Describe the social, cultural, economic, and political context.

Please answer each questions by each tool requirement. And please not be thin for each question’s answer.

There are those requirements for each question.

Tool 1. Understand the Past

In order to make use of the past you must be able to characterize, contextualize, and elaborate historical periods. This process allows you to �set the stage� in which people of the past experienced the world. It gives you a sense of the historical contexts that influenced how the past played out. It gives you an understanding of how we are all influenced by the social environment in which we live..

In this class you are provided with broad overview essays that set out the historical context and important features that give the period its historical substance. By analyzing the overview essays you should be able to create a clear picture in your own mind of the period in question as a coherent whole. While this is somewhat of an artificial conceptualization, it gives you a way to remember the context in which the past played out. You should review each essay until you understand the author�s view of the period.

STANDARDS

To meet the standard for this tool the work must:

� Summarize the distinctive nature and general contours of the period.

� Describe the social, cultural, economic, and political context.

� Note people, ideas, movements, events, and other factors that played out in the period.

� Be sufficiently developed to convey understanding of the past.

To exceed the standard for this tool the work must meet the criteria above and do one or more of the following:

� Show a thoughtful and complex understanding of the past.

� Be well-developed. Go beyond a basic level of elaboration.

Example of an explanation to show understanding of a historical period, based on a secondary source essay.

In the half century after the end of Reconstruction, the United States became increasingly modern in its technology, economy, and politics. It was a �Gilded Age� in which the country�s �outward wealth and dazzle� contrasted with �inner corruption and poverty,� according to historian Richard White. The country set about integrating the West through government action intended to develop the vast agricultural potential of the region while dealing with the Indians through suppression and integration. White notes that this was not only a tragedy for the plains Indians, but it was a �paradox� in which farmers became more productive in the new vast lands of the West, but also saw their share of the economy decline over the period. However, for White, the �greatest changes of the period� were the rise of industry, the growth of wage labor, and urbanization. The economy reflected these changes such that by the turn of the century the United States produced half of the world�s industrial output. The industrial growth was accompanied by social changes as immigrants came from abroad and industrial workers flocked to the cities in search of jobs. Immigrants began to give the country its diverse and cosmopolitan character as they formed enclaves in many cities, but they also experienced discrimination and restriction. Americans found jobs in the growing factories, but faced a grim existence as the work often was unhealthful and dangerous. Reformers set out to resolve the country�s problems as growing labor organization clashed with the growing power of industrial capital. Historical factors that Rodgers sets out as important include:

-The end of Reconstruction enshrined repression and segregation in the South for African Americans.

-The Dawes Act of 1887 redistributed western lands from Indians to white Americans.

-Chinese Exclusion Act of 1883 represented growing conflict between �native� Americans and new immigrants.

-Railroads increased to 161,000 miles, consumed massive quantities of steel, and employed hundreds of thousands.

-Workers reacted against the grim conditions of industrial work in strikes such as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877

-While industrial growth continued, it was uneven and did not spread across all sectors of the economy.

-Horatio Alger wrote novels that tried to reconcile the new economy with the old values of individualism.

-Groups such as the �antimonopolists� and Populists emerged to oppose the growing aggregation of business.

-Thomas Edison was a symbol of the new focus on technology and invention.

-John D. Rockefeller represented the vast wealth and growing power of business conglomerates.

-The country�s new power manifested itself in the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Tool 2. Understand Sources

Understanding what people believe or felt about the past , or experienced themselves in the past, helps us recognize the contingent nature of history. Everything we know about the past is mediated by those who have studied it or lived in it. There are two types of sources:

a. Secondary Sources: Our understanding of the past is contingent upon the interpretations of historians who have examined the past record and synthesized the evidence into an essay or some other output that reflects their view. Secondary sources are the accounts produced by historians or other scholars, generally long after the events have taken place. You must be able to clearly identify, summarize, and express their viewpoint. This is not the author�s subject or topic, but what he or she believes about the topic. What is his or her claim about the topic? Generally you can summarize this viewpoint in much the same form as you would express your own argument in a thesis or premise, as shown in Rule 3a below�being sure to clearly identify the author or authors.

STANDARDS FOR Tool 2a

To meet the standard for this tool the work must:

� Show a basic understanding of the author�s basic viewpoint.

To exceed the standard for this tool the work must meet the criteria above and do one or more of the following:

� Clearly and precisely identify, summarize, and express the author�s viewpoint.

b. Primary Sources: Our understanding of the past is based largely on the original sources of those who lived at the time in question. Primary sources are original letters, photographs, works of art, interviews, printed accounts, official records, statistics, or other material produced at the time to which they refer or by those who witnessed the events of the time. Primary sources are often autobiographies or memoirs produced by people who lived the events they describe, even when they were created later. To understand a primary source you must both analyze it and evaluate its value as evidence. You must be able to read and penetrate the language of people who may not speak as you do. What do they mean? What is their viewpoint? How do the times in which they were produced impact the creation of the source? How do they relate to the present day? What questions about history and about the present day can you answer using this source?

STANDARDS FOR Tool 2b

To meet the standard for this tool the work must:

� Properly identify and cite the source(s).

� Generally summarize and express the meaning of the source(s).

To exceed the standard for this tool the work must meet the criteria above and do one or more of the following:

� Show a clear sense of the historical context for the source(s).

� Indicates the questions about history and the present day can this source address.

Example of a brief coherent examination of a primary source.

Thomas Edison linked his invention �factory� to the need of the new business enterprises of the time. In an 1877 letter to the head of Western Union Telegraph, Edison asked the company for $40,000 that would allow for the creation of �unusual facilities� for �perfecting any kind of Telegraphic invention.� Clearly, Edison reflected a time when the country was seeking to advance itself technologically. While he aims to secure funding for his work, he shows that he has the entrepreneurial spirit that characterized the spirit of the late-nineteenth century. His use of the term �factory� gives the source its tie to the industrial revolution that was then underway in the United States, and, consequently, this source is useful in understanding the industrial expansion of the times. It also addresses the way society approaches technology today, not only as a tool, but as a way to achieve wealth and fame. Edison, like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and other entrepreneurs advanced technology, built corporations, and made millions.

Tool 3. Use History

As noted in the introduction, history is something that we can use to access and take advantage of the vast database of useful information that is the best. But it must be done properly with focus, coherence, and effectively-applied evidence.

a. Be focused and coherent. The first few sentences of any written work constitute your thesis or main premise that introduces or summarizes the work. It may characterize a historical period, set up a paragraph topic, or summarize a larger historical essay. It represents your main argument, explanation, or interpretation. The first few sentences is what gives your work coherence, or holds it together. The thesis should be clear, focused, and complex. Avoid beginning with general, vague, or superficial statements. Short declarative sentences will often be insufficient to summarize complex topics. Avoid writing such that it sounds like you are answering a question. Write as though the work would stand alone without reference to vague descriptors such as �this chapter� or �these sources.� If you are responding to a question, don’t repeat the assumptions or terms of the question, but summarize the overall explanation that will be developed in the body of the paragraph or essay. The opening statement for a paragraph may require only a sentence, while an essay may need three or four sentences. A typical thesis for this course should be 30 to 75 words, depending upon the writing task.

STANDARDS

To meet the standard for this tool the work must:

� Begin with a statement that is clear and focused.

� Generally hold together and flow directly from point to point.

To exceed the standard for this tool the work must meet the criteria above and do one or more of the following:

� Begin with a statement that is complex.

� Show thoughtfulness, insight, and/or originality.

Here is an example of a premise or thesis:

Although there was a great disparity between rich and poor, the technological innovations of the late- nineteenth century thrust the United States into the age of industry, urban life, and modernity. Invention and scientific advances came to be applied to industrial work, spawning new approaches, economic expansion, and innovative solutions to factory problems.

b. Use Evidence: Generally, history is based on evidence. You will use this information from and about the past to make a case, defend a claim, support an argument, illustrate an explanation. Evidence Selection: You must always be careful to choose evidence that supports the argument or interpretation that you expressed in your thesis. Its connection to the thesis must be made clear to the reader. When directed to do so in this class you should use the provided sources directly and explicitly. You should use both primary and secondary sources to give clarity and richness in the support for your view. While both primary and secondary sources are essential and effective, you should look for opportunities to use primary sources as they are the basis for all good historical interpretation. Evidence Identification and Citation: Evidence that effectively supports the thesis must be identified and properly cited. You must clearly identify the sources you use as part of a sentence, as shown in the examples below. At a minimum you should cite the author, give some clear time reference, and add other identifying points added as necessary. When making a second reference to an author always use his or her last name. Parenthetic citations or footnotes are not required. Evidence Quotation: Quotations from sources, integrated carefully within your own sentences, are essential for good historical writing. Quotations are effective tools for conveying authority and power to your writing. The quotation should be used to strengthen YOUR explanation, analysis, or interpretation, but should not be used to convey undigested and unprocessed information to the reader. In their text A Sequence for Academic Writing, Behrens, Rosen, and Beedles note that you should use quotations when the source�s language is memorable and adds �liveliness� to your writing, or when you want �a source to lend authority and credibility to your own writing.� When using a quotation, incorporate it smoothly into your own stream of language, rather than merely dropping it in without an introduction or signal phrase. See the note on historical evidence above for methods of citing quotations. While ample quotation can make for a strong paper, you should keep them short, never more than twenty-five words. The assertion, paragraph, or paper should contain primarily your own words, so you should use only memorable, illustrative, or poignant words or phrases of your source. A few words or a phrase is generally sufficient to convey your point.

STANDARDS

To meet the standard for this tool the work must:

� Select evidence that directly and clearly supports the argument or interpretation.

� Identify sources sufficiently and as part of sentences.

� Provide the author, type, and a time reference, if available.

� Use short quotations.

� Use sufficient evidence to support the thesis. (For longer works.)

� Draw on mostly primary and some secondary sources. (For longer works.)

To exceed the standard for this tool the work must meet the criteria above and do one or more of the following:

� Use substantial evidence to support the thesis. (For longer works.)

� Blend evidence smoothly throughout the work. (For longer works.)

Examples of points of evidence, one for a secondary source and one for a primary source:

–In a 2004 essay, historian Paul Israel notes that Thomas Edison was key to the �technologies we associate with our modern, technological society.� Edison founded basic industries, according to Israel, but his �most important contribution was a new method of invention� that became the first industrial research laboratory.

–Thomas Edison linked his invention �factory� to the need of the new business enterprises of the time. In an 1877 letter to the head of Western Union Telegraph, Edison asked the company for $40,000 that would allow for the creation of �unusual facilities� for �perfecting any kind of Telegraphic invention.�

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Tool 4: Show Empathy

By developing an appreciation of how others see, and saw, the world, we gain range, depth, and openness in our thinking. You should be able to explain the lived experiences, decisions, and actions of people in a specific historical and social context. And you should be able to demonstrate understanding of how people in the past thought, felt, made decisions, acted, and faced consequences. You should try to be open to their experience, attitudes, and ideas, even when you don�t agree with them. Try to show that you understand how they were influenced by the times in which they lived. This is empathy or historical perspective, but it doesn�t mean that you have to agree with the people you read about. It means that you understand �where they are coming from� even if you find their ideas, words, and actions repugnant. The expression of empathy or historical perspective can be any length, a short paragraph like the one shown below or much longer commentaries. You should make direct reference to the source or sources by author, use some of the words from the sources, place the people in their historical context, and show understanding of the lived experiences of the people in the sources. Unlike other work in this class, examples of empathy can be written in first person.

STANDARDS:

To meet the standard for this tool the work must:

� Show a basic understanding of how people in the past decided, acted, and faced consequences.

� Indicate an impression of how people in the past thought or felt.

� Show how people in the past were influenced by their historical and social context.

� Show openness to ideas and actions of people in the past.

� Uses the words of people in the past.

To exceed the standard for this tool the work must meet the criteria above and do one or more of the following:

� Show insight and complexity in addressing people in the past.

� Show a keen sensibility of how people in the past thought or felt about their experiences.

Example of a one-paragraph informal comment:

Immigrants really had a difficult time when they came to America. I can see that both Chinese and Jewish immigrants faced discrimination even though they came here to have a better life. Mary Tape just wanted to send her kids to good schools, but when she did they were �hated.� And Jews came from Russia but said �they were safer from assault and insult in that country than they are on the streets of Chicago.� Maybe it was because they were both seen as �different� than the white, Anglo, Christian Americans who were already in America. Both groups probably set themselves apart from society by living in neighborhoods where there were others like them. I can see that in the article by Jacob Riis. He showed how New York was divided up into these little communities of immigrants. That was probably more comfortable for them and gave them access to things that they might not find outside their own community, so it was understandable. It also gave New York its �cosmopolitan character,� as Riis said. Maybe that�s true for all of the United States at that time.

Scroll down for an explicated paragraph that incorporates the Tools.

Example of a coherent paragraph incorporating most of the guidelines above.

Although there was a great disparity between rich and poor, the technological innovations of the late-nineteenth century thrust the country into the modern age. Invention and scientific advances came to be applied to industrial work, spawning new approaches, economic expansion, and innovative solutions to factory problems. According to the historian Brent Glass in a 2006 essay, the engineer John A Roebling created some of the most �daring structures� in the world, bridges that were both �functional and beautiful� including his �masterpiece,� the Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1883. In a 2004 essay, the historian Paul Israel notes that Thomas Edison was key to the �technologies we associate with our modern, technological society.� For Israel, however, Edison�s �most important contribution was a new method of invention� that became the first industrial research laboratory. Edison linked his invention �factory� to the need of the new business enterprises of the time. In an 1877 letter Edison asked the head of Western Union Telegraph, the company for $40,000 that would allow for the creation of �unusual facilities� for �perfecting any kind of Telegraphic invention.� Similarly, while working on improving communications, Alexander Graham Bell wrote in 1878 �It is possible to connect every man’s house, office or factory with a central station, so as to give him direct communication with his neighbors.� Evaluation of the example paragraph.

General Caveat: The paragraph includes few or no errors in writing mechanics and follows scholarly conventions of style and usage.

Tool 1: It shows understanding of the period in question.

Tool 2: It shows understanding of four sources, two secondary and two primary.

Tool 3a: The paragraph Begins with a clear premise to give the work focus and coherence.

Tool 3b: Evidence is well-selected and directly supports the thesis.

Tool 3b: The author clearly and properly identifies the sources used.

Tool 3b: Points of evidence use several short quotations.

Tool 4: Empathy is not expressed overtly, but may be implied in the way the paragraph shows openness to the actions of Edison and Bell and in the way they are placed in their historical context.

ASSIGNMENT II

Answer all questions. Number your responses. Leave a space between each response.

Save your file to your own computer or storage media in MS Word (.doc or .docx).

–For all responses apply the �General Caveat: Be Scholarly.�

1. Write an explanation of the period from the 1760s through the 1790s as outlined in the Overview Essays by M.J. Smith and Pauline Maier. Apply Tool 1 .

2. What is the main argument of Benjamin Irvin in his essay on Benjamin Franklin? Note that you are NOT describing the topic of his essay, but what he believes about that topic. What is his claim or interpretation? Respond in two or three sentences. Apply Tool 2a .

3. Write a brief examination of the source by Benjamin Franklin. Read the background essay that precedes the source before reading the source itself. Apply Tool 2b .

4. �The emergence of a new American nation-state was not just about the �Founding Fathers.� There were others who were engaged in the events that led to the formation of the new republic.� How did each of the seven sources in the section on Revolution and Constitution support this thesis? Respond in one point of evidence for each source. Apply Tool 3b .

5. �Nationalism grew dramatically in late-eighteenth century as Americans went through a period of self-examination and celebration of their new life as an independent nation.� How did each of the seven sources in the section on �New Nation� support this thesis? Respond in one point of evidence for each source. Apply Tool 3b .

6. Comment informally on any ONE primary source that seemed especially meaningful to you in the sections titled �Revolution and Constitution� or �New Nation.� Respond in a coherent paragraph. Apply Tool 4 .

Assignment 3

ASSIGNMENT III

Answer all questions. Number your responses. Leave a space between each response.

Save your file to your own computer or storage media in MS Word (.doc or .docx).

–For all responses apply the �General Caveat: Be Scholarly.�

1. Write an explanation of the period from the 1790s through the 1840s as outlined in the Overview Essay by Joyce Appleby. Apply Tool 1.

2. Write a one paragraph summary of the essay by Marie Jenkins Schwartz . Apply Tool 2a

3. Write a brief collective examination of the two primary sources on Antebellum Religion. Respond in a coherent paragraph. Apply Tool 2b .

4. Discuss the role and status of women in the early-nineteenth centuries, and how they coped with their position in American society, based on the four sources in �Women in the Antebellum Period.� Respond in a coherent paragraph. Apply Tool 3 .

5. Explain the nature of reform from the perspective of the Transcendentalist movement, based on the four sources in Antebellum Reform. Respond in a coherent paragraph. Apply Tool 3 .

6. Comment informally on the source by Hannah Valentine. Respond in a coherent paragraph. Apply Tool 4 .

ASSIGNMENT IV

Answer all questions. Number your responses. Leave a space between each response.

Save your file to your own computer or storage media in MS Word (.doc or .docx).

–For all responses apply the �General Caveat: Be Scholarly.�

1. Write an explanation of the period from the 1830s through 1861 as outlined in the Overview Essays by Ted Widmer and Bruce Levine. Apply Tool 1 .

2. Write a one paragraph summary of the essay by M.J. Smith on American Regionalism. Apply Tool 2a.

3. Write a brief collective examination of the three primary sources in the section on Antebellum Politics. Respond in a coherent paragraph. Respond in a coherent paragraph. Apply Tool 2b .

4. Explain how women and African Americans attempted to secure their place in the nation during the antebellum period as show in the section on Citizenship in Antebellum America. Respond in a thesis statement. Apply Tool 3a

5. How did each of the six sources in the section on Citizenship in Antebellum America support the thesis you wrote for question 4? Respond in one point of evidence for each source. Apply Tool 3b .

6. Explain the debate over American nationalism as reflected in the documents on Sectionalism and Secession. Respond in a coherent paragraph. Apply Tool 3 .

7. Comment informally on any primary source in the section on Citizenship in Antebellum America. Respond in a coherent paragraph. Apply Tool 4 .

ASSIGNMENT V

Answer all questions. Number your responses. Leave a space between each response.

Save your file to your own computer or storage media in MS Word (.doc or .docx).

–For all responses apply the �General Caveat: Be Scholarly.�

1. Write an explanation of the period from 1861 to the 1870s as outlined in the Overview Essay by Eric Foner. Apply Tool 1 .

2. Write a collective explanation of the Civil War Letters. Respond in a coherent paragraph. Apply Tool 2.

3. Discuss African Americans and emancipation in the Civil War era, as suggested by the sources on Emancipation. Respond in a thesis statement. Apply Tool 3a

4. How did each of the four sources in the section on Emancipation support the thesis you wrote for question 4? Respond in one point of evidence for each source. Apply Tool 3b .

5. Explain how African Americans and women and attempted to secure their place in the nation after the civil war, as suggested by the sources on the Post Bellum Period. Respond in a coherent paragraph. Apply Tool 3.

6. Comment informally on the two Letters of Mattie Oblinger in the section on Women in the West. Respond in a coherent paragraph. Apply Tool 4 .

Resources:

For II

Part II. 1760s to 1790s

1. Read the Overview Essays below thoroughly and carefully.

Highlight or note the general contours and key features of this period.

2. Review the sources in the sections.

Note how they relate to the historical period.

3. Complete the Assignment and submit on Blackboard before the deadline.

OVERVIEW ESSAYS (2)

? M.J. Smith, �The Roots of American Nationalism�

By the mid-eighteenth century a new society was emerging in the colonies as concepts born in Europe found expression in the particular circumstances of North America. There came to be the beginnings of a distinct �American� society and culture, a national identity that was being forged by the particular circumstances of life in America and by new ideas born in Europe. Most notably, the intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment led to a questioning of long-held traditions and lifeways, and gave some colonists the ideas with which to challenge the basic premises of their relationship with Europe.

As a result of the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution Western civilization became exposed to new worlds. New technology of investigation and navigation (the telescope and the caravel, for example) led to the discovery of realms hitherto unknown to Europeans. Scientific researchers using lenses found in the heavens new cosmic worlds and, literally, under their noses new microscopic worlds that were both wonderful and frightening. At the same time, explorers traveled abroad and found new terrestrial worlds, occupied by natural and human forms that offered threats as well as opportunities.

Inevitably, the exposure to these new worlds meant that the old order no longer made sense to Europeans. The traditions and institutions that had long provided the answers to life�s questions came into question, and thinkers began to formulate new approaches to answering such questions. Among those who most profoundly changed human understanding was the French philosopher Ren� Descartes, who called for a radical skepticism in all thinking. Descartes argued in 1637 that truth could be known, but that we should �never to accept anything as true if I had not evident knowledge of its being so.� By the mid-1600s, Cartesian thinking (for Descartes) was influencing intellectuals throughout Europe and suggesting that we should question traditional authority through formal methods of investigation.

By the 1700s, the new ways of thinking had coalesced into an intellectual movement that came to be called the Enlightenment, a font of ideas that would come to America where it would form the basis of important aspects of American life. The Enlightenment is also known as the Age of Reason, for one of its most central tenets: the idea than anyone can, regardless of their place in the social hierarchy, had the freedom to become �enlightened� through the use of their own powers of reason. “Have courage to use your own reason!” said the philosopher Emmanuel Kant in 1784. The use of reason, rather than relying on some higher, or supernatural, power suggests that humans have the ability to learn and make judgments by the application of their intellectual faculties. The world would improve as more people became thus enlightened through the resulting scientific and social progress. Reason and progress went hand-in-hand in this conception.

For Enlightenment-era thinkers, an absolute reliance on spiritual explanations for the way the world worked was no longer acceptable. Consequently, the Enlightenment continued the quest for natural (rather than supernatural) explanations that had begun during the Renaissance. They undertook to know the world through experiment and observation, using the scientific method and their own senses in a process known as empiricism. Americans like Benjamin Franklin conducted experiments in what they called �natural philosophy,� the pursuit of laws by which things worked. As he wrote in a 1755 letter, �Let the experiments be made�.� Their studies led the empiricists to conclude that the universe was governed by knowable, natural laws and they called for the expansion of education to ensure that these laws would be known to all of humankind.

In one sense, the empiricists called for a world of knowledge that transcended national boundaries, a cosmopolitan universe of letters where understanding would be free and open. On other hand, Franklin and other Americans came to believe that America, in particular, was ripe for this kind of empirical research now that it had gone beyond the early �drudgery� of establishing itself. By the mid-1700s, Franklin believed, there was a class of Americans who had the resources and leisure to undertake the kind of experiment and exploration that would not only �improve the common stock of knowledge� but would also establish America as a distinct place in the world of natural philosophy, as he argued in 1743. Consequently, the Enlightened thinking of early 1700s, Franklin�s empiricism in particular, was part of the sense of American distinctiveness that would grow to the point of revolution by the 1770s.

Based on these ideas Franklin and others founded in 1743 the American Philosophical Society, the first learned society in the country dedicated to the cultural and intellectual development of humankind. As stated in its original charter, the Society undertook �all philosophical experiments that light into the nature of things, tend to increase the power of man over matter, and multiply the conveniences or pleasures of life.� Membership included doctors, lawyers, clergymen, merchants, tradesmen like Benjamin Franklin. The society number many of the nation�s founders as its members, including George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine, and John Marshall. In their current mission statement, the APS deems its original charter as �enlightened� and believes it illustrates �how closely the new nation linked learning and freedom, regarding each as the support and protection of the other.�

Basic to enlightenment thinking is the idea of freedom. As noted above, thinkers from Descartes to Franklin believed in intellectual liberty, and freedom from the constraints of traditional institutions. To be �enlightened,� wrote the philosopher Emmanuel Kant in the eighteenth century, �nothing is required but freedom.� More than just scientific study, Enlightenment thinkers explored the political and economic realms, as well, and suggested that liberty should extend to issues in governance and the marketplace. The ideology that best expresses the extension of basic liberty to most areas of human activity and thought is liberalism.

The classical form of liberalism that was born in the Enlightenment is based on the idea that people should be free from interference of traditional authority, most notably the government. The growth of liberal ideas represented a break from the traditional strong roles of the state, the aristocracy, and the church. Individual rights, private property, and a free marketplace are all central tenets that eighteenth century liberals expressed, and that found a fertile ground for growth in the British colonies where a monarchy controlled government and commerce.

Among the most influential thinkers of the Enlightenment was John Locke, who developed basic ideas of political liberalism, publishing his most influential works in the 1690s. The Englishman Locke argued in Two Treatises of Government and other works that humans are sovereign in themselves and over their property, that government should be limited to the protection of the life and property of citizens, that they are naturally �in a state of perfect freedom.� Among humans there develops a social contract, a mutual moral and political obligation among a people to ensure their well-being in a state of nature. The social contract is an ancient theory, developed as early as the ancient Greek philosopher, Socrates. For Locke, the natural condition of humankind is this state of perfect and complete freedom in which people have a natural right to live as they please free from the interference of others. Property, which becomes private property when a person mixes his labor with the raw materials of nature, is central to Locke�s ideas because in the state of nature there is always the potential for conflicts to arise over such ownership. Civil governments are established by a society to secure their rights, to provide protection for life and property that are established in natural law.

Most important in Locke�s ideas for Americas was the notion that if a government fails to fulfill its obligations, it can be replaced by the citizenry. Locke suggested that people join in civil society to preserve their property, their lives, their liberty, and their well-being in general. They have a compact with government to secure those rights and, therefore, citizens are justified in resisting the authority of government, whether parliament or monarch. When civil government becomes tyranny, denying the people�s rights to participate in the making of laws, that the citizens have a right, if not a duty, to resist the authority of government, dissolve the compact, and create a new political system. This was a radical concept in a time when Americans were increasingly feeling oppressed by the distant monarchy and government in which they had no influence. It would find great favor in British North America among those who would be the political liberals who forged the movement for independence and the creation of the American republic.

Liberalism, as noted by the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in a 1956 essay, was the country�s �birthright.� He wrote that it was �European political thinkers two centuries ago who saw in America the [ideal example] of primal political innocence�. �In the beginning,� as Locke put it, �all the world was America.�� In other words, the United States was a country born liberal. It was built on a �grand strategy of freedom,� and it has remained committed, with few exceptions, to this strategy. As the political liberalism of Locke, Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and others found expression in the colonies, American nationalism took root and flourished.

But the evolution of national identity would be a troubled one. From the early-1700s to the present, national identity has been highly contested terrain. Americans struggled to understand their country as a nation and often disagreed about the conception or definition of what was a �nation� and who should be included.

The author is Professor of History at Valencia College.

? Pauline Maier, �The American Revolution, 1763�1783, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History 49 W. 45th Street, 6th Floor � NYC, NY 10036 (646) 366-9666 � 2009�2014 All Rights Reserved

The British colonists of mainland North America had great hopes for the future in 1763, when the Peace of Paris formally ended the Seven Years� War. Since the late seventeenth century, their lives had been disrupted by a series of wars between Britain and the �Catholic Powers,� France and Spain. Now, however, a triumphant Britain took title to Spanish Florida, French Canada, and all of Louisiana east of the Mississippi. With the British flag flying over so much of the North American continent, the colonists looked forward to a time of uninterrupted peace, expansion, and prosperity. Deeply proud of the British victory and their own identity as �free Britons,� they neither wanted nor foresaw what the next two decades would bring�independence, revolution, and yet another war.

Independence

The Seven Years� War had left Great Britain with a huge debt by the standards of the day. Moreover, thanks in part to Pontiac�s Rebellion, a massive American Indian uprising in the territories won from France, the British decided to keep an army in postwar North America. Surely the colonists could help pay for that army and a few other expenses of administering Britain�s much enlarged American empire. Rather than request help from provincial legislatures, however, Britain decided to raise the necessary money by acts of Parliament.

Two laws, the Sugar Act (1764) and the Stamp Act (1765), began the conflict between London and America. The Sugar Act imposed duties on certain imports not, as in the past, to affect the course of trade�for example, by making it more expensive for colonists to import molasses from the non-British than from the British West Indies�but to raise a revenue in America �for defraying the expense of defending, protecting, and securing the same.� The Stamp Act levied entirely new excise taxes (like sales taxes) in America on pamphlets, almanacs, newspapers and newspaper advertisements, playing cards, dice, and a wide range of legal and commercial documents. Those accused of violating the Stamp Act would be tried in Admiralty Courts, which had no juries and whose jurisdiction normally pertained to maritime affairs. The colonists protested that provision because it violated their right to trial by jury. Above all, however, they insisted that both acts levied taxes on them and that, under the old English principle of �no taxation without representation,� Parliament had no right to tax the colonists because they had no representatives in the House of Commons.

British spokesmen did not question the principle but argued that the colonists, like many Englishmen in places that could not send delegates to Parliament, were �virtually� represented in Parliament because its members sought the good of the British people everywhere, not just of those who chose them. That made no sense to the Americans, who lived in a young society where representation was generally tied to population and voters expected their representatives to know and defend their interests. A legislator could not represent people who did not choose him, they argued. It was as simple as that.

Several colonies unsuccessfully petitioned Parliament against the Sugar and Stamp Acts. A Stamp Act Congress of delegates from nine colonies met in New York in October 1765, passed resolutions asserting their rights, and petitioned the king, the Lords, and the Commons for redress of their grievances. What else could the colonists do? Allowing the Stamp Act to go into effect would create a precedent for new taxes, which Parliament would surely approve again and again because every tax on the Americans relieved them and their constituents of that financial burden.

Boston led the way. On August 14 and 15, 1765, a popular uprising there forced the Massachusetts stamp collector, Andrew Oliver, to resign his office. That meant there was nobody in the colony to distribute stamps or collect the taxes. With a minimum of force, the Stamp Act had been effectively nullified in Massachusetts. Soon other colonies� stampmen resigned to avoid Oliver�s fate. In the end, the Stamp Act went into effect only in remote Georgia for a brief time. In the spring of 1766, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act, but it also passed a Declaratory Act that said Parliament had the right to bind the colonies �in all cases whatsoever.�

As if to affirm that right, in 1767 the new chancellor of the exchequer, Charles Townshend, persuaded Parliament to pass an act levying new duties on glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea imported into the American colonies to help pay for the colonies� defense and also to pay royal officials who had previously been dependent on provincial assemblies for their salaries. Those �Townshend duties� sparked a second wave of opposition. In an effort to avoid further violence within America, the colonists organized non-importation associations to build pressure for repeal of the duties among those manufacturers and merchants in Britain who suffered from the decline in exports to America. Only men signed the associations, but women often supported the effort by making homespun cloth to replace British textiles and seeking alternatives to imported tea. Exports to America declined enough that in 1770 Parliament repealed most of the Townshend duties, retaining only the one on tea.

That led to a third crisis in 1773, when Parliament passed a Tea Act to help the financially strapped East India Company (EIC) sell its surplus tea in America. The Tea Act did not impose a new tax. It refunded to the EIC duties collected in Britain and allowed the company to sell tea in America through its own agents (or �consignees�) rather than through independent merchants. The king�s minister, Lord North, who proposed the act, thought that the Tea Act would allow the EIC to price its tea low enough to compete with smugglers of cheap Dutch tea. The act also gave the EIC a monopoly of the American market, which caused discontent among colonial merchants cut out of the tea trade and others who feared that more monopolies would follow if this one became established. More important, Lord North insisted on retaining the old Townshend duty on tea. He did not anticipate how much opposition that would provoke from colonists determined to resist all taxes imposed upon them by Parliament.

The first tea ship, the Dartmouth, arrived in Boston on November 28, 1773. For several weeks thereafter, a mass meeting of �the Body of the People,� whose members came from Boston and several nearby towns, tried unsuccessfully to get the consignees to resign and to secure permission from customs officials and the royal governor for the ships to leave the harbor and take their tea back to England. (In Philadelphia and New York, the consignees resigned and the tea ships were successfully sent back to England with the tea chests still on board.) Finally, on December 16, the night before the tea became subject to seizure by customsmen, to whom the consignees would surely pay the duty, a group of men disguised as Indians threw 342 chests of tea into the harbor.

An angry Parliament responded to the �Boston Tea Party� in 1774 by passing a series of Coercive Acts that the colonists soon called the �Intolerable Acts.� They closed Boston Harbor (the Port Act); nullified the Massachusetts Charter of 1691 and instituted a new government with greater royal control (the Massachusetts Government Act); and allowed royal officials accused of committing felonies while executing their offices in Massachusetts to be tried in England (the Administration of Justice Act). The fourth Coercive Act, a new Quartering Act, facilitated housing troops where they could be used against colonial civilians. Soon the king appointed General Thomas Gage, head of the British army in North America, as governor of Massachusetts, and essentially put the province under military rule.

If the Coercive Acts were meant to isolate Massachusetts, they failed; the other colonies rallied to its defense. A Continental Congress met in Philadelphia (September 5�October 26, 1774), adopted a statement of rights, demanded the repeal of several acts of Parliament including the �unconstitutional� Coercive Acts, advised the people of Massachusetts to act in self defense, and approved a comprehensive program of economic sanctions against Britain (the �Continental Association�) that would be enforced by elected local committees. It also called a second Continental Congress to meet on May 10, 1775, if the Americans� grievances had not yet been redressed. By then, however, war between provincial and regular soldiers had begun at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts (April 19, 1775).

The Second Continental Congress again petitioned the king for redress of grievances and assured him of the colonists� loyalty. Nonetheless, in a proclamation in August and again in a speech to Parliament in October 1775, King George III said that the Americans were seeking independence. Their professions of loyalty, he claimed, were �meant only to amuse,� that is, to mislead. He had already decided that only force could end the conflict. In November, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, offered freedom to slaves who fled to the British lines. That further alienated white planters. And in December, the king signed a Prohibitory Act that put American shipping on the same status as that of enemy nations, effectively putting the American colonists outside his protection. Soon he began negotiating with German princes to hire soldiers to help put down the American �rebellion.� Those actions drove more and more Americans toward the independence that the king sought to prevent.

Some colonists�roughly 20 percent of the population�remained loyal to the Crown. Those �loyalists� included farmers and artisans of modest means as well as wealthy merchants and planters. One group, however, was represented among loyalists out of proportion to its incidence in the population as a whole: British officeholders, from sheriffs to royal governors. Other loyalists lived in areas cut off from the flow of information, and so were not driven by events to reconsider their allegiance, or they had reason to think their liberty and interests would be better served under the Crown than in a government controlled by the majority of their white male neighbors. Many members of the Church of England who lived in Congregationalist Connecticut drew that conclusion. So did the unassimilated members of several ethnic minorities and those slaves who flocked into British lines.

