Reading summary 76 pages summarized into 15 pages

1. A New World - Focus Questions

1. What were the major patterns of Native American life in North America before European arrived?

The people of the American continents previously unaware of each other existence, were thrown into continuous interaction. The inhabitants of North and South America had developed no immunity to the germs that also accompanied the colonizers. As a result, they suffered a series of devastating epidemics, the greatest population catastrophe in human history. The residents of the America were no more a single group, they spoke hundreds of different languages and lived in numerous kinds of societies. However, were descended from bands of hunters and fishers. The early inhabitants and their descendants spread across the two continents. As the climate warmed, they faced a food crisis as the immense animals they hunted, including woolly mammoths and giant bison, became extinct. North and South America were hardly an empty wilderness. (Foner, 1-3)

2. How did Indian and European ideas of freedom differ on the eve of contact?

Indian civilizations in North America had not developed the scale, grandeur, or centralized organization of the Aztec and Inca societies to their South. North American Indians lacked the technologies Europeans had mastered, such as metal tools and machines, gunpowder, and the scientific knowledge necessary for long distance navigation. They also lacked wheeled vehicles. Their “backwardness” became a central justification for European conquest. But, overtime, Indian societies had perfected techniques of farming, hunting, and fishing, developed structures of political power and religious belief, and engaged in far reaching networks of trade and communication. (Foner, 5)

3. What impelled European explorers to look west across the Atlantic?

4. What happened when the peoples of the Americas came in contact with Europeans?

The most striking feature of Native American society at the time Europeans arrived was its sheer diversity. Each group had its own political system and set of religious beliefs, and North America was home to literally hundreds of mutually unintelligible languages. Indian identity centered on the immediate social group, a tribe, village, chiefdom, or confederacy. When Europeans arrived, many Indians saw them as simply one group among many. The system of gender relations in most Indian societies also differed markedly from of that Europe. Europeans tended to view Indians in extreme terms. They were regarded either as “noble savages”, gentle, friendly, and superior in some ways to Europeans, or as uncivilized and brutal savages. Europeans insisted that by subduing the Indians, they were actually bringing them freedom. The freedom of true religion, private poverty, and the liberation of both men and women from uncivilized and unchristian gender roles. (Foner, 7-11)

5. What were the chief features of the Spanish empire in America?

Spain had established an immense empire that reached from Europe to the Americas and Asia. The Atlantic and Pacific oceans, once barriers separating different parts of the world, now became highways for the exchange goods and the movement of people. Spanish galleons carried gold and silver. The Spanish empire included the most populous parts of the New World and the regions richest in natural resources. Spain’s empire exceeded in size the Roman empire of the ancient world. Spanish America was essentially an urban civilization, an “empire of towns”. (Foner, 22-23)

6. What were the chief features of the French and Dutch empires in North America?

The French and Dutch were primarily commercial ventures that never attracted large numbers of colonists. The French prided themselves on adopting a more humane policy than their imperial rivals. They worked out a complex series of military, commercial, and diplomatic connections, the most enduring alliances between Indians and settlers in colonial North America. They brought striking changes, introducing new goods and transforming hunting from a search for food into a quest for marketable commodities. The Netherlands, dominated international commerce, and Amsterdam was Europe’s foremost shipping and banking center. The small nation had entered a golden age of rapidly accumulating wealth and stunning achievements in painting, philosophy, and the sciences. The Dutch invented the joint stock company, a way of pooling financial resources and sharing the risk of maritime voyages, which provide central to the development of modern capitalism. The Dutch prided themselves on their devotion to liberty, freedom of the press and of private religious practice, cheap livestock, and free land after six years of labor. (Foner, 35-39)

2. Beginnings of English America (1607-1660) - Focus Questions

1. What were the main contours of English colonization in the seventeenth century?

English North America in the seventeenth century was a place where entrepreneurs sought to make fortunes, religious minorities hoped to worship without governmental interference and to create societies based on biblical teachings, and aristocrats dreamed of re-creating a vanished world of feudalism. Those who drew up blueprints for settlement expected to reproduce the social structure with which they were familiar, with all its hierarchy and inequality. The lower orders would occupy the same less-than-fully-free status as in England, subject to laws regulating their labor and depriving them of a role in politics. But for ordinary men and women, emigration offered an escape from lives of deprivation and inequality. (Foner, 46)

2. What obstacles did the English settlers in the Chesapeake overcome?

The settlers of English America came to enjoy greater rights than colonists of other empires, including the power to choose members of elected assemblies, protections of the common law such as the right to trial by jury, and access to land, the key to economic independence. In some colonies, though by no means all, colonists enjoyed considerably more religious freedom than existed in Europe. Many of degrees of freedom coexisted in seventeenth-century North America, from the slave, stripped completely of liberty, to the independent landowner, who enjoyed a full range of rights. During a lifetime, a person might well occupy more than one place on this spectrum. The settler’s success, however, rested on depriving Native Americans of their land and, in some colonies, on importing large numbers of African slaves as laborers. Freedom and lack of freedom expanded together in seventeenth-century America. (Foner, 46-47)

3. How did Virginia and Maryland develop in their early years?

The Virginia Company realized that for the colony to survive it would have to abandon the search for gold, grow its own food, and find a market able commodity. It would also have to attract more settlers. With this end of view, it announced new policies that powerfully shape Virginian’s development as a functioning society rather than an outpost of London-based investors. Instead of retaining all the land for itself, the company introduced the headright system, awarding fifty acres of land to any colonist who paid for his own or another’s passage. Virginia surrendered its charter and became the first royal colony, its governor now appointed by the crown. Virginia had failed to accomplish of any of its goals for either the company or the settlers. As a commodity with an ever-expanding mass market in Europe, tobacco became Virginia’s substitute for gold. It enriched an emerging class of tobacco planters, as well as members of the colonial government who assigned good land for themselves. The crown profited from custom duties, producing startling profits for landowners. The spread of tobacco farming produced a dispersed society with few towns and little social unity. It inspired a get-rich-quick attitude and a frenzied scramble for land and labor. Virginia, however, lacked one essential element of English society, stable family life. (Foner, 58-61)

Although it began under very different sponsorship and remained much smaller than Virginia during the seventeenth century, the second Chesapeake colony, Maryland followed a similar course of development. As in Virginia, tobacco came down to dominate the economy and tobacco planters the society. But Maryland’s history was strikingly different. Maryland was established as a proprietary colony, that is, a grant of land a government authority to a single individual. Most, as in Virginia, came as indentured servants, but others took advantage of Maryland’s generous headright system to acquire land by transporting workers to the colony. Initially, Maryland seems to have offered servants greater opportunity for landownership than Virginia. Unlike in the older colony, freedom dues in Maryland included fifty acres of land. (Foner, 63-64)

4. What made the English settlement of New England distinctive?

The early history of that region in intimately connected to the religious movement known as “Puritanism”, which arose in England late in the sixteenth century. The term was initially coined by opponents to ridicule those not satisfied with the progress of the Protestant Reformation in England. Puritanism came to define a set of religious principles and a view of how society should be organized. Puritans differ among themselves on many issues. Puritans considered religious belief a complex and demanding matter and urged believers to seek the truth by reading the Bible and listening to sermons by educated ministers, rather than devoting themselves to sacraments administered priests and to what Puritans considered formulaic prayers. However, Puritanism was not a simply a set of ideas but a state of mind, a zealousness in pursuing the true faith that alienates many who held differing religious views. Freedom of Puritans was primarily a spiritual affair. Puritans believed that religious uniformity was essential to social order. (Foner, 64-65)

5. What were the main sources of discord in the early New England?

The Puritans exalted individual judgement-hence their insistence on reading the Bible. They considered too much emphasis on the “self” dangerous to social harmony and community stability. Town banished individuals for such offenses as criticizing the church or government, complaining about the colony in letters home to England. Tolerance of difference was not high on the list of Puritan values. Along with the disruptive religious controversies, New England, like the other colonies, has to deal with the difficult problem of relations with Indians. The leaders of the New England colonies prided themselves on the idea that religion was the primary motivation for emigration. Lacking a marketable staple like sugar and tobacco, New Englanders turned to fishing and timber for exports. While religious divisions spawned new settlements, the desire for land among younger families and newcomers was the major motive for New England’s expansion. (Foner, 71-80)

6. How did the English Civil War affect the colonies in America?

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, when English emigrants began arriving in the New World, “freedom” still played only a minor role in England’s political debates. This long-running battle arose from religious disputes about how fully the Church of England should distance its doctrines and forms of worship from Catholicism. Conflicts also developed over the respective powers of the king and Parliament, a debate that produced numerous invocations of the ides of the ”freeborn Englishman” and led to a great expansion of the concept of English freedom. But then, the breakdown of authority had stimulated intense discussion of liberty, authority, and what it meant to be a “freeborn Englishman”. Two democratic political movements groups, Levellers and Diggers offered a glimpse of the modern definition of freedom as a universal entitlement in a society based on equal rights, not a function of social class, and hoping to give freedom an economic underpinning through the common ownership of land. Even before the restoration of the monarchy, , some of radical movements spawned by the English Civil War had been crushed or driven underground. (Foner, 82-83)

3. Creating Anglo-America - Focus Questions

1. How did the English empire in America expand in the mid-seventeenth century?

By the middle of the seventeenth century, it was apparent that the colonies could be an important source of wealth for the mother country. According to the prevailing theory known as “mercantilism”, the government should regulate economic activity so as to promote national power. It should encourage manufacturing and commerce by special bounties, monopolies, and other measures. Above all, trade should be controlled so that more gold and silver flowed into the country than left it. That is, exports of goods, which generated revenue from abroad, should exceed imports, which required paying foreigners for their products. In the mercantilist outlook, the role of colonies was to serve the interests of the mother country by producing marketable raw materials and importing manufactured goods from home. “Foreign trade”, formed the basis of “England’s treasure”. Commerce, not territorial plunder, was the foundation empire. England’s new economic policy, mercantilism, rested on the idea that England should enjoy the profits arising from the English empire. According to the Navigation laws, certain “enumerated” goods, essentially the most valuable colonial products, such as tobacco and sugar, had to be transported in English ships and sold initially in English ports, although they could then be re-exported to foreign markets. Similarly, most European goods imported into the colonies had to be shipped through England, where customs duties were paid. This enabled English merchants, manufacturers, shipbuilders, and sailors to reap the benefits of colonial trade, and the government to enjoy added income from taxes. As the members of the empire, American colonies would profit as we3ll, since their ships were considered English. Indeed, the Navigation Acts stimulated the rise of New England’s shipbuilding industry. (Foner, 89-91)

2. How was slavery established in the Western Atlantic world?

No European nation, including England, embarked on the colonialization of the New World with the intention of relying on African slaves or the bulk of its labor force. But the incessant demand for workers spurred by the spread of tobacco cultivation eventually led Chesapeake planters to turn to the transatlantic trade in slaves. Compared with indentured servants, slaves offered planters many advantages. Slave’s terms of service never expired, and they therefore did not become a population of unruly landless men. Their children were slaves, and their skin color made it more difficult for them to escape into the surrounding society. African men, were accustomed to intensive agricultural labor, and they had encountered many diseases known in Europe and developed resistance to them, so were less likely to succumb to epidemics. Africans were seen as so alien-in color, religion, and social practices-that they were “enslavable” in a way that poor Englishmen were not. It is difficult to enslave a people on their native soil. Slaves are almost always outsiders, transported from elsewhere to their place of labor. In the Americas, slavery was based on the plantation, an agricultural enterprise that brought together large numbers of workers under the control of a single owner. This imbalance magnified the possibility of slave resistance and made it necessary to police the system rigidly. It encouraged the creation of a sharp boundary between slavery and freedom. In the New World, slavery would

come to be associated with race, a concept that drew a permanent line between whites and blacks. Unlike in Africa, slaves in the Americas who became free always carried with them in their skin color the mark of bondage-a visible sign of being considered unworthy of incorporation as equals into free society. A sense of Africans as alien and inferior made their enslavement by the English possible. But prejudice by itself did not create North American slavery. For this situation to take root, planters, and government authorities had to be convinced that importing African slaves was the best way to solve their persistent shortage of labor. The shipping of slaves from Africa to the New World became a major international business during the seventeenth century. It was already well entrenched elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere. English emigrants to the West Indies outnumbered those to North America. By the end of it, huge sugar plantations manned by hundreds of slaves dominated the West Indian economy. Slaves cost more than indentured servants, and the high death rate among tobacco workers made it economically unappealing to pay for a lifetime labor. (Foner, 96-100)

3. What major social and political crises rocked the colonies in the late seventeenth century?

The most important social distinction in the seventeenth century was between the white plantation owners who dominated politics and society and everybody else-small farmers, indentured servants, and slaves. In Maryland, `had suddenly restricted the right to vote to owners of fifty acres of land or a certain amount of personal property, a Protestant uprising unsuccessfully sought to oust his government and restore the suffrage for all freemen. The long struggle for domination of English government between Parliament and the crown reached its culmination in the Glorious Revolution, which established parliamentary supremacy once and for all and secured the Protestant succession to the throne. It expanded its control finance, influenced foreign affairs, and excluded from political and religious power Catholics and Dissenters. Unlike the broad social upheaval that marked the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution was in effect a coup engineered by a small group of aristocrats in alliance with an ambitious Dutch prince. They had no intention of challenging the institution of monarchy. To justify the ouster, Parliament enacted Bill of Rights, which listed parliamentary powers such as control over taxation as well as rights of individuals, including trial by jury. British politics were mirrored in the American colonies. Despite the new regime’s language of liberty, religious freedom was far more advanced in some American colonies. Throughout English America the Glorious Revolution powerfully reinforced among the colonists the sense of sharing a proud legacy of freedom and Protestantism with the mother country. (Foner, 100-106)

4. What were the directions of social and economic change in the eighteenth-century colonies?

The English colonies had far outstripped their rivals in population and trade. As stability returned after the crises of the late seventeenth century, English North America experienced an era of remarkable growth. The most striking characteristic of colonial American society was its sheer diversity. The colonies were essentially English outposts. As economic conditions in England improved, the government began to rethink the policy of encouraging emigration. No longer

concerned with an excess population vagabonds and “masterless men”, authorities began to worry that large-scale emigration was draining labor from the mother country. European immigrants to the colonies during this time continued to arrive as bound laborers who had temporarily sacrificed their freedom to make the voyage to the New World. But as the colonial economy prospered, poor indentured migrants were increasingly joined by professionals and skilled craftsmen-teachers, ministers, weavers, carpenters-whom England could ill afford to lose. This brought to an end official efforts to promote English emigration. Eighteenth century British America was not a “melting pot” of cultures. Ethnic groups tended to live and worship in relatively homogeneous communities. American society had a far more diverse population than Britain. Nowhere was this more evident than in the practice of religion. Equally important to eighteenth century immigrants, however, were other elements of freedom, especially the availability of land, the lack of a military draft, and the absence of restraints on economic opportunity common in Europe. Skilled workers were in great demand. By the mid eighteenth century, the different regions of the British colonies had developed distinct economic and social orders. The financial, commercial, and cultural center of British America, its growth rested on economic integration with the rich agricultural region nearby. (Foner, 111-120)

