Office Hours: Mon., Wed., 10:00-10:45 & by appointment.
Never, never call me or my teaching assistants at home.
Telephone: 257-3037
Office: 1729 Patterson Office Tower
e-mail address: msumm2@pop.uky.edu
Who I am: Mark Wahlgren Summers
My trusty confederates: James Crinean
Carrie Russ
Michael Schwarz
Suzy Wampler
Roger Ward
What this Course is About
History 108 covers the first half of American history, from the
arrival of Leif the Lucky on the strands of Markland to the end of the
Civil War and the affirmation of the Union.
This course FILLS ONE HALF OF THE CROSS-DISCIPLINARY PAIRING
REQUIREMENTS THAT UNIVERSITY STUDIES EXPECTS OF YOU. Please see your UK
Bulletin for more details on what it pairs with.
It will consider the landing of the European settlers, the transformation
and destruction of Indian cultures, the exploitation and transformation
of African captives and their descendants -- a dozen wars and two or three
revolutions, only one of them violent -- the faltering progress of democracy
and the frustrated promise of free government -- the settling of the West,
the unsettling of the staid East, and of course the Great Rebellion (1861-65).
A series of general questions run through the first half of American
history and relate to the kind of essay topics I ask on exams:
a) WHAT IS AN AMERICAN, THIS NEW PERSON? (is it new?)
HOW DO AMERICANS COME TO DEFINE THEMSELVES AS A UNIQUE, A SEPARATE, A NATIONAL
CULTURE?
How does nature form and affect them? What effect have
they on nature?
What is the role of Providence -- and of the individual -- in
defining his or her own existence in america?
In what ways are Americans shaped by their higher vision -- call
it perfectionism, millennialism -- the search for Heaven in the wild?
And how does this clash with their desire for gain?
What is the America Dream? And how does it fit reality?
How did the westward movement shape our identity and character?
b) WHAT HOLDS US TOGETHER AS A PEOPLE? WHAT DRIVES US APART?
What institutions and traditions have shaped our identity as
a nation?
Out of many, one: how did we become a culture of many cultures,
a harmony of discords?
How does our art, our literature, our music, show the stresses
and undercurrents of society?
How does the tension between liberty and order, civilization
and wildness, tradition and change, tell something about us?
What to Expect from Me
Lectures, which you are EXPECTED TO SHOW UP FOR. Because history
comes alive only when seen and felt, I may use slides or music. It will
be noisy; with any luck, you won't go to sleep. And you will
learn material, shaped in ways that the textbook does not shape it.
Requirements of the Course
FINAL EXAMINATION (30% of your grade; it takes place Tuesday,
Dec. 17th at 8 a. m.)
TWO MIDTERMS (20% each)
DISCUSSION SECTION, with all the work it entails: 30%
This 30% should include three out-of-class writing assignments,
one of which you will be allowed to rewrite, before a grade is assigned.
They are NOT long ones.
It will also include, I suspect, three or more quizzes.
This should total 100%. You will do all the reading assigned
for the course by dawn of the day assigned on this syllabus; and be held
responsible for it and anything in lectures or discussion section.
That discussion section meets once a week. You MUST attend it.
And you'd be a chump not to, since the t.a. handles 100% of your grading
-- under my supervision, of course.
About writing. Before the course is done, you will become
better writers than you were; exams are generally 30% identifications,
20% short essay, 50% long essay. Help in learning how to write proficiently,
in an organized way is something that discussion sections will help with;
but we strongly recommend two things:
for everyone: the Bedford Guide, which -- as you may find in
English 100-level courses -- is the sacred text of writing competently.
for those with a little less confidence: the Writing Center,
on campus, which helps make people's writing better.
ACHTUNG! WARNING!! Monstrous, Evil, Lethal Criminal Acts
If you're sick of this institution, one of the best ways OUT
of it is to cheat or plagiarize in my class. Please see STUDENT RIGHTS
AND RESPONSIBILITIES for definitions of cheating. My definition may be
broader still. Any work you claim as your own that comes from another
person or lacks what I consider adequate acknowledgment of their contribution
is cheating. Copying another person's paper -- copying off their
test -- is cheating, too. Taking anything from a website or from
Cliff Notes or their equivalent (under whatever name) and using words as
if they were your own – even three or four words in a row – is cheating.
Crib sheets are cheating, when used during an examination.
Anyone caught will RUE THE DAY. He or she will get a zero on
the work, an F in the course, and I will do all I can to have them expelled
or suspended from this university.
I've done it before. I'll do it again. Those in any doubt
about what can happen if you cross the line should have a chat with some
of the many people in last year’s History 108 – or at any rate, those still
going to this University.
Readings
Textbook: Davidson, Lytle, Gienapp, Heyrman, Stoff, Nation of
Nations, volume I (1, mind you). Assigned reading is cited in the calendar
below as NN, and then the chapter number.
Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom
Celia: A Slave
Redemption Option
If things go amiss on the midterm, take heart. You get a chance
to take it again on the Thursday of the week before final exams (Dec. 12th)
at around 3:30 p.m. Whatever grade you get the second time around
-- for better or worse -- replaces the original grade. Usually folks do
better, because they study harder. The exam is no harder, no easier. It
is the equivalent of the first one you took, covering the same material.
Incompletes
Don't ask for one. You'll need a very good excuse to get one:
say, your own death, a nomination for Vice President, or nuclear war, each
of which needs documentary proof. I do NOT give them on account of
dead grandmothers, even if you have six die at the same time.
Calendar of Coming Events (More or Less)
Aug. 28th -- INTRODUCTION: Europe, Least Likely to Succeed?
Sept. 4th -- O Brave New World: Nature's Nation Discovered Anew, 1492-1610
(NN, 1)
Sept. 9th -- Utopias Limited: Errands into the Wilderness (NN, 2)(start
Morgan)
Sept. 11h -- Savages and Americans: Unmaking the Indians
Sept. 16th -- Unwilling Newcomers: Slavery's Genesis (NN, 4)
Sept. 18th -- A Turbulent & Fanatick People (Sept. 23rd --
The Best Poor Man's Country?
Sept. 25th -- The Empire Strikes Back, 1754-1775 (NN, 5) (finish Morgan)
Sept. 30th -- Rage Militaire: Never a Dull Minuteman, 1775-83 (NN,
6)
Oct. 2nd-- Who Should Rule At Home? 1775-1790 (NN, 17)
October 7th -- EXAM #1
Oct. 9th -- A Fundamental Law for All Seasons?
Oct. 14th -- Launching the Republic: We Are All Federalists, We
Are All Republicans, 1789-1805 (NN, 8)
Oct. 16th -- The Lost Garden of Jefferson, the Lost Peace of Madison,
1801-1812 (NN, 9)
Oct. 21st -- A Silly Little War, 1812-15
Oct. 23rd -- Letting Loose Creative Energies, 1800-30 (NN, 10)
October 28th-- Expansionism Treads the Trail of Tears
October 30th -- The West is East, New-Made
Nov. 4th -- The Age of Andrew Jackson (NN, 11)
Nov. 6th -- Firebells in the Night: the Union in Danger, 1815-1833
Armistice Day -- EXAM #2
Nov. 13th -- The Benevolent Empire Rules and Saves (NN, 12)
Nov. 18th -- Reformers and Other Lunatics
Nov. 20th -- That Troublesome Property: Slavery (NN, 13) (Celia)
Nov. 25th -- Lords of the Loom and Lords of the Lash
Nov. 27th -- From the Halls of Montezuma to the Wilmot Proviso (NN,
14)
Dec. 2nd -- And the War Came, 1850-61 (NN, 15)
Dec. 4th -- General Stupidity Commands the Troops, 1861-65 (NN, 16)
Dec. 9th -- Slavery's Fall
Dec. 11th -- A More Perfect Union: 1865
FINAL EXAMINATION: Tuesday, December 17th, 2002, 8:00 a.m. (barbarous!)
Study Guide for the First Examination
Below are a series of essay questions. On the exam, one will
appear. It's worth 50% of the exam grade, and takes 30 minutes. Lectures,
readings, discussion, all should help in answering them.
1. "Freedom -- so precious there just wasn't enough for everybody."
The year is 1783. This is suggested as a national motto, fitting
our history till now.
Does it work? How well or badly?
2. "The real revolution -- socially, economically, politically -- took place before Lexington and Concord. We were not Britons any longer -- indeed, in some sense, the New World made it impossible that we COULD be." How might colonial history, up to 1783, fit or fail to fit this claim?
3. "America -- democratic in spite of itself." Write an essay about the colonial period, showing how democracy (equal rights -- government by the consent of the governed) came about, and how far it was intended by the founders of the colonies.
4. "America was the greatest let-down in history, the great Failure," a cynic, looking at the colonial period snarls. "Misery, cruelty, blood and ruin -- that's the story of the settlement and development of the Thirteen Colonies." Oh yeah? How true, partly true, or false is this statement?
5. How did wars make the American people up to 1783? (I DON'T want histories of those wars; I want effects or results from wars; and I don't just mean the Revolution. How did all wars make a very different America with different Americans than it would have been otherwise?)
6. "A toast to FREEDOM: the one, the only, force that shaped a successful,
practical, prosperous America."
How well or badly does this explain our development, 1607-1775?
7. Was America really a new England? Why not, and how did this affect the way it would develop?
8. "The Revolution was, in its basic form, just plain conservatism. We had a good thing -- economically and in terms of freedom -- and all we were doing was trying to keep it. Because the simple truth is, Americans HATED to change, and had always hated to change." A professor (not me) tries to explain the events of the colonial period and the Revolutionary period that way. Is this an adequate understanding of American society from, say, 1700 to around the mid 1780s? Was it essentially conservative, static, frozen in time?
9. "Colonies. You seen one, you seen 'em all, culturally speaking.
Thirteen colonies, and not a farthing's worth of important difference between
'em, by the time of the Revolution."
Is that so? How far or how little? How did the differences
tell us about the conflicting strains that might go into the new United
States?
Short Essays
These are ten-minute ones (20% of midterm grade each). Naturally
they aren't the only ones I might propose, but they are the KIND that you
can expect one of on the exam.
1. Discovering America was a series of mistakes. Discuss.
2. How did Virginia's experiments turn sour, and why?
3. Who were the Puritans and why do they matter, if at all?
4. How did slavery develop?
5. What effect did European settlement have on the Indians?
6. WAS this the "best poor man's country" and what made it so?
7. How did the notion of religious toleration develop?
8. Why did the colonies prosper in the 1700s?
9. Was the French and Indian War a turning point? How?
10. New England, Pennsylvania, the South -- how did religion affect
the society that evolved there?
11. What did it take to succeed in 18th century America?
12. What were the causes of the American Revolution?
Identifications
An identification usually takes no more than one sentence or two.
Probably nine or ten will appear on the exam, and you will do SIX of
them. Please, do NOT do MORE than six. (Yes, some people do; maybe
it’s caused by panic; but they oughtn’t.) The only ones counted will
be the first six, counting down from the top of the page.
Jamestown
Baron von Steuben
Anne Hutchinson
James Oglethorpe
Captain John Smith
Bunker Hill
Bacon’s Rebellion
Boston Massacre
Powhatan
Boston tea-party
Intolerable Acts
John Rolfe
Natchez Revolt
Leisler’s Rebellion
headrights
Townshend Acts
quitrents
Stamp Act
Sir Walter Raleigh
Sons of Liberty
Roanoke
Committees of Correspondence
Virginia Company
Navigation Acts
Spain’s “Black Legend”
mercantilism
Paxton Boys
Green Mountain Boys
Salutary Neglect
George III
Lord Cornbury
Great Awakening
mourning war
George Whitefield
Arawaks and Caribs
Inner Light
Puritans
New Lights, Old Lights
congregationalism
jeremiad
Virtual representation
Declaratory Act
privateers
Peace of Paris
letters of marque
Braddock’s retreat
Monmouth
Columbus
Cowpens
Suffolk Resolves
Yorktown
Verrazzano
Saratoga
Sir Humfry Gilbert
“rage militaire”
Northwest Passage
Articles of Confederation
Amerigo Vespucci
St. Brendan
Prince Henry the Navigator
terms of indenture
Stono Rebellion
John Eliot
Lord Dunmore’s War
Benjamin Franklin
"mechanical courage"
Middle Passage
triangular trade
INTRODUCTORY: EUROPE --LEAST LIKELY TO
SUCCEED?
I. PREVIEWS & SHORT SUBJECTS
WHO I AM -- AND MY ALLIES
WHAT YOU WILL DO
When, how, possibly why
MONSTROUS ACTS OF VILLAINY
REDEMPTION
QUESTIONS?
II. EUROPE AT THE END OF HISTORY
THE MYSTERIOUS OCEAN
HY-BRASIL? ANTILLIA?
CHRISTENDOM ON THE SKIDS, 1400S
RENAISSANCE, YES, BUT ....
BLACK DEATH
A CHURCH IN DECAY
THE TURK IN CONSTANTINOPLE
WHY DIDN'T SOMEBODY ELSE DISCOVER AMERICA?
ISLAM?
CHINA?
III. PASSAGE TO INDIA, O SOUL!
NEW WAYS OF SAILING
ASTROLABES
COMPASSES
LATEEN SAILS
PRINCE HENRY THE NAVIGATOR
VASCO DA GAMA AT THE GATES OF CATHAY
CODA: FROM THE END OF THE WORLD TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH,
1492-93
Questions to consider:
1. Why was it Europeans,
who "discovered" America? Why not other civilizations?
2. How did technology explain
it?
3. How could folks be gloomy,
in the great Renaissance? What on earth did they have to feel gloomy
about?
O BRAVE NEW WORLD! NATURE'S NATION
DISCOVERED ANEW
PRELUDE: WHO REALLY DISCOVERED AMERICA?
(Wahlgrenote: it ain't Vendell Villkie, as the gremlin says in "Falling
Hare")
I. A NEW WORLD IN THE WAY
COLUMBUS GOES WRONG, AND
STAYS SO
THE CABOTS' "NEW-FOUND LAND"
AMERIGO VESPUCCI DISCOVERS
-- AMERIGO VESPUCCI, DISCOVERER
UNKNOWN SEAS, IMAGINARY
LANDS
BALBOA DOESN'T FIND CHINA AFTER ALL, 1513
VERRAZANO'S PENINSULA
FROBISHER'S GOLD
NORTHWEST PASSAGES UP THE HUDSON
SIR HUMFRY GILBERT'S DISCOVERY
II. UNIMAGINED PROSPECTS
NORUMBEGA AND THE SEVEN
CITIES OF GOLD
FOREST PRIMEVAL
"THOSE DEVIL'S BRATS" &
OTHER WILDLIFE
ABUNDANCE IN EDEN
III. INNOCENTS IN EDEN?
ARAWAKS AND CARIBS
THE INDIANS' AMERICA
MANY CULTURES
UNTUTORED MINDS?
DID THEY HAVE NATIONS?
A PEOPLE WITHOUT PROPERTY?
A HUNTING PEOPLE?
IODINE -- DIGITALIS -- QUININE
SCALPING, MOURNING WAR
CODA: THOSE WHO ATE WOOD AND DRANK BLOOD
Questions to ponder:
1. How was the discovery of America a series of
mistakes?
2. What was so new about the New World?
3. What was the most costly mistake of all?
UTOPIAS LIMITED: ERRANDS INTO THE
WILDERNESS
a Wahlgrennote: Some parts of this lecture,
I ran out of time. Don't panic. I have filled in the pertinent
information by typing down pretty much what my lecture would have said.
And several others too, of course!
Gather them up, the bright and drowning stars,
And with them gather, too,
The clay, the iron, and the knotted rope,
The disinherited, the dispossessed,
The hinds of the midland, eaten by the squire's
sheep,
The outcast yeoman, driven to tramp the roads,
The sturdy beggars, roving from town to town,
Workless, hopeless, harried by law and state,
The men who lived on nettles in Merry England,
The men of the blackened years
When dog's meat was a dainty in Lincolnshire,
(Have you heard the news from Virginia?)