By the spring of 1776, however, even many reluctant colonists thought they had no choice. They could declare their independence and secure foreign help, probably from France, Britain�s old enemy, or they would be crushed. On July 2, Congress, confident that it had the support of the people, approved a resolution that �these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States,� then spent much of the next two days editing a draft declaration of independence. On July 4, it approved the text by which the United States claimed a �separate and equal station� among �the powers of the earth,� free of that allegiance to the Crown and state of Great Britain that had for so long been a cause of profound pride among the British colonists of North America.

Revolution

The Declaration of Independence asserted the right of the people to �alter or to abolish� a government that failed to secure their rights and to adopt another in a form they thought most likely �to effect their safety and happiness.� For that purpose, the Americans rejected not only British rule but also monarchy. The governments they founded would be republics�that is, governments without any hereditary rulers, in which all power came directly or indirectly from the people. In the eighteenth century, that was revolutionary.

It might also have been foolhardy: all the republics of past times had failed. But with a resolution and radical preface approved on May 10 and 15, 1776, well before declaring independence, Congress had called on the states to establish new governments in which �every kind of authority� under the British Crown was �totally suppressed� and all authority was exerted �under the authority of the people.� In 1776, ten states wrote new constitutions (the world�s first written constitutions) or, in the case of Connecticut and Rhode Island, made appropriate changes in their colonial charters. New York and Georgia followed in 1777, along with Vermont, which was trying to win its independence from New York. Finally, in 1780, Massachusetts wrote the last of the first state constitutions. Soon states began to replace their first constitutions, building on their experience and the example of constitutions created in other states.

The state-based institutional experiments between 1776 and 1780 shaped the future of American government. At first, the states placed most power in their legislatures, which in most colonial governments had been the only institution elected by the people. Gradually, however, the states moved toward dividing power, first among the executive and two houses of the legislature (like the king, Lords, and Commons of Britain�s unwritten constitution), and then among the legislative, executive, and judiciary branches of government (separation of function). As a result, the Articles of Confederation (which Congress sent to the states for ratification on November 15, 1777) seemed old-fashioned by the time the document was were ratified in March 1781. The Articles made a worthy effort at dividing power between the states and the nation but put all of the central government�s power in one institution, Congress. In 1787, the Federal Convention in Philadelphia decided that the Confederation could not safely be given more power unless that power was divided among different branches of government. In that regard, as in others, the federal Constitution grew out of the earlier development of constitutions within the states.

The state constitution-writers also realized that constitutional or fundamental laws had to be distinguished from ordinary laws, which could be enacted and then easily revised by state legislatures. Massachusetts solved that problem in 1780 when it adopted a state constitution that had been�by popular demand�drafted by a specially elected state convention, then ratified directly by the sovereign people in the towns. Henceforth constitutions, including the federal Constitution, would be a direct act of legislation by �We the people,� a phrase that, in 1787, the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia took directly from the 1780 Massachusetts constitution and inserted into the federal Constitution. Ordinary laws remained the work of legislatures. That distinction remains fundamental to the American legal system.

These critical institutional advances were achieved relatively quickly and remain part of the Revolution�s legacy. Other changes took more time. The ideals of the Revolution, especially the notion that �all men are created equal� and have God-given rights, and that all legitimate authority comes from consent, were incompatible with the institution of slavery. Some states understood that and passed gradual emancipation laws or laws that facilitated private manumissions. Often, slaves freed themselves by running away�repeatedly if necessary. Women, too, began to ask why the laws treated them differently than men. In truth, even the idea of equality among white men faced resistance in a society where educated and propertied white men saw themselves as the country�s natural rulers. But just raising the issue of what equality implied made clear that colonial America was gone forever, and that the Revolution would, in time, bring changes far beyond what its most prominent advocates anticipated.

War

The war was not the Revolution, but without military victory the Revolution�that is, the fundamental changes that revolution brought�would have failed. Even a negotiated settlement with Britain would have brought the Americans back under the British Crown, ending the republic, the constitutional experimentation, and the social transformations begun in 1776.

At first, the Americans did remarkably well against the king�s troops. General Gage arrived in Boston expecting, as did the king and ministers in Britain, that a modest number of regular soldiers could arrest local troublemakers and restore royal authority in Massachusetts. That expectation proved to be wrong. Insurgent colonists throughout the colony forced men appointed to the new provincial Council under the Massachusetts Government Act to resign or flee to the protection of the royal army in Boston. Then the provincials imposed heavy casualties on the regular soldiers retreating toward Boston after the battles at Lexington and Concord, and again two months later, on June 17, 1775, at the Battle of Bunker (or, more exactly, Breed�s) Hill. Soon after, General George Washington took charge of the Massachusetts Provincial Army, which became the Continental Army, camped in Cambridge. The king�s soldiers remained under siege across the Charles River in Boston, then a peninsula connected to the mainland by a narrow causeway. After the Americans fortified Dorchester Heights, threatening British control of the harbor, General William Howe, Gage�s successor, decided to evacuate, which he and his army did on March 17, 1776.

If the king�s troops were conducting not a local police action but a war, the place to be was in or near New York City, an island at the base of the great Hudson River. And there, in late June and early July, as the Continental Congress in Philadelphia bravely declared independence, the British assembled more than 30,000 experienced soldiers and sailors, the greatest military force ever seen in North America. At the end of June, Washington had only 19,000 troops, most of whom had been in active duty only a few months. By contrast, privates in the British infantry units averaged nine years of service. Similarly, the king�s generals averaged thirty years of military experience, while their American counterparts had only two. It took no genius to see that the provincials were not only outnumbered but also seriously outclassed.

Washington lost the Battle of Brooklyn Heights on nearby Long Island (August 27, 1776), but managed to transfer his remaining men to Manhattan that night. He retreated up the island and crossed onto the mainland, fought a battle at White Plains in Westchester County, New York, on October 28, then slipped down through New Jersey, where the people were busy trying to save their necks by signing loyalty oaths to the king. Even Washington feared the war was lost. But he crossed the Delaware River into Pennsylvania on December 11, then re-crossed it and stopped the downward spiral by winning critical battles at Trenton and Princeton, New Jersey, on December 26, 1776, and January 3, 1777. Then he took his army into winter quarters as irregular troops in New Jersey, angered by British soldiers� abuses of civilians, put the king�s forces on the defensive.

The year 1777 was a turning point in the war. General John Burgoyne led a major campaign from Canada down the Richelieu and Hudson Rivers, but the Continental Army, reinforced with New England militiamen, forced him to surrender at Saratoga, New York (October 17). After hearing the news, the French opened negotiations for an alliance. On February 6, 1778, the French and American negotiators signed a treaty of military alliance and another of amity and commerce, which Congress ratified the following September. Once France entered the war, Britain had to defend its homeland and its possessions in the West Indies, not just fight the Americans. Moreover, it had to face a powerful French navy on the world�s waterways. That made the war much harder for Britain to win.

As a consequence, the British evacuated Philadelphia in 1778, which General Howe had taken the year before (when he might better have relieved Burgoyne). Leaving a base on Manhattan, they concentrated their attention on the southern colonies, as if to save a part of their American empire, while waging secondary battles on the western frontier and making scattershot attacks on New England ports. The British took Savannah in December 1778, then Charleston, where the American General Benjamin Lincoln surrendered his army in May 1780. A second American army under General Horatio Gates fell to the British at Camden, North Carolina, in August.

Even without an American army in the field, the fighting continued. The British organized loyalist militias to maintain control over conquered territory, but once the British army left, guerrilla bands emerged from hiding and the war in the South became a nasty civil war, neighbor against neighbor. Meanwhile, a third southern army, under General Nathanael Greene, nibbled away at the British army until its commander, Lord Charles Cornwallis, retreated northward into Virginia. Finally Cornwallis settled in at Yorktown on the Chesapeake Bay waiting for reinforcements from New York. That was a big mistake: the French fleet under Comte Fran�ois de Grasse sealed the bay off to British ships while Washington and the French General Rochambeau marched south and mounted a siege that forced Cornwallis to open negotiations for a surrender (October 17, 1781). The British still held New York City and Charleston, but Lord North understood that the war was over when he heard the news. Parliament would not replace Cornwallis�s army. It had thrown enough good money after bad.

Thanks in part to the skill of the American negotiators, the Peace of Paris (1783) was very favorable to the United States. Great Britain recognized American independence, as France had done in 1778, and the United States gained all the land east of the Mississippi between Canada, which Britain retained, and Florida, which returned to Spain. The future of the American republic remained uncertain, but it would at least be in the hands of its people, a people who had, with considerable help from the French, won their independence from the most powerful nation in the world.

Pauline Maier is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of American History at MIT.

?

? TOWARD REVOLUTION

? Benjamin H. Irvin, “Benjamin Franklin’s ‘Enriching Values.� Common-Place 6:3 (April 2006)

https://www.common-place.org/vol-06/no-03/irvin/

? Benjamin Franklin, from �Observations Concerning the Increase of mankind,� 1751

Europe is generally full settled with Husbandmen, Manufacturers, &c. and therefore cannot now much increase in People: America is chiefly occupied by Indians, who subsist mostly by Hunting. But as the Hunter, of all Men, requires the greatest Quantity of Land from whence to draw his Subsistence, (the Husbandman subsisting on much less, the Gardner on still less, and the Manufacturer requiring the least of all), The Europeans found America as fully settled as it well could bee by Hunters; yet these having large Tracks, were easily prevail’d on to part with Portions of Territory to the new Comers, who did not much interfere with the Natives in Hunting, and furnish’d them with many Things they wanted.

Land being thus plenty in America, and so cheap as that a labouring Man, that understands Husbandry, can in a short Time save Money enough to purchase a Piece of new Land sufficient for a Plantation, whereon he may subsist a Family; such are not afraid to marry; for if they even look far enough forward to consider how their Children when grown up are to be provided for, they see that more Land is to be had at Rates equally easy, all Circumstances considered.

Hence Marriages in America are more general, and more generally early, than in Europe. And if it is reckoned there, that there is but one Marriage per Annum among 100 Persons, perhaps we may here reckon two; and if in Europe they have but 4 Births to a Marriage (many of their Marriages being late) we may here reckon 8, of which if one half grow up, and our Marriages are made, reckoning one with another at 20 Years of Age, our People must at least be doubled every 20 Years.

But notwithstanding this Increase, so vast is the Territory of North-America, that it will require many Ages to settle it fully; and till it is fully settled, Labour will never be cheap here, where no Man continues long a Labourer for others, but gets a Plantation of his own, no Man continues long a Journeyman to a Trade but goes among those new Settlers, and set up for himself, &c. Hence Labour is no cheaper now, in Pennsylvania, than it was 30 Years ago, tho’ so many Thousand labouring People have been imported.

The Danger therefore of these Colonies interfering with their Mother Country in Trades that depend on Labour, Manufactures, &c. is too remote to require the Attention of Great-Britain.

But in Proportion to the Increase of the Colonies, a vast Demand is growing for British Manufacturers, a glorious Market wholly in the Power of Britain, in which Foreigners cannot interfere, which will increase in a short Time even beyond her Power of supplying, tho’ her whole Trade should be to her Colonies: Therefore Britain should not too much restrain Manufactures in her Colonies. A wise and good Mother will not do it. To distress, is to weaken, and weakening the Children, weakens the whole Family….

‘Tis an ill-grounded Opinion that by the Labour of Slaves, America may possibly vie in Cheapness of Manufactures with Britain. The Labour of Slaves can never be so cheap here as the Labour of working Men is in Britain. Any one may compute it. Interest of Money in the Colonies from 6 to 10 per Cent. Slaves one with another cost L30 Sterling per Head. Reckon then the Interest of the first Purchase of a Slave, the Insurance or Risque on his life, his Clothing and Diet, Expences in his Sickness and Loss of Time, Loss by his Neglect of Business (Neglect is natural to the Man who is not to be benefitted by his own Care or Diligence), Expense of a Driver to keep him at Work, and his Pilfering from Time to Time, almost every Slave being by Nature a Thief, and compare the whole Amount with the Wages of a Manufacturer of Iron or Wool in England, you will see that Labour is much cheaper there than it can ever be by Negroes here. Why then will Americans purchase Slaves? Because Slaves may be kept as long as a Man pleases, or has Occasion for their Labour; while hired Men are continually leaving their Master (often in the midst of his Business) and setting up for themselves.

….There are suppos’d to be now upwards of One Million English Souls in North-America, (tho’ ’tis thought scarce 80,000 have been brought over Sea) and yet perhaps there is not one the fewer in Britain, but rather more, on Account of the Employment the Colonies afford to Manufacturers at Home. This Million doubling, suppose but once in 25 Years, will in another Century be more than the People of England, and the greatest Number of Englishmen will be on this Side the Water

?

? REVOLUTION AND CONSTITUTION

? Woody Holton, “Unruly Americans in the Revolution,” History Matters. Fall 2009 The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History 49 W. 45th Street, 6th Floor � NYC, NY 10036 (646) 366-9666 � 2009�2014 All Rights Reserved [https://www.gilderlehrman.org/]

Nearly all of the blockbuster biographies of the Founding Fathers�whether the subject is George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, or John Adams�portray the vast majority of ordinary Americans as mere bystanders. Although the authors of these bestsellers sometimes pause to honor the common soldiers in the Continental Army, most pay little attention to white men who did not enlist�and none at all to African Americans, Indians, and women of all ranks.

Meanwhile a host of other historians have been quietly documenting the many ways in which women, slaves, natives, and small farmers�the 95 percent of Americans who were not members of the Founding-era gentry�shaped the independence movement and Revolutionary War and were in turn influenced by both. If ordinary colonists really had been as passive as they appear in the most popular histories of the Founding era, the American Revolution would have been a very different thing, and it might not have occurred at all.

Taxes�But Also Territory

While everyone knows that parliamentary �taxation without representation� was one of the principal grievances leading to the American Revolution, we sometimes forget that the British government also mounted other assaults against free colonists� economic well-being. Nearly all of the best-known Founding Fathers�from Thomas Jefferson and George Washington in Virginia to Benjamin Franklin and Robert Morris in Pennsylvania and Henry Knox and Abigail (not John!) Adams in Massachusetts�dreamed of vastly enhancing their wealth by speculating in western land. That meant obtaining large grants directly from the government, essentially for free, and then dividing them into smaller tracts to be sold to actual settlers. But in October 1763, the Privy Council in London took out a map of North America and drew a line along the crest of the Alleghany Mountains. Beyond that line, the ministers declared, no colonist would be permitted to settle.

At first George Washington was confident that the Proclamation Line was only a �temporary expedient� that would soon be repealed. But the British government stood by the 1763 decree for the same reason that it had been promulgated in the first place: in order (as Washington put it) �to quiet the minds of the Indians.� It was not sympathy for the Indians� plight that had motivated the Privy Council to turn the area west of the Alleghanies into a giant reservation. Nor was it fear, since of course British officials were in no danger. The issue was financial. Earlier in 1763, more than a dozen Native American nations had joined together in a coalition dedicated to preserving their land. The ensuing revolt is popularly known as Pontiac�s Rebellion, though that label understates the range of the insurgency and exaggerates the role of a single Ottawa headman in a movement where leadership was actually quite dispersed.

If the Indians of present-day Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan had not decided to rebel in 1763, the Privy Council might never have drawn the Proclamation Line, and land speculators like Washington and Jefferson would have had one less reason to rebel against Great Britain. The Declaration of Independence mentions the well-known issue of taxation once�and Indians and their land three times.

In 1769, the Virginia House of Burgesses (whose members included Thomas Jefferson and George Washington) unanimously adopted a resolution asking the Privy Council to repeal the Proclamation of 1763. British officials never acted on the request, and one reason was their abiding concern that taking the Indians� land would provoke renewed hostilities. Lord Hillsborough, George III�s secretary for his American dominions, was determined to keep Britain out of a �general Indian War, the expense whereof will fall on this kingdom.� The imperial government�s ensuing decision to thwart the land-hungry provincials had the ironic effect of paving the way for an even more expensive war against a coalition of colonists.

Indispensible Allies

Once the imperial government had announced its intention to clamp down on its North American colonists in the crucial areas of taxation, territory, and trade, the Americans responded with a wide variety of protests. While it was the Franklins, Jeffersons, and Adamses who made the speeches and published the pamphlets, the real work of erecting liberty poles, intimidating colonial officials, tarring and feathering the recalcitrant, taunting British soldiers, and eventually dumping East India Company tea into Boston Harbor fell to ordinary working people. Historians have shown that many of the most famous incidents of the revolutionary era grew out of deep-seated conflicts that had begun long before the American Revolution formally began.

The best-known incident that grew out of this longstanding animosity was the so-called Boston Massacre. The shootings in King Street on the night of March 5, 1770 were a direct outgrowth of a host of petty conflicts, for instance a shouting match between workers at a ropewalk (where ships� rigging was made) and off-duty�and underpaid�British soldiers competing with them for work.

Less dramatic but more important to the eventual success of the American Revolution was a series of boycotts of trade with Britain. The best-known item on the banned list was tea, a beverage much more popular among women than men. Male Patriots understood that the boycotts could not succeed without the help of their mothers, daughters, and wives, and the result was an unprecedented and highly successful effort to involve women in politics, initiated as much by the women themselves as by men.

The most valuable product that the colonists normally imported from the mother country was cloth, and when the Patriots extended their boycott to textiles, they created another opportunity for American women. It was up to them to spin the thread (and in some cases weave the yarn) that would replace the fabric once imported from Britain.

�Domestic Insurrections�

By the fall of 1774, most free colonists in British North America were angry at the imperial government, but very few of them wanted to wrench their colonies out of the British empire. Most just wanted to turn back the clock�back to 1763, before Parliament and the Privy Council launched their irksome initiatives in the areas of taxation, territory, and trade. In 1775 and early 1776, a host of well-known factors�notably the British use of German (�Hessian�) mercenaries, the loss of life at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill, and the publication of Thomas Paine�s Common Sense�conspired to convert free Americans to the cause of independence.

South of the line that Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon had surveyed in the mid-1760s, many colonists turned against the British for a less well known reason. They were furious at King George III and his American representatives for forming an alliance with African Americans.

At the time of the American Revolution, about one fifth of the people in the rebelling colonies�approximately half a million souls�were enslaved. Early in the imperial conflict, black Americans began to perceive that the widening gap between white Loyalists and Patriots created a space of opportunity for themselves. During protests against the Stamp Act in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1765, white Patriots were alarmed to hear their cries of �Liberty� echoed back to them by a group of their slaves. �In one of our Counties lately,� the young Virginian James Madison reported in November 1774, �a few of those unhappy wretches met together & chose a leader who was to conduct them when the English Troops should arrive.�

African Americans kept on conferring all through the winter and spring of 1775. During the third week of April 1775, officials in Williamsburg, the capital of Virginia, received a half dozen reports of slave insurrection conspiracies�more than during any previous week in the colony�s history. At the end of that same week, late in the evening of April 20, 1775, Lord Dunmore, Virginia�s royal governor, ordered the removal of the gunpowder from the powder magazine in the center of Williamsburg. White Virginians believed the governor�s timing was no coincidence�that he had deliberately removed the gunpowder amid the swirl of insurrection rumors in order to leave them vulnerable to the fury of their slaves. When independent military companies began marching toward Williamsburg in order to force the governor to return the gunpowder, Dunmore seemed to confirm his white subjects� worst fears, declaring that if any top British official was harmed, he �would declare freedom to the slaves & reduce the city of Wmsburg to ashes.�

When a group of slaves offered to fight alongside the governor in return for their freedom, he turned them away and even threatened to have them beaten if they returned. But the slaves kept coming�rallying to the British standard not only in Virginia but in other British colonies as well. On November 14, 1775, Governor Dunmore�s �Ethiopian Regiment� (as he termed his African American troops) fought a battle against militiamen from Princess Anne County (now Virginia Beach) at Kemp�s Landing near Norfolk, and the black soldiers won.

The very next day, November 15, 1775, Dunmore issued an emancipation proclamation that was not too different from the one Abraham Lincoln would publish four score and seven years later. Like Lincoln�s, Dunmore�s proclamation did not free a single slave. He extended his offer only to black Virginians �appertaining to rebels� (Dunmore was himself a large-scale slaveholder) who were �able and willing� to bear arms for their king. Hundreds of slaves joined Dunmore. Within a year, the majority of them would die, primarily from smallpox. But a remnant survived and earned their freedom by serving on the British side throughout the war.

In the capstone grievance in the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress alleges that George III has �excited domestic insurrection amongst us.� Actually, given Governor Dunmore�s reluctance to act on his initially-empty threat to �declare freedom to the slaves,� it is less accurate to say the British initiated their alliance with the slaves than that the slaves incited the British. Here was another case in which seemingly-powerless Americans�the black men and women who are routinely excluded from the mammoth biographies that dominate most modern readers� understanding of the American Revolution�played a crucial role in the conflict.

An Ambiguous Legacy

In their own way (and sometimes inadvertently), Native Americans, enslaved blacks, and ordinary whites all helped propel men like Washington, Hamilton, and Hancock down the road to independence. In turn, the ensuing years of political upheaval and war powerfully influenced each of these groups.

The Americans who suffered the most were, ironically enough, those who had enjoyed the most success in battle: Indians. Despite their military successes, the Indians lost out where it mattered most�at the bargaining table in Paris, where of course they were not represented. Although British officials had never purchased or conquered the region between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers (essentially the modern-day Midwest), they nonetheless ceded this region to their former colonists in the peace treaty signed in Paris in 1783. It would be another decade before the U.S. military conquered the Native American coalition striving to defend this land, but the nullification of the Proclamation of 1763 had begun on July 4, 1776.

For African Americans the outcome of the Revolutionary War was more complex. Now that white settlers claimed the Mississippi as their western border, slavery had plenty of room into which to expand�which it did after the invention of the cotton gin, with disastrous results for African Americans. On the other hand, the Revolutionary War permitted thousands of black Americans to claim their freedom. Two northern states, Massachusetts and the new state of Vermont, abolished slavery, and most of the others put it on the road to extinction (although in some cases this would prove to be a very long road). But many more slaves�perhaps 10,000 or more�obtained their freedom by fighting on the British side. After the war, the imperial government settled the bulk of them in Nova Scotia, but continuing discrimination convinced many of these refugees to accept Parliament�s offer to move to the new British colony of Sierra Leone in West Africa. Others made their way to British colonies that remained in the imperial fold or to the home island. Some have even been traced to Australia.

Historians of the American Revolution have never been able to reach an agreement about what it did for�or to�free women. Most recently, womens� historians have argued that free women did benefit�at least temporarily. They had been politicized during the 1760s and 70s, as their domestic activities took on political meaning in the boycotts. Moreover, when men left home to become soldiers and statesmen, women took over their farms and businesses. As they mastered activities such as hiring farm workers and selling crops, their self confidence grew.. More than one wife who corresponded with her absent husband went from describing the family farm as �yours� early in the war to declaring it �ours� (and in some case �mine�) several years later.

Free women benefited in another way as well. Americans feared that their new form of republican government would fail unless ordinary men practiced political virtue�a willingness to sacrifice for their country. After the revolution, reformers turned to women to instill this patriotism in their sons and daughters. Mothering thus became a �civic� act and Republican Motherhood a new ideology for women. With it came a realization that women could not properly instruct their children in virtue if they themselves did not receive a proper education in such fields as political theory, philosophy and history. �If we mean to have Heroes, Statesmen and Philosophers,� Abigail Adams told her husband in August 1776, �we should have learned women.�

Yet, if these were gains for women, they were offset by the fact that full citizenship, including suffrage, was denied them. And, in many new states women�s economic situation worsened as inheritance laws changed and put them at a disadvantage.

Free white men were the clearest winners of the American Revolution, but for the vast majority of freemen, these gains were modest at best. Historians have shown that, especially after the adoption of the U.S. Constitution in 1789, ordinary farmers actually lost ground in some important areas. For instance, control over the money supply�which determined whether debtors gained at the expense of creditors or vice versa�passed from the colonial assemblies, many of which had been elected annually, to a federal government that often seemed beyond the reach of common plowmen.

If the vast majority of Americans of the Founding era received few lasting benefits from the American Revolution, the long-term prospect was brighter. Most white men of the Founding era chose not to respect women�s, African Americans�, and Indians� right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of the happiness, and many members of the gentry class suspected that Jefferson�s affirmation that all men are created equal was not even true among white males. And yet the promises of liberty and equality held forth in this document written by a slaveholder have continued to serve as beacons. The 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Rights and Sentiments that initiated the women�s rights movement was modeled on the Declaration of Independence, and Frederick Douglass harried the consciences of white Northerners by asking, �What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?� Indeed the whole subsequent history of the United States can be summed up as a struggle between the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the circumstances of its creation.

Woody Holton is an associate professor at the University of Richmond. His last book, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, which has been published in Arabic as well as English, was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize and the National Book Award. His next book, due out in November 2009, is an economic biography of Abigail Adams.

? Letter from Mercy Otis Warren to Catharine Macaulay, 1775

Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814) was a writer living in Massachusetts at the time of the Revolution.

At a time when all Europe is interested in the fate of America you will forgive me my Dear Madam if I lay aside the ceremony usually observed…& again call of your Attention…to my Last [letter] in which I hinted that the sword was half drawn from the scabbard. Soon after which this people were obliged to unsheathe it to repel the violence offered to individuals & the impotence of an attempt to seize the private property of the subjects of the king of England. And thereby put it out of their power to defend themselves against the Corrupt Ministry of this Court.

You have undoubtedly, Madam, been Apprized of the Consequences of this hostile movement which compelled the Americans to fly to arms in Defense of all that is held dear & sacred among Mankind. And the public papers as well as private accounts have witnessed to the Bravery of the peasants of Lexington & the spirit of freedom Breathed from the Inhabitants of the surrounding Villages. You have been told of the distresses of the people of Boston…. Famine & pestilence began to rage in the City [forcing]…most of them to Depart leaving their Effects behind & to quit this Elegant and Convenient Habitation in the Capital & fly back into the Hospitable army of their Brethren in the Country. And the Conflagration of Charlestown [the Battle of Bunker Hill] will undoubtedly Reach each British Ear before this came to your hand. Such instances of wanton Barbarity have been seldom practiced even among the most Rude & uncivilized Nations. The ties of Gratitude which now broken through by the king, troops, in this base tradition greatly enhance their guilt. It was the Inhabitants of that town who prompted by humanity generously opened the door to the routed Gage on the Nineteenth of April and poured Balm into the Wound, of the Exhausted & dying soldiers after their precipitant retreat. Had they observed a different conduct on that Memorable day. Had they assisted in cutting off s[ai]d…retreat it might not have been in the power of General Gage to have wrapped that town in flames & driven out the miserable inhabitants the prey of poverty & despair…. I shall…only give a short account of the present situation of American affairs in the Environs of Boston. We have a well appointed brave and high spirited continental army. Consisting of about twenty-two thousand Men commanded by the accomplished George Washington…of one of the first fortunes in America. A man whose military abilities & public & private virtue, place him in the first class of the Good & Brave & one really of so high a Stamp as to do Honor to Human Nature. This army as it be originally recruited & to be supported & paid at the expense of the United colonies of America. And were Britain powerful & infatuated enough to find out a force sufficient to cut of[f] this little Resolute army…it would exhibit in the field thrice their Number. Ready to avenge the stroke & cut down the justice of Heaven on the Destroyer of the peace, liberty, & happiness of Mankind….

The great Council of America have once more petitioned His Majesty to devise some…Reconciliation. This is a final proof with what Reluctance the progeny of Britain draw forth the sword against their unnatural parent. Both the Ministerial & the American army seem at present to be rather on the defensive as if each were wishing for some Benign Hand to interpage and heal the dreadful contest without letting out the blood from the bosom of their Brethren.

This document was accessed from Digital History. Gilder Lehrman Document Number: GLC 1800.2

? Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, May 1776

Abigail Adams wrote this letter to her husband, the future president, while he was participating in the Second Continental Congress.

How many are the solitary hours I spend, ruminating upon the past, and anticipating the future, whilst you overwhelmd with the cares of State, have but few moments you can devote to any individual. All domestick pleasures and injoyments are absorbed in the great and important duty you owe your Country “for our Country is as it were a secondary God, and the First and greatest parent. It is to be preferred to Parents, Wives, Children, Friends and all things the Gods only excepted. For if our Country perishes it is as imposible to save an Individual, as to preserve one of the fingers of a Mortified Hand.” Thus do I supress every wish, and silence every Murmer, acquiesceing in a painfull Seperation from the companion of my youth, and the Friend of my Heart.

I believe tis near ten days since I wrote you a line. I have not felt in a humour to entertain you. If I had taken up my pen perhaps some unbecomeing invective might have fallen from it; the Eyes of our Rulers have been closed and a Lethargy has seazd almost every Member. I fear a fatal Security has taken possession of them. [illegible] Whilst the Building is on flame they tremble at the expence of water to quench it, in short two months has elapsed since the evacuation of Boston, and very little has been done in that time to secure it, or the Harbour from future invasion till the people are all in a flame; and no one among us that I have heard of even mentions expence, they think universally that there has been an amaizing neglect some where. Many have turnd out as volunteers to work upon Nodles Island, and many more would go upon Nantaskit if it was once set on foot. “Tis a Maxim of state That power and Liberty are like Heat and moisture; where they are well mixt every thing prospers, where they are single, they are destructive.”

A Goverment of more Stability is much wanted in this colony, and they are ready to receive them it from the Hands of the Congress, and since I have begun with Maxims of State I will add an other viz. that a people may let a king fall, yet still remain a people, but if a king let his people slip from him, he is no longer a king. And as this is most certainly our case, why not proclaim to the World in decisive terms your own importance?

Shall we not be dispiced by foreign powers for hesitateing so long at a word?

I can not say that I think you very generous to the Ladies, for whilst you are proclaiming peace and good will to Men, Emancipating all Nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over Wives. But you must remember that Arbitary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken — and notwithstanding all your wise Laws and Maxims we have it in our power not only to free ourselves but to subdue our Masters, and without voilence throw both your natural and legal authority at our feet

“Charm by accepting, by submitting sway

Yet have our Humour most when we obey.”

I thank you for several Letters which I have received since I wrote Last. They alleviate a tedious absence, and I long earnestly for a Saturday Evening, and experience a similar pleasure to that which I used to experience find in the return of my Friend upon that day after a weeks absence. The Idea of a year dissolves all my Phylosophy.

Our Little ones whom you so often recommend to my care and instruction shall not be deficient in virtue or probity if the precepts of a Mother have their desired Effect, but they would be doubly inforced could they be indulged with the example of a Father constantly before them; I often point them to their Sire

“engaged in a corrupted State

Wrestling with vice and faction.”

I designd to have finished the sheet, but an opportunity offering I close only just inform you that May the 7 our privateers took two prises in the Bay in fair sight of the Man of war, one a Brig from Irland the other from fyall loaded with wine Brandy and the other Beaf &c. The wind was East and a flood tide, so that the tenders could not get out tho they tried several times, the Light house fired Signal guns, but all would not do, they took them in triumph and carried them into Lyn.

Johnny and Charls have the Mumps, a bad disorder, but they are not very bad. Pray be kind enough to remember me at all times and write as often as you possibly can to your Portia

? Gary B. Nash, “Ordinary Americans and the Constitution.” History Now. Fall 2007 The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History 49 W. 45th Street, 6th Floor � NYC, NY 10036 (646) 366-9666 � 2009�2014 All Rights Reserved

The Constitution is so honored today, at home and abroad, that it may seem irreverent to suggest that for a great many ordinary Americans, it was not what they wished as a capstone of their revolutionary experience. This is not to say that they opposed the Constitution from beginning to end. Far from it. Rather, they were alarmed at important omissions in the Constitution, particularly a Bill of Rights. Many believed that the Constitution was the work of men of wealth and prestige who meant to submerge the most democratic features of the American Revolution. This is why historians are generally agreed that if the Constitution had been put before the electorate for an up and down vote�a plebescite, in effect�it would not have been ratified. Considering that the suffrage was limited to about half of the adult white men (others were not qualified for lack of property), this would have been a thumping rejection of what was seen by ordinary people as a conservative, elitist-tinged document.

With this in mind, let�s consider how three large groups�African Americans, artisans, and small farmers�viewed the Constitution, and examine why these groups had deep reservations about its ability to steer the nation forward without compromising the founding principles of the American Revolution.

African Americans

Not until 1845, after Madison�s long-hidden notes on the debates of the Constitutional Convention were published, would William Lloyd Garrison, a fervent abolitionist, call the Constitution a �covenant with death� and �an agreement with hell� because of the several proslavery clauses embodied in the document and how the delegates to the convention put them there. Enslaved African Americans�about one-sixth of the nation�s population in 1790–knew that well enough, for the Constitution that began with the lofty words �To create a more perfect union� did nothing to release them and their children from slavery.

This was obvious as well to free African Americans, though their fragile position in the northern and Chesapeake states made it difficult for them to criticize the Constitution once it was ratified. And it was well-known that among the Antifederalists opposing ratification of the Constitution, some were disturbed at the proslavery character of the document. One such person was Luther Martin, attorney general of Maryland, who railed against delaying the end of the slave trade for twenty years and lamented that the Constitution did not include a clause �to authorize the general government from time to time, to make such regulations as should be thought most advantageous for the gradual abolition of slavery, and the emancipation of the slaves.� In protesting the fugitive slave clause (Article IV, Section 2) shortly after ratification, black Americans again signified their understanding that northern delegates to the Constitutional Convention had bowed to southern slave owners.

It would take a half-century before Frederick Douglass expressed what many of his black predecessors latently believed about the Constitution, and this feeling grew as the number of slaves increased rapidly in the first half of the nineteenth century. �The Constitution of the United States�What is it?� asked Douglass. �Who made it? For whom and for what was it made?� His answer was disquieting for whites but empowering for blacks: �Liberty and Slavery�opposite as Heaven and Hell�are both in the Constitution; and the oath to support the latter is an oath to perform that which God has made impossible. . . If we adopt the preamble, with Liberty and Justice, we must repudiate the enacting clauses, with Kidnapping and Slave holding.�

Artisans

Representing perhaps one-tenth of the population, craftsmen ranged across a great many trades, and they were far from unified in their political views. Nonetheless, most supported the Constitution. They knew that the Articles of Confederation left the Continental Congress with no taxing power, with no �energy,� with no authority to raise an army to suppress insurrections, either by black slaves or white farmers� desperate at post-1783 demands for taxes and debt payments that they could not meet in the midst of a postwar depression. Also, they favored a shift of power from state legislatures to a federal government because it promised federal protection for the American-made goods that they produced in competition with British artisans. Tariff protection, mandated by a stronger central government, fit their needs for the public to �buy American.�

Yet a great many artisans had concerns about the Constitution. Particularly, they feared that it would usher in an era where the democratic promise of the Revolution�both in economic and political terms�would wither away.

