administration of Justice Act (1774), 151
Impeachment, of Johnson (Andrew), 432–33
Imports British colonies in North America.
See British North America trade
taxation on. See Tariffs Impost, 205 Impressment, of Americans by British,
254, 259 Incan empire, 37 Incorporation laws, origin of, 279 Indentured servants
Chesapeake region colonies, 57–59, 62–63
decline of system, 68 English origin of, 58–59 males preferred, 62–63, 110 in middle colonies, 110 rigors/hardness of, 63 term of servitude, 110 women as, 63, 110
Independence Hall, Philadelphia, 207 (i) India
cotton exports from, 399 European exploration of, 31 Seven Years’ War, 132, 135
Holmes, George F., 366 Holy Roman Emperor, 45–46 Home rule, for South, 440, 443 Homespun cloth, 146–47 Homestead Act (1862), 409 Homo erectus, 5 Homo sapiens, 5–6 Hone, Philip, 298 Hood, John B., 415 Hooker, Thomas, 86–87 Hopewell culture, 16–17 Hopi, 16 Horses, Native American use of, 10,
313, 315 (i) Horseshoe Bend, battle of (1814), 258 Hourglass, 29 Household goods
patriotic themes on, 242 (i) timekeepers, 272 (i)
House of Burgesses, Virginia colony, 55–56, 142
House of Representatives African Americans in, 419, 420 (i) election of 1800 intervention, 245 election of 1824 intervention, 268 founders’ development of, 208–9,
212 Housing
Native American, 19 slave quarters, 342–43, 347 (i) on sugar plantation, 71 (i)
Houston, Sam, 318 Howe, William, 161–62, 167–68,
176–77 Hudson, Carrie, 346 Hudson River region, 91, 91 (m), 166 Huguenots, 120 Huitzilopochtli (god), 22 Human sacrifice
by Mexica, 22 (i), 22–23 by Native Americans, 3, 21
Hunchback (ship), 388 (i) Hunter, David, 401 Hunting
buffalo (bison), by Native Americans, 7–10, 9, 20, 313–14
and gathering, Native Americans, 8–12, 18, 20
of mammoths, by Native Americans, 5, 6, 8
Huron people, 139 Hutchinson, Anne, 85–86 Hutchinson, Thomas, 132 (i), 141, 143
Albany Plan of Union, 135 and Boston Tea Party, 150
I-16 INDEX
John Brown Going to His Hanging (Pippin), 380 (i)
Johnson, Andrew background/activities of, 427 Fourteenth Amendment call for
rejection by, 431–32 Freedmen’s Bureau veto, 428–29 impeachment of, 432–33 Reconstruction sabotaged by,
428–33 slavery, attitude toward, 427, 428 succeeds Lincoln, 415, 426 as Unionist, 427 vetoes by, 432 as vice president, 427
Johnson, Jane, 347 Johnson, William, 135, 139 Johnston, Albert Sidney, 398 Johnston, Joseph, 396 Joint-stock companies, 53, 80, 84–85 Jones, Charles Colcock, 348 Journalism. See Newspapers Judicial review, Marbury v. Madison,
247 Judiciary. See Supreme Court Judiciary Act (1789), 247
Kansas Bleeding Kansas, 374–76, 375 (m) free vs. slave state settlers in, 375 (i) Lecompton constitution, 378
Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), 365, 366–67, 370, 370 (m), 374
and emergence of Republican Party, 371, 373
Kaskaskia, battle at, 178 Kearny, Stephen Watts, 322 Kee-O-Kuk, the Watchful Fox, Chief of
the Tribe (Catlin), 315 (i) Kennesaw Mountain, battle of (1864),
413 (m), 414 Kentucky
Civil War in, 394, 398 secession rejected by, 389, 390
King, Boston, 185 King Cotton diplomacy, 399 King George, Grandy, 101–2 King Philip (Metacomet)
(Wampanoag chief), 98 King Philip’s War (1675–1676), 98,
98 (m), 99 (i) King’s Mountain, battle of (1780),
183–84 King William’s War (1689–1697), 100 Kinship, among African slaves, 117
James II (Duke of York, England), 94–95
James II (England), 99 Jamestown, 50–53
advertisement for settlers, 57 (i) fragility of, 53, 55
Jay, John as chief justice, 220 at constitutional convention, 213 Federalist Papers, 213, 220 Jay Treaty, 232–33, 237 on Shays’s Rebellion, 206
Jayme, Luis, 126–27 (b) Jay Treaty (1795), 232–33, 237 Jefferson, Thomas, 244–54, 246 (i)
Articles of Confederation ratification and, 192
background/activities of, 245–46 Barbary Wars, 247 (i), 247–48 and committees of correspondence,
149 Declaration of Independence, 164 election of 1796, 237 election of 1800, 239–40, 244–45 election of 1804, 254 Embargo Act (1807), 254 Federalist initiatives dismantled by,
246 on First Bank of U.S., 225 on Haitian Revolution, 236 on Hamilton’s debt financing, 225 Hemings, Sally, and, 246 (i) on Lexington and Concord battle,
155 Louisiana Purchase, 248–53 Native American alliances,
251–53 Northwest Territory and, 202,
203 (m), 204 Ordinance of 1784, 202 philosophical stance, 121 republican ideals of, 245–47 Revolutionary War escape, 184 at Second Continental Congress,
161 as secretary of state, 220 on slavery, 116, 265, 342 as vice president, 237
Jemison, Mary, 173 Jersey, 174 Jews
immigrants, colonial arrivals, 94 Reconquest, 27, 30
Jim Crow, 437 Jobs. See Employment
Ironclad warships, 388 (i), 398 Iron industry, 306 Iroquois Confederacy
Albany Congress, 134–35 cessions of land to U.S. from,
200–202 Fort Stanwix Treaty, 200–202 in Revolutionary War, 179 (m)
Iroquois people culture of, 18–19 in New England colonies, 106
Irrepressible conflict speech (Seward), 381
Irrigation, of Native Americans, 13, 14
Isabella (Spain), 26 (i), 26–29, 28 (i), 31–32
Isham, Edward, 351 Isolationism, Monroe Doctrine and,
265–67 Isthmus of Panama, 34 Italy, and Mediterranean trade (1500s),
28, 29 (m)
Jackson, Andrew Age of Jackson, features of, 273–74 bank war, 289–90 cabinet under, 284 charisma of, 284 cultural environment in era of,
290–94 democratic agenda, 284–85 election of 1824, 268 (m) election of 1824 as corrupt bargain,
267 election of 1828, 283–84, 284 (m) election of 1832, 289, 297 Florida, invasion by, 265–67 as “the Great Father,” 286 (i) on moneyed interests/abuses, 279,
289–90 Native American removal, 285–88 Native American removal policy,
287 (m) nullification doctrine, 288–89 partisan identity, emergence of,
282–83 Reconstruction and, 421 (i) as secretary of war, 268–69 slavery, abolition issue under,
294–96 vetoes by, 284, 289 in War of 1812, 258–59
Jackson, Thomas J. (Stonewall), 396 James I (England), 52, 55–56, 60, 79
INDEX I-17
free blacks, view of, 377, 401 on Grant (Ulysses S.), 398 homes of, 304 (i) inaugural address (1861), 383, 388 on Kansas-Nebraska Act, 377 on Mexican-American War, 321 military strategy abilities, 393 and North-South war. See Civil
War (1861–1865) Reconstruction plan of, 420–23, 421 (i) on sectional politics, 360, 377 treason declared by, 411 on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 366
Lincoln, Mary Todd, 302–3, 304 (i) Lincoln, Nancy, 303 Lincoln, Thomas, 303 Lipscomb family, 351 Liquor. See Alcoholic beverages Literacy
free black opportunities, 436 women, rise in, 292
Literacy tests, and voting, 264 Little Turtle (Miami chief), 231 (i)
Fallen Timbers, battle of, 229, 231 on liquor traded to Native
Americans, 231 Livestock, as export, 107 Livingston, Robert R., 249, 250 (m) Loans. See Credit financing Locke, John, 71 Locomotive, symbolism of, 308–9 (i) Lone Star Republic, 318 Longhouses, 19 Long Island, battle of (1776), 168 Looms, mechanization of, 278 (i) López, Narciso, 369 (b) López de Santa Anna, Antonio, 318, 322 Louisiana. See also New Orleans,
Louisiana Reconstruction era, 422 secession from Union, 382 in War of 1812, 258–59
Louisiana Purchase as Jefferson success, 243 Lewis and Clark expedition,
249–51, 250 (m) Native American alliance, 251–53 price paid, 249
Lovejoy, Elijah, 295 Lowell, Massachusetts, textile mills,
277 (m), 280–81 (b) Lower South
secession from Union, 382 secession of, 382 (m), 390 (m) states of, 335 (m), 388
Lawrence, Kansas, 375 (i) League of Five Nations, 19 Lecompton constitution (Kansas),
378 Le Dru, Pierre, 244 (i) Lee, Richard Henry, 144, 149 Lee, Robert E.
in Civil War, 393, 396, 412–13, 413 (m)
Harpers Ferry raid and, 359 Legal Tender Act (1862), 409 Legislation. See specific laws Legislature
in early years of independence, 194
founders’ development of, 208 Leisler, Jacob, 99 Leisure and entertainment, of plain
folk, 352 Lenni Lenape (Delaware) people. See
Delaware (Lenni Lenape) people Leopard (ship), 254 (m) Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania
(Dickinson), 145, 160 Letters on the Equality of the Sexes
(Grimké), 273 Lew, Barzillai, 165 (i) Lewis, Meriwether, 246, 249, 261 Lewis and Clark expedition, 243,
250 (m) cultural exchange items, 252–53 (b)
Lexington, battle at (1775), 153–54, 154 (m)
Liberal Party, 440–41 Liberator (newspaper), 273, 295,
333 Liberia, West Africa, free slave
migration to, 294 Life expectancy, of ancient
Americans, 11 Limited government
Jackson’s view of, 283 Jefferson’s view of, 246
Lincoln, Abraham, 381 (i) assassination of, 415, 426 background/activities of, 302–3,
377, 393 cabinet of, 393 Civil War actions, 388, 399, 400–402 -Douglas debates, 378–79 election of 1860, 378, 380–81,
382 (m) election of 1864, 414–15 emancipation of slaves, 386,
400–402
Kiowa people, culture of, 313 Kivas (ceremonial rooms), 13, 14,
14 (i), 16 Know-Nothing Party, 371, 373 Knox, Henry, 219, 228 Ku Klux Klan
founding of, 435 laws restricting, 442 Reconstruction era rampage, 419
Ku Klux Klan Act (1871), 442
Labor, of people. See Workers Ladies Association, 169 Lady’s Magazine, woman’s rights in,
234 (i) Lakes. See specific lakes Lancaster Turnpike, 222 Land
ancestral of Native Americans. See Native American removal; Native American reservations
grants of. See Land grants speculative. See Land speculation
Land bridge, between Siberia and Alaska, 6, 6 (m)
Land grant certificates, as currency, 175 Land-Grant College Act (Morrill Act,
1863), 409 Land grants
to free blacks, 422–23, 427 to proprietors, middle colonies, 91 to railroads, 307 for universities, 409
Land ordinances, in early years of independence, 202–4
Land sales, federal land, for agriculture, 305
Land speculation colonial era, 132, 140 in early years of independence,
202 land sales (1810–1860), 290 (f)
Langhorne, James H., 404 (i) Languages, Mexico, native language, 36 Laramie, Fort, Indian conference at, 314 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 41 Latin America. See also Central
America; South America; specific countries
Law and legislation. See also specific laws
in British colonies in America. See British North America
Supreme Court and. See Supreme Court
I-18 INDEX
Mason-Dixon line, 333 (m), 333–35 Mason family, 89 (i) Massachusetts
school integration in (1855), 329 Shays’s Rebellion in, 205–6,
206 (m) slave petition for freedom/rights,
196–97 (b) Massachusetts Bay colony, 80 (i),
80–91. See also Boston (colonial) charter revoked, English rule,
98–99 “city on a hill” vision, 81–82 committees of correspondence in,
149–50 first book printed in, 76 (i) founding of, 80–81 land granted to, scope of, 80 land sales in, 106 loyalists in, 171 Pilgrims and Plymouth colony,
80 Puritan revival, 121 Puritan settlers, 76–87 Quakers in, 89–90 as royal colony, 80–81, 99 royal/military rule imposed (1774),
151 Salem witch trials, 91–92,
92–93 (b) self-government of, 80, 84–85 towns and cities of, 85
Massachusetts Bay Company, 78 Massachusetts Government Act
(1774), 151 Massasoit (Wampanoag chief), 80 Mass media. See Newspapers Mathews, John, 346 Matrilineal descent, 19 Mayflower (ship), 80 Mayflower Compact, 80 Maysville Road, 284–85 McClellan, George B., 394–96,
414–15 McCormick, Cyrus, 305, 409 McCrea, Jane, 177 (i) McGillivray, Alexander (Creek chief),
228 McIntosh, Fort, Treaty of (1785), 202 Meade, George G., 412 Measles, 35, 45 Mechanization and technology
of farming/agriculture, 305, 305 (i) of manufacturing, 306 Native American weaving, 21 (i)
Pierce era, 367 Polk as supporter, 320 westward movement and, 312–13,
318 Manufacturing. See also Textile
industry advances (1815–1850), 277–79 American system of, 305 for domestic market versus import,
306 Hamilton’s plan for, 226 mechanization of, 306 shoe production, 278–79
Manumission laws, 199 Map making, New World map, 34 Marbury, William, 246–47 Marbury v. Madison (1803), 247 “March to the Sea” (1864), 413 (m) Marine Corps, in Barbary Wars, 248 Market revolution (1815–1840),
274–82 banking system, 278 boom and bust cycles, 279, 282 corporate law during, 279 manufacturing and factories,
277–79 transportation advances, 275 (m),
275–77 Markets, Native American, 253 Marriage
of free blacks, 354 legal, for free blacks, 424 (b) mixed-race. See Intermarriage;
Miscegenation (interracial sex) Oneida community, 327 plural, and Mormons, 317 slave unions, nonlegal, 260, 347 women and. See Women and
marriage Marshall, James, 324 Martin, Anna, 171 Martin, Susanna, 92–93 (b) Martinique, 138 (m)
in Seven Years’ War era, 135 Mary II (England), 99 Maryland
Civil War in, 396 partial emancipation in, 198–99 secession rejected by, 389–90
Maryland colony. See also Chesapeake region colonies
Catholicism in, 64 Protestant rebellion, 99
Mason, George, 213 Mason, Priscilla, 235 (b)
Loyalists, Revolutionary War era, 130–31, 169–74, 170 (m)
Lucas, Eliza, 118 (i) Lumber industry, timber as colonial
export, 87, 107 Luther, Martin, 45–46 Lutheranism, 109 Lyon, Matthew, 239 (i)
Mackintosh, Ebenezer, 142 Madison, Dolley, political
participation, form of, 254, 255, 255 (i), 259
Madison, James, 190 (i) Articles of Confederation