The poor, the restless, the striving, the broken
knights,
The cast-off soldiers, bitter as their own scars,
The younger sons without office or hope of land,
Glover and cooper, mercer and cordwainer,
.....
Gather the waifs of the London parishes,
The half-starved boys, the sparrows of London streets,
The ones we caught before they could cut a purse,
And bind them out and send them across the sea.
-- Steven Vincent Benet, WESTERN STAR
I. "THE GOOD NEWS FROM VIRGINIA"
PROMISED LAND -- THE BLACK
LEGEND OF SPAIN
SIR FRANCIS DRAKE SINGES THE KING OF SPAIN'S BEARD
VIRGINIA COMPANY, PLANING ANEW
PIPE DREAMS IN JAMESTOWN,
1607-15
WHAT THE PLANNERS DID NOT EXPECT
"BLOUDY FLUX," AND THE STARVING TIME
CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH SAVES ... CIVILIZATION????
PLANS FAIL -- FROM SILK TO SMOKE
JOHN ROLFE'S DISCOVERY
And we look back, and see how the thing was done,
And looking back, think, 'So, of course, it must
be.'
And are wrong by a million miles, and never see
The daily living and dying under the sun.
For they did not know what would happen. No one
knew.
No one knew, though the men in England planned,
Planned with cunning of brain and strength of hand,
And their plans were deer-tracks, fading out in
the dew.
They planned for gold and iron, for silk and wood,
For towns and settled farming and steady things,
And an Indian pipe puffed out its blue smoke-rings,
And where they had made their plans, the tobacco
stood.
And those who came were resolved to be Englishmen,
Gone to the world's end, but English every one,
And they ate the white corn kernels, parched in
the sun,
And they knew it not, but they'd not be English
again.
They would try, they would swear they were, they
would drink the toast,
They would loyally petition and humbly pray,
And over them was another sort of day,
And in their veins was another, a different ghost.
For the country is where the life is, not elsewhere.
The country is where the heart and the blood are
given.
They could swear to be English by every oath under
Heaven.
It did not alter the country by a hair.
--- Steven Vincent Benet
II. PILGRIMS AND PURITANS
A COVENANT WITH THE LORD
THE CHURCH GOES ALL TO PIECES, 1517-1648
CALVINISM: THE PURITAN IMPULSE
WHAT PURITANISM WAS NOT
THE IMPORTANCE OF DUTY
COTTON MATHER
Grim Cotton Mather
Was always seeing witches,
Daylight, moonlight,
They buzzed around his head,
Pinching him and plaguing him
With aches and pains and
stitches,
Witches in his pulpit,
Witches by his bed.
Nowadays, nowadays,
We'd say he was crazy,
But everyone believed him
In old Salem town;
And nineteen people
Were hanged for Salem witches
Because of Cotton Mather
And his long black gown.
Old Cotton Mather
Didn't die happy;
He could preach and thunder,
He could fast and pray;
But men began to wonder
If there had been witches
--
When he walked in the streets
Men looked the other way.
-- Steven Vincent Benet
A Wahlgrenote: Don't you believe it.
1. He didn't die happy, but not because of the witches
2. Everybody still believed in witches.
3. Nobody blamed HIM for the hangings.
4. It wasn't his doing.
5. If they looked the other way, it was because he believed that people
could be saved from smallpox by science -- by
inoculation.
6. And Mather was absolutely right.
7. If he didn't die happy, it was because he knew what any good Puritan
knew --
that he maybe, just maybe, didn't stand with the Lord's elect;
that for all his striving, he had not lived up to God's demands
No matter how good you've tried to be, it may not be enough.
For the best of us is saved only by the grace of a merciful God.
And of those with great talents -- like Mather's own talents -- much is
expected.
8. To die absolutely certain that God's grace has fallen on you is to die
damned indeed --
to die swollen with the pride that YOU, by what you are and what you have
done, can
hold the Lord hostage, forced, whether He will or no, to open to you the
doors of Heaven.
8. That's all you need to know, to really know Cotton Mather -- or to feel
the intensity of the demands of Puritanism.
A COVENANT WITH THE LORD
FROM SCROOBY TO PLYMOUTH'S SHORE
Pilgrims began in the English village of Scrooby. They didn't leave
eagerly -- didn't leave willingly. But the simple fact was that they
couldn't find any other way of worshipping their way. The ministers,
as was the custom, were not of their choosing in the established church;
the bishops chose them -- and there it took political pull, as much as
anything. They had no say in doctrine, and, as far as they were concerned,
doctrine was very, very wrong indeed. Communion, even for those without
the saving faith -- church membership without any tests to see whether
a person was fit -- not to mention all the paraphernalia and all the panoply
that the Bible didn't specifically allow in church: statues, stained-glass
windows, paintings, church organs and choirs. Lovely stuff, all that
-- but that's not what the ancient religion was all about. Wasn't
it supposed to be the sermon? Wasn't that the big deal?
Appeal, if you would to
the King. James I may have arranged for casting the Bible in modern-day
English -- the King James Bible -- but he was not one for changing a church
system where the King rules the church, chooses the archbishop and the
bishops &c. "I'll harry ye from the land," he told the Puritans,
and that was what he did with fines and jail terms and ear-croppings.
So the Pilgrms quit England for Holland, where a
more Puritanical state and more tolerance for other religions lingered.
But the Dutch were too easy going. So the Pilgrims looked to the
New World, and set sail for places so bare, so forbidding that NOBODY would
want them, for growing tobacco or for getting rich.
They found it -- on Cape Cod.
Incidentally, do you know who tried to come with
them? Captain John Smith. The Pilgrims refused to let him on
board; he wasn't godly enough. But they used his maps of the coastline.
JOHN WINTHROP PLANTS "A CITY ON A HILL" AT BOSTON
SEPARATISM
CONGREGATIONALISM
"...that men shall say of succeeding plantacions: the Lord make it like
that of New England: for wee
must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of
all people are uppon us: soe that if wee shall
deale falsely with our god in this worke we have undertaken and soe
cause Him to withdraw his present help
from us, wee shall be made a story and a by-word through the world,
wee shall open the mouthes of enemies to
speak evill of the wayes of God and all professours for Gods sake;
we shall shame the faces of many of God's
worthy servants, and cause theire prayers to be turned into Cursses
upon us till wee be consumed out of the
good land whither we are going."
-- John Winthrop, "A Model of Christian Charity"
A Walhgrenote:
Read that. Read it carefully. How well does that square with the
vision of Puritans as a
smug people, who know that the Lord is on their side?
III. HOLY EXPERIMENTS ON THE DELAWARE
Massachusetts wasn't the
only Holy Experiment -- the Plantation Religious. A very different
kind was formed in the Middle Colonies, half a century later. To
understand that, you have to understand the Quakers.
By the 1640s, both the royal
Church and the royal State were in trouble. England had a revolution
and a civil war. Puritans and enemies of a King determined to rule
alone, without the help of Parliament took command and cut off Charles
I's head -- not to mention the Archbishop's. The Kings would be back.
But for twenty years, the whole lid came off religion in England,
and sects without end developed, each reading the Protestant Bible their
own way: Ranters and Fifth Monarchy Men and Baptists and goodness knows
what. It was a very exciting, noisy time. And out of that time
came the Society of Friends -- the Quakers, as they were called, because
they boasted that they quaked in the sight of the Lord.
They were more like Puritans than the jolly face
you see on the Quaker Oats box.
WILLIAM PENN AND QUAKERS
IN THE SIGHT OF THE LORD
But they were not at all
Puritans in another sense. Puritans would tell you that the word
of the Lord is in one place, and one only -- not in the decrees of bishops
and archbishops and Kings -- not in the decrees of Popes and the Vatican
-- but in the Scriptures; and to understand the way of God and the will
of the universe, it is there you look.
Quakers insisted that the
will of the Lord was in all of us. It was what they called an ....
INNER LIGHT
You could therefore learn the will of the Lord by personal revelation.
Now there are some very radical concepts that flow
from the idea that every person has the voice of the Lord within them.
You don't have to be like one early Quaker leader who took the next step
-- that since every person had a little of Christ within him that he himself
was Christ (which resulted in him riding into Bristol on a donkey on Palm
Sunday, with followers strewing rushes before him, and with a jail sentence
and having a hole bored through his tongue) -- to see that if everyone
has an Inner Light, then everyone can potentially be saved.
What happens, then, to the idea of the Puritans
that some are saved and some are damned, and that there is nothing -- just
plain nothing that any person on this earth can do about it -- that it
has been predestined since the start of all time? People can listen
to that light, and can accept that grace from God.
But if everyone has the Inner Light, then everyone
is equal. Not just the saved. Everyone. Women as well as men.
Blacks as well as whites. Indians as well as English people. You
are the equal of magistrates and Kings. And you do not take your
hat off to them -- you take your hat off only before God; you refer
to them as "thee" rather than "you," because in the 17th century, you use
"thee" for talking to your equals, and "you" in talking to a person to
whom greater respect is due -- your betters.
What cause, then, for you to dress up fine and show
off your luxuries? This is the sin of pride. So Quakers were
the people of simplicity. They didn't have fancy mansions. They didn't
get their portraits painted -- at most, a sillouette. And their houses
have no mirrors. That's a sign of worldly vanity..
Their churches tell it all. They aren't churches
at all. They are meeting-houses. There's no sermon, that centerpiece to
Puritan religion. Who shall say that a minister has more Inner Light
than the congregation? So there is no minister in Quakerism, and
members -- women, too -- speak out in meeting as the will of God moves
them. They conduct their own services.
Simplicity also means that you are ALWAYS on God's
service. So a Quaker won't take an oath in court or swear before
God. Taking an oath means that it takes special rigamarole for you
to be honest. It's as good as saying, when I'm not under oath, I
don't have to tell the truth. But you are always under oath in a
sense. The Inner Light is within you, and the Lord is there to hear your
words. Shouldn't you be honest at all times?
If all people have the Inner Light, if all are equal,
then what right have people to snuff out that Inner Light in others?
What right have equals to enslave each other? how can you justify
war, or the use of force? How can you justify conquest? And how can
you justify persecuting people for their religion? Take the Indians
and their outlandish religious customs. Their gods may not look anything
like yours. But isn't it possible -- isn't it PROBABLE -- that their
gods are the way the Lord has used the Inner Light to bring them into His
grace? Isn't it possible that being a Catholic or a Jew or a Buddhist
is just another form of the Inner Light? And if that's so, what right
has any state to say, as Puritans do -- as King James would -- as Louis
XIV in France did: worship the way I say, or taste the sword and lodge
in my prisons?
Simplicity -- equality -- peace -- toleration.
You can see how Quakerism was revolutionary. You
can see WHY it would unsettle and scare kings. You can see why Puritans
would look at this wild sect, with NO respect for magistrates and with
talk of personal revelations as well as Scripture for knowing the will
of God, and would be appalled. You can see why Massachusetts hanged
four Quakers and jailed so very many more. And you can see why for
every one jailed, there were dozens more who insisted on coming to Massachusetts,
just so they could suffer in the cause of the Lord, and for every one hanged,
there were a hundred who came hoping to be hanged, basking in the glow
of an Inner Light that they read right.
Does this sound like the jolly, harmless sect that
you've read about?
Or does it explain why England got too hot to hold
them -- and why, when William Penn wanted to set up a refuge for them in
the New world, King Charles II was only too glad to let him do so?
SIMPLICITY -- EQUALITY -- PEACE
A PLACE FOR ALL GOD'S
PEOPLES?
This was Pennsylvania.
And it was, from the first, a very different place. Not just a refuge
for Quakers, but for people of all religions, who wanted to worship as
they saw fit -- Presybterians and Catholics, Hutterites and Amish and Mennonites
from Germany, Huguenots from France.
There were no whips, no witchcraft trials, no jail
terms for worshipping wrong here.
And instead of war on the Indians, there were treaties
with them as equals, treaties that the Quakers never swore to, because
they didn't believe in taking oaths. As Voltaire said, William Penn's was
the only treaty never sworn to and never broken. War raged
to the south, in Virginia and to the north, in New York. But for
76 years, the farmers of Pennsylvania knew peace, because the Quakers knew
so much about fair dealings. And even when war did come to the frontiers,
and settlers' cabins burned, the houses where the Indians knew that Quakers
lived were left untouched, their inhabitants unharmed -- because the Quakers,
by keeping their faith, had kept faith.
Go to Pennsylvania for the fairest criminal system
in the world -- for the fewest crimes punishable by death. Go there
for peace and for prosperity. And if you want to buy goods anywhere
in the world, you buy it from a Quaker merchant -- because you know that
these people are honor bound to keep their word, and whatever goods they
sell you have as good as a money-back guarantee. If you wanted to
buy a used car (assuming there were any back then,which there weren't)
imagine what a Quaker used car dealer would be like. He'd tell you
every flaw in the product -- every potential drawback. The Inner
Light would give him no choice.
Is it any wonder that by 1750 -- less than seventy
years after its founding -- Philadelphia is the second biggest English
speaking city in the world, right after London? is it any wonder
that it prospered?
But the trouble with prosperity is what the Puritans
discovered. By doing good, you may end up doing well. But the
children of those who do well lose a lot of their old faith. They
begin to enjoy the luxuries, the wealth; and the crusading fire goes out
of all too many of them. And so by the 1750s, you find Quakers who
DO have mirrors and DO have their portraits painted and DO have coats of
arms made for the family and DO buy Turkish carpets for their floors and
-- most dismayingly of all -- hold people as slaves.
CODA: DOING GOOD AND DOING WELL: MEETING-HOUSE AND
COUNTING-HOUSE
This is the problem: when the meeting house (where
they get called to worship) faces up against the counting-house (where
they make their money). And no religion has been able to face the
difficulty with complete success.
Yet for Puritans and for Quakers, let me stress that
they did better than most.
Because they wanted everyone
to read the word of God for him or herself, Puritans created common schools
-- and the idea that all people, not just the rich who can afford it, should
be schooled and educated, is with us today.
Because they believed that each church should set
doctrine and choose ministers for itself, the Puritans had created a kind
of self-government in religion, much like the self-government of the towns,
that is at the heart of what we would call democracy. And because
churches strewn in a hundred towns across a thousand and more square miles
can't be controlled from Boston or Hartford, the Puritans found themselves
having to accept a religion that had countless minor variations.
Not wanting toleration, they had to give way, at least a little; and some
of them, like Roger Williams, came to take this as a guiding -- and for
its day, revolutionary -- principle: that religion was too important, too
vital, to let the state meddle in it in any way, by picking favorites or
deciding which kinds not to permit. In the end, the Puritans
even had to leave the Quakers alone.
Because they believed that the will of the Lord
could be seen in different ways, the Quakers created a climate for a far
wider toleration than Puritans had done, and in Philadelphia, they showed
that toleration paid.
Let's remember that conscience may be dulled and
still remain. Is it by coincidence that the first great antislavery
tract in English was written by a Puritan judge, Samuel Sewall, THE SELLING
OF JOSEPH? Is it by pure chance that the first Protestant sect in
this New World to declare officially that you couldn't be a good church
member and a slaveholder was the Quakers?
SAVAGES AND AMERICANS: UNMAKING THE
INDIANS
Prologue: American Names
Ipswich -- Gloucester -- Boston -- Salem -- Providence...
Jamestown-York River -- Prince George's County...
Massachusetts -- Connecticut -- Tennessee
or, what's in a name?
Wahlgren note: for some of the information
in this lecture, you might look at the unfinished lecture about the discoverers
of the New World. Having not got around to it before, I have amalgamated
it in this time around.
I. STRANGERS MEET, IN A STRANGE LAND
LOST TRIBES OF ISRAEL?
SAVAGE CONDUCT?
WERE THEY CIVILIZED?
HOW THEY LIVED
HUNTING, FARMING, FISHING
TRADE
LAW, GOVERNMENT
MEDICINE -- SCURVY &C.