The artisans� economic concerns centered on equal access to capital, land, and education and the chance to achieve what they called a �decent competency.� Believing in the virtuousness of productive labor and the indispensability of laboring people to the community, many artisans deplored what they saw as a growing tendency of the rich to feed off the poor, while casting aspersions on �the sheeplike masses� and �the vulgar herd.� If the Constitution facilitated the rise of a super-wealthy commercial elite, the day was not far off before the small producers� dream of social justice and a rough economic equality would be shattered. George Bryan, writing as �Centinel,� put it plainly. He opposed the Constitution because it played into the hands of the �aristocratic juntos of the well-born few, who had been zealously endeavoring since the establishment of their [colonial] constitutions, to humble that offensive upstart�equal liberty.�

Liberty also meant political rights. The artisans had found their voice during the revolution, throwing off deference to wealthy leaders, and coming to play important positions on seaport committees charged with enforcing boycotts against British products. They had insisted that they were a part of the body politic�to be enfranchised, allowed to run for office, and given respect for their service to the community. At the time of Constitution-making, they were beginning to form mechanic organizations, which would soon become nodes of political consciousness. All of this seemed at risk as the ratification debates engaged the public.

In some towns, especially in the interior, artisans and small shopkeepers fiercely opposed ratification of the Constitution. In Carlisle, Pennsylvania, for example, reported William Petrikin, an ordinary man, �almost every day some new society [was] being formed� to block �this detestable federal conspiracy.� A volunteer militia company which he led even pledged �to oppose the establishment of the new Constitution at the risque of our life and fortunes.� Crowd action occurred only rarely during the ratification process, but sentiments ran strong against what thousands of ordinary citizens saw as a retreat from the liberties they had gained during the revolution.

By the late eighteenth century, most artisans had drifted away from the Federalist Party into the Jefferson-led Democratic-Republican Party because some of the features of the Constitution that worried them at the time of its creation came to the fore under the first several Congresses and the presidencies of Washington and Adams. As one New York City sailmaker declaimed at a Fourth of July celebration in 1797, �Wherever the wealthy by the influence of riches are enabled to direct the choice of public officers, there the downfall of liberty cannot be very remote.� Proud to live �by the sweat of their brows,� the artisans passed down their fears of concentrated economic and political power�the enemy of a society of equal opportunity and social justice�to industrial laborers who by the 1820s were confronting capital in its expansive, freewheeling form.

Small Farmers

When Amos Singletary, the rough-hewn farmer from Worcester County, Massachusetts rose before the state�s elected convention gathered in 1788 to decide on whether to ratify the Constitution, he spoke without benefit of any schooling. But standing behind the plow, he had developed a wealth of feelings and political instincts. Singletary may have appreciated that a written constitution was in itself a landmark event in the Western world, and he may have celebrated the fact that conventions of delegates elected by their constituents were charged with deciding on the wisdom of the document. These, after all, were breathtaking innovations in putting the power in the people–or, as was the case in Massachusetts, to give a say in political matters to about half the white adult males who qualified through property ownership.

But gnawing at Singletary�s innards was something born of his lifelong experience with the men of wealth in western Massachusetts. He, like most debt-ridden farmers tilling marginal lands in New England, had just left behind a wrenching, blood-filled civil insurrection born out of desperation. �These lawyers, and men of learning, and moneyed men, that talk so finely, and gloss over matters so smoothly, to make us poor illiterate people swallow down the pill,� he sputtered, �expect to get into congress themselves; they expect to be managers of the Constitution and get all the power and all the money into their own hands, and then they will swallow up all of us little folks, like the great Leviathan. Mr. President; yes just as the whale swallowed up Jonah. This is what I am afraid of.�

Singletary did not speak for all farmers and probably not for most of the commercially successful men of the plow. But he spoke for the hardscrabble families who eked out a living far from commercial markets. Such men toiled on the frontiers of the new nation, especially in the Appalachian hill country from Maine to Georgia. As small agricultural producers, they feared and hated what they regarded as moneyed, parasitical men who did not live by their own labor but handled money, speculated in land, bore hard on debtors to whom they made loans, and paid low taxes in relation to their wealth.

Many ordinary farmers did support the Constitution because they accepted the Federalists� arguments that the nation was languishing under a government with insufficient power to levy taxes for national defense, conduct a muscular foreign policy, and devise national solutions to other national problems. The promise of the addition of a Bill of Rights, the lack of which was a bone in the throat of a majority of people, set at ease many who feared the aristocratic tendencies of the Constitution and the transfer of power from state legislatures to a federal Congress. But decade after decade, usually in times of economic stress, agrarian radicals would step forward in every part of the expanding nation to seek redress for grievances that were rooted, in their view, from a narrow, aggrandizing minority of wealthy Americans who benefited the most from the Constitution.

Gary B. Nash is professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. His books include The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness and the Origins of the American Revolution (1979), The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (2005), and The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (2006).

? Petition to the House of Representatives for the State of Massachusetts, Jan. 13, 1777

The petition of A Great Number of Blackes detained in a State of slavery in the Bowels of a free & Christian Country Humbly shuwith [showeth] that your Petitioners apprehend that thay [they] have in Common with all other men a Natural and Unaliable [inalienable] Right to that freedom which the Grat Parent of the Unavers hath Bestowed equalley on all menkind and which they have Never forfuted by any Compact or agreement whatever�but thay wher Unjustly Dragged by the hand of cruel Power from their Derest friends and sum of them Even torn from the Embraces of their tender Parents�from A popolous Pleasant and plentiful contry and in violation of Laws of Nature and off Nations and in defiance of all the tender feelings of humanity Brough hear Either to Be sold Like Beast of Burthen & Like them Condemnd to Slavery for Life�Among A People Profesing the mild Religion of Jesus A people Not Insensible of the Secrets of Rational Being Nor without spirit to Resent the unjust endeavours of others to Reduce them to a state of Bondage and Subjection your honouer Need not to be informed that A Life of Slavery Like that of your petioners Deprived of Every social privilege of Every thing Requisit to Render Life Tolable is far worse then Nonexistence.

[In Imitat]ion of the Lawdable Example of the Good People of these States your petitiononers have Long and Patiently waited the Evnt of petition after petition By them presented to the Legislative Body of this state and cannot but with Grief Reflect that their Success hath ben but too similar they Cannot but express their Astonishment that It has Never Bin Consirdered that Every Principle form which Amarica has Acted in the Cours of their unhappy Dificultes with Great Briton Pleads Stronger than A thousand arguments in favowrs of your petioners they therfor humble Beseech your honours to give this petion [petition] its due weight & consideration & cause an act of the Legislatur to be past Wherby they may be Restored to the Enjoyments of that which is the Naturel Right of all men�and their Children who wher Born in this Land of Liberty may not be heald as Slaves after they arrive at the age of twenty one years so may the Inhabitance of this Stats No longer chargeable with the inconsistancey of acting themselves the part which they condem and oppose in others Be prospered in their present Glorious struggle for Liberty and have those Blessing to them, &c.

? Cato, �Letter to the editor of the Philadelphia Freeman�s Journal,� Sept. 21, 1781

I AM a poor negro, who with myself and children have had the good fortune to get my freedom, by means of an act of assembly passed on the first of March 1780, and should now with my family be as happy a set of people as any on the face of the earth, but I am told the assembly are going to pass a law to send us all back to our masters. Why dear Mr. Printer, this would be the cruellest act that ever a sett of worthy good gentlemen could be guilty of. To make a law to hang us all, would be merciful, when compared with this law; for many of our masters would treat us with unheard of barbarity, for daring to take the advantage (as we have done) of the law made in our favor.�Our lots in slavery were hard enough to bear: but having tasted the sweets of freedom, we should now be miserable indeed.�Surely no christian gentlemen can be so cruel! I cannot believe they will pass such a law.�I have read the act which made me free, and I always read it with joy�and I always dwell with particular pleasure on the following words, spoken by the assembly in the top of the said law. “We esteem it a particular blessing granted to us, that we are enabled this day to add one more step to universal civilization, by removing as much as possible the sorrows of those, who have lived in undeserved bondage, and from which, by the assumed authority of the kings of Great-Britain, no effectual legal relief could be obtained.� See it was the king of Great- Britain that kept us in slavery before.�Now surely, after saying so, it cannot be possible for them to make slaves of us again�nobody, but the king of England can do it�and I sincerely pray, that he may never have it in his power.�It cannot be, that the assembly will take from us the liberty they have given, because a little further they go on and say, �we conceive ourselves, at this particular period, extraordinarily called upon, by the blessings which we have received, to make manifest the sincerity of our professions and to give a substantial proof of our gratitude.” If after all this, we, who by virtue of this very law (which has those very words in it which I have copied,) are now enjoying the sweets of that �substantial proof of gratitude� I say if we should be plunged back into slavery, what must we think of the meaning of all those words in the begining of the said law, which seem to be a kind of creed respecting slavery? but what is most serious than all, what will our great father think of such doings? But I pray that he may be pleased to tern the hearts of the honourable assembly from this cruel law; and that he will be pleased to make us poor blacks deserving of his mercies. [Signed] CATO

? Small-scale, non-commercial, �yeoman� farmers from western Massachusetts published this letter in the Massachusetts Gazette in January, 1788.

Many are the arts made use of by our aristocratick gentlemen, to accomodate the federal constitution to the yeomanry of the country. But it is very unlucky for them, that they should be so far misled, as to attempt to trump up one thing which appears by no means to be founded in truth, viz that none but placemen and pensioners are opposed to it. This is so far from [equating] with truth, that we conceive it to be an absolute falsehood. We would ask the disinterested part of the community just to look over the characters w[h]ich are so fond of swallowing this creature, which exhibits all the pourtraits of an over-bearing aristocracy, and see if they are not chiefly composed of salary men and pensioners, and those who at least think themselves fair candidates for places of honour and emolument, whenever the aristocratick wheels of the federal chariot shall be set in motion.

When we see the adherents to this constitution chiefly made up of civil and ecclesiastical gown men, and their dependents, the expedient they have hit upon is not likely to have the intended effect. There are many men destitute of eloquence, yet they can see and hear�They can think and judge, and are therefore not likely to be wheedled out of their senses by the sophistical reasonings of all the advocates for this new constitution in the country combined. We know this is not true; and as we well know the design of such representations, we would have those gentlemen know, that it will not take. They must pull upon some other string, or they must fail. Another thing they tell us, that the constitution must be good, from the characters which composed the Convention that framed it. It is graced with the names of a Washington and a Franklin. Illustrious names, we allow�worthy characters in civil society. Yet we cannot suppose them, to be infallible guides, neither yet that a man must necessarily incur guilt to himself merely by dissenting from them in opinion.

We cannot think the noble general, [Washington] has the same ideas with ourselves, with regard to the rules of right and wrong. We cannot think, he acts a very consistent part, or did through the whole of the contest with Great Britain: who, notwithstanding he wielded the sword in defence of American liberty, yet at the same time was, and is to this day, living upon the labours of several hundreds of miserable Africans, as free born as himself; and some of them very likely descended from parents who, in point of property and dignity in their own country, might cope with any man in America.We do not conceive we are to be overborne by the weight of any names, however revered. �ALL MEN ARE BORN FREE AND EQUAL;� if so, every man hath a natural and unalienable right to his own opinion, and, for asserting this right, ought not to be stimatized with the epithets of tenacious and dogmatical. If we were to pin our faith on any sleeves but our own (without derogating in the least from the merit of any one of the Massachusetts delegates in the federal convention) we should be as likely to pin it on the sleeve of the hon. mr. Gerry as any one of them. But we mean to see with our own eyes, and thus seeing to act for ourselves. In this view, as a tribute due from us to that hon. gentleman, we must acknowledge his tenderness, his care for the preservation of the liberties of the people, and his desire on all occasions to preserve them from invasion. This hon. gentleman was one who assisted in rearing the pillars of a republican government, he has ever since aided in the support of them, and thus hath acted a much more consistent part than those his brethren, who, after all the expense and fatigue of rearing the building, are now for razing the foundations, destroying instead of repairing the frame, and erecting another, which by no means can answer the good purpose of sheltering the people from storms. But, to lay aside the metaphor�

This gentleman is much more consistent, than those who are for turning our republican government into a hateful aristocracy. And we must think it very dishonourable in the aristocratickal party, to treat the worthy gentleman, in the manner they have done in the publick papers. We can assure them it has been far from helping their cause. We do not wish to tire the publick, but would hint to those gentlemen, who would would rob the people of their liberties, that their sophistry is not like to produce the effect. We are willing to have a federal constitution. We are willing another trial should be made; this may be done without derogating from the gentlemen, who composed the late convention. In framing a constitution for this commonwealth, two trials were made before one would stick. We are willing to relinquish so much, as to have a firm, energetick government, and this we are sensible may be done, without becoming slaves, to the capricious fancies of any sett of men whatever. It is argued, that there is no danger that the proposed rulers will be disposed to exercise any powers that this constitution puts into their hands, which may enable them to deprive the people of their liberties. But in case, say they, they should make such attempts, the people may, and will rise to arms and prevent it; in answer to which, we have only to say, we have had enough of fighting in the late war, and think it more eligible, to keep our liberties in our own hands, whilst it is in our power thus to do, than to place them in the hands of fallible men, like ourselves, who may if they please, entirely deprive us of them, and so we be at last reduced to the sad alternative of losing them forever, or recovering them back by the point of the sword. The aristocratick party are sensible, that these are the sentiments of the majority of the community, and their conduct plainly evinces the truth of a well known ancient adage� ” Nothing cuts like the truth.”

?

? NEW NATION

? J. Hector St. John De Crevecoeur, excerpt from Letters from an American farmer, 1782.

What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European, or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. Americans are the western pilgrims, who are carrying along with them that great mass of arts, sciences, vigour, and industry which began long since in the east; they will finish the great circle. The Americans were once scattered all over Europe; here they are incorporated into one of the finest systems of population which has ever appeared, and which will hereafter become distinct by the power of the different climates they inhabit. The American ought therefore to love this country much better than that wherein either he or his forefathers were born. Here the rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labour; his labour is founded on the basis of nature, SELF-INTEREST: can it want a stronger allurement? Wives and children, who before in vain demanded of him a morsel of bread, now, fat and frolicsome, gladly help their father to clear those fields whence exuberant crops are to arise to feed and to clothe them all; without any part being claimed, either by a despotic prince, a rich abbot, or a mighty lord. Here religion demands but little of him; a small voluntary salary to the minister, and gratitude to God; can he refuse these? The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence.–This is an American.

? David Waldstreicher, �The Invention of the Fourth of July,� History Now (Summer 2005) The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History 49 W. 45th Street, 6th Floor � NYC, NY 10036 (646) 366-9666 � 2009�2014 All Rights Reserved [https://www.gilderlehrman.org/]

The Fourth of July, or Independence Day, as it has come to be known, is perhaps the most and the least American of holidays. It is the most American because it marks the beginning of the nation, because it rapidly became an occasion for expressing what America is all about, and because it is locally and voluntarily observed. It is the least American because it was created mostly out of English material.

Beginning in the sixteenth century, at times of great controversy over matters of church and state, people in the British Isles began to use official and unofficial anniversaries in order to make political statements. Celebrating � or refusing to celebrate � the monarch could be controversial when questions of dynastic succession or royal or parliamentary policy were at stake. Protestants attacked traditional Roman Catholic saints� days; kings and archbishops of the Church of England invented new holidays like the King�s Birthday to cement the alliance between the monarchy and the Church of England and in the process helped create an English, and later a British, identity. �Red- letter days,� as they were known because they appeared in red ink in printed almanacs, served as a flexible calendar for what historians call popular politics � the political expressions and practices of ordinary people, sometimes mobilized by officials and organized dissenters. Whether bells were rung, songs sung, sermons given, or the king toasted — and how these actions were carried out — could make a great deal of difference to people who were listening for political meanings. From fasts to feasts and from birthdays to funerals, all kinds of life events were marked by this popular, celebratory politics.

British colonizers of North America brought the celebrations, and the politics, with them. By the eighteenth century they began to participate fully in these traditions. In doing so they expressed their very real membership in the British Empire, and, often at the same time, they fought more local battles. By the mid-1760s, when the controversies over the regulation of the empire began to heat up, festivals served as the perfect way to peacefully protest while also spreading the word beyond colonial seaports. Reports of parades and dinners for the repeal of the Stamp Act, for example, were reprinted in newspapers, spreading the modes and the logic of loyal resistance. The greater the numbers turning out for such celebrations, the more the protest movement could claim to represent the people, not just the merchants and tradesmen who would feel the new taxes first. These sometimes daring protests seemed less so when they used traditional rituals, a move that reinforced the patriots� argument that the protesters were only claiming the traditional rights of Englishmen.

In July 1776, American rebels staged celebrations of independence that were at once spontaneous and at the same time — and in a strikingly modern sense — media events. Independence had already been in the air for at least a year, and the Continental Congress had already declared two national fast days, July 20, 1775, and May 17, 1776. Yet on forwarding the printed Declaration of Independence to the states, Congress did not recommend fasting, mourning, bell ringing, or any other observance. Congress would not order the nation to celebrate its own birth. The new nation could not actually exist until the people had celebrated its existence and the proof had appeared in print, but in fact many colonists did devise celebrations to mark the event.

The Declaration had thrust all blame onto the king, and its public proclamation set off a public, symbolic murder, and funeral, for the king � an inversion of a King�s Birthday celebration. People in New York City tore down the equestrian statue of George III and hacked it to pieces. (It is said that metal bits of it were later used to make bullets.) In other places the monarch�s picture and royal arms were ceremoniously burned. In Huntington, Long Island, people took down the old liberty pole and used the material to fashion an effigy. This mock king sported a wooden broadsword and was described in a newspaper as having a blackened face �like Dunmore�s Virginia regiment� (the slaves who had been invited by the governor of Virginia to help put down the rebellion) and feathers, �like Carleton and Johnson�s savages� (the king�s Iroquois allies in New York). Fully identified with his African and Indian allies, wrapped in the Union Jack, the king was hung, exploded, and burnt. In Savannah, George III was �interred before the Court House.� The press descriptions made sure to mention the ringing of bells and the bonfires � the two most important aspects of traditional King�s Birthday celebrations. These printed descriptions inspired new celebrations and stressed the loud and visible support of the people for the end of monarchy and the beginning of American independence under new forms of government. The celebrations and descriptions they inspired made it seem possible that the thirteen North American colonies, which until that time had had more connections with England than with one another, might unite to form a new nation.

During the difficult years of the Revolutionary War, patriots began to celebrate the anniversary of American independence on July 4th and also marked battle victories, and their anniversaries, in similar fashion. These patriots focused on what unified them and on a glorious national future that would follow from their victories, rather than on the British past that they had once actively remembered at such occasions but which they had now left behind. The need of the revolutionary movement to simultaneously practice politics and create national unity only raised the stakes of celebrating national holidays. The trend in the early republic would be for July Fourth, and other celebrations modeled on the Fourth, to spread nationalism and at the same time, to provide venues for divisive political expression. In this way, Americans learned to be American and to practice partisanship without any sense of contradiction. Just as they blamed the British while claiming and using British traditions, they used the Fourth of July to praise and criticize their governments and each other, in the process struggling over who, and what, was truly American.

In 1787 and 1788, proponents of the new federal Constitution staged �spontaneous� celebrations of ratification in the various states, not only to express their relief, but also to attack their opponents and to try to convince doubters that the acceptance of the new national charter by all the states was inevitable. During the 1790s, when disputes over foreign affairs and the role of public opinion between elections led Federalists and Democratic Republicans began to coalesce into informal national political parties, these partisans began to hold separate Fourth of July celebrations in larger towns. They also used the Fourth and its now more fully developed repertoire of parades, sermons, toasts, and newspaper reportage, as a model for new celebrations with explicit political meanings. Federalists began to celebrate Washington�s Birthday in order to support Washington�s policies and confirm their claims to embody the nation. For a time Democratic Republicans marked anniversaries of the French Revolution, which they felt expressed the more democratic version of politics they sought to turn into American tradition. After 1800 they also celebrated March 4th, the anniversary of Thomas Jefferson�s election to the presidency, as an alternative to what they called the �monarchical� tradition of President Washington�s Birthday. Such celebrations helped Americans put into practice a two-party system, which few justified on its own terms but which, along with the newspapers that were increasingly subsidized by parties, provided an orderly meeting ground for an unwieldy federal electoral politics and a tradition of popular rituals.

July Fourth and its alternatives enabled Americans to preserve a paradox: a revolutionary tradition. While these nationalist political celebrations naturally came to have a conservative basis after the Revolutionary Era, there were others, such as abolitionists, who used the celebration to criticize American policy. Shut out of the two-party system by politicians who refused to address the issue of slavery on a national level, abolitionists, too, invented alternative festivals, like celebrations of the end of the slave trade. When Frederick Douglass asked, �What to the Slave to the Fourth of July?� and answered, �The Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn,� he did so at an alternative Fifth of July celebration held in Rochester, New York, in 1852. Douglass continued the American penchant for not only celebrating but also inventing new holidays when the political possibilities of the old ones seemed insufficient.

David Waldstreicher is a professor of history at Temple University. His books include In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776�1820 (1997); Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution (2004); and Slavery�s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (2009).

? David Jaffee, “Art and Society of the New Republic, 1776�1800”. In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000�.

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/arso/hd_arso.htm (October 2004)

? William Manning, “The Sentiments of a Labourer”: Inquires in the Key of Liberty, 1798

William Manning, a farmer, revolutionary foot soldier, and political theorist, became agitated during the postwar period. In 1798, he completed a treatise called �The Key of Liberty.� Manning hoped to take advantage of the growing availability of newspapers and pamphlets during the post-revolutionary period to distribute his ideas.

THE KEY OF LIBBERTY: To all the Republicans, Farmers, Mecanicks, and Labourers In Amarica your Canded attention is Requested to the Sentiments of a Labourer. Introduction: Learning & Knowledg is assential to the preservation of Libberty & unless we have more of it amongue us we Cannot Seporte our Libertyes Long.

I am not a Man of Laming my selfe for I neaver had the advantage of six months schooling in my life. I am no travelor for I neaver was 50 Miles from whare I was born in no direction, & I am no grate reader of antiant history for I always followed hard labour for a living. But I always thought it My duty to search into & see for my selfe in all maters that consansed me as a member of society, & when the war began betwen Brittan & Amarica I was in the prime of Life & highly taken up with Liberty & a free Government. I See almost the first blood that was shed in Concord fite & scores of men dead, dying & wounded in the Cause of Libberty, which caused serious sencations in my mind.

But I beleived then & still believ it is a good cause which we aught to defend to the very last, & I have bin a Constant Reader of publick Newspapers & closely attended to men & measures ever sence, through the war, through the operation of paper money, framing Constitutions, makeing & constructing Laws, & seeing what selfish & contracted ideayes of interests would influence the best picked men & bodyes of men.

I have often thought it was imposable ever to seport a free Government, but firmly believing it to be the best sort & the ondly one approved off by heaven it was my unweryed study & prayers to the almighty for many years to find out the real cause & a remidy and I have for many years bin satisfyed in my own mind what the causes are & what would in a grate measure prove a reamidy provided it was carried into efect.

But I had no thoughts of publishing my sentiments on it untill the adoption of the Brittish trety1 in the manner it has bin done. But seeing the unweryed pains & the unjustifyable masures taken by large numbers of all ordirs of men who git a living without labour in Elections & many other things to ingure the interests of the Labourer & deprive us of the priviledges of a free government, I came to a resolution (although I have nither laming nor lasure for the purpose) to improve on my Constitutional Right & give you my sentiments on what the causes are & a remidy.

In doing which I must study bravity throughout the hole & but just touch on many things on which voloms mite be written, but hope I shall do it so as to be understood, and as I have no room for compliments & shall often make observations on sundry ordirs of men & their conduct, I beg leave once for all to observe that I am far from thinking any ordirs of men who live with out Labour are intirely needless or that they are all chargable with blame. But on the conterary I firmly believe that their is a large number in all ordirs who are true frinds to Libberty & that it is from them that Libberty always has & allways will receive its prinsaple seport. But I also beleive that a large majority of them are actuated by very different prinsaples. Also as I am not furnished with Documents & other Information that would be usefull I may represent Some things different from what they really are & so desire that they may be taken ondly as my Opinnion & belived no further than they appear Evident.

? Noah Webster, On the Education of Youth in America (Boston, 1790)

Noah Webster is best known for his American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828.

In despotic governments the people should have little or no education, except what tends to inspire them with servile fear. Information is fatal to despotism.

In monarchies education should be partial and adapted to the rank of each class of citizens. But “in a republican government,” says the same writer, “the whole power of education is required.” Here every class of people should know and love the laws. This knowledge should be diffused by means of schools and newspapers, and an attachment to the laws may be formed by early impressions upon the mind.

Two regulations are essential to the continuance of republican governments: 1. Such a distribution of lands and such principles of descent and alienation as shall give every citizen a power of acquiring what his industry merits. 2. Such a system of education as gives every citizen an opportunity of acquiring knowledge and fitting himself for places of trust. These are fundamental articles, the sine qua non of the existence of the American republics.

Hence the absurdity of our copying the manners and adopting the institutions of monarchies.

In several states we find laws passed establishing provision for colleges and academies where people of property may educate their sons, but no provision is made for instructing the poorer rank of people even in reading and writing. Yet in these same states every citizen who is worth a few shillings annually is entitled to vote for 1egislators. This appears to me a most glaring solecism in government. The constitutions are republican and the laws of education are monarchical. The former extend civil rights to every honest industrious man, the latter deprive a large proportion of the citizens of a most valuable privilege.

In our American republics, where government is in the hands of the people, knowledge should be universally diffused by means of public schools. Of such consequence is it to society that the people who make laws should be well informed that I conceive no legislature can be justified in neglecting proper establishments for this purpose.

When I speak of a diffusion of knowledge, I do not mean merely a knowledge of spelling books and the New Testament. An acquaintance with ethics and with the general principles of law, commerce, money, and government is necessary for the yeomanry of a republican state. This acquaintance they might obtain by means of books calculated for schools and read by the children during the winter months and by the circulation of public papers.

“In Rome it was the common exercise of boys at school to learn the laws of the twelve tables by heart, as they did their poets and classic authors.” What an excellent practice this in a free government!

It is said, indeed by many, that our common people are already too well informed. Strange paradox! The truth is, they have too much knowledge and spirit to resign their share in government and are not sufficiently informed to govern themselves in all cases of difficulty.

There are some acts of the American legislatures which astonish men of information, and blunders in legislation are frequently ascribed to bad intentions. But if we examine the men who compose these legislatures, we shall find that wrong measures generally proceed from ignorance either in the men themselves or in their constituents. They often mistake their own interest, because they do not foresee the remote consequences of a measure.

It may be true that all men cannot be legislators, but the more generally knowledge is diffused among the substantial yeomanry, the more perfect will be the laws of a republican state.

Every small district should be furnished with a school, at least four months in a year, when boys are not otherwise employed. This school should be kept by the most reputable and well informed man in the district. Here children should be taught the usual branches of learning, submission to superiors and to laws, the moral or social duties, the history and transactions of their own country, the principles of liberty and government. Here the rough manners of the wilderness should be softened and the principles of virtue and good behavior inculcated. The virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities, and for this reason the heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head.

Such a general system of education is neither impracticable nor difficult, and excepting the formation of a federal government that shall be efficient and permanent, it demands the first attention of American patriots. Until such a system shall be adopted and pursued, until the statesman and divine shall unite their efforts in forming the human mind, rather than in loping its excrescences after it has been neglected, until legislators discover that the only way to make good citizens and subjects is to nourish them from infancy, and until parents shall be convinced that the worst of men are not the proper teachers to make the best, mankind cannot know to what a degree of perfection society and government may be carried. America affords the fairest opportunities for making the experiment and opens the most encouraging prospect of success.

Part III. 1780s to 1810s

1. Read the Overview Essays below thoroughly and carefully.

Highlight or note the general contours and key features of this period.

2. Review the sources in the sections.

Note how they relate to the historical period.

3. Complete the Assignment and submit on Blackboard before the deadline.

OVERVIEW ESSAY

? Joyce Appleby, �National Expansion and Reform, 1815�1860,� The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History 49 W. 45th Street, 6th Floor � NYC, NY 10036 (646) 366-9666 � 2009�2013 All Rights Reserved [https://www.gilderlehrman.org/]

A good way to understand the men and women who created America�s reform tradition and carried it across the Mississippi in the years before the Civil War is to look at the political heritage their parents and grandparents left to them. The very idea of generations resonated with new meaning after independence. The conveyance of social responsibility from one generation to another is always a fascinating interplay of the inherited and the novel, but the American Revolution was a social and political rupture that clouded the future for young Americans. Together they faced a new way of life in a new nation.

While this attachment within the generation that inherited the Revolution weakened traditional loyalties, it also held out the promise of creating a new political will that would extend across the continent. The Revolutionary leader Gouverneur Morris expressed this hope when he wrote that a �national spirit is the natural result of national existence; and although some of the present generation may feel colonial oppositions of opinion, that generation will die away, and give place to a race of Americans.�[1]

Fighting a war for independence had not unified Americans. Rather it created the problem of unity�an imperative to hang together once the actual fighting ended and peace had been secured. The states were held together by a loose confederation. Much of the land Americans claimed still remained part of the ancestral domain of American Indians. The commonalities that did exist among the states�those of language, law, and institutional history�pointed in the wrong direction, back to the past when they were still part of the British Empire.

The Declaration of Independence with its charged statements about equality and �certain unalienable rights� proved far more divisive than unifying. The flagrant contradiction between slavery and the principle of equality led to the first emancipation movement as one after another of the northern states abolished slavery in the waning years of the eighteenth century. With these remarkable acts, the Mason-Dixon boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania became the symbolic division between freedom and slavery, an ominous development at a time when Americans were working to strengthen their union.

The Constitution created a national government along with the new responsibility of being an American citizen for white men. Most of those who George Washington invited to serve in his administration were social conservatives who believed that the world was divided between the talented few and the ordinary many. They endorsed individual freedom and equality before the law, but believed that members of the upper class should govern, restricting the common man to voting. Thomas Jefferson, chafing at this elitist doctrine, organized an opposition to the Federalists based on the contentious issues of popular participation, free speech, and equal opportunity. Two raucous presidential campaigns permanently disrupted the electoral decorum that the Federalists had hoped to impose with the new constitutional order. Jefferson�s presidential victory in 1800 opened the way for the next generation to fashion the world�s first liberal society.

The embrace of personal liberty as a defining feature of American politics gave concrete grounds for the hope that slavery would end. The number of free blacks, swollen by northern emancipation, southern manumissions, and greater scope for self-liberation, led to the formation of African American communities. Their success gave the lie to slaveholders� dismissive claims about the abilities of African Americans. After the Revolution, whites and blacks mingled in churches and shops, on the frontier and in the cities of the Upper South and the North, along with persistent racial prejudice. Despite the campaigns to abolish slavery in the northern states, African Americans figured on the margins of political life, and the existence of slavery in the �land of the free� continued to exacerbate sectional tensions.

During this time a French countess planted the seeds of a powerful idea�American exceptionalism�in a letter to Jefferson on the eve of the French Revolution: �The characteristic difference between your revolution and ours,� she wrote, �is that having nothing to destroy, you had nothing to injure, and labouring for a people, few in number, incorrupted, and extended over a large tract of country, you have avoided all the inconvenience of a situation, contrary in every respect.� Then she added, �Every step in your revolution was perhaps the effect of virtue, while ours are often faults, and sometimes crimes.�[2]

This view of the United States as exceptional was echoed among reform-minded Europeans. �They are the hope of the human race, they may well become its model,� Anne Robert Turgot told the pro-American English minister Richard Price. The famed editor of the Encyclopedie, Denis Diderot, proclaimed the new United States an asylum from fanaticism and tyranny �for all the peoples of Europe.�

The new nation appeared exceptional to such Europeans because, in their view, its healthy, young, hard-working population had won a revolutionary prize�what was seen as an empty continent upon which to settle its free-born progeny. America was exceptional because the familiar predators of ordinary folk�the extorting tax collector, the overbearing nobleman, the persecuting priest, the extravagant ruler�had failed to make the voyage across the Atlantic. Natural abundance, tolerance, exemption from Old World social evils�these were among the materials from which the European reform imagination created the exceptional United States. This view ignored the new nation�s reliance on slavery and its displacement of Native peoples, who did not figure in the romanticized view of a New World, where the evils of the Old World could be eradicated.

America�s ordinary citizens took up this view, celebrating what was distinctively American: its institutional innovations, its leveling spirit, above all, its expanded opportunities for common people. To them the idea of American exceptionalism had enormous appeal, for it played to their strengths. Taking up western land could become a movement for spreading democratic institutions across the continent. Being exceptional established a reciprocity between American abundance and high moral purposes. It infused the independence and hardiness of America�s farming families with civic value, generating patriotic images that could resonate widely without addressing the question of slavery.

The Fourth of July rhetoric of the hoi polloi made clear that American exceptionalism freed them from the elite�s embrace of European gentility. To be genteel, one had to accept the cultural domination of Europe. For ordinary Americans the country�s greatness emerged in a lustier set of ideals�open opportunity, an unfettered spirit of inquiry, destruction of privilege, personal independence.

During the nineteenth century, ordinary white Americans ignored the insignificance of their country on the world stage and propelled their republic discursively into the march of progress, a resonant new idea in Western culture. What might be construed elsewhere as uninterestingly plebian was elevated to a new goal for mankind. America was the only nation, Richard Hofstadter wryly commented, that began with perfection and aspired to progress. And American history was written to explain how this could be.[3]

Three themes of American exceptionalism came into play: the clean slate with its implicit rejection of the past, the autonomy of the individual with its accompanying disparagement of dependency, and the commitment to natural rights with the corollary that democratic governance could best protect them. The metaphor of a clean slate helped create the illusion of a frontier emptied of human inhabitants�a virginal continent�an image that drew a veil over the violent encounters with the indigenous peoples that actually paced the westward trek of Americans. The autonomous man enjoyed the freedom to be the designer of his and his family�s life unaided or impeded by others, and the republic drew its worth from protecting individual rights. Democratic rhetoric likewise drew a veil over the severe limits that existed for those whose race or sex had already been assigned a value at birth.

This idea of being exceptional didn�t really become the core of national identity until those who fought for independence and wrote the Constitution had retired from public life�as the Virginia dynasty of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, gave way to men such as John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Then a new generation of Americans took possession of their legacy and wrapped their imagination around the idea of a special role in world history for their nation. The tensions between the ideal and reality generated the reform movements that flourished in antebellum America. Activists became agents of change in an era of change, brought about by the convergence of political revolutions, intellectual ferment, and social turbulence.