ratification and, 192 background/activities of, 188–90 Barbary Wars, 248 Bill of Rights, development by, 220 at constitutional convention, 208,
213 at Continental Congress, 189 Dolley’s social functions, 255,
255 (i) election of 1808, 254–55 election of 1812, 257 Federalist Papers, 213 on First Bank of U.S., 225 on Hamilton (Alexander), 217–18 on Hamilton’s debt financing,
224–25 Marbury vs. Madison, 246–47 as secretary of state, 246 Virginia Plan, 208 War of 1812, 254, 256–59
Magellan, Ferdinand, 34 Mahican people, 106 Mail service, by Pony Express, 409 Maine, 80
as free state, 265, 266 (m) Malinali (Marina), 36 Mammoths
extinction of, 7–8 Native American hunting of, 5, 6, 8
Manassas, battle of. See Bull Run (Manassas)
Mandan people, 20, 251 Manhate people, 91 Manhattan Island, 91, 94 (i). See also
New York City (colonial) Manifest destiny
filibusters, 368–69 (b) meaning of, 312–13 Native American removal and, 367,
370
INDEX I-19
Military. See Armed forces; Weapons and armaments
Military districts, Reconstruction era South, 432, 432 (m)
Military draft in Civil War, 403, 404, 410–11 conscientious objectors, 220
Military Reconstruction Act (1867), 432, 432 (m)
Militia, colonial. See Revolutionary War (1775–1783)
Militia Act (1862), 402 Milliken’s Bend, battle of (1863), 403 Mills, textile. See Textile industry Minavavana (Ojibwa chief), 138 Mingo people, 134 Minié, Claude, 393 (i) Minié balls, 393 (i) Mining
California for gold. See Gold rush (1849–1852)
coal, 306 Minority groups. See specific groups Minuit, Peter, 91 Minutemen, 153 Miscegenation (interracial sex), 336,
337 (i) antiabolition statement on,
337 (i) Missionaries
Puritan, 82 Quaker, 95
Missions (New Spain) in California, 124 (i), 124 (m),
124–25, 126–27 (b) confiscation in California, 318 encomienda system and, 39–41 Native American conversion
attempts, 68–69 in New Spain colonies, 39–43,
68–69 Mission San Carlos Borroméo, 124 Mission San Diego de Alcalá, 124,
126–27 (b) Mississippi
Civil War in, 398, 411 (m), 411–12
Reconstruction era defiance, 427–28
secession from Union, 382 Thirteenth Amendment rejected
by, 427 Mississippian culture, 2 (i), 17, 20 Mississippi River region, 138 (m)
Civil War in, 398
Mexico abolition of slavery in, 361 boundaries (1830s), 317 (m) Cortés and conquest of, 35–37 decimating diseases in, 35 (i) Gadsden Purchase (1853), 367,
367 (m) Mexican cession (1848), 361 (m) Mexica people, 21–23 native people of, 14, 16 (i) rancheros program by, 318 Spanish conquest of, 23, 35–37,
37 (i) Texas independence from, 318 war with U.S. See Mexican-
American War (1846–1848) western U.S. expansion into
(1820–1840s), 317 (m), 317–19 Mexico City, assault on (1847), 323 Miami, Fort, 230–31 Miami people
Fallen Timbers, battle of, 229 Fort Wayne Treaty, 256
Middle colonies, 91–96. See also New Jersey colony; New York colony; Pennsylvania colony
diversity in, 91, 94, 95–96, 100 exports of, 95, 97 farming in, 110–11, 112 (i) geographic extent (1600s), 91 (m) immigrants, origins of, 109–10 indentured servants in, 110 land grants/proprietors, 91, 94–95 migration to South via, 111 Native Americans of, 111, 123 (m) New Jersey, 95 New Netherland (New York),
91, 94 Pennsylvania, 95–96 in Revolutionary War, 166–68,
167 (m) slavery in, 110–11 timeline, 77 unifying elements among, 119–25 wheat exports, 111
Middle Passage, 115–16 Midwest (region). See specific states Migration. See also Immigrants;
Immigration to American West. See Western
expansion of ancient Americans to Americas,
5–7 Militancy. See Revolts, rebellions,
resistance
navigational aids, 29 warfare and. See Weapons and
armaments Mediterranean region
Barbary States in, 247 trade routes, age of exploration,
31 (m), 33 (m) Melrose, Andrew, 308–9 (i) Melville, Herman, 158 (i) Memoir on Slavery (Harper),
338–39 (b) Memphis, Tennessee
civil rights riots (1866), 431 (i) Civil War in, 395 (m), 398
Men paternalism, 342–44 saloon culture of, 294 separate spheres concept, 291 universal male suffrage, 264
Menéndez de Avilés, Pedro, 39 Mennonites, 109 Mercantilism, 66 Merchants
New England colonies, 108 wealth of, 108
Méricourt, Théroigne de, 234 (b) Merrimack (frigate), 398 Merrimack River, 277 Mesa Verde, 15 Mestizos, 41, 44 (i) Metacomet (King Philip) (Wampanog
chief), 98 Methodists
free black groups, 423 plain folk as, 352–53 slave conversions to, 348 women in power positions,
261 women worshippers, 293
Mexican-American War (1846–1848), 319–26, 321 (m)
atrocities in, 322 (i) casualties in, 323 death from disease, 323 opponents of, 320–21 Polk’s justification of, 320 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and,
323 volunteers in, 320, 322 (i) western territorial expansions after,
324 (m), 361 (m) Mexica people, 21–23
ball courts of, 16 (i) language of, 36 and Spanish conquest, 36–37
I-20 INDEX
Native American conflicts at Acoma pueblo, 39 and Bacon’s Rebellion, 66–67 Catholic missionaries, conversion
attempts, 68–69, 126–27 (b) in Chesapeake region colonies,
54–55, 66–67 Creek War (1813–1814), 258 in early years of independence,
138–39, 200–201, 227–31 Fallen Timbers, battle of (1794),
230–31, 245 forts, attacks on, 139, 139 (m) and fur trade, 123 gold rush era, 325 intertribal conflicts, 11, 21, 314 Jamestown assault, 55 King Philip’s War (1675–1676), 98,
98 (m), 99 (i) land encroached by settlers, 66–67,
98, 139–40 of Mexica, 22–23 New Spain, degradation in, 39–43,
125 New Spain, forced labor in, 68–69,
125 Pequot War (1636–1637), 98 Pontiac’s Rebellion, 138–39, 139 (m) Proclamation of 1763, 139 Pueblo Revolt, 69 removal from ancestral lands. See
Native American removal in Revolutionary War, 177 (i),
177–78, 179 (m) Seven Years’ War, 124, 132–37 slaughter of Native Americans, 98,
139, 178, 230–31, 286 slaughter of whites, 55, 66, 69, 98,
127 (b), 134, 177 (i) Tippecanoe, battle of, 256,
256 (m) and Treaty of Paris (1783), 186 in War of 1812, 243–44
Native American policy assimilation, forced, 286–87 removal and relocation. See Native
American removal; Native American reservations
Native American removal concentration policy, 314–15 Indian Removal Act (1830),
285–87 under Jackson, 285–88 Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), 367,
370, 370 (m)
Mormon Trail, 314 (m) Mormon War (1857), 317 Morrill (Land-Grant College) Act
(1863), 409 Morrill, Justin, 409 Morristown, New Jersey, in
Revolutionary War, 168 Morse, Samuel F. B., 306 Motherhood, republican ideal, 221 Mott, Lucretia, 327 Mound builders. See Burial mounds Mulattos
as slave property, 345 (i) Spanish combinations, New Spain,
44 (i) Murray, Judith Sargent, 221, 221 (i) Music
hymns and spirituals, 353 of slaves, 117 (i) in warfare, 165 (i)
Muskogean people, 20 Muslims
on Iberian Peninsula, 27 Reconquest, 27, 30
Nahuatl language, 36 Napoleon I Bonaparte (France), 249 Narragansett people, 76, 98 Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, as Told by Himself (Douglass), 366
Narváez, Pánfilo de, 38 Nashville, battle of (1864), 413 (m),
415 Nast, Thomas, on Grant scandal,
441 (i) Natchez people, 20 National Banking Act (1863), 409 Nationalism, Confederacy in Civil
War, 405 National Negro Convention
(Philadelphia), 295 National Republicans, 283, 289 National Union Party, 431 Native American alliances
Albany Congress attempt, 134–35 with British in Revolutionary War,
171, 173 (b), 176–78, 177 (i), 186 with British in War of 1812, 243–44 Fort Stanwix Treaty, 200–202 Fort Wayne Treaty, 256 Louisiana Purchase and, 251–53 Thanksgiving, first, 80 trade with colonists, 55, 91, 122–24 Treaty of New York (1790), 228–29
Missouri and Bleeding Kansas, 374–75 Civil War in, 397 secession rejected by, 389, 390
Missouri Compromise (1820), 264–65, 266 (m)
Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) repeal of, 370, 370 (m)
as unconstitutional, Dred Scott decision, 376–77
Missouri River region, Lewis and Clark expedition, 250–53
Mixed marriages. See Intermarriage Mixed-race people
and Haitian Revolution, 233, 236 Spanish combinations, New Spain,
41, 44 (i) white men/slave women, 345 (i)
Mogollon people, 13–14, 20 Mohawk people
Albany Congress, 134–35 culture of, 19 Fort Stanwix Treaty, 200–203 as loyalists, 171, 186 in Revolutionary War, 176
Mohawk Valley region, 176–77, 179 (m)
Molasses Act (1733), 140 Money. See Currency and money Money supply, stimulating, 279 Monitor (ironclad), 398 Monks Mound, 3 Monopolies, legal, transport
companies (1815), 276 Monroe, James, 262–67
election of 1816, 262 election of 1820, 262 Missouri Compromise, 264–65,
266 (m) Monroe Doctrine, 265–67
Monroe Doctrine (1823), 265–67 Montecino, Antón, 42–43 (b) Montezuma (Mexico), 36 Montgomery, Alabama, Confederacy
established at, 382 Montgomery, Richard, 166 Montreal, Canada
in Revolutionary War, 166 in Seven Years’ War era, 135
Moral reform, moral reform movement (1830s), 294
Moral Reform Society, 294 Moravians, 109, 112 (i) Mormons, westward exodus of,
315–17
INDEX I-21
New Jersey gradual emancipation in, 198 women’s voting rights, 195, 260
New Jersey colony founding of, 95 geographic extent (1600s), 91 (m) in Revolutionary War, 167 (m),
168 New Jersey Plan (1787), 208–9 New Jerusalem, New York, 261 New Mexico
Civil War in, 397 Gadsden Purchase (1853), 367 Mexican-American War in, 322 Mexican cession of (1848), 323,
324 (m) Native Americans of, 13–16 popular sovereignty, 364
New Mexico colony Pueblo Revolt in, 69 Spanish exploration/outposts in,
39 Spanish missionaries, 68–69
New Negroes (slave era), 116 New Netherland, 91 New Orleans, battle of (1815), 258–59 New Orleans, Louisiana
Civil War in, 395 (m), 398 control of, 138 (m) cotton trade in, 341 (i) Reconstruction era violence, 431 Spanish control, 136, 248–49 in War of 1812, 257 (m)
New Spain, 39–44 California missions, 124 (i),
124 (m), 124–25 Columbus expeditions, 27, 28 (i),
31 (m), 31–32 in eastern North America, 123 (m),
133 (m) encomienda system, 39–41 English (British) colonies
compared to, 73, 128 Florida, 38–39, 68–69, 123 (m) Mexico, conquest of, 35–37, 37 (i) missions of. See Missions (New
Spain) mixed-race people in, 41, 44 (i) Native Americans, forced labor,
40–45, 68–69, 125 New Mexico, 39, 68–69 New Orleans as part of, 136,
248–49 tobacco exports, 60–61 Treaty of Tordesillas, 32
Neville, John, 226 New Amsterdam, 91, 94 (i) Newburgh Conspiracy, 200 New England. See also specific states
colonies. See New England colonies manufacturing in, 306 textile mills in, 277 (m), 277–79 urban population (1860), 341
New England Anti-Slavery Society, 295
New England colonies, 76–91. See also Connecticut colony; Massachusetts Bay colony; Rhode Island colony
British control attempts, 98–99 as Dominion of New England,
98–99 exports of, 87, 97, 107 families in, 82, 88, 89 (i) farms and farming in, 106 homogeneous population of,
106, 108 King Philip’s War, 98, 98 (m), 99 (i) land distribution system, 106 Massachusetts Bay colony, 80–91 Native Americans of, 76, 80, 98,
106, 123 (m) population growth (1600–1700s),
87–88, 88 (f) poverty in, 108 Puritans in, 76–87 Revolutionary War, British strategy,
175–77 Rhode Island, 77 royal government imposed (1684),
98–99 settlements (1600s), 81 (m) timeline, 77 unifying elements among, 119–25 wealth and trade, 108
Newfoundland, 33 New France
colonial losses to British, 135–36, 138 (m)
in eastern North America, 123 (m), 133 (m)
English (British) colonies compared to, 128
King William’s War, 100 Seven Years’ War, 134–36, 138 (m) as threat to English colonies, 100,
123 New Hampshire, 80
ratification of Constitution, 213 tax revolt (1786), 205
Native American resistance, 286–88
public protests about, 285 Supreme Court on, 288 Trail of Tears, 287 (m), 287–88
Native Americans, 2–24. See also specific cultures
buffalo (bison), uses of, 313–14 in California, 10–11 ceremonial dances, 47 (i) cessions of land to U.S. from,
200–202, 230 (m), 256 in Confederate army, 397 death from European diseases, 35,
45, 55, 82, 125, 162 forced labor of, Carolina, 71 forced labor of, New Spain, 40–45,
68–69 in New Amsterdam, 94 (i) in North America (by 1490s), 17,
18 (f), 19 (m) in North America (by 1500), 19 (m) North American cultures of, 19 (m) origin in Americas. See Ancient
Americans population (1490s), 17, 18 (f), 19 (m) power symbols of, 253 (i) racism against, 39–43 revivals, 139 and tobacco cultivation, 51, 56
Native American women early cultures, 6, 12, 13 (i),
14–15, 19 Pocahontas, 50–51, 52 (i)
Nativism. See also Anti-immigration; White supremacy
Know-Nothing Party, 371, 373 Nat Turner’s rebellion, 332–33, 334 (i) Natural increase, 104–5 Naturalization. See Citizenship Nauvoo, Illinois, Mormons in, 316 Navajo people, culture of, 20 Navigation Acts (1650, 1651, 1660),
66, 96–97 Navigational aids, exploration, age
of, 29 Navy, U.S. See U.S. Navy Nebraska, Kansas-Nebraska Act
(1854), 367, 370, 370 (m) Necessary and proper clause, 210 Necessity, Fort, 134 Negro first strategy, 434 Neutrality Act (1818), 368 (b) Neutrality Proclamation (1793), 232 Nevada, Comstock Lode in, 360
I-22 INDEX
in Northwest Ordinance of 1787, 204
Quebec Act (1774), 151 Seven Years’ War, 134 (m), 134–38
Ojibwa people, 137 (i) Oklahoma, Native Americans
relocated to. See Indian Territory Old Ship Meeting House,