MOURNING WAR
EVOLVING CIVILIZATIONS:
THE FIVE NATIONS
II. IDEOLOGY OF CONQUEST
WHOSE RIGHT TO THE LAND?
NOMADS' LAND = NO MAN'S LAND
DO FLAGS FOLLOW THE LAND SALE?
PLAYING GAMES WITH DEEDS
III. FAIR TRADE? THE CULTURAL EXCHANGE
JOHN ELIOT'S PRAYING INDIANS
WHY CONVERSION DIDN'T WORK
FUR TRADE
DEERSKINS IN THE SOUTH
WHY INDIANS ADOPTED EUROPEAN
GOODS
HOW EUROPEAN GOODS ADAPTED
THE INDIANS
GUNS AND HORSES RE-MAKE WAR
"SEVEN DOGS"
DISEASE
NATIVE NATIONS AGAINST EACH OTHER
EXTERMINATION
KING PHILIP'S WAR, 1675-76
"VENGEANCE, DEAR COUNTRYMEN...."
CODA: IN ADAM'S FALL, WE SINNED ALLI.
UNWILLING NEWCOMERS: SLAVERY'S GENESIS
I. WHY SLAVERY?
THE UNTHINKING DECISION
Slavery wasn't something planned from the start. Not in Virginia,
certainly.
Oh, it existed throughout Central and South America. The Spanish
and Portuguese found, from early on, how much money could be made in sugar
and other crops on slave labor -- Indian slave labor and African slave
labor, too.
There were black workers in Virginia from the very first years. But
it is not clear that they were slaves, and certainly most of them were
NOT. Many of them lived out their service into freedom; some came
here and were free when they came. In the law, there was no distinction
between servants based on color.
Most labor in Virginia came from free-born people, or from servants --
indentured servants.
INDENTURED SERVICE, AND HOW IT WORKED
"Terms of indenture" are a contract -- the terms being that in return for
someone paying your passage to America, you will work for them for a period
of time, as apprentice or servant; the term varies, but seven years is
the most common.
This is how most white English folks came to the
South from 1600 to 1780, and a lot of those in the northern colonies, too.
Benjamin Franklin's ancestors, for example.
It's nothing shameful. And, no, it wasn't
simply the dregs and scum of society who did it.
OPPORTUNITY
FOR THE OFFSCOURINGS
"SPIRITS", KIDNAPPINGS
"Spirits" are the recruiting agents who kidnapped or inveigled adults to
board a ship for America. and not just adults. Kids were snatched
off the city streets. You lure them with sweets. Drunks are easy
to nab, too. Lots of chumps will believe glittering promises, too.
The phrase "spirited away" comes from the "spirits" and their stealings.
So does the word "kidnapping."
A talented spirit can spirit away 500 souls a year.
WHO CAME TO AMERICA?
Young people. By and large, indentured servants were 18 to 24 years
old, mostly 19 or 20 or 21 -- people just out of their apprenticeship.
Maybe a little under half of those servants were yeoman farmers and maybe
two-thirds worked on a farmin some form.
FREEHOLDS FOR NEWCOMERS
The bonus at the end was land -- a freehold of fifty acres, if you lived
out your seven year term and didn't get in serious trouble with the law,
the kind whereby people get hanged a lot.
In time, it was possible.... just possible .... hat there would be a pot
of gold at the end of the rainbow. You might end life as some of
the indentured servants in Maryland did, with something to show for it.
You might end up sitting on juries or even sitting in the colonial assembly
-- making it to justice of the peace or militia officer or sheriff.
"SEASONING"
But would you live long enough to collect? Odds are, in the 1600s,
that you would die before your seven years ended. People from a mild
English climate roasted under a Maryland sun, and hard field labor doesn't
build strong bodies twelve ways ... not with fever and malaria and dysentery
present. Up to 1671, four of every five servants in Virginia died
before their time was up.
If you died in the first three years, that was 'seasoning."
BUT
A SERVANT IS NO SLAVE
Being an indentured servant is miserable. A servant isn't like Jeeves
in some movie, a gentleman's gentleman, handing him his towel as he emerges
from the bath. It's not like being a scullery maid. It's usually
back-breaking work, plowing and clearing fields, harvesting, carrying,
and with mighty few privileges attached.
1. you can be bought or sold
2. you can get handed over, to pay a gambling debt
3. the master's next of kin can inherit you
4. you can be rented out for your work
5. your master has the right to whip you
6. you can't marry without the master's consent
7. you cannot vote
8. you can't engage in trade
If the master catches you fooling around, a few years might be added to
your service.
But in other ways, it is not the same as slavery. You can own property of your own. You can sue in the courts or be sued. If you get beaten too badly, the courts can end your service pronto and set you free. If your contract is misplaced, you still can only be held for a term of years; your freedom is guaranteed.
TROUBLE FROM MEN WITHOUT MASTERS
Everything changed in the 1670s. Mortality was down. Now the
odds were better than even that a servant WOULD live out his seven year
term .... and insist on land, which -- the good kind -- was in scarce supply.
There had always been problems with indentured servants anyhow. They
had guns, and knew how to use them. They were English, and spoke English.
If they ran away, how could you catch them? The settlements were spread
wide, and a strange new white man doesn't excite much notice or any suspicion.
But this means the calculation
changes. Say you have a choice between buying a servant for x dollars
for a seven year term; or buying a slave for 2 times x dollars for life
-- but that you know that either man is likely to die before seven years
is up. Which is the smarter investment? Why buy a person for life,
when he costs more and isn't going to live very long?
Now, count up the figures
again. Suppose the servant will live out his seven years; suppose
the slave will live 7, 10, 20 years. Suppose the slave will have kids,
and they most likely will live to grow up and can be worked, too.
Which is the better investment NOW?
FROM SERVANTS TO SLAVES
LANGUAGE AND CULTURE MAKE SLAVERY POSSIBLE
Consider this: a white servant runs away. Nobody notices one more white
man on the road. He can escape to Maryland or Philadelphia. You've
just lost your investment.
But think about owning a black African. Any white traveller sees
him on the roads, he's going to notice. Where can he run to that
he won't be spotted? And he's African, mind! How is he going
to get back to Africa? Where can he possibly go? Who can he
ask directions from? His very accents -- his broken English -- are
a tip-off that he's not One of Us (assuming We are white).
In fact, if he doesn't know any English, and a lot of Africans don't, not
at first, anyhow, how is he going to get directions at all?
Every
servants brought to Virginia is one more freeman -- one more person to
control -- one more dangerous, masterless man.
But a slave -- that's safer. No rising expctations. No hopes. No guns.
Whatever
the reasoning.
In 1650 Virginia had 300 blacks, free and slave, out of 15,000 people.
As of 1700 there were 8000 black slaves.
By 1750 there were 100,000 ... that's more than 40% of the population.
You can see the change in the laws.
After 1640 for the first time, you see bills of sale of servants that add
the words "and their successors forever." Now, those are ominous
words; only a slave could be sold with his or her successors forever.
Laws decreed that for white "servants" who ran away, they would get time
tacked onto their service. But not so for black ones. Why?
Because THE BLACK ONES WERE ALREADY SERVING FOR LIFE, obviously.
You can't give a person a life sentence -- plus three years. It doesn't
compute.
BARBADOS: THE COLONY OF A COLONY
South Carolina was founded differently. It was partly the place where
the sugar island of Barbados got its food. Barbados was too good
for growing sugar to waste in cattle and corn. So Barbados sent people
to the mainland to do it; and sons of the planters carried their slaves,
because land in Barbados was scarce, and set up in the South Carolina tidelands.
JUSTIFYING ENSLAVEMENT
Race prejudice certainly existed before slavery came to North America,
though it wasn't quite "race" the way we think of the term. But slavery
gives a strong motivation for intensifying and excusing, explaining and
enhancing race prejudices.
IMAGES OF BLACKS -- "CURSED BE CANAAN"
To justify a decision for slavery, you can go to a rich tradition of folklore
and otherwise about Africans. And you can find Biblical justification,
as long as you don't read too well. Go to Genesis and Noah after
the Flood. Drunk, he falls asleep naked. His son Ham mocks his father;
the other sons cover him up. When Noah awakens, and finds what's
happened, he's sore wroth and puts a curse on the son of Ham: "Cursed be
Canaan!" his children shall be the servants of servants all their
days.
Well, there it is -- Divine
sanction. Blacks are the children of Ham. God wanted them to be slaves
for what Ham did. What could be neater?
(Of course, nothing in the
Bible says that Ham was one color and his brothers another; nothing said
that the Lord paid attention to Noah's curse, and if you look at the Canaanites
later in the Bible, there's a lot of evidence that He couldn't have, because
when we come on them later, they aren't slaves; what's more they don't
live in Africa; what's more, nothing in the book says that they're black.
But you have to read LIBERALLLLLLLLLLLY).
II. BADGES OF SERVICE
WHO OWNED SLAVES? AND WHY?
Every
colony had slaves. Every one. Massachusetts included. Rhode
Island's official name, even now, is Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.
Now, Plantations back then didn't mean what it does today. It meant
a planting, a settling of the land with people. But there WERE plantations
there, well knwn for their horses and slaves.
Benjamin Franklin had slaves.
Slavery was there early, too. Pick which colony you'd think had the
most slaves in 1660
a) Maryland
b) Virginia
c) Nieu Amsterdam (also to be known as New York)
The right answer is c). The comparative numbers would shift,
but as late as the Revolution, you could find 20,000 slaves in New York.
Still, there's a certain distinction. North of Maryland, every colony
is less than 10% black -- and necessarily even less still slave, because
some blacks were free, and many were free-born. Every state from
Maryland on South was one fourth black or more. Virginia was 40%
slave, South Carolina's population was 60% slave by 1730. And locally,
the margin's bigger still. Go to Tidewater and lowland Virginia in
1760. The land of Jefferson and Washington? To be sure.
But your typical person in many of those counties wasn't Washington.
He or she was a slave.
Who owned slaves? We often think of the aristocrats doing it.
A lot of big planters were big owners. Robert "King" Carter's 700 slaves .... William Byrd's 225.
But you didn't have to be rich to own slaves. Most people owned only a
few of them. Farmers, not planters. And not just farmers.
Artisans, mrchants owned them, too. If you were a mechanic in Charleston
-- a skilled laborer -- and made enough money to write a will, just about
1 in 2 of you would have slaves to bequeath to your heirs.
FROM FARMERS TO SQUIRES
And why not? Slaves are a mighty profitable investment, if you can see
'em only as a piece of property and not as a member of the human race with
inalienable rights. Say it's 1700. You want to buy an indentured
servant who'd work for five years for you, or a slave who'd work for life.
A servant's cheaper. It'd cost 40% of what a slave would. So it would take 2 1/2 times as long to pay off your investment. But you'd have to buy a new servant every five years, and a slave lasts forever. If you have another slave of the opposite gender you get DIVIDENDS -- kids, and they work, too. Think of the profits now! Henry Thacker, let's say, buys Sharlott, a twelve year old, in 1720. She gives birth to 13 kids. In 1764 she's still around, still working, and her children and grandchildren total 21 people. By that time, she's produced a total return of 2700% on her original cost.
Slavery's a way for people to rise from farmer to squire, to get from middling to downright wealthy. And for the rich, it's the best way of going to super-rich.
WILLIAM BYRD, Jr. -- ENGLISH STYLE FROM AN AMERICAN
INSTITUTION
You take an aristocrat of Virginia like William Byrd, Jr. His house
is tremendous, a brick Georgian pile that looks like the kind of edifice
that
British gentility are building. His rooms are full of English furniture
and British paintings. He can take the tour of Europe; he can send
his
kids to European schools.
How did he get it? You know perfectly well. Slavery ... the American
institution.
THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
The trip across the Atlantic, a positive horror.
You're a slave trader. You carry iron bars with you. African purchasers
can make them into rings and ornaments on their own.
Conch shells are good, too. A hundred pounds of these are the price
of one slave.
Manufactured goods? Definitely textiles -- British woollens, knives, sowrds,c
utlasses, muskets, and liquor.
Not your French brandy and Dutch gin, but ones from sugar that slaves had
grown: rum.
A good slaving trip takes time shopping. You don't buy all in one place.
You'll work your way down the African coast, maybe eight months in all.
Now, from the captives' perspective.... you are probably taken prisoner
miles from the coast, and not by Europeans. African kings from some
foreign country (yes, Africa had countries, too) takes you and may march
you to the shore. Five out of every ten may not make it to the slave ships
before dying of hardship and neglect.
On board the ship, you're packed in tight..
There's not much room to stand in the hold: ceilings are only five feet
high. But YOU don't have that five feet. You are put on platforms,
shelves with 20 inches of headroom. Your food is a meal of boiled
rice or corn meal in the morning, and horse-beans covered in palm oil,
flour and red pepper at four in the afternoon. Toilet facilities
for 600 people -- three large buckets. Daytime, you spend on deck.
To keep from melancholy, you're given exercise. You walk or jump to the
smack of the cat o' nine tails.
Nights are long and hard
with cries of anguish, moans, and weeping.
Not all the human cargo
gets to America. Many go mad. Many others kill themselves.
And those who are diseased are dropped overboard, in their chains, still
alive -- to prevent them infecting the rest of the "commodities."
On average, one in eight will die in the crossing -- and, in the 1600s,
maybe one in five. One in three will die during the first year of
work. So for every two taken up in Africa to go to America, one will
be dead within three years' time.
And
the slave trade is one of the British Empire's growth industries in the
1700s.
After 1713, some 70,000 to 100,000 Africans a year are carried over the
Atlantic by British and American slave ships.
RACE LAW TO JUSTIFY SLAVERY
Slavery could not exist without law, but increasingly, the law had another
purpose: to justify slavery on the basis of race -- that this was done
because blacks were, by their color, not fit for the rights of free-born
Englishmen. So the law clamped down on the rights of free blacks, not just
enslaved ones. Thus, there were laws to keep blacks out of
Charleston without a pass on holidays and Sundays -- curfews that they,
but not whites, had to obey -- patrols in the countryside, and a militia
that you had to be white to join. The laws set up different penalties
for white and black -- not just for free and slave. A white
would be fined; a black would be whipped; a punishment meted out in public
for black malefactors would not be done publicly for white ones.
Colonies made freedom harder to get, and made it
harder for masters to set their slaves free, and the assumption behind
it was that the natural condition for blacks SHOULD be slavery.
In South Carolina (and for a while in Virginia) any free black, set free,
was compelled to leave the colony. Massachusetts declared that blacks
could not play the government lottery; Delaware forbade blacks to administer
corporal punishment to white offenders; South Carolina and Virginia denied
them the vote; and everywhere, there were laws limiting their right to
testify against a white person -- the right to resist a white aggressor
-- the right to marry or have sexual relations with whites -- and the right
to hold real estate.
Slavery couldn't exist without force. Not the policeman's night-stick, but physical terrorism. And the law, as time went on, in slave societies, inflicted punishments that would be unthinkable for whites: castration, nose-slitting, branding, burning at the stake, chopping off ears and hands and toes.
HOW SLAVERY ENRICHED THE
NORTH
Slave trade profits are stupendous. Let's not kid ourselves.
Rate of return could be as high as 300% per voyage.
Who gains? Well, among others, those southern cities of Boston,
Salem, New London, and Newport.
All of them are deeply involved in the slave trade.
The first American-born slave ship was built in Salem.
The first American slave ship sent to Africa came from New England, and
that was in John Winthrop's time, in 1645 (let it be noted that the Puritans
arrested the captain and had him tried in court for "kiling, stealing,
and wronging of the negers," as the indictment read. What really
irritated them, though, was that he had done all this ON THE SABBATH.
The cargo of Africans was returned home, at public expense).
John Hancock ... his name is the big 'un on the Declaration of Independence.
He imported slaves. So did Robert Morris, the banker of the Revolution.