During these same years, America entered into a period of commercial expansion that promoted the construction of roads, the extension of postal services, and the founding of newspapers in country towns. A dense new communication network amplified the resonance of partisan disputes. The control over information and opinions once exercised exclusively by an elite had been wrested away by the articulate critics of that elite. A strong consensus quickly formed that American democracy required a broad base of educated people and literacy became widespread for both men and women, promoted by religious and commercial demands. Reading became a necessity, met by a thriving print culture. European visitors expressed astonishment that those who lived in the rural areas were as well informed as city dwellers.

Land lured men and women westward. By 1810 a third of the American population lived in a new settlement. The conclusion of the War of 1812 added another push towards the frontier as soldiers got paid in land bounties. The fertile lands of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys beckoned, giving ordinary men a chance to capitalize their family�s labor. All this movement thrust the nation into sustained warfare against the native inhabitants.

Urbanization grew apace; population in the older cities more than doubled, though three-quarters of Americans still lived on farms or rural towns on the eve of the Civil War. Within a decade, merchants, freed from British restrictions, sent ships across the Pacific and into the Indian Ocean. Baltimore became the fastest growing city in the United States, benefitting from its access to both the Atlantic and the hinterland for the raw materials and customers for its flourishing flour-milling industry. Yankee ingenuity displayed itself in manufacturing and retailing. In the rural Northeast where there were plenty of rivers, entrepreneurs tapped into waterpower. Both men and women sought liberation from the drudgery of farm work in the hundreds of factories that sprang up along the waterways of Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut. Enterprise moved out to the countryside and down the social ladder as a market emerged that matched the nation�s geographic and public reach.

Antebellum economic growth undulated through boom and bust cycles, the busts being remembered as the Panics of 1819, 1837, and 1857. The European demand for cotton created most of the booms�though the discovery of gold in the newly acquired California in 1848 was the most spectacular. Cotton, however, tied the American economy to slavery at the very time that the first emancipation movement created the portentous division between free and slave states. Profits from cotton coursed through the whole American economy. Southern specialization meant that plantation owners looked north for wood products, tools, and some foodstuffs, while they imported their luxury items from Europe.

As northern states used their impressive communications network to spread their values, southerners�that is, the planter elite�began to perceive themselves standing against the nation, straining at the bonds of union as they drew closer to one another through shared political goals and intense sociability. Enslaved men and women, whose numbers ranged from 30 percent to 60 percent of each slave state�s population, formed ties with slaves on neighboring plantations, though they all lived in fear of being sent to the southern frontier of Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Poorer whites clustered in the small communities of the hill country.

The Bill of Rights and the steady, if slow, expansion of the suffrage for white men and a few free black men kept the democratic torch burning. Equally significant was the disestablishment of colonial churches. Between 1786 and 1833, Virginia, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Massachusetts replaced their established churches with religious freedom, like those of the other states. Their leaders could have approved multiple established churches, but they opted to disentangle religious and political institutions, mirroring at the state level that �wall of separation between church and state� which Jefferson wrote about in 1802. This move particularly benefitted Baptists and Methodists, which were the fastest-growing denominations in the nation. Neither had enjoyed state support and both had suffered discrimination from the established churches.

Although the majority of Americans were nominally Christians, many of them lived without places of worship, especially those who had moved to the frontier. Paying for clergy, church buildings, and seminaries now depended upon voluntary contributions, and without state support, many churches struggled to survive. Yet the separation of church and state paradoxically strengthened religion in America, for it permitted a hundred spiritual flowers to bloom, and bloom they did. Ministers began experimenting with new methods designed explicitly to revive Christianity in America.

In the early 1800s revivals passed in waves over the country�s villages, towns, and cities. They could be scheduled or impromptu, held in church buildings or out in the open at great camp meetings lasting many days. Charismatic preachers exhorted men and women to confess their sins and accept the grace extended to them through Christ. Many achieved fame for their persuasive ability. The astute French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville commented wryly that every time he was told he was going to meet a priest, he met a politician.[4] To be born again became the core religious experience. While some churches continued to accept the doctrine of predestination associated with Calvin, an increasing number believed that good works contributed to a Christian�s claim on heaven.

These revivals transformed American culture and the nature of Protestant Christianity in the United States. Ministers, responding to the �call to do the Lord�s work,� would pack their Bibles in their saddle bags and set off to find a field of souls to harvest. The Methodist Church organized circuits for their ministers to ride to extend their reach. The revivalists� stress on personal salvation led to the neglect of other elements of Christian dogma and of the learned clergy to explicate them. They also encouraged personal commitments that went far beyond conventional service attendance. Critics within America�s older churches�Lutheran, Dutch Reformed, Congregational, Presbyterian, and Episcopal�found much to find fault with in this new movement. They considered its theology shallow and disliked what they saw as manipulative appeals to the emotions, but the evangelicals were astoundingly popular.[5]

Reliance upon the Bible led to differing interpretations and new denominations. Every contested meaning had the potential of inspiring a new group of worshippers. Upstate New York was called �the burned over district� in reference to the intense passions aroused by the revivals as well as their frequency. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sprang from this soil, while the Disciples of Christ began as an effort to bring all the denominations together and ended by adding to the proliferating array. Without a formal hierarchy, the Baptists were particularly prone to splintering over doctrinal differences.

After a long period during which many Christians had drifted toward a more rationalist understanding of divinity and others had been set adrift by the turmoil of two wars, the disestablishment campaigns, and westward movement, the revivals successfully re-pietized America. While Evangelicals may have constituted a minority, they successfully imposed their mores upon the public.

The new denominations educated members in democratic practices as well. Forming new churches required volunteers to raise funds, build organizations, and participate in decision-making. Women, blacks, and the poor, often excluded from voting, learned about democratic governance in their churches. With a strong wind at their back, Evangelical Protestants sought to fill in the empty canvas of the American continent, assured by their success and their confidence in the fresh footings of the US Constitution.[6]

The zeal generated by the revivals fueled an extensive missionary movement, at home among the American Indian tribes and abroad. In the early nineteenth century, the American Board of Commissions for Foreign Missionaries sent young missionary couples to Asia, a field opened up by American commerce to Ceylon and India.[7] Evangelical associations like the Bible Society, the Peace Society, and the Sunday School Union followed in quick succession.

The General Union for Promoting the Observance of the Sabbath was organized to ensure the sanctity of Sundays. They exerted pressure on storekeepers to show respect for the day of rest and worship, but lost the battle to close post offices or stop the flow of water into the Erie Canal where rowdy boatman shattered Sabbath tranquility.[8] The network of Evangelical organizations became known as the Benevolent Empire, a term that captures their proponent�s aspiration to rise above denominational differences to join forces for proselytizing and educating, wherever needed. Scarcely a social ill escaped the attention of these men and women.

In 1827 a perceptive observer was struck by the constant churning of people in the United States. He concluded that if �movement and the quick succession of sensations and ideas constitute life, here one lives a hundred fold more than elsewhere; here, all is circulation, motion, and boiling agitation.� He continued, �Experiment follows experiment; enterprise follows enterprise.�[9] A British naval officer more laconically commented that �the Americans are a restless, locomotive people: whether for business or pleasure, they are ever on the move in their own country, and they move in masses. . . . Wandering about seems engrafted in their Nature,� he added; they �forever imagine that the Lands further off are still better than those upon which they are already settled.�[10] These observers saw the novelty of a society directed almost entirely by the ambitious dreams that had been unleashed by their exceptional situation.

In all this mobility lay the seeds of the many social problems Evangelicals addressed. The decline of traditional ordering mechanisms had led to deteriorating standards of personal behavior. Anyone who wasn�t a reformer usually needed reforming. In 1820, Americans fifteen years and older drank more liquor than ever before or since. Artisans in most shops took a whiskey break every morning and afternoon. Children could easily encounter alcoholic teachers; heavy drinking punctuated most public celebrations. Gambling and ritualized violence figured prominently in public life as well, and mobs formed easily. The lightly governed, newly settled communities in the West had their urban equivalent in the older cities where the decadal doubling of population created entirely new neighborhoods.

Efforts to stop alcohol consumption were largely a top-down affair until Lyman Beecher, one of the stars of the revival movement, launched the American Temperance Society in 1826. He shifted the focus from the hopeless drunkard to the social drinker and made abstinence, not moderation, the goal. Fanning out to the West and the South, Beecher�s group swept up Methodists and Baptists who had long deplored the pervasive drinking. His temperance tracts reached 100,000 readers at a time when the biggest paper in the country had a circulation of 4,500.[11]

In the 1840s, a new group, the Washington Temperance Society, garnered a membership of half a million in three years. Formed by working-class men in Baltimore, the Washingtonians campaigned to secure local-option prohibition laws. Harking back to the Revolutionary heritage, temperance workers claimed that they had liberated themselves from a tyranny worse than Britain�s. Changes in American drinking habits came swiftly; consumption was cut in half in the ten years between 1835 and 1845, but the campaign to make the sale of alcoholic beverages illegal persisted through the century.[12]

Many Catholics immigrated to the United States during the Irish potato famines of the 1840s and 1850s. Less censorious about drinking�they picnicked with beer in public parks�Catholics drew the ire of temperance leaders. They also suffered persecution from nativist groups who feared and defamed their religion. Joined by emigrating Germans, the Catholics soon built their own churches, parochial schools, and seminaries. When John Hughes became Archbishop of New York in 1842, Catholics acquired a forceful champion who publicly exposed every insult and injury that Catholics sustained. Americans slowly came to realize that their respect for religious freedom meant more than tolerating diversity within the Protestant fold.

The two most significant reform causes of the antebellum period called for the end of slavery and full citizenship for women. In the afterglow of the Revolution, anti-slavery societies agitated for cures for this poisonous thorn in the body politic. State legislatures, including Virginia�s, debated schemes for emancipation. Free African Americans were particularly active in keeping the issue alive with petitions to legislatures, legal suits, pamphlets, newspapers, and acts of self-liberation.[13] They were particularly eager to undermine colonization societies, which attempted to solve the problem of racial prejudice by sending freed slaves to Africa. The Quakers, first in the anti-slavery field, helped establish the so-called underground railroad to ease southern slaves� flight from captivity. The fear of slave revolts, after the successful one in Haiti, haunted white southerners. The 1820 census showed that the slave population had almost doubled in twenty years.[14]

The increasing profitability of cotton gradually stilled anti-slavery voices in the South, and it took some dramatic developments to stir much concern about southern slavery in the North. Missouri applied for admission to the Union as a slave state�the first state carved from the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. New York Congressman James Talmadge, railing against the extension of such �a monstrous scourge,� tried to tack on a gradual emancipation provision to the enabling act. Finally, under the Missouri Compromise of 1820, Missouri came in as a slave state with the promise of no further extension of slavery, in essence pushing the problem off to an uncertain future and energizing some new opponents to slavery.

William Lloyd Garrison brought the full force of evangelical fervor to the abolition movement. A newspaperman by trade, he started the Liberator in 1831 and founded, with others, the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. His statement in the Liberator�s first issue gives a sense of his fierce determination: �I am in earnest�I will not equivocate�I will not excuse�I will not retreat a single inch�AND I WILL BE HEARD.� Abolitionists followed his lead by abandoning gradual and ameliorative measures and demanding �immediate and complete emancipation.�[15] This position provoked the wrath of southerners and the scorn of many in Garrison�s native New England.

Congress was intent on containing, not enflaming, the conflict over slavery. Despite the clear right of Americans to petition Congress, they adopted a gag rule to prevent anti-slavery petitions from being read. This issue rankled as no other, until abolitionists were able to persuade Congress to change it. Senator and former Vice-President John Calhoun said this repeal put the states on an irreversible path towards conflict over slavery.[16] Not until the new Republican Party in 1854 articulated its opposition to any extension of slavery into the western territories did anti-slavery northerners find a unifying, rallying position.

Mobilizing people against slavery triggered a movement to secure greater political participation for women. Sarah and Angelina Grimke, who championed both abolition and women�s rights, were forceful advocates from the South. With Garrison, they proved to be the fulcrum for the entwined efforts. Propertied women had voted in New Jersey for thirty-three years after the Revolution, but they lost that right as citizenship became less defined by property and more by independence, which the law denied women. At the same time American popular culture defined woman�s role as the presiding domestic presence and nurturer of male citizens.[17] When the American Anti-Slavery Society encouraged women to take an active part in its outreach, some men broke away to form an anti-slavery society that did not admit women. This kind of response intensified the determination of a handful of pioneers�Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Lucretia Mott�to pursue the struggle for equal rights for women. It would be hard to exaggerate how radical this movement was in the 1840s and 1850s, yet the work these women had done in anti-slavery work and the temperance movement made it seem quite natural to them that women should be active in the public sphere.

Stanton came from a prominent New York family. She not only received an excellent academy education, she also learned about the law from her father�s law clerks. Strong willed and talented, she studied and then rejected the legal system that so thoroughly subordinated women, especially wives, to men.[18] She and her abolitionist husband honeymooned in London, where they attended the Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840. Mott, a charismatic Quaker feminist, also attended. When the men voted to deny women participation in the conference, Stanton and Mott forged a bond. Mott, like two other women�s rights leaders, Lucy Stone and Susan Anthony, had awakened to the discrimination against women when she discovered that male colleagues where she was teaching earned four times more than she did.

Stone was the first woman from Massachusetts to earn a college degree; she was also unique in refusing to take her husband�s name. Stanton said that Stone �was the first person by whom the heat of the American public was deeply stirred on the woman question.�[19]

Through temperance and abolitionist work, many women learned the organizational skills that were to stand them in good stead when they turned their heads and hearts toward eradicating the laws and mores subjugating women because of their sex. In 1848, Stanton and Mott threw themselves into organizing the Woman�s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Drawing 300 activists, among them forty men, the convention endorsed Stanton�s Declaration of Sentiments, which was based on the Declaration of Independence. Delegates at the convention passed a number of resolutions, including an audacious claim for the right to vote. Leading newspapers, in an attempt to ridicule the proceedings, published in full the Declaration of Sentiments with its description of an aristocracy of sex �exalting brute force above moral power, vice above virtue, ignorance above education, and the son above the mother who bore him.� The publicity was an attempt to scandalize the public, but Stanton shrewdly observed the widening of their of readership as a result.

Learning about the Seneca Falls convention drew Susan Anthony to active participation in the women�s rights movement. Her Quaker father was both a cotton manufacturer and an abolitionist who undertook her education after he discovered that her primary school limited the subjects it would teach girls. In 1851, Anthony met Stanton, and the two of them founded the first women�s temperance society. After that they traveled together on speaking tours, which became forays into hostile territory punctuated by insults and battery. Stone, who was also an indefatigable speaker, reported occasions when she was hit by ice, rotten fruit, eggs, and a hymnal.[20]

Many women were turned into agitators for women�s rights because of negative reactions to their participation in the reform movements that were sweeping the North in the antebellum period. They felt compelled to seek the liberty, equality, and independence that Americans extolled as a national legacy and overcame any personal timidity to do so. After the Civil War, they continued to campaign for the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery. But the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 giving newly freed African American men the voting privileges that the women had so long sought became a bitter pill to swallow.[21]

Defending slavery through the decades placed the southern states in opposition to the experimental thrust of northern life. Increasingly northerners and southerners construed their differences as implicit challenges to one another. Emancipation had given those in the North a deceptive sense of their political convictions. The opening up of opportunities to move, to innovate, to express personal opinions defined for many what it meant to be an American. In making the ideal American a restless, ingenious, and accomplishment-centered person, northerners characterized the nation in a way that made southern differences ever more apparent. Over time southern states coalesced as the South, a separate society from that of the rest of the nation. Its leaders no longer apologized for slavery as they had in the Revolutionary area; instead they defended it as the basis of a truly genteel, American, civilization.

Conflict became inevitable when northern voters rallied around Abraham Lincoln and supported the Republican Party�s adamant opposition to the extension of slavery in the presidential election of 1860. Lincoln�s victory drove southern leaders to secede rather than accept the containment of slavery. With the firing of cannon on Fort Sumter, the federal redoubt in Charleston harbor, on April 12, 1861, they took up arms to defend their way of a life.

The ardent reform campaigns had given ordinary northerners a sense that their country was what Turgot had called the �hope of the human race.�[22] As European countries retreated from democracy, the United States seemed more and more exceptional as a self-governing people dedicated to securing inalienable rights for all.[23] Northern soldiers fought to save the union as described in the Declaration of Independence. Halting the extension of slavery had unified them; abolishing slavery came about through fighting the war. Evangelical Christians with their intense reforming zeal supplied the energy for the reform movements of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. Fusing the social ideals of liberty and equality with the personal ones of seeking redemption, they had narrowed the scope for compromise. They had also fortified Northerners to fight for their values as keenly as those in the South fought for theirs.

________________________________________

[1] Gouverneur Morris to John Jay, Jan. 10, 1784 in The Correspondence and Public Papers of John Jay, ed. Henry P. Johnson (New York: G. P. Putnam�s Sons, 1891), 3:104�105.

[2] Les Amities Americaines de Madame d�Houdetot, d�apres sa correspondance

inedite avec Benjamin Franklin et Thomas Jefferson, ed. Gilbert Chinard (Paris: Daupeley-Gouverneur, 1924), 56.

[3] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 15. I have borrowed Anderson�s phrase.

[4] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Vintage Books, 1954), 1:304�307.

[5] Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815�1848 (New York: Oxford, 2007), 187.

[6] Sidney Mead, �Denominationalism: The Shape of Protestantism in America,� Church History 23 (1954); Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 180-188.

[7] Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 13.

[8] Richard R. John, �Taking Sabbatarianism Seriously: The Postal System, the Sabbath and the Transformation of American Political Culture,� Journal of the Early Republic 10 (Winter 1990): 538.

[9] Michel Chevalier, Society, Manners, and Politics in the United States: Letters on North America, ed. John W. Ward (1839; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), 299.

[10] Frederick Marryat, A Diary in America, with Remarks on Its Institutions, ed. Sydney Jackman (New York: Knopf, 1962), 366.

[11] Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution, 205-215. See also Merton M. Hyman et al, Drinkers, Drinking, and Alcohol-Related Mortality and Hospitalizations: A Statistical Compendium (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980).

[12] W.J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 7-9, 40-46, 191-195; Joyce Appleby, �The Personal Roots of the First American Temperance Movement,� Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 14 (1997):141-159; Robert L. Hampel, Temperance and Prohibition in Massachusetts, 1813-1852 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982), 2-4; 183-185 offers a historiographical survey of the subject.

[13] Joseph Yannielli, �George Thompson among the Africans: Empathy, Authority, and Insanity in the Age of Abolition,� Journal of American History, 96 (March 2010):986ff.

[14] Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution, 247

[15] Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin�s Press, 1998), 225.

[16] Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 6.

[17] Robert Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Barbara Leslie Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middleton CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981).

[18] Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years & More: Reminiscences, 1815�1897 (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1993), 1:5-6, 333, 48, 54. See also Ellen Carol Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women�s Movement in America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).

[19] Alice Stone Blackwell, Lucy Stone: Pioneer of Woman�s Rights (Charlottesville VA: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 94. See also Jean H. Baker, Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

[20] Elinor Rice Hays, Morning Star: A Biography of Lucy Stone, 1818�1893 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1961), 72-73; Sally Gregory McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women�s Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 81. See also Rebecca J. Mead, How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868�1914. (New York: New York University Press, 2004).

[21] Ann D. Gordon, ed. The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 2:567.

[22] Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, The Life and Writings of Turgot: Comptroller-General of France, 1774�6, ed. W. Walker Stephens (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1895), 303.

[23] Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

Joyce Appleby is professor of history emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of Inheriting the Revolution: the First Generation of Americans (2000). Her most recent book is The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (2010).

? WOMEN IN THE ANTEBELLUM PERIOD

? Excerpt from the published memoir of Anne Carson, ca. 1810

Anne Carson of Philadelphia attended one of the first coeducational academies in the nation but her unemployed father forced the 15-year-old to marry a 41-year-old ship captain.

Shortly after this, my unfortunate self made my entr�e into this vale of tears, for such indeed it proved to me. I was their second child; my father continued in the mercantile trade with considerable success; his family increased rapidly; and I can truly say that my days of childhood and youth were uninterrupted scenes of perfect happiness. I received my education at the best seminaries Philadelphia then afforded; no expense was spared, but the volatility of my disposition, and that haughty independence of mind, which has so strongly marked my riper years, interfered too much with my studies, and prevented me from obtaining that pre-eminence I ought to have acquired.�

At school I formed an acquaintance with two young ladies and with them passed those hours in diversion that ought to have been devoted to study. I must here also remark on the gross impropriety of associating boys and girls in the same seminaries, as at school I imbibed those seeds of coquetry, which have essentially injured me in the estimation of the world, and acquired many of those opinions that have tinctured my mind with ideas almost masculine. I was ever an admirer of personal beauty, and my young mind even then aimed at conquest; we all had our favorite beaux, and ever ambitious of excelling my companions to attract and hold the attention of the handsomest boys in the school, was an object to my young heart of pleasure and triumph.

My mother�s anxiety to make me a proficient in needlework was more conspicuous than the cultivation of my mind (she being a matron of the old school). In this I forwarded her views by an unremitting attention to my work; I therefore became complete mistress of my needle, and excelled in plain sewing and fancy work. This gratified my fond parent, who overlooked many of my failings in consideration of my attention to, and excellence in, this her favourite branch of my education; this, and writing, were the only arts I ever excelled in while at school. My father�s profession keeping him so much from home, the care of the family devolved solely upon my mother, and as there were seven of us, all small at one time, viz., five girls and two boys, she could not be expected to have time to eradicate from my mind those weeds. Thus I grew up fair to the eye, and of a pleasing exterior; my heart was warm, rather than tender, generous, humane, and susceptible; affectionate to those that were kind to me; but haughty, cold, and vindictive to those that attempted to controul my will, or restrain my pleasure. Fond of dress, and amply provided with the means of gratifying this my favourite propensity, vanity formed a conspicuous trait in my character. My figure increased rapidly; I was ever uncommonly tall of my age; before I had attained my fourteenth year, I was of the middle stature. This rapid growth gave me the appearance of womanhood, before age justified the idea, or my understanding was sufficiently cultivated to render me a suitable companion for gentlemen of my father�s standing in society and profession� .

My father�s affairs continued prosperous. The luxuries of the West Indies were in our family added to the delicacies of our plentiful city. I knew not a care but to amuse myself or perform my part of the plain work of the family. The first check my vivacity ever knew was occasioned by my father�s being detained in France for eighteen months by the French embargo. On his return, he had contracted a habit of indolence and a disgust to his profession, which prevented his engaging in business for three years. This neglect on his part, and his keeping my mother in total ignorance, at length introduced pecuniary embarrassment, that awoke me in common with the rest of my family from our dream of pleasurable tranquility�. [My mother] communicated to my elder sister and myself, with many tears, the situation of my father�s affairs; and this, I can truly say, was the first sorrow I had ever known. We then agreed to retrench our family expenses, hoping by frugality and economy to continue our independence�. The family was now reduced, in some measure, to dependence on my father�s pay and success in business. This was a precarious support for a family consisting of seven children, five of them girls educated in ease and plenty and taught to look forward to brilliant prospects. How were their views obscured, if not annihilated, and themselves reduced to comparative poverty. This we bore with patience, and some degree of fortitude; every retrenchment was made in our household establishment consistent with comfort. My grandmother returned to the house of my uncle, Samuel McCuthchen, then a lieutenant in the navy of the United States.

My mother, from habit and her early marriage, was considered by my father incapable of conducting any business, and we knew not what method to adopt to add to our scanty income, my father�s pride forbidding the idea of his daughters’ learning any trade. Had he permitted my mother to keep a shoe, grocery, or grog shop, now at this time our family might have been opulent, and some of its members probably lawyers, doctors, and even clergymen�.

In June [I801] Captain Carson and myself were married by the command of my father, who was lying very ill. I then wanted two months of being sixteen years of age. Oh Mary, how cruel, how weak in parents thus to almost force, or compel a girl, scarce past the days of happy childhood, to enter into a state that forever afterwards stamps her future fate with happiness or miseries extreme. I did not love Captain Carson, to that passion I was a perfect stranger. It is true, my girlish vanity was flattered by his dashing appearance, elegant figure, and handsome face; nay my pride was gratified by being the bride of a United State�s officer, and my sense of right satisfied by my obedience to my parents in becoming his wife�

I had married Captain Carson without loving him. The flame his kindness kindled in my heart one day, his stormy temper extinguished the next; accustomed to the kindest treatment in his absence, from all my family and friends, and experiencing only the extreme of misery when with him, at my own house, both became alike hateful to me: for can human nature love a being that tantalizes, teazes, and even domineers over her�impossible. The slave toiling beneath the burning sun, and shrinking from the lash of a cruel overseer, can still anticipate a respite from his labour when the sun shall have sunk down beneath the western waves, or be secure if he fulfills his duty by performing the task marked out for him. But alas! I could never find a mitigation of my sufferings, night or day; a word, a look, might raise a storm in his mind. Thus was my naturally haughty temper rendered fierce and intractable from self-defence. I was very young when married to him, my heart unbiased by any attachment; he had received my unreluctant hand and vows of fidelity. Had he then endeavoured to gain it, my heart would soon have accompanied them; but his haughty soul disdained to try to gain the affection of a girl he fancied bound to love him, and like the Turkish bashaw, who, when his female slaves are endeavouring to attract his attention by their blandishments, haughtily throws a handkerchief to the happy she with whom he condescends to pass an hour. So did Captain Carson fancy that I was compelled to meet and return his love, when he condescended to be in a good humour. To this kind of conduct, I never could or would bend. I was an American; a land of liberty had given me birth; my father had been his commanding officer; I felt myself his equal, and pride interdicted my submitting to his caprices. Therefore the ill treatment I received from him (but which many a simple wife might consider good) I resented. Thus we lived: can any thing on earth equal the misery of matrimonial infelicity?�to find a tyrant where we expected a soothing companion, and to know that dire suspicion is corroding the bosom on which we depend for protection, sympathy, consolation and confidence. If not to a husband, where can a woman look for happiness?…

I had now been one year without receiving any means of support for myself and children from him. The money he left me on his going to Baltimore, was rapidly wasting away, and I found that I could not depend on Capt. C. for a renewal of my funds, when they would be exhausted. I had never been accustomed to any employment, except needle-work for myself and family. How then could I seek for it? �from the rich and great? �that seemed impossible�my soul shrunk from the idea. Of business I knew nothing; yet something I must do, else become the victim of penury, or a dependent on my parents, who had a large family and very slender income, my father�s half pay being then their sole dependence. After devising and revising a variety of plans, all of which my mother opposed, saying, as none of the family had ever been in business, I could not expect encouragement, and would quickly exhaust my finances in stock, which would lay dead on my hands. My mind ever active and enterprising, was not to be intimidated by her imbecile doubts and false pride. Independence was my idol, and I resolved, flattered by hope, and impelled by my guardian angel, to endeavor to realize my plans. I therefore sold all my superfluous furniture, and as Capt. C. had brought me a considerable quantity of china in the early stages of our marriage, which, at this time, was getting scarce, as the India trade was very much embarrassed by the national disputes between Great Britain and these States which terminated in the late war [the War of 1812]. Those articles were therefore to me a valuable acquisition, as I had determined to enter into the sale of china and queens-ware. I therefore rented a house in Second-street [for $500 per annum], a part of the city well calculated for business, where I commenced with a slender capital; and being, as I thought, too young to live entirely alone in so public and exposed a situation, I prevailed on my parents to remove to the same house, and reside. Thus protected by parental care, I entered into business, with hope, confidence, and activity. Heaven smiled on my endeavours, and prosperity crowned my exertions; peace and plenty were the inmates of my humble dwelling; industry is the parent of both, as indolence is that of vice, want, and misery. I now had no leisure for painful reflections, or disagreeable retrospections; time flew on downy pinions; the day was never too long, for I was usefully, pleasantly, and profitably employed. My children engrossed my affections, and promised to amply reward my paternal cares of them. My sisters were my companions, my parents my friends, the public patronage was equal to my most sanguine expectations, and I was happy. Yet whence did this happiness arise? �from industry. I was now a useful and active member of society.

I, meantime, became again entirely devoted to my business. My mother had got a share of the contract for making clothes for the use of the army, and, as the war had greatly injured my trade, I pursued this new avocation to increase my income, and procure for my children such indulgences as they had been accustomed to. My time was continually employed in cutting out work for the females that depended on us for bread, and the support of their families. I was indefatigable in my attentions to this and the store. Disgusted with man, and sick of the very name of love, I met all the advances of those that sought my favour with cool indifference, which soon dismissed them from the pursuit; whether honourable or otherwise, I cared not. Of the deceptions of that sex, I was perfectly convinced, and laughed at their efforts to again enslave me. I could not be mistaken in the views of some, who, as they were men of families, I was conscious were dishonourable.

Source: Ann Baker Carson, The Memoirs of the Celebrated and Beautiful Mrs. Ann Carson, 2d edition (Philadelphia, 1828), 19�21, 22�25, 40, 58�59, 76�77, 100.

? Frances Wright, excerpt from “Letter XXIII: Condition of Women,” (March 1820) in Views of Society and Manners in America

Englishwoman Frances (Fanny) Wright (1795-1852) writer, lecturer, and social reformer. She first came to the United States on a series of visits that began in 1818. She wrote about northern American woman and went on a public speaking tour of U.S. cities in the late 1820s. She became a U.S. citizen in 1825.

In the education of women, New England seems hitherto to have been peculiarly liberal. The ladies of the eastern states are frequently possessed of the most solid acquirements, the modern and even the dead languages, and a wide scope of reading; the consequence is that their manners have the character of being more composed than those of my gay young friends in this quarter. I have already stated, in one of my earlier letters, that the public attention is now everywhere turned to the improvement of female education. In some states, colleges for girls are established under the eye of the legislature, in which are taught all those important branches of knowledge that your friend Dr. Rush conceived to be so requisite.

In other countries it may seem of little consequence to inculcate upon the female mind “the principle of government, and the obligation of patriotism,” but it was wisely forseen by that venerable apostle of liberty that in a country where a mother is charged with the formation of an infant mind that is to be called in future to judge of the laws and support the liberties of a republic, the mother herself should well understand those laws and estimate those liberties. Personal accomplishments and the more ornamental branches of knowledge should certainly in America be made subordinate to solid information. This is perfectly the case with respect to the men; as yet the women have been educated too much after the European manner. French, Italian, dancing, drawing engage the hours of the one sex (and this but too commonly in a lax and careless way), while the more appropriate studies of the other are philosophy, history, political economy, and the exact sciences. It follows, consequently, that after the spirits of youth have somewhat subsided, the two sexes have less in common in their pursuits and turn of thinking than is desirable. A women of a powerful intellect will of course seize upon the new topics presented to her by the conversation of her husband. The less vigorous or the more thoughtless mind is not easily brought to forego trifling pursuits for those which occupy the stronger reason of its companion.

I must remark that in no particular is the liberal philosophy of the Americans more honorably evinced than in the place which is awarded to women. The prejudices still to be found in Europe, though now indeed somewhat antiquated, which would confine the female liberty to romances, poetry, and belles lettres, and female conversation to the last new publication, new bonnet, and pas seul, are entirely unknown here. The women are assuming their place as thinking beings, not in despite of the men, but chiefly in consequence of their enlarged views and exertions as fathers and legislators.

I may seem to be swerving a little from my subject, but as I have adverted to the place accorded to women in one particular, I may as well now reply to your question regarding their general condition. It strikes me that it would be impossible for women to stand in higher estimation than they do here. The deference that is paid to them at all times and in all places has often occasioned me as much surprise as pleasure

In domestic life there is a tenderness on the part of the husband to his weaker helpmate, and this in all situations of life that I believe in no country is surpassed and in few equalled. No cavaliere servente of a lady of fashion, no sighing lover, who has just penned a sonnet to his “mistress’s eyebrow,” ever rendered more delicate attentions to the idol of his fancy that I have seen rendered by an American farmer or mechanic, not to say gentleman, to the companion of his life. The wife and daughters of labouring citizen are always found neatly dressed and occupied at home in household concerns; no field labour is ever imposed upon a woman, and I believe that it would outrage the feelings of an American, whatever be his station, should he see her engaged in any toil seemingly unsuited to her strength. In travelling, I have myself often met with a refinement of civility from men, whose exterior promised only the roughness of the mechanic or working farmer, that I should only have lookekd for from the polished gentleman.

Perhaps the condition of women affords, in all countries, the best criterion by which to judge of the character of men. Where we find the weaker sex burdened with hard labour, we may ascribe to the stronger something of the savage, and where we see the former deprived of free agency, we shall find in the latter much of the sensualist. I know not a circumstance which more clearly marks in England the retrograde movement of the national morals than the shackles now forged for the rising generation of women. Perhaps these are as yet more exclusively laid upon what are termed the highest class, but I apprehend that thousands of our countrywomen in the middle ranks, whose mothers, or certainly whose grandmothers, could ride unattended from the Land’s End to the border and walk abroad alone or with an unmarried friend of the other sex armed with all the unsuspecting virtue of Eve before her fall–I apprehend that the children and grandchildren of these matrons are now condemned to walk in leading strings from the cradle to the altar, if not to the grave, taught to see in the other sex a race of seducers rather than protectors and of masters rather than companions. Alas for the morals of a country when female dignity is confounded with helplessness and the guardianship of a woman’s virtue transferred from herself to others! If any should doubt the effect produced by the infringement of female liberty upon the female mind, let them consider the dress of the present generation of English women. This will sufficiently settle the question without refrence to the pages of the daily journals. Of the two extremes it is better to see a woman, as in Scotland, bent over the glebe, mingling the sweat of her brow with that of her churlish husband or more churlish son, than to see her gradually sinking into the childish dependence of a Spanish donna.

The liberty here enjoyed by the young women often occasions some surprise to foreigners, who, contrasting it with the constraint imposed on the female youth of Paris or London, are at a loss to reconcile the freedome of the national manners with the purity of the national morals; but confidence and innocnece are twin sisters, and should the American women ever resign the guardianship of their own virtue, the lawyers of these democracies will probably find as good occupation in prosecuting suits for divorce as those of any of the monarchies of Europe.