Massachusetts, 86 (i) Old South, 420 Old South Church, Boston, 150 Olive Branch Petition, 163 Oliver, Andrew, 142–43 Oñate, Juan de, 39 Oneida community, 327 Oneida people
culture of, 19 in Revolutionary War, 176 and Seven Years’ War, 135
Onondaga people, 19 Ontario, Lake, 135 “On the Equality of the Sexes”
(Murray), 221 Opechancanough (Algonquian chief),
55, 66 Ordinance of 1784, 202 Ordinance of 1785, 202 Ordnance Bureau (Confederacy),
393 Oregon
Spanish exploration of, 38 western expansion into, 313–15
Oregon Trail, 313–15, 314 (m) Oriskany, battle of (1777), 158 (i),
176 (m) Osage people
Jefferson’s alliance with, 251–52 statehood requested by, 264
O’Sullivan, John L., 313 Otis, Hannah, 108 (i) Otis, James, 212 (i) Ottawa people, 139
cessions of land to U.S. from, 202
Fallen Timbers, battle of, 230–31 Ozette whale effigy, 11 (i)
Pacific Northwest native cultures, 11, 11 (m)
Pacific Ocean region Balboa exploration, 34 Pacific Coast native cultures, 8,
10–11, 20 settlement of, 124 (i)
Pacific Railroad Act (1862), 409
Nonconsumption colonial era agreements, 146–47,
147 (i) embargo against British (1807),
254 Non-Intercourse Act (1809), 256 North (region)
abolition of slavery (by 1840s), 310, 329–30
in Civil War. See Union (North in Civil War)
North, Frederick, Lord, 149, 150, 151 North Africa, Barbary Wars, 247 (i),
247–48 North America. See also Canada;
Mexico ancient peoples of. See Ancient
Americans; Native Americans colonial era, U.S. See British North
America eastern, empires in, 123 (m) European influences in, 138 (m) Native Americans in (by 1492),
18 (f) Native Americans in (by 1500),
19 (m) separation from Pangaea, 5, 6 (m)
North Carolina earliest settlement. See Carolina Roanoke Island colony, 47 (i) secession from Union, 389
Northern colonies. See also Middle colonies; New England colonies
Revolutionary War in, 167 (m), 175–77
Northup, Solomon, 366 Northwest Coast cultures, 20 Northwest Ordinance (1787), 202–4,
229, 265 Northwest Passage, search for, 33,
46–47, 91 Northwest Territory, Jefferson’s
proposal, 202, 203 (m), 204 Nova Scotia, free slave migration to,
155, 185 Noyes, John Humphrey, 327 Nullification, by states (1828), 288–89 Nursing, women in Civil War, 409–10
Ohio coal mining, 306 Native Americans in, 16–17
Ohio Company, 132, 134 Ohio River region
Native Americans of, 229–30, 242
Newspapers abolitionist, 295 of black abolitionists, 329 expansion of (1829–1840), 283 (t) partisan, emergence of, 283
New World European exploration of. See
Exploration, Age of wealth from, 38
New York Constitution, ratification holdout,
213 Fort Stanwix Treaty, 200–202,
202 (m) gradual emancipation in, 198, 265 Native American cessions of land
to, 200–202 Native Americans of, 200–201 Oneida community in, 327 Second Great Awakening meetings
in, 293 New York (colony)
Manhattan. See New York City (colonial era)
in Revolutionary War, 166, 167 (m), 175–77
New York, Treaty of (1790), 228–29 New York City
antidraft riots in, 411 capital moved from, 222 Washington inauguration in,
216 (i) New York City (colonial era)
British naming of, 91 British takeover from Dutch, 91, 94 geographic extent (1600s), 91 (m) Native Americans of, 91, 94 (i) nonconsumption agreements, 146 religious toleration, 94 in Revolutionary War, 167 Stamp Act Congress, 144
New York Female Moral Reform Society, 294
New York Tribune, 441 Niagara, Fort, 135, 178 Nicaragua, filibusters in, 368 (b),
369 (b) Night riders, 443 Niña (ship), 31 Ninth Amendment, 220 Nipmuck people, 98 Nobility, of Mexica, 23 Noble, T. S., 345 (i) Nomads, Native Americans as, 8–9,
12, 20, 313
INDEX I-23
housing of, 71 (i) indentured servant labor, 59, 62–63 labor code for free slaves, 422–23,
428 paternalism, 342–44 planters, political power of, 355–56 during Reconstruction, 428 rice plantations, 71, 118 (i), 340 sharecropping, 438–39, 439 (m) slave labor, 30, 69–73, 71 (i),
340–42 sugar plantations, 30, 69–70, 71 (i),
340 tobacco plantations, 59 (i), 340 women as managers, 118 (i)
Plows, 305, 305 (i) Plural marriage, Mormons, 317 Plymouth colony, 80 Pocahontas, 50–51, 52 (i) Political information
communication flow (1815–1840), 276
partisan newspapers, 283 Political parties. See also specific parties
benefits to candidates, 284 in early elections, missing from,
236–37 in early years of independence,
236–40 election of 1800, party lines in,
239–40 Jacksonian era evolution of, 283–84 nominating conventions, beginning
of, 297 realignment (1848–1860), 371–73,
372 (m) sectionalism and, 372 (m)
Politicians, lawyer-politicians, economic power of, 279
Politics African Americans and. See
African Americans and politics in British colonies in America. See
British North America sectional. See Sectional politics women and. See Women and
politics Polk, James K., 319–23
election of 1844, 319–20 expansionism of, 319–20 Mexican-American War, 320–23 retirement of, 362
Pollution. See Environmental hazards Polygamy, Mormons and, 317 Ponce de León, Juan, 38
Perry, Oliver Hazard, 258 Personal liberty laws, 365 Peru, gold, Spanish conquest for, 37 Petersburg, Virginia, siege of
(1864–1865), 413 (m), 415 “Petition ‘to the Union Convention of
Tennessee Assembled in the Capital at Nashville’,” 425 (b)
Petroglyphs, 7 (i) Philadelphia (colonial era)
colonial wealth and trade, 111 First Continental Congress in
(1774), 152–53 as Quaker city, 95, 111, 112 in Revolutionary War, 177, 193 Second Continental Congress in
(1775), 160–61 Philadelphia (ship), 247 (i), 247–48 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
as capital city, 222 constitutional convention (1787),
207 (i), 207–13 Philip II (Spain), 46 Phillips, Wendell, 421, 434 Photography
Brady (Mathew) photographs, 381 (i)
daguerreotypes, 278 (i) Phyllis dummy board (New England
slave), 104 (i) Pickering, Fort, 431 Pierce, Franklin, election of 1852, 367 Pike, Zebulon, 251 Pikes, of Brown (John), 358 (i) Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth,
254–55 Pinckney, Thomas, 237 Pinta (ship), 31 Pippin, Horace, 380 (i) Pirates, Barbary Wars, 247–48 Pisa, Italy, 28 Pit houses, 13 Pitt, Fort, 138, 178, 179 (m) Pitt, William, 135–36, 145 Pizarro, Francisco, 37 Plague (Black Death), 28 Plain folk, 349, 352–53, 355 Plains people, culture of, 313–14 Plantations
in 1860 and 1881, 439 (m) during Civil War, 405, 408 cotton plantations, 340–42 and economic growth, 341–42 families of, 342–45, 343 (i) and Haitian Revolution, 233
Paine, Thomas Common Sense, 163, 163 (i) Rights of Man, The, 235 (b)
Paleo-Indians, 6–8 Palmetto Guards, 375 (i) Palo Alto, battle at (1846), 322 Panama, Isthmus, crossing by
Balboa, 34 Pangaea, 5, 6 (m) Panics
of 1819, 279, 282 of 1837/1839, 296, 298–99 causes of, 279, 282, 298
Pardons, for Confederate rebels, 421, 427, 428, 432
Paris, Treaty of (1763), 136, 138, 138 (m) Paris, Treaty of (1783), 184–86, 185 (i) Partible inheritance, 106 Paternalism, 342–44 Patriotism
colonial era women, 146–47 in Revolutionary War, 169
Patroonships, 91 Pawnee people, culture of, 20 Paxton Boys, 139 Peace Democrats, 414–15 Pea Ridge, battle of (1862), 395 (m),
397 Peninsula campaign (1862), 396,
396 (m) Peninsulares, 41 Penn, William, 91, 95–96 Penn family (Pennsylvania), 111 Pennsylvania
Civil War in, 412 coal mining, 306 gradual emancipation in, 198 Whiskey Rebellion, 226–27
Pennsylvania colony Bethlehem, 112 (i) exports of, 95 farms and farming in, 111, 112 (i) geographic extent (1600s), 91 (m) immigrants, origins of, 109–10 indentured servants in, 110 legislature, single-house, 96 Native American relations in, 111 Native Americans of, 95 Quaker settlement of, 95–96 in Revolutionary War, 168
Pennsylvania Dutch (Germans), 109–10
Penobscot people, 18 Pequot War (1636–1637), 98 Percy, George, 53
I-24 INDEX
Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction (1863), 421
Productivity, and inventions. See Mechanization and technology
Property ownership free blacks, restrictions, 329 married women, restrictions,
344 slaves as property, 336 as voting qualification, 99, 119,
194, 264, 282 women’s right to (1860), 328
Prophetstown, 256 Proprietors
and Carolina settlement, 71 land grants to, middle colonies, 91,
94–96, 125 Prospecting. See Gold rush
(1849–1852) Prosperity. See Wealth Prossor, Thomas, 245 Protective tariffs. See Tariffs Protestant Association, 99 Protestant Reformation, 45–46, 78 Protestants
in Chesapeake region colonies, 64 in England, 79 Glorious Revolution, 99–100 Know-Nothing goals, 371 revivals. See Revivals, religious Scots-Irish immigrants, 109 women in power positions,
260–61 Public credit, building, Hamilton’s
plan, 222–27 Public schools
beginning of (1830s), 292 integration, Massachusetts (1855),
329 Public transportation, African
American segregation, 436–37
Pueblo Bonito, 14 (i), 14–15 Pueblo people, 38, 69 Pueblo Revolt, 69 Pueblos, 12, 15–16, 20, 21 Puritans, 76–87
churches of, 86 (i) Church of England, rejection of,
83–84 dissension among, 76–77, 85–87 doctrines of, 83 family arrivals, 82 government for Puritanism, 84–85 Halfway Covenant of, 89
Prairie, movement into. See Western expansion
Preachers camp meetings, 352 (i) in Great Awakening, 121, 122 (i) women as, 260–61, 261 (i)
Predestination, 83 Prejudice. See Discrimination and
prejudice Presbyterians, 109, 120, 293 Presidency
Alien and Sedition Acts (1798), 238–39
founders’ development of, 209 Washington and development of,
219 Presidential elections
of 1789, 219 of 1792, 227 of 1796, 236–37 of 1800, 239–40, 244–45 of 1804, 254 of 1808, 254–55 of 1812, 257 of 1816, 262 of 1820, 262 of 1824, 267–68, 268 (m) of 1828, 283–84, 284 (m) of 1832, 289, 297 of 1836, 297–98 of 1840, 299 of 1844, 319 of 1848, 362, 362 (m), 372 (m) of 1852, 366–67, 372 (m) of 1856, 372 (m), 373–74 of 1860, 372 (m), 378, 380–81,
382 (m) of 1864, 414–15 of 1868, 440, 440 (m), 443 (i) of 1872, 441 of 1876, 445, 445 (m)
Presidential Reconstruction, 426–29 President of U.S. See also Presidency;
individual presidents title, choosing by founders, 219
Presidios, 124 Preston, John Smith, 382 Preston, Thomas, 148 Price of Blood, The (Noble), 345 (i) Printing press, 29 Prisoners of war
in Civil War, 414 (i) in Revolutionary War, 168, 174–75,
201 Proclamation of 1763, 139–40
Pontiac (Ottawa chief), Pontiac’s Rebellion, 138–39, 139 (m)
Pony Express, 409 Poor people, southern whites, 351–52 Poor Richard’s Almanack (Franklin),
111 (i), 111–12 Popé (Pueblo people), 69 Pope, and Columbus explorations, 32 Pope, John, 396 Popular sovereignty
Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), 367, 374–75
and political parties, 371 western expansion and, 361–62
Population growth after American Revolution, 224 (i) in British colonies in America. See
specific colonies and regions in early years of independence,
222 methods of growth, 104 by natural increase, 104–5 by slave imports, 113, 113 (m)
Port cities in South, 341 (i) trade and (17th century), 62 (i)
Port Hudson, battle of (1863), 403 Portolá, Gaspar de, 124 Portugal
Africa, exploration and outposts by, 29 (m)
in age of exploration, 29 (m), 29–31, 30 (i)
Brazil, exploration and outposts by, 33, 39, 40 (m)
plantation slave labor, 30, 71 (i) Reconquest, 27, 30 Treaty of Tordesillas, 32
Post Office, 222 Potato blight, in Ireland, 312 Potawatomi people, 139
Fallen Timbers, battle of, 230–31 Fort Wayne Treaty, 256
Pottawatomie Creek, Brown’s (John) raid at, 358–59, 375
Pottery of African American slaves, 332 (i) of Native Americans, 12, 15 (i)
Poverty, poor southern whites, 351–52 Powder Alarm, 152 Powell, Anne, 204 Power loom, 278 (i) Powhatan (Algonquian chief)
and Jamestown settlers, 53–55 and John Smith, 50–51
INDEX I-25
Reformers and reform movements alcohol prohibition. See
Temperance movement to free slaves. See Abolition
movement moral reformers, 294 transcendentalists, 326 utopian communities, 326–27 for women’s rights. See Women’s
movement Regulation, by government. See
Federal regulation Religion. See also specific religions
of African American slaves, 348 in American colonies. See specific
colonies free black churches, 423 Puritan doctrines, 83–84 revivalism. See Revivals, religious women and. See Women and
religion Religious affiliation
colonial church attendance, 64, 96, 121
colonial era varieties, 120–21 free blacks, 423 increase in (1830s), 293
Religious education, Sunday school movement, 293 (i)
Religious toleration Chesapeake region colonies, 71 New York colony, 95 Pennsylvania colony, 95–96
Relocation, of Native Americans. See Native American removal
Repartimiento reform, 41, 43–44 (b) Report on Manufactures (Hamilton), 226 Report on Public Credit (Hamilton),
223–24 Representation
in British colonies. See British North America
founders’ development of, 208–9 republican concept, 193–94 virtual, 141, 144
Republicanism concept/philosophy of, 193–94 democracy versus, 209–10 ideals and women, 221 Jefferson’s concept of, 245–47
Republican Party abolitionist position of, 371, 373,
376–77 beginning of (1854), 371, 373 civil rights legislation by, 429
Reapers, mechanical, 305, 409 Rebellions. See Revolts, rebellions,
resistance Reconquest, 27, 30 Reconstruction (1863–1877), 418–46