Moses Brown, now ... there's a fine civic minded fella, the Providence
tycoon. His fortune will found a textile industry that lasts a century.
His endowments set up Brown University. But his money came from the
slave trade.
Remember Faneuil Hall in
Boston, the "Cradle of the Revolution"? The place where ever so many
Americans shouted that Britons never shall be slaves? But the hall
was built by Peter Faneuil, who made his money as a merchant, largely dealing
in the sale of human beings.
III. AFRICA IN THE NEW WORLD
THEY DID NOT GO GENTLE INTO
THE DARK NIGHT
NEW YORK IN A TERROR, 1712
Every so often an uprising was planned; and less often, one broke out.
In 1712, some two dozen slaves rose up. They set fire to a house
and killed nine whites.
What followed was a serious panic and a slaughter. Suspected conspirators
were hunted down. Some killed themselves, rather than be taken. The
ones taken alive were condemned -- a dozen to be hanged, three to be burned.
One was left alive, hanging in his chains, without food or drink, to starve
to death. One was burned slowly over a slow flame (the process took
eight to ten hours). One was broken on the wheel.
STONO REBELLION, 1739
This happened in South Carolina in September. A group of slaves tried to
set themselves free at all cost. They broke into a store on the Stono
River, seized small arms and powder, killed the storekeeper and his family
and left their heads on the front steps. From there, the makeshift
army marched, burning houses and plundering them, gathering more slaves
into the force as they went. They got a standard and two drums and
a cry of "Liberty." Any white that came their way was killed.
But the uprising didn't make it out of the first day. By afternoon, whites
were alerted and summoning forces of their own. Black rebels were
killed and their heads put on the mile-posts along the road. For
days, the area was swept, looking for suspects. The whole colony
was ordered under arms. Guards were posted at ferry crossings.
Sixty or more people were dead by the time it was over -- most of them
black. The rebellion was crushed out ferociously.
GULLAH SPEECH
African dialects and word-patterns touched and altered southern speech,
and African-American speech.
RICE PLANTING COMES TO THE
LOWLANDS
Without Africans, there would have been no rice planting in America. The
methods were West African, and the tools that went with them, as well.
THE
SONG OF A LOST PEOPLE
CODA: OUT OF SLAVERY, AMERICAN FREEDOM -- OUT OF POVERTY,
PLENTY
Slavery
existed. We shouldn't kid ourselves that it was relatively benign.
We shouldn't kid ourselves that because slaves died as fast as imports
raised their numbers in South America, and because slaves lived and increased
their numbers by natural causes in America, that ours was a good, a civilized
slavery. Nor should we cleanse ourselves of guilt by noting that
Africans had slavery -- that the Moslem countries had slavery and carried
on an extensive slave trade into the late 1800s. We shouldn't comfort
ourselves with the evidence, chapter by chapter and verse by verse, that
the Bible sanctioned -- legitimated -- accepted slavery as a natural part
of life (though not a slavery based on race, let me emphasize again).
None of that will do any good.
Slavery was an evil.
It wasn't a southern evil only. It was a national evil.
But let this be said, too,
though it doesn't make the case much better. Even in the 1700s, there
were Americans who looked on slavery and saw it for the evil it was.
The best of them were men of religion: Puritan and Quaker.
SAMUEL
SEWALL, THE SELLING OF JOSEPH
Puritan, and one of those involved in the Salem witch trials. But
Sewall's tract was the first in North America to challenge slavery as God-given
and God-permitted.
BENJAMIN
LAY
Quaker. A hunchbacked dwarf, eccentic, unyielding.
JONATHAN
WOOLMAN
Quaker. His argument was plain to slaveholders: the real sin is not
in what you do to slaves. It is the danger to your immortal soul,
however kind you
may be. For slavery carries with it the sin of pride. You
have taken on the role of a God, with the power of life and death over
another, to rob him or her of free will. That is a power that belongs to
none but God. We are not -- we must never think of ourselves -- as
Gods on earth. But as slave masters, that is precisely what you choose
to make yourself. Set your slaves free, not primarily for their sakes,
but for your own, and that of your immortal soul.
Is it a wonder, then, that
the first great Christian sect in America to decide that one could not
be a good member of the faith and a slave-trader was the Quaker faith?
THE BEST POOR MAN'S COUNTRY
I. FOREVER ENGLAND'S?
WHY THE COLONIES PROSPERED
HEADRIGHTS &
QUITRENTS -- and land enough for all
PARTIBLE INHERITANCE
MOLASSES, RUM AND COMMERCE
CODFISH FROM BOSTON
"TRIANGULAR TRADE"
PRIVATE TRADE IS A PUBLIC
TRUST
PRIVATEERS -- LETTERS OF MARQUE
CAPTAIN KIDD AND THE PIRATES
THE MEN BEHIND THE CORSAIRS
II. "SALUTARY NEGLECT"
NAVIGATION ACTS -- WHAT
IS MERCANTILISM?
MOLASSES ACT
HAT ACT, IRON ACT
ENGLISH GOODS ON ENGLISH BOTTOMS
BOUNTIES FOR INDIGO
ROYAL POWER STOPS AT THE
WATER'S EDGE
2 GEORGES
2 REVOLUTIONS
... AND "POOR FRED"
CODA: THE WAY TO WEALTH LEADS TO ENGLAND
THE KINGS' WARS
A TURBULENT & FANATICK PEOPLE?
I. HOLY EXPERIMENTS
CHURCHES AILING?
TROUBLE IN THE CHOIR
COTTON MATHER, SMALLPOX,
AND THE JEREMIAD
TOLERANCE
THE SHALLOW ROOTS OF THE
ESTABLISHED CHURCH
VESTRYMEN CONTROL SOUTHERN PULPITS
GREAT AWAKENING, 1738-60
GEORGE WHITEFIELD WOWS THEM
JONATHAN EDWARDS
NEW LIGHTS, OLD LIGHTS
ROOM FOR ALL?
II. THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE
THE GOVERNOR IN A TRAFFIC JAM
PARLIAMENT IN THE AGE OF WALPOLE
"ROTTEN BOROUGHS"
"VIRTUAL REPRESENTATION"
WHO VOTED? WHO RULED?
LEGISLATURES: GENERAL COURT, HOUSE OF BURGESSES
LOCAL SELF-RULE -- JUSTICES OF THE PEACE, TOWN MEETINGS
ROYAL GOVERNMENT IS A STATE OF MIND
WHY GOVERNORS NEVER HAD A CHANCE
LORD CORNBURY REPRESENTS QUEEN ANNE
SUSPENDING CLAUSES
PLACE ACTS
DEFERENTIAL DEMOCRACY
(NOT MUCH DEFERENCE, NOT MUCH DEMOCRACY)
CODA: "'TIS HEMP I'M GROWING NOW!"
As honest Hodge the Farmer,
sowed his field,
Cheered with the hope of
future gain 'twould yield,
Two upstart Jacks in office,
proud and vain,
Come riding by, and thus
insult the Swain:
"You drudge and sweat, and
labor here, old boy,
But we the fruits of your
hard toil enjoy."
"Belike you may," quoth
Hodge, "and but your due,
For, gentlemen, 'tis HEMP
I'm sowing now."
-- Poor Richard's Almanac
Math puzzle:
if Poor Richard can put two and two together about people in office, and
if
deference to authority is at the heart of respecting the decrees of the
Empire, how
many years is the Empire going to last, when things start getting tough?
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, 1754-1775
I. "SALUTARY NEGLECT" GETS LESS SALUTARY
THREE GEORGES AND THE ROBINARCHY
Americans had got off easily because for years,
they didn't matter much to the policy makers in London; the money was rolling
in from the mercantile system, and it was pretty good money. As long
as there were offices to give to their friends, the Robert Walpoles and
Dukes of Newcastle hardly asked for more.
This was all the more so because the Kings were
not of a mind to pay much attention to what went on in England, much less
in the colonies. They were Germans, from Hanover, and their love
for war and mistresses went about as far as they had the passion for.
And what a depressing lot the Hanovers were!
KING
STORK III REPLACES KING LOG II
"POOR FRED" AND PURE GEORGE
character reference: "Look! there he goes -- the wretch! --
that villain!! I wish the ground
would open this moment and sink the monster to the lowest hole in Hell."
-- his mother
character reference: "Pray, Mama, don't throw away your wishes for what
cannot happen,
but wish he may die and that we may all go about with smiling faces, glad
hearts,
and crepe and hoods for him."
-- his sister
So altogether, when Frederick
died from an infection caught after a bad game of tennis, nobody was all
that sorry about it. And when in 1760, George II died of a fit of
apoplexy from trying too hard at answering one of the calls of nature,
it was his grandson, George III who ascended the throne.
Eighteen years old, English born, George was quite
a change from his predecessors. "I glory in the name of Briton,"
he said -- and he did. He loved England, and English laws.
There was no moral looseness about him. He was faithful to his wife
and fond of his many appalling, self-satisfied, selfish children.
No fancy meals for George. He liked plain beef and plain potatoes
on the table. As for drinking ... a glass or two at dinner was as
far as he was likely to go. Card playing and gambling were something
he frowned down upon. He was not a fool. Unlike his great grandfather
who could not even speak English, George III could speak German and English
and Latin and Greek and French. He was well read, and for all of
his pompous image with us, he had a good sense of humor and could think
on his feet quickly.
There's one story about that. Meeting a guest
at a party, he told him: "I am told you are a great family man -- many
children indeed! -- better than a dozen, eh?"
Embarrassed, the guest corrected him: "No, sire,
only eleven."
George (blinking): "Ah! Well, surely that is BETTER
THAN A DOZEN!"
Other kings loved war; George never did. What he
liked was ... agriculture. He would read magazines and write letters
to the editors (under assumed names) advising them the best ways of raising
turnips and manuring fields. He was frugal, and he took his job seriously;
he studied, and he worked at it.
Surely if there ever was a King such as Benjamin
Franklin would have designed, it was George.
And that was exactly the problem. A King that
knows his job and wants to do it can be the worst nuisance in the world.
He actually will pay attention to the Colonies, and paying attention,
he could tell that something very seriously wrong was afoot. The
colonies were being misgoverned. The Navigation Laws were not enforced.
And here a great war had just been fought, to protect
them from the French in Canada; surely they should bear a larger share
of the tax burden for paying it?
A WAR FOR EMPIRE, 1754-1765
THE PEACE OF PARIS PASSETH ALL UNDERSTANDING
By now, many colonists had got a pretty good sense
of what was wrong with the British empire. There's nothing like war for
watching the realities of Empire, who is boss and who is a second class
citizen. And to fight this war, England was perfectly willing to
kidnap, break and enter, rob, or violate the law, so far as it served its
purpose.
PRESS GANGS -- nabbing men off the streets of our towns (just as was done
in England) to serve in His Majesty's navy. A miserable occupation,
with the cat o'nine tails flogging for infractions and the certainty of
want and hunger for the family you have left behind unsupported.
As Dr. Samuel Johnson said, the only difference between a ship in the navy
and a prison is that YOU DON'T DROWN IN A PRISON.
WRITS OF ASSISTANCE
ARE AMERICANS SECOND-CLASS ENGLISHMEN?
All at once, it became clear that when a crisis
came, the "rights of Englishmen" didn't amount to much; or if they did,
England thought them precious, like jewels -- which are precious because
they are scarce -- and that sharing them around to the people outside of
that "tight little isle" would only mean there wasn't enough liberty to
go around.
It can be said that by the time the Redcoats left
the thirteen colonies in America at the end of the Seven Year's War, just
about every colonist was glad to see the back of them, and didn't want
to see them again.
But they would. And they did.
II. BRITONS NEVER SHALL BE SLAVES?
Wars cost money. England paid heavily. So
it was that the Empire decided to tax Americans, as well.
Now, the colonists DID pay taxes already.
They paid it to their towns. They paid it to their colonial governments.
And that money had gone to help win the war against the French. It wasn't
as if they had got off scot-free.
And for years, they had paid the taxes that the
Navigation Acts set up. But those were taxes to regulate trade, not to
raise revenue. This time, the taxes would be different -- English
taxes primarily imposed to put money into the English treasury.
And this, without a single American represented
in Parliament, to give our side.
This, without the slightest voice in the counsels
of the mighty, to justify our side.
The fact that we thought that way, though, shows
how far from English ways we had come. For by the 1760s, Americans
believed that representatives in a legislature, in a Parliament, represented
PEOPLE -- the People that elected them. But any English scholar could
tell you that this just wasn't so. Parliament didn't represent the
people. Towns with nobody in them had two Members of Parliament;
cities with tens of thousands had no members.
Parliament represented the NATION as a whole.
It represented the EMPIRE as a whole. It didn't matter whether you
could vote or couldn't -- whether you had a member from your colony or
county or not. The members (MP's) sitting all represented you, and
everybody else. But most of all, they represented Property.
They were meant to. Not people -- property, and the various propertied
interests. That was how government was supposed to work.
And how it DID work over
there. But not here.
So you can see where this is going to end up.
Two cultures, each of which prides itself on being "English" and having
the 'rights of Englishmen," when they use that term mean different things.
They do not share the same language at all.
STAMP ACT, 1765 -- SONS OF LIBERTY ARISE
1. what did the Stamp Act tax?
2. who decided what the tax was?
3. if you didn't pay, how did they try you?
It taxed papers to clear
ships from harbors
on college diplomas
on appointments to public office
on deeds for land, on mortgages, on leases, on indentures
on contracts, on bills of sale, on liquor licenses on playing cards on
dice on pamphlets, on newspapers, on ads, on almanacs.
It was more than the money
involved, much more.
The Stamp Act wasn't just a bitter pill -- not sugar-coated,
at that.
It was a blooming outrage.
Taxation without representation, and heavy taxation.
This time, there wasn't the slightest pretense that it was to regulate
trade. it was to raise money; it was a tax.
It would hurt struggling
newspapers and silence the,
It threatened trial by jury.
It demanded payment in gold and silver, which Americans
had none of.
But how do you fight it? What can you do? Issue a protest? that would take too long, over the wasteland of waters between Westminster and the woods. Vote for enemies of the tax in Parliament, when you have no vote for anyone and no seats in Parliament?
In the confusion, mobs led the way to act.
Colonies resolved that the tax was illegal, and some of them instructed
officials not to use the stamps, and to issue the documents and treat them
as legal, whether they held the stamp or not.
How, though, could you make royal appointees obey
you? The answer was simple: see to it that the stamps never
got distributed at all. Customs collectors must be put in a spot
where they could not deand stamped documents, because there were no stamps
for them to demand. And that was where mobbing the stamp distributors
came in. Force them to resign, for their health, chase them out of
the colonies, pull their businesses and warehouses down, make the colonies
too hot for them.
In boston, the mob was the work of the sons of Liberty, led by many in the town's elite, including Sam Adams and James Otis.
So it was that by November 1st, 1765, the day when the stamp act went into force, the courts were open -- and ran without stamps on documents. The ships brought in goods or took them out, without the stamps. Deeds for land were arranged, without the stamps. People married witho ut the stamps.
and at the same time the colonists resolved to boycott English goods, till the odious law was repealed. No silks .... no tea ... no textiles from England.
They made it stick, too.
INTERNAL TAXES AND EXTERNAL ONES
BOYCOTT
THE FIRST CONTINENTAL CONGRESS
DECLARATORY ACT, 1766 -- IT AIN'T OVER TILL IT'S
OVER
At first, English authorities
floated the idea of perhaps repealing the Stamp tax if the colonists would
pay the costs of having put it into operation in the first place.
that, Benjamin Franklin commented, reminded him of the Frenchman who used
to accost English people on the Seine bridges, brandishing a red-hot iron.
Bowing in his most complimentary way, he would say, "Pray, Monsieur Anglais,
do me the favor to let me have the honor of thrusting this hot iron into
your backside?"
The Englishman, much agitated cried: "Zounds, what
does this fellow mean! Begone with your iron, or I'll break your
head!"