I often lament that in the rearing of women so little attention should be commonly paid to the exercies of the bodily organs; to invigorate the body is to invigorate the mind, and Heaven knows that the weaker sex have much cause to be rendered strong in both. In the happiest country their condition is sufficiently hard. Have they talents? It is difficult to turn them to account. Ambition? The road to honorable distiction is shut against them. A vigorous intellect? It is broken down by sufferings, bodily and mental. The lords of creation receive innumerable, incalculable advantages from the hand of nature, and it must be admitted that they everywhere take sufficient care to foster the advantages with which they are endowed. There is something so flattering to human vanity in the consciousness of superiority that it is little surprising if men husband with jealousy that which nature has enabled them to usurp over the daughters of Eve. Love of power more frequently orginates in vanity than pride (two qualities, by the way, which are often confounded) and is, consequently, yet more peculiarly the sin of little than of great minds. Now an overwhelming proportion of human minds appertain to the former class and must be content to soothe their self-love by considering the weakness of others rather than their own strength. You will say this is severe; is it not true? In what consists the greatness of a despot? In his own intrinsic merits? No, in the degradation of the multitude who surrond him. What feeds the vanity of a patrician? The consciousness of any vitrute that he inherits with his blood? The list of his senseless progenitors would probably soon cease to command his respect if it did not enable him to command that of his fellow creatures. “But what,” I hear you ask, “has this to do with the condition of women? Do you mean to compare men collectively to the despot and the patrician?” Why not? The vanity of the despot and the patrician is fed by the folly of their fellow men, and so is that of their sex collectively soothed by the dependence of women: it pleases them better to find in their companion a fragile vine,clinging to their firm trunk for support, than a vigorous tree with whosebranches they may mingle theirs. I believe they sometimes repent of their choice when the vine has weighed the oak to the ground. It is difficult, in walking through the world, not to laugh at the consequences which, sonner or later, overtake men’s follies, but when these are visted upon women I feel more disposed to sigh. Born to endure the worst afflictions of fortune, they are enervated in soul and body lest the storm should not visit them sufficiently rudely. Instead of essaying to the counteract the unequal law of nature, it seems the object of man to visit it upon his weaker helpmate more harshly. It is well, however, that his folly recoils upon his own head, and that the fate of the sexes is so entwined that the dignity of the one must rise or fall with that of the other.

In America much certainly is done to ameliorate the condition of women, and as their education shall become, more and more, the concern of the state, their character may aspire in each succeeding generation to a higher standard. The republic, I am persuaded, will be amply repaid for any trouble or expense that may be thus bestowed. In her struggles for liberty much of her virtue emanated from the wives and daughters of her senators and soldiers, and to preserve to her sons the energy of freemen and patriots she must strengthen that energy to her daughters.

To invigorate the character, however, it is not sufficient to cultivate the mind. The body also must be trained to wholesome exercise, and the nerves braced to bear those extremes of climate which here threaten to enervate the more weakly frame. It is the union of bodily and mental vigor in the male population of America which imparts to it that peculiar engergy of character which in its first infancy drew forth so splendid a panegyric from the British orator: “What in the world is equal to it?” exclaimed Mr.Burke. “Whilst we follow them (the colonists) among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson’s Bay and Davis’ Straits, whilst we are looking for them beneath the Arctic Circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the antipodes, and engaged under the frozen serpent of the South. Falkland Island, which seemed too remote and romantic an object for the grasp of national ambition, is but a stage and resting place in the progress of their victorious industry; nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging to them than the accumulated winter of both the poles. We know that while some of them draw a line and strike the harpoon on the coast of Africa, others run the longitude, and pursue their gigantic game along the coast of Brazil. No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries; no climate that is not witness to their toils.”

Now, though it is by no means requisite that the American women should emulate the men in the pursuit of the whale, the felling of the forest, or the shooting of wild turkeys, they might, with advantage, be taught in early youth to excel in the race, to hit a mark, to swim, and in short to use every exercise which could impart vigor to their frames and independence to their minds. But I have dwelt enough upon this subject, and you will, perhaps, apprehend that I am about to subjoin a Utopian plan of national education: no, I leave this to the republic herself, and, wishing all success to her endeavours, I bid your farewell.

? Alexis de Tocqueville, Excerpt from Democracy in America, 1835

Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville was a thinker, writer, and social critic who examined social life and politics. He traveled the United States in the early nineteenth century. His book, Democracy in America, is considered one of the most important examinations of American society and politics during its formative years.

Among almost all Protestant nations young women are far more the mistresses of their own actions than they are in Catholic countries. This independence is still greater in Protestant countries like England, which have retained or acquired the right of self-government; freedom is then infused into the domestic circle by political habits and by religious opinions. In the United States the doctrines of Protestantism are combined with great political liberty and a most democratic state of society, and nowhere are young women surrendered so early or so completely to their own guidance.

Long before an American girl arrives at the marriageable age, her emancipation from maternal control begins: she has scarcely ceased to be a child when she already thinks for herself, speaks with freedom, and acts on her own impulse. The great scene of the world is constantly open to her view, far from seeking to conceal it from her, it is every day disclosed more completely and she is taught to survey it with a firm and calm gaze. Thus the vices and dangers of society are early revealed to her; as she sees them clearly, she views them without illusion and braves them without fear, for she is full of reliance on her own strength, and her confidence seems to be shared by all around her.

An American girl scarcely ever displays that virginal softness in the midst of young desires or that innocent and ingenuous grace which usually attend the European woman in the transition from girlhood to youth. It is rare that an American woman, at any age displays childish timidity or ignorance. Like the young women of Europe she seeks to please, but she knows the cost of pleasing. If she does not abandon herself to evil, at least she knows that it exists; and she is remarkable rather for purity of manners than for chastity of mind.

I have been frequently surprised and almost frightened at the singular address and happy boldness with which young women in America contrive to manage their thoughts and their language amid all the difficulties of free conversation; a philosopher would have stumbled at every step along the narrow path which they trod without accident and without effort. It is easy, indeed, to perceive that even amid the independence of early youth an American woman is always mistress of herself; she indulges in all permitted pleasures without yielding herself up to any of them, and her reason never allows the reins of self-guidance to drop, though it often seems to hold them loosely.

In France, where traditions of every age are still so strangely mingled in the opinions and tastes of the people, women commonly receive a reserved, retired, and almost conventional education, as they did in aristocratic times; and then they are suddenly abandoned without a guide and without assistance in the midst of all the irregularities inseparable from democratic society. The Americans are more consistent. They have found out that in a democracy the independence of individuals cannot fail to be very great, youth premature, tastes ill-restrained, customs fleeting, public opinion often unsettled and powerless, paternal authority weak, and marital authority contested. Under these circumstances, believing that they had little chance of repressing in woman the most vehement passions of the human heart, they held that the surer way was to teach her the art of combating those passions for herself. As they could not prevent her virtue from being exposed to frequent danger, they determined that she should know how best to defend it, and more reliance was placed on the free vigor of her will than on safeguards which have been shaken or overthrown Instead, then, of inculcating mistrust of herself, they constantly seek to enhance her confidence in her own strength of character. As it is neither possible nor desirable to keep a young woman in perpetual and complete ignorance, they hasten to give her a precocious knowledge on all subjects. Far from hiding the corruptions of the world from her, they prefer that she should see them at once and train herself to shun them, and they hold it of more importance to protect her conduct than to be over-scrupulous of the innocence of her thoughts.

Although the Americans are a very religious people, they do not rely on religion alone to defend the virtue of woman; they seek to arm her reason also. In this respect they have followed the same method as in several others: they first make vigorous efforts to cause individual independence to control itself, and they do not call in the aid of religion until they have reached the utmost limits of human strength.

I am aware that an education of this kind is not without danger; I am sensible that it tends to invigorate the judgment at the expense of the imagination and to make cold and virtuous women instead of affectionate wives and agreeable companions to man. Society may be more tranquil and better regulated, but domestic life has often fewer charms. These, however, are secondary evils, which may be braved for the sake of higher interests. At the stage at which we are now arrived, the choice is no longer left to us; a democratic education is indispensable to protect women from the dangers with which democratic institutions and manners surround them.

?

? SLAVES IN THE ANTEBELLUM PERIOD

? Marie Jenkins Schwartz, �Family Life in the Slave Quarters: Survival Strategies,� OAH Magazine of History, 15:4 (Summer 2001).

A visitor to a large southern plantation between the years 1830 and 1860 most likely would have formed first an impression of the owner�s home, or �Big House� as it was sometimes called. Owners often deliberately situated their homes to dominate the landscape, as if to emphasize their own importance. From the vantage point of the Big House, masters and mistresses kept watch over the plantation in an effort to ensure that everything ran smoothly. Supervision focused on the enslaved workers who grew the cotton, rice, tobacco, sugar, and other crops that made the plantation profitable; who waited on the owners and their guests; and who performed skilled tasks such as blacksmithing, weaving, sewing, carpentry, and cooking. A guest walking around the grounds adjacent to the Big House would have encountered a variety of barns and smaller buildings where most of the specialized jobs were performed. Off in the distance were the fields. In between, the guest might glimpse a cluster of seemingly inconsequential cabins constituting the �quarters.� Guests of the owning family generally did not venture here, where the slaves lived.

Historians also have been reluctant to visit the slave quarters, with the result that teachers and students frequently have spent more time thinking about how slavery looked from the vantage of the Big House (slave owners) than from the quarters cabins (enslaved people). The civil rights movement associated with the 1950s and 1960s encouraged historians to explore the past lives of African Americans, including those who experienced enslavement. At first the scholarship focused on how slaves were treated by owners, but more recently historians have been asking what enslaved men, women, and children did when their owners were not around. This shift in focus�from the Big House to the slave quarters�has enabled historians to uncover a web of social relationships that helped African Americans survive bondage. One idea that has emerged from this recent scholarship has been that, despite the constant threat of separation and the necessity of submitting to slave owners, slave families�supported by the larger slave community�devised strategies that enhanced the lives of members and helped them endure bondage.

* * *

Antebellum southern slaves lived in family units. The one- or two-room cabins located in the slave quarters usually housed one family each, although more than one family occasionally occupied one shelter. Here in the small, cramped indoor spaces, in the yards surrounding each cabin, and in the unpaved streets, slave families tried to fashion a private life for themselves that allowed each member to be more than a slave. They courted and married, bore babies and raised children, all actions that imparted meaning to their lives. In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, about half of all slaves were younger than age sixteen; nearly one-third were under the age of ten. Rather than to act solely in the role of slave, men, women, and children defined themselves as mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles�human beings who experienced life within families despite hardships difficult for modern people to imagine.

Slaveholders thought of the men, women, and children they held in bondage as property. Masters and mistresses considered the slave�s most important relationship to be that maintained with an owner. They worried that children reared to respect other authority figures, such as parents, might question the legitimacy of the southern social order, which granted slaveholders sweeping power over the people they held in bondage. Consequently, owners planned activities and established rules intended to minimize the importance of a slave�s family life and to emphasize the owner�s place as the head of the plantation. Many slaveholders went so far as to refer to their slaves as members of their own families. Of course, they did not treat slaves as equal to their own children or other kin, but speaking of slaves as part of the family helped to justify (in the minds of slaveholders, if not slaves) the owner�s power to interfere in the slave�s private life. Owners considered it their prerogative to determine what slaves did both day and night, including deciding such mundane matters as what they ate, how they dressed, and when they went to bed.

Slaves did not share their owners� thinking. They, particularly parents, worried about owner interference in their private lives. Slavery could never be made acceptable to the enslaved people, but experiences within families as husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters, and extended kin allowed them to experience life in human terms. Just as important, families helped to shield people in bondage�particularly children�from some of slavery�s worst features. Families engaged in a variety of economic activities that improved the material conditions under which each member lived. For example, some cultivated food for their own consumption. They raised chickens and ate the eggs; grew rice, corn, and vegetables; kept bees and harvested the honey; and hunted and trapped small animals, which were cleaned and cooked for the table.

Slave families placed special importance on having a source of food that was not controlled by owners. Slaveholders provided slave families with �rations,� or weekly food allotments, which they considered sufficient for keeping slaves healthy enough to perform the heavy labor demanded of them. From the slave�s perspective, however, the rations were insufficient. For one thing, they tended to be monotonous and of a poor quality. Rations regularly consisted of some type of fatty, salted meat, corn meal, and potatoes. More important, they could be withdrawn if the slaveholder decided to punish the slave family for some infraction of plantation rules. For example, if a slave ran away or could not or would not work as the owner specified, the slaveholder could withhold some of the rations from the family or from all the slaves living in the quarters. The owner hoped that this would prompt the recalcitrant slave to return to the plantation or to work harder or better so as to prevent relatives and friends from suffering. The practice helped slaveholders maintain discipline on the plantation, but it also encouraged slave family members to work together to ensure that they would have food and other necessities of life if an owner withheld them.

All members of a family pitched in to ensure that no one suffered from the want of food. For parents, this meant that work continued well into the night after they had left their owners� fields or other work sites. Fathers gathered fuel on the way back to the cabin for use in cooking, while mothers hurried home to check on any young children left in the quarters during the adult work day and to begin meal preparations. After supper, mother and father customarily cooperated to cultivate a small garden with the help of children. Even very young boys and girls could help, if only by holding pine torches so that the adults and older children could see to plant or pull weeds. After gardening, or instead of gardening, fathers and sons might hunt or fish. At times, mothers and daughters joined in fishing.

Young children contributed substantially to the family diet. Adults generally worked for their owners in the field or at another work site from early morning until late evening. At busy times of year, such as during harvest, they might remain there into the night. During such times, families could secure additional food only with the help of those family members who were too young, too old, or too infirm to carry out the heavy work demanded during periods of peak activity. Although children often had chores to perform for their owners during the day, they seldom worked as long as adults. This left time for subsistence activities: feeding chickens and gathering eggs, tending rabbit traps, beating rice with a mortar and pestle, helping to cook, and performing a host of other chores (1). When parents arrived home from the field, they could check to ensure that the work had been done as they had directed and mete out punishment or praise accordingly.

Most of these economic activities met with owner approval, but others displeased masters and mistresses. When no one was watching, children sometimes appropriated items without first securing an owner�s permission. Boys and girls, who often spent time in their owner�s homes as wait staff, cook�s helpers, or nursemaids to the planter�s children, returned home with pockets full of salt or whatever else was at hand. Little Henry Baker�s mistress found the practice so widespread that she banned the construction of pockets in boys� breeches to make it more difficult to conceal items. Young Tom Morris surreptitiously gathered eggs for his mother to cook. Ben Horry and his father secretly obtained so much rice that they sold some in the local black market (2).

Parents did not question closely where food came from when it was presented by children, in part because they reasoned that slaves were not committing theft when they took from owners. Southern law defined slaves as chattel, or moveable property, and slaves recognized the absurdity of defining theft as the consumption of an owner�s property by the owner�s property. Enslaved parents taught sons and daughters that owners were the real thieves because they stole people, which no one had the right to do. Slaveholders bought, traded, and sold slaves whenever they needed cash or believed they had too much or too little labor to suit their needs, which created turmoil within the slave quarters. Former Virginia slave Ishrael Massie, interviewed decades after slavery ended, recalled that servants who waited on the owning family in the Big House sometimes learned in advance the names of the slaves planned for sale. They would visit the quarters bearing the bad news. Ishrael�s sister Sadie was sold and taken so far away that he never heard from her again. Jennie Patterson experienced a similar fate. She said later that she could not remember many details of the transaction because she �was scared to death� (3). Those families who avoided separation worried about the possibility, and decades later people who recalled those days still referred to them as a sad parting time.

Parents were outraged at this situation, which prompted them to share their assessment of their owner�s behavior with sons and daughters. They were determined that their children would not grow up thinking that slavery was morally acceptable, especially the practice of selling family members apart from one another. Therefore, they limited their definition of theft to what owners did to slaves or to the taking of property belonging to another slave, not an owner. They called the practice of appropriating the owner�s property �taking� rather than �theft.� The slaves� definition allowed children to assist the family by gathering goods belonging to an owner without undermining a strong sense of morality within the quarters.

Slaves not only consumed food taken or cultivated, they also sold or traded it, along with other goods and services, and used any cash they obtained to better their living conditions. Rice planter James R. Sparkman, who owned a large number of slaves and observed firsthand many of their economic activities, explained that most of the money slaves made went to purchase �comforts and presents to their families,� which included–;in addition to food and clothing–household or personal items such as mosquito nets, buckets, sieves, and pocket knives. Mistress Fanny Kemble Butler, whose husband owned cotton and rice plantations in Georgia, recorded in her diary some of the ways slaves accumulated small amounts of cash. They trapped and sold fowls found in abundance in the region. They also trapped animals and sold the furs. Other slaves earned cash by clearing paths and driveways and making buckets, barrels, and boots for sale (4). All of this they did at night or on Sundays, when slaves usually had time for themselves.

The economic activities of slave families sometimes extended well into the night. Many women spun thread for cloth to be used in the construction of clothing or blankets made of cotton, wool, or flax after supper and occasionally after everyone else had gone to bed. Small children helped by picking seeds from cotton or by performing other chores so that their mothers could devote time to spinning and sewing. Fathers, together with children, helped to gather fibers for the fabric by picking cotton, cutting flax, sheering sheep, or collecting the wool left on briars when sheep passed by. Fathers also fashioned moccasins or other footwear out of animal hides or cloth. Women saved small scraps of material from worn-out clothes and blankets, which they pieced together into quilts that became bedding for young children.

As they did with food, owners distributed clothing and blankets to slaves, but slaves considered the quantity and quality inadequate, especially for growing children. Planters customarily gave out shoes only to slaves old enough to work in the fields; younger children had to do without unless their parents could provide them. Owners distributed blankets each year to slaves, but younger children frequently had to share until they were old enough to work as adults. Each working hand received on average four suits of clothing per year, but young children had to make do with one or two. Again, family economic activities enabled slave parents to supplement the supplies doled out by owners, but this became harder as the children grew.

Most owners provided children, boys and girls alike, with one-piece garments called a shirt-tail in the case of boys and a shift in the case of girls. As children grew taller, the shirt or shift provided less coverage. Planters hoped that the situation would at some point force parents to admit that their sons and daughters were old enough to work at adult tasks. Once they undertook such duties, children would receive clothing and food equal to that of an adult worker, which would relieve families of the responsibility of providing some of these items.

Children became capable of field work at about the age of ten or twelve, just about the time a child�s rations proved inadequate for appeasing the youth�s appetite and the youth became desirous of greater modesty in dress. Under southern laws, slaveholders had the right to force children into the field to work whenever they wished. If children did not comply, they could be whipped or punished in some other way for not following an owner�s orders. For practical reasons, owners did not wish to proceed in this manner. For one thing, children (and their parents) did not always respond to harsh treatment the way an owner intended. They might run away, retaliate by breaking tools or destroying crops, or become too upset or resentful to work efficiently. Stories circulated throughout the South about slaves who burned barns or, worse, harmed members of their owners� families after their owners had behaved especially cruelly toward children or other slaves. Instead of physically forcing youngsters to begin adult work, most slaveholders waited for parents and children to seek the increased food and clothing that growing bodies required.

Slave parents must have thought long and hard about whether to withhold their children from their owners� fields or to send them there. Because they worked such long hours for their owners, adults had little time to secure food and clothing for children on their own. On the other hand, children were important to the family economy, since they gardened, trapped animals, fished, and took care of other household chores during the parents� absence.

The Jemison family of Alabama apparently wanted to withhold the labor of their son Perry from his master as long as possible (5). Perry lived with his mother, father, two brothers, and two sisters in a double-log cabin in Alabama. His grandparents lived on the same plantation. By pooling their resources, the family was able to keep Perry from working in the fields beyond the age when most children began doing so. Perry had only one garment, a shirt-tail. He did not get a regular food allotment from his owner, so he shared those given to his mother and grandmother. He also ate other foods obtained by the slave family, including raccoon, possum, rabbit, fish, and vegetables. He most likely slept at night under one of the �very respectable quilts� his mother sewed from bits of cloth she managed to accumulate.

Perry was interviewed by government agents in the 1930s, long after slavery had ended. Based on the brief account he gave of his life and a knowledge of plantation practices, it is possible to speculate about why his family wished to keep him out of the field. First, slaves worked hard; on Perry�s plantation they worked from before daylight until after dark for as many as seven days each week, which left little time for adults to carry out the hunting, fishing, and gardening that provided slaves with a measure of independence from the owners. Perry may have been responsible for carrying out many of these chores. In addition, some of the work required of slaves was dangerous, particularly for young children. Perry had been seriously injured by his father�s scythe when he was a young boy, and his family may have wished to spare him from further harm.

The work of older children such as Perry was especially important to the welfare of slave families, in part because owners established rules for adults intended to ensure that they were rested enough to work hard during the day. Slaveholders knew that if workers stayed up late hunting or spinning thread they would not work efficiently the following morning. Consequently, they set bedtimes for adults and sometimes went so far as to lock them in their cabins at night. Because of such practices, slaves sometimes found it easier to assign daily economic chores to children rather than to leave them for adults to carry out at night.

Slaveholders also tried to restrict family economic activities by specifying what they could and could not do: which crops slaves could cultivate, when they could fish, and where they could hunt, for example. Of course, when slaveholders tried to establish regular bedtimes for adult slaves, or set rules about when and where slaves could fish or garden, they found them difficult to enforce. Slaveholders did not want to stay awake all night policing the slave quarters, so slaves might simply wait until their owners had gone to bed before starting out on hunts or butchering and cooking the animals they killed. Night time gave slave families opportunities for privacy.

Slave families did not spend all their private time working. They gathered together at night or on Sundays (if they had the day to themselves). Leisure activities often involved more than one generation, and many a child was held spellbound by scary stories told in the dark or was entertained with songs and musical instruments. Parents also tried to make work fun for children by incorporating enjoyable activities. Stories, songs, and riddles livened up the lives of children who worked into the night helping parents complete such chores as picking seeds from cotton or spinning thread from the fiber.

Many of the tales told by adults on such occasions served didactic purposes; that is, they imparted lessons that adults wanted children to learn. Stories about small, weak animals outwitting larger, stronger ones reminded everyone that slaves might at times use their wits to improve their lives, despite their owner�s superior power. In some stories, the larger animals got the better of the smaller ones, a reminder to children and adults alike that enslaved people had always to be on guard against the capriciousness of owners.

The prevalence of clandestine activities in the cabin and quarters meant that enslaved children had to be circumspect with regard to what they saw and heard in the quarters. Engaging in secret activities posed special problems for families with young children. Little children are notorious tattletales, and parents had to cope with the possibility that they would blurt out information about forbidden activities in front of owners. One little girl even told her owner of a plot by slaves to escape his plantation (6)!

To avoid the situation, slaves often commenced clandestine activities after the youngest children went to bed, and older sons and daughters were taught to keep their voices down in the quarters and to exercise discretion in what they said around owners. Those children who did not learn this lesson from verbal instruction learned it the hard way, as did one Virginia girl who happened upon adults preparing to eat a stolen lamb. She found herself subject to a whipping by one of the participants in the feast, who explained: �Now what you see, you don�t see, and what you hear, you don�t hear.� He meant that she should never discuss the incident; the whipping forewarned her of what lay in store if she did (7). All children had to learn that some activities were to be kept �in their sleeves,� a phrase meaning to keep a secret within the family or among slaves in the quarter. Learning such lessons was a part of growing up for slave children (8).

The situation of slave children was complicated by the expectation of slaveholders that children should maintain loyalty and obedience toward the owning family rather than toward their families of origin. Whereas mothers and fathers expected children to contribute to the welfare of the slave family and to mind their parents and not divulge secrets to owners, slaveholders expected children to perform work that benefitted owners and to report irregularities in plantation routines to them. This created a dilemma for the slave child who at an early age needed to develop an understanding of the complex relationships that existed on the plantation (9).

Slaveholders employed rewards as well as punishments in an effort to ensure that slave children directed their loyalty and love toward owners rather than parents. These mostly came in the form of treats, such as food or special privileges. Owners hoped these indulgences would win the children over. Enslaved parents seldom had special food or toys to share with their children, and they found it necessary to keep children busy at chores and to teach them harsh lessons about how to survive in a slave society. In the contest for the children�s love and loyalty, parents nevertheless had advantages. Slaveholders rarely carried out tasks of child rearing directly, which left children under the supervision of slaves. In the quarters, boys and girls absorbed critiques of slavery from the viewpoint of those who experienced it firsthand.

Children enjoyed whatever treats owners provided, to be sure. On occasion, individual children accepted such indulgences as proof that an owner cared for them at least as much as did parents. Abbey Mishow never lived in the slave quarters. Her mother died when Abbey was a baby, and her mistress took her into the Big House, where she was raised �just like a pet.� Abbey accompanied her owning family on sojourns from home and dressed in clothing that set her apart from the plantation�s other enslaved children. As an adult, Mishow maintained that she never missed her mother because her mistress treated her well. But the motherless Mishow was more an exception than the rule. Most children understood even from a young age the difference between being a member of the owner�s family and being an owner�s slave. Genia Woodberry, like Abbey, lived in her owner�s home as a young girl, and by her own account her mistress treated her well. But she missed her mother (though she was not allowed to show it), especially at night when she rocked her owner�s baby to sleep. She never accepted her mistress as a surrogate. Former slave Annie Burton understood that black children&emdash;even those who lived in the Big House&emdash;were not true members of owner families: the owner�s children �had dainties and we had crusts� (10).

Indulgences by owners counted for something: all slaves hoped for owners who provided them. However, treats or privileges could never compensate for the cruelties of enslavement. All too soon, children reached an age at which they recognized that for the enslaved, treats were rare, punishments harsh, and family separations possible.

If children did not experience harsh conditions firsthand, they witnessed or heard about them. When Oliver Bell saw his mother beaten because she had violated plantation rules, he began to cry. �Go get that boy a biscuit,� the mistress commanded. It quieted the boy temporarily, but Bell�s bitter memory of the whipping lasted a lifetime. Children listening in the cabin or quarters to accounts of slavery�s atrocities shared the story teller�s outrage that enslavement left people vulnerable to such treatment (11).

Like little Oliver, other children understood enslavement as a cruelty inflicted upon members of one race by another. As they grew to adulthood, enslaved boys and girls learned difficult lessons about how to behave to keep themselves, their relatives, and other slaves out of trouble and to foster their own survival as well as that of an African American people. Most learned life�s important lessons as part of a family, the black family. Owners might convince themselves that a plantation comprised one family, black and white, but the experiences of the enslaved people taught them otherwise. The plantation comprised different families, white and black, whose experiences were intertwined but not joined.

Endnotes available in the original

Marie Jenkins Schwartz is an associate professor of history at the University of Rhode Island, Kingston. Her recent book Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South (2000) explores more completely the experiences of enslaved families.

? Hannah Valentine, Letter to Mary Campbell, May 2, 1838

Hannah Valentine was a house slave for David and Mary Campbell of Abingdon, Virginia. When the Campbell family moved to Richmond, during David Campbell�s term as governor, Hannah stayed behind and tended the homestead. This is an excerpt of a letter written from Hannah to Mary Campbell while she was in Richmond. [This material comes from Campbell Family Papers in the Special Collections Library of Duke University. < https://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/campbell/ >]

Abingdon May 2d 1838

My dear Mistress

I was very much gratified at receiving a letter from you last monday. When I was writing to Richard I thought you would like to hear particularly about everything at home and as it gave you pleasure I am very glad that I did mention something about it. We were all very uneasy about you when we heard you were confined to your bed, for we knew that you must be very sick if that was the case. I cannot tell you how much pleased I was to hear that you were well enough to walk about your room, and I shall be still more so when I hear you are riding out for I think that will be of more service to you than anything else. I hope by this time you are well enough to be preparing for your trip to the north, and I long for the time to come when I shall see you & my dear master & miss Virginia at home once more, not to speak of Michael and my children. �

Well now my dear Mistress I must begin to tell you all about home. The house looks exactly as it did when you left it. It has been aired regularly, and every part attended to after a rain or snow. The yard looks very well and has not been injured at all except some of the peach trees in the part of the yard next to the mill dam were some what injured by a deep snow which fell the last of March or the first of April. Mr Lathim & Page went as quickly as they could and shook the snow from all the trees or I think they would have been very much injured. It was the deepest snow I have ever seen in this country. We have had a cold and dry spring, and I was afraid that all the fruit was killed, but I hope it is not. I am not a very good judge of such things, but I examined some of the peach blossoms, and I think that some of the fruit is safe unless we have more hard frosts. The pine, and all the other trees look well. In the garden aunt Lethe has sowed all the different kinds of vegetable seed she normally puts in when you are at home. The strawberry vines are in full bloom, and a promise a good crop of fruit. I should like to know what you would wish done with them. If you wish any preserved, and how many. If you do I will endeavour to do them as nicely as possible. If you have no objection I will sell the ballance, and see how profitable I can make them for you. Aunt Lethe was somewhat annoyed by persons from town, schoolchildren & who crossed the garden, so she put a lock on the gate, and we have determined not to let any one go in it again, unless some lady that we know would not molest any thing. �

Aunt Lethe & Lucy send their love to you & master & miss Virginia & to all the servants. Please give my love to them too. � I hope I shall see you in August looking as well as ever such is the sincere wish of your affectionate servant.

–Hannah

? ANTEBELLUM REFORM

? Philip F. Gura, �Transcendentalism and Social Reform,� History Now 30 (Winter 2011) The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History 49 W. 45th Street, 6th Floor � NYC, NY 10036 (646) 366-9666 � 2009�2013 All Rights Reserved [https://www.gilderlehrman.org/]

Those Americans who have heard of American Transcendentalism associate it with the writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and his friend Henry David Thoreau. Asked to name things about the group they remember, most mention Emerson�s ringing declaration of cultural independence in his �American Scholar� address at Harvard�s commencement in 1837 and his famous lecture �Self-Reliance,� in which he declared that �to be great is to be misunderstood�; Thoreau�s two-year experiment in self-sufficiency at Walden Pond and his advice to �Simplify! Simplify!�; and the minister Theodore Parker�s close association with the radical abolitionist John Brown. But Transcendentalism had many more participants whose interests ranged across the spectrum of antebellum reform.[1]

To understand it fully, however, one must consider its origins. Transcendentalism�s roots were in American Christianity. In the 1830s young men training for the liberal Christian (Unitarian) ministry chafed at their spiritual teachers� belief in Christ�s miracles, claiming instead that his moral teachings alone were sufficient to make him an inspired prophet.[2] Similarly, they rejected the widely accepted notion that man�s knowledge came primarily through the senses. To the contrary, they believed in internal, spiritual principles as the basis for man�s comprehension of the world. These formed the basis of the �conscience� or �intuition� that made it possible for each person to connect with the spiritual world. When man thus moved above or beyond��transcended��the cares and concerns of the mundane, lower sphere, he was in touch with and lived through this spiritual principle, what Ralph Waldo Emerson termed the �Oversoul.�[3]

At its core, Transcendentalism celebrated the divine equality of each soul. There was no arbitrary division between saved and damned, for anyone could have a transcendent experience and thereafter live his life connected to the spiritual world. Transcendentalism thus seemed the ideal philosophy for a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal and have the same inalienable rights. In this, the movement began to overlap with antebellum efforts toward social reform, for if all men and women were spiritually equal from birth, they all deserved to be treated with social and political equality as well.

Because of this basic belief, many Transcendentalists became involved in efforts to reverse conditions that prevented individuals from realizing their full potential. For example, Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott�s father, began the Temple School, an educational experiment for elementary-age children that stressed their innate divinity and encouraged its early discovery and cultivation. He had to close the school after parents objected to how Alcott taught the Gospels. Alcott�s assistant there, Elizabeth Peabody, went on to pioneer the kindergarten movement in the United States. Orestes Brownson, son of Vermont farmers and one of the few Transcendentalists not college-educated, remained loyal to his roots and dedicated his life to improving the conditions of the working class; his statements on the likelihood of class warfare between laborer and owner anticipated those of Karl Marx.

Other Transcendentalists moved directly toward what we would recognize today as socialism. Brownson�s close friend George Ripley resigned from his Unitarian pulpit near the Boston waterfront and started the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education. Through this utopian experiment in communal living he tried to break down the barriers between intellectuals and laborers, and divided the community�s profits according to socialist principles. At Brook Farm members rotated through different forms of work, the most educated having their turn at farming, husbandry, and crafts, and common laborers given the opportunity to engage in art, music, drama, and other activities to which they had been little exposed.[4] Alcott, seeking a new project after the failure of the Temple School, began the quixotic Fruitlands experiment in Harvard, Massachusetts, where he and a handful of other idealists sought to live as vegetarians, giving up even shoe leather and beasts of burden in their respect for all life. The �community� did not last through its first autumn.[5]

In another arena, Margaret Fuller, influenced by Emerson�s doctrine of self-reliance, became the foremost advocate of women�s rights in her day. Her pioneering Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), in which she argued, on Transcendentalist principles, the economic and psychological equality of the sexes, influenced many Transcendentalists and others. Not afraid to put her principles into operation, she later traveled to Europe to report on the political and social revolutions of 1848 for Horace Greeley�s New-York Tribune; she and her husband, an Italian count, died in a shipwreck sailing from Europe to the United States in 1850.

For some, such reform activities were the natural outgrowth of Transcendentalist thought, and they made social reform virtually the entire focus of their Transcendentalism. Until the 1840s Emerson was not the de facto leader of the group. Rather, the most visible members of the loosely associated group were Ripley and Brownson, both of whom stressed social engagement in their Unitarian ministries in Boston.

The impoverished, the mentally and physically challenged, the imprisoned and those otherwise institutionalized, and the enslaved: Transcendentalists recognized these members of society as their equals in spirituality, and America�s promise would not be fulfilled until the benefits of its citizenship were available to all. Ripley�s Brook Farm was the most dramatic attempt to resolve the inequities in the mundane world. He abandoned his ministry among middle-class Bostonians in large measure because his congregation was content in their comfort and felt no compulsion to extend understanding and charity in the way their minister wished. Similarly, Brownson, appalled at what he saw as the rapidly deteriorating social condition of the working class, first started his own reformist periodical, the Boston Quarterly Review, and then embraced Roman Catholicism, whose ethic of brotherhood he believed better served the impoverished and oppressed.

Ripley�s and Brownson�s centrality began to fade when Emerson emerged as a major Transcendentalist spokesperson in the wake of the furor over his �Divinity School Address� (1838), when he insulted the Harvard theological faculty by claiming that their preaching was uninspired, and the publication of his first book of essays three years later. In these and other works he provided Transcendentalists another way to define and act on their beliefs, one that revolved around his glorification of the individual rather than active engagement in social reform. Emerson, for example, never joined Brook Farm, although his close friend and cousin Ripley implored him to do so, aware that Emerson�s participation would bring the experiment even more attention. He wrote Ripley a blunt refusal, explaining that he still had far to travel on his own personal, spiritual journey before he could get so directly involved with other the reformation of others� lives. Allied with Emerson in this belief that self-reform trumped social engagement was his disciple Henry Thoreau and, for a while, Margaret Fuller. Both stressed the importance of individual responsibility and attention to one�s own conscience rather than amelioration of others� conditions, potentially a distraction from self-improvement.