African American inequality, 418–20, 427–29
carpetbaggers and, 418 (i), 434 collapse of, 440–45 Confederate congressional
representatives, 428 congressional, 429–34 constitutions, content of, 435–36 Democratic Party, southern,
435–36, 443–45 economic development of South,
437 Fourteenth Amendment, 430–31 Johnson impeachment, 432–33 Johnson’s oppositional position,
428–33 labor code for African American
workers, 422–23, 428 Lincoln’s plan, 420 (i), 420–23 military rule of South, 432, 432 (m) political struggle in South, 434–39 presidential, 426–29 Radical, 431–32 sharecropping, 438–39 southern defiance, 427–28 southern Republican Party, 418 (i),
428–29, 431–32, 434–38, 440–42, 444 (m)
Supreme Court undermining of, 442
timeline, 419 violence/riots during, 431 (i) voting during, 420 (i) wartime, 420–23 white supremacy, rise of, 419, 435,
442–45 Reconstruction Acts (1867), 432–33,
435 Reconstruction Amendments. See
Fifteenth Amendment; Fourteenth Amendment; Thirteenth Amendment
Recreation. See Leisure and entertainment
Redcoats, 168 Red Cross, founding of, 410 Redeemers, 443–45 Redemptioners, 110 Red Hawk (Shawnee chief), 178 Reformation, Protestant, 45–46, 78
piety, decline of, 77, 88–89 Puritan Revolution, 64, 84 (i), 87 religious roots of, 78–79 revival, 121 Salem witch trials, 90 (i), 90–91,
92–93 (b) self-government of, 80 and Williams (Roger), 76–77
Quadrant, 29 Quakers
doctrines of, 89–90, 95, 96 in Massachusetts Bay colony, 89–90 Pennsylvania colony settlement,
95–96 women, role of, 89, 261
Quantrill, William Clarke, 397 Quartering Act (1774), 151 Quasi-War (1798–1800), 238 Quebec, Canada
and Revolutionary War, 166–67, 167 (m)
and Seven Years’ War, 135 Quebec Act (1774), 151 Quincy, Josiah, 149 Quitman, John, 369 (b) Quorum, lack of, in early years of
independence, 192–93
Racial segregation. See African Americans and segregation
Racism. See also African Americans and racism; Anti-immigration; Discrimination and prejudice; White supremacy
against Native Americans, 39–43 Radical Reconstruction, 431–32 Radical Republicans, 428, 432 Railroads
expansion of (1829–1840), 277 expansion of (1860), 306–8, 307 (m) first, 277 industrialization and, 306–7 land grants to, 307 transcontinental. See
Transcontinental railroad Raleigh, Walter, 47 Rancheros, 318, 325 Ranchos, 318 Randall, A. B., 424 (b) Randolph, Edmund, 220, 343 Rape, of Indian women, 125 Rapier, James T., 418–20, 420 (i), 436,
443, 446 Rapier, John, 418
I-26 INDEX
Rhode Island colony founding of, 77 governor appointment, 125
Rice, as export, 71, 118 Rice production, Carolina plantations,
71, 118 (i), 340 Richmond, Virginia, as Confederate
capital, 395 (m) Rights of Man, The (Paine), 235 (b) Rights of Woman, The (de Gouges),
234 (b) Rio Grande River, 320 Rivers. See also specific river regions
and rivers steamboat travel and, 275 (m)
Roads and highways in early years of independence, 222,
222 (m) expansion (1815–1840), 275 (m),
276, 284–85 Roanoke Island, 47 (m), 52 Robards, Rachel Donelson, 283 Robin John family, 102–3 Rochambeau, Comte de, 184 Rockingham, Marquess of, 145 Rolfe, John, 51, 52 (i), 56, 57 Rolfe, Thomas, 51 Roman Catholicism. See Catholics Rosecrans, William, 412 Ross, John (Cherokee chief), 287–88 Rowlandson, Mary, 98 Royal colonies
Massachusetts Bay colony as, 80–81, 99
Virginia as, 55–56 Royal fifth, 39 Runaway slaves. See Fugitive slaves Rural areas, population of (1860), 306 Rush, Benjamin, 221 Russia, California missions to deter, 124
Sacajawea (Shoshoni guide), 251 Sack of Lawrence, 375 Sager family, 316 (i) St. Augustine, Florida, 39 St. Clair, Arthur, 229 Saint Domingue, 233 St. Lawrence River region
exploration, 47 Saints (Puritan), 83, 88 Salem witch trials, 90–91, 92–93 (b) Salvation, Puritans on, 81 Samoset (Wampanoag people), 80 Sampson, Deborah (Robert
Shurtliff), 159
balance of power in, 180 (i) British loss, reasons for, 186 British strategy, 166, 167 (m) Bunker Hill battle, 161 (m),
161–63, 162 (i) campaigns of 1777–1779 (North
and West), 175–80 Canadian territory in, 166, 167 (m) Continental army, 158 (i), 161,
165–66 Continental financing of, 161, 175 events leading to. See American
independence movement financial instability and corruption,
175 first year of (1775–1776), 165–68 Fort Stanwix battle, 158 (i),
176–77 free slaves in, 155, 165, 181 French support, 164, 178–80, 184 guerrilla warfare, 183 home-front struggles, 168–75 Lexington and Concord as
beginning, 153–54, 154 (m) Long Island battle, 168 loyalists during, 169–74, 170 (m) middle colonies in, 166–68,
167 (m), 175–77 minutemen, 153 Native American/British alliance
in, 171, 173 (b), 176–78, 179 (m), 186
in North (1775–1778), 167 (m) Oriskany battle, 176, 177 prisoners of war, 168, 174–75, 201 rural resistance, pre-war, 152 Saratoga battle, 176 (m), 177 in South, 182 (m) southern strategy, 181–84, 182 (m) timeline, 159 traitors, 171, 174, 182–83, 183 (i) Treaty of Paris, 184–86 Valley Forge, 177 war debt after, 199–200, 205,
223–25 women activists, 165, 169 women soldiers, 159 Yorktown, British surrender, 184,
184 (m) Revolutions
French, 231–32 in Haiti, 233, 236
Rhode Island early textile mill, 277 gradual emancipation in, 198
Republican Party (continued) free blacks in, 434–35 Liberal Party offshoot, 440–41 Lincoln in, 377–78 southern, Reconstruction era,
428–29, 431–32, 434–38, 440–42, 444 (m)
southern support of, 418 (i) women in early party, 373
Republicans (Jeffersonian) on Alien and Sedition Acts, 238 election of 1796 and, 236–37 election of 1800, 239–40, 244–45 election of 1808, 254–55 in power (1800–1824), 242–69
Republic of Haiti, 233 Requerimiento, 42–43 (b) Requisition of 1785, 205 Resaca de la Palma, battle at (1846),
321 (m), 322 Reservations. See Native American
reservations Revenue Act (1764) (Sugar Act), 140–41 Revenue Act (1767) (Townshend
duties), 145–46 Revere, Paul, 148 (i), 154, 154 (m) Revivals, religious
camp meetings, 292–93, 352 (i) colonial era, 121, 122 (i) Great Awakening as, 121, 122 (i) Native American, 139 plain folk and, 352–53 reformer beliefs, 326 Second Great Awakening, 292–93
Revolts, rebellions, resistance of African American slaves, 348–49 of African slaves, 116–17 Bacon’s Rebellion, 66–67 Bear Flag Revolt, 317–18 Brown’s (John) raids, 358–59,
379–80 and Native Americans. See Native
American conflicts Nat Turner’s rebellion, 332–33,
334 (i), 349 New York City draft riots, 411 Shays’s Rebellion, 205–6, 206 (m) Stamp Act protests, 142–43 Stono Rebellion, 117 Whiskey Rebellion, 226–27, 227 (i)
Revolutionary War (1775–1783), 158 (i)
American independence, early years. See American independence (1776–1800)
INDEX I-27
Sex and sexuality interracial sex. See Miscegenation
(interracial sex) in Oneida community, 327
Sex discrimination. See Gender inequality
Seymour, Horatio, 440, 443 (i) Shadrach (runaway slave), 365 Shamans, 7 (i) Sharecroppers, free blacks as, 438–39,
439 (m) Shawnee people, 179 (m)
Fallen Timbers, battle of, 230–31, 245
Fort Stanwix Treaty and, 201–2 as loyalists, 171 in Revolutionary War, 178 and Seven Years’ War, 134 Tecumseh as chief, 242–44 Tippecanoe, battle of, 256, 256 (m)
Shays, Daniel, 205–6 Shays’s Rebellion (1786–1787), 205 (i),
205–6, 206 (m) Shenandoah River region
Civil War in, 414 colonial settlement of, 111
Shepard, William, 205 (i) Sheridan, Philip H., 414 Sherman, William Tecumseh
in Civil War, 412, 413 (m), 414 Sherman land for free blacks,
422–23, 427 Sherman’s March to the Sea, 414 Shiloh, battle of (1862), 395 (m), 398 Shipbuilding, New England colonies,
87, 106 Shipping
on canals, 277 colonial trade restrictions, 66,
96–97, 141 halts on trade. See Embargo tribute and Barbary Wars, 247–48 XYZ affair, 237
Ships caravels, 31 in Civil War, 398 prison ships, 174–75 steamboat routes (1840), 275 (m) submarines, in Civil War, 399
Shoe manufacturing, 278–79 Shoshoni people, culture of, 313 Shurtliff, Robert, 158–59 Siberia, human migration point, 6, 6 (m) Sierra Leone, free slave migration to,
155
Seminole people, 266 in Confederate army, 397 resistance to removal, 286,
288 Senate
election to, 378–79 founders’ development of, 208–9
Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments (1848), 327–28
Seneca Falls women’s conference, 327–28
Seneca people culture of, 19 Fort Stanwix Treaty, 200–203 in Revolutionary War, 176
Senegambia, 114 (m) “Sentiments of an American Woman,
The,” 169 Separate spheres doctrine, 291 (i),
291–92 Separatists, 80, 81 Serra, Junípero, 124, 127 (b) Servants
body servants, in Civil War, 404 (i) domestic. See Domestic servants indentured. See Indentured
servants Settlements
along James River, 64 (m) Chesapeake region colonies, 54 (i) growth of. See Cities in middle colonies, 110 (m) of Native Americans, 8–12, 19, 21 Native American villages, 13–17 in New England colonies, 85, 106
Settlers free state vs. slave state, 375 (i) western-bound. See Western
expansion Seven Cities of Cíbola, 38 Seven Days Battle (1862), 396, 396 (m) Seventeenth Amendment, 378–79 Seventh Amendment, 220 Seven Years’ War (1754–1763), 132–37
British war debt following, 140 causes of, 132–34 consequences of, 135–36 European areas of influence during,
133 (m) lessons for colonists, 132, 137 postwar territories, 138 (m)
Seward, William H. as abolitionist, 363–64, 374 higher law doctrine, 381 as secretary of state, 393
Sanitary Commission, 409–10 San Jacinto, battle at (1836), 318 San Miguel de Gualdape, 38 San Salvador, Columbus landing at, 32 Santa Clara, California, mission in,
124 (i) Santa Fe, New Mexico, 39, 397 Santa Fe Trail, 314 (m), 317–18 Santa Maria (ship), 31 Santamaria, Juan, 369 (b) Santo Domingo, 233 (m) Saratoga, battle of (1777), 167 (m),
176 (m), 177 Sauk and Fox people, 286 Savannah, Georgia
fall in Civil War, 413 (m), 414, 415
Revolutionary War in, 181 Scalawags, 435 Schools. See also Public schools
integration, Massachusetts (1855), 329
for women. See Women and education
Schurz, Carl, 419, 446 Scots-Irish immigrants, colonial era,
104, 105 (m), 109–10 Scott, Dred, 376 (i)
Dred Scott v. Sandford, 376–77 Scott, Winfield, 323, 367 Scottish immigrants, colonial era, 104,
105 (m) Scriven, Abream, 347 Secession, of South. See Confederacy
(South in Civil War) Second Amendment, 220 Second Bank of the U.S., 279, 289–90
and panic of 1819, 279, 282 Second Continental Congress (1775),
160–61, 189 Second Great Awakening, 292–93 Secotan village, 54 (i) Sectional politics
antebellum era, 360 Compromise of 1850, 364 election of 1860 and, 380–81, 382 (m) Lincoln’s view of, 360, 377 realignment (1848–1860), 370–73,
372 (m) Sedgwick, Susan Ridley, portrait of
Mum Bett, 189 (i) Sedition Act (1798), 238–39 Segregation, African Americans. See
African Americans and segregation
I-28 INDEX
nullification crisis, 288–89 Reconstruction era defiance,
427–28 Revolutionary War in, 182 (m) secession from Union, 382 Sherman land for free blacks,
422–23, 427 voting qualifications, 119
Southern colonies. See also individual colonies
Chesapeake area. See Chesapeake region colonies
exports of, 118 Revolutionary War strategy,
181–84, 182 (m) slave labor, 57–58, 71–73 slave population, 113 (f), 113–14 unifying elements in colonies and,
119–25 voting qualifications, 119 wealth of gentry, 118–19
Southern Literary Messenger, 365 Southern Rights flag, 375 (i) Southern slavery, 332–56
colonial slave labor, 57–58, 71–73 colonial slave population, 113 (f),
113–14 cultural influence of slaves, 336 defense of slavery, 336–37,
338–39 (b), 354, 356 in early years of independence,
199 ex-slaves. See Free blacks filibusters, 369 (b) Fugitive Slave Act, 365 Kansas-Nebraska Act as
continuation of, 366–67 miscegenation (interracial sex),
336, 337 (i) Missouri Compromise, 264–65,
266 (m) paternalism, 342–44 plantation slaves, 340–42 politics of, 354–56 religion of slaves, 337, 348 resistance and revolts, 348–49 Second Middle Passage, 335–36 slave codes, 336 slave families, 347–48 slave quarters, 346, 347 (i) in upcountry, 351 in Upper versus Lower South,
382–83 white supremacy, concept of, 336 work of slaves, types of, 346–47
Smith, Gerrit, 329 (i) Smith, John
and Pocahontas, 50–51 on Virginia colony weakness, 55
Smith, Joseph, 316 Smoking. See Tobacco Smuggling, colonial, 136, 140–41, 150 Sneden, Robert, 414 (i) Snuff, 61 Social class and wealth status. See
Socioeconomic status Social factors, in New Spain, 41 Social inequality
African Americans. See African American inequality
Chesapeake region colonies, 64–68 free-labor rationale for, 311 voting rights and, 194–95 and women. See Gender inequality
Socialism, utopian communities, 299 Social mobility, free labor and, 311 Society of Friends. See Quakers Society of Republican Revolutionary
Women (Paris), 234 (b) Socioeconomic status. See Elites;
Poverty; Social inequality; Wealth
Soldiers. See Armed forces Sons of Liberty
Boston Massacre protest, 148 Stamp Act protests, 142–44
South (region) agricultural crops of, 340 (m). See
also Cotton production; Rice; Sugar; Tobacco production
before Civil War. See Antebellum South
during Civil War. See Confederacy (South in Civil War)
colonial era. See Southern colonies Old South, 420 Reconstruction era. See