Frenchman (not a bit fazed): "Nay, Monsieur, if
you do not choose it, I do not insist upon it. But at least you will in
justice have the goodness to pay me something for the heating of my iron."
The notion was dropped, and so was the Stamp Act.
But what colonists missed in the cheering was the passage of the Declaratory
Act. For here Parliament declared that it HAD THE RIGHT TO TAX THE
COLONIES, and tax them however it pleased -- that it did NOT admit that
they were in the right on the issue.
After that, it's only a matter of time before the
iron is heated anew, this time to be shoved the colonists' way.
As indeed happened, within the year.
TOWNSHEND ACTS, 1767
It was an alternative to
an internal tax. A tax on goods coming into the americas -- the very
kind that they had paid for so long, for the purposes of navigation.
Who could possibly object to that?
....Taxes on tea and on paper and paint and
lead
But the colonists did object, and for the same reasons.
It was taxation without representation, without the consent of those taxed.
They had other reasons, too, for the Townshend Acts also strengthened the
enforcement of the Navigation Laws, that till now had hardly been enforced.
This was bad, allthe worse because the income of the Customs Commissioners
set up under the law came from how many arrests they made; they got a share
of the take, whenever a ship and its cargo were seized and confiscated
for the violation of the Navigation Laws.
Naturally, this was an invitation to the creative
interpretation of those laws. Every nit-picking, every concentration on
niggling detail and orders and forms that could show a merchant as having
not lived up to the complete, absoluuuuuuuute letter of the law, meant
that the Commissioners could make money out of it by arrests and fines
and divvying the swag.
it would take angels not to be tempted by the possibilities
of loot, and the Commissioners were not angels. They were appointees,
from a culture that believed that offices are property -- to be used as
best will make you money. In an age when army paymasters, quite legally,
could take the government funds given to them to pay the troops, deposit
them in their personal bank accounts, and collect and pocket the interest,
in an age when every court clerk got a fee on top of his salary, for every
piece of paper he signed, sealed or stamped, and when petty officials in
the right place could make more than the Prime Minister, what else would
you expect?
CUSTOMS COMMISSIONERS AS RACKETEERS
REDCOATS IN BOSTON, 1768
BOSTON MASSACRE, 1770
From the pictures,
the copper engravings of Paul Revere, we know just what took place on that
cold March 5th, 1770, as evening was coming on. It was another British
outrage -- of course it was. Innocent blood was shed on the streets
of Boston. Redcoats had opened fire, those butchers, those inhuman
brutes, on citizens, inoffensive residents of the city.....
Whose only crime was that they were throwing hard
objects at the soldiers, threatening them with sticks, shouting for their
blood, and making every attempt short of killing them to kill them.
That's how any Redcoat can tell you it happened, and without stretching
the truth one single iota. Imagine to yourself being a British
trooper, five thousand miles from home, surrounded by people, all of whom
would like to see you dead, every hour of every day, and now, surrounded
by a mob of angry, ferocious people. Imagine the sense of panic.
And if someone discharges his musket, by accident perhaps, what do you
think is going to happen? There's going to be shooting, a lot of
it. And half a dozen of Boston's patriotic ruffians are going to
be lying on the cobblestones, bleeding their mobbish principles all over
the street.
It's not that easy. But any British soldier
could have told you that this was exactly how it was, and what it looked
like. Frightened, bullied, badgered troops had been set upon and had broken
under the strain. It happens. It costs lives. But
it isn't something that was planned. It isn't part of a plot to teach
the colonists a lesson. It is an accident of war.
But try telling any Bostonian that!
LIBERTY IN DANGER? #45
Looking at England, the colonists began to wonder: is there a conspiracy,
a conspiracy at the top, against Liberty? is it possible that the
Ministry (the people in charge of the Government -- the Prime Minister,
the Cabinet, and their chums) is out not just to tax us, but to take away
our rights and all English rights, there and here?
If you were afraid of that, you didn't have to look
far. You could look at John Wilkes, the English patriot, and his
article in NORTH BRITON , #45, attacking the King and his ministers.
The magazine was condemned as sedition. it was burned by the public
hangman. Wilkes was jailed. he was elected to Parliament by the people.
Parliament wouldn't seat him. he was elected again -- and again they wouldn't
seat him.
A government that can do that to its people at home,
what won't it do to its subjects abroad?
Be afraid -- be very afraid.
III. THE COLLAPSE OF IMPERIAL RULE
So even when things seemed to calm down, in the
summer of 1770, it wasn't a peace. It was more like a truce.
The Liberty boys slept on their arms, with one eye open. The Ministryhad
fallen back from its demands, but it would try again; you could bet on
it.
In these circumstances, any little thing could be
seen as part of this vast, conspiratorial design. And that is exactly
how it WAS seen.
GOVERNORS DESTROYED
THOMAS HUTCHINSON & JUDGES' SALARIES
What could be wrong with the idea of governor Thomas
Hutchinson of Massachusetts, that the Crown should pay for the judges'
salary. Taxpayers would be spared the burden, naturally, and that would
make them happy. It would make the judges happy, too -- they would
get a salary hike; they would be likelier to stay on the bench longer,
and continuity, in interpreting the law is a very good thing. What could
be wrong with it?
What could be wrong with it? What could be
wrong with taking the power to pay judges out of the hands of the General
Court? What could be wrong with having the Judge paid by the governor?
What could be wrong with the judge looking to the Crown for his pay check/
What could be wrong with the Judge knowing that he owed the governor and
the Crown everything/ What could be wrong with him feeling that if
he wanted to be paid and paid well he would have to bring in decisions
the Crown liked? What could be wrong with making the judges the willing,
cringing and fawning tools of the Ministry? What could be wrong with
turning the courts into engines of oppression, always deciding against
the people who stood up against the Governor and against the King, and
railroading them to prison or ruining them with fines? What could
be wrong with kangaroo courts and the use of law as a giant hammer to beat
down the people's liberties? What?
Well, what do you think? And so when Hutchinson's
private letters to the Crown and the British government, suggesting this
change in how judges got paid, were made public, it ruined him. All
chance that Governor Hutchinson had of bringing the people of Massachusetts
to trust the English government and its good intentions, or his own good
intentions was gone.
COMMITTEES OF CORRESPONDENCE
TEA ACT -- WHY COULDN'T AMERICANS AFFORD CHEAP TEA?
monopoly
what were the taxes going to be used FOR?
who SOLD it?
if you can do that with tea, what can't you do it with?
THE
PARTY, DECEMBER 16TH, 1773
NO MORE MR. NICE GUY, 1774
to understand this, we have to see the British point
of view. They insisted that Parliament is supreme. it can make any
law, fire any official, impeach anyone, jail anyone, overrule any colonial
charter, pass any tax, that it pleases. Its power is complete and
absolute. The power of the Colonies is only by the grace, the good
will of Parliament. Its free speech, its right of petition -- all
of these are PRIVILEGES that Parliament has allowed them.
Too long it has allowed colonial mobs to threaten
and terrorize the King's own officers. Too long it has allowed the
laws to be violated, ignored, flouted and scorned. Too long it has
permitted the press in the Colonies to snarl and abuse and lie about people
in government in ways that in England would have earned a few years in
jail or a fine big enough to bust a man's wallet wide open. It went
soft. It retreated on the Stamp Act, yielding on its undoubted right
to tax. it retreated partway on the Townshend Acts; it gave
the colonists a better deal on tea than they had had before. And this is
how lenience is repaid -- with mob violence, pillage, anarchy, and law
enforcement officials who won't do a thing about it. It's time to
show them that the British lion has claws and teeth, after all. It's
time to make quite clear that they should be darned glad they have any
rights at all. And so, from this rage, this dudgeonry,
arose ....
THE INTOLERABLE ACTS
1. the port is closed
2. one town meeting a year
3. military rule
This could not be borne.
And the colonists, especialy those of Boston, didn't. A new continental
Congress was called, to work out a reply to Parliament and to bring all
the colonies into joint action to assert their rights. In Massachusetts,
colonists began creating their own private armies -- local militias, and
every day better armed, better prepared for an uprising.
It was a tinderbox. The British officials
were not monsters. General Gage, the military commander sent to Boston,
was a reasonable man, sensible, with very decent instincts. But he
was also a commander. And a military commander, if he sees an enemy
arming, getting ready to kill his men, isn't going to be discreet and just
them them prepare, and wait until they start killing him, and until he's
outnumbered and outgunned and a real, ferocious, bloody war is in the making.
He did the only right thing to do: he determined to grab those guns
and that ammunition in Concord before it could be used against his men.
Better a few casualties now than thousands of casualties a few months hence,
and hangings from every gallows in New England for treason against the
Crown.
But it was too late by the time he acted.
And on the night of April 18th, 1775 the signals went out from the church
in Boston that the regulars were on the way, and Paul Revere and Charles
Dawes and others saddled and rode to spread the alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm.
And when the British arrived at the creek in Concord,
there were colonists, with muskets in their hands to bar the way.
CODA: TO THE RUDE BRIDGE THAT ARCHED THE FLOOD
By the rude bridge that arch'd the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurl'd,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired a shot heard 'round the world.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, CONCORD HYMN
"RAGE MILITAIRE": NEVER A DULL MINUTEMAN
I. THE FRUSTRATION OF BRITISH POWER
MILITARY MIGHT IS NOT ENOUGH
LOSING BOSTON, 1776
BUNKER HILL to DORCHESTER HEIGHTS
PHILADELPHIA TAKES HOWE, 1777
TRENTON, 1776
PRINCETON, 1777
SARATOGA, 1777 -- and why we should honor Benedict Arnold
the boot
SPIRIT ISN'T ENOUGH, EITHER
GEORGE WASHINGTON, SLOW LEARNER
DISASTER ON LONG ISLAND, 1776
GERMANTOWN
THE SELF-MADE MAN MAKES HIMSELF ANEW
II. PROFESSIONALIZING THE SOLDIER
MINUTEMEN -- THE MYTH OF THE CITIZEN ARMY
RAGGED REGIMENTS, MASTERLESS MEN
VALLEY FORGE: FORGE OF DISCIPLINE
BARON von STEUBEN GIVES "MECHANICAL COURAGE"
GENERAL CONFUSION GIVES
WAY
NATHANIEL GREENE
HENRY KNOX PROVIDES THE BIG GUNS
MONMOUTH, 1778 -- THE BRITISH
OUTMATCHED
III. UNWINNABLE WAR, 1778-1781
FRENCH COCK, SPICED WITH
OLD SAGE
(Benjamin Franklin does more than neck in Paris)
TORY SANDCASTLES IN THE
SOUTH
the fall of Charleston
YORKTOWN, 1781 --
we get by with a little help from our France
"MY GOD, IT IS ALL OVER!" -- and it was
CODA: THE EAGLE & THE SWORD
WHO SHOULD RULE AT HOME?
PROLOGUE: BEGINNING THE WORLD OVER AGAIN
WHERE DID REFORM IMPULSES
COME FROM?
I. THE POSSIBILITIES OF REFORM
BENJAMIN RUSH: OPTIMIST
SLAVERY -- DRINK -- VIRTUE -- PEACE
PUBLIC EDUCATION
PURGES AND MADNESS
CHURCH AND STATE: DISESTABLISHMENT
PRISON REFORM
II. THE HALF-WON FIGHT: SLAVERY
THE IDEOLOGY OF NATURAL
RIGHTS
THE REVOLUTION AND THE EQUALITY
OF MAN
LORD DUNMORE'S REBELLION
MANUMISSION LAWS DOWN SOUTH
EMANCIPATION UP NORTH
THE TIDE OF FREEDOM EBBS
CODIFYING SLAVE-LAWS
VOTING FOR WHITES ONLY?
NEW LAWS CHAIN THE FREE BLACK
III. A HALF-REVOLUTION IN POLITICS
THE WHOLE IDEA OF CONSTITUTIONS
WHY PUTTING IT DOWN ON PAPER MATTERS
HOW POWER WAS RESHUFFLED
1. weaker governors
2. power goes to the lower house
3. making judges accountable to the people
4. the fear of government power
ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION
BILLS OF RIGHTS
WHO COULD VOTE? WHO COULD
HOLD OFFICE?
CODA: "HOW LONG WILL THEIR VIRTUE LAST?"
A FUNDAMENTAL LAW FOR ALL SEASONS
PROLOGUE: THE ANXIETY ATTACK OF THE 1780S
I. WAS THE REPUBLIC REALLY IN DANGER?
ACHIEVEMENTS -- NORTHWEST ORDINANCE
THE NATIONAL DOMAIN BELONGS TO ALL
A NATIONAL BUREAUCRACY
PAYING OFF THE DEBT
A FRAGILE CONFEDERATION
LOCAL RULE RUN AMOK
1 STATE CAN BLOCK 12
FISCAL CRISIS: "NOT WORTH A CONTINENTAL"
NEW TYRANNIES: LEGISLATIVE MAJORITIES & PROPERTIED
MEN
DRIVING OUT THE TORIES -- IN SPITE OF OUR TREATIES
SELF-MADE STATES
FRANKLIN
KENTUCKY: the next NEW SPAIN?
SHAYS REBELLION, 1786 -- BEGINNING
OF THE END?
II. THE CONSTITUTIONAL EXPERIMENT, 1787
OUR FOUNDERS, WITHOUT WARTS
(or Beards)
GIVE AND TAKE IN PHILADELPHIA
BICAMERALISM
THE 3/5THs COMPROMISE
THE REVOLUTION DEFLECTED
CHECKS AND BALANCES
LIMITED VETO
LIMITED STATE SOVEREIGNTY
JUDICIAL REVIEW HOLDS ELECTED OFFICIALS IN CHECK
DISCORDANT MAJORITIES GRIDLOCK EACH OTHER
The People cannot elect....
-- court
-- president
-- senate
THE REVOLUTION FULFILLED
THE PEOPLE ARE SOVEREIGN
A GOVERNMENT OF EXPRESSED POWERS?
SEPARATION OF POWERS MEANS LIBERTY
FORBIDDEN FRUITS, EVEN FOR FOUNDING FATHERS
WAS THE CONSTITUTION "A COVENANT WITH HELL"?
(Of course. But it was a very good "covenant with Hell.")
III. PROOF OF THE PUDDING
RATIFICATION
FEDERALISTS AND ANTI-FEDERALISTS
"IMPLIED POWERS" AND EXPRESSED ONES
MARSHALL LAW
MARBURY vs. MADISON
CODA: THE BLANK CHECK OF THE CONSTITUTION
WE ARE ALL FEDERALISTS, 1789-1801
PROLOGUE: ROMAN VIRTUES, ROMAN MODELS FOR AMERICA
I. TOWARDS THE CORRUPTED REPUBLIC?
THE FIRST CONGRESS DEFINES
THE NEW POLITICAL ORDER
ALEXANDER HAMILTON
IMPLIED POWERS -- ANY RIGHT TO BUILD POST OFFICES?
ASSUMPTION OF DEBTS -- THE SWAP FOR D. C.
BANK OF THE U.S., 1791
A COMMERCIAL AMERICA?
REPUBLICANS v. FEDERALISTS
JAMES MADISON, THOMAS JEFFERSON
THE FIRST PARTY SYSTEM
beware of "factions"
II. TOWARDS A ROMAN EMPIRE?
NEUTRALITY UNDER DIFFICULTIES,
1793-97
REVOLUTION IN FRANCE
A CLOSE SHAVE FOR LOUIS XVI
CITIZEN GENET TRIES TO DE-NEUTRALIZE US
NEUTRALITY PROCLAMATION
MARTIAL ALEXANDER THE GREAT?