This split among Transcendentalists did not go unremarked. Peabody, for example, wondered if Emerson�s stress on self-reliance and individual fulfillment might not lead to what she termed �ego-theism,� his setting up himself, or comparably inspired individuals, as somehow gods themselves. She concluded that when one held such self-centered views as Emerson did, �faith commit[ed] suicide� when an individual failed to realize that �man proves but a melancholy God� in comparison to the divine being whom she still worshipped.[6] Similarly, after reading Emerson�s Essays: First Series, one of Fuller�s prot�g�s, Caroline Healey (Dall) thought that what he had to say about self-reliance was �extravagant and unsafe.�[7] Another of Emerson�s friends, Henry James Sr., echoed this criticism. �The curse of our present times, which eliminates all their poetry,� he observed of his contemporaries� resistance to socialism, is the �selfhood imposed on us by the evil world.�[8]

Emerson himself recognized the conflict. Asked to speak at a memorial for the great reformer Theodore Parker, who had died on the threshold of the Civil War, he demurred, remarking how different they were in their approaches to the problems of the age. �Our differences of method and working,� he wrote to the organizing committee of the memorial, were �such as really required and honored all [Parker�s] Catholicism and magnanimity to forgive in me.� In the privacy of his journal, he was even more candid. �I can well praise him [but only] at a spectator�s distance, for our minds & methods were unlike�few people more unlike.�[9]

Through the 1840s this division persisted among Transcendentalists and associated groups, but in the next decade it gradually ceased to be of great significance. After the signal year 1850, in which Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, all parties pulled away from internecine squabbling as the sectional crisis challenged all Americans to confront the immense problem of chattel slavery. Transcendentalists who had advanced social reforms that included efforts to increase rights for women, labor, and the indigent redirected their energies toward extinguishing the institution of slavery.

Theodore Parker was the leader in this fight, but he was a special case, for even as he vociferously condemned the Southern slaveholders and the politicians they elected (and any northerners complicit with them), he continued to preach about the great inequities of wealth in cities like Boston. He understood the connections between northern businessmen and southern slaveholders, and declared worship of Mammon�or wealth�the evil. In one sermon he told his audience that he was speaking in a city �whose most popular idol is mammon, the God of God; whose Trinity is a Trinity of Coin!� �The Eyes of the North are full of cotton,� he continued. �They see nothing else, for a web is before them; their ears are full of cotton, and they hear nothing but the buzz of their mills; their mouth is full of cotton, and they can speak audibly but two words�Tariff, Tariff, Dividends, Dividends.�[10] He genuinely worried that liberty might fail. If men continued to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law, he said, he did not know when the struggle would end but did not care if the Union went to pieces.

Other Transcendentalists were similarly swept up in this fervor, believing slavery the great evil to be extinguished before all others. Many women who hitherto had devoted themselves to women�s rights were swayed by such arguments and believed that their turn for equality would come after the African Americans�. Unfortunately, in this they were disappointed. Speaking of the Transcendentalists� commitment to abolition in the 1850s, the Unitarian clergyman Octavius Brooks Frothingham explained in 1876 why they and others were so quick to put aside other pressing issues. He recalled that in the 1850s the �agitation against slavery had taken hold of the whole country; it was in politics, in journalism, in literature, in the public hall and parlor.�[11]

When the Civil War was over, what became of the movement? Some of its leaders did not even live to see the end of the war, most notably Parker, Thoreau, and Fuller. Others moved on to new causes. After the failure of Brook Farm in the late 1840s, Ripley moved to New York City, replacing Fuller as book reviewer at Greeley�s Tribune. Brownson became an apologist and proselytizer for Roman Catholicism. Peabody embraced the kindergarten movement and, later, Native American rights. That left Emerson as the public face of Transcendentalism.

There was some progress in the area of women�s rights, with Caroline Healey Dall assuming Fuller�s place as one of the intellectual leaders of the women�s movement, and Brook Farm alumna Almira Barlow providing it new guidance. Ministers like John Weiss (Parker�s disciple), David Wasson, and Samuel Johnson, however, defended Transcendentalism against the rise of the scientific method that placed most value on material facts rather than spiritual ideals. Few Transcendentalists, however, were involved in the growing disputes between labor and capital, the reformation of asylums and penitentiaries, or other matters on a reformist agenda.

By the 1870s, the uneasy balance between the self and society that had characterized the antebellum phase of the Transcendental movement tipped irrevocably in the direction of the self. The intellectual power of Transcendentalists was directed toward individual rights and, implicitly, market capitalism, not humanitarian reform. Emerson�s admittedly demanding philosophy of self-reliance, an artifact of the early 1840s, was simplified and adopted as a chief principle. More and more, people identified Transcendentalism with the idea of individualism alone, rather than with the ethic of brotherhood that was supposed to accompany it, a process that only accelerated after Emerson�s death in 1882. It was left to others to promulgate a religion, the Social Gospel, that reached out to the poor and forgotten.

The New York Unitarian clergyman and erstwhile Transcendentalist Samuel Osgood summed this up well. Reacting to a suggestion that in the 1870s Transcendentalism had lost its relevance, he argued that the group�s very success in spreading its ideas had made their philosophy less visible. �The sect of Transcendentalists has disappeared,� he wrote, �because their light has gone everywhere.�[12] He meant that American culture had absorbed Emerson�s most distinctive thought, the deification of the individual. With more hindsight, however, one might argue differently. Emerson�s fame presaged, ironically, the death knell of the higher principle of universal brotherhood for which Transcendentalism, more than any other American philosophy, might have provided the foundation.

________________________________________

[1] Philip F. Gura, in American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007) offers a thorough brief overview of the subject.

[2] William R. Hutchison, The Transcendental Ministers: Church Reform in the New England Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), is still the best source for the religious roots of the controversy between younger and older Unitarians.

[3] Emerson makes the distinction between the Reason and Understanding in his �Divinity School Address� of 1838. He speaks of the Oversoul in 1841 in the essay by that name.

[4] See Sterling F. Delano, Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).

[5] See Richard Francis, Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

[6] Elizabeth Peabody, �Egotheism, the Atheism of Today� (1858), reprinted in idem., Last Evening with Allston and Other Papers (Boston: D. Lathrop, 1886), 3.

[7] Helen R. Deese, ed., Selected Journals of Carline Healey Dall, in Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections 90 (2006), 81.

[8] Henry James, Moralism and Christianity; or, Man�s Experience and Destiny (New York: Redfield, 1850), 84.

[9] Ralph Waldo Emerson to Moncure Daniel Conway, June 6, 1860, in Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton, Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 10 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939�1995), 5: 221; and Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, ed. William H. Gilman, et al., 16 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960�1982), 14: 352�353.

[10] Theodore Parker, A Sermon of War (1846) in The Collected Works of Theodore Parker, ed. Frances Power Cobbe, 12 vols. (London: Tr�ber, 1863�1865), 4: 5�6, 25.

[11] Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Transcendentalism in New England: A History (New York: Putnam, 1876), 331.

[12] Samuel Osgood, �Transcendentalists in New England,� International Review 3 (1876), 761.

________________________________________

Philip F. Gura is the William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His books include American Transcendentalism: A History (2007), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction, Jonathan Edwards: America�s Evangelical (2005), and The Wisdom of Words: Language, Theology, and Literature in the New England Renaissance (1981).

? Ralph Waldo Emerson, from The Transcendentalist, 1841

What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism. As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture.

? Henry David Thoreau, from On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, 1837

Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.

? Margaret Fuller, from Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 1843

It is so true that a woman may be in love with a woman, and a man with a man. It is pleasant to be sure of it, because it is undoubtedly the same love that we shall feel when we are angels, when we ascend to the only fit place for the [lovers], where “[They do not ask for man and woman.]” It is regulated by the same law as that of love between persons of different sexes, only it is purely intellectual and spiritual, unprefaced by any mixture of lower instincts, undisturbed by any need of consulting temporal interests; its law is the desire of the spirit to realize a whole, which makes it seek in another being that which it finds not in itself.

?

? ANTEBELLUM RELIGION

? Jesse Lee, Farmer�s Gazette [Newspaper in Sparta, GA.], Aug. 8, 1807

The Methodists have lately had a Camp Meeting in Hancock County, about three miles south of Sparta in Georgia. The meeting began on Tuesday, 28th July, at 12 o�clock, and ended on Saturday following. We counted thirty-seven Methodist preachers at the meeting; and with the assistance of a friend I took an ac-count of the Tents, and there were one hundred and seventy-six of them, and many of them were very large. From the number of people who attended preaching at the rising of the sun, I concluded that there were about 3000 persons, white and black together, that lodged on the ground at night. I think the largest congregation was about 4000 hearers.

We fixed the plan to preach four times a day-at sunrise, 10 o�clock, 3 o�clock and at night; and in general we had an exhortation after the sermon. We had 14 sermons preached at the Stage; and 9 exhortations given after the sermons were closed; besides these, there were two sermons preached at the Tents on one night, when it was not convenient to have preaching at the Stage.

The ground was laid out in a tolerable convenient place, containing 4 or 5 acres, and the Tents were pitched close to each other; yet the ground only admitted of about 120 Tents in the lines; the other Tents were pitched behind them in an irregular manner. We had plenty of springs convenient for to supply men and beasts with water. The first day of the meeting, we had a gentle and comfortable moving of the spirit of the Lord among us; and at night it was much more powerful than before, and the meeting was kept up all night without intermission however, before day the white people retired, and the meeting was continued by the black people.

On Wednesday at 10 o�clock the meeting was remarkably lively, and many souls were deeply wrought upon; and at the close of the sermon there was a general cry for mercy; and before night there were a good many persons who professed to get converted. That night the meeting continued all night, both by the white & black people, and many souls were converted before day.

On Thursday the work revived more & spread farther than what it had done before; and at night there was such a general stir among the mourners at the Stage that we did not attempt to preach there; and as we had but one Stage it was thought best to have preaching at some of the Tents. The meeting at the Stage continued all night and several souls were brought to God before day, and some just as the day broke.

Friday was the greatest day of all. We had the Lord�s Supper at night, by candlelight, where several hundred communicants attended; and such a solemn time I have seldom seen on the like occasion; three of the preachers fell helpless within the altar; and one lay a considerable time before he came to himself From that the work of convictions and conversion’ spread, and a large number were converted during the night, and there was no intermission until the breake of day at that time many stout hearted sinners were conquered.

On Saturday morning we had preaching at the rising of the sun; and then with many tears we took leave of each other. I suppose there was about eighty souls converted at that meeting, including white and black people. It is thought by many people that they never saw a better Camp Meeting in Georgia.

The people in general behaved exceedingly well; and there was not a public reproof given from the pulpit during the meeting. There were a few disorderly per-sons who brought liquors to sell, &c. But the Magistrates took some of them with a State warrant, and bound them over to court; after this we were more quiet. This Camp Meeting will long live in the memories of many of the people who attended it.

? Frances Trollope, excerpts from Domestic Manners of the Americans, Chapter 15: �Camp Meeting,� 1832

–Trollope was a English writer. She traveled in the United States in the early nineteenth century.

It was in the course of this summer that I found the opportunity I had long wished for, of attending a camp-meeting, and I gladly accepted the invitation of an English lady and gentleman to accompany them in their carriage to the spot where it is held; this was in a wild district on the confines of Indiana.

�

When we arrived, the preachers were silent; but we heard issuing from nearly every tent mingled sounds of praying, preaching, singing, and lamentation. The curtains in front of each tent were dropped, and the faint light that gleamed through the white drapery, backed as it was by the dark forest, had a beautiful and mysterious effect, that set the imagination at work; and had the sounds which vibrated around us been less discordant, harsh, and unnatural, I should have enjoyed it; but listening at the corner of a tent, which poured forth more than its proportion of clamour, in a few moments chased every feeling derived from imagination, and furnished realities that could neither be mistaken or forgotten.

Great numbers of persons were walking about the ground, who appeared like ourselves to be present only as spectators; some of these very unceremoniously contrived to raise the drapery of this tent, at one comer, so as to afford us a perfect view of the interior.

The floor was covered with straw, which round the sides was heaped in masses, that might serve as seats, but which at that moment were used to support the heads and the arms of the close-packed circle of men and women who kneeled on the floor.

Out of about thirty persons thus placed, perhaps half a dozen were men. One of these, a handsome looking youth of eighteen or twenty, kneeled just below the opening through which I looked. His arm was encircling the neck of a young girl who knelt beside him, with her hair hanging dishevelled upon her shoulders, and her features working with the most violent agitation; soon after they both fell forward on the straw, as if unable to endure in any other attitude the burning eloquence of a tall grim figure in black, who, standing erect in the centre, was uttering with incredible vehemence an oration that seemed to hover between praying and preaching; his arms hung stiff and immoveable by his side, and he looked like an ill-constructed machine, set in action by a movement so violent, as to threaten its own destruction, so jerkingly, painfully, yet rapidly, did his words tumble out; the kneeling circle ceasing not to call in every variety of tone on the name of Jesus; accompanied with sobs, groans, and a sort of low howling inexpressibly painful to listen to. But my attention was speedily withdrawn from the preacher, and the circle round him, by a figure which knelt alone at some distance; it was a living image of Scott’s Macbriar, as young, as wild, and as terrible. His thin arms tossed above his head, had forced themselves so far out of the sleeves, that they were bare to the elbow; his large eyes glared frightfully, and he continued to scream without an instant’s intermission the word “Glory!” with a violence that seemed to swell every vein to bursting. It was too dreadful to look upon long, and we turned away shuddering.

We made the circuit of the tents, pausing where attention was particularly excited by sounds more vehement than ordinary. We contrived to look into many; all were strewed with straw, and the distorted figures that we saw kneeling, sitting, and lying amongst it, joined to the woeful and convulsive cries, gave to each, the air of a cell in Bedlam.

One tent was occupied exclusively by Negroes. They were all full-dressed, and looked exactly as if they were performing a scene on the stage. One woman wore a dress of pink gauze trimmed with silver lace; another was dressed in pale yellow silk; one or two had splendid turbans; and all wore a profusion of ornaments. The men were in snow white pantaloons, with gay coloured linen jackets. One of these, a youth of coal-black comeliness, was preaching with the most violent gesticulations, frequently springing high from the ground, and clapping his hands over his head. Could our missionary societies have heard the trash he uttered, by way of an address to the Deity, they might perhaps have doubted whether his conversion had much enlightened his mind.

At midnight a horn sounded through the camp, which, we were told, was to call the people from private to public worship; and we presently saw them flocking from all sides to the front of the preachers’ stand. Mrs. B. and I contrived to place ourselves with our backs supported against the lower part of this structure, and we were thus enabled to witness the scene which followed without personal danger. There were about two thousand persons assembled.

One of the preachers began in a low nasal tone, and, like all other Methodist preachers, assured us of the enormous depravity of man as he comes from the hands of his Maker, and of his perfect sanctification after he had wrestled sufficiently with the Lord to get hold of him, et cetera. The admiration of the crowd was evinced by almost constant cries of “Amen! Amen!” “Jesus! Jesus!” “Glory! Glory!” and the like. But this comparative tranquility did not last long: the preacher told them that “this night was the time fixed upon for anxious sinners to wrestle with the Lord;” that he and his brethren “were at hand to help them,” and that such as needed their help were to come forward into “the pen.” �

The crowd fell back at the mention of the pen, and for some minutes there was a vacant space before us. The preachers came down from their stand and placed themselves in the midst of it, beginning to sing a hymn, calling upon the penitents to come forth. As they sung they kept turning themselves round to every part of the crowd and, by degrees, the voices of the whole multitude joined in chorus. This was the only moment at which I perceived any thing like the solemn and beautiful effect, which I had heard ascribed to this woodland worship. It is certain that the combined voices of such a multitude, heard at dead of night, from the depths of their eternal forests, the many fair young faces turned upward, and looking paler and lovelier as they met the moon-beams, the dark figures of the officials in the middle of the circle, the lurid glare thrown by the altar-fires on the woods beyond, did altogether produce a fine and solemn effect, that I shall not easily forget; but ere I had well enjoyed it, the scene changed, and sublimity gave place to horror and disgust.

The exhortation nearly resembled that which I had heard at “the Revival,” but the result was very different; for, instead of the few hysterical women who had distinguished themselves on that occasion, above a hundred persons,, nearly all females, came forward, uttering howlings and groans, so terrible that I shall never cease to shudder when I recall them. They appeared to drag each other forward, and on the word being given, “let us pray,” they all fell on their knees; but this posture was soon changed for others that permitted greater scope for the convulsive movements of their limbs; and they were soon all lying on the ground in an indescribable confusion of heads and legs. They threw about their limbs with such incessant and violent motions, that I was every instant expecting some serious accident to occur.

But how am I to describe the sounds that proceeded from this strange mass of human beings? I know no words which can convey an idea of it. Hysterical sobbings, convulsive groans, shrieks and screams the most appalling, burst forth on all sides. I felt sick with horror. As if their hoarse and over strained voices failed to make noise enough, they soon began to clap their hands violently. �

Many of these wretched creatures were beautiful young females. The preachers moved about among them, at once exciting and soothing their agonies. I heard the muttered “Sister! dear sister!” I saw the insidious lips approach the cheeks of the unhappy girls; I heard the murmured confessions of the poor victims, and I watched their tormentors, breathing into their ears consolations that tinged the pale cheek with red. Had I been a man, I am sure I should have been guilty of some rash act of interference; nor do I believe that such a scene could have been acted in the presence of Englishmen without instant punishment being inflicted; not to mention the salutary discipline of the treadmill, which, beyond all question, would, in England, have been applied to check so turbulent and so vicious a scene.

After the first wild burst that followed their prostration, the meanings, in many instances, became loudly articulate; and I then experienced a strange vibration between tragic and comic feeling.

A very pretty girl, who was kneeling in the attitude of Canova’s Magdalene immediately before us, amongst an immense quantity of jargon, broke out thus: “Woe! woe to the backsliders! hear it, hear it Jesus! when I was fifteen my mother died, and I backslided, oh Jesus, I backslided! take me home to my mother, Jesus! take me home to her, for I am weary! Oh John Mitchel! John Mitchel!” and after sobbing piteously behind her raised hands, she lifted her sweet face again, which was as pale as death, and said, “Shall I sit on the sunny bank of salvation with my mother? my own dear mother? oh Jesus, take me home, take me home!” Who could refuse a tear to this earnest wish for death in one so young and so lovely? But I saw her, ere I left the ground, with her hand fast locked, and her head supported by a man who looked very much as Don Juan might, when sent back to earth as too bad for the regions below.

One woman near us continued to “call on the Lord,” as it is termed, in the loudest possible tone, and without a moment’s interval, for the two hours that we kept our dreadful station. She became frightfully hoarse, and her face so red as to make me expect she would burst a blood-vessel. Among the rest of her rant, she said, “I will hold fast to Jesus, I never will let him go; if they take me to hell, I will still hold him fast, fast, fast!”

The stunning noise was sometimes varied by the preachers beginning to sing; but the convulsive movements of the poor maniacs only became more violent. At length the atrocious wickedness of this horrible scene increased to a degree of grossness, that drove us from our station; we returned to the carriage at about three o’clock in the morning, and passed the remainder of the night in listening to the ever increasing tumult at the pen. To sleep was impossible.

Part IV. 1820s to 1861

1. Read the Overview Essay below thoroughly and carefully.

Highlight or note the general contours and key features of this period.

2. Review the sources in the sections.

Note how they relate to the historical period.

3. Complete the Assignment and submit on Blackboard before the deadline.

? OVERVIEW ESSAYS (2)

? Ted Widmer The Age of Jackson The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History 49 W. 45th Street, 6th Floor � NYC, NY 10036 (646) 366-9666 � 2009�2013 All Rights Reserved [https://www.gilderlehrman.org/]

The Age of Jackson has never been easy to define. Broader than his presidency (1829�1837), and narrower than his life (1767�1845), it roughly describes the third, fourth, and fifth decades of the nineteenth century. While some historians have attempted to define this era as the Age of Reform, or Democracy, or the Market Revolution, no name has ever conveyed more of the era�s energy, upward aspiration, and general restlessness than that of Jackson himself. If his election in 1828 launched the Age of Jackson, and terminated the so-called Era of Good Feelings, then his death in 1845 and the Mexican War that immediately followed it (1846�1848) might be considered the era�s close. By 1850, the crisis over slavery began to dominate almost every aspect of political discourse, leading to the unraveling of the great Democratic coalition forged by Jackson.

The twenty-two years between 1828 and 1850 are brief, but there is nothing small about the significance of Jackson�s era. It was a time of tremendous growth, as measured by any index of population, wealth, or economic productivity. The American experiment in democracy recalibrated itself in important ways, including enlarged suffrage and a strengthened presidency. The geographic center of the United States shifted dramatically to the west, as Americans poured across the Appalachians, as Jackson himself had done, and built new lives in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. In nearly every category, Americans began to act out Ralph Waldo Emerson�s popular phrase, �self-reliance.� One group that had been confined to the margins of power, landless white male voters, saw their status rise during the Age of Jackson. Others�white women in particular�clarified their desire for greater power, although they did not achieve it until the following century. And others still�African Americans and American Indians�were generally and often forcefully excluded from any form of citizenship. In other words, it was an era of quite sharp ambition, and marked contrasts, resulting in real progress for millions of middling male Americans, and a rising level of frustration for those who saw no progress at all.

In crude demographic terms, the growth of the American population was staggering. Through both immigration and natural increase, the numbers of Americans grew exponentially. In 1830, the census recorded 12,866,020 Americans living in twenty-four states, including 2,009,043 slaves. In 1850, the United States had nearly doubled to 23,191,876 people, including 3,204,313 slaves. Seven new states�Arkansas, Michigan, Florida, Texas, Iowa, Wisconsin, and California�joined the Union, to say nothing of a vast amount of territory (including California) conquered from Mexico, which includes most of the Southwest.

But those figures, startling though they are, only begin to tell the story. There was also an extraordinary rise in urban population, as immigrants and rural Americans poured into coastal cities, river cities, and new cities like Chicago that came into existence almost overnight. More than any other city, New York exploded in size, nearly trebling from 202,589 to 515,547 in those twenty years. In the 1830s, nearly 600,000 immigrants came to the United States, primarily from Europe. In the 1840s, that number swelled to 1.7 million.

The reasons for this growth are not hard to find. Land was abundantly and inexpensively available, especially in the interior sections opened up by Jacksonian policies such as Indian removal. And an economy that was generally booming (despite a depression in 1837) created not only jobs, but a never-ending cycle of new industries. The Industrial Revolution owed its origin to the textile trade in New England, but picked up steam in the 1830s and 1840s, as factories expanded, machines grew more sophisticated, and productivity soared. What wasn�t moving fast in these decades? Goods and people raced from place to place on railroads, while the completion of the Erie Canal in the mid-1820s, and the development of Henry Clay�s �American System,� an internal network of economic relationships, accelerated commerce dramatically. Other rapid improvements followed quickly in communications�the telegraph was invented in 1844, and by 1850, Americans could send and receive messages to each other nearly instantaneously, in a form of instant messaging not too different from our own. There was also constant improvement in the ways in which newspapers were distributed and their numbers increased rapidly. In 1831, there were fifty-four newspapers in New York alone.

These massive increases in the size and speed of the United States might have caused more trouble than they did if the mechanisms of government had not adapted well to them. This too was an important legacy of Jackson. His political lieutenant, Martin Van Buren, had helped to liberalize voting requirements in New York, resulting in a significant rise in new voters, and unsurprisingly, a rise in popularity for those who loosened the requirements. Other states followed suit, and the result was a broad new coalition of poor and middle-class voters, dramatically empowered vis-a-vis the old landed elites of the coastal cities. These were Jackson�s people. He rode his high popularity to an unprecedented sway over the US government, deepening the powers of the presidency. For example, he forcibly suppressed a powerful senator (and his former vice president), John C. Calhoun, when the latter flirted with the idea that his state, South Carolina, might nullify an act of the federal government. And Jackson led a dramatic showdown against East Coast financial interests when he refused to recharter the original Bank of the United States�a crusade that increased his popularity, but may have contributed to the financial volatility that was also a feature of the Jacksonian era. Even if the federal government was tiny by modern standards, it was coming much closer to people�s lives than it had. If �democracy� was still a new concept (the word had only been invented in 1789), Jackson did much to put flesh on its bones. Indeed, his party often called itself, simply, �The Democracy.�

The great majority of Americans felt great zeal over this progress. As Alexis de Tocqueville, noted during his travels in the 1830s, Americans were patriotic, energetic, and highly individualistic�a word he coined. But as he also noted, they developed flexible systems of consensus and community dialogue that allowed this fledgling democracy to function. These included volunteer organizations, free public schools, and a high degree of connectivity to the body politic. To Tocqueville�s astonishment and general admiration, Americans seemed to have largely achieved the equality they proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence.

Of course, this equality was not universal, and only a tiny number of African Americans and Native Americans would have felt included in these elastic definitions of political and economic citizenship. Women could never vote in this era, although they organized more effectively and achieved occasional breakthroughs, such as the Seneca Falls conference in 1848, which rewrote the Declaration of Independence in language that was gender neutral. Significant numbers of rural Americans felt threatened by the incursions of railroads, joint stock corporations, fast-talking businessmen and other features of the Jacksonian landscape. Poverty, though rare compared to Europe, was nevertheless growing in large cities. But in spite of these real problems, most Americans felt a high degree of optimism in the future.

As this enormous and distended country felt itself growing in all directions, it inevitably began to express itself. For decades, Americans had felt keenly the sting of European taunts that their culture was feeble and monotonous. Even Tocqueville, generally admiring, permitted himself a few snubs on this front. But a torrent of new writings poured forth in the 1830s and 1840s, ranging from a highly vigorous newspaper press to a robust set of writings from a new generation of American writers. These included an active group of poets, essayists, and novelists around Boston, including Emerson and his friends Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne. And in New York, befitting its spectacular growth, a renaissance was underway that would eventually see Manhattan become the nation�s information headquarters, a position it has never relinquished. There, Walt Whitman wrote startling new poems and Herman Melville wrote epic novels that would incorporate all of the brassy confidence and some of the anxiety of the Jacksonian era.

The end of the Jacksonian era illustrated some of the instability that attended America�s extraordinarily rapid growth. Following Jackson�s death in 1845, a young Tennessean president, James K. Polk, led the United States into a war against Mexico that Jackson would have appreciated�fast, acquisitive, and victorious. All or part of ten new states came into the United States with the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and it was precisely this windfall that destabilized the coalition Jackson had gone to such lengths to build. For decades, the issue of slavery had lain close to the surface of American prosperity, fueling fortunes in the South (and more than a few in the North), while undermining the equality and self-reliance that Jacksonians claimed to believe in. Jackson had stared down the extreme advocates of slavery�s expansion in the Nullification Crisis, but as a slaveholder himself, he had little patience with efforts to end slavery. The winning of the West from Mexico forced all of these questions uncomfortably into the open. But without Jackson there to guide the conversation (or more accurately, to stifle it), tempers flared, and the North and South began to encounter a growing inability to get along. The Compromise of 1850 represented a last effort of the great generation of US senators who had governed well throughout the Age of Jackson, but it was violated within four years of its passage, laying the groundwork for the Civil War. That was a failure of politics as well as a violation of the original American creed, as expressed so enduringly, and so paradoxically, by the slaveholder who penned most of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson. Throughout much of the Jacksonian era, politicians from different regions and backgrounds had meaningfully subscribed to the same national vision. But in the race toward prosperity (sometimes a literal race, as with the California gold rush of 1849), some of those higher principles were sacrificed at the altar of self-aggrandizement. That too was a legacy of the Age of Jackson.

A former general, Jackson would have recognized the problem as a familiar military one. As armies of Americans moved quickly into the future, they did not always protect their supply lines�the ideas, and support systems, and community values that had taken them so far in so short a time. It is not certain that Jackson, or any other general, could have stopped Americans from racing headlong into the future without thinking through all of the consequences. But it was clear by 1850 that they had moved very quickly in the previous twenty-two years, and that there would someday be a final reckoning.

Ted Widmer is the Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director and Librarian at the John Carter Brown Library. An award-winning author, Widmer is widely published on topics in American history and politics. His first book, Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (2000), was the recipient of the 2001 Washington Irving Literary Medal. He is the author of Martin Van Buren (2005), and Ark of the Liberties: America and the World (2008).

? Bruce Levine, �The Failure of Compromise,� The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History 49 W. 45th Street, 6th Floor � NYC, NY 10036 (646) 366-9666 � 2009�2014 All Rights Reserved

In the spring of 1861, the United States of America split into two hostile countries�the United States and the new Confederate States of America. The two opposing heads of state agreed about what was causing the rupture�the long-running dispute concerning slavery and especially its status in the federal territories. �One section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended,� noted Abraham Lincoln in his First Inaugural Address, �while the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute.�[1] In a message to his own congress the following month, the Confederate president implicitly affirmed that interpretation. He and his colleagues had left the Union, Jefferson Davis explained, because Lincoln�s party had pledged to exclude �the labor of African slaves� from �the public domain� of the territories.

As Davis emphasized in the same message, slavery �was and is indispensable� to the South�s kind of society.[2] Of the more than twelve million souls who resided in the southern states in 1860, nearly one out of every three was enslaved. As commodities that could be (and were) freely bought and sold, their bodies were worth something like three billion dollars. That was a sum greater than the value of all the farmland in all of the South and fully three times as great as the construction costs of all the railroads then running throughout all the United States. But even more important was the labor that those four million people performed. Slave labor yielded more than half of all the South�s tobacco; almost all of its sugar, rice, and hemp; and 90 percent of its cotton. Only slave laborers, southern leaders were sure, would work hard enough and cheaply enough to yield the immense profits that slaveholders expected.

But the slaveholders� attachment to slavery went even deeper than those considerations. Slavery, it seemed to them, was the only firm foundation for republican government. More generally still, their �peculiar institution� was the unique basis of the particular outlook, assumptions, norms, habits, and relationships that defined their world and to which they had become deeply and reflexively attached.

In the North, just as in the South, meanwhile, economic and social development shaped the population�s cultural, intellectual, and political lives and values. Northerners who embraced an economy based on free labor came to view the ownership of one human being by another as economically backward, morally repugnant, and politically antidemocratic.

This basic difference gave rise to a protracted conflict that waxed and waned in intensity between the Revolution and the Civil War. Various aspects of that issue became the foci of that conflict at various times�including the way to apportion representation in Congress, the right to petition Congress, the right of states to nullify federal laws, and the recapture of runaway slaves. But the most persistent and explosive of issue was that of slavery�s geographical expansion.

Supporters and opponents of slavery both believed that the institution needed to spread in order to survive. Slave-based agriculture was intensive and exhausted the soil quickly. It therefore constantly required additional lands. As large portions of the US population moved westward, only the creation of new slave states could sustain the slaveholders� political power in Congress and the Electoral College. And conversely, allowing the territories, and the states carved out of them, to banish slavery would provide slaves contemplating escape new sanctuaries toward which to flee.

Opponents of slavery thought it equally urgent to bar that institution from the West. Many northern farmers and urban dwellers wanted to be able to migrate into the West without dwelling among slaves, competing with cheap slave labor, or being governed locally by slave-owning politicians. Nor did they relish the idea of increasing the slaveholders� already outsized political power in the federal government. By preventing slavery from expanding, finally, many of its opponents hoped to see it choke to death where it already existed.

This dispute repeatedly erupted into major political crises. Those who prized national harmony above the rights or wrongs of slavery tried to defuse these crises with legislative deals that offered something to both sides. The two most important of these deals became known as the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850.

In 1819, the Missouri Territory�a piece of the Louisiana Purchase�applied for statehood. By that time there were some 10,000 slaves living in the territory. In order to prevent the spread of slavery, a group of northern congressmen led by James Tallmadge Jr. of New York proposed granting statehood to Missouri on condition that it gradually abolish of slavery. This would be accomplished by preventing any additional slaves from entering Missouri and emancipating all slave children born in Missouri following statehood once those children reached the age of twenty-five.

The House of Representatives, where the more populous North enjoyed greater strength than the South, passed the Tallmadge plan. The Senate, however, where slave and free states had the same representation regardless of the size of their populations, voted to admit Missouri as a state without imposing any restrictions on slavery there.

A legislative compromise finally broke this stalemate. Congress granted statehood to Missouri without barring slavery from it, and Maine, whose application for statehood had in the interim been blocked by southern senators, would now enter the Union as a free state. But in another measure Congress declared slavery illegal in all remaining territories that had been purchased in 1803 and lay north of Missouri�s southern border (at 36� 30? latitude).

A war with Mexico between 1846 and 1848 led to a second great compromise over slavery. By the terms of the treaty that ended that war, the United States acquired more than half a million square miles of Mexican land. Anticipating such an outcome, Rep. David Wilmot, a Pennsylvania Democrat, introduced a measure in the summer of 1846 declaring that �neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part� of any land seized during the war. After a heated debate, the House of Representatives passed the �Wilmot proviso,� but in the Senate, once again, proslavery forces mustered the votes needed to block the measure.

This conflict, too, ended in a compromise embodied in a number of congressional resolutions. One accepted the province of California into the Union as a state with the right to decide for itself whether or not to legalize slavery within its borders; it soon outlawed slavery. A second measure organized the rest of the lands taken from Mexico into two territories�New Mexico and Utah�without addressing the status of slavery there. In a process dubbed �popular sovereignty,� the white residents of each territory would be permitted to decide that question on their own; both territorial governments later legalized slavery. To placate anti-slavery sentiment, a third measure forbade using the District of Columbia any longer as a regional slave market, making it a crime to bring any additional slaves into the District for the purpose of selling and delivering them elsewhere. And to mollify slaveholders, a fourth measure was adopted. Designed to put additional teeth into the fugitive slave clause of the US Constitution, it empowered federal marshals to pursue people accused of being runaways into free states and to force citizens of those states to join their posses. It also established a body of special federal commissioners (instead of northern judges) to preside over all such cases and denied jury trials to the accused. A final part of the compromise package settled a boundary dispute between Texas and the New Mexico territory.

Many political leaders cheered both the 1820 and 1850 compromises as resolutions of the slavery conflict. Each did, for a time, formally decide the specific questions then in contention. But neither testified to the existence of an overriding, nationwide spirit of conciliation among the population�and neither resolved the fundamental, underlying dispute over slavery, its merits, and its future in the United States.

In both 1820 and 1850, compromise advocates had found it impossible to pass the measures they offered in a single bill. Too many northern congressmen objected to the concessions being made to the South (such as admitting Missouri as a slave state or strengthening the fugitive slave bill), and too many southern congressmen felt the same way about concessions offered to the North (such as outlawing slavery in much of the Louisiana Purchase or admitting California effectively as a free state). Therefore, single �omnibus� compromise bills were broken up into separate measures so that each could be voted upon and passed by distinct, shifting majorities.

In both the North and the South, many who disliked all or part of the compromise packages agreed to abide by them for the sake of maintaining national peace. But the opposing sentiments that made both the 1820 and 1850 compromises so difficult to enact ultimately undermined each of them.