5. How did patterns of class and gender roles change in eighteenth-century America?

Most free Americans benefited from economic growth, but as colonial society matured an elite emerged that, while neither as powerful nor as wealthy as the aristocracy of England, increasingly dominated politics and society. Indeed, the gap between rich and poor probably grew more rapidly at this period of time. In New England and the Middle Colonies, expanding trade made possible the emergence of a powerful upper class of merchants. In Virginia, the upper class was so tight-knit and intermarried so often that the colony was said to be governed by a “cousinocracy”. Eighteenth century Virginia was far healthier environment than in the early days of settlement. Planters could expect to pass their wealth down to the next generation, providing estates for their sons and establishing family dynasties. Elites in different regions slowly developed a common lifestyle and sense of common interests. Wealthy Americans tried to model their lives on British etiquette and behavior. The richest group of mainland colonists were South Carolina planters. They were grandees lived a lavish lifestyle amid imported furniture, fine wines, silk clothing, and other items from England. Throughout the colonies, elites emulated what they saw as England’s balanced, stable social order. They viewed society as a hierarchical structure in which some men were endowed with greater talents than the others and destined to rule. The social order, they believed, was held together by webs of influence that linked patrons and those dependent on them. “Superiority” and “dependence” were natural elements of any society. An image of refinement served to legitimize wealth and political power. Colonial elites prided themselves on developing aristocratic manners, cultivating the arts, and making productive use of leisure. At the other end of the social scale, poverty emerged as a visible feature of eighteenth-century colonial life. Taking the colonies as a whole, half of the wealth at mid-century was concentrated in the hands of the richest of the population. Attitudes and policies

toward poverty in colonial America mirrored British precedents. The better-off colonists generally viewed the poor as lazy, shiftless, and responsible for their own plight. To minimize the burden in taxpayers, poor persons were frequently set lo labor in workhouses, where they produced goods that reimbursed authorities for part of their upkeep. Most communities adopted stringent measures to “warn out” unemployed and propertyless newcomers who might become dependent on local poor relief. These involved town authorities either expelling the unwanted poor from an area or formally declaring certain person ineligible for assistance. Many were members of families headed by widowed or abandoned women. The large majority of free Americans lived between the extremes of wealth and poverty. Along with racial and ethnic diversity, what distinguished the mainland colonies from Europe was the wide distribution of land and the economic autonomy of most ordinary free families. Perhaps, two-thirds of the free male population were farmers who owned their own land. England, had no class of laborers as exploited as American slaves, but three-fifths of its people owned no property at all. During this period of time, colonial farm families viewed landownership almost as a right, the social precondition of freedom. Accorded with social reality, a wide distribution of property that made economic independence part of the lived experience of large numbers of white colonists. In the household economy during this period of time America, the family was the center of economic life. Most work revolved around the home, and all members-men, women, and children-contributed to the family’s livelihood. The independence of the small farmer depended in considerable measure on the labor of dependent women and children. As the population grew and the death rate declined, family life stabilized and more marriages became lifetime commitments. Free women were expected to devote their lives to being good wives and mothers. Already enshired in law and property relations, male domination took on a greater and greater social reality. As colonial society became more structured, opportunities that had existed for women in the early period receded. Elites tied to imperial centers of power dominated the political and economic life of nearly every colony. (Foner, 121-127)

4. Slavery, Freedom, and the Struggle for Empire - Focus Questions

1. How did African slavery differ regionally in eighteenth-century North America?

The Atlantic slave trade would later be condemned by statesmen and general opinion as a crime against humanity. But in the eighteenth century, it was a regularized business in which European merchants, African traders, and American planters engaged in complex bargaining over human lives, all with the expectation of securing a profit. The slave trade was a vital part world of commerce. /free laborers working for wages were atypical and slavery was the norm. Slave plantations contributed mightily to English economic development. The first mass consumer goods in international trade were produced by slaves-sugar, rice, coffee, and tobacco. The rising demand for these products fueled the rapid growth of the Atlantic slave trade. A series of triangular trading routes crisscrossed the Atlantic, carrying British manufactured goods to Africa and the colonies, colonial products including tobacco, indigo, sugar, and rice to Europe, and slaves from Africa to the New World. Overall, in the eighteenth century, Atlantic commerce consisted primarily of slaves, crops produced by slaves, and goods destined for slave societies. Traders remained in their “factories” and purchased slaves brought to them by African rulers and dealers. The transaclantic slave trade made Africa a major market for European goods, especially textiles and guns. Cheap imported textiles undermined traditional craft production, while guns encouraged the further growth of slavery, since the only way to obtain European weapons was to supply slaves. From a minor institution, slavery grew to become more and more central to West African society, a source of wealth for African merchants and of power for newly emerging African kingdoms. Only a small proportion of slaves carried to the New World were destined for mainland North America. Diseases like measles and smallpox spread rapidly, and the crews on slave ships also suffered a high death rate. However, their numbers increased steadily. During this period of time, the growing world demand for tobacco encouraged continued slave imports. When tobacco prices fell in the arly part of the century, some planters shifted to grain production. But tobacco remained their primary source of wealth. As slavery expanded, planters engrossed the best lands and wealth among the white population became more and more concentrated. At the top stood large planters, below them numerous lesser planters and landowning yeomen, and at the bottom a large population of convicts, indentured servants, tenant farmers, and, ofcourse, the slaves. Violance lay at the heart of the slave system. Race took on more and more importance as a line of social division. Free blacks lost the right to employ white servants and to bear arms, were subjected to special taxes, and could be punished for striking a white person, regardless of the cause. Nonetheless, slavery was not entirely marginal to northern colonial life. Slaves worked as farm hands, in artisan shops, as stevedors loading and unloading ships, and as personal servants. But with slaves so small a part of the population that they seemed to pose no threat to the white majority, laws were less harsh in the South. Most were domestic workers, but slaves worked in all sector of the economy. In an urban economy that expanded and contracted according to the ups and downs of international trade, many employers concluded that relying on wage labor, which could be hired and fired at will, made more economic sense than a long-term investment in slaves. (Foner, 132-140)

2. What factors led to distinct African-American cultures in the eighteenth-century?

They came from different cultures, spoke different languages, and practiced many religions. Slavery threw together individuals who would never otherwise have encountered one another and who had never considered their color or residence on a single continent a source of identity or unity. Their bond was not kinship, language, or even “race”, but slavery itself. The process of creating a cohesive culture and community took many years, and it proceeded at different rates in different regions. During this period of time, the majority of American slaves were described them by African origin and spoke of their bearing on their bodies “country marks”-visible signs of ethnic identity in Africa. Some of the religions were spread out, although it varied as much as those on the other continents, they shared some elements, especially belief in the presence of spiritual forces in nature and a close relationship between the sacred and secular worlds. On the rice plantations, slaves lived in extremely harsh conditions and had a low birth rate throughout the eighteenth century, making rice production dependent on continued slave imports from Africa. The slave seldom came into contact with whites and enjoyed far more autonomy than elsewhere in the colonies. The larger structures of their lives were established by slavery, but they were able to create an African based culture. Despite a continuing slave trade in which young, single males predominated, slaves slowly created families and communities that bridged generations. The common threads that linked these regional African-American cultures were the experience of slavery and the desire for freedom. Throughout the eighteenth century, blacks risked their lives in efforts to resist enslavement. During this period of time America, dreams of freedom knew no racial boundary. (Foner, 140-145)

3. What were the meanings of British liberty in the eighteenth century?

Despite the centrality of slavery to its empire, eighteenth century Great Britain prided itself on being the world’s most advanced and freest nation. It was not only the era’s greatest naval and commercial power but also the home of a complex governmental system with a powerful Parliament representing the interests of a self a self-confident landed aristocracy and merchant class. Central to this se3nse of British identity was the concept of liberty. The fierce political struggles of the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution bequeathed to eighteenth century Britons and abiding conviction that liberty was their unique possession. They believed power and liberty to be natural antagonist. On both sides of the Atlantic, every political cause, it seemed, wrapped itself in the language of liberty and claimed to be defending the “rights of Englishmen.” Continental writers dissatisfied with the lack of liberty in their own countries looked to Britain as a model. As the coexistence of slavery and liberty within the empire demonstrated British freedom was anything but universal. British liberty was fully compatible with wide gradations in personal rights, liberty was the bond of empire. Increasingly, the idea of liberty lost its traditional association with privileges derived from membership in a distinct social class and became more and more identified with a general right to resist arbitrary government. Liberty was central to two sets of political ideas. One is termed by scholars “republicanism”. They celebrated active

participation in public life by economically independent citizens as the essence of liberty. The second set political ideas celebrating freedom came to be known as “liberalism”. This was essentially individual and private. Republicanism and liberalism would eventually come to be seen as an alternative understandings of freedom. These systems of thought overlapped and often reinforced each other. Both political outlooks could inspire a commitment to constitutional government and a foundation of freedom. Both traditions were transported to eighteenth century America. Ideas about liberty imported from Britain to the colonies would eventually help to divide the empire. (Foner, 145-149)

4. What concepts and institutions dominated colonial politics in the eighteenth-century?

Colonial politics for most of the eighteenth century was considerably less tempestuous than in the seventeenth, with its bitter struggles for power and frequent armed uprisings. Political stability in Britain coupled with the maturation of local elites in America made for more tranquil government. In many respects, politics in eighteenth-century America had a more democratic quality than in Great Britain. Its purpose was to ensure that men who possessed an economic stake in society and the independence of judgement that went with it determined the policies of the government. Colonial politics, however, was hardly democratic in a modern sense. Considerable power in colonial politics rested with those who held appointive, not elective, office. In some colonies, a majority of free men possessed the right to vote, but an ingrained tradition of “deference” the assumption among ordinary people that wealth, education, and social prominence carried a right to public office sharply limited effective choice in elections. Aspirants for public office actively sought to ingratiate themselves with ordinary voters, distributing food and liquor freely at the courthouse where balloting took place. Preoccupied with events in Europe and imperial rivalries, successive British governments during the first half of the eighteenth century adopted a policy of “salutary neglect” towards the colonies, leaving them largely to govern themselves. With imperial authority so weak, the large landowners, merchants, and lawyers who dominated colonial assemblies increasingly claimed the right to control local politics. Convinced that they represented the will of the people, elected colonial assemblies used their control of finance to exert influence over appointed governors and councils. During this period of time, as economic development enhanced the power of American elites, the assemblies they dominated became more and more assertive. Many of the conflicts between governors and elected assemblies stemmed from the colonies economic growth. This language reverberated outside the relatively narrow world of elective and legislative politics. Especially in colonial towns and cities, the eighteenth century witnessed a considerable expansion of the “public sphere”, the world of political organization and debate independent of the government, where an informed citizenry openly discussed questions that had previously been the preserve of officials. Elected assemblies, not governors, most frequently discouraged freedom of the press in colonial America. Colonial newspaper vigorously defended freedom of the press as a central component of liberty, insisting that the citizenry had a right to monitor the workings of government and subject public officials to criticism. But since government printing contracts were crucial for

economic success, few newspapers attacked colonial governments unless financially supported by an opposition faction. The most famous colonial court case involving freedom of the press demonstrated that popular sentiment opposed prosecutions for criticism of public officials. The criticism of social and political institutions based on tradition and hereditary privilege rather than the dictates of reason could also be applied to established churches. (Foner, 149-157)

5. How did the Great Awakening challenge the religious and social structure of British North America?

Like freedom of the press, religion was another realm where the actual experience of liberty outstripped its legal recognition. Religion remained central to eighteen century American life. Yet many church leaders worried about lax religious observance as colonial economic growth led people to be more and more preoccupied with worldly affairs. Many ministers were concerned that westward expansion, commercial development, the growth of Enlightenment rationalism, and lack of individual engagement in church services were undermining religious devotion. Known as the Great Awakening, the revivals were less a coordinated movement than a series of local events united by a commitment to a “religion of the heart”, a more emotional and personal Christianity than that offered by existing churches. The revivals redrew the religious landscape of the colonies. During this period of time witnessed a revival of religious fundamentalism in many parts of the world, in part a response to the rationalism of the Enlightenment and a desire for greater religious purity. Methodism and other forms of enthusiastic religion were flourishing in Europe. Like other intellectual currents of the time, the Great Awakening was a transatlantic movement. Many of the new churches began to criticize the colonial practice of levying taxes to support an established church; they defended religious freedom as one of the natural rights government must not restrict. Although the revivals were primarily a spiritual matter, the Great Awakening reflected existing social tensions, threw into question many forms of authority, and inspired criticism of aspects of colonial society. The revivals broadened the range of religious alternatives available to Americans, thereby leaving them more divided than before and at the same time more fully integrated into transatlantic religious developments. But the impact of the Great Awakening spread beyond purely spiritual matters. The revivals encouraged many colonists to trust their own views rather than those of established elites. The revivalists aim was spiritual salvation, not social or political revolution. But the independent frame of mind they encouraged would have significant political consequences. (Foner, 157-160)

6. How did the Spanish and French empires in America develop in the eighteenth century?

The Spanish empire encompassed nan area that stretched from the Pacific coast and New Mexico into the Great Plains and eastward through Texas and Florida. The Spanish government made a concerted effort to reinvigorate its empire north of the Rio Grande. On the Pacific coast, Russian fur traders in the eighteen century established a series of forts and trading posts in Alaska. A string of Spanish missions and presidios soon dotted the California coastline. Serra was widely

praised in Spain for converting thousands of Indians to Christianity, teaching them Spanish, and working to transform their hunting and gathering economies by introducing settled agriculture and skilled crafts. More than any other Spanish colony, California was a mission frontier. These outposts served simultaneously as religious institutions and centers of government and labor. Their aim was to transform the culture of the local population and eventually assimilate it into Spanish civilization. Spain’s North American colonies remained peripheral parts of its empire when compared with its possessions in Central and South America and the Caribbean. During the eighteenth century, the population and economy of Canada expanded. Nonetheless, the population of French North America continued to be dwarfed by the British colonies. Prejudice against emigration to North America remained widespread in France. By claiming control of a large arc of territory and by establishing close trading and military relations with many Indian tribes, the French empire posed a real challenge to the British. French forts and trading posts ringed the British colonies. The French were a presence on the New England and New York frontiers and in western Pennsylvania. (Foner, 160-163)

7. What was the impact of the Seven Years War on imperial and Indian-white relations?

Spain’s empire was far more extensive, France had greater influence in Europe, and the Dutch dominated overseas trade and finance. Only in the eighteenth century, after numerous wars against its great rivals France and Spain, did Britain emerge as the world’s leading empire and its center of trade and banking. The War of the Spanish Succession being the high rate of taxation inspired discontent at home, and would later help to spark the American Revolution. The existence of global empires implied that warfare among them would also be global. The Seven Years War put strains on all the participants. The Seven Years War not only redrew the map of the world but produced dramatic changes within American colonies as well. Participation in the Seven Years War created greater bonds among the colonies. But the war also strengthened colonists pride in being members of the British empire. Now that this had been accomplished, British victory in the Seven Years War seemed a triumph of liberty over tyranny. (Foner, 164-172)