STANDING ARMIES, BANE OF FREE GOVERNMENT
WHISKEY REBELLION, 1794
JAY TREATY, 1795 -- MUCH IS GIVEN
THE ELECTION OF BONNY JOHNNY
ADAMS
III. SAVING THE REPUBLIC, 1797-1801
XYZ PAPERS: "Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute"
ALIEN & SEDITION ACTS, 1798
HAMILTON RAISES AN ARMY
THE KENTUCKY & VIRGINIA RESOLUTIONS RAISE A STORM
THE REPUBLIC SURVIVES
CODA: "EVERY DIFFERENCE OF OPINION IS NOT A DIFFERENCE OF
PRINCIPLE"
THE BANK SURVIVES
LOUISIANA PURCHASE (though
not stipulated in the bond)
THE SHORT DEATH AND LONG
LIFE OF ALEXANDER HAMILTON
THE LOST GARDEN OF THOMAS JEFFERSON, THE
LOST PEACE OF MADISON, 1800-1812
In fancy now beneath the twilight gloom,
Come, let me lead thee o'er
this 'second Rome,'
Where tribunes rule, where dusky Davii bow,
And what was Goose Creek
once is Tiber now;
This embryo capital, where Fancy sees
Squares in morasses, obelisks
in trees;
Which second-sighted seers even now adorn
With shrines unbuilt and
heroes yet unborn.
Though naught but woods, and JEFFERSON they see,
Where streets should run
and sages ought to be.
--Tom Moore
Prologue: SAGE IN CARPET-SLIPPERS
THOMAS JEFFERSON, MAN OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT
THE PARADOX OF SUCCESSFUL PERSONAL GOVERNMENT
I. ZERO-SUM GOVERNMENT MEANS TROUBLE
THE JEFFERSONIAN REVOLUTION
HAMILTONIANISM SUSTAINED
KEEPING THE BANK OF THE U.S.
LOUISIANA PURCHASE, 1803
CUT-RATE GOVERNMENT COSTS PLENTY
TAX CUTS
THE "MOSQUITO FLEET"
WEAKNESS AT THE CENTER
STYMIED PRESIDENTS OF THE VIRGINIA DYNASTY
MADISON, MONROE, AND THE ALL-POWERFUL CABINET
KINGS OF THE HILL: JOHN RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE
II. THE PULL FROM OUTSIDE
HOW LONG CAN MANY REMAIN ONE?
FEDERALISM IN DECAY -- "NEW
ENGLAND RULES & SAVES"
BLOUNT CONSPIRACY
AARON BURR'S DREAM OF A
WESTERN EMPIRE
WAR IN EUROPE STIRS UP TROUBLE, 1803-1812
"FREE SHIPS MAKE FREE GOODS?"
ESSEX RULE, ORDERS IN COUNCIL
MILAN AND BERLIN DECREES BOLSTER NAPOLEON'S BLOCKADE
AMERICANS ARE IMPRESSED
III. WAR, NOT SUBMISSION, 1807-1812
THE FARMER'S FRIEND PROTECTS
COMMERCE
CHESAPEAKE INCIDENT, 1807
EMBARGO -- THE OGRABME'S JAWS ARE TOO WEAK
MR. MADISON'S TRADE WAR,
1809-1812
NON-INTERCOURSE ACT, 1809: no trade with either, until...
MACON BILL #2: trade with both, until....
BONAPARTE PLAYS US FOR SUCKERS
ENGLAND SURRENDERS TOO LATE
CODA: WHY WAR?
"WAR HAWKS" -- "ON TO CANADA"
"FREE TRADE AND SAILORS' RIGHTS"
THE REPUBLIC IN DANGER:
WEAKNESS FORCES US TO SHOW FORCE
A SILLY LITTLE WAR, 1812-15
I. THE FAILURE OF REPUBLICAN GOVERNMENT
UNFIT CONGRESS
BANKRUPT TREASURY
A CABINET OF NINCOMPOOPS
OUTNUMBERED AMERICANS
WHAT OUR ARMY WAS LIKE
WHAT OUR NAVY WAS LIKE
II. THE COMIC-OPERA WAR
FIELD TACTICS: HOW THEY
WORKED
THE CITIZEN-SOLDIER CAN'T
DO THE JOB
FORT MEIGS
INVADING CANADA
GENERAL WINFIELD SCOTT AT LUNDY'S LANE
INVADING AMERICA
ILL-PREPARED AMERICANS MEET THE BRITISH ARMY
BLADENSBURG RACES
BURNING OF WASHINGTON
PROOF THROUGH THE NIGHT:
FT. McHENRY AND THE BATTLE OF
BALTIMORE
III. LIMITED WAR, UNLIMITED GAIN
HOW THE WAR TOUCHED AMERICANS' LIVES
(war? what war?)
PERRY, WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON, CAPT. McDONOUGH
BATTLE OF LAKE ERIE
TIPPECANOE, 1811
HOLDING THE LINE ON LAKE CHAMPLAIN, 1814
ANDREW JACKSON & THE BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS,
1815
A LIMITED PEACE: TREATY OF GHENT, Dec. 24th, 1814
LOSERS
INDIANS -- TECUMSEH'S ALLIANCE
TREATY OF FT. JACKSON
WINNERS: THE NEW NATIONALISM
FLORIDA, 1819
MONROE DOCTRINE, 1823: HANDS OFF
DEATH & TRANSFIGURATION OF FEDERALISM
HARTFORD CONVENTION, 1814-15
CODA: THE NEW-MADE PAST
THE FOURTH OF JULY
LEXINGTON DISCOVERS THE
BATTLE OF LEXINGTON
PATRICK HENRY ASKS FOR LIBERTY
OR DEATH, HAVING ALREADY GOT
BOTH
LETTING LOOSE CREATIVE ENERGIES, 1800-30
PROLOGUE: TIMOTHY DEXTER'S CATS
I. YANKEE KNOW-HOW MAKES THE WORLD AFRESH
ICE AND STONE
FREDERICK TUDOR
GREEK REVIVAL
TINKERS AND INVENTORS
THE AGE OF STEAM: FULTON'S FOLLY
"DO NOT THE ARTS OF CIVILIZATION FOLLOW THE TRAIN?'
FORGING THE FACTORY
MASS PRODUCTION
INTERCHANGEABLE PARTS
ELI WHITNEY, GUNMAKER
NEW PRODUCTION NEEDS NEW PEOPLE
THE LADIES OF LOWELL
"REMEMBER TOM DUNN!"
A MIDDLE-CLASS WOMAN'S PLACE IS IN THE HOME
II. CLIPPER SHIPS AND CAPITAL
CODFISH ARISTOCRACY
PEPPER PRINCES -- AND GINSENG
CLIPPER SHIPS AND WHALERS
LEGAL FICTIONS: JOINT STOCK
COMPANY
GENERAL INCORPORATION
LIMITED LIABILITY
THE RIGHT OF FREE CONTRACT
III. LAISSEZ-FAIRE-Y TALES
GOVERNMENT AID ALL THE WAY
PATENT LAWS
WHO PAID FOR RAILROADS & CANALS?
HENRY CLAY'S "AMERICAN SYSTEM":
WILDCAT BANKS & THE B.U.S.
CODA: LORDS OF THE LOOM
EXPANSIONISM TREADS THE TRAIL OF TEARS
PROLOGUE: LAND ENOUGH!
I. WHY AND HOW THEY WENT WEST
TECHNOLOGY'S ROLE -- THE
MARKET ECONOMY
CYRUS McCORMICK'S REAPER
ELI WHITNEY'S COTTON GIN
ERIE CANAL AND OTHERS
TURNPIKES
ROBERT FULTON'S STEAMBOAT
EDEN ON THE WABASH?
SAFETY VALVE
(name to conjure with: Frederick Jackson Turner)
CHEAP LAND FOR ALL?
HARRISON LAND ACT, 1800
"SQUATTERS"
AN EMPIRE FOR FARMERS
TAKING FLORIDA
II. A DISPOSABLE SOCIETY
NEW CAPITALS
ABUNDANCE MEANS WASTE
PASSENGER PIGEONS
DISPOSABLE PEOPLE
III. UNSETTLING OF THE WEST
GENOCIDE ON A CASH BASIS
FUR TRADE
SMALLPOX FOR SALE
TRIBE vs TRIBE: CREEK vs SEMINOLE
RED STICKS
BATTLE OF HORSESHOE BEND
DEADLY PHILANTHROPY
"CESSIONS"
ALLOTMENTS
TIPPECANOE & SHARP KNIFE TOO
WORCESTER
v. GEORGIA
TRAIL OF TEARS, 1830-38
CODA: HOW THE WEST MAY HAVE MADE THE CIVIL WAR
THE WEST IS THE EAST, NEW-MADE
PROLOGUE: RING-TAILED ROARERS
RALPH WALDO EMERSON SEES
A PURIFYING NATURE
FAREWELL TO CIVILIZATION?
TURNER THESIS: HOW THE FRONTIER
MADE AMERICANS
I. WILD FOLKS IN A WILDER WEST
AMERICANIZING THE LANGUAGE
SCRUMPTIOUS, ABSQUATULATE
TALL TALES
ROGUE'S HARBOR
MOUNTAIN MEN -- SAVAGES
OR BUSINESSMEN?
II. VIOLENCE & DEMOCRACY
INSTITUTIONS IMPERILED
GOUGING
NOT WESTERN
ALONE -- THE CODE DUELLO
WEST = TRUE EQUALITY?
PIONEERING GOVERNMENT INSTITUTIONS
EVERY MAN A COLONEL
ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY
III. THE WORLD THEY LEFT BEHIND
FAMILIES MADE THE WEST
CITIES IN THE FOREST: LEXINGTON AND CHICAGO
BOOSTERS
EASTERN MODELS FOR WESTERN SOCIETY
THE NORTH'S WEST, THE SOUTH'S WEST
STUDY GUIDE FOR EXAMINATION #2 HISTORY 108
Long Essays. One of these will be on Exam #2. Again, you should use TEXTBOOK, DISCUSSION and lectures to answer them, as best you can. What is needed is detail, LOTS of it: name-dropping, dates, events -- and a good enough organization so that the detail clearly fits the question ASKED. Remember Summers's Rule #1: there is NO simple answer. If a statement is made, for you to agree or disagree or comment on, you may find the proper response is more of a "No, BUT..." or a "Yes, BUT..." or a "Well, yes and no," rather than a "You betcha" or a "Rats! Pure guff!"
1. “Look west across the Appalachians – east across the Atlantic, if you would understand the America that came into being at home,” said – well, said nobody at all; I just made it up. But let’s develop that theme: how, from the end of the Revolution to the 1830s, did the way America developed – and the dangers and opportunities it faced – come from the outskirts and outside? And what did it do to us?
2. “Innovation – thinking things out anew: that’s what made America great.” Did it, in the period 1783-1840? And how did the inventors – the innovators – the people who had new ideas and ways of doing things make a different society, a different America from that of George Washington’s day? (This has something to do with technology – railroads and the like; but there can be innovation in IDEAS, or PRINCIPLES. Think it out).
3. “We are all Federalists, we are all Republicans,” said Thomas Jefferson. Let’s take that in a cynical sense that he didn’t: politics – and the government policies that parties put through – DOESN’T MATTER. It had no impact on the way people worked and lived, on their freedoms, on their condition, between 1780 and 1840. How true, untrue, partly true, slightly true, mostly false, partly false, is this?
4. “When you vote, you only change the names of the Cabinet. When you shoot, you pull down governments, inaugurate new epochs, abolish old orders and set up new.” Mr. Undershaft, a character in a George Bernard Shaw play says this. “It is true,” says another character. “But it ought not to be true.” Looking at American history in the half-century or so after independence, and our wars – and politicians, is there something in what Mr. Undershaft says? Is it not violence and the threat of force that really changed America and defined its evolution?
5. Looking at the abundance of land and of our production of goods, an historian called us a “people of plenty.” How did we obtain that abundance – that plenty – in the period 1783-1840? And at what cost – to whom? (Hint: Eli Whitney? Louisiana Purchase? Indians?)
6. Report-card on the republic, 1840: you should give grades for America since 1783, and explain the grades. Subjects to grade: liberty and justice for all. And has the pupil shown signs of improvement over that time-period?
7. It’s 1840. You are chosen to carve four faces on Mt. Mushroar, THE four people who – in what they did or as a symbol of qualities – traits – characteristics – talents that they had – made America what it was, since the end of the Revolution. Who would you pick, and why? (Use imagination on this one, and keep in mind, it doesn’t HAVE to be a specific Great Man, necessarily. If I built this monument in 1660 I might pick Captain John Smith, but I might just as well choose a Native American, because of all the things the various tribes of so-called Indians gave to settlers, – the way they lived, and what they ate. If it were 1865, I might pick Lincoln (probably would) but I might put up there the face of a Union soldier, any one of them, as a stand-in for all soldiers in all our wars, or, for that matter, the face of a black person to represent the contribution for weal and woe of slavery – and other things).
8. “Nobody made America great.” That’s a peculiar statement for
1783-1850; but does it work? (Hint: either it means we weren’t great,
or it means that America wasn’t made great by the doings of Great Men –
but by the many things done by people who were not great, and not in all
cases men – common everyday people – what politicians would call “the bone
and sinew of free society.” You choose how you’re going to understand
this question, but then make the best case you can.
Identifications -- These come in all kinds of shapes and forms, and
this is not a TOTAL list.
But this will give you the feel of it, and assuming you DO know
these, it would be a cold day in
November, that you wouldn't be able to do at least six of the nine
or so i.d.'s on the second
midterm.
Benjamin Rush 3/5 compromise Anti-Federalists
Hamilton Jefferson John Adams
George Washington Assumption Whiskey Rebellion
Shay's Rebellion Alien & Sedition Acts Federalists
Neutrality Proclamation Jay Treaty Northwest Ordinance
XYZ Affair Embargo mosquito fleet
Lewis & Clark Macon Bill #2 Orders in Council
manumission John Marshall Marbury v. Madison
McCulloch v. Maryland Gibbons v. Ogden B. U. S.
Andrew Jackson Martin van Buren Henry Clay
Hartford Convention Daniel Webster John C. Calhoun
Bladensburg Races battle of New Orleans Winfield Scott
"corrupt bargain" Bank War Locofocos
Trail of Tears Tecumseh Tippecanoe
Red Sticks Timothy Dexter Frederic Tudor
limited liability general incorporation Missouri crisis
William Lloyd Garrison Sojourner Truth "gag rule"
Nullification disestablishment Jay-Gardoqui Treaty
James Madison Monroe Doctrine Crevecoeur
Miamis Edmond Genet Louisiana Purchase
Treaty of Greeneville 2d Great Awakening Black Hoof
American System Lowell Erie Canal
Eli Whitney Cyrus McCormick Robert Fulton
Harrison Land Act safety valve theory Fred. Jackson Turner
Short Essays. These are not the only possibilities, but they do afford
some food for
thought and ways of assembling your information.
1. How did the Constitution show the effects of compromise?
2. Did the Constitution fulfill or betray the promise of the Revolution?
3. How did we get into -- why did we get into -- the War of 1812?
4. What did we gain from the War of 1812, if anything?
5. What explains the destruction of the Indian tribes, 1787-1840?
6. What exactly WAS Jeffersonian Democracy, and how far did it go?
7. What created the market economy in this country?
8. Why was the West settled as quickly as it was?
9. Was the West a totally different society from the one it left behind?
10. How did the Revolution and its half-century aftermath change or
fail to change the position of
women in American society?
11. What differences separated Federalists and Democratic-Republicans?
12. What is the significance to his age of Andrew Jackson?
13. How did technology alter the American economy, 1776-1850?
14. How did the rise of industry transform the America that Crevecoeur
had seen and honored?
15. What divided Democrats and Whigs? what issues? where did they stand?
16. Was there a real revolution at home, that came out of the American
Revolution?