Reconstruction (1863–1877) Republican Party in, 418 (i) slavery in. See Southern slavery upcountry of, 350 (m) Upper and Lower sections,
335 (m) South America. See also specific
countries European colonies in, 40 (m) Monroe Doctrine and, 267
South Carolina Civil War in, 415 earliest settlement. See Carolina
Silver Comstock Lode, 360 as hard money, 225, 290 presentational, 205 (i) Spanish conquest for, 37, 41
Silversmiths, 107 Singing plows, 305 Sioux people
culture of, 313 Western tribe. See Lakota
(Western) Sioux people Sixth Amendment, 220 Skilled workers. See Artisans Slaughterhouse cases (1873), 442 Slave catchers, 366 Slave codes, 336, 380 Slave drivers, 347 Slave Power, slaveholders as, 373, 375 Slave revolts
free blacks as leaders, 353 Gabriel’s revolution, 245 in Haitian Revolution, 233 Nat Turner’s rebellion, 332–33 white Americans’ fear of, 236, 245,
353 Slaves and slavery
African origin. See African slaves in British colonies. See African slaves of Caribbean tribes, 35 defense of, 338–39 (b) in early years of independence,
195–99 pottery by, 332 (i) on sugar plantations, 30, 69–70 as trade/industry. See Slave trade in United States. See African
Americans and slavery; African slaves
in West Indies, 69–70 Slave trade
as African-based industry, 102–3 Atlantic trade, 114 (m) capture and enslavement process,
115–16 males preferred, 115 Middle Passage and, 115–16 mortality rates, 116 mulattos, trade of, 345 (i) Second Middle Passage, 335–36 slave imports (1451–1870), 113 (f)
Smallpox in Columbian exchange, 35, 35 (i) Native American death from, 45 Revolutionary War inoculations,
162, 168
INDEX I-29
in South, 340 West Indies, 69–70
Sullivan, John, 178 Sumner, Charles, 319, 362, 430
Brooks attack on, 375–76 on Fourteenth Amendment
limitations, 430 Sumter, Fort, attack on, 389 Sunday schools, 293 (i) Supreme Court. See also specific cases
Dred Scott v. Sanford, 376–77 first chief justice, 220 Marbury v. Madison, 247 pro–Native American decisions, 287 proslavery decisions, 376–77 Reconstruction undermined by,
442 Surplus. See Federal budget surplus Susan Constant (ship), 53 Syphilis, in Columbian exchange, 35
Taino people, 32, 39 Tallmadge, James, Jr., 265 Tallmadge amendments, 265 Tanaghrisson (Mingo chief), 134 Taney, Roger B., 376–77 Tarhe the Crane (Wyandot chief),
231 (i) Tariffs
of Abominations (1828), 288–89 American System proposal, 267 iron goods, 288
Task system, for slaves, 117 Taxation
under Articles of Confederation, 191, 205
of British colonies in America. See British North America; British North America trade
Civil War era legislation, 409 Civil War financing, 394, 405 in early years of independence,
205 Reconstruction era imbalance, 443 of whiskey, Hamilton’s plan,
226–27, 227 (i) Tax revolts, Shays’s Rebellion and,
205–6 Taylor, Zachary
death of, 364 election of 1848, 362, 362 (m) in Mexican-American War, 320–23
Tea Act (1773), 147 (i), 150 Teachers, as female profession, 262,
292
States. See also individual states; specific U.S. regions, for example, South (region)
Constitution, ratification of, 211 (m)
eminent domain laws, 279 during Reconstruction. See
Reconstruction (1863–1877) State sovereignty
in early years of independence, 193–99
Native American removal issue, 287–88
nullification crisis, 288–89 state constitutions, 193–94 Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions
as test, 238–39 voting rights, 195, 220
Steamboats casualties, 276 coal-powered, 306 cotton trade, port of New Orleans,
341 (i) environmental problems from,
276 proliferation after 1807, 276 travel routes, 275 (m)
Stephens, Alexander, 382, 428 Stephens, Harry, family, 426 (i) Stevens, Thaddeus, 432 Stewart, Maria, 295 Stocks, First Bank of the U.S. sale of,
225 Stono Rebellion, 117 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 262
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 365–66, 366 (i) Strikes, textile mill workers, 278,
280–81 (b) Stringfellow, Thornton, 339 (b) Stuart, James E. B. (Jeb), 396 Stuyvesant, Peter, 94 Submarines, in Civil War, 399 Subsidies, for transport companies
(1815), 276 Suffrage. See African Americans and
voting rights; Voting rights; Woman suffrage
Sugar, Caribbean exports (1700s), 69 Sugar Act (Revenue Act) (1764),
140–41 Sugar islands, French. See Guadeloupe;
Martinique Sugar production
plantation slave labor, 30, 69–70, 71 (i), 114 (m)
Southwest Native Americans of, 12–16, 20 Spanish settlements in, 39
Spain Adams-Onís Treaty with, 267 colonies of. See New Spain debt/bankruptcy in 16th century, 46 exploration and conquest by, 33–46 Golden Age of, 45 missionaries of. See Missions (New
Spain) Reconquest, 27, 30 warfare. See Seven Years’ War
Spanish Armada (1588), 79 (i) Spears, of Native Americans, 7, 10 Speculation
economic cycles and, 282 First Bank of the U.S. stock, 225 in land. See Land speculation
Spoils system call for end of, 440 under Grant (Ulysses), 440 under Jackson (Andrew), 284
Spotsylvania Court House, battle of (1864), 412, 413 (m)
Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln in, 303, 304 (i), 308, 377
Squanto (Wampanoag chief), 80 Squatters
on western farmland, 305 in western territory, 140
Stagecoach travel in early years of independence, 222,
275 increase in, 276
Stamp Act (1765), 141–43 protests, 142–44, 143 (i)
Stamp Act Congress (1765), 144 Standardization, in manufacturing, 306 Stanton, Edwin M., 424 (b), 433 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 327–28
Reconstruction era protest, 430, 434 rights advocated by, 430 (i)
Stanwix, Fort battle at (1777), 158 (i), 176–77 Treaty of (1784), 200–202, 202 (m)
State Department first secretary, 220 size of (1801), 246
Statehood Missouri Compromise, 264–65,
266 (m) Northwest Ordinance of 1787,
202–3, 229 territories, process for, 202–3
I-30 INDEX
Town meetings, 85 Townshend, Charles, 145 Townshend duties (1767), 145–46,
149 Trade
under Articles of Confederation, 191, 207
British colonies in North America. See British North America trade
Columbian exchange and, 34–35 halts on. See Embargo of humans. See Slave trade import taxes. See Tariffs by Native Americans, 11, 20 and port cities (17th century),
62 (i) Portugal with Africa (1400s),
30–31 routes, age of exploration, 31 (m) routes, European (15th century),
29 (m) by ship. See Shipping western region needs, 313, 325
Trail of Tears, 287 (m), 287–88 Trails
California, 318 Oregon, 313–15 Santa Fe, 317–18 wagon trains on, 316 (i) western, 313 (m), 314 (m)
Traitors Arnold (Benedict) as, 182–83,
183 (i) defined by Continental Congress,
171 Revolutionary War era, 171, 174,
182–83 Transcendentalists, 326 Transcontinental railroad
federal assistance for, 409 first (1869), 313 and western expansion, 367
Transportation. See also Railroads; Roads and highways; specific methods
advances (1815–1840), 275–77 and communication flow, 276 in early years of independence, 222,
222 (m) routes of (1840), 275 (m) by water. See Ships
Travel, in early years of independence, 222, 223 (m)
Travis, Joseph, 332 Travis, William B., 318
Textile industry workers strikes by, 278, 280–81 (b) women as, 277–79, 278 (i),
280–81 (b) Textiles
colonial era availability, 102 (i) homespun cloth, 146–47 Native American weaving, 21 (i)
Thanksgiving, first, 80 Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant)
on divided authority, 201 as loyalist, 171, 176, 177, 186
Third Amendment, 220 Thirteenth Amendment, South
rejection of, 427 Three-fifths clause, 209, 259, 265 Ticonderoga, Fort, 135 Tilden, Samuel J., 445 Timber, 87, 107 Tippecanoe, battle of (1811), 256,
256 (m) Tlaxcala and Tlaxcalan people, 36 Tobacco
as Chesapeake region export, 56, 60–61 (b), 118
in Columbian exchange, 35 European consumers (1600s), 56,
60–61, 72 (i) export duty (1670s), 67 Native American cultivation, 51, 56 New Spain exports, 60–61 paraphernalia of smoking, 60 (i), 61 social aspects, 60 (i), 60–61 (b),
62 (i) Taino cultivation of, 32
Tobacco production agricultural aspects, 56–57, 63–64 Chesapeake region plantations,
56–64, 59 (i) first planting in colonies, 56 on plantations, 59 (i), 340 tobacco processing, 50 (i), 59 (i),
72 (i) westward shift in, 340
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 334 Toleration of religion. See Religious
toleration Tools, of ancient Americans, 6, 7, 8, 10,
10 (i), 13 (i), 14–15, 15 (i) Toombs, Robert, 362, 380, 389 Tordesillas, Treaty of (1494), 32 Tories, 170 Toronto, Canada, in War of 1812,
257–58 Toussaint L’Ouverture, 233, 236 (i)
Technology. See Mechanization and technology
Tecumseh (Shawnee chief), 244 (i) background/activities of, 242–44 confederacy of, 243, 244, 255 Tippecanoe, battle of, 256, 256 (m) in War of 1812, 243–44, 258
Tejanos (Spanish-speaking), in Texas, 318
Telegraph, 306, 306 (i) Temperance movement, goals and
activities (1830), 294 Tenant farmers
colonial era, 109, 118 poor southern whites, 351
Tennent, William, 121 Tennessee
Civil War in, 398, 412 Fourteenth Amendment ratified by,
431 Reconstruction era, 422 secession from Union, 389
Tenochtitlán, 22 Spanish conquest of, 36 (m), 36–37
Tenskwatawa (Prophet, Shawnee), 243, 256
Tenth Amendment, 220 Tenure of Office Act (1867), 433 Term limits
under Articles of Confederation, 194
founders’ development of, 209 Territories. See also Western expansion
in early years of independence, 202–4
free-soil issue, 361–62 Northwest Territory, 203 (m) of relocated Native Americans. See
Indian Territory statehood process for, 202–3
Teton Sioux people, 20 Texas
annexation of, 319–20 independence from Mexico, 318 Lone Star Republic, 318 Mexican cession of (1848), 323,
324 (m) -Mexico boundary (1830s), 317 (m) secession from Union, 382 as slave state, 320
Texcoco, Lake, 22 Textile industry
cotton mill locations (1840), 277 (m) Lowell mills, 277–78, 280–81 (b) mechanization in, 278 (i)
INDEX I-31
Vicksburg, Mississippi (1863), siege of, 411 (m), 411–12, 413 (m)
Vincennes, Fort, 178 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A
(Wollstonecraft), 234 (i), 235 (b) Virginia
Civil War in, 392, 394, 396, 412–13, 413 (m)
in colonial era. See Virginia colony Constitution, ratification holdout,
213 Nat Turner’s rebellion in, 332–33 partial emancipation in, 198–99 Reconstruction era, 422 secession from Union, 389 West Virginia created, 390
Virginia (ironclad), 398 Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions
(1798), 238–39, 288 Virginia colony, 51–56. See also
Chesapeake region colonies Bacon’s Rebellion, 66–67 and committees of correspondence,
149 fragility of, 53, 55, 56 indentured servant system, 57–59 Jamestown, 50–53 middle colony migrants to, 111 Native American relations in,
50–55, 66–67 as royal colony, 55 royal government of, 55–56,
65–66 settlement in, 110 (m) slave labor, 57–58 Stamp Act protest, 142, 144 tobacco as export, 56, 60–61 (b),
62 (i), 118 tobacco growing, 56–59, 62–63 voting qualifications, 119
Virginia Company, 52–53, 55–57 Virginia Convention, 189 Virginia Plan (1787), 208 Virginia Resolves, 142, 207 Virtual representation, 141, 144 Virtuous persons, in early years of
independence, 219, 221, 235 Visible saints, 83, 88 Voting inequality
African Americans and. See African Americans and voting rights
in Chesapeake region colonies, 65–66
literacy tests and, 264
in South, 388, 389–90, 390 (m), 425 (b)
United States, government of. See Federal government
United States v. Cruikshank (1876), 442 Universities and colleges. See also
individual schools academies for women equal
to, 262 Morrill Act and, 409
Upcountry region of, 350 (m) yeomen of, 350–51
Upper South states of, 335 (m), 388 states rejecting secession, 382–83,
389, 390 (m) Uprisings. See Revolts, rebellions,
resistance Urbanization. See Cities U.S. Navy
African Americans in, 386–87, 388 (i), 402
Barbary Wars and, 247–48 in Civil War, 386–87, 388 (i), 393,
395 (m), 398–99 Utah
Mormons in, 316–17 Native Americans in, 14–15 popular sovereignty, 364
Utopians communities, 299, 326–27 as socialists, 299
Vallandigham, Clement, 411 Vallejo, Mariano, 325 Valley Forge, 177 Van Buren, Martin, 296–99
election of 1836, 297–98 election of 1840, 299 election of 1848, 362, 362 (m) as secretary of state, 284, 297 on slavery, 297
Vanderlyn, John, 177 (i) Venice, Italy, 28 Vermont, 80 Verrazano, Giovanni da, 46 Vesey, Denmark, 353, 354 Vespucci, Amerigo, 33–34 Veto, founders’ development of, 208,
209 Vice-admiralty courts, 141 Vice presidency
first vice president, 219 Twelfth Amendment, 237, 245
Treason. See Traitors Treasury Department
establishment of, 299 Hamilton as head, 216, 217, 220
Treaties. See specific treaties Tribute
Barbary States demand, 247 of encomienda system, 39–41 and Mexica empire, 23 by Native Americans, 69
Tripoli, Barbary Wars, 247 (i), 247–48
Troy Female Seminary, 262 Trumbull, John, 218 (i), 246 (i) Trumbull, Lyman, 428 Tubman, Harriet, 329–30 Turner, Nat, 334 (i), 349
background/activities of, 332–33 Turner, West, 347 Turnpikes, 276 Twelfth Amendment, 237, 245, 268 Twelve Years a Slave (Northup), 366 Twenty-Negro law, 405 Tyler, John, 319, 320
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 365–66, 366 (i)