5. The American Revolution - Focus Questions

1. What were the roots and significance of the Stamp Act controversy?

The immediate cause of the riot was the Stamp Act, a recently enacted British tax that many colonists felt violated their liberty. The Stamp Act crisis inaugurated not only struggle for colonial liberty in relation to Great Britain but also a multisided battle to define and extend liberty within America. Having only recently gloried in their enjoyment of “British liberty”, they came to conclude that membership in the empire was a threat to freedom, rather than its foundation. This conviction set the colonies on the road to independence. When Americans began to insist that because they were unrepresented in Parliament, in British government could not tax the colonies, they won little support in the mother country. To their surprise, however, British governments found that the effective working of the empire requires the cooperation of local populations. Time and again, British officials backed down in the face of colonial resistance, only to return with new measures to centralize control of the empire that only stiffened colonial resolve. The British government had already alarmed many colonists by issuing writs of assistance to combat smuggling. These were general search warrants that allowed customs officials to search anywhere they chose for smuggled goods. The Sugar Act established a new machinery to end widespread smuggling by colonial merchants. And to counteract the tendency of colonial juries to acquit merchants charged with violating trade regulations, it strengthened the admiralty courts, where accused smugglers could be judged without benefit of a jury trial. Thus, colonists saw the measure not as welcome reduction in taxation but as an attempt to get them to pay a levy they would otherwise have evaded. The Sugar Act was an effort to strengthen the long established Navigation Acts. The Stamp Act represented a new departure in imperial policy. For the first time, Parliament attempted to raise money from direct taxes in the colonies rather than through the regulation of trade. The Stamp Act managed to offend virtually every free colonists-rich and poor, farmers, artisans, and merchants. Opposition to the Stamp Act was the first great drama of the revolutionary era and the first major split between colonists and Great Britain over the meaning of freedom. Nearly all colonial political leaders opposed the act. Some opponents of the Stamp Act distinguished between internal taxes like the stamp duty, which they claimed Parliament had no right to impose, and revenue legitimately raised through the regulation of trade. No word was more frequently invoked by critics of the Stamp Act than “liberty”. As the crisis continued, symbols of liberty proliferated. Initiated by colonial elites, the movement against the Stamp Act quickly drew in a far broader range of Americans. Opponents of the Stamp Act, however, did not rely solely on debate. As in the Stamp Act crisis, “liberty” was their rallying cry, but in this case liberty had less to do with imperial policy than secure possession of land. (Foner, 174-183)

2. What key events sharpened the divisions between Britain and the colonists in the late 1760s and early 1770s?

The government in London decided to impose a new set of taxes on Americans. In opposing the Stamp Act, some colonists had seemed to suggest that they would not object if Britain raised

revenue by regulating trade. As had happened during the Stamp Act crisis, the streets of American cities filled with popular protest against the new duties. Royal troops had been stationed in the city after rioting that followed the British seizure of the ship Liberty for violating trade regulations. As merchant’s profits shriveled and many members of the colonial elite found they could not do without British goods, the non-important movement was collapsing. The conviction that the British government had set itself on a course dangerous to liberty underpinned colonial resistance when the next crisis arose. The next crisis underscored how powerfully events in other parts of Britain’s global empire affected the American colonies. Tea, once preserve of the wealthy, had by now become a drink consumed by all social classes in England and the colonies. These enabled it to dump low-priced tea on the American market, undercutting both established merchants and smugglers. Money raised through the taxation of imported tea would be used to help defray the costs of colonial government, thus threatening, the assemblies control over finance. The tax on tea was not new. But many colonists insisted that to pay it on this large new body of imports would acknowledge Britain’s right to tax the colonies. As tea shipments arrived, resistance developed in the major ports. (Foner, 184-188)

3. What key events marked the move toward American Independence?

British actions had destroyed the legitimacy of the imperial government in the eyes of many colonists. The committees became training grounds where small farmers, city artisans, property less laborers, and others who had heretofore had little role in government discussed political issues and exercised political power. As the crisis deepened, Americans increasingly based their clams not simply on the historical rights of Englishmen but on the more abstract language of natural rights and universal freedom. By the end of 1775, the breach with Britain seemed irreparable. But many colonists shied away from the idea of independence. Pride in membership in the British empire was still strong, and many political leaders, especially in colonies that had experienced internal turmoil, feared that a complete break with the mother country might unleash further conflict. Anarchy from below, in their views, was as much a danger as tyranny from above. Such fears affected how colonial leader responded to the idea of independence. On July 2, 1776, the Congress formally declared the United States an independent nation. Two days later, it approved the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson and revised by the Congress before approval. The Declaration of Independence is ultimately an assertion of the right of revolution. The Declaration of Independence changed forever the meaning of American freedom. It completed the shift from the rights of Englishmen to the rights of mankind as the object of American independence. Individual self-fulfillment, unimpeded by government, would become a central element of American freedom. Tradition would no longer rule the present, and Americans could shape their society as they saw fit. A distinctive definition of nationality resting on American freedom was born in the Revolution. From the beginning, the idea of “American exceptionalism”-the belief that the United States has a special mission to serve a s a refuge from tyranny, a symbol of freedom, and a model for the rest of the world-has occupied a central place in American nationalism. And for more than two centuries, the Declaration has remained an

inspiration not only to generations of Americans denied the enjoyment of their natural rights, but to colonial peoples around the world seeking independence. (Foner, 188-199)

4. How were American forces able to prevail in the Revolutionary War?

Declaring Americans independent was one thing; winning independence another.

6. The Revolution Within - Focus Questions

1. How did equality become a stronger component of American freedom after the Revolution?

Colonial America was a society with deep democratic potential. It took the struggle for independence to transform it into a nation that celebrated equality and opportunity. In rejecting the crown and the principle of hereditary aristocracy, many Americans also rejected the society of privilege, patronage, and fixed status that these institutions embodied. To be sure, the men who led the Revolution from start to finish were by and large members of the American elite. The lower classes did not rise to power as a result of independence. The idea of liberty became a revolutionary rallying cry, a standard by which to judge and challenge homegrown institutions as well as imperial ones. Jefferson’s seemingly straightforward assertion in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” announced a radical principle whose full implications no one could anticipate. Inequality had been fundamental to the colonial social order; the Revolution challenged it in many ways. Henceforth, American freedom would be forever linked with the idea of equality – equality before the law, equality in political rights, equality of economic opportunity, and, for some, equality of condition. With liberty and equality as their rallying cries, previously marginalized groups advanced their demands. In the end, the Revolution did not undo the obedience to which male heads of household were entitled from their wives and children, and, at least in the southern states, their slaves. For free men, however, the democratization of freedom was dramatic. American Revolution, the term came into wider use to express the popular aspirations for greater equality inspired by the struggle for independence. As the public sphere expanded far beyond its previous boundaries, equality became the rallying cry of Pennsylvania’s radicals. They particularly attacked property qualifications for voting. Overall, the Revolution led to a great expansion of the right to vote. (Foner, 212-217)

2. How did the expansion of religious liberty after the Revolution reflect the New American ideal of freedom?

As remarkable as the expansion of political freedom was the Revolution’s impact on American religion. Freedom of worship before the Revolution arose more from the reality of religious pluralism than from a well-developed theory of religious liberty. Before the Revolution, most colonies supported religious institutions with public funds and discriminated in voting and office holding against Catholics, Jews, and even Dissenting Protestants. Many of the leaders of the Revolution considered it essential for the new nation to shield itself from the unruly passions and violent conflicts that religious differences had inspired during the past three centuries. The movement towards religious freedom received a major impetus during the revolutionary era. The seven state constitutions that began with declarations of rights all declared a commitment to “the free exercise of religion”. Religious liberty became the model for the revolutionary generations define private matters that must be protected from governmental interference. Even as the separation of church and state created the social and political space that allowed all kinds of

religious institutions to flourish, the culture of individual rights of which that separation was a part threatened to undermine church authority. (Foner, 217-221)

3. How did the definition of economic freedom change after the Revolution, and who benefited from the changes?

In economic as well as political and religious affairs, the Revolution rewrote the definition of freedom. In colonial America, slavery was one part of a broad spectrum of kinds of unfree labor. The decline of the forms of labor had many causes. The democratization of freedom contributed to these changes. The development sharpened the distinction between freedom and slavery and between a northern economy relying on what would come to be called “free labor” and a southern economy ever more heavily dependent on the labor of slaves. Economic dislocations sharpened the controversy. Coupled with wartime disruption of agriculture and trade and the hoarding of goods by some Americans hoping to profit from shortages, this produced an enormous increase in prices. In opposition to the traditional view that men should sacrifice for the public good, believers in freedom of trade argued that economic development arose from economic self-interest. “Natural liberty” would regulate price. Here were two competing conceptions of economic freedom-one based on the traditional view of individuals, the other that unregulated economic freedom would produce social harmony and public gain. The clash between these two visions of economic freedom would continue long after independence had been achieved. (Foner, 222-225)

4. How did the Revolution diminish the freedoms of both Loyalists and Native Americans?

Not all Americans shared in the democratization of freedom brought on by the American Revolution. Loyalist-those who retained their allegiance to the crown-experienced the conflict and its aftermath as a loss of liberty. Loyalists included some of the most prominent Americans and some of the humblest. At some points in the war, Loyalists serving with the British outnumbered Washington’s army. The struggle for independence heightened existing tensions between ethnic groups and social classes within the colonies. Some Loyalist ethnic minorities, feared that local majorities would infringe on their freedom to enjoy cultural autonomy. The War of Independence was in some respects a civil war among Americans. Freedom of expression is often a casualty of war, and many Americans were deprived of basic rights in the name of liberty. Some wealthy Loyalists saw their land confiscated and sold at auction. When the war ended, many Loyalists were banished from the US or emigrated voluntary-rather than live in an independent US. For those Loyalists who remained in the US, hostility proved to be short-lived. Loyalists who did not leave the country were quickly reintegrated into American society, although despite the promise of the Treaty of Paris, confiscated Loyalist property was not returned. (Foner, 225-228)

5. What was the impact of the Revolution on slavery?

African-Americans saw in the ideals of the Revolution and the reality of war an opportunity to claim freedom. Slave owning and slave trading were accepted routines of colonial life. Slavery played a central part in the language of revolution. Apart from “liberty”, it was the word most frequently invoked in the era’s legal and political literature. Eighteen century writers frequently juxtaposed freedom and slavery as “the two extremes of happiness and misery in society”. Such a language was employed without irony even in areas where nearly half the population in fact consisted of slaves. The presence of thousands of slaves powerfully affected the meaning of freedom for the leaders of the American Revolution. The contradiction between freedom and slavery seems so self-evident that it is difficult today to appreciate the power of the obstacles to abolition. At the time of the Revolution, slavery was already an old institution in America. Some patriots in fact, argued that slavery for blacks made freedom possible for whites. Nothing was more essential to freedom, in this view, than the right of self-government and the protection of property against outside interference. These principles suggested that for the government to seize property-including slave property-against the owner’s will would be an infringement on liberty. If government by the consent of the governed formed the essence of political freedom, then to require owners to give up their slave property would reduce them to slavery. By imparting so absolute a value to liberty and defining freedom as a universal entitlement rather than a set of rights specific to a particular place or people, the Revolution inevitably raised questions about the status of slavery in the new nation. Before independence, there had been little public discussion of the institution, even though enlightened opinion in the Atlantic world had come to view slavery as morally wrong and economically inefficient, a relic of a barbarous past. But it was during the revolutionary era that slavery for the first time became a focus of public debate. The Revolution inspired widespread hopes that slavery could be removed from American life. Most dramatically, slaves themselves appreciated that by defining freedom as a universal right, the leaders of the Revolution had devised a weapon that could be used against their own bondage. The language of liberty echoed in slave communities, living amid freedom but denied its benefits, slaves appropriated the patriotic ideology for their own purposes. The most insistent advocates of freedom as a universal entitlement were African-Americans, who demanded that the leaders of the struggle for independence live up to their self-proclaimed creed. The turmoil of war offered other avenues to freedom. Many slaves ran away from their masters and tried to pass as freeborn. Black sought to make white Americans understand slavery as a concrete reality-the denial of all the essential elements of freedom-not merely as a metaphor for the loss of political self-determination. Most slaves of the revolutionary era were only one or two generations removed from Africa. By invoking the Revolution’s ideology of liberty to demand their own rights and by defining freedom as a universal entitlement, blacks demonstrated how American they had become, even as they sought to redefine what American freedom in fact represented. Numerous signers of the Declaration of Independence lost slaves as a result. Some of these escaped slaves were recaptured as the tide of battle turned in the patriots’ favor. For a brief moment, the revolutionary upheaval appeared to threaten the continued existence of slavery. During the War of Independence, nearly every state prohibited or discouraged the further

importation of slaves from Africa. Slavery was peripheral to the economy, the method of abolition reflected how property rights impeded emancipation. Generally, abolition laws did not free living slaves. For slaves alive when the northern laws were passed, hopes for freedom rested on their own ability to escape and the voluntary actions of their owners. And many northern slaveholders proved reluctant indeed when it came to liberating their slaves. All in all, the Revolution had a contradictory impact on American slavery and, therefore, on American freedom. On the eve of independence, virtually every black person in America had been a slave. They formed a standing challenge to the logic of slavery, a haven for fugitives, and a springboard for further effort at abolition. For many Americans, white as well as black, the existence of slavery would henceforth be recognized as a standing affront to the ideal of American freedom. The stark fact is that slavery survived the War of Independence and, thanks to the natural increase of the slave population, continued to grow. (Foner, 230-240)

6. How did the Revolution affect the status of women?

The revolutionary generation included numerous women who contributed to the struggle for independence. Within American households, women participated in the political discussions unleashed by independence. Gender, nonetheless, formed a boundary limiting those entitled to the full blessings of American freedom. Despite the expansion of democracy, politics remained overwhelmingly a male realm. For men, political freedom meant the right to self-government, the power to consent to the individuals and political arrangements that ruled over them. For women, however, the marriage contract superseded the social contract. A woman’s relationship to the larger society was mediated through her relationship with her husband. In both law and social reality, women lacked the essential qualification of political participation-the opportunity for autonomy based on ownership of property or control of one’s own person. Since the common law included women within the legal status of their husbands, women could not be said to have property in themselves in the same sense as men. Men took pride in qualities like independence and masculinity that distinguished them from women and still considered control over their families an element of freedom. Many women who entered public debate felt the need to apologize for their forthrightness. Most men considered women to be naturally submissive and irrational, and therefore unfit for citizenship. While public debate in the revolutionary era viewed men’s rights as natural entitlements, discussions of women’s roles emphasized duty and obligations, not individual liberty. Their rights were nonpolitical, deriving from their roles as wives and mothers. The Revolution, nonetheless, did produce an improvement in status for many women. Recording to the ideology of “republican motherhood” that emerged as a result of independence, women played an indispensable role by training future citizens. Even though republican motherhood ruled out direct female involvement in politics, it encouraged the expansion of educational opportunities for women, so that they could impart political wisdom to their children. The idea of republican motherhood reinforced the trend, already evident in the eighteenth century, toward the idea of “companionate” marriage, a voluntary union held together by affection and mutual dependency rather than male authority. Like slaves, some free women

adapted the rhetoric of the Revolution to their own situation. The subordination of women did not become a major source of public debate until long after American independence. (Foner, 241-244)