THE AGE OF ANDREW JACKSON
PROLOGUE: THE ERA OF GOOD FEELINGS ENDS, 1824-25
HENRY CLAY
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
ANDREW JACKSON
THE "CORRUPT BARGAIN"
I. POLITICS FOR THE PEOPLE
THE HALF-WON REVOLUTION
CAUCUSES MAKE PRESIDENTS
DEFERENCE TO THE F. F. V.'S
NOBODY RUNS -- THEY ONLY STAND FOR OFFICE
PROPERTY QUALIFICATIONS
NOBODY'S SERVANT: THE SOCIAL MEANING OF INDEPENDENCE
CONSTITUTION-WRITING
MANHOOD SUFFRAGE
REAPPORTIONMENT
WHITE MALES ONLY
THE REVOLUTIONARY ALTERNATIVE: DORR WAR
HOW POLITICS REALLY WORKED
TREATING
STUMP SPEECHES
PARADES AND HICKORY POLES
II. JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY
"OLD HICKORY," SYMBOL FOR
AN AGE
MARTIN van BUREN, PROFESSIONAL POLITICIAN
THE MAKING OF THE JACKSONIAN
PARTY SYSTEM
"LIGHTHOUSES OF THE SKIES"
MAYSVILLE VETO
THE BANK WAR: NICK BIDDLE TAKES ON THE PRESIDENT
"THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH GOVERNED"
POWER TO THE PEOPLE'S PRESIDENT
KING VETO
SPOILS SYSTEM
WHIGS AND dEMOCRATS
"BLACK DAN" WEBSTER
PRINCE HARRY CLAY
III. THE POLITICIZATION OF AMERICAN LIFE
"TIPPECANOE AND TYLER TOO,"
1840
VOTER TURNOUTS
PIPE LAYING
PLAQUEMINING
PUDDING TICKETS
THE POLITICAL
CARTOON
CODA: "TRUE DEMOCRACY IS FAITH IN GOD AND MAN BOTH"
FIREBELLS IN THE NIGHT: THE UNION IN
DANGER, 1815-1833
PROLOGUE: MISSOURI CRISIS, MISSOURI COMPROMISE, 1819-21
I. NORTH OF SLAVERY
MAKING A FREE NORTH, 1784-1847
COTTON AND CONSCIENCE
II. FAREWELL TO THE "NECESSARY EVIL"
COLONIZATION SOCIETIES FALTER
IMMEDIATE ABOLITION
WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON
The Liberator set the tone in its first issue on January 1, 1831:
"I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising
as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think or speak, or
write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house
is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell h9im to moderately rescue
his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate
her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; -- but urge me not
to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest --
I will not equivocate -- I will not excuse -- I will not retreat a single
inch -- and I will be heard."
He didn't, and he was.
Garrison had real importance.
Wendell Phillips had greater literary ability, in the antislavery movement;
Parker Pillsbury of New Hampshire had more eloquence. Nathaniel P.
Rogers was sensitive, earnest, charming . But all of them called
themselves Garrisonian abolitionists. They took the back seat to
him, and were proud to. Even when they disagreed or broke from him, they
admired his courage and his clear, crisp voice, setting forth the absolute
evil of slavery, without palliation or excuse.
For Garrison was the first loud voice for immediate abolition.
Immediatism doesn't mean you end slavery tomorrow. There might be a lag-time
-- an apprenticeship period -- a determination to end slavery for all children
born after such and so a date, when they turned 25. But the process
must begin immediately -- it must begin now. That was what immediatism
meant.
It must be abolition without any compensation, Garrisonians
argued. If you believe -- as the colonizationists didn't seem to
-- that slavery wasn't just improper, dangerous, and inefficient, but a
sin in the eyes of the Lord -- if you believed that the holding of slaves
is a rebellion against God, by keeping some men and women from being the
accountable moral agents that all people have to be, since Man is accountable
to God for all he does -- then it follows that slavery is a SIN.
and you don't compensate people for sin. One should not profit from
one's sins, one should repent them. To pay a person for having owned
slaves is as wrong as to pay them to give up adultery or to give up stealing
or lying.
Emancipation, the abolitionists
argued, is more than a mere freedom. It has to be based on the idea
that all people are created equal, regardless of race. The slogan
of the society is, "Am I not a Man and a Brother?" Not just
the South, but the North is guilty of the prejudice that was one of the
results of the sin of slavery. There must be black ministers and
teachers; there must be an end to separate schools for white and black;
there must be a full right to testify in court, the way any white could,
and ride on streetcars the same as any white could, and to vote, the way
any white male could.
In other words, this is a movement that challenges
not just the way the South lives, but the way the North lives. It
is deeply, profoundly radical. We shouldn't be surprised then, that
very few Northerners are abolitionists, and very many Northerners saw the
abolitionists as fanatics, wild people, threats to order and property and
the natural laws set down by God. We shouldn't be surprised that
abolitionists made a lot of noise, but had very few numbers.
And PLEASE KEEP IN MIND that this was true all the way to 1860. Northerners grew more antislavery; but they were not so antislavery as to be abolitionists. Many didn't want any blacks, free or slave, in America, or in their own communities. Many wanted slavery outlawed, but only in the distant future; it was enough in their own time to keep it from spreading further. Most would have let the southern states decide when and how slavery should be extinguished -- and the time table they were willing to allow would stretch all the way past the time when Captain Kirk and the starship Enterprise started its five year mission.
WENDELL PHILLIPS
THE
TAPPANS
A PLACE FOR SOJOURNER TRUTH
This was a movement like few others.
there was room for women to speak and organize and argue and hold official
places -- which, even among reformers, wasn't the custom in those days.
There was room for people regardless of color, to be treated as equal workers
in the good cause: former slaves like Frederick Douglass of Maryland,
and voices for antislavery and feminism like Sojourner Truth.
COME-OUTERS
Antislavery spilled into everything, including many Northern churches.
For most churches were federated nationally. They had southern branches,
and this made them timid in policy, where slavery was concerned.
Fearful of offending, they left slavery to individual conscience -- or
closed their eyes as southern preachers argued that slavery was God-given,
Divinely-inspired and sanctioned, and that black subjection was demanded
by a curse laid upon all Negroes in Genesis.
In such a church, morality
took the back seat, abolitionists cried, and making a good profit was foremost
in the ecclesiastical mind. It was time to make the churches see
their moral responsibility -- or, if they wouldn't, to secede -- to come
out of the church -- and join one that stood for the right values.
So the "come outers" did their best to draw off churchgoers and form new
congregations.
THE SILENCED SOUTH
A MOB IN THE MAIL-ROOM
By the 1830s, antislavery groups couldn't even send literature to southern
planters and slave owners, to persuade them to set their slaves free.
Mobs ransacked the post offices and burnt material, to keep it from being
read -- and for all this, the federal government gave its blessing,
or at least winked an eye.
OPPRESSORS OF THE PRESS
To keep slavery safe and strong, white southerners silenced all the antislavery
newspapers in their midst. Some presses were wrecked, some editors
were killed, others were driven from the states.
Nor was it just the press. University professors
were dismissed for questioning slavery or declaring that they meant to
vote for candidates that slavery's apologists considered to be hostile
to slavery's interests. Open dissidents against slavery were threatened,
challenged to duels, and sometimes killed.
SEE
NO EVIL, SPEAK NO EVIL
MUZZLING THE NORTH
ELIJAH LOVEJOY DIES AT ALTON
GAG RESOLUTION
THE LONELY FIGHT OF "OLD MAN ELOQUENT"
We wage no war, we lift
no arm, we fling no torch within
The firedamps of the quaking mine beneath your soil of sin.
We leave you with your bondmen,
to wrestle while ye can,
With the strong upward tendencies and godlike soul of man!
But for us, and for our
children, the vow which we have given
For freedom and humanity is registered in Heaven:
No slave-hunt in our borders
-- no pirate on our strand --
No fetters in the Bay State -- no slave upon our land!
-- John Greenleaf Whittier
III. "OUR FEDERAL UNION, IT MUST AND SHALL BE PRESERVED"
MARSHALL LAW
BINDING THE STRANDS OF FEDERAL POWER TOGETHER
1. can federal courts overturn state courts?
2. can federal law trump state law?
3. can Maryland tax a national bank?
ONE AND INSEPARABLE?
HARTFORD CONVENTION, 1814-15
the significant thing that NOBODY said
DANIEL WEBSTER: "LIBERTY
AND UNION...."
NULLIFICATION FOLLIES, 1828-183
CALHOUN -- THE CAST-IRON MAN FORGED ANEW
FLORIDE AND FLORIDA MAKE A PRESIDENT
TARIFF OF ABOMINATIONS, 1828
THE NULLIFICATION ORDINANCE, 1832
BLUE COCKADES IN CHARLESTON
ANDREW
JACKSON HOLDS THE LINE, 1832-33
... and why this is the moment when secession came to mean WAR
CODA: COMPROMISE, THE EVER ELUSIVE
THE FIRE NEXT TIME?
THE BENEVOLENT EMPIRE RULES AND SAVES
I. GOD'S CHOSEN PEOPLE ON THE SKIDS?
DISESTABLISHMENT
VOLUNTARISM
UNITARIANS, UNIVERSALISTS AND DEISTS
BAD TOM PAINE, MAD TOM JEFFERSON
IMMORALITY RUN RIOT?
II. REVIVALISM, 1800-60
CAMP MEETINGS AND THE NEW
CALVINISM
SECOND GREAT AWAKENING
CANE RIDGE
BURNT-OVER DISTRICT
CIRCUIT RIDERS AND TUB-THUMPERS
LYMAN BEECHER
CHARLES GRANDISON FINNEY
THE NEW IMPORTANCE OF FREE WILL
PERFECTIONISM
THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS: MILLER'S MILLENNIUM
UTOPIAS IN THE WILDERNESS
SHAKERTOWN
DESERET
THE BENEVOLENT EMPIRE WINS THE WEST
DENOMINATIONALISM
III. PIETY AND DISCIPLINE: THE SOCIAL EFFECTS OF THE AWAKENING
SOCIAL CONTROL
SABBATARIANISM
BLUE LAWS
SCHOOLS FOR VIRTUE: RAISING GOOD CHARACTERS
MORALITY IN POLITICS
THE POWER OF PRAYING WOMEN: CINCINNATI, 1874
POPISH PLOTS: MARIA MONK'S HORRID TALES
CHARLESTOWN, 1834
KNOW-NOTHINGS, 1850S
CODA: PIETY, TOLERANCE & BEHAVIOR
REFORMERS AND OTHER LUNATICS
PROLOGUE: ALL AGES ARE AGES OF REFORM
PERFECTIONISM AND DEMOCRACY
LUCRETIA MOTT'S AMERICA
I. ALL THINGS POSSIBLE
WHO WERE THE REFORMERS?
MORALITY IS WOMEN'S BUSINESS
NOTHING UNTOUCHED: OBERLIN
SYLVESTER GRAHAM
INTERLOCKING DIRECTORATES OF REFORM
ENGLISH MODELS
GREELEY'S TRIBUNE
II. UPLIFTERS
HORACE MANN
SAMUEL GRIDLEY HOWE
THOMAS GALLAUDET
DOROTHEA DIX OPENS THE MADHOUSE DOOR
DEMON RUM -- T.TOTALERS
EXPLODING DRUNKS
COLD WATER ARMY
TURNING MORALS INTO MANDATES -- THE MAINE LAW
III. EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL
EVERY MAN A LAWYER
"AM i NOT A WOMAN AND A
SISTER?"
THE BLACKWELLS
ELIZABETH CADY STANTON AT SENECA FALLS
BLACK RIGHTS: THE MOB &
THE MINSTREL SHOW
CHARLES SUMNER AND THE SCHOOLS OF BOSTON
HERRENVOLK DEMOCRACY
CODA: THE INESCAPABLE LINK
THAT TROUBLESOME PROPERTY: SLAVERY
Of all that Orient lands can vaunt
Of marvels with our own
competing,
The strangest is the hashish plant
And what will follow on
its eating.
..................
Such scenes that Eastern plant awakes!
But we have one ordained
to beat it:
The hashish of the West, which makes
Or fools or knaves of all
who eat it.
The preacher eats and straight appears
His Bible in a new translation:
Its angels, Negro-overseers
And Heaven itself a snug
plantation!
The man of peace about whose dreams
The sweet millennial angels
cluster,
Tastes the mad weed and plots and schemes,
A raving Cuban filibuster!
The judge partakes, and sits ere long
Upon his bench a railing
blackguard,
Decides offhand that right is wrong
And reads the Ten Commandments
backward.
O, potent plant! So rare a taste
Has never Turk or Gentoo
gotten!
The hempen Hashish of the East
Is powerless to our western
cotton!
-- John Greenleaf Whittier
I. THREE MYTHS ABOUT THE "OLD SOUTH"
ONE SOUTH, WELL-AGED?
PLANTERS AND PO' WHITES?
COTTON IS KING?
II. RIGHTS OF MAN REVISED
PATERNALIST IDEAL
"CHATTELS PERSONAL" -- ECONOMIC
REALITIES
"Runaway -- a negro fellow named Dick -- has many scars on his back from
being whipped."
ad., Vicksburg Sentinel, August 22, 1837
""Runaway, a negro woman and two children; a few days before she went off,
I burnt her with a hot iron
on the left side of her face, I tried to make the letter M."
-- Micajah Ricks, Raleigh Standard, July 18, 1838
"One hundred dollars reward
for a negro fellow Pompey, 40 years old, he is branded on the left jaw."
-- R. P. Carney, Mobile Register, December 22, 1832
" Ran away. Sam. He was shot
a short time since, through the hand, and has several shots in his left
arm
and side."
-- O. W. :Lains, Helena Journal, June 1, 1833
"We would remind those who
deprecate and sympathize with Negro slavery that his slavery here ...
Christianizes, protects, supports, and civilizes him; that it governs
him far better than free laborers at the
North are governed."
-- George Fitzhugh, SOCIOLOGY FOR THE SOUTH
UPKEEP
MORTALITY
THE OWNER'S MANUAL: SLAVERY UNDER LAW
SLAVES WITHOUT MASTERS
MASTERS WITHOUT SLAVES: WHY YEOMEN FAVORED SLAVERY
III. THE WORLD THE SLAVES MADE
UNGRATEFUL "CHILDREN"
RESISTANCE: NAT TURNER,
1831
FLIGHT: HARRIET TUBMAN
THIEVES, LIARS AND OTHER SURVIVORS
THE LORD OF MOSES REMEMBERS
FOLK-RELIGION
THE FAMILY SURVIVES
IV. MAKING OF THE MASTER-CLASS
POWER TO THE PLANTER: LEGISLATURES
STATE BANKS
THE FIELD OF HONOR -- CODE
OF THE DUEL
"LEAVE WOMEN AND NEGROES
ALONE"
THE RIGHT TO PROTECTION
THE OBLIGATION TO OBEY
THE BELLE AND THE BRUTE
"BLESS ALL MY CHILDREN, WHITE AND BLACK...."
DETESTABLE DEMOCRACY
FITZHUGH, CANNIBALS ALL
FREEDOM -- IS IT TOO GOOD FOR WHITES, EITHER?
"Liberty is an evil which government is intended to correct. This
is
the sole object
of government."
"With thinking men, the question can never arise: Who ought to be
free?
Because no one ought to be free. All government is slavery. The proper
subject of investigation
for philosophers and philanthroipists is, "is the
existing mode
of government adapted to the wants of its subjects?"
"It is, we believe, conceded on all hands that men are not born physically,
morally, or
intellectually equal -- some are males, some females, some from
birth, large,
strong, and healthy, others weak, small and sickly -- some are
naturally amiable,
others prone to all kinds of wickednesses -- some brave,
others timid.
Their natural inequalities beget inequalities of rights....
"Men are not born entitled to equal rights! It would be far nearer
the truth
to say that
'some were born with saddles on their backs, and others booted and
spurred to ride
them' -- and the riding does them good. They need the reins, the
bit, and the
spur.
"... Life and liberty are not 'inalienable'; they have been sold in all
countries
and in all ages,
and must be sold so long as human nature lasts."
-- George Fitzhugh, SOCIOLOGY FOR THE SOUTH
THE SOUTH SPREADS, BUT THE NORTH GROWS
I. THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING INDUSTRY
MILLS, MINES, AND MUDSILLS
TREDEGAR IRON WORKS
WHY THE SOUTH LAGGED
SLAVERY?