Underground railroad, 330, 365 Unemployment
and panic of 1819, 282 Reconstruction era, 441
Union (North in Civil War), 408–11 African Americans in armed
forces, 402–3 Andersonville prisoners, 414 (i) battles lost, 394, 396 battles won, 395 (m), 396, 397–98,
402, 411–14 commanders, freeing of slaves by,
401 diplomatic victory of, 399 economic advantages of, 391, 394 financing the war, 393–94 fugitive slave arrivals in, 400–401,
401 (i), 405 inflation, 394 Lincoln as military strategist, 393 military draft, 403 mobilization of, 392–94 resources of, 391–92, 392 (f) social divisions, 408 women, roles of, 409–10
Unionists carpetbaggers, 434 Johnson (Andrew) as, 427
I-32 INDEX
Webster, Daniel, 298 anti-free-soil stance, 363
Weld, Ezra Greenleaf, 329 (i) Wendell, Elizabeth Hunt, 104 (i) West (region). See also Pacific Ocean
region abolition of slavery (by 1840s), 310,
329–30 Civil War in, 395 (m), 396 (m),
397–98 in early years of independence,
191–92, 192 (m) expansion into. See Western
expansion Native American relocations. See
Native American removal; Native American reservations
Native Americans of, 251–53, 313 secession and, 382 (m) states loyal to Union, 390 (m)
West Africa African American culture and, 114 (m) slave trade, 115
West Coast. See Pacific Ocean region Western expansion
agricultural development, 305 California acquisition, 318–19 in early years of independence,
230 (m) environmental alteration and
progress, 308–9 (b) free state decisions, 361–64 Gadsden Purchase (1853), 367,
367 (m) Homestead Act and, 409 Jefferson’s expeditions (1804–1806),
250 (m) Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), 367,
370 land sales (1810–1860), 290 (f) Louisiana Purchase and, 248–53,
250 (m) manifest destiny and, 312–13, 318 Mexican-American War and,
319–26 into Mexican borderlands
(1820–1840s), 317 (m), 317–19 Mexican land cessions, 323,
324 (m), 361 (m) Mormons and, 315–17 Native American land cessions,
230 (m), 256 Native American removal, 287 (m) Oregon Trail, 313–15 as political issue, 319–20
Native American/British alliance in, 243–44
Warren, James, 212 (i) Warren, Mercy Otis, 212, 212 (i) Warriors, of Mexica, 22 Wartime Reconstruction, 420 (i),
420–23 Washington, Booker T., on education
of free blacks, 437 (i) Washington, D.C.
abolition of slavery in, 400 burning by British (1814), 258, 258 (i) location, choosing, 225 slave trade in, 363
Washington, Fort, 229 Washington, George
cabinet of, 219–20 at constitutional convention, 208 farewell address, 236–37 as Federalist, 210 Hamilton relationship with, 217 inauguration of, 216 (i) military expertise, 162 Neutrality Proclamation, 232 and Newburgh Conspiracy, 200 presidency established by, 219–20 president, election of, 219, 227 on prisoners of war, 174 as Revolutionary War commander
in chief, 161 Revolutionary War strategy,
167–68, 178, 184 and Seven Years’ War, 134–35 on slavery, 116 in Whiskey Rebellion, 226–27
Washington, Lawrence and Augustine, 132, 134
Washington, Martha, 245 Water, scarcity of. See Drought Waving the bloody shirt, 440, 445 Wayne, Anthony (Mad Anthony),
229–31, 231 (i) Wayne, Fort, treaty (1809), 256 Wealth. See also Elites
colonial era merchants, 108, 111 colonial era southern gentry,
118–19 gold rush and, 325 of Mexica people, 23 of Seven Cities of Cíbola, 38
Weapons and armaments in Civil War, 393, 393 (i), 408 (i) of Native Americans, 10, 20 to Native Americans by colonists, 122
Weaving, by ancient Americans, 21 (i)
Voting inequality (continued) property ownership rules, 66, 96,
99, 119, 264, 282 Puritan restrictions, 85 women and. See Woman suffrage
Voting participation, increase in, election of 1828, 282
Voting rights antebellum South, 355 colonial era rights, 56, 65–66 founders’ development of, 208–9 inequality. See Voting inequality missing in Bill of Rights, 220 reform measures, 263–64 state sovereignty era, 195, 220 universal, for men, 264
Wade, Benjamin, 421 Wade-Davis bill (1864), 421 Wage discrimination
African Americans, 403 women, 327–28, 409
Wage labor for factory workers, 277–78 non-slave laborers. See Free labor
Wagner, Fort, battle of, 403 Wagon trains
and Native American concentration policy, 314–15
western destination, 313–15, 316 (i)
Waldseemüller, Martin, 34 Walker, David, 295, 333 Walker, William, 368 (b), 369 (b) Wampanoag people, 80
King Philip’s War, 98, 98 (m), 99 (i) War. See also specific wars
with Native Americans. See Native American conflicts
prisoners in. See Prisoners of war War debt
bond issues. See Bonds, government
Confederate, 427 funding versus payoff, 223–25 post–Revolutionary War, 199–200,
205, 217, 223–25 War Department, first secretary, 219 Warfare. See also Armed forces;
Weapons and armaments guerrilla tactics. See Guerrilla
warfare War Hawks, 256–57 War of 1812, 254, 256–59
battles/regions in, 257 (m)
INDEX I-33
education for. See Women and education
inequality. See Gender inequality married. See Women and marriage matrilineal descent, 19 in mixed-race marriages, 41, 44 Native American. See Native
American women religion and. See Women and
religion in wartime. See Women and
warfare in westward movement, 315, 316 (i) witch trials in Salem, 90 (i), 90–91,
92–93 (b) Women activists
in abolition movement, 272–74, 274 (i), 295–96, 366 (i), 373
in early years of independence, 212, 212 (i), 221
feminism. See Women’s movement in moral reform movement, 294 Revolutionary War era, 146–47,
147 (i), 163–64, 169, 169 (i), 245 shoe binders, 278 textile workers, 277, 280–81 (b)
Women and education academies for women, 261–62, 292 curriculum for women, 261–62 in early years of independence, 221 postgraduate professions, 262 public school attendance, 261
Women and marriage divorce, 260, 344 feme covert (covered woman)
doctrine, 260 polygamy and Mormons, 317 property ownership restrictions,
344 republican ideal, wives as, 221 separate spheres and, 291–92 wage earners, women as, 292 wages and property rights, 328
Women and politics Adams (Abigail) and, 163–64,
169 (i), 194–95, 245 Adams (Louisa Catherine) social
functions, 267 Daughters of Liberty, 145, 146–47,
147 (i), 234 in early years of independence,
212 (i), 221 French Revolution and, 234–35 (b) Madison (Dolley) social functions,
255, 255 (i), 259
White supremacy Ku Klux Klan, 435, 442 Lincoln’s view of, 377 Night Riders, 443 northern versus southern view of,
336–37 rampages against blacks, 419 (i),
443–44 of Reconstruction era Democrats,
435–36, 442–45, 443 (i) Redeemers, 443–45
White terror, 435 Whitman, Marcus and Narcissa, 316 (i) Whitney, Eli, 222, 340 Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully
Translated into English Metre, 76 (i) Wichita people, culture of, 313 Wigglesworth, Michael, 88 Wilderness, battle of the (1864), 412,
413 (m) Wilkinson, Eliza, 169 Wilkinson, Jemima, 261 Willard, Emma, 262, 262 (i) William III (England), 99 Williams, Roger
dissenting Puritan ideals of, 76–77 Rhode Island founding by, 77
Williamsburg, Virginia, battle at, 184 Wilmot, David, 359, 360–61 Wilmot Proviso (1846), 361, 373 Winthrop, John
as Massachusetts Bay colony governor, 81–82, 85–86
on Native Americans, 77 Puritans denounced by, 76–77,
85–86 Wisconsin, as free state, 362 Witches, Salem witch trials, 90 (i),
90–91, 92–93 (b) Wives. See Women and marriage Wollstonecraft, Mary, 234 (i), 235 (b) Woman suffrage
in early years of independence, 195, 260
Fifteenth Amendment exclusion of, 433–34
founding women, 430 (i) Fourteenth Amendment exclusion
of, 430 Women
activism of. See Women activists; Women and politics; Women’s movement
African American. See African American women
popular sovereignty, 361–62 slavery issue, 319–20, 328, 359,
361–62, 367 Texas annexation, 318–20 trade, transformations needed for,
313, 325, 367 trails of, 313 (m), 314 (m) wagon trains, 313–15
Western Hemisphere in age of exploration. See
Exploration, Age of Europeans in, time frame, 24 human migration to, 5–7 sea routes to East and, 34
West India Company (Dutch), 91, 94
West Indies American ships captured (1793),
232 and Carolina settlement, 70 (m),
70–71 slave trade, routes of, 114 (m) sugar and slave labor, 69–70
Westmoreland Resolves (1765), 144 West Point, 182–83 West Virginia, creation of, 390 Westward the Star of the Empire Takes
Its Way . . . (Melrose), 308–9 (i) Whale hunting, by Native Americans,
11, 11 (i) Wheat
as colonial export, 111 production, early years of
independence, 222 Wheatley, Phillis, 155, 155 (i) Whig Party
antebellum South, 355 decline of, 371, 372 (m) election of 1836, 298 election of 1840, 299 election of 1848, 362, 362 (m) election of 1852, 367, 371 evolution of, 283 Mexican-American War opposed
by, 320–21 reform activism of, 294
Whiskey Rebellion (1794), 226–27, 227 (i)
White, Hugh Lawson, 298 White, John, 47, 54 (i) White Eyes (Delaware chief), 178 Whitefield, George, 121, 122 (i) White House, naming of, 255 White Man’s Country, 443 (i) Whites, poor southern whites, 325–27
I-34 INDEX
in textile industry. See Textile industry workers
women as. See Women workers World Turn’d Upside Down (pamphlet),
84 (i) Worship. See also Religion
of Mexica, 22–23 of Taino people, 32
Worth, William, 322 (i) Writing
Native Americans lack of, 4–5, 20 systems, study of, 4–5
Wyandot people, cessions of land to U.S. from, 202
XYZ affair, 237–38
Yeomen, 349–52 Chesapeake region colonies, 65,
118 Civil War, impact on, 405 plantation belt yeomen, 350 political participation of, 355 in southern Republican Party, 435 upcountry yeomen, 350–51
York, Canada. See Toronto Yorktown, battle of (1781), 158, 184,
184 (m) Young, Brigham, 316–17 Young, Lewis, 347
Zemis (Taino spirits), 32 Zuñi people, 16, 38, 38 (i)
married women, 292 as nurses, 409–10 plantation management, 118 (i) shoe binders, 278–79 as teachers, 262, 292 in textile industry, 277–79, 278 (i),
280–81 (b) wage discrimination, 327–28,
409 yeomen, 350–51
Wood carvings, by Native Americans, 2 (i), 11, 11 (i)
Woodhenges, 17 Woodland peoples, 16–17
burial mounds, 16–17, 20 chiefdoms, 16 as hunter-gatherers, 11–12 linguistic/cultural groups of,
18–20 Woodside, John A., 263 (i) Worcester v. Georgia (1832), 287 Workday, for slaves, 347 Workers
children as. See Child labor immigrants as. See Immigrant
workers indentured servants, 57–59 New Spain encomenderos,
40–43 non-slave laborers. See Free labor slave labor. See African Americans
and slavery; African slaves; Slaves and slavery
Women and politics (continued) presidential campaign participa-
tion, 374 (i) Republican Party support (1854), 373 wives of candidates, activism of,
225, 259, 267, 373, 374 (i) Women and religion
in authority positions, 260–61, 293 evangelicalism and, 293 preachers, women as, 260–61, 261 (i) Quaker women, role of, 89, 261
Women and warfare Civil War and, 406–7, 409–10 in Revolutionary War, 159, 165
Women’s movement bloomer wearing, 328 (i) connection to abolition, 295–96 in early years of independence, 221,
221 (i), 234–35 (b) Seneca Falls Declaration of
Sentiments, 327–28 treatise on equality, first American,
273 for voting rights. See Woman suffrage
Women workers activism of, 278, 280–81 (b) Civil War era, 409–10, 410 (i) domestic role. See Women and
marriage as domestic servants, 292 freedom and working/wages, 277 indentured servants, 63, 110 Irish immigrants, 312
M-1
U.S. Political/Geographic and World Maps
WASHINGTON
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Mt. Washington (6,288 ft.; 1,917 m)
Mt. Mitchell (6,684 ft.; 2,037 m)
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Omaha
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Houston
Oklahoma City
Little Rock
Memphis
Nashville
Baton Rouge
New Orleans
Jackson
Birmingham
Montgomery
Miami
Tallahassee
Jacksonville
Orlando
Atlanta Columbia
Charleston
Raleigh
Charlotte
Norfolk
Richmond
Charleston
Frankfort
Louisville
Springfield
St. Louis
Jefferson City
Kansas City
Des Moines
Minneapolis
St. Paul
Madison
Milwaukee
Chicago
Indianapolis Cincinnati
Columbus
Lansing
Detroit
Cleveland
New York
Manchester
Trenton
Pittsburgh
Buffalo
Philadelphia Harrisburg
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DoverBaltimore
Hartford
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HoustonHH
PUERTO RICO VIRGIN
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A T L A N T I C O C E A N
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GUATEMALA EL SALVADOR
COSTA RICA
JAMAICA CUBA
HAITI
PANAMA
NICARAGUA
BAHAMAS
HONDURAS
BELIZE
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
U N I T E D S T A T E S
C A N A D A
ST. KITTS AND NEVIS
ST. LUCIA
ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA DOMINICA
BARBADOS GRENADA TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO GUYANA
SURINAMEVENEZUELA
COLOMBIA
PERU
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PARAGUAY
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GUINEA-BISSAU
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IRELAND
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SPAIN
PORTUGAL
UNITED KINGDOM
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BURKINA FASO
GHANA
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Puerto Rico (U.S.)