7. Founding a Nation - Focus Questions

1. What were the achievements and problems of the Confederation government?

The first written constitution of the US was the Articles of Confederation, drafted by Congress in 1777 and ratified by the states four years later. The Articles sought to balance the need for national coordination of the War of Independence with widespread fear that centralized political power posed a danger to liberty. There was no president to enforce the laws and no judiciary to interpret them. Major decisions required the approval of nine states rather than a simple majority. The only powers specifically granted to the national government by the Articles of Confederation were those essential to the struggle for independence-declaring war, conducting foreign affairs, and making treaties with other governments. Various amendments to strengthen the national government were proposed during the seven years when the Articles of Confederation were in effect, but none received the approval of all the states. The Articles made energetic national government impossible. The most important was establishing national control over land to the west of the thirteen states and devising rules for its settlement. When it came to disposing of western land and regulating its settlement, the Confederation government faced conflicting pressures. Whatever the achievements of the Confederation government, in the eyes of many influential Americans they were outweighed by its failings. Both the national government and the country at large faced worsening economic problems. (Foner, 249-255)

2. What major disagreements and compromises molded the final content of the Constitution?

The new Constitution would create a legislature, an executive, and a national judiciary. Congress would have the power to raise money without relying on the states. States would be prohibited from infringing on the rights of property. And the government would represent the people. The key to stable, effective republican government was finding a way to balance the competing claims of liberty and power. Differences quickly emerged over the proper balance between the federal and state governments and between the interests of large and small states. Under the Articles of Confederation, no national official had been chosen by popular vote. Overall, however, the new structure of government was less than democratic. Nor did the delegates provide for direct election of either federal judges or the president. The president would be chosen either by members of an electoral college or by the House of Representatives. The number of electors for each state was determined by adding together its allocation of senators and representatives. A state’s electors would be chosen either by its legislature or by popular vote. The actual system of election seemed a recipe for confusion. Each elector was to cast votes for two candidates for president, with the second-place finisher becoming vice president. The Senate would then elect the vice president. Federalism refers to the relationship between the national government and the states. Compared to the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution significantly strengthened national authority. The structure of government was not the only source of debate at the Constitutional Convention. The Constitution’s slavery causes were compromises, efforts to find a middle ground between the institution’s critics and defenders. However, they embedded slavery more deeply than ever in American life and politics. The

Constitution gave the national government no power to interfere with slavery in the states. The Constitution created a new framework for American development. It created national political institutions, reduced the power of the states, and sought to place limits on popular democracy. (Foner, 258-263)

3. How did Anti-Federalist concerns raised during the ratification process lead to the creation of the Bill of Rights?

Each state held an election for delegates to a special ratifying delegation. A fierce public battle ensued, producing hundreds of pamphlets and newspaper articles and spirited campaigns to elect delegates. The problem of balancing democracy and respect for property would only grow in the years ahead because economic development would inevitably increase the numbers of poor. The multiplicity of religious denominations offered the best security for religious liberty. Opponents of ratification, called Anti-Federalists, insisted that the Constitution shifted the balance between liberty and power too far in the direction of the latter. Anti-Federalists lacked the coherent leadership of the Constitution’s defenders. Anti-Federalists repeatedly predicted that the new government would fall under the sway of merchants, creditors, and others hostile to the interests of ordinary Americans. Liberty was the Anti-Federalists watchword. To the vision of the US as an energetic great power, Anti-Federalists counterposed a way of life grounded in local, democratic institutions. Anti-Federalism died. Ironically, the parts of the Constitution Americans most value today-the freedoms of speech, the press, and religion, were not in the original document. Many delegates at state conventions had refuse to vote for ratification unless promised that a Bill of Rights would be added to the Constitutions. The roots and even the specific language of some parts of the Bill of Rights lay far back in English history. Today, when Americans are asked to define freedom, they instinctively turn to the Bill of Rights and especially the First Amendment, with its guarantees of freedom of speech, the press, and religion. Nonetheless, the Bill of Rights subtly affected the language of liberty. (Foner, 263-270)

4. How did the definition of citizenship in the new republic exclude Native Americans and African-Americans?

The colonial population had been divided by ethnicity, religion, class, and status and united largely by virtue of their allegiance to Britain. Since the government in the US rested on the will of the people, it was all the more important to identify who the people were. Every nation confronts the task of defining its identity. To be an American, all one had to do was commit oneself to an ideology of liberty, equality, and democracy. From the outset, American nationality combined both civic and ethnic definitions. For most of our history, American citizenship has been defined by blood as well as by political allegiance. The early republic’s policies toward Indians and African-Americans illustrate the conflicting principles that shaped American nationality. The status of free blacks was somewhat indeterminate. Nowhere does the original Constitution define who in fact are citizens of the US. The individual states were left free to determine the boundaries of liberty. Even as the decline of apprenticeship and indentured

servitude narrowed the gradations of freedom among the white population, the Revolution widened the divide between free Americans and those who remained in slavery. (Foner, 271-279)

8. Securing the Republic - Focus Questions

1. What issues made the politics of the 1790s so divisive?

Political divisions first surfaced over the financial plan developed by Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton in 1790 and 1791. Hamilton’s immediate aims were to establish the nation’s financial stability, bring the government’s support the country’s most powerful financial interests, and encourage economic development. Hamilton’s vision of powerful commercial republic won strong support from American financiers, manufacturers, and merchants. Opposition in Congress threatened the enactment of Hamilton’s plans. Political divisions began over Hamilton’s fiscal program, but they deepened in response to the events in Europe. Events in France became a source of bitter conflict in America. Enthusiasm for France inspired a rebirth of symbols of liberty. Liberty poles and caps reappeared on the streets of American towns and cities. By the mid-1790s, two increasingly coherent parties had appeared in Congress, calling themselves Federalists and Republicans. Both parties laid claim to the language of liberty, and each accused its opponent of engaging in a conspiracy to destroy it. The Federalists may have been the only major party in American history forthrightly to proclaim democracy and freedom dangerous in the hands of ordinary citizens. Republicans, were more sympathetic to France than the Federalists and had more faith in democratic self-government. They drew their support from an unusual alliance of wealthy southern planters and ordinary farmers throughout the country. They were far more critical than the Federalists of social and economic inequality, and more accepting of broad democratic participation as essential to freedom. Federalists saw the societies as another example of how liberty was getting out of hand. Political liberty meant not simply voting at elections but constant involvement in public affairs. The democratic ferment of the 1790s inspired renewed discussion about women’s rights. Wollstonecraft did not directly challenge traditional gender roles, but for greater access to education and to paid employment for women rested on the idea that this would enable single women to support themselves and married women to perform more capably as wives and mothers. The expansion of the public sphere offered new opportunities to women. (Foner, 283-294)

2. How did competing views of freedom and global events promote the political divisions of the 1790s?

In 1792, Washington won unanimous reelection. Four years later, he decided to retire from public life, in part to establish the precedent that the presidency is not a life office. Washington defended his administration against criticism, warned against the party spirit, and advised his countrymen to steer clear of international power politics. Confronted with mounting opposition, some of it voiced by immigrant pamphleteers and editors, Federalists moved to silence their critics. A new Naturalization Act extended from five to fourteen years the residency requirement for immigrants seeking American citizenship. The Alien Act allowed the deportation of persons from abroad deemed “dangerous” by federal authorities. The Sedition Act authorized the prosecution of virtually any public assembly or publication critical of the government. The main target was the Republican press, seen by Federalists as a group of upstart workingmen whose

persistent criticism of the administration fomented popular rebelliousness and endanger “genuine liberty”. The Alien and Sedition Acts failed to silence Republican press. The Sedition Acts thrust freedom of expression to the center of discussions of American liberty. Both resolutions attacked the Sedition Act as an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment. The resolutions were directed against assaults on freedom of expression by the federal government, not the states. “Jefferson and Liberty” became the watchword of the Republican campaign. Republicans had developed effective techniques for mobilizing voters. The Federalists, who viewed politics as an activity for a small group of elite men, found it difficult to match their opponents’ mobilization. The events of the 1790s demonstrated that a majority of Americans believed ordinary people had a right to play an active role in politics, express their opinions freely, and contest the policies of their government. Lurking behind the political battles of the 1790s lay the potentially divisive issue of slavery. The issue of slavery would not disappear. The very first Congress under the new Constitution received petitions calling for emancipation. Events during the 1790s underscored how powerfully slavery defined and distorted American freedom. (Foner, 295-300)

3. What were the achievements and failures of Jefferson’s presidency?

The first president to begin his term in Washington DC, Jefferson assumed office on March 4, 1801. The capital’s condition seemed to symbolize Jefferson’s intention to reduce the importance of the national government in American life. Jefferson hoped to dismantle as much of the Federalist system as possible. During his eight years as president, he reduced the number of government employees and slashed the army and navy. He abolished all taxes except the tariff, including the hated tax on whiskey, and paid off part of the national debt. He aimed to minimize federal power and eliminate government oversight of the economy. Jefferson distrusted the unelected judiciary and always believed in the primacy of local self-government. The greatest irony of Jefferson’s presidency involved his greatest achievement, the Louisiana Purchase. The cost, made the Louisiana Purchase one of history’s greatest real-estate bargains. Ina stroke, Jefferson had doubled the size of the US and ended the French presence in North America. Within a year of the purchase, Jefferson dispatched an expedition to explore the new territory. Their objects were both scientific and commercial-to study the area’s plants, animal life, and geography, and to discover how the region could be exploited economically. The success of their journey helped to strengthen the idea that American territory was destined to reach all the way to the Pacific. The Louisiana Purchase demonstrated that despite its vaunted isolation from the Old World, the US continued to be deeply affected by events throughout the Atlantic world. The first war fought by the US was to protect American commerce in a dangerous world. Only a few months after taking office, Jefferson employed the very navy whose expansion he had strongly criticized. The federal government paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in ransom and agreed to annual sums to purchase peace. The Barbary Wars were the new nation’s first encounter with the Islamic world. But the conflicts helped to establish a long-lasting pattern in which Americans viewed Muslims as an exotic people whose way of life did not adhere to Western standards. In the eyes of many Americans, Islam joined monarchy and aristocracy as forms of Old World

despotism that stood as opposite of freedom. According to international law, neutral nations had a right to trade nonmilitary goods with countries at war. To Jefferson, the economic health of the US required freedom of trade with which no foreign government had a right to interfere. Jefferson left office at the lowest point of his career. (Foner, 302-310)

4. What were the causes and significant results of the War 1812?

In 1795, James Madison had written that war is the greatest enemy of “true liberty”. Nonetheless, Madison became a war president. Reports that the British were encouraging Tecumseh’s efforts contributed to the coming of the War of 1812. In June 1812, with assaults on American shipping continuing. Madison asked Congress for a declaration of war. The vote revealed a deeply divided country. It was the first time the US declared war on another country, and was approved by the smallest margin of any declaration of war in American history. Like the War of Independence, the War of 1812 was a two-front struggle-against the British and Indians. With neither side wishing to continue the conflict, the US and Britain signed the Treaty of Ghent, ending the war. The treaty restored the previous status quo. No territory exchange hands, nor did any provisions relate to impressment or neutral shipping rights. Considering that the war had not been a military success for the US, the Treaty of Ghent was about as good an outcome as could be expected. The Treaty of Ghent produced an unusual episode in American diplomacy. As in the War of Independence, thousands of slaves found freedom by escaping to British forces during the War of 1812. A number of contemporaries called the War of 1812 the Second War of Independence. (Foner, 312-314)

9. The Market Revolution (1800-1840) - Focus Questions

1. What were the main elements of the market revolution?

In the first half of the nineteenth century, an economic transformation known to historians as the market revolution swept over the US. Its catalyst was a series of innovations in transportation and communication. American technology had hardly changed during the colonial era. The market revolution represented an acceleration of development already under way in the colonial era. In the first half of the nineteenth century, in rapid succession, the steamboat, canal, railroad, and telegraph wrenched America out of its economic past. These innovations opened new land to settlement, lowered transportation costs, and made it far easier for economic enterprises to sell their products. They linked farmers too national and world markets and made them major consumers of manufactured goods. The completion in 1825 of the 363-mile Erie Canal across upstate New York allowed goods to flow between the Great Lakes and New York City. In its financing by the state government, the Erie Canal typified the developing transportation infrastructure. Canals connected existing waterways. The railroad opened vast new areas of the American interior to settlement, while stimulating the mining of coal for fuel and the manufacture of iron for locomotives and rails. At the same time, telegraph made possible instantaneous communication throughout the nation. Improvements in transportation and communication made possible the rise of the West as a powerful, self-conscious region of the new nation. (Foner, 320-324)

2. How did the market revolution spark social change?

Although the market revolution and westward expansion occurred simultaneously in the North and the South, their combined effects heightened the nation’s sectional divisions. The most dynamic feature of the American economy in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century was the rise of the Cotton Kingdom. The early industrial revolution, which began in England and soon spread to parts of the North, centered on factories producing cotton textiles with water-powered spinning and weaving machinery. These factories generated an immense demand for cotton, a crop the Deep South was particularly suited to growing because of its climate and soil fertility. A fairly simple device consisting of rollers and brushes, the gin quickly separated the seed from the cotton. It made possible the growing and selling of cotton on a large scale. Since cotton was produced solely for sale in national and international markets, the South was in some ways the most commercially oriented region of the United States. In the North, the market revolution and westward expansion set in motion changes that transformed the region into an integrated economy of commercial farms and manufacturing cities. They increasingly concentrated on growing crops and raising livestock for sale, while purchasing at stores goods previously produced at home. However, the bulk of the crop was corn as cheaply as their western counterparts, increasingly concentrated on producing dairy products, fruits, and vegetables for nearby urban centers. Like rural areas, urban centers witnessed dramatic changes due to the market revolution. Urban merchants, bankers, and master craftsmen took advantage of the economic opportunities created by the expanding market among commercial farmers. The drive

among these businessmen to increase production and reduce labor costs fundamentally altered the nature of work. In some industries, most notably textiles, the factory superseded traditional craft production altogether. Factories gathered large groups of workers under central supervision and replaced hand tools with power-driven machinery. The market revolution helped to change Americans’ conception of time itself. As the market revolution accelerated, work in factories, workshops, and even for servants in Americans’ homes took place for a specified number of hours per day. Closely supervise work tending a machine for a period determined by a clock seemed to violate the independence Americans considered an essential element of freedom. Employers turned instead to those who lacked other ways of earning a living. While some factories employed entire families, the early New England textile mills relied largely on female and child labor. The constant supervision of the workers’ private lives seems impossibly restrictive from a modern point of view. But this was the first time in history that large numbers of women left their homes to participate in the public world. Most valued the opportunity to earn money independent at a time when few other jobs were open to women. Economic expansion fueled a demand for labor by increased immigration from abroad. The introduction of the ocean going steamship and the railroad made long-distance travel more practical. Frequently, a male family member emigrated first; he would later send back money for the rest of the family to follow. American law increasingly supported the efforts of entrepreneurs to participate in the market revolution, while shielding them from interference by local governments and liability for some of the less desirable results of economic growth. The corporate form of business organization became central to the new market economy. Corporations were therefore able to raise far more capital than the traditional forms of enterprise. (Foner, 327-338)