Chafing at the new fugitive slave law, anti-slavery forces tried to render it unenforceable. Southerners who liked the new �popular sovereignty� doctrine used it to overturn the Missouri Compromise. In 1854, Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois introduced a bill into Congress to facilitate the political organization of the Nebraska territory, a vast region composed of lands obtained in the Louisiana Purchase but not yet formed into states. Over the years, southern leaders had come more and more to resent the 1820 exclusion of slavery from that part of the continent. As a result of their pressure, Douglas�s bill declared the Missouri Compromise null and void. It divided Nebraska into two territories, a Nebraska to the north and a Kansas to the south. White settlers would decide the legal status of slavery in each via �popular sovereignty.�

The repeal of the Missouri Compromise triggered a huge political backlash in the free states that ultimately gave rise to a new political party, the Republican Party, that pledged to exclude slavery from all federal territories. In the Kansas territory, meanwhile, a guerrilla war known as �Bleeding Kansas� erupted between pro- and anti-slavery settlers, who received support from others in the North and South.

In 1857, a Supreme Court dominated by southerners and pro-southern Democrats sought once again to resolve the conflict over slavery in the territories with a two-pronged ruling in the now-famous Dred Scott case. The Court declared that a slaveholder could carry human property into free territories and even free states and hold such people there for an unspecified period of time without losing claim to them. The Court also ruled that neither Congress nor territorial governments had the constitutional power to outlaw slavery in any federal territory.

This decision only further inflamed anti-slavery opinion in the North and brought additional support to the Republican Party. In the most dramatic expression of the escalating tensions, the abolitionist John Brown and about two dozen men, white and black, mounted a raid in 1859 against a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. They hoped to encourage a massive slave revolt that would eventually spread further. Although the attempt failed, it did much to stoke the flames of the North-South conflict.

By 1860, most northern voters had manifestly lost confidence in legislative compromises over slavery. They therefore cast their ballots for presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln, who pledged to outlaw slavery throughout the territories and who hoped this would accelerate that system�s �ultimate extinction.�[3] Convinced that Lincoln�s election proved that slavery had no future in the United States, South Carolina�s leaders voted that state out of the United States in December 1860. As it departed, it exhorted the rest of the slave states to follow suit.

Once again the call went up for a compromise that would turn back the secession tide. Political leaders advanced a variety of solutions designed to do so. They varied in detail, but all called for mollifying the South by allowing slavery to expand into some of the federal territories. The most popular of these was a plan devised by Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky. It would amend the US Constitution to prohibit Congress from ever abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia or interfering with the slave trade between states and would provide compensation for any master unable to recover slaves who had escaped into the North.

But the plan�s centerpiece was a decision to divide the territories between North and South by extending the old Missouri Compromise line (of 36� 30?) westward, outlawing slavery above that line while recognizing and permanently protecting it south of that line in all territories that were �now held, or hereafter acquired.� All these amendments were to be permanently in force and un-repealable once ratified.

Lincoln was prepared to make some concessions to avert disunion, but he refused to abandon the core of the Republican platform. �We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told in advance, the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten. . . . If we surrender, it is the end of us.� Crittenden�s proposal to legalize slavery in all southerly territories �now held, or hereafter acquired� testified to a continuing intention to annex additional parts of Mexico and the Caribbean to the United States for the purpose of expanding slavery within it. If the North gave in to blackmail, Lincoln warned, the South would �repeat the experiment upon us� whenever they wish, soon no doubt demanding that Cuba be absorbed as a slave state �as a condition upon which they will stay in the Union.�[4]

The Republican Party�s rank and file agreed with Lincoln�s stand, and the Crittenden plan failed to win congressional approval. And in short order the rest of the states of the lower South cotton kingdom (Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, Louisiana, and Florida) declared themselves out of the Union, too.

The departure of the lower South and the Republicans� refusal to back away from their program strengthened secession sentiment in four of the eight slave states still in the Union�Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas. The major Virginia planter Robert E. Scott, once a unionist, now warned that the secession of seven slave states had �given to the non-slaveholding States such a preponderance in the Federal Government over the remaining slaveholding States as to make it incompatible with the safety of the latter to remain permanently associated with them under the present constitution.� Now �the free States would control the Government� while the remaining slave states will �be reduced to the condition of humble subordination.�[5] Leaders of all four of those slave states in the upper South again demanded that Lincoln repudiate his party�s program or risk additional withdrawals from the Union. They also warned that any use of force by the federal government to prevent the Union�s dissolution would propel them into the arms of their sister slaveholding states in the Confederacy.

Lincoln rejected these ultimatums. When the Confederacy fired upon and forced the surrender of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor in April 1861, Lincoln called on the states to send volunteers to put down this armed rebellion against the government. Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina refused and made good on their threat to join the Confederacy. The era of compromise had ended; the era of civil war had begun.

________________________________________

[1] In Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler et al (1953), 4:268�269.

[2] Dunbar F. Rowland, ed., Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers and Speeches (1923), 5:72�73.

[3] Lincoln made this point numerous times. For just one example, see Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 2:461.

[4] Abraham Lincoln to James T. Hale, Jan. 11, 1861, in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 4:172.

[5] Proceedings of the Virginia State Convention of 1861, ed. George H. Reese (1965), 3:61�62.

________________________________________

Bruce Levine is professor of history and African American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War (2005), Half Slave & Half Free: The Roots of Civil War (1992, 2005), and other books, and the forthcoming The Fall of the House of Dixie: How the Civil War Remade the South . . . and the Nation (2013).

?

? REGIONALISM

M.J. Smith, �American Regions.�

By the early nineteenth century, the country was developing into three distinct regions with contrasting societies, cultures, and economies. The North was industrializing and urbanizing with factory workers and foreign immigrants giving a new character to the region. The South remained primarily agricultural and rural with the presence of a large enslaved population infusing Southern life. The West was a rapidly-developing frontier, a region of sparse population and a pioneer spirit where westward-moving �Americans� confronted the Indians and Mexicans that already lived there.

The North

In the first half of the nineteenth century industry grew in the United States, mainly in a corridor from Baltimore, Maryland through northern Massachusetts. Old cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, and New York continued to grow while new industrial cities, such as Lowell, Massachusetts, were established to serve as factory centers and to house their workers. Factories tended to be cited along water courses and the major cities were on coastal harbors. While steam power was well-established, water transportation was still essential to the country�s economic life. Canals and railroads would both make their appearance during this period, but shipping by river and sea remained the primary mode of moving goods around the country and the world. Early maps of Lowell, Mass. showed how the factories congregated along the Merrimack River with housing for the workers nearby. The factories of the period were large affairs, multi-story buildings producing mostly textiles, typically patterned after those in British industrial centers like Manchester.

The factories were highly mechanized, with loud, clanking power looms and other devices churning out cotton and wool cloth by the thousands of yards. The machines were tended by factory operatives, often young women and children, who worked long hours in dangerous, unhealthful conditions. In her memoir Harriet H. Robinson recalled her experiences as a factory operative in the 1840s. The workers� day �extended from five o�clock in the morning until seven in the evening, with one half hour each for breakfast and dinner.� Some workers, Robinson reports, were as young as ten years old and were paid only two dollars a week. These young �mites,� as she called them, �were forced to be on duty nearly fourteen hours a day� which was �the greatest hardship in the lives of these children.� The workers lived at the mill site in dormitories and kept to a rigid daily schedule enforced by bells that woke them in the morning, called them to work, and rang mealtimes.

Despite the working conditions, rigid lifestyle, long hours, and low pay, or perhaps because of these factors, the women of the new industrial centers began to organize to improve their conditions. The had their own publications that increasingly called into questions their conditions of life and expressed their growing dissatisfaction with the factory work. Women workers in one center formed the Lowell Factory Girls Association in 1835 to protest their status and called strikes for improvements. The women expressed their concerns and a call to organization in their journal Factory Tracts and published a manifesto in 1845 that condemned the factory owners as �drivelling cotton lords, this mushroon aristocracy of New England, who so arrogantly aspire to lord it over God�s heritage.� They called on the strength of their �united influence� to insist that their �rights cannot be trampled upon with impunity.� They said forcefully, �…we WILL no longer submit to that arbitrary power which has for the last ten years been so abundantly exercised over us.� Unions such as these had limited success in these early years, but did convince some factory owners to institute changes to the advantage of the workers.

As the factory centers grew, the population of the North grew as well. By the 1860s the population of the North was more than double that of the South. The residents began to concentrate in the cities where the jobs were, giving the North it�s urban character. By the 1860s almost all of the country�s large cities were in the North, with the South having few cities of any size and none with any significant industry. New York City had attained its status as the country�s largest city, with 203,000 residents in 1830.

While the cities of North were peopled with migrants coming from the countryside, it was foreign immigration that so remarkably changed the social and cultural character of the region. Foreign immigrants flocked to the county across the decades before the Civil War. Average annual immigration for the decade prior to 1830 was about 14,000. For the years from 1831 to 1846 annual immigration rose to some 71,000 per year. But from 1846 to 1854 immigration soared to an annual average of 335,000.

The two largest immigrant groups were German and Irish who came to the country looking for opportunity and to escape mainly from economic problems in Europe. One cartoon from the period portrayed the poor conditions of the Irish farmer in the homeland, while another cartoon a German immigrant says �only a fool would stay� in Germany. During the antebellum period German and Irish immigrants constituted from half to more than three-quarters of all foreign immigrants. While the groups differed dramatically, they added new elements to U.S. society and culture. The Irish were largely Roman Catholic and tended to be small farmers and fairly poor when they left Ireland. Driven from their country by the potato famine, the Irish immigrants tended to gravitate to larger cities and, having familiarity with English, tended to integrate more rapidly. Germans, on the other hand, were more diverse and frequently spoke no English. Consequently, the Germans assimilated less quickly and formed more enduring cultural enclaves, sometimes in smaller towns of the Midwest. Both groups retained at least some of their ethnic culture, fostered by local foreign-language press and ties to each other. They also formed their communities in the North, avoiding the slave South that had little need for foreign free labor in agricultural sector that predominated there.

Despite a degree of assimilation, both groups faced some hostility and negative attitudes by the white �native� Americans who had immigrated generations before. Groups sought to suppress the immigrants, who they believed would cheapen labor and dilute the culture. An antebellum-era cartoon portrayed German and Irish immigrants combatively carrying away the ballot box, suggesting the additional fear that they could sway elections away from the dominate elites already in power. The so-called �Know-Nothing� Party organized to oppose immigration and on their flag of the 1850s they �Native Americans� to �Beware of Foreign Influence.�

So, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Northern states were developing and industrializing. Large cities, advanced technology, and �modern� forms of labor characterized the region. In addition, immigrants came in large numbers changing to the social and cultural makeup of the region more in keeping with the diversity that would be one of the country�s most notable features. This social diversity also extended to economic diversity as, unlike the South, the North had a variety of business enterprises: industrial, retail, financial, and commercial.

The South

The South, on the other hand, remained largely rural and agricultural, with an economy dominated by a single, monolithic crop. Population and population density were much lower than in the North. The region lacked the cosmopolitan aspects of the North, with few foreign immigrants and fewer imported goods like those that found their way to the Northern cities.

While the North was developing its cities, the South was not. Such Southern cities as existed were small, and they lacked the diversification of those in the North. Richmond, Virginia, one of the largest Southern cities and later the confederate capital, had only 38,000 residents in 1860. In a memoir, Mary Norcott Bryan recalled Richmond of the 1830s as �a muddy, dirty, dusty place, and we did not see buildings of much importance.� Other cities like Charleston, New Orleans, and Montgomery, Alabama were also primitive compared to the bustling urban centers of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.

Industry was limited in the South with the section having less than ten percent of the number of industrial workers. Transportation in the South was also primitive, with fewer, less efficient railroads, and a shipping network that served mainly to send goods to Northern ports or cities. With lower levels of urbanization and a smaller tax base, the South was behind the North in providing public education. While reformers in the North saw education as necessary to the new urban, industrial society, the South maintained much lower levels of education. Some 20 percent of southern white adults were illiterate, while only a small fraction of Northerners could not read or write.

In the late 1700s Southern farms mainly produced tobacco, rice, and sugar cane. But after the invention of the cotton gin, patented by Eli Whitney in 1794, cotton became the main crop. The remarkable device made cotton production profitable by efficiently and cheaply removing the sticky seeds. Southern plantation owners quickly converted to cotton reaching an annual production by 1860 of about 4.5 million bales, at 500 lbs. a bale. Cotton production not only defined the Southern economy, but accounted for some 60 percent of American exports. As the plantation owner and Southern politician James Henry Hammond said in an 1858 speech, �Cotton is King.�

But while cotton was economically powerful and the large antebellum plantation often represented the Old South, the reality of southern life was much more complicated, according to the historian Steven Mintz. In a recent essay Mintz wrote that �Despite the strength of the plantation stereotype, the South was, in reality, a diverse and complex region.� There were no large plantations in much of the section and many southern farms were small enterprises, focusing on subsistence or trading locally.

Although the South�s population included millions of people of African descent, they were enslaved in the clearly pre-modern system of labor that provided the region with a character that differed remarkably with that of the North. In a recent essay the historian Steven Mintz wrote that �Although slavery was highly profitable, it had a negative impact on the southern economy. It impeded the development of industry and cities and contributed to high debts, soil exhaustion, and a lack of technological innovation.� Slavery was, in other words, a backward institution. Or as the writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson said in an 1844 speech �Slavery is no scholar, no improver; �everything goes to decay.� Despite these negative assessments of slave labor, the institution helped shape the culture of the Old South. By 1860 there were about four million slaves in the region, or nearly 40 percent of the population. Slaves labored in the fields and homes of white Southerners, often in brutal conditions and always in a way in which their lives were scrutinized, structured, and defined by others. They lacked any real freedom.

Most Southerners saw slavery as benevolent and fair. To a considerable extent, Southern plantation owners took a paternalistic attitude toward their slaves, seeing them as their �people.� Southern publications at the time portrayed warm relations between slave owners and their slaves. Slave-owning mothers routinely turned over the care of their children to their slaves and photographs of the time show the white mistress reading to black slave children or the black �mammy� cuddling with the white children in their care. A Virginia slave owner wrote in 1837 that slaves, �if well treated and used, are the happiest laboring class in the world…..Liberally and plentifully fed, warmly clad and housed, your negroes work harder and more willingly, will be more healthy, and their moral character be improved, ��

On the other hand, Northerners often saw slavery as cruel, brutal, and violent. Northern literature portrayed the beatings, the harsh work, and the sales of slaves as property. In particular, Northern abolitionists condemned the South. In her 1852 novel Uncle Tom�s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe explained the ever-worsening brutality of slavery when she wrote, �Whipping and abuse are like laudanum [opium]; you have to double the dose as the sensibilities decline.�

Cotton grew in a great swath of the south from the Atlantic to Texas, an area known as the �black belt� for the rich, dark soil in which the crop grew well. The �black belt� was also the region where the enslaved population was largest. States with the most cotton production had the largest proportion of slaves; some counties had more blacks than whites. While most Southerners didn�t own slaves, the presence of this large population of African-Americans, without rights or the freedoms whites enjoyed, influenced the day to day lives of all who lived in the section. Legally slaves were subordinate to all, even the poorest of the poor whites.

While the �plantation� image of the South loomed large in American mythology, owners of large numbers of slaves were �extremely rare� according to Mintz. Still, about a third of all southern white families owned one or more slaves. Mintz writes that �a majority of white southern families either owned slaves, had owned them, or expected to own them.�

Paternalism and domination existed in the relations between two major population sectors, white and black. At the same time, the southern economy was dominated by a single commodity, which gave the South a sense of power, or even arrogance, that that might have informed their identity as members of a Southern nation, distinct from that of the North.

The West

Before 1821 much of the country west of the Mississippi River was ruled by Spain, and then later by independent Mexico. For much longer, it had been occupied by Native Americans. Over the forty years before the Civil War Americans moved west in large numbers, displacing the peoples and cultures that previously existed there. Infused with a spirit of �manifest destiny,� a belief in their God-given right to expand, Americans took control of the region by occupation and by military conquest. In doing so they gave the West its pioneering character, a tough, willful, often-hardscrabble, existence in a vast, but thinly-populated zone that encompassed about half of the country�s territory by the end of the nineteenth century.

Although relatively few Americans had crossed the Mississippi before 1830, the numbers of those doing so swelled in the 1840s and 1850s. In 1845 the publisher John L. O’Sullivan wrote that it was “the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.� Around this time Horace Greeley, a newspaper editor in New York, is said to have written in a letter, �Go West, young man, and grow up with the country.� Such ideas spurred the migration to the west and did help expand the country all the way to the Pacific.

Tens of thousands of Americans moved west to take advantage of millions of acres of vacant land that had been acquired by the U.S. government. They first moved into the territory purchased from France in 1803, but the vast region that would later become the states of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, and California remained part of Mexico. At first, the Mexican government welcomed enterprising citizens of the United States into their northern provinces, and even provided land grants to help develop the region. But as the numbers of �colonists� grew, the U.S. government and the colonists themselves sought to annex the territory to the United States. Texas independence from Mexico followed by the Mexican-American War resulted in the acquisition of the region for the United States. It was a massive loss for the fledgling Mexican state, but an expansion of about one-third for the United States.

The Americans who moved west struggled at first, but later made the land productive. Oregon pioneer Isaac Statts wrote in a 1847 letter that he was �highly pleased with this country, and so far as I can now say, shall spend the remainder of my days in it. It has assuredly the most healthy climate in the world.� Others found the hardscrabble existence too much of a struggle and succumbed to the elements, Indian resistance, or their inability to make the land pay for their subsistence. Part of the problem for the pioneers of the West was isolation. While tens of thousands migrated, they were spread over a territory so vast that homesteads might be days apart or more. Towns were few and cities almost non-existent.

One great boon to American expansion was the discovery of gold in California just as it was acquired from Mexico. Gold fever gripped the country. Beginning in 1849 tens of thousands of men, and smaller numbers of women, arrived in California to make their fortune. Few did so from gold, but the gold rush fueled the rapid growth and development of the far West. California became the jewel of Pacific America, with San Francisco becoming a large and prosperous city.

Despite the rapid expansion of the gold rush, however, little developed between California and the Mississippi before the Civil War. Livestock raising, grain farming, and mining all became part of the Western economy, but none produced the kind of development or enrichment that Northern industry or Southern cotton agriculture produced back East. It wouldn�t be until the post-bellum period that the vast grain fields and the mining boom would create riches and boost the formation of larger towns and cities.

–Mark Smith is Professor of History at Valencia College.

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? ANTEBELLUM POLITICS

? Alexis de Tocqueville, from Democracy in America, 1835

Alexis De Tocqueville was a French political thinker and writer who visited the United States in the early 1830s, during the presidency of Andrew Jackson. He published Democracy in America in 1835 .

The political laws of the United States are to be discussed, it is with the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people that we must begin.

The principle of the sovereignty of the people, which is always to be found, more or less, at the bottom of almost all human institutions, generally remains there concealed from view. It is obeyed without being recognized, or if for a moment it is brought to light, it is hastily cast back into the gloom of the sanctuary.

“The will of the nation” is one of those phrases, that have been most largely abused by the wily and the despotic of every age. Some have seen the expression of it in the purchased suffrages of a few of the satellites of power; others, in the votes of a timid or an interested minority; and some have even discovered it in the silence of a people, on the supposition that the fact of submission established the right to command.

In America the principle of the sovereignty of the people is NEIther barren nor concealed, as it is with some other nations; it is recognized by the customs and proclaimed by the laws; it spreads freely, and arrives without impediment at its most remote consequences If there is a country in the world where the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people can be fairly appreciated, where it an be studied in its application to the affairs of society, and where its dangers and its advantages may be judged, that country is assuredly America.

I have already observed that, from their origin, the sovereignty of the people was the fundamental principle of most of the British . colonies in America. It was far, however, from then exercising as much influence on the government of society as it now does. Two obstacles, the one external, the other internal, checked its invasive progress.

It could not ostensibly disclose itself in the laws of colonies which were still forced to obey the mother country; it was therefore obliged to rule secretly in the provincial assemblies, and especially in the townships.

American society at that time was not yet prepared to adopt it with all its consequences. Intelligence in New England and wealth in the country to the south of the Hudson (as I have shown in the preceding chapter) long exercised a sort of aristocratic influence, which tended to keep the exercise of social power in the hands of a few. Not all the public functionaries were chosen by popular vote, nor were all the citizens voters. The electoral franchise was everywhere somewhat restricted and made dependent on a certain qualification, which was very low in the North and more considerable in the South.

The American Revolution broke out, and the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people came out of the townships and took possession of the state. Every class was enlisted in its cause; battles were fought and victories obtained for it; it became the law of laws.

A change almost as rapid was effected in the interior of society, where the law of inheritance completed the abolition of local influences.

As soon as this effect of the laws and of the Revolution became apparent to every eye, victory was irrevocably pronounced in favor of the democratic cause. All power was, in fact, in its hands, and resistance was no longer possible. The higher orders submitted without a murmur and without a struggle to an evil that was thenceforth inevitable. The ordinary fate of falling powers awaited them: each of their members followed his own interest; and as it was impossible to wring the power from the hands of a people whom they did not detest sufficiently to brave, their only aim was to secure its goodwill at any price. The most democratic laws were consequently voted by the very men whose interests they impaired: and thus, although the higher classes did not excite the passions of the people against their order, they themselves accelerated . the triumph of the new state of things; so that, by a singular change, the democratic impulse was found to be most irresistible in the very states where the aristocracy had the firmest hold. The state of Maryland, which had been founded by men of rank, was the first to proclaim universal suffrage and to introduce the most democratic forms into the whole of its government.

When a nation begins to modify the elective qualification, it may easily be foreseen that, sooner or later, that qualification will be entirely abolished. There is no more invariable rule in the history of society: the further electoral rights are extended, the greater is the need of extending them; for after each concession the strength of the democracy increases, and its demands increase with its strength. The ambition of those who are below the appointed rate is irritated in exact proportion to the great number of those who are above it. The exception at last becomes the rule, concession follows concession, and no stop can be made short of universal suffrage.

At the present day the principle of the sovereignty of the people has acquired in the United States all the practical development that the imagination can conceive. It is unencumbered by those fictions that are thrown over it in other countries, and it appears in every possible form, according to the exigency of the occasion. Sometimes the laws are made by the people in a body, as at Athens; and sometimes its representatives, chosen by universal suffrage, transact business in its name and under its immediate supervision.

In some countries a power exists which, though it is in a degree foreign to the social body, directs it, and forces it to pursue a certain track. In others the ruling force is divided, being partly within and partly without the ranks of the people. But nothing of the kind is to be seen in the United States; there society governs itself for itself. All power centers in its bosom, and scarcely an individual is to be met with who would venture to conceive or, still less, to express the idea of seeking it elsewhere. The nation participates in the making of its laws by the choice of its legislators, and in the execution of them by the choice of the agents of the executive government; it may almost be said to govern itself, so feeble and so restricted is the share left to the administration, so little . do the authorities forget their popular origin and the power from which they emanate. The people reign in the American political world as the Deity does in the universe. They are the cause and the aim of all things; everything comes from them, and everything is absorbed in them.

? Andrew Jackson, �Proclamation, Nov. 24, 1832�

President Andrew Jackson issued this proclamation to the citizens of South Carolina who had declared certain federal tariffs null and void. South Carolina, led by Jackson�s vice president John C. Calhoun, claimed that the tariffs favored northern manufacturers at the expense of southern farmers. Congress later passed the Force Act that authorized the use of the federal military against any state that failed to carry out the provisions of the tariff acts. Eventually a compromise was worked out that, for the time being, avoided conflict between the federal government and the southern states.

Whereas a convention assembled by the State of South Carolina, have passed an ordinance by which they declare, “That the several acts…of Congress…for the imposing of duties and imposts on the importation of foreign commodities…are unauthorized by the Constitution of the United States and violate the true meaning and intent thereof, and are null and void, and have no law” nor binding on the citizens of that State….

And…the said ordinance declares that the people of South Carolina…have said that they will consider any act passed by Congress abolishing or closing the ports of the said State…as inconsistent with the longer continuance of South Carolina in the Union….

And whereas the said Ordinance prescribes on the people of South Carolina a course of conduct in direct violation of their duty as citizens of the United States, contrary to the laws of their country, subversive of its constitution, and having for its object the destruction of the Union…. To preserve this bond of our political existence from destruction, to maintain inviolate this state of national honor and prosperity, and to justify the confidence my fellow-citizens have reposed in me, I, Andrew Jackson, President of the United States, have thought proper to issue this my PROCLAMATION, stating my views of the Constitution and laws applicable to the measures adopted by the Convention of South Carolina….

The Ordinance is founded not on the…right of resisting acts which are plainly unconstitutional and too oppressive to be endured; but on the strange position that nay one State may not only declare an Act of Congress void, but prohibit its execution…. It is true, they add, that to justify this abrogation…it must be palpably contrary to the constitution; but it is evident that to give the right of resisting laws of that description, coupled with the uncontrolled right to decide what laws deserve that character, is to give the power of resisting all laws. For, as by the theory, there is no appeal, the reasons alleged by the State, good or bad, must prevail….

I consider then the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one State, incompatible with the existence of the union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed….

The law in question was passed under a power expressly given by the Constitution, to lay and collect imposts…. The Constitution has given expressly to Congress the right of raising revenue and of determining the sum the public exigencies will require. The States have no control over the exercise of this right, other than that which results from the power of changing the Representatives who abuse it, and thus procure redress….

On such expositions and reasonings the Ordinance grounds not only an assertion of the right to annul the laws of which it complains, but to enforce it by a threat of seceding from the Union if any attempt is made to execute them.

This right to secede is deduced from the nature of the Constitution, which they say is a compact between sovereign States, who have preserved their whole sovereignty, and therefore are subject to no superior: that because they made the compact, they can break it, when, in their opinion, it has been departed from by the other states. Fallacious as this course of reasoning is, it enlists State pride, and finds advocates in the honest prejudices of those who have not studied the nature of our Government sufficiently to see the radical error on which it rests.

The people of the United States formed the Constitution, acting through the State Legislatures in making the compact, to meet and discuss its provisions, and acting in separate conventions when they ratified those provisions; but the terms used in its construction show it to be a government in which the people of all the States collectively are representative. We are ONE PEOPLE in the choice of the President and Vice President. Here the States have no other agency than to direct the mode in which the votes shall be given…. The people, then, and not the States, are represented in the Executive branch….

When chosen, they [members of the House of Representatives] are all representatives of the United States, not representatives of the particular State from which they come. They are paid by the United States, not by the State; nor are they accountable to it for any act done in the performance of their legislative functions; and however they may in practice, as it is their duty to do, consult and prefer the interests of their particular constituents when they come in conflict with any other partial or local interest, yet it is their first and highest duty, as representatives of the United States, to promote the general good.

The Constitution of the United States, then, forms a government, not a league, and whether it be formed by compact between the States, or in any other manner, its character is the same. It is a government in which all the people are represented, which operates directly on the people individually, not upon the States–they retained all the power they did not grant. But each State having expressly parted with so many powers as to constitute jointly with the other States a single Nation, cannot from that period possess any right to secede, because each secession does not break a league, but destroys the unity of a Nation, and any injury to that unity is not only a breach which would result from the contravention of a compact, but it is an offence against the whole Union….

No one fellow citizens, has a higher reverence for the reserved rights of the States than the Magistrate who now addresses you…. The States, severally have not retained their entire sovereignty. It has been shown that in becoming parts of a nation, not members of a league, they surrendered many of their essential parts of sovereignty. The right to make treaties–declare war–levy taxes–exercise exclusive judicial and legislative powers–were all of them functions of sovereign power. The States then, for all these important purposes, were no longer sovereign. The allegiance of their citizens was transferred in the first instance to the Government of the United States–they became American citizens, and owed obedience to the Constitution of the United States and to laws made in conformity with the powers it vested in Congress…. Treaties and alliances were made in the name of all. Troops were raised for the common defence. How then, with all these proofs that under all changes of our position we had, for designated purposes and with defined powers, created national Governments–how it is, that the most perfect of those several modes of union, should now be considered as a mere league that may be dissolved at pleasure? It is an abuse of terms….

Fellow citizens of my native State! let me not only admonish you, as the first Magistrate of our common country, not to incur the penalty of its laws, but use the influence that a Father would over his children whom he saw rushing to certain ruin…. You are free members of a flourishing and happy union. There is not settled design to oppress you.–You have indeed felt the unequal operation of the laws which may have been unwisely, not constitutionally passed; but that inequality must necessarily removed. At the very moment when you were madly urged on to the unfortunate course you have begun, a change in public opinion has commenced. The nearly approaching payment of the public debt, and the consequent necessity of a diminution of duties, had already produced a considerable reduction, and that too on some articles of general consumption to your State….

If your leaders could succeed in establishing a separation, what would be your situation? Are you united at home–are you free from the apprehension of civil discord, with all its fearful consequences? Do our neighboring republics, every day suffering some new revolution or contending with some new insurrection–do they excite your envy?…. The laws of the United States must be executed. I have no discretionary power on the subject–my duty is emphatically pronounced in the Constitution. Those who told you that you might peaceably prevent their execution, deceived you–they could not have been deceived themselves. They know that a forcible opposition could alone prevent the execution of the laws, and they know that such opposition must be repelled. Their object is disunion: but be not deceived by names: disunion, by armed force, is TREASON….

? Robert Y. Hayne, Governor of South Carolina, �Inaugural Address,� December, 1832

These are excerpts from the address as published in a South Carolina newspaper.

In the great struggle in which we engaged, for the preservation of our rights and liberties, it is my fixed determination to assert and uphold the SOVEREIGN AUTHORITY OF THE STATE, and to enforce by all the means that may be entrusted to my hands, her SOVEREIGN WILL. I recognize no ALLEGIANCE, as paramount to that which the citizens of South Carolina, owe to the State of their birth, or their adoption….

South Carolina, after ten years of unavailing petitions and remonstrances, against a system of measures on the part of the Federal Government, which in common with the other Southern States–she has repeatedly declared, to be founded in USURPATION, utterly subversive of the rights, and fatal to the prosperity of her people,–has in the face of the world PUT HERSELF UPON HER SOVEREIGNTY, and made the solemn declaration that this system shall no longer be enforced within her limits. All hope of a redress of this grievance, from a returning sense of justice on the part of our oppressors, or from any probable change in the policy of the Government, having fled, nothing was left for South Carolina, but to throw herself upon her reserved rights, or to remain for ever in a condition of “Colonial vassalage.” She has, therefore, resolved to stand upon her rights, and it is for her sister States, now, to determine, what is to be done in this emergency. She has announced to them her anxious desire that this controversy shall be amicably adjusted, either by a satisfactory modification of the Tariff, or by a reference of the whole subject to a convention of all the States. Should neither of these reasonable propositions be acceded to, then she will feel herself justified before God and Man, in firmly maintaining the position she has assumed, until some other mode can be devised, for the removal of the difficulty. South Carolina is anxiously desirous of living at peace with her brethren; she has not the remotest wish to dissolve the political bonds which have connected her with the great American family of Confederated States. With Thomas Jefferson, “she would regard the dissolution of our Union with them, as one of the greatest of evils–but not the greatest,–there is one greater: SUBMISSION TO A GOVERNMENT WITHOUT LIMITATION OF POWERS;” and such a government she conscientiously believes will be our portion, should the system against which she is now struggling, be finally established as the settled policy of the country. South Carolina is solicitous to preserve the Constitution as our fathers framed it–according to its true spirit, intent, and meaning, but she is inflexibly determined never to surrender her reserved rights, not to suffer the Constitutional compact to be converted into an instrument for the oppression of her citizens….

A confederacy of sovereign states, formed by the free consent of all, cannot possibly be held together, by any other tie than mutual sympathies and common interest. The unhallowed attempt to cement the union with the blood of our citizens, (which if successful would reduce the free and sovereign States of this confederacy to mere dependent provinces) South Carolina has solemnly declared, would be regarded by her, as absolving her “from all further obligation to maintain or preserve her political connexion with the people of the other States.” The spirit of our free institutions, the very temper of the age, would seem to forbid the thought of an appeal to force, for the .settlement of a constitutional controversy. If, however, we should be deceived in this reasonable expectation–South Carolina, so far as her means extend, stands prepared to meet danger, and repel invasion, come from what quarter it may….

If after making those efforts due to her own honor and the greatness of the cause, she is destined utterly to fail, the bitter fruits of that failure, [will fall] not to herself alone, but to the entire South, nay to the whole union…. The speedy establishment, on the ruins of the rights of the states, and the liberties of the people, of a great CONSOLIDATED GOVERNMENT, “riding and ruling over the plundered ploughman and beggared yeomanry” [Jefferson’s words] of our once happy land–our glorious confederacy, broken into scattered and dishonored fragments–the light of liberty extinguished, never perhaps to be resumed–these–these will be the melancholy memorials of that wisdom, which saw the danger while yet at a distance, and of that patriotism, which struggled gloriously to avert it….

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? CITIZENSHIP IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA

? Mary Sheldon,”Women and Politics,” 26 September 1848, Composition Book.

Mary Sheldon was a student at Oberlin College, in Ohio.

What has woman to do with politics? What can she do more than occasionally to attend a convention or mass meeting, and wave her handkerchief or hand to cheer the politician?

What more can she do! do you ask as though she would attempt to effect a great object by cheers alone. We will take time to answer this question; and first enquire what are woman’s duties. In our country these consist mainly in attending to the duties of the household, a general phrase designed to include all the various arts of cooking & cleaning, smoothing, making, mending etc. all that pertains to the house and by way of recreation fancy needle-work and perhaps a share in the duties of Voluntary Associations sometimes known under the name of Sewing Societies. Besides this on her devolves the onerous task of caring for and instructing children, not only the care of girls until they arrive at age but often the management of boys until they are prepared to leave home for College instruction or the duties of active life. These one would think were sufficient and yet with the assistance of domestics or in a small family much leisure is found for the improvement of the mind, which many with very limited advantages have accomplished to a wonderful extent. How, we ask, could she better employ a portion of this time than in making herself acquainted with the principles of civil government and the economy of our own. In a republican government such as our own no mother can tell that her son may not be called to important offices no common school teacher can say that she is not moulding the mind of a future president.

Look around on our country. See to what a depth of degradation the great political parties of our nation have sunk. Is it not proverbial that the worst man has the best chance of succeeding in an election? Look again at our halls of legislation. One fourth (I speak within bounds) of the time of the public servants, our senators and representatives is spent in electioneering speeches in listening to or making speeches to advance the interest of one or another set of men and these things increasing annually. Each session seem to be more corrupt than the preceding. If, as Napolean thought, mothers were to be the salvation of France where else should we look for reform. See our public offices filled with the basest of mengluttonous, winebibbus [drunkenness], licentious; and what shall effect a reformation if the healthful moral influence of woman be not brought to bear upon these things.