Bermuda (U.K.)
Martinique (Fr.)
Falkland Is. (U.K.)
French Guiana (Fr.)
Galápagos Is. (Ec.)
Hawai’i (U.S.)
Western Sahara (Mor.)
Azores (Port.)
Canary Is. (Sp.)
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TURKEY
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AFGHANISTAN
TAJIKISTAN
BHUTAN
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SINGAPORE
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IRAN
MONGOLIA KAZAKHSTAN
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C H I N A
INDIA
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A U S T R A L I A
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NIGERIA
CHAD
SOMALIA
BELARUS
ROMANIA
BULGARIA
GREECE
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AUS. HUNG.
SE.
SYRIA
ARMENIA
AZERBAIJAN
GEORGIA
JORDAN
IRAQ
ERITREA
OMAN
MALDIVES
BANGLADESH
THAILAND
CAMBODIA
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
FINLAND
BEL.
MALTA CYPRUS
ISRAEL
KUWAIT
QATAR
BAHRAIN
DJIBOUTI
LUX.
LATVIA ESTONIA
LITHUANIA
SWITZ. SLN.
CR.
NETH. DEN.
TUNISIA
B.H. KO.MO.
ALB. MAC.
LEBANON
MOLDOVA
EQ. GUINEA
BENIN TOGO
RWANDA
BURUNDI
GABON DEM. REP. OF THE CONGO
ANGOLA
NAMIBIA
SOUTH AFRICA
MOZAMBIQUE
CAMEROON
UGANDA
TANZANIA COMOROS
MALAWI
MAURITIUS
SWAZILAND
LESOTHO
ZAMBIA
ZIMBABWE MADAGASCAR
SEYCHELLES
BOTSWANA
KENYA
C O
N G
O
CENTRAL AFRICAN REP.
SÃO TOMÉ
& PRÍNCIPE
MYANMAR (BURMA)
PHILIPPINES
KIRIBATINAURU
PALAU
TUVALU
FIJIVANUATU
TIMOR LESTE
SOLOMON IS.
MARSHALL IS.
FEDERATED STATES OF MICRONESIA
PAPUA NEW
GUINEA
NEW ZEALAND
ALGERIA
A N T A R C T I C A
Taiwan
Mariana Is. (U.S.)
Guam (U.S.)
New Caledonia (Fr.)
Tasmania (Aust.)
Gaza Strip West Bank
120°E 140°E 160°E
ABBREVIATIONS
ALB. AUS. BEL. B.H. CR. CZ. DEN. HUNG. KO. LUX. MAC. MO. NETH. SE. SLK. SLN. SWITZ.
ALBANIA AUSTRIA BELGIUM BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA CROATIA CZECH REPUBLIC DENMARK HUNGARY KOSOVO LUXEMBOURG MACEDONIA MONTENEGRO NETHERLANDS SERBIA SLOVAKIA SLOVENIA SWITZERLAND
M-5
About the Authors
James L. Roark (Ph.D., Stanford University) is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of American History at Emory University. In 1993, he received the Emory Williams Distinguished Teaching Award, and in 2001–2002 he was Pitt Professor of American Institutions at Cambridge University. He has written Masters without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction and coauthored Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South and coedited with Michael P. Johnson No Chariot Let Down: Charleston’s Free People of Color on the Eve of the Civil War.
Michael P. Johnson (Ph.D., Stanford University) is professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. His publications include Toward a Patriarchal Republic: Th e Secession of Georgia; Abraham Lincoln, Slavery, and the Civil War: Selected Speeches and Writings; and Reading the American Past: Selected Historical Documents, the documents reader for Th e American Promise. He has also coauthored Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South and coedited No Chariot Let Down: Charleston’s Free People of Color on the Eve of the Civil War with James L. Roark.
Patricia Cline Cohen (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 2005–2006. She has written A Calculating People: Th e Spread of Numeracy in Early America and Th e Murder of Helen Jewett: Th e Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York, and she has coauthored Th e Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York.
Sarah Stage (Ph.D., Yale University) has taught U.S. history at Williams College and the University of California, Riverside, and she was visiting professor at Beijing University and Szechuan University. Currently she is professor of Women’s Studies at Arizona State University. Her books include Female Complaints: Lydia Pinkham and the Business of Women’s Medicine and Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession.
Susan M. Hartmann (Ph.D., University of Missouri) is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of History at Ohio State University. In 1995 she won the university’s Exemplary Faculty Award in the College of Humanities. Her publications include Truman and the 80th Congress; Th e Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s; From Margin to Mainstream: American Women and Politics since 1960; and Th e Other Feminists: Activists in the Liberal Establishment.
HOW TO ANALYZE PRIMARY SOURCES In their search for an improved understanding of the past, historians look for new evidence — written documents or visual artifacts. When they encounter a written or visual primary source, historians ask certain key questions. You should ask these questions too. Sometimes historians can’t be certain about the answer, but they always ask the question.
Analyzing a written document
Who wrote the document? Is it a specific person or someone whose identity you can merely infer from the context of the document (for example, a par- ent writing to a child, a traveler writing home)?
When and where was it written?
Why was the document written? Is there a clear purpose, or are multiple interpretations possible?
Who was, or who might have been, its intended audience?
What point of view does it reflect?
What can the document tell us about the individual who produced it and the society from which he or she came?
Analyzing a visual source
Who made the image or artifact, and how was it made?
When and where was the image or artifact made?
Who paid for or commissioned it? How can you tell?
For what audience might it have been intended? Where might it have originally been displayed or used?
What message or messages is it trying to convey?
How could it be interpreted differently depending on who viewed or used it?
What can this visual source tell us about the individual who produced it and the society from which he or she came?
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright Page
- Brief Contents
- About the Cover Art
- Preface: Why This Book This Way
- Versions and Supplements
- Contents
- Maps, Figures, and Tables
- Special Features
- 1 Ancient America: Before 1492
- 2 Europeans Encounter the New World, 1492–1600
- 3 The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1601–1700
- 4 The Northern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1601–1700
- 5 Colonial America in the Eighteenth Century, 1701–1770
- 6 The British Empire and the Colonial Crisis, 1754–1775
- 7 The War for America, 1775–1783
- 8 Building a Republic, 1775–1789
- 9 The New Nation Takes Form, 1789–1800
- 10 Republicans in Power, 1800–1824
- 11 The Expanding Republic, 1815–1840
- 12 The New West and the Free North, 1840–1860
- 13 The Slave South, 1820–1860
- 14 The House Divided, 1846–1861
- 15 The Crucible of War, 1861–1865
- 16 Reconstruction, 1863–1877
- Appendices
- Glossary
- Spot Artifact Credits
- Index
- U.S. Political/Geographic and World Maps
- About the Authors
- Contents
- About the Cover Art
- Preface: Why This Book This Way
- Versions and Supplements
- Brief Contents
- Maps, Figures, and Tables
- Special Features
- CHAPTER 1 Ancient America, Before 1492
- OPENING VIGNETTE: An archaeological dig helps uncover ancient North American traditions
- Archaeology and History
- The First Americans
- African and Asian Origins
- Paleo-Indian Hunters
- Archaic Hunters and Gatherers
- Great Plains Bison Hunters
- Great Basin Cultures
- Pacific Coast Cultures
- Eastern Woodland Cultures
- Agricultural Settlements and Chiefdoms
- Southwestern Cultures
- VISUALIZING HISTORY: “Daily Life in Chaco Canyon”
- Woodland Burial Mounds and Chiefdoms
- Native Americans in the 1490s
- Eastern and Great Plains Peoples
- Southwestern and Western Peoples
- Cultural Similarities
- The Mexica: A Mesoamerican Culture
- Conclusion: The World of Ancient Americans
- CHAPTER REVIEW
- LearningCurve: bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
- CHAPTER 2 Europeans Encounter the New World, 1492–1600
- OPENING VIGNETTE: Queen Isabella of Spain supports Christopher Columbus’s risky plan to sail west across the Atlantic
- Europe in the Age of Exploration
- Mediterranean Trade and European Expansion
- A Century of Portuguese Exploration
- A Surprising New World in the Western Atlantic
- The Explorations of Columbus
- The Geographic Revolution and the Columbian Exchange
- Spanish Exploration and Conquest
- The Conquest of Mexico
- The Search for Other Mexicos
- Spanish Outposts in Florida and New Mexico
- New Spain in the Sixteenth Century
- DOCUMENTING THE AMERICAN PROMISE: “Justifying Conquest”
- The Toll of Spanish Conquest and Colonization
- The New World and Sixteenth-Century Europe
- The Protestant Reformation and the Spanish Response
- Europe and the Spanish Example
- Conclusion: The Promise of the New World for Europeans
- CHAPTER REVIEW
- LearningCurve: bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
- CHAPTER 3 The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1601–1700
- OPENING VIGNETTE: Pocahontas “rescues” John Smith
- An English Colony on Chesapeake Bay
- The Fragile Jamestown Settlement
- Cooperation and Conflict between Natives and Newcomers
- From Private Company to Royal Government
- A Tobacco Society
- Tobacco Agriculture
- A Servant Labor System
- BEYOND AMERICA’S BORDERS: “American Tobacco and European Consumers”
- The Rigors of Servitude
- Cultivating Land and Faith
- Hierarchy and Inequality in the Chesapeake
- Social and Economic Polarization
- Government Policies and Political Conflict
- Bacon’s Rebellion
- Toward a Slave Labor System
- Religion and Revolt in the Spanish Borderland
- The West Indies: Sugar and Slavery
- Carolina: A West Indian Frontier
- Slave Labor Emerges in the Chesapeake
- Conclusion: The Growth of English Colonies Based on Export Crops and Slave Labor
- CHAPTER REVIEW
- LearningCurve: bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
- CHAPTER 4 The Northern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1601–1700
- OPENING VIGNETTE: Roger Williams is banished from Puritan Massachusetts
- Puritans and the Settlement of New England
- Puritan Origins: The English Reformation
- The Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony
- The Founding of Massachusetts Bay Colony
- The Evolution of New England Society
- Church, Covenant, and Conformity
- Government by Puritans for Puritanism
- The Splintering of Puritanism
- Religious Controversies and Economic Changes
- The Founding of the Middle Colonies
- From New Netherland to New York
- DOCUMENTING THE AMERICAN PROMISE: “Hunting Witches in Salem, Massachusetts”
- New Jersey and Pennsylvania
- Toleration and Diversity in Pennsylvania
- The Colonies and the English Empire
- Royal Regulation of Colonial Trade
- King Philip’s War and the Consolidation of Royal Authority
- Conclusion: An English Model of Colonization in North America
- CHAPTER REVIEW
- LearningCurve: bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
- CHAPTER 5 Colonial America in the Eighteenth Century, 1701–1770
- OPENING VIGNETTE: The Robin Johns experience horrific turns of fortune in the Atlantic slave trade
- A Growing Population and Expanding Economy in British North America
- New England: From Puritan Settlers to Yankee Traders
- Natural Increase and Land Distribution
- Farms, Fish, and Atlantic Trade
- The Middle Colonies: Immigrants, Wheat, and Work
- German and Scots-Irish Immigrants
- “God Gives All Things to Industry”: Urban and Rural Labor
- The Southern Colonies: Land of Slavery
- The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Growth of Slavery
- Slave Labor and African American Culture
- Tobacco, Rice, and Prosperity
- Unifying Experiences
- Commerce and Consumption
- Religion, Enlightenment, and Revival
- Trade and Conflict in the North American Borderlands
- Colonial Politics in the British Empire
- DOCUMENTING THE AMERICAN PROMISE: “Spanish Priests Report on California Missions”
- Conclusion: The Dual Identity of British North American Colonists
- CHAPTER REVIEW
- LearningCurve: bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
- CHAPTER 6 The British Empire and the Colonial Crisis, 1754–1775
- OPENING VIGNETTE: Loyalist governor Thomas Hutchinson stands his ground in radical Massachusetts
- The Seven Years’ War, 1754–1763
- French-British Rivalry in the Ohio Country
- The Albany Congress
- The War and Its Consequences
- VISUALIZING HISTORY: “Cultural Cross-Dressing in Eighteenth-Century Portraits”
- Pontiac’s Rebellion and the Proclamation of 1763
- The Sugar and Stamp Acts, 1763–1765
- Grenville’s Sugar Act
- The Stamp Act
- Resistance Strategies and Crowd Politics
- Liberty and Property
- The Townshend Acts and Economic Retaliation, 1767–1770
- The Townshend Duties
- Nonconsumption and the Daughters of Liberty
- Military Occupation and “Massacre” in Boston
- The Destruction of the Tea and the Coercive Acts, 1770–1774
- The Calm before the Storm
- Tea in Boston Harbor
- The Coercive Acts
- Beyond Boston: Rural New England
- The First Continental Congress
- Domestic Insurrections, 1774–1775
- Lexington and Concord
- Rebelling against Slavery
- Conclusion: The Long Road to Revolution
- CHAPTER REVIEW
- LearningCurve: bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
- CHAPTER 7 The War for America, 1775–1783
- OPENING VIGNETTE: Deborah Sampson masquerades as a man to join the Continental army
- The Second Continental Congress
- Assuming Political and Military Authority
- Pursuing Both War and Peace
- Thomas Paine, Abigail Adams, and the Case for Independence
- The Declaration of Independence
- The First Year of War, 1775–1776
- The American Military Forces
- The British Strategy
- Quebec, New York, and New Jersey
- The Home Front
- Patriotism at the Local Level
- The Loyalists
- Who Is a Traitor?