3. How did the meanings of American freedom change in this period?

The market revolution and west ward expansion had produced a society that amazed European visitors: energetic, materialistic, and seemingly in constant motion. Westward migration and urban development created a large mobile population no longer tried to local communities who sought to seize the opportunities offered by economic change. Westward expansion and the market revolution profoundly affected the lives of all Americans. They reinforced some older ideas of freedom and helped to create new ones. The restless, competitive world of the market revolution strongly encouraged the identification of American freedom with the absence of restraint on self-directed individuals seeking economic advancement and personal development. The popular religious revivals that swept over the country during the Second Great Awakening added a religious underpinning to the celebration of personal self-improvement, self-reliance, and self-determination. Even more than its predecessor of several decades earlier, the Second Great Awakening stressed the right of private judgement in spiritual matters and the possibility of universal salvation through faith and good works. (Foner, 338-345)

4. How did the market revolution affect the lives of workers, women, and African-Americans?

As the market revolution progressed, the right to compete for economic advancement became a touchstone of American freedom. Many enterprising Americans seized the opportunities offered by the market revolution to enrich themselves. The market revolution affected the lives of all Americans. But not all were positioned to take advantage of its benefits. Most blacks, were slaves, but even free blacks found themselves excluded from the new economic opportunities. While many white Americans could look forward to a life of economic accumulation and individual advancement, large numbers of free blacks experienced downward mobility. The result was a rapid decline in economic status, until by mid-century, the vast majority of northern blacks labored for wages in unskilled jobs and as domestic servants. Women, too, found many of the opportunities opened by the market revolution closed to them. As the household declined as a center of economic production, many women saw their traditional roles undermined by the availability of mass-produced goods previously made at home. Some women, as noted above, followed work as it moved from household to factory. Others embraced a new definition of femininity, which glorified not a woman’s contribution to the family’s economic well-being, but her ability to create a private environment shielded from the competitive tensions of the market economy. With more and more men leaving the home from work, women did exercise considerable power over personal affairs within the family. For both “sexes”, freedom meant fulfilling their respective “inborn” qualities. Men were rational, aggressive, and domineering, while women were nurturing, selfless, ruled by the emotions, and thus less fitted for public life. Men moved freely between the public and private “spheres”, women were supposed to remain cloistered in the private realm of the family. Women could not compete freely for employment, since only low-paying jobs were available to them. Even though most women were anything but idle, in a market economy where labor increasingly meant work that created monetary value, it became more and more difficult to think of labor as encompassing anyone but men. As this complaint suggest, many Americans experienced the market revolution as an enhancement of the power to shape their own lives, but as a loss of freedom. The economic transformation produced an explosive growth in the nation’s output and trade and a rise in the general standard of living. The market revolution transformed and divided American society and its conceptions of freedom. It encouraged a new emphasis on individualism and physical mobility among white men, while severely limiting the options available to women and African-Americans. It opened new opportunities for economic freedom for many Americans, while leading others to fear that their traditional economic independence was being eroded. In a democratic society, it was inevitable that the debate over the market revolution and its consequences for freedom would be reflected in American politics. (Foner, 347-353)

10. Democracy in America (1815-1840) - Focus Questions

1. What were the social bases for the flourishing democracy of the early mid-nineteenth century?

The market revolution and territorial expansion were intimately connected with a third central element of American freedom-political democracy. The challenge to property qualifications for voting, begun during the American Revolution, reached its culmination in the early nineteenth century. A flourishing democratic system had been consolidated. American politics was boisterous, highly partisan, and sometimes violent, and it engaged the energies of massive numbers of citizens. In a country that lacked more traditional bases of nationality-a powerful and menacing neighbor, historic ethnic, religious, and cultural unity-democratic political institutions came to define the nation’s sense of its own identity. Democracy reinforced a sense of equality among those who belonged to the political nation, and it deepened the divide separating them from those who did not. The right to vote increasingly became the emblem of American citizenship. The market revolution and political democracy produced a large expansion of the public sphere and an explosion in printing sometimes called the “information revolution”. The growth of the reading public, yet another facet of the democratization of American life, opened the door for the rise of a new generation of women writers. As democracy triumphed, the intellectual grounds for exclusion shifted from economic dependency to natural incapacity. Gender and racial differences were widely understood as part of a single, natural hierarchy of innate endowments. A boundary drawn by nature itself was not really exclusion at all. In the nineteenth century, women came to be seen as too pure to risk contamination in the rough-and-tumble world of politics. Paradoxically, personal transformation, developing to the fullest the potential inherent within each human being, the limits of American democracy rested on the belief that the character and abilities of non-whites and women were forever fixed by nature. The political world of the nineteenth century, so crucial an arena for the exercise of American freedom, was in part defined in contrast to the feminine sphere of the home. Freedom in the public realm in no way implied freedom in private life. If the exclusion of women from political freedom continued a long-standing practice, the increasing identification of democracy and whiteness marked something of a departure. Despite racial inequalities, many whites of the revolutionary generation had thought of African-Americans as “citizen of color”, potential members of the body politic. But in the nineteenth century, the definition of the political nation became more and more associated with race. In effect, race had replaced class as the boundary between those American men who were entitled to enjoy political freedom and those who were not. (Foner, 357-364)

2. What efforts were made in this period to strengthen the economic integration of the nation, and what major crises hindered these efforts?

Given the primitive state of transportation, it proved very difficult to move men and goods around the country. The plan rested on three pillars; a new national bank, a tariff on imported manufactured goods to protect American industry, and federal financing of improved roads and canals. (Foner, 364-365)

3. What were the major areas of conflict between nationalism and sectionalism?

Parallels existed between the Spanish-American revolutions and the one that had given birth to the United States. In both cases, the crisis of empire was precipitated by programs launched by the imperial country aimed in large measure at making the colonies contribute more to its finances. The Spanish-Americans declarations of independence borrowed directly from that of the US. The New Latin America constitutions were more democratic than that of the US. And it proved far more difficult for the new Latin American republics to achieve economic development than the US. The Monroe Doctrine is sometimes called America’s diplomatic declaration of independence. For many decades, it remained a cornerstone of American foreign policy. The Monroe Doctrine reflected a rising sense of American nationalism. But sectionalism seemed to rule domestic politics. John Quincy Adams enjoyed one of the most distinguished pre-presidential careers of any American president. Adams was not an engaging figure. He had a clear vision of national greatness. He strongly supported the American System of government sponsored economic development. He held a view of federal power far more expansive than most of his contemporaries. His plans included the establishment of a national university, an astronomical observatory, and a naval academy. The US, the freest nation on earth, would also, he predicted, become the mightiest. Adam’s program handed his political rivals a powerful weapon. The clash between Adams and Van Buren demonstrated how democracy was changing the nature of American politics. Van Buren had established the political apparatus of the Democratic Party. Adams, disdained political organization. (Foner, 370-378)

4. In what ways did Andrew Jackson embody the contradictions of democratic nationalism?

Andrew Jackson was a man of many contradictions. Although he had a little formal education, he was capable of genuine eloquence in his public statements. By the time of Jackson’s presidency, politics had become more than a series of political contests. Thousands of Americans willingly attended lengthy political orations and debates. There was more to party politics, than spectacle and organization. Jacksonian politics revolved around issues spawned by the market revolution and the continuing tension between national and sectional loyalties. The party battles of the Jacksonian era reflected the clash between “public” and “private” definitions of American freedom and their relationship to governmental power, a persistent tension in the nation’s history. Democrats, considered individual morality a private matter, not a public concern. An activist national government, could enhance the realm of freedom. Jackson, left office with many more principles than he came in with. Despite his commitment to states rights, his first term was dominated by a battle to uphold the supremacy of federal over state law. John C. Calhoun soon emerged as the leading theorist of nullification. Almost from the beginning of Jackson’s first term, Calhoun’s influence in the administration waned. One incident that helped set Jackson against Calhoun occurred a few weeks after the inauguration. Far weightier matters soon divided Jackson and Calhoun. Debate over nullification illegal, unconstitutional, and treasonous. Nullification was not a purely sectional issue. Calhoun denied that nullification was a step

toward disunion. To Jackson, nullification amounted to nothing less than disunion. The nullification crisis underscored Jackson’s commitment to the sovereignty of the nation. Removal was the alternative to the coexistence championed by Apess. It powerfully reinforced the racial definition of American nationhood and freedom. At the time of independence, Indians had been a familiar presence in many parts of the US. (Foner, 379-388)

5. How did the Bank War influence the economy and party competition?

The Bank symbolized the hopes and fears inspired by the market revolution. The expansion of banking helped to finance the nation’s economic development. The Bank War reflected how Jackson enhanced the power of the presidency during his eight years in office, proclaiming himself the symbolic representative of all the people. His victory ensured the death of the Bank of the US. During Jackson’s second term, state bankers were in the ascendancy. Jackson authorized the removal of federal funds from its vaults and their deposit in local banks. Without government deposits, the Bank of US lost its ability to regulate the activities of state banks. Prices rose dramatically, and even though wages also increased, they failed to keep pace. Inevitably, the speculative boom collapsed. For the time being, the Jacksonians had succeeded in separating government-both federal and state-from the economy. Under Van Buren, the hard money, anti-bank wing of the Democratic Party came to power. Congress approve the policy, known as the Independent Treasury, which completely separated the federal government from the nation’s banking system. (Foner, 388-393)

11. The Peculiar Institution - Focus Questions

1. How did slavery shape social and economic relations in the Old South?

When Federick Douglass was born, slavery was already an old institution in America. During the first thirty years of Douglass’s life, the number of slaves and the economic and political importance of slavery continued to grow. In the nineteenth century, cotton replaced sugar as the world’s major crop produced by slave labor. Cotton had been grown for thousands of years in many parts of the globe. Cotton assumed an unprecedented role in the world economy. The early industrial revolution centered on factories using cotton as the raw material to manufacture cloth, cotton had become by far the most important commodity in international trade. Slave trading was a visible, established business. The “free states” had ended slavery, but they were hardly unaffected by it. Northern merchants and manufacturers participated in the slave economy and shared in its profits. Money earned in the cotton trade helped to finance industrial development and internal improvements in the North. Slavery led the South down a very different path of economic development than the North’s, limiting the growth of industry, discouraging immigrants from entering the region, and inhibiting technological progress. They loaned money for the purchase of land and slaves, not manufacturing development. Many northerners viewed slavery as an obstacle to American progress. The profits produced by slavery for the South and the nation as a whole formed a powerful obstacle to abolition. The foundation of the Old South’s economy, slavery powerfully shaped race relations, politics, religion, and the law. Many southern farmers lived lives of economic self-sufficiency remote from the market revolution Unlike northern farmers, they did not provide a market for manufactured goods. This was the main reasons why the South did not develop an industrial base. Ownership of slaves provided the route of wealth, status, and influence. Slavery was a profit-making system, and slaveowners kept close watch on world prices for their products and invested in enterprises such as railroads and canals. The slave plantation was deeply embedded in the world market, and planters sought to accumulate land, slaves, and profits. The paternalist outlook both masked and justified the brutal reality of slavery. Even those who had no direct stake in slavery shared with planters a deep commitment to white supremacy. Indeed, racism-the belief that blacks were innately inferior to whites and unsuited for life in any condition other than slavery-formed one pillar of the proslavery ideology. Most slaveholders also found legitimation for slavery in biblical passage such as the injunction that servants should obey their masters. Others argued that slavery was essential to human progress. Without slavery, planters would be unable to cultivate the arts, sciences, and other civilized pursuits. Still other defenders of slavery insisted that the institution guaranteed equality for whites by preventing the growth of a class doomed to a life of unskilled labor. Many white southerners declared themselves the true heirs of the American Revolution. Proslavery writers began to question the ideals of liberty, equality, and democracy so widely shared elsewhere in the nation. Southern writers, newspaper editors, politicians, and clergymen increasingly devoted themselves to spreading the defense of slavery. (Foner, 397-409)

2. What were the legal and material constraints on slaves lives and work?

Before the law, slaves were property. Slaves could be sold or leased by their owners at will and lacked any voice in the governments that ruled over them. They could not testify in court against white person, sign contracts or acquire property, own firearms, hold meetings unless a white person was present, or leave the farm or plantation without the permission of their owner. It also against the law to teach a slave to read or write. As the nineteenth century progressed, some southern states enacted laws to prevent the mistreatment of slaves, and their material living conditions improved. Many factors contributed to improving material conditions. And with the price of slaves rising dramatically after the closing of the African slave trade, it made economic sense for owners to become concerned with the health and living conditions of their human property. The existence of slavery helped to define the status of those blacks who did enjoy freedom. Free blacks had no voice in selecting public officials. They were prohibited from owning dogs, firearms, or liquor, and they could not strike a white person, even in self-defense. They were not allowed to testify in court or serve on juries, and they had to carry at all times a certificate of freedom. Poor free blacks who required public assistance could be bound out to labor alongside slaves. Despite the legal restrictions on free blacks in the state, they prospered as farmers and skilled craftsmen, and they learned to defend their rights in court, even winning lawsuits against whites who owed them money. Large plantations were diversified communities, where slaves performed all kinds of work. Other plantations counted among their slaves engineers, blacksmiths, and weavers, as well as domestic workers from cooks to coachmen. Slaves cut wood to provide fuel for steamboats, worked in an iron and coal mines, manned the docks in the southern seaports, and laid railroad track. Slaveowners employed a variety of means in their attempts to maintain order and discipline among their human property and persuade them to labor productively. Masters had almost complete discretion in inflicting punishment, and rare was the slave who went through his or her life without experiencing a whipping. Subtler means of control supplemented violence. Owners encouraged and exploited divisions among the slaves, especially between field hands and house servants. They created systems of incentives that rewarded good work with time off or even money payments. (Foner, 409-418)

3. How did family, gender, religion, and values combine to create distinct slaves cultures in the Old South?

At the center of the slave community stood the family. The US, where the slave population grew from natural increase rather than continued importation from Africa, had an even male-female ratio, making the creation of families far more possible. To be sure, the law did not recognize the legality of slave marriages. Most adult slaves married, and their unions, when not disrupted by sale, typically lasted for a lifetime. Most slaves lived in two-parent families. The threat of sale, which disrupted family ties, was perhaps the most powerful disciplinary weapon slaveholders possessed. In some ways, gender roles under slavery differed markedly from those in the larger society. Slave men and women experienced, in a sense, the equality of powerlessness. Slave men could not act as the economic providers for their families. Nor could they protect their wives

from physical or sexual abuse by owners and overseers or determine when and under what conditions their children worked. Whatever its internal arrangements, the family was central to the slave community, allowing for the transmission of values, traditions, and survival strategies. A distinctive of Christianity also offered solace to slaves in the face of hardship and hope for liberation from bondage. To masters, it offered another means of social control. (Foner, 418-