NO GENTLEMEN IN TRADE
CANES FROM CONNECTICUT
KING COTTON'S
DOMAIN
ILL FARES THE LAND
AGRICULTURAL REFORM
EXPANSION BECOMES A WAY OF LIFE
STEAMBOATS OVER STEEL RAILS
II. NEW AMERICANS IN A NEW WEST
POTATO FAMINE, FORTY-EIGHTERS
ACROSS THE RHINE -- IN CINCINNATI
RAILROADS FORGE A
NORTHERN WEST
LaCROSSE & MILWAUKEE RR
ILLINOIS YANKEES: STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS
A HOMESTEAD ACT FOR A YANKEE PRAIRIE?
WHOSE MISSOURI? WHOSE MARYLAND?
III. LONE STAR AND BEAR FLAG
MOSES AUSTIN'S DREAM
AN EXPERIMENT SMOTHERED IN COTTON
"VICTORY OR DEATH" AT THE ALAMO
SAN JACINTO, 1836
THE TEXAS REPUBLIC IN THE
MARRIAGE-MARKET
REVOLUTION BY CONESTOGA
WAGONS
THE OREGON TRAIL
GOLD FEVER IN CALIFORNIA: THE ARGONAUTS
CODA: THE BALANCE SHEET FOR MANIFEST DESTINY, 1850
FROM THE HALLS OF MONTEZUMA TO THE
CONTINENTAL DIVIDE
PROLOGUE: MANIFEST DESTINY AT FLOODTIDE
"54-40 OR FIGHT!"
JAMES KNOX POLK
I. WAR WITH MEXICO
HOW MUCH IS "ALL tEXAS"?
RIO GRANDE -- NUECES
"THAT LYING PREAMBLE"
ROUGH & READY'S WAR, 1846-48
WHY WE WON
ZACHARY TAYLOR
WINFIELD SCOTT
NICHOLAS TRIST'S TREATY OF GUADELOUPE-HIDALGO
II. FREE SOIL
ANTISLAVERY GOES POLITICAL
LIBERTY PARTY, 1840, 1844
CONSCIENCE WHIGS, BARNBURNER DEMOCRATS
THE "HALE" STORM
SALMON P. CHASE, ATTORNEY-GENERAL FOR RUNAWAY NEGROES
WILMOT PROVISO, 1847
FREE SOILERS MAKE A PRESIDENT, 1848
III. ONE LAST COMPROMISE, 1850
CRISIS OVER CALIFORNIA
HENRY CLAY'S OMNIBUS
WEBSTER'S 7TH OF MARCH SPEECH
So
fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn
Which once he wore!
The glory from his grey hairs gone
Forever more!
Revile him not; the Tempter hath
A snare for all;
And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath,
Befit his fall!
..........
All else is gone. From those great eyes
The soul has fled;
When faith is lost, when honor dies,
The man is dead!
Then, pay the reverence of old days
To his dead fame;
Walk backward, with averted gaze,
And hide the shame!
-- John Greenleaf Whittier
A Wahlgrenote: why would anybody say this of Daniel Webster?
What had he done?
SEWARD'S "HIGHER LAW"
A NEW FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW
ELECTION OF 1852
CODA: "THE SOUTH, THE POOR SOUTH...."
AND THE WAR CAME, 1854-61
PROLOGUE: A CANE FOR SENATOR SUMNER, 1856
I. BLEEDING KANSAS, HEMHORRAGING UNION
FRANKLIN PIERCE COMES TO ... POWER???
NOBODY SEEMS TO BE IN CHARGE, 1853
DOUGLAS'S DREAM
"SQUATTER SOVEREIGNTY"
KANSAS-NEBRASKA ACT, 1854
"A H-L OF A STORM, 1854-57
REPUBLICAN PARTY ARISES
BORDER RUFFIANS AND BEECHER'S BIBLES
FREE STATE MEN
"THE CRIME AGAINST KANSAS"
A BUCK, WITHOUT ANY CHANGE, 1856
JAMES BUCHANAN
BUCHANAN 'SETTLES" THE CRISIS
DRED SCOTT DECISION
LECOMPTON CONSTITUTION, 1857
"I made James Buchanan, and by G-d I will unmake him"
II. A HOUSE DIVIDED, 1857-1860
SLAVE POWER CONSPIRACY
A FEDERAL SLAVE-CODE?
"DOUGHFACES"
THE ANTISLAVERY CONSTITUTION
PERSONAL LIBERTY LAWS
DEMOCRATS DIVIDE, 1860
ABE LINCOLN, THE UNION-SPLITTER
III. THE FAILED REVOLUTION, 1860-61
JOHN BROWN'S RAID, 1859
IMMEDIATE SECESSION, COOPERATIONISTS
WHY THE SOUTH WAS DIVIDED
SAM HOUSTON, PARSON BROWNLOW
MAJOR ANDERSON AT FORT SUMTER
CODA: THE GUN THAT ENDS THE GAME, APRIL 12th, 1861
GENERAL STUPIDITY COMMANDS THE TROOPS,
1861-1865
PROLOGUE: WELCOME, WAR!
I. RICHMOND IS A HARD ROAD TO TRAVEL
SCOTT'S ANACONDA -- SLOW & STEADY WINS
McCLELLAN: THE LITTLE GENERAL THAT COULDN'T
THE VIRGINIA MENTALITY
HOW THE WEST WAS WON
VICKSBURG, 1863
SHERMAN'S MARCH TO THE SEA
THE CAVALIER AND THE MACHINE
LEE'S IMPROVISED WAR
GRANT'S ORGANIZED WAR
II. AMERICA GOES TO MILITARY SCHOOL
THE PEOPLE'S WAR
CLARA BARTON
DESERTING FOR THE FOLKS BACK HOME
BULL RUN, 1861 -- PLAY WAR
Prog'ress -- n.,
IMPROVED MEANS OF KILLING
BAYONETS, CAVALRY
THE RIFLE AND MINIE BALL CHANGE ALL
RALLY 'ROUND THE FLAG, BOYS,
OR ELSE -- THE DRAFT
NEW TOYS, OLD RULES
III. WHEN THIS CRUEL WAR IS OVER
HARDTACK, SHODDY, AND MUD
NOT WAR, BUT MURDER
FREDRICKSBURG, 1862
The increasing moonlight
drifts across my bed,
And on the churchyard by
the road, I know
It falls as white and noiselessly
as snow....
'Twas such a night two weary
summers fled;
The stars, as now, were
waning overhead.
Listen! Again the
shrill-lipped bugles blow
Where the swift currents
of the river flow
Past Fredricksburg;
far off the heavens are red
With sudden conflagration;
on yon height,
Linstock in hand, the gunners
hold their breath;
A signal rocket pierces
the dense night,
Flings its spent stars upon
the town beneath:
Hark! -- the artillery
massing on the right,
Hark! -- the black squadrons
wheeling down to Death.
-- Thomas Bailey Aldrich, "Fredricksburg"
"Here lay one without a head, there one without legs, yonder a head and
legs
without a trunk,
everywhere horrible expressions -- fear, rage, madness,
torture; lying
in pools of blood, lying with heads half-buried in mud, with
fragments of
shell sticking in oozing brain, with bullet-holes all over the puffed
limbs."
-- eyewitness, touring the battlefield at Fredricksburg as the
shooting stopped
Ponder the following:
1. How does memory change -- sweeten -- or gussy up -- the realities of
war?
2. Do those guys of you with the usual fantasy-lives STILL want to enlist
in the Civil War, given the chance?
GETTYSBURG, 1863
THE BUTCHER'S
BILL
Add up the following:
1. Dead in Revolutionary War
+ 2. Dead in War of 1812
+ 3. Dead in Mexican War
+ 4. Dead in Spanish-American War
+ 5. American dead in World War I
+ 6. American dead in World War
II up through Normandy beach
------------------------------------------------------------------------_
TOTAL: as many as
the Civil War
CODA: WHAT PRICE VICTORY?
SLAVERY'S FALL
Prologue: "GLORY TO GOD!"
CRITTENDEN RESOLUTION
I. "CONTRABANDS"
THE ECONOMIC IMPACT OF SLAVERY
REBEL SLAVEHOLDERS
ROBERT SMALLS
STEALS AWAY
The issue: is your enemy's weapon private property?
Do you have to ask him, before you take it away from him?
The other issue: what do you do if the "property" has ideas of its own?
BENJAMIN F. BUTLER AT FORTRESS MONROE
FREMONT'S DECREE -- DAVID HUNTER'S DECLARATION
CONGRESS SLOUCHES TOWARDS EMANCIPATION
CONFISCATION ACT #2
MR. LINCOLN'S DILLEMMA
COMPENSATION OR COLONIZATION?
"PRAYER OF TWENTY MILLIONS"
II. EMANCIPATION
THE WILL OF THE LORD SPEAKS
THROUGH THE DEAD
EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION
WE ARE COMING, FATHER ABRAHAM
DRAFT RIOT BLUES
54TH MASSACHUSETTS
SECOND-CLASS PAY FOR FIRST-CLASS SOLDIERS
FORT WAGNER
FORT PILLOW
"THAT FROM THESE HONORED
DEAD WE TAKE INCREASED DEVOTION"
CODA: TOWARDS THE THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT
We wait beneath the furnace blast
The pangs of transformation.
Not painlessly doth God recast
And mold anew the nation.
Hot burns the fire where wrongs expire;
Nor spares the hand that from the land
Uproots the ancient evil.
In vain the bells of war shall ring
Of triumphs and revenges;
While still is spared the evil thing
That severs and estranges.
But blest the ear
That yet shall hear
The jubilant bell
That rings the knell
Of slavery forever!
-- John Greenleaf Whittier
A MORE PERFECT UNION: 1865
FINAL EXAMINATION STUDY GUIDE
SHORT ESSAY TOPICS (You'll do two, for 20% total)
Which gets chosen is up to me, and I may not choose any
of them. I might even choose a picture or two, and ask you to write
about them: it's posssssssible. But they are the kind of thing to expect
from a short essay.
1. Was slavery an economic or paternalist relationship?
2. What was Manifest Destiny? How did it work?
3. Why did the United States win the Civil War?
4. How did we get into a Civil War?
5. Why emancipation?
6. How did the antislavery movement change and become big-time?
7. What was the Benevolent Empire, and what did it do?
8. Were you here the day before Thanksgiving? If so, try to imagine
what I would ask.
9. Was the Constitution a sell-out of our Revolution?
10. What made the Civil War so terrible and bloody? How did the generals
respond to it?
11. What was the class structure of the Old South like? simply
poor whites and planters?
12. How did slaves make a culture of their own?
13. What did reform cover, in the 1800s? Why did the South shun it?
14. Was the West a totally new civilization?
15. What issues divided Jacksonian Democrats from Whigs?
16. How did the market economy come into being?
17. "We are all Federalists; we are all Republicans." What was Jefferson
talking about? Was he
right?
LONG ESSAY QUESTIONS. Below, notice a bunch of essay questions.
I will choose only
ONE for you to do on the final (fifty percent of the grade on that
exam, and one hour of your time)
with good detail and better organization. Remember: SIMPLE ANSWERS
DO NOT EXIST,
and I do NOT want an all-one-way or all-the-other-way answer to complicated
topics.
1. "A republic -- if you can keep it." So said Benjamin Franklin in 1787, at the end of the constitutional convention. It's 1861 -- Report card time. How well have Americans fulfilled those high-sounding promises and expectations for a country of the people, by the people, for the people?
2. "America: a republic the generals made great and that the politicians
lost." Take this quote,
which I've made up. Looking back since 1812 and as far up as 1865,
discuss how true or false
this idea is. (Mind, it has two pretty obvious assumptions: war
and force made us better off with
no bad side-effects, politics only did us damage. You gonna go along
with that?)
3. "The way institutions, politics and culture developed, the
Civil War was a sure thing by 1850;
and for the same reasons, a Union victory was a safe bet before the
fighting began." That so?
Discuss this statement, and how much - as well as how little -- truth
there is in it, from what you
know from this course.
4. We have talked of morality and conscience throughout this course,
and how it shaped policy
(that is, what government did), what issues folks talked about, how
their own day-to-day behavior
changed or was changed for them. Pull it all together and say
what effect morality and conscience
had on American action from 1775 to 1865.
5. "The Americans have little faith. They rely on the power
of a dollar; they are deaf to a
sentiment." So said Ralph Waldo Emerson. Take America, 1815-1865.
How well or badly does
this explain the course of our history?
6. "The reason why the Union broke down in 1861 is simple," Major Zimbo
Brownshirt explains.
"Since Washington's time, Americans have had too much freedom.
Freedom to grab, freedom to
do as they please. Freedom means anarchy -- disrespect for order.
What we see by 1861 is the
natural result." How far and how little was America's ailment
(not just in terms of issues leading to
the Civil War) too much freedom, too little power at the center?
7. "Men are not 'born entitled to equal rights'! ... Some were
born with saddles on their backs,
and others booted and spurred to ride them -- and the riding does them
good." George Fitzhugh,
one of slavery's defenders, said this. Taking American history from
1780 or so to 1865, how far
or how little truth was there in his larger points, that equality of
rights and of condition weren't the
American way, and that one set dominating others was the way America
became great,
prosperous, and for those on top, free?
8. When we want to explain the collapse of the Union and the way the
Civil War turned out -- and
we can start as early as the 1780s, or with the Trail of Tears, or
with the Missouri Compromise --
editor Horace Greeley's words: "Go west, young man!" are apt.
How far -- and perhaps how
little -- did the west and the frontier explain the crisis of 1861-65?
9. YOU will invent five people -- any five. Each of them must
be sharply different from the
others. Each must be born between 1780 and 1820 -- and all must
be alive in 1865. They will
have kids, perhaps, grandkids possibly. They can be any gender, any
race. But they must be
DIVERSE -- because diversity is one of the basic facts of what it means
to be American in
19th-century America. Using each of these people, and giving
their life stories, you will bring in as
many facts, events, trends about history from Jefferson's time to Lincoln's
as you can.
10. "We built what we thought was a republic in the 1770s, a torch to
light an unfree world to
liberty," an American from the 1860s laments, "and it's turned into
an empire -- conquering,
colonizing, putting people to the sword, silencing dissent, stifling
freedom and making war." Is
there a case for this? And was the picture so utterly bleak as
all that?
Sample Identifications
Of course, these aren't all the possibilities. But you'd be crazy NOT
to know the ones below
Stephen A. Douglas James Buchanan doughfaces
colonization movement
come-outers Wendell Phillips
William Lloyd Garrison mosquito fleet Winfield Scott
Missouri Compromise Gettysburg
Emancipation Proclamation
Compromise of 1850 nullification
54-40 or fight! Embargo "contrabands"
American System
James Madison Henry Clay
John C. Calhoun Federalists
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
impressment Know Nothings
Daniel Webster Andrew Jackson Trail of Tears
Gag resolution Whigs
Wilmot Proviso Fugitive Slave Law
Dred Scott case Slave Power
Ft. Sumter Cyrus McCormick
Dorothea Dix
Bull Run John Brown
Monroe Doctrine Adams-Onis Treaty
Alexander Hamilton
exploding drunks
3/5 compromise
John Marshall minie ball
Whiskey Rebellion Jay Treaty
Erie Canal
"safety valve"
John Quincy Adams Bill of Rights
"free soil" Robert E. Lee Anaconda
Hartford Convention
Louisiana Purchase Frederick Douglass
Samuel Gridley Howe
Zachary Taylor Transcendentalism
Robert Owen Maine Law Eli Whitney
Nat Turner Sam Houston
Brigham Young Bleeding Kansas
Kansas-Nebraska Act 13th Amendment
Benevolent Empire Cane Ridge Miller's millennium
paternalist myth
battle of New Orleans
Bladensburg Races Bank War spoils system