- DOCUMENTING THE AMERICAN PROMISE: “Families Divide over the Revolution”
- Prisoners of War
- Financial Instability and Corruption
- The Campaigns of 1777–1779: The North and West
- Burgoyne’s Army and the Battle of Saratoga
- The War in the West: Indian Country
- The French Alliance
- The Southern Strategy and the End of the War
- Georgia and South Carolina
- Treason and Guerrilla Warfare
- Surrender at Yorktown
- The Losers and the Winners
- Conclusion: Why the British Lost
- CHAPTER REVIEW
- LearningCurve: bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
- CHAPTER 8 Building a Republic, 1775–1789
- OPENING VIGNETTE: James Madison comes of age in the midst of revolution
- The Articles of Confederation
- Confederation and Taxation
- The Problem of Western Lands
- Running the New Government
- The Sovereign States
- The State Constitutions
- Who Are “the People”?
- Equality and Slavery
- DOCUMENTING THE AMERICAN PROMISE: “Massachusetts Blacks Petition for Freedom and Rights”
- The Confederation’s Problems
- The War Debt and the Newburgh Conspiracy
- The Treaty of Fort Stanwix
- Land Ordinances and the Northwest Territory
- The Requisition of 1785 and Shays’s Rebellion, 1786–1787
- The United States Constitution
- From Annapolis to Philadelphia
- The Virginia and New Jersey Plans
- Democracy versus Republicanism
- Ratification of the Constitution
- The Federalists
- The Antifederalists
- The Big Holdouts: Virginia and New York
- Conclusion: The “Republican Remedy”
- CHAPTER REVIEW
- LearningCurve: bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
- CHAPTER 9 The New Nation Takes Form, 1789–1800
- OPENING VIGNETTE: Brilliant and brash, Alexander Hamilton becomes a polarizing figure in the 1790s
- The Search for Stability
- Washington Inaugurates the Government
- The Bill of Rights
- The Republican Wife and Mother
- Hamilton’s Economic Policies
- Agriculture, Transportation, and Banking
- The Public Debt and Taxes
- The First Bank of the United States and the Report on Manufactures
- The Whiskey Rebellion
- Conflict on America’s Borders and Beyond
- Creeks in the Southwest
- Ohio Indians in the Northwest
- France and Britain
- The Haitian Revolution
- BEYOND AMERICA’S BORDERS: “France, Britain, and Woman’s Rights in the 1790s”
- Federalists and Republicans
- The Election of 1796
- The XYZ Affair
- The Alien and Sedition Acts
- Conclusion: Parties Nonetheless
- CHAPTER REVIEW
- LearningCurve: bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
- CHAPTER 10 Republicans in Power, 1800–1824
- OPENING VIGNETTE: The Shawnee chief Tecumseh attempts to forge a pan-Indian confederacy
- Jefferson’s Presidency
- Turbulent Times: Election and Rebellion
- The Jeffersonian Vision of Republican Simplicity
- Dangers Overseas: The Barbary Wars
- Opportunities and Challenges in the West
- The Louisiana Purchase
- The Lewis and Clark Expedition
- Osage and Comanche Indians
- VISUALIZING HISTORY: “Cultural Exchange on the Lewis and Clark Trail”
- Jefferson, the Madisons, and the War of 1812
- Impressment and Embargo
- Dolley Madison and Social Politics
- Tecumseh and Tippecanoe
- The War of 1812
- Washington City Burns: The British Offensive
- Women’s Status in the Early Republic
- Women and the Law
- Women and Church Governance
- Female Education
- Monroe and Adams
- From Property to Democracy
- The Missouri Compromise
- The Monroe Doctrine
- The Election of 1824
- The Adams Administration
- Conclusion: Republican Simplicity Becomes Complex
- CHAPTER REVIEW
- LearningCurve: bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
- CHAPTER 11 The Expanding Republic, 1815–1840
- OPENING VIGNETTE: The Grimké sisters speak out against slavery
- The Market Revolution
- Improvements in Transportation
- Factories, Workingwomen, and Wage Labor
- Bankers and Lawyers
- Booms and Busts
- DOCUMENTING THE AMERICAN PROMISE: “Mill Girls Stand Up to Factory Owners, 1834”
- The Spread of Democracy
- Popular Politics and Partisan Identity
- The Election of 1828 and the Character Issue
- Jackson’s Democratic Agenda
- Jackson Defines the Democratic Party
- Indian Policy and the Trail of Tears
- The Tariff of Abominations and Nullification
- The Bank War and Economic Boom
- Cultural Shifts, Religion, and Reform
- The Family and Separate Spheres
- The Education and Training of Youths
- The Second Great Awakening
- The Temperance Movement and the Campaign for Moral Reform
- Organizing against Slavery
- Van Buren’s One-Term Presidency
- The Politics of Slavery
- Elections and Panics
- Conclusion: The Age of Jackson or the Era of Reform?
- CHAPTER REVIEW
- LearningCurve: bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
- CHAPTER 12 The New West and the Free North, 1840–1860
- OPENING VIGNETTE: With the support of his wife, Abraham Lincoln struggles to survive in antebellum America
- Economic and Industrial Evolution
- Agriculture and Land Policy
- Manufacturing and Mechanization
- Railroads: Breaking the Bonds of Nature
- VISUALIZING HISTORY: “The Path of Progress”
- Free Labor: Promise and Reality
- The Free-Labor Ideal
- Economic Inequality
- Immigrants and the Free-Labor Ladder
- The Westward Movement
- Manifest Destiny
- Oregon and the Overland Trail
- The Mormon Exodus
- The Mexican Borderlands
- Expansion and the Mexican-American War
- The Politics of Expansion
- The Mexican-American War, 1846–1848
- Victory in Mexico
- Golden California
- Reforming Self and Society
- The Pursuit of Perfection: Transcendentalists and Utopians
- Woman’s Rights Activists
- Abolitionists and the American Ideal
- Conclusion: Free Labor, Free Men
- CHAPTER REVIEW
- LearningCurve: bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
- CHAPTER 13 The Slave South, 1820–1860
- OPENING VIGNETTE: Slave Nat Turner leads a revolt to end slavery
- The Growing Distinctiveness of the South
- Cotton Kingdom, Slave Empire
- The South in Black and White
- The Plantation Economy
- DOCUMENTING THE AMERICAN PROMISE: “Defending Slavery”
- Masters and Mistresses in the Big House
- Paternalism and Male Honor
- The Southern Lady and Feminine Virtues
- Slaves in the Quarter
- Work
- Family and Religion
- Resistance and Rebellion
- The Plain Folk
- Plantation-Belt Yeomen
- Upcountry Yeomen
- Poor Whites
- The Culture of the Plain Folk
- Black and Free: On the Middle Ground
- Precarious Freedom
- Achievement despite Restrictions
- The Politics of Slavery
- The Democratization of the Political Arena
- Planter Power
- Conclusion: A Slave Society
- CHAPTER REVIEW
- LearningCurve: bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
- CHAPTER 14 The House Divided, 1846–1861
- OPENING VIGNETTE: Abolitionist John Brown takes his war against slavery to Harpers Ferry, Virginia
- The Bitter Fruits of War
- The Wilmot Proviso and the Expansion of Slavery
- The Election of 1848
- Debate and Compromise
- The Sectional Balance Undone
- The Fugitive Slave Act
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin
- The Kansas-Nebraska Act
- BEYOND AMERICA’S BORDERS: “Filibusters: The Underside of Manifest Destiny”
- Realignment of the Party System
- The Old Parties: Whigs and Democrats
- The New Parties: Know-Nothings and Republicans
- The Election of 1856
- Freedom under Siege
- “Bleeding Kansas”
- The Dred Scott Decision
- Prairie Republican: Abraham Lincoln
- The Lincoln-Douglas Debates
- The Union Collapses
- The Aftermath of John Brown’s Raid
- Republican Victory in 1860
- Secession Winter
- Conclusion: Slavery, Free Labor, and the Failure of Political Compromise
- CHAPTER REVIEW
- LearningCurve: bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
- CHAPTER 15 The Crucible of War, 1861–1865
- OPENING VIGNETTE: Runaway slave William Gould enlists in the U.S. Navy
- “And the War Came”
- Attack on Fort Sumter
- The Upper South Chooses Sides
- The Combatants
- How They Expected to Win
- Lincoln and Davis Mobilize
- Battling It Out, 1861–1862
- Stalemate in the Eastern Theater
- Union Victories in the Western Theater
- The Atlantic Theater
- International Diplomacy
- Union and Freedom
- From Slaves to Contraband
- From Contraband to Free People
- The War of Black Liberation
- The South at War
- Revolution from Above
- Hardship Below
- The Disintegration of Slavery
- DOCUMENTING THE AMERICAN PROMISE: “Home and Country”
- The North at War
- The Government and the Economy
- Women and Work at Home and at War
- Politics and Dissent
- Grinding Out Victory, 1863–1865
- Vicksburg and Gettysburg
- Grant Takes Command
- The Election of 1864
- The Confederacy Collapses
- Conclusion: The Second American Revolution
- CHAPTER REVIEW
- LearningCurve: bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
- CHAPTER 16 Reconstruction, 1863–1877
- OPENING VIGNETTE: James T. Rapier emerges in the early 1870s as Alabama’s most prominent black leader
- Wartime Reconstruction
- “To Bind Up the Nation’s Wounds”
- Land and Labor
- The African American Quest for Autonomy
- DOCUMENTING THE AMERICAN PROMISE: “The Meaning of Freedom“
- Presidential Reconstruction
- Johnson’s Program of Reconciliation
- White Southern Resistance and Black Codes
- Expansion of Federal Authority and Black Rights
- Congressional Reconstruction
- The Fourteenth Amendment and Escalating Violence
- Radical Reconstruction and Military Rule
- Impeaching a President
- The Fifteenth Amendment and Women’s Demands
- The Struggle in the South
- Freedmen, Yankees, and Yeomen
- Republican Rule
- White Landlords, Black Sharecroppers
- Reconstruction Collapses
- Grant’s Troubled Presidency
- Northern Resolve Withers
- White Supremacy Triumphs
- An Election and a Compromise
- Conclusion: “A Revolution But Half Accomplished”
- CHAPTER REVIEW
- LearningCurve: bedfordstmartins.com/roarkconcise
- APPENDIX I: Suggested References
- APPENDIX II: Documents
- The Declaration of Independence
- The Constitution of the United States
- Amendments to the Constitution with Annotations (including the six unratified amendments)
- APPENDIX III: Facts and Figures: Government, Economy, and Demographics
- Presidential Elections
- Presidents, Vice Presidents, and Secretaries of State
- Supreme Court Justices
- Federal Spending and the Economy, 1790–2009
- Population Growth, 1630–2010
- Birthrate, 1820–2007
- Life Expectancy, 1900–2007
- Major Trends in Immigration, 1820–2010
- Glossary
- Spot Artifact Credits
- Index
- A
- B
- C
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
- L
- M
- N
- O
- P
- Q
- R
- S
- T
- U
- V
- W
- X
- Y
- Z
- U.S. Political/Geographic and World Maps
- About the Authors
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