4. What were the major forms of resistance to slavery?

The most widespread expression of hostility to slavery was “day-to-day resistance” or “silent sabotage”-doing poor work, breaking tools, abusing animals, and in other ways disrupting the plantation routine. Many slaves made believe that they were ill to avoid work. Then there was the theft of food, a form of resistance so common that one southern physician diagnosed it as a hereditary disease unique to blacks. More dangerous, were serious crimes committed by slaves, including arson, poisoning, and armed assaults against individual whites. Even more threatening to the stability of the slaves system were slaves who ran away. War provided the opportunity for mass escape. In a few instances, large groups of slaves collectively seize their freedom. Resistance to slavery occasionally moved beyond such individual and group acts to defiance to outright rebellion. The proslavery argument increasingly permeated southern intellectual and political life, while dissenting opinions were suppressed. Some states made membership in an abolitionist society a criminal offense, while mobs drove critics of slavery from their homes. (Foner, 424-429)

12. An Age of Reform (1820-1840) - Focus Questions

1. What were the major movements and goals of antebellum reform?

Abolitionism was only one of the era’s numerous efforts to improve American society. The reform impulse was part of this proliferation of voluntary groups. American established organizations that worked to prevent the manufacture and sale of liquor, end public entertainments and the delivery of the mail on Sunday, improve conditions in prisons, expand public education, uplift the condition of wage laborers, and reorganize society on the basis of cooperation rather than competitive individualism. Some reform movements flourished throughout the nation. Reform was an international crusade. Reformers adopted a wide variety of tactics to bring about social change. Some reformers decide to withdraw altogether from the larger society and establish their own cooperative settlements. About 100 reform communities were established in the decades before the Civil War. Historians call them “utopian” These communities differed greatly in structure and motivation. Nearly all the communities set out to reorganize society on a cooperative basis, hoping to restore social harmony to a world of excessive individualism and to narrow the widening gap between rich and poor. Through their efforts, the words “socialism” and “communism”, meaning a social organization in which productive property is owned by the community rather than private individuals, entered a language of politics. Most utopian communities also tried to find substitutes for conventional gender relations and marriage patterns. But nearly all insisted that the abolition of private property must be accompanied by an end to men’s “property” in women. The Shakers, the most successful of the religious communities, also had a significant impact on the outside world. The Shakers believed, had a “dual” personality, both male and female, and thus the two sexes were spiritually equal. Their work was deemed equally important. They completely abandoned traditional family life. Although they rejected the individual accumulation of private property, the Shakers proved remarkably successful economically. Another influential and controversial community was Oneida. Oneida was an extremely dictatorial environment. Communities with a more worldly orientation tended to be beset by internal divisions and therefore lasted for much shorter periods. The most important secular communitarian was Robert Owen. He said individuals could be transformed by changing the circumstances in which they lived. Harmony eluded the residents of New Harmony. They squabbled about everything from the community’s constitution to the distribution of property. Owen’s settlement survived for only a few years, but it strongly influenced the labor movement, educational reformers, and women’s rights advocates. Most Americans saw the ownership of property as the key to the economic independence, to freedom and marriage as the foundation of the social order. Criticism of war became outright pacifism, critics of slavery now demanded not gradual emancipation but immediate and total abolition. The temperance crusade and other reform movements aroused considerable hostility. Many Americans saw the reform impulse as an attack on their own freedom. Drinking was a prominent feature of festive celebrations and events like militia gatherings. Reformers had to reconcile their desire to create moral order and their quest to enhance personal freedom. On the other hand, reformers insisted that self-fulfillment came through self-discipline. The definition of

the free individual was the person who internalized the practice of self-control. The tension between liberation and control in the era’s reform movements was vividly evident in the proliferation of new institutions that reformers hope could remake human beings into free, morally upright citizens. The largest effort at institution building before the Civil War came in the movement to establish common schools-that is, tax-supported state school systems open to all children. Horace Mann was the era’s leading educational reformer. His annual reports, widely read throughout the country, combined conservatism and radicalism, liberation and social control. He hoped that universal public education could restore equality to a fractured society by bringing the children of all classes together in a common learning experience and equipping the less fortunate to advance in the social scale. He believed that the schools were training individuals-meaning persons who internalized self-discipline. (Foner, 433-443)

2. What were the different varieties of abolitionism?

Before the 1830s, those white Americans willing to contemplate an end to bondage almost always coupled calls for abolition with the “colonization” of feed slaves. Colonization struck many observers as totally impractical. Many northerners saw colonization as the only way to rid the nation of slavery. Other colonizationists believed that slavery and racism were so deeply embedded in American life that blacks could never achieve equality if freed and allowed to remain in the country. In the decades before the Civil War, several thousand black Americans did emigrate to Liberia with the aid of the Colonization Society. But most African-American adamantly opposed the idea of colonization. In fact, the formation of the American Colonization Society galvanized free blacks to claim their rights as Americans. Their resolutions insisted that blacks were Americans, entitled to the same freedom and rights enjoyed by the whites. The abolitionist movement that arose in the 1830s differed profoundly from its genteel, conservative predecessor. Drawing on the religious conviction that slavery was an unparalleled sin and the secular one that it contradicted the values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, a new generation of reformers rejected the traditional approach of gradual emancipation and demanded immediate abolition. They directed explosive language against slavery and slaveholders and insisted that blacks, once free, should be incorporated as equal citizens of the republic rather than being deported. White abolitionist themselves were hardly free of the racism that pervaded American society. Nearly all abolitionists insisted that economic, cibil, and political rights in the US should be equally enjoyed without regard to race. Perfecting American society, they insisted, meant rooting out not just slavery, but racism in all its forms. Beginning with a handful of activists, the abolitionist movement expanded rapidly throughout the North. Abolitionists seized upon the recently invented steam printing press. Identifying slavery as a sin was essential to replacing the traditional strategies of gradual emancipation and colonization with immediate abolition. Many southerners feared that he abolitionists intended to spark a slave insurrection. Standing outside established institutions, abolitionists adopted the role of radical social critics. The abolitionist crusade both reinforced and challenged common understandings of freedom in Jacksonian America. Abolitionists repudiated the idea of “wage slavery”, which had been

popularized by the era’s labor movement. On the other hand, abolitionists argued that slavery was so deeply embedded in American life that its destruction would require fundamental changes in the North as well as the South. In a society in which the rights of citizenship had become more and more closely associated with whiteness, the antislavery movement sought to reinvigorate the idea of freedom as a truly universal entitlement. The origins of the idea of an American people unbounded by race lies not with the founders, who by and large made their peace with slavery, but with the abolitionists. Abolitionists also pioneered the modern idea that human rights took precedence over national sovereignty. Abolitionists debated the Constitution’s relationship to slavery. Abolitionist literature also helped to expand the definition of cruelty. Despite being denounced by their opponents as enemies of American principles, abolitionists consciously identified their movement with the revolutionary heritage. The Declaration of Independence was not a fundamental to public oratory in the early republic as it would later become. Abolitionists seized upon it, interpreting the document’s preamble as a condemnation of slavery. Abolitionists never represented more than a small part of the North’s population. But as the slavery controversy intensified, the belief spread far beyond abolitionists circles that slavery contradicted the nation’s heritage of freedom. (Foner, 443-450)

3. How did abolitionism challenge barriers to racial equality and free speech?

Blacks played a leading role in the antislavery movement. The first racially integrated social movement in American history and the first to give equal rights for blacks a central place in its political agenda, abolitionism was nonetheless a product of its time and place. White abolitionists could not free themselves entirely from this prejudice. What is remarkable, however, is not that white abolitionists reflected the prejudices of their society, but the extent to which they managed to rise above them. Most adamant in contending that the struggle against slavery required a redefinition of both freedom and Americanness were black members of the abolitionist crusade. Black abolitionists developed an understanding of freedom that went well beyond the usage of most of their white contemporaries. They worked to attack the intellectual foundations of racism, seeking to disprove pseudoscientific arguments for black inferiority. Many black abolitionists called on free blacks to seek out skilled and dignified employment in order to demonstrate the race’s capacity for advancement. T every opportunity, black abolitionists rejected the nation’s pretensions as a land of liberty. Many blacks dramatically reversed the common association of the US with the progress of freedom. Even more persistently than their white counterparts, black abolitionists articulated the ideal of color-blind citizenship. Black abolitionists also identified the widespread poverty of the free black population as a consequence of slavery and insisted that freedom possessed an economic dimension. At first, abolitionism aroused violent hostility from northerners who feared that the movement threatened to disrupt the Union, interfere with profits wrested from slave labor, and overturn white supremacy. Far from stemming the movement’s growth, however, mob attacks and attempts to limit abolitionists freedom of speech convinced many northerners that slavery was incompatible with the democratic liberties of white Americans. The abolitionist movement now broadened its

appeal so as to win the support of northerners who cared little about the rights of blacks but could be convinced that slavery endangered their own cherished freedoms. For many years, the American public sphere excluded discussion of slavery. (Foner, 450-455)

4. What were the diverse sources of the antebellum women’s rights movement and its significance?

Much of the movement’s grassroots strength derived from northern women, who joined by the thousands. A few became famous, but most antislavery women remain virtually unknown to history. The public sphere was open to women in ways government and party politics were not. Women’s letters and diaries reveal a keen interest in political issues, from slavery to presidential campaigns. Women organized a petition campaign against the policy of Indian removal. Although unsuccessful, the experience helped to produce a generation of women who then turned their attention to abolitionism, temperance, and other reforms. All these activities enabled women to carve out a place in the public sphere. But it was participation in abolitionism that inspired the early movement for women’s rights. In working for the rights of the slave, not a few women developed a new understanding of their own subordinate social and legal status. Like abolitionism, temperance, and other reforms, women’s rights were an international movement. Lacking broad backing at home, early feminists found allies abroad. Women also demanded the right to participate in the market revolution. Truth insisted that the movement devote attention to the plight of poor working-class women and repudiate the idea that women were too delicate to engage in work outside the home. Feminism demanded an expansion of the boundaries of freedom rather than a redefinition of the idea. But even as it sought to apply prevailing notions of freedom to women, the movement posed a fundamental challenge to some of society’s central beliefs-that the capacity for independence and rationality were male traits, that the world was properly divided into public and private realms, and that issues of justice and freedom did not apply to relations within the family. The dichotomy between freedom and slavery powerfully shaped early feminist’s political language. Just as the idea of “wage slavery” enabled northern workers to challenge the inequalities inherent in market definitions of freedom, the concept of the “slavery of sex” empowered the women’s movement to develop an all-encompassing critique of male authority and their own subordination. Feminist abolitionists did not invent the analogy between marriage and slavery. Marriage was not equivalent to slavery. Influenced by abolitionism, women’s rights advocates turned another popular understanding of freedom-self-ownership, or control over one’s own person-in an entirely new direction. The emphasis in abolitionist literature on the violation of the slave woman’s body by her master helped to give the idea of self-ownership a concrete reality that encouraged application to free women as well. The demand that women should enjoy the rights to regulate their own sexual activity and procreation and to be protected by the state against violence at the hands of individual rights should stop at the household’s door. The issue of women’s private freedom revealed underlying differences within the movement for women’s rights. Belief in equality between the sexes and in the sexes’ natural differences coexisted in antebellum feminist thought. Even feminists critical of the

existing institution of marriage generally refrained from raising in public the explosive issue of women’s “private” freedom. Even in reform circles, the demand for a greater public role for women remained extremely controversial. While the achievement of most of their demands lay far in the future, the women’s rights movement succeeded in making “the woman question” a permanent part of the transatlantic discussion of social reform. The abolitionists’ greatest achievement lay in shattering the conspiracy of silence that had sought to preserve national unity by suppressing public debate over slavery. (Foner, 455-464)

13. A House Divided (1840 – 1861) - Focus Questions

1. What were the major factors contributing to U.S. territorial expansion in the 1840s?

In the 1840s, slavery moved to the center stage of American politics. It did so not in the moral language or with the immediatist program of abolitionism, but as result of the nation’s territorial expansion. During this period of time, the American presence in the area had been limited to a few fur traders and explorers. This did not stop Americans from settling in either region. National boundaries meant little to those who moved west. Settlement of Oregon did not directly raise the issue of slavery. By 1840, California was already linked commercially with the US. California also attracted a small number of American newcomers. The Mexican War was the first American conflict to be fought primarily on foreign soil and the first in which American troops occupied a foreign capital. Inspired by the expansionist fervor or manifest destiny, a majority of Americans supported the war. The Mexican War is only a footnote in most Americans’ historical memory. Few public monuments celebrate the conflict. Mexicans, regard the war as a central event of their national history and a source of continued resentment over a century and a half after it was fought. With the end of the Mexican War, the US absorbed half a million square miles of Mexico’s territory. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo fuaranteed to “male citizens” of the area “the free enjoyment of their liberty and property” and “all the rights” of Americans-a provision designed to protect the property of large Mexican landowners in California. Although not newcomers, they had to adjust to a new identity as if they were immigrants. The spirit of manifest destiny gave a new stridency to ideas about racial superiority. “Race” in the mid-nineteenth century was an amorphous notion involving color, culture, national origin, class, and religion. The imposition of the American system of race relations proved detrimental to many inhabitants of the newly acquired territories. Texas had already demonstrated as much. Mexico had abolished slavery and declared persons of Spanish, Indians, and African origin equal before the law. Only whites were permitted to purchase land, and the entrance of free blacks into the state was prohibited altogether. Local circumstances affected racial definitions in the former Mexican territories. California’s gold-rush population was incredibly diverse. As early surface mines quickly became exhausted, they gave way to underground mining that required a large investment of capital. This economic development worsened conflicts among California’s many racial and ethnic groups engaged in fierce competition for gold. California would long remain in the American imagination a place of infinite opportunity, where newcomers could start their lives anew. But the boundaries of freedom there were tightly drawn. In a remarkable coincidence, the California gold rush took place almost simultaneously with another located halfway around the world. As in California, the gold rush was a disaster for the aboriginal peoples, whose population, already declining, fell precipitously. (Foner, 467-480)

2. Why did the expansion of slavery become the most divisive political issue in the 1840s and 1850s?

Before 1846, the status of slavery in all parts of the US had been settled, either by state law or by the Missouri Compromise, which determined slavery’s status in the Louisiana Purchase. The acquisition of new land reopened the question of slavery’s expansion. The Free Soil position had a popular appeal in the North that far exceeded the abolitionists’ demand for immediate emancipation and equal rights for blacks. While Congress possessed no constitutional power to abolish slavery within a state, well-known precedents existed for keeping territories free from slavery. Many northerners had long resented what they considered southern domination of the federal government. For thousands of northerners, the ability to move to the new western territories held out the promise of economic betterment. Such views merged easily with opposition to the expansion of slavery. Unlike abolitionism, the “free soil” idea also appealed to the racism so widespread in northern society. To single out slavery as the one form of property barred from the West would be an affront to the South and its distinctive way of life. Many older plantation areas already suffered from soil exhaustion. The admission of new free states would overturn the delicate political balance between the sections and make the South a permanent minority. Southern interests would not be secure in a Union dominated by non-slaveholding states. American principles of liberty and self-government appeared to be triumphing in the Old War. With the slavery issue appearing more and more ominous, established party leaders moved to resolve differences between the sections. Many southerners opposed the measure, fearing that it would upset the sectional balance in Congress. California would enter the Union as free state. The slave trade, but not slavery itself, would be abolished in the nation’s capital. A stringent new law would allow southerners to reclaim runaway slaves. In the Senate debate on the Compromise, the divergent sectional positions received eloquent expression. Powerful leaders spoke for and against compromise. For one last time, political leaders had removed the dangerous slavery question from congressional debate. The security of slavery was more important to them than states’-rights consistency. The fugitive slave issue affected all the free states, not just those that bordered in a series of dramatic confrontations, fugitives, aided by abolitionist allies, violently resisted recapture. The sight of many refugees seeking liberty in a foreign land challenged the familiar image of the US as an asylum for freedom. At least temporarily, the Compromise of 1850 seemed to have restored sectional pace and party unity. In 1854, the old political order finally succumbed to the disruptive pressures of sectionalism. A strong believer in western development, he hoped that a transcontinental railroad could be constructed through Kansas or Nebraska. But he feared that this could not be accomplished unless formal governments had been established in these territories. Unlike the lands taken from Mexico, Kansas and Nebraska lay in the nation’s heartland, directly in the path of westward migration. Slavery, was prohibited there under the terms of the Missouri Compromise. It helped to convince millions of northerners that southern leaders aimed at nothing less than extending their peculiar institution throughout the West. Thanks to Douglas’s energetic leadership, the Kansas-Nebraska Act became law. It is difficult to think of a piece of legislation in American history that had a more profound impact on national life. (Foner, 480-487)

3. What combination of issues and events fueled the creation of the Republican Party in the 1850s?

The disruptive impact of slavery on the traditional parties was the immediate cause of political transformation in the mid-1850s. But the rise of the Republican Party also reflected underlying economic and social changes, notably the completion of the market revolution and the beginning of mass immigration from Europe. The catalyst was the completion of the railroad network. Four great trunk railroads now linked eastern cities with western farming and commercial centers. The economic integration of the Northwest and Northeast created the groundwork for their political unification in the Republican Party. Northern society stood poised between old and new ways. The majority of the population still lived not in large cities but in small towns and rural areas, where the ideal of economic independence-owning one’s own farm or shop-still lay within reach. Yet the majority of the northern workforce no longer labored in agriculture, and the industrial revolution was spreading rapidly. Although the southern economy was also growing and the continuing expansion of cotton production brought wealth to slaveholders, the South did not share in these broad economic changes. All European immigrants benefited from being white. The newcomers had the good fortune to arrive after white male suffrage had become the norm and automatically received the right to vote. In a country where the suffrage had become essential to understanding of freedom, it is significant that many white male immigrants could vote almost from the moment they landed in America, while non-whites, whose ancestor had live in the country for centuries, could not. By 1856, it was clear that the Republican Party-a coalition of antislavery Democrats, northern Whigs, Free Soilers, and Know-Nothing opposed to the further expansion of slavery-would become the major alternative to the Democratic Party in the North. In Republican hands, the antithesis between “free society” and “slave society” coalesced into a comprehensive worldview that glorified the North as the home of progress, opportunity, and freedom. Slavery, Republican insisted, must be kept out of the territories so that free labor could flourish. To southern claims that slavery was the foundation of liberty, Republicans responded with the rallying cry “freedom national”-meaning not abolition, but ending the federal government’s support of slavery. Under the banner of free labor, northerners of diverse backgrounds and interests rallied in defense of the superiority of their own society. Republicans were not abolitionists-they focused on preventing the spread of slavery, not attacking it where it existed. Their free labor outlook, which resonated so effectively with deeply held northern values, helps to explain the Republicans’ rapid rise to prominence. The Democratic platform endorsed the principle of popular sovereignty as the only viable solution to the slavery controversy. One major party had been destroyed, another had been seriously weakened, and a new one had arisen, devoted entirely to the interests of the North. (Foner, 487-492)

4. What enabled Lincoln to emerge as president from the divisive party politics of the 1850s?

Few presidents have failed more disastrously in what they set out to accomplish. Even before his inauguration, Buchanan became aware of an impending Supreme Court decision that held out the hope of settling the slavery controversy once and for all. The Missouri Compromise, recently

reapealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, had been unconstitutional, and so was any measure interfering with southerners’ right to bring slaves into the western territories. The decision in effect declared unconstitutional the Republican platform of restricting slavery’s expansion. The depth of American’s divisions over slavery were brought into sharp focus in 1858 in one of the most storied election campaigns in the nation’s history. Lincoln reentered politics in 1854 as a result of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. He once said that he “hated slavery as much as any abolitionist.” Unlike abolitionists, Lincoln was willing to compromise with the South to preserve the Union. But on one question he was inflexible-stopping the expansion of slavery. Lincoln developed a critique of slavery and its expansion that gave voice to the central values of the emerging Republican Party and the millions of northerners whose loyalty it commanded. His speeches combined the moral fervor of the abolitionists with the respect for order and the Constitution of more conservative northerners. If slavery were allowed to expand, he warned, the “love of liberty” would be extinguished and with it America’s special mission to be a symbol of democracy the entire world. In a sense, his own life personified the free labor ideology and the opportunities northern society offered to laboring men. The Lincoln-Douglas debates, held in seven Illinois towns and attended by tens of thousands of listeners, remain classics of American political oratory. To Lincoln, freedom meant opposition to slavery. Douglas argued that the essence of freedom lay in local self-government and individual self-determination. A large and diverse nation could only survive by respecting the right of each locality to determine its own institutions. In a critique not only of the antislavery movement but of the entire reform impulse deriving from religious revivalism, Douglas insisted that politicians had no right to impose their own moral standards on society as whole. Lincoln shared many of the racial prejudices of his day. He opposed giving Illinois blacks the right to vote or serve on juries and spoke frequently of colonizing blacks overseas as the best solution to the problems of slavery and race. With the Republicans continuing to gain strength in the North, Democrats might have been expected to put a premium on party unity as the election of 1860 approached. Many white southerners felt that the opportunity was eroding for economic independence through ownership of land and slaves-liberty as they understood it. By the late 1850s, southern leaders were bending every effort to strengthen the bonds of slavery. The Democratic Party, the last great bond of national unity, had been shattered. Lincoln’s devotion to the Union appealed to moderate Republicans, and his emphasis on the moral dimension of the sectional controversy made him acceptable to Republicans from abolitionist backgrounds. In effect, two presidential campaigns took place in 1860. The most striking thing about the election returns was their sectional character. Without a single vote in ten southern states, Lincoln was elected the nation’s sixteenth president. (Foner, 493-

5. What were the final steps on the road to secession?

In the eyes of many white southerners, Lincoln’s victory placed their future at the mercy of a party avowedly hostile to their region’s values and interests. Those advocating secession did not believe Lincoln’s administration would take immediate steps against slavery in the states.

Secessionist equated their movement with the struggle for American independence. Other political leaders struggled to find a formula to resolve the crisis. Even after rejecting the Crittenden Compromise, Lincoln did not believe war inevitable. In his inaugural, Lincoln tried to be conciliatory. He rejected the right of secession but denied any intention of interfering with slavery in the states. In his first month of president, Lincoln walked a tightrope. In 1861, Longfellow’s warning came to pass. The Union created by the founders lay in ruins. The struggle to rebuild it would bring about a new birth of American freedom. (Foner, 503-507)

14. A New Birth of Freedom: The Civil War (1861-1865) - Focus Questions

1. Why is the Civil War considered the first modern war?

The American Civil War is often called the first modern war. In a war of this kind, the effectiveness of political leadership, the ability to mobilize economic resources, and a society’s willingness to keep up the fight despite setbacks are as crucial to the outcome as success or failure on individual battlefields. Neither the soldiers nor their officers were prepared for the way technology had transformed warfare. The Civil War was the first major conflict in which the railroad transported troops and supplies and the first to see railroad junctions such as Atlanta and Petersburg become major military objectives. The war saw the use of the telegraph for military communication, the introduction of observation balloons to view enemy lines, and even primitive hand grenades and submarines. This development changed the nature of combat, emphasizing the importance of heavy fortifications and elaborate trenches and giving those on the defensive-usually southern armies-a significant advantage over attacking forces. The War of rifle and trench produced the appalling casualty statistic of Civil War battles. Nor was either side ready for other aspects of modern warfare. The Civil War was the first war in which large numbers of Americans were captured by the enemy and held in dire conditions in military prisons. Everywhere in the world, war was becoming more destructive. The scale of Civil War bloodshed was unique in American history, but not in the nineteenth century world. Another modern feature of the Civil War was that both sides were assisted by a vast propaganda effort to mobilize public opinion. At the same time, the war’s brutal realities were brought home with unprecedented immediacy to the public at large. The outbreak of the war found both sides unprepared. Each side tried to find ways to maximize its advantages. While the Union accomplished little in the East in the first two years of the war, events in the West followed a different course. (Foner, 511-518)

2. How did a war to preserve the Union become a war to end slavery?

War, it has been said, is the midwife of revolution. And the Civil War produced far-reaching changes in American life. The most dramatic of these was the destruction of slavery, the central institution of southern society. At the outset of the war, Lincoln invoked time-honored northern values to mobilize public support. But while appealing to free labor values, Lincoln initially insisted that slavery was irrelevant to the conflict. Meanwhile, slaves themselves took actions that helped propel a reluctant white America down the road to emancipation. Well before Lincoln made emancipation a war aims, blacks, in the North and the South, were calling the conflict the “freedom war.” At first, blacks’ determination to seize the opportunity presented by the war proved a burden to the army and an embarrassment to the administration. Since slavery stood at the foundation of the southern economy, they insisted, emancipation was necessary to weaken the South’s ability to sustain the war. The most uncompromising opponents of slavery before the war, abolitionists and Radical Republicans, quickly concluded that the institution must become a target of the Union war effort. These appeals won increasing support in a Congress frustrated by lack of military success. Throughout these months, Lincoln struggled to retain control of the emancipation issues. During the summer of 1862, Lincoln concluded that emancipation had become a political and militari necessity. The initial northern reaction was not encouraging. On January 1, 1863, after greeting visitors at the annual White House New Year’s reception, Lincoln retired to his study to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. The document did not liberate all the slaves, on the day it was issued, it applied to very few. Because its legality derived from the president’s authority as military commander-in-chief to combat the South’s rebellion, the Proclamation exempted areas firmly under Union control. Not only did the

Emancipation Proclamation alter the nature of the Civil War and the course of American History, but it also represented a turning point in Lincoln’s own thinking. It contained no reference to compensation to slaveholders to colonization of the freed people. For the first time, it committed the government to enlisting black soldiers in the Union army. The Civil War, which was begun to preserve the prewar Union, now portended a far-reaching transformation in southern life and a redefinition of American freedom. Decoupling emancipation from colonization meant that the freed slaves would become part of American life. Of the Proclamation’s provisions, few were more radical in their implications than the enrollment of blacks into military service. At the outset, the Union army refused to accept northern black volunteers. The administration feared that whites would not be willing to fight alongside blacks, and that enlisting black soldiers would alienate the border slave states that remained in the Union. For black soldiers themselves, military service proved to be a liberating experience. The Union navy treated black sailors pretty much the same as white sailors. Conditions on ships made racial segregation impossible. Black and white sailors lived and dined together in the same quarters. They received equal pay and had the same promotion opportunities. Nonetheless, black soldiers played a crucial role not only in winning the Civil War but in defining the war’s consequences. (Foner, 519-527)

3. How did the Civil War transform the national economy and create a stronger nation-state?

Never was freedom’s contested nature more evident than during the Civil War. But it was Lincoln himself who linked the conflict with the deepest beliefs of northern society. It is sometimes said that the American Civil War was part of a broader nineteenth-century process of nation building. Throughout the world, powerful, centralized nation-states developed in old countries, and new nations emerged where none had previously existed. The Civil War took

place as modern states were consolidating their power and reducing local autonomy. The mobilization of the Union’s resources for modern war brought into being a new American nation-state with greatly expanded powers and responsibilities. The US remained a federal republic with sovereignty divided between the state and national governments. The upsurge of patriotism, and of national power, was reflected in many aspects of American life. Religious beliefs enabled Americans to cope with the unprecedented mass death the war involved. Coping with death also required unprecedented governmental action, from notifying next of kin to accounting for the dead and missing. This intense new nationalism made criticism of the war effort-or of the policies of the Lincoln administration-seem to Republicans equivalent to treason. Even as he invoked traditional values, Lincoln presided over far-reaching changes in northern life. The effort to mobilize the resources of the Union greatly enhanced the power not only of the federal government but also of a rising class of capitalist entrepreneurs. Nourished by wartime inflation and government contracts, the profits of industry boomed. Mechanization proceeded apace in many industries, and agriculture also flourished. Union army, yet its population, grain production, and farm income continued to grow. As in contemporary German and Japan, the new American nation-state that emerged during the Civil War was committed to rapid economic development. Congress adopted policies that promoted economic growth and permanently altered the nation’s financial system. The need to pay for the war produced dramatic changes in financial policy. To raise money, the government increased the tariff to unprecedented heights, imposed new taxes on the production and consumption of goods, and enacted the nation’s first income tax. A heavy tax drove money issued by state banks out of existence. Thus, the US, whose money supply before the war was a chaotic mixture of paper notes issued by state and local banks, now had essentially two kinds of national paper currency-greenbacks printed

directly by the federal government, and notes issued by the new national banks. Along with profitable contracts to supply goods for the military effort, wartime economic policies greatly benefited northern manufacturers, railroad men, and financies. Taken together, the Union’s economic policies vastly increased the power and size of the federal government. And while much of this expansion proved temporary, the government would never return to its weak and fragmented condition of the prewar period. For many northern women, the conflict opened new doors of opportunity. Many of these wartime gains were short-lived, but in white-collar government jobs, retail sales, and nursing, women found a permanent place in the workforce. Some northern women took a direct part in military campaigns. Hundreds of thousands of northern women took part in organizations that gathered money and medical supplies for soldiers and sent books, clothing. And food to freedmen. The suffrage movement suspended operations during the war to devote itself to the Union and emancipation. From the ranks of this wartime mobilization came many of the leaders of the postwar movement for women’s rights. As the war progressed, it heightened existing social tensions and created new ones. The growing power of the federal government challenged traditional notions of local autonomy. (Foner, 528- 539)

4. How did the war effort and leadership problems affect the society and economy of the Confederacy?

The man charged with the task of rallying public support for the Confederacy proved unequal to the task. Moreover, the Confederacy’s lack of a party system proved to be a political liability. “King Cotton diplomacy” turned out to be ineffective. But the Confederate policy had far-reaching global consequences. As the war progressed, social change and internal turmoil engulfed much of the Confederacy. Economic deprivation also sparked disaffection. The war left

countless farms, plantations, businesses, and railroads in ruins. But Confederate policies exaggerated its effects. Like the Union, the Confederacy borrowed heavily to finance the war. Continued loyalty to the Union was a dangerous stance in the Confederate South. Confederate military tribunals imprisoned hundreds of Unionists. But southerners loyal to the Union made a significant contribution to northern victory. Even more than in the North, the war placed unprecedented burdens on southern white women. All Confederate women struggled to cope as their loved ones were drawn off into the army. Southern women’s self-sacrificing devotion to the cause became legendary. The growing shortage of white manpower eventually led Confederate authorities to a decision no one could have forseen when the war began: they authorized the arming of slaves to fight for the South. Both the British and Americans had used slave soldiers in the War of Independence, but slavery survived, as it undoubtedly would have had the Confederacy managed to win the Civil War. (Foner, 539-543)

5. What were the military and political turning points of the war?

In April 1863, “Fighting Joe” Hooker, who had succeeded Ambrose E. Burnside as the Union commander in the East, brought the Army of the Potomac into central Virginia to confront Lee. Lee now gambled on another invasion of the North, although his strategic objective remains unclear. Lee found himself in the unusual position of confronting entrenched Union forces. After two days of failing to dislodge them, he decided to attack the center of the Union line. On the same day that Lee began retreat from Gettysburg, the Union achieved a significant victory in the West. Nearly two years, would pass before the war ended. Brought east to take command of Union forces, Grant in 1864 began a war of attrition against Lee’s army in Virginia. A month of the war’s bloodiest fighting followed. The sustained fighting in Virginia was a turning point in

modern warfare. Grant had become the only Union general to maintain the initiative against Lee, but victory still eluded him. As casualty rolls mounted in the spring and summer of 1864, northern morale sank to its lowest point of the war. Lincoln for a time believed he would be unable to win reelection. The result ensured that the war would continue until the Confederacy’s defeat. (Foner, 543-546)

6. What were the most important wartime “rehearsals for Reconstruction”?

As the war drew toward a close and more parts of the Confederacy came under Union control, federal authorities found themselves presiding over the transition for slavery to freedom. The most famous “rehearsal for Reconstruction” took place on the Sea Islands just off the coast of South Carolina. Each of these groups, in addition to the islands’ black population, had its own view of how the transition to freedom should be organized. Other northerners, believed that the transition from slave to free labor meant not giving blacks land but enabling them to work for wages in more humane conditions than under slavery. The experiment also bequeathed to postwar Reconstruction the contentious of whether landownership should accompany black freedom. A different rehearsal for Reconstruction, involving a larger area and population than the Sea Islands, took place in Louisiana and the Mississippi Valley. After the capture of Vicksburg, the Union army established regulations for plantation labor. Military authorities insisted that the emancipated slaves must sign labor contracts with plantation owners who took an oath of loyalty. Neither side was satisfied with the new labor system. Blacks resented having to resume working for whites and being forced to sign labor contracts. Planters complained that their workers were insubordinate. But only occasionally did army officers seek to implement a different vision of freedom. As the Civil War progressed, the future political status of African-

Americans emerged a s a key dividing line in public debates. Lincoln’s plan offered no role to blacks in shaping the post-slavery order. His leniency toward southern whites seems to have been based on the assumption that many former slaveholders would come forward to accept his terms, thus weakening the Confederacy, shortening the war, and gaining white support for the ending of slavery. As the war drew to a close, it was clear that while slavery was dead, no agreement existed as to what social and political system should take its place. After Lincoln’s reelection, the war hastened to its conclusion. On January 31, 1865, Congress approved the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery throughout the entire Union. April 1865 brought some of the most momentous events in American history. Lincoln did not live to savor victory. On April 11, in what proved to be his last speech, he called publicly for the first time for limited black suffrage. Lincoln died the next morning. The Civil War laid the foundation for modern America, guaranteeing the Union’s permanence, destroying slavery, and shifting power in the nation from the South to North. It dramatically increased the power of the federal government and accelerated the modernization of the northern economy. And it placed on the postwar agenda the challenge of defining and protecting African-American freedom. (Foner, 546-551)

15. “What is Freedom?”; Reconstruction (1865-1877) - Focus Questions

1. What visions of freedom did the former slaves and slaveholders pursue in the postwar South?

With the end of the Civil War, declared an Illinois congressman in 1865, the US, for the first time “wholly free”. The destruction of slavery, made the definition of freedom the central question on the nation’s agenda. During Reconstruction, freedom became a terrain of conflict, its substance opens to different, often contradictory interpretations. Out of the conflict over the meaning of freedom arose new kinds of relations between black and white southerners, and a new definition of the rights of all Americans. African-Americans’ understanding of freedom was shaped by their experiences as slaves and their observation of the free society around them. Freedom, meant escaping the numerous injustice of slavery-punishment by the lash, the separation of families, denial of access to education, the sexual exploitation of black women by their owners-and sharing in the rights and opportunities of American citizens. Black relished the opportunity to demonstrate their liberation from the regulations, significant and trivial, associated with slavery. With slavery dead, institutions that had existed before the war, like the black family, free blacks’ churches and schools, and the secret slave church, were strengthened, expanded, and freed from white supervision. The family was central to the post emancipation black community. Former slaves made remarkable efforts to locate loved ones from whom they had been separated under slavery. But while Reconstruction witnessed the stabilization of family life, freedom subtly altered relationships within the family. Emancipation increased the power of black men and brought to many black families the nineteenth century notion that men and women should inhabit separate “spheres.” At the same time, blacks abandoned white-controlled religious institutions to create churches of their own. As the major institution independent of white control, the church played a central role in the black community. Another striking example of the freedpeople’s quest for individual and community improvement was their desire for education. In a society that had made political participation a core element of freedom, the right to vote inevitably became central to the former slaves’ desire for empowerment and equality. Former slaves’ ideas of freedom, like those of rural people throughout the world, were directly related to landownership. Many former slaves insisted that through their unpaid labor, they had acquired a right to the land. In its individual elements and much of its language, former slaves’ definition of freedom resembled that of white Americans-self-ownership, family stability, religious liberty, political participation, and economic autonomy. But these elements combined to form a vision very much on their own. For whites, freedom, no matter how defined, was given, a birthright to be defended. For African-Americans, it was an open-ended process, a transformation of every aspect of their lives and of the society and culture that had sustained slavery in the first place. Most white southerners reacted to military defeat and emancipation with dismay, not only because of the widespread devastation but also because they must now submit to northern demands. Planters families faced profound changes in the war’s aftermath. Southern planters sought to implement an understanding of freedom quite different from that of the former slaves. As they struggled to accept the reality of emancipation, most planters defined black freedom in the narrowest manner. Freedom still meant hierarchy and mastery; it was a

privilege not a right, a carefully defined legal status rather than an open-ended entitlement. Certainly, it implied neither economic autonomy nor civil and political equality. Along with the former slaves and former masters, the victorious Republican North tried to implement its own vision of freedom. At the same time, northern capital and migrants would energize the economy. The Bureau agents were supposed to establish schools, provide aid to the poor aged, settle disputes between whites and blacks and among the freedpeople, and secure for former slaves and white Unionists equal treatment before the courts. While the Bureau did not establish school itself, it coordinated and helped to finance the activities of northern societies committed to black education. They also assumed control of hospitals established by the army during the war, and expanded the system into new communities. The idea of free labor, was “the noblest principle on earth.” All that was required to harmonize race relations in the South was fair wages, good working conditions, and the opportunity to improve the laborer’s situation in life. Because no land distribution took place, the vast majority of rural freedpeople remained poor and without property during Reconstruction. By the turn of the century, a significant number of southern African-Americans had managed to acquire small parcels of land. Out of the conflict on the plantations, new systems of labor emerged in the different regions of the South. Sharecropping initially arose as a compromise between blacks’ desire for land and planters’ demand for labor discipline. But as the years went on, sharecropping became more oppressive. Sharecroppers’ economic opportunities were severely limited by a world market in which the price of farm products suffered a prolonged decline. Both black and white farmers found themselves caught in the sharecropping and crop-lien systems. Even as the rural South stagnated economically, southern cities experienced remarkable growth after the Civil War. Thus, Reconstruction brought about profound changes in the lives of southerners, black and white, rich and poor. Each of these groups turned to Reconstruction politics in an attempt to shape to its own advantage the aftermath of emancipation. The US was not the only society to confront the problem of the transition from slavery to freedom. But if struggles over land and labor united its postemancipation experience with that of other societies, in one respect the US was unique. The struggle resulted in profound changes in the nature of citizenship, the structure of constitutional authority, and the meaning of American freedom. (Foner, 556-568)

2. What were the sources, goals, and competing visions for Reconstruction?

Congress now proceeded to adopt its own plan of Reconstruction. In June, it approved and sent to the states for ratification the Fourteenth Amendment, which placed in the Constitution the principle of citizenship for all persons born in the US, and which empowered the federal government to protect the rights of all Americans. The amendment prohibited the states from abridging the “privileges and immunities” of citizens or denying them the “equal protection of the law.” In a compromise between the radical and moderate positions on black suffrage, the amendment did not grant blacks the right to vote. But it did provide that if a state denied the vote to any group of men, that state’s representation in Congress would be reduced. The Fourteenth Amendment offered the leaders of the white South a choice-allow black men to vote and keep

their state’s full representation in the House of Representatives, or limit the vote to whites and sacrifice part of their political power. The Fourteenth Amendment produced an intense division between the parties. Nonetheless, by writing into the Constitution the principle that equality before the law regardless of race is a fundamental right of all American citizens, the amendment made the most important change in that document since the adoption of the Bill of Rights. The Fourteenth Amendment became the central issue of the political campaign of 1866. Although, the Fifteenth Amendment opened the door to suffrage restrictions not explicitly based on race-literacy tests, property qualifications, and poll taxes-and did not extend the right to vote to women, it marked the culmination of four decades of abolitionists agitation. The laws and amendments of Reconstruction reflected the intersection of two products of the Civil War era-a newly empowered national state and the idea of a national citizenry enjoying equality before the law. The Reconstruction amendments voided many northern laws discriminating the basis of race. The new amendments also transformed the relationship between the federal government and the states. The authors of the Reconstruction amendments assumed that rights required national power to enforce them. The Reconstruction amendments transformed the Constitution from a document primarily concerned with federal-state relations and the rights of property into a vehicle through which members of vulnerable minorities could stake a claim to freedom and seek protection against misconduct by all levels of governments. Reconstruction redrew the boundaries of American freedom. Lines of exclusion that limited the privileges of citizenship to white men had long been central to the practice of American democracy. Reconstruction Republicans’ belief in universal rights also had its limits. Advocates of women’s rights encountered the limits of the Reconstruction commitment to equality. Women activists saw Reconstruction as the moment to claim their own emancipation. The destruction of slavery led feminists to search for ways to make the promise of free labor real for women. Even as it rejected the racial definition of freedom that had emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century, Reconstruction left the gender boundary largely intact. Despite their limitations, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the Reconstruction Act of 1867 marked a radical departure in American and world history. The Reconstruction Act of 1867 inaugurated America’s first real experiment in interracial democracy. (Foner, 572-579)

3. What were the social and political effects of Radical Reconstruction in the South?

Among the former slaves, the passage of the Reconstruction Act inspired an outburst of political organization. At mass political meetings-community gatherings attended by men, women, and children-African-American staked their claim to equal citizenship. The constitutions greatly expanded public responsibilities. Throughout Reconstruction, black voters provided the bulk of the Republican Party’s support. But African-Americans did not control Reconstruction politics. As their opponents frequently charged. African-Americans were represented at every level of government. The presence of black officeholders and their white allies made a real difference in southern life, ensuring that blacks accused of crimes would be tried before juries of their peers and enforcing fairness in such aspects of local government as road repair, tax assessment, and

poor relief. The new southern governments also brought to power new groups of whites. Many Reconstruction officials were northerners who for one reason or another had made their homes in the South after the war. Others hoped Reconstruction governments would help them recover from wartime economic losses by suspending the collection of debts to creditors. In view of the daunting challenges they faced, the remarkable thing is not that Reconstruction governments in many respect failed, but how much they did accomplish. The new governments also pioneered civil rights legislation. Enforcement varied considerably from locality to locality, but Reconstruction established for the first time at the state level a standard of equal citizenship and recognition of blacks’ right to a share of public services. Rather than land distribution, the Reconstruction governments pinned their hopes for southern economic growth and opportunity for African-Americans and poor whites alike on regional economic development. To their supporters, the governments of Radical Reconstruction presented a complex pattern of disappointment and accomplishment. Public facilities were rebuilt and expanded, school systems established, and legal codes purged of racism. It is a measure of how far change had progressed that the reaction against Reconstruction proved so extreme. (Foner, 579-583)

4. What were the main factors, in the both North and South, for the abandonment of Reconstruction?

The South’s traditional leaders-planters, merchants, and Democratic politicians-bitterly opposed the new governments. Corruption did exist during Reconstruction, but it was confined to no race, region, or party. Many poor whites who had initially supported the Republican Party against it when it became clear that their economic situation was not improving. The most basic reason for opposition to Reconstruction was that most white southerners could not accept the idea of former slaves voting, holding office, and enjoying equality before the law. In order to restore white supremacy in southern public life and to ensure planters a disciplined, reliable labor force, they believed, Reconstruction must be overthrown. Opponents launched a campaign of violence in an effort to end Republican rule. The Civil War ended in 1865, but violence remained widespread in large parts of the postwar South. In the early years of Reconstruction, violence was mostly local and unorganized. On occasion, violence escalated from assaults on individuals to mass terrorism and even local insurrections. The federal government had freed the slaves, made them citizens, and given them the right to vote. The Liberals’ alienation from the Grant administration initially had little to do with Reconstruction. Democratic criticisms of Reconstruction found a receptive audience among the Liberals. Other factors also weakened northern support for Reconstruction. The Supreme Court whittled away at the guarantees of black rights Congress had adopted. The justices rejected their claim, ruling that the amendment had not altered traditional federalism. Most of the rights of citizens, it declared, remained under state control. By the mid-1870s, Reconstruction was clearly on the defensive. As a historical process-the nation’s adjustment to the destruction of slavery-Reconstruction continued well after 1877. Blacks continued to vote and, in some states, hold office into the 1890s. But as a distinct era of national history-when Republicans controlled much of the South, blacks exercised significant political power, and the

federal government accepted the responsibility for protecting the fundamental rights of all American citizens-Reconstruction had come to an end. Despite its limitations, Reconstruction was a remarkable chapter in the story of American freedom. However, Reconstruction revealed some of the tensions inherent in nineteenth-century discussions of freedom. Reconstruction placed on the national agenda a problem that would dominate political discussion for the next half-century-how, in a modern society, to define the economic essence of freedom. (Foner, 583-590)