All this can be effected without doing violence to the present usages of society. Let her become acquainted with government and the characters of the leading men of the nation. Let her influence be felt by her friends as on the side of justice and right. Hers it is to frown upon oppression and vice, and especially to instill into the minds of youth a patriotic spirit, a spirit of self sacrifice for the good of the country rather than a spirit of self aggrandisement at its expense. Hers it is to encourage the virtuous and deserving & to strengthen the weak and vasillating mind to do the right.

? The Seneca Falls Convention �Declaration of Sentiments,� 1848

The delegates of the Convention issued this declaration.

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer. while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled. The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyrranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.

He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.

He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men–both natives and foreigners.

Having deprived her of this first right of a citizedn, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides.

He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.

He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.

He has made her, morally, an irresponsible being, as she can commit many crimes with impunity, provided they be done in the presence of her husband. In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master–the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement.

He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes, and in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given, as to be wholly regardles of the happiness of women–the law, in all cases, going upon a flase supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands.

After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single, and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it.

He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration. He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most homorable to himself. As a teacher of theoloy, medicine, or law, she is not known.

He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her.

He allows her in church, as well as state, but a suborinate position, claiming apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the church.

He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in man.

He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to her God.

He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her conficence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.

Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation–in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States.

? Caroline Kim-Brown, �Defining Freedom A New Style for Suffragists,� Humanities, May/June 2006.

Mary Walker wanted to be famous. In her 1855 commencement address at Syracuse Medical College, she said that usefulness must be the highest priority and that she hoped that she and her fellow doctors would write their

names “on the highest tablet of fame.”

Walker’s fame would come from her work as a Civil War surgeon and her seven-decade crusade for women’s rights in all spheres–marriage, work, and voting. But her public battle for equality began with dress reform.

In early January 1857, Walker wrote her first letter to the editor for The Sibyl: A Review of the Tastes, Errors and Fashions of Society.

The journal, created in 1856 by Dr. Lydia Sayer, and her soon-to-be husband, John S. Hasbrouck, was the official publication of the Dress Reform Association.

The Dress Reform Association had held its first meeting in Glen Haven, New York, in February 1856, and it is possible that Walker and Sayer Hasbrouck met there and Sayer Hasbrouck recruited Walker as a contributor. The Sibyl, although created to challenge the unhealthy fashions commonly donned by nineteenth-century women, quickly drew contributors and readers interested in a range of topics, including temperance, suffrage, and the conditions for women at coeducational and women’s medical colleges.

In her first letter to The Sibyl, Walker noted that residents of Rome, New York, and neighboring communities were interested in the upcoming dress reform convention in Canastota.

“We expect there will be a good attendance of those who are richly provided with common sense, intelligence, and decision of character. . . . We have very numerous and very large hopes that the coming convention will ‘tell well’ for reformatory principles.”

The idea of dress reform had been evolving over several decades. Many women who were part of the westward movement or who, like Walker and her sisters, lived on a farm had learned quickly that shortening skirts and wearing pants was practical for physical labor. These early changes in costume received little public attention.

Criticism grew louder for women such as George Sand and Rosa Bonheur who had begun in the 1840s to alter their clothing choices, but still they were seen as exceptional women who had little relation to the sex in general.

The action that is credited with bringing the dress reform movement to national attention in the United States was initiated by Elizabeth Smith Miller, daughter of Gerrit Smith, who began in the spring of 1851 to appear in public in a dress she had designed. It included what she called “Turkish trousers” (full, billowing pant legs that tapered to a tight fit around the ankles) and a skirt shortened to about four inches below the knee. Miller created a sensation, largely because she wore it without having a need to perform physical labor. She argued that it was a more healthful style of clothing, unlike the typical dresses of that day that could include thirty-five yards of fabric and ten pounds of petticoats.

Miller’s cousin, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, joined Miller in wearing the reform dress, and their mutual friend, Amelia Jenkins Bloomer of Homer, New York, quickly embraced their actions.

In the June 1851 issue of her temperance magazine, The Lily, Bloomer published an explicit argument against the physical dangers of conventional clothing, which “distorted spines, compressed lungs, enlarged livers, and [resulted in] displacement of the whole abdominal viscera.” Because Bloomer had the power of the press in which to make her points, the new female attire quickly became known as the Bloomer dress. Notably, she referred to Miller’s design as the “Freedom Dress” in subsequent articles.

By late 1851, newspapers deemed women in reform dresses as “ridiculous and indecent,” as the International Monthly asserted in its November issue, “an abandoned class . . . vulgar women whose inordinate love of notoriety is apt to display itself in ways that induce their exclusion from respectable society.”

The general response to their unconventional dress demonstrated the fear that the public felt when women dress reformers failed to adhere to conventional feminine attire: Women’s freedom of movement, in the most basic bodily sense, could rapidly lead to women’s emancipation from the subservient social role they were expected and, some insisted, ordained to occupy.

Bodily knowledge was necessary to understanding the dangers of fashionable clothing, and that knowledge–just as it had been for the earliest women who, like Walker, sought to become physicians–was supposed to desex a woman. Dress reformers believed that such knowledge was the basis for advances in all realms of knowledge, that liberty of body and mind were inseparable.

Although traditional physicians were largely on the side of insisting that women remain dressed in conventional clothing, many eclectic, homeopathic, and hydropathic medical practitioners supported the new style. Aligned with temperance advocates and health reform movements–and the support of publicly recognized women such as Stanton–the dress reform campaign quickly became aligned with the women’s rights movement. Most of the major figures in the suffrage movement donned the reform dress at one time or another.

The connection between suffrage and dress reform extended back at least to the 1851 suffrage convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, when Paulina Wright Davis had included in the proceedings a letter sent by a French suffragist, H. M. Weber, who supported the reform dress and asserted that wearing it did not make one eccentric or suggest that a woman was trying to pass as a man; it was, rather, a “convenience to her business.”

This was a point with which Mary Walker ardently agreed. Although she would be criticized throughout her life for attempting to be a man, she always countered that she was a woman who chose to wear healthy clothing.

Walker’s second contribution to The Sibyl was the lead article for the January 15, 1857, issue. In it, she covered the January 7 convention at Canastota, giving a detailed account of the gathering, its participants, and its evolving policies, including the agreement not to demand only one style of reform clothing. Walker herself had been one of the speakers, as was the Honorable Gerrit Smith. Although Elizabeth Cady Stanton could not attend, she sent a letter in support, and Walker would soon be sharing platforms with Smith and Stanton at dress reform and suffrage conventions.

In her January 7 speech at Canastota, Walker discussed the advantages of the short skirt in comparison with the long skirt, and she had Miss R. A. Donovan of Flint, Michigan, join her onstage as a model of the most efficient reform dress. She pointed out several other outfits in the audience that were notably well designed.

Walker’s reputation as a dress reform advocate spread quickly. Soon her own activities were the subject of accounts in The Sibyl. A correspondent reports in the December 15, 1857, issue on a “well attended” lecture Walker had given on the subject. Walker argued that women needed to be more knowledgeable about their own “physical organization” in order to maintain their health and have an awareness of the dangers of “tight and cumbrous clothing usually worn by women.” The reporter concluded that Dr. Mary Walker “manifests great desire to benefit her sex, and undoubtedly has it in her power to do much good.”

But the editor of the Black River Herald had also attended the lecture, and he asserted that she would do better for her sex if she would “discard her silly notions of dress.” The criticism outraged Sayer Hasbrouck, who responded that the Herald, “puffed up with a little brief authority . . . [and] with but limited ideas of the importance of the subject they are discussing,” was not supporting women but doing “a world of mischief” against them. She emphasized that Dr. Walker “is an educated and practicing physician” and encouraged Walker to press on with the “great work in which she is engaged.” In doing so, Hasbrouck concluded, Walker “will receive what she so richly merits, the blessings of millions now weak, suffering and faltering.”

Not only did Walker continue her foray into the new realm of lecturing, she now began to submit short articles to The Sibyl rather than just letters to the editor. Her first two contributions were “Synopsis of a Sermon, By Rev. A. S. Wightman” and “A Bloomer in the Street.” In the first, she reviews a sermon written by Wightman, a Methodist minister, in which he had offered progressive ideas about the rights as well as duties of Christian women. In the latter critique, she draws on an article by a “Mr. X” that had appeared in the Oswego Commercial Times criticizing a young woman who appeared on the streets of Oswego in a Bloomer outfit. Walker takes apart the argument of Mr. X , who said, “She bore herself timidly along as if conscious of the observation of the crowd, and as if she was sustained by the romantic spirit of being martyrized in the cause of a reformation in fashion.”

Walker’s response was, “True, Mr. X, she is a martyr, but not half as much a one as the poor devotee of fashion! No, for she has tried BOTH and found the Bloomer martyrdom much the easier; for in THIS the mental, moral, and physical are free and untrammeled and nothing suffers but the pride, while in THAT all suffer! O that the perfect slaves of fashion would break away from their masters and follow the north star freedom, leaving the terrible chains of purse misery and physical agony forever in the rear.”

The success of Walker’s lectures and the support of her dress reform colleagues encouraged her to become involved in other reform movements. She was well known to Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucy Stone by the late 1850s.

While they agreed on suffrage actions at this time, Anthony, Stanton, and Walker discovered distinct differences when they attended a Friends’ Yearly Meeting at Waterloo, New York. The three women also discussed the women’s rights movement. While Stanton and Anthony welcomed Walker’s support in these years, they did not agree with her continued support of dress reform. As Walker writes about their conversations at Waterloo: “Susan B. Anthony said to me: ‘Mrs. Stanton and I had to leave off short dresses and trousers, and you will have to, too!’ Mrs. Stanton said to me: ‘Miss Anthony and I had to leave off short dresses and pants, and you will have to!’ I answered both of them that I did not see why I should have to. I was . . . in regular practice of medicine and surgery, and was well dressed. They clearly saw that I was keeping the woman question at the front, as they could not do. I made a constant exemplification of woman’s equal rights.”

Eventually, leading suffragists moved away from dress reform, a stance that caused Sayer Hasbrouck to rebuke them for having “little faith” and a “lack of energy” for true reform. Sayer Hasbrouck, Walker, and other women who continued to wear reform clothing for the rest of their lives endured a level of criticism that Anthony, Stanton, and Stone could not.

In September 1859, shortly before the Civil War began, The Sibyl published Walker’s “Women Soldiers.” Walker’s article coincided with the ongoing discussion in the pages of The Sibyl and on the lecture platforms at women’s rights conventions of the injustice of women’s taxation without representation.

Conservatives, Walker noted, always respond to this argument with the tired charge, “‘Shoulder the musket and go to the battle field,’–just as though every one that had political rights must of necessity be a warrior.” It is time, she adds, that “such ignorant conservatives” hear the truth: “women have gone to the ‘battle field,’ fought and died in their country’s cause, been willing martyrs, and you have not heard of them! Women have helped to gain the elective franchise that you to-day enjoy, and now you thrust her away from the polls, as though she were not worthy to enjoy what she has fought for by your sire’s side.”

From Revolutionary times, Walker argues, women have fought bravely in wartime, in spite of the numerous ways in which men attempted to thwart their activities. Such men keep women from participating because they “fear that women might dazzle!”

As Walker builds her argument, she attacks what she calls opponents’ “butterflyism”–the denigration of women as incapable of such service. Her voice of indictment is uncompromising, and it is the voice she will retain for the rest of her public life: “But Mr. or Miss Conservative, you say that only very young and inconsiderate women ever expose themselves to the fury of the cannon’s mouth or anywhere else out of their sphere. You are not as ignorant as you are malicious, for you wish that you could trample on all women, and you try to convince yourself that there is not, nor ever has been any women who aspired to notoriety in any other direction, than owning a ‘love of a bonnet,’ ‘queenly robes,’ ‘white arms and necks,’ &c.”

After citing other women from various countries who have fought in righteous battles, Walker concludes that conservatives will be proved wrong: They will “see many such ‘instances of Bloomerism’ in our own country, among our 800 Bloomers, if war should break out and need such service. Yours in rendering to woman honors due. Dr. Walker.”

Her equating Bloomerism with the warrior spirit makes a transition in the definition of Bloomerism to that of a militant force. As the Civil War began, Dr. Mary Walker would reject the musket, but she would shoulder her medical bag and “go to the battle field” with an ardent commitment to the Union cause and an insistence on her right to serve her country as a physician–not as a nurse, which the military would have preferred. It was a daunting challenge to the gendered code of the nation, and it was an act that would forever put her in the public consciousness.

? Frederick Douglass, Speech, delivered July 5, 1852 in Rochester, New York

The former slave, Frederick Douglass, was the most prominent abolitionist and advocate for African American rights in the nineteenth century. Asked to speak on July 4th, Douglass chose to speak on July 5th.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy�a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

? Proceedings of the Colored National Convention Held in Rochester, NY, 1853

African American leaders organized the national convention movement in the 1850s

We are Americans, and as Americans, we would speak to Americans. We address you not as aliens nor as exiles, humbly asking to be permitted to dwell among you in peace; but we address you as American citizens asserting their rights on their own native soil. . . .

Notwithstanding the impositions and deprivations which have fettered us- notwithstanding the disabilities and liabilities, pending and impending- notwithstanding the cunning, cruel, and scandalous efforts to blot out that right, we declare that we are, and of right we ought to be American Citizens. We claim this right, and we claim all the rights and privileges, and duties which, properly, attach to it. . . .

By birth, we are American citizens; by the principles of the Declaration of Independence, we are American citizens; within the meaning of the United States Constitution, we are American citizens; by the facts of history, and the admissions of American statesmen, we are American citizens; by the hardships and trials endured; by the courage and fidelity displayed by our ancestors in defining the liberties and in achieving the independence of our land, we are American citizens. . . .

? Supreme Court of the United States, �Decision in the Case of Dred Scott v. Sandford,� 1857

Dred Scott was a slave in Missouri who argued in an 1846 lawsuit that because he had lived for four years in the free North his slave status was erased. The case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court and in 1856 the court ruled against Scott. Below is an excerpt of the decision issued by the Chief Justice Roger B. Taney.

The question is simply this: Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied by that instrument to the citizen? One of which rights is the privilege of suing in a court of the United States in the cases specified in the Constitution….

The words “people of the United States” and “citizens” are synonymous terms, and mean the same thing. They both describe the political body who … form the sovereignty, and who hold the power and conduct the Government through their representatives…. The question before us is, whether the class of persons described in the plea in abatement [people of African ancestry] compose a portion of this people, and are constituent members of this sovereignty? We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word “citizens” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them. …

The court think the affirmative of these propositions cannot be maintained. And if it cannot, [Dred Scott] could not be a citizen of the State of Missouri, within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States, and, consequently, was not entitled to sue in its courts.

?

? SECTIONALISM AND SECESSION

? Steven Mintz, �Southern Nationalism,� Digital History, 2007 � Digital History 2014.

https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=3559

? State of South Carolina, �Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union,� December 24, 1860

The people of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, on the 26th day of April, A.D., 1852, declared that the frequent violations of the Constitution of the United States, by the Federal Government, and its encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States, fully justified this State in then withdrawing from the Federal Union; but in deference to the opinions and wishes of the other slaveholding States, she forbore at that time to exercise this right. Since that time, these encroachments have continued to increase, and further forbearance ceases to be a virtue.

And now the State of South Carolina having resumed her separate and equal place among nations, deems it due to herself, to the remaining United States of America, and to the nations of the world, that she should declare the immediate causes which have led to this act.

In the year 1765, that portion of the British Empire embracing Great Britain, undertook to make laws for the government of that portion composed of the thirteen American Colonies. A struggle for the right of self-government ensued, which resulted, on the 4th of July, 1776, in a Declaration, by the Colonies, “that they are, and of right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; and that, as free and independent States, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do.”

They further solemnly declared that whenever any “form of government becomes destructive of the ends for which it was established, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government.” Deeming the Government of Great Britain to have become destructive of these ends, they declared that the Colonies “are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”

In pursuance of this Declaration of Independence, each of the thirteen States proceeded to exercise its separate sovereignty; adopted for itself a Constitution, and appointed officers for the administration of government in all its departments– Legislative, Executive and Judicial. For purposes of defense, they united their arms and their counsels; and, in 1778, they entered into a League known as the Articles of Confederation, whereby they agreed to entrust the administration of their external relations to a common agent, known as the Congress of the United States, expressly declaring, in the first Article “that each State retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every power, jurisdiction and right which is not, by this Confederation, expressly delegated to the United States in Congress assembled.”

Under this Confederation the war of the Revolution was carried on, and on the 3rd of September, 1783, the contest ended, and a definite Treaty was signed by Great Britain, in which she acknowledged the independence of the Colonies in the following terms: “ARTICLE 1– His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz: New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be FREE, SOVEREIGN AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that he treats with them as such; and for himself, his heirs and successors, relinquishes all claims to the government, propriety and territorial rights of the same and every part thereof.”

Thus were established the two great principles asserted by the Colonies, namely: the right of a State to govern itself; and the right of a people to abolish a Government when it becomes destructive of the ends for which it was instituted. And concurrent with the establishment of these principles, was the fact, that each Colony became and was recognized by the mother Country a FREE, SOVEREIGN AND INDEPENDENT STATE.

In 1787, Deputies were appointed by the States to revise the Articles of Confederation, and on 17th September, 1787, these Deputies recommended for the adoption of the States, the Articles of Union, known as the Constitution of the United States.

The parties to whom this Constitution was submitted, were the several sovereign States; they were to agree or disagree, and when nine of them agreed the compact was to take effect among those concurring; and the General Government, as the common agent, was then invested with their authority.

If only nine of the thirteen States had concurred, the other four would have remained as they then were– separate, sovereign States, independent of any of the provisions of the Constitution. In fact, two of the States did not accede to the Constitution until long after it had gone into operation among the other eleven; and during that interval, they each exercised the functions of an independent nation.

By this Constitution, certain duties were imposed upon the several States, and the exercise of certain of their powers was restrained, which necessarily implied their continued existence as sovereign States. But to remove all doubt, an amendment was added, which declared that the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, respectively, or to the people. On the 23d May , 1788, South Carolina, by a Convention of her People, passed an Ordinance assenting to this Constitution, and afterwards altered her own Constitution, to conform herself to the obligations she had undertaken.

Thus was established, by compact between the States, a Government with definite objects and powers, limited to the express words of the grant. This limitation left the whole remaining mass of power subject to the clause reserving it to the States or to the people, and rendered unnecessary any specification of reserved rights.

We hold that the Government thus established is subject to the two great principles asserted in the Declaration of Independence; and we hold further, that the mode of its formation subjects it to a third fundamental principle, namely: the law of compact. We maintain that in every compact between two or more parties, the obligation is mutual; that the failure of one of the contracting parties to perform a material part of the agreement, entirely releases the obligation of the other; and that where no arbiter is provided, each party is remitted to his own judgment to determine the fact of failure, with all its consequences.

In the present case, that fact is established with certainty. We assert that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own Statutes for the proof.

The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows: “No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”

This stipulation was so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made. The greater number of the contracting parties held slaves, and they had previously evinced their estimate of the value of such a stipulation by making it a condition in the Ordinance for the government of the territory ceded by Virginia, which now composes the States north of the Ohio River.

The same article of the Constitution stipulates also for rendition by the several States of fugitives from justice from the other States.

The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.

The ends for which the Constitution was framed are declared by itself to be “to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

These ends it endeavored to accomplish by a Federal Government, in which each State was recognized as an equal, and had separate control over its own institutions. The right of property in slaves was recognized by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burthening them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor.

We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that “Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,” and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.

On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.

The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.

Sectional interest and animosity will deepen the irritation, and all hope of remedy is rendered vain, by the fact that public opinion at the North has invested a great political error with the sanction of more erroneous religious belief.

We, therefore, the People of South Carolina, by our delegates in Convention assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, have solemnly declared that the Union heretofore existing between this State and the other States of North America, is dissolved, and that the State of South Carolina has resumed her position among the nations of the world, as a separate and independent State; with full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do.

? Abraham Lincoln, �First Inaugural Address,� March 4, 1861.

In compliance with a custom as old as the Government itself, I appear before you to address you briefly and to take in your presence the oath prescribed by the Constitution of the United States to be taken by the President before he enters on the execution of this office.”

I do not consider it necessary at present for me to discuss those matters of administration about which there is no special anxiety or excitement.

Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States that by the accession of a Republican Administration their property and their peace and personal security are to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension. Indeed, the most ample evidence to the contrary has all the while existed and been open to their inspection. It is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that–

I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.

Those who nominated and elected me did so with full knowledge that I had made this and many similar declarations and had never recanted them; and more than this, they placed in the platform for my acceptance, and as a law to themselves and to me, the clear and emphatic resolution which I now read:

Resolved, That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of power on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depend; and we denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any State or Territory, no matter what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes.

I now reiterate these sentiments, and in doing so I only press upon the public attention the most conclusive evidence of which the case is susceptible that the property, peace, and security of no section are to be in any wise endangered by the now incoming Administration. I add, too, that all the protection which, consistently with the Constitution and the laws, can be given will be cheerfully given to all the States when lawfully demanded, for whatever cause–as cheerfully to one section as to another.

There is much controversy about the delivering up of fugitives from service or labor. The clause I now read is as plainly written in the Constitution as any other of its provisions:

No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall in consequence of any law or regulation therein be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.

It is scarcely questioned that this provision was intended by those who made it for the reclaiming of what we call fugitive slaves; and the intention of the lawgiver is the law. All members of Congress swear their support to the whole Constitution–to this provision as much as to any other. To the proposition, then, that slaves whose cases come within the terms of this clause “shall be delivered up” their oaths are unanimous. Now, if they would make the effort in good temper, could they not with nearly equal unanimity frame and pass a law by means of which to keep good that unanimous oath?

There is some difference of opinion whether this clause should be enforced by national or by State authority, but surely that difference is not a very material one. If the slave is to be surrendered, it can be of but little consequence to him or to others by which authority it is done. And should anyone in any case be content that his oath shall go unkept on a merely unsubstantial controversy as to how it shall be kept?

Again: In any law upon this subject ought not all the safeguards of liberty known in civilized and humane jurisprudence to be introduced, so that a free man be not in any case surrendered as a slave? And might it not be well at the same time to provide by law for the enforcement of that clause in the Constitution which guarantees that “the citizens of each State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States”?

I take the official oath to-day with no mental reservations and with no purpose to construe the Constitution or laws by any hypercritical rules; and while I do not choose now to specify particular acts of Congress as proper to be enforced, I do suggest that it will be much safer for all, both in official and private stations, to conform to and abide by all those acts which stand unrepealed than to violate any of them trusting to find impunity in having them held to be unconstitutional.

It is seventy-two years since the first inauguration of a President under our National Constitution. During that period fifteen different and greatly distinguished citizens have in succession administered the executive branch of the Government. They have conducted it through many perils, and generally with great success. Yet, with all this scope of precedent, I now enter upon the same task for the brief constitutional term of four years under great and peculiar difficulty. A disruption of the Federal Union, heretofore only menaced, is now formidably attempted.

I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself.

Again: If the United States be not a government proper, but an association of States in the nature of contract merely, can it, as a contract, be peaceably unmade by less than all the parties who made it? One party to a contract may violate it–break it, so to speak–but does it not require all to lawfully rescind it?

Descending from these general principles, we find the proposition that in legal contemplation the Union is perpetual confirmed by the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured, and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was “to form a more perfect Union.”

But if destruction of the Union by one or by a part only of the States be lawfully possible, the Union is less perfect than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity.

It follows from these views that no State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void, and that acts of violence within any State or States against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances.

I therefore consider that in view of the Constitution and the laws the Union is unbroken, and to the extent of my ability, I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States. Doing this I deem to be only a simple duty on my part, and Ishall perform it so far as practicable unless my rightful masters, the American people, shall withhold the requisite means or in some authoritative manner direct the contrary. I trust this will not be regarded as a menace, but only as the declared purpose of the Union that it will constitutionally defend and maintain itself.

In doing this there needs to be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall be none unless it be forced upon the national authority. The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere. Where hostility to the United States in any interior locality shall be so great and universal as to prevent competent resident citizens from holding the Federal offices, there will be no attempt to force obnoxious strangers among the people for that object. While the strict legal right may exist in the Government to enforce the exercise of these offices, the attempt to do so would be so irritating and so nearly impracticable withal that I deem it better to forego for the time the uses of such offices.

The mails, unless repelled, will continue to be furnished in all parts of the Union. So far as possible the people everywhere shall have that sense of perfect security which is most favorable to calm thought and reflection. The course here indicated will be followed unless current events and experience shall show a modification or change to be proper, and in every case and exigency my best discretion will be exercised, according to circumstances actually existing and with a view and a hope of a peaceful solution of the national troubles and the restoration of fraternal sympathies and affections.

That there are persons in one section or another who seek to destroy the Union at all events and are glad of any pretext to do it I will neither affirm nor deny; but if there be such, I need address no word to them. To those, however, who really love the Union may I not speak?

Before entering upon so grave a matter as the destruction of our national fabric, with all its benefits, its memories, and its hopes, would it not be wise to ascertain precisely why we do it? Will you hazard so desperate a step while there is any possibility that any portion of the ills you fly from have no real existence? Will you, while the certain ills you fly to are greater than all the real ones you fly from, will you risk the commission of so fearful a mistake?

All profess to be content in the Union if all constitutional rights can be maintained. Is it true, then, that any right plainly written in the Constitution has been denied? I think not. Happily, the human mind is so constituted that no party can reach to the audacity of doing this. Think, if you can, of a single instance in which a plainly written provision of the Constitution has ever been denied. If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might in a moral point of view justify revolution; certainly would if such right were a vital one. But such is not our case. All the vital rights of minorities and of individuals are so plainly assured to them by affirmations and negations, guaranties and prohibitions, in the Constitution that controversies never arise concerning them. But no organic law can ever be framed with a provision specifically applicable to every question which may occur in practical administration. No foresight can anticipate nor any document of reasonable length contain express provisions for all possible questions. Shall fugitives from labor be surrendered by national or by State authority? The Constitution does not expressly say. May Congress prohibit slavery in the Territories? The Constitution does not expressly say. Must Congress protect slavery in the Territories? The Constitution does not expressly say.

From questions of this class spring all our constitutional controversies, and we divide upon them into majorities and minorities. If the minority will not acquiesce, the majority must, or the Government must cease. There is no other alternative, for continuing the Government is acquiescence on one side or the other. If a minority in such case will secede rather than acquiesce, they make a precedent which in turn will divide and ruin them, for a minority of their own will secede from them whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such minority. For instance, why may not any portion of a new confederacy a year or two hence arbitrarily secede again, precisely as portions of the present Union now claim to secede from it? All who cherish disunion sentiments are now being educated to the exact temper of doing this.

Is there such perfect identity of interests among the States to compose a new union as to produce harmony only and prevent renewed secession?

Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible. The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.

I do not forget the position assumed by some that constitutional questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court, nor do I deny that such decisions must be binding in any case upon the parties to a suit as to the object of that suit, while they are also entitled to very high respect and consideration in all parallel cases by all other departments of the Government. And while it is obviously possible that such decision may be erroneous in any given case, still the evil effect following it, being limited to that particular case, with the chance that it may be overruled and never become a precedent for other cases, can better be borne than could the evils of a different practice. At the same time, the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal. Nor is there in this view any assault upon the court or the judges. It is a duty from which they may not shrink to decide cases properly brought before them, and it is no fault of theirs if others seek to turn their decisions to political purposes.

One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute. The fugitive- slave clause of the Constitution and the law for the suppression of the foreign slave trade are each as well enforced, perhaps, as any law can ever be in a community where the moral sense of the people imperfectly supports the law itself. The great body of the people abide by the dry legal obligation in both cases, and a few break over in each. This, I think, can not be perfectly cured, and it would be worse in both cases after the separation of the sections than before. The foreign slave trade, now imperfectly suppressed, would be ultimately revived without restriction in one section, while fugitive slaves, now only partially surrendered, would not be surrendered at all by the other.

Physically speaking, we can not separate. We can not remove our respective sections from each other nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced and go out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other, but the different parts of our country can not do this. They can not but remain face to face, and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them. Is it possible, then, to make that intercourse more advantageous or more satisfactory after separation than before? Can aliens make treaties easier than friends can make laws? Can treaties be more faithfully enforced between aliens than laws can among friends? Suppose you go to war, you can not fight always; and when, after much loss on both sides and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions, as to terms of intercourse, are again upon you.

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it. I can not be ignorant of the fact that many worthy and patriotic citizens are desirous of having the National Constitution amended. While I make no recommendation of amendments, I fully recognize the rightful authority of the people over the whole subject, to be exercised in either of the modes prescribed in the instrument itself; and I should, under existing circumstances, favor rather than oppose a fair opportunity being afforded the people to act upon it. I will venture to add that to me the convention mode seems preferable, in that it allows amendments to originate with the people themselves, instead of only permitting them to take or reject propositions originated by others, not especially chosen for the purpose, and which might not be precisely such as they would wish to either accept or refuse. I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution–which amendment, however, I have not seen–has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service. To avoid misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose not to speak of particular amendments so far as to say that, holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.

The Chief Magistrate derives all his authority from the people, and they have referred none upon him to fix terms for the separation of the States. The people themselves can do this if also they choose, but the Executive as such has nothing to do with it. His duty is to administer the present Government as it came to his hands and to transmit it unimpaired by him to his successor.

Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world? In our present differences, is either party without faith of being in the right? If the Almighty Ruler of Nations, with His eternal truth and justice, be on your side of the North, or on yours of the South, that truth and that justice will surely prevail by the judgment of this great tribunal of the American people.

By the frame of the Government under which we live this same people have wisely given their public servants but little power for mischief, and have with equal wisdom provided for the return of that little to their own hands at very short intervals. While the people retain their virtue and vigilance no Administration by any extreme of wickedness or folly can very seriously injure the Government in the short space of four years.

My countrymen, one and all, think calmly and well upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of you in hot haste to a step which you would never take deliberately, that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be frustrated by it. Such of you as are now dissatisfied still have the old Constitution unimpaired, and, on the sensitive point, the laws of your own framing under it; while the new Administration will have no immediate power, if it would, to change either. If it were admitted that you who are dissatisfied hold the right side in the dispute, there still is no single good reason for precipitate action. Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land are still competent to adjust in the best way all our present difficulty.

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect, and defend it.”

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature

?

Part V. 1850s to the 1870s

1. Read the Overview Essay below thoroughly and carefully.

Highlight or note the general contours and key features of this period.

2. Review the sources in the sections.

Note how they relate to the historical period.

3. Complete the Assignment and submit on Blackboard before the deadline.

? OVERVIEW ESSAY

? Eric Foner, �Civil War and Reconstruction, 1861-1877,� The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History 49 W. 45th Street, 6th Floor � NYC, NY 10036 (646) 366-9666 � 2009�2013 All Rights Reserved

[https://www.gilderlehrman.org/]

In 1877, soon after retiring as president of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, embarked with his wife on a two-year tour of the world. At almost every location, he was greeted as a hero. In England, the son of the Duke of Wellington, whose father had vanquished Napoleon, greeted Grant as a military genius, the primary architect of Union victory in the American Civil War. Parading English workers hailed him as the man whose military prowess had saved the world�s leading experiment in democratic government and as a Hero of Freedom who had helped secure the emancipation of America�s four million slaves. Otto von Bismarck, the Chancellor of Germany, welcomed Grant as a nation builder, who had accomplished on the battlefield something�national unity�that Bismarck was attempting to create for his own people.

As the reaction to Grant�s tour demonstrates, contemporaries recognized the Civil War as an event of international significance. The various meanings imparted to it offer a useful way of outlining why the Civil War was so pivotal in our own history. The war changed the nature of warfare, gave rise to today�s American nation-state, and destroyed a slave society unprecedented in the modern world. In its aftermath, during the era of Reconstruction, Americans struggled to come to terms with these dramatic changes and, temporarily, established biracial democratic government on the ashes of slavery.

In the physical destruction it brought to the South, the economic changes it produced throughout the nation, and the new ideas it spawned, the Civil War altered the lives of several generations of Americans. The war produced a loss of life unprecedented in the American experience. The 620,000 combatants who perished nearly outnumber those who died in all other American wars combined. For those who lived through it, the Civil War would always remain the defining experience of their lives.

The Civil War is sometimes called the first modern war, although what constitutes �modernity� in warfare is a matter of debate. It was the first war to bring the full impact of the industrial revolution to bear on the battlefield. Railroads transported troops and supplies, and railroad junctions such as Chattanooga, Atlanta, and Petersburg became major military objectives. The telegraph made possible instantaneous communication between generals and between the battlefield and home front. The war took place soon after a revolution in arms manufacture had replaced the traditional musket, accurate at only a short range, with the more modern, and deadly, rifle and bullet. This development changed the nature of combat, emphasizing the importance of heavy fortifications and elaborate trenches and giving those on the defensive�usually Southern armies�an immense advantage over attacking forces. The rifle produced the appalling casualty statistics of Civil War battles. At Gettysburg, there were nearly fifty thousand dead, wounded, and missing. Total wartime casualties numbered well over one million, in an American population of around thirty-two million.

The Civil War began as a conventional contest of army versus army but by the end had become a war of society against society, with slavery, the foundation of the southern social order, becoming a target. In such a contest, civilian morale proved as crucial to sustaining and winning the war as events on the battlefield, and the population�s will to fight became as much a military consideration as armies in the field. Historians have long debated whether the Union�s victory was inevitable. Certainly, the Union overshadowed the Confederacy in manpower and economic resources. But the Union also had a far greater task. It had to conquer an area as large as western Europe, while the Confederacy, like the American patriots during the War of Independence, could lose battle after battle and still win the war, if their opponents tired of the conflict. Thus, political leadership was crucial to victory, and Lincoln proved far more successful than his Confederate counterpart, Jefferson Davis, in mobilizing public sentiment. One historian has suggested that if the North and South had exchanged presidents, the South would have won the war.[1]

Northern victory consolidated the American Union. In this sense, the Civil War forms part of the nineteenth-century process of nation-building. But Lincoln�s Union was rather different from the nations being constructed in Europe. It was conceived as neither the reclamation of ancestral lands nor the institutional embodiment of a common ancestry, language, or culture. Rather, as Lincoln himself insisted, the nation was the incarnation of a universal set of ideas, centered on political democracy and human liberty. These principles, of course, had been enunciated by the Founding Fathers, but only with the destruction of slavery could the United States seriously claim to represent to the world the idea of human liberty.

It is easy to forget how decentralized the United States was in 1861, and how limited were the powers of the federal government. There was no national banking system, no national railroad gauge, no national tax system, not even reliable maps of the areas where the war would take place. The army in 1861 numbered 14,000 men, the federal budget was minuscule, and nearly all functions of government were handled at the state and local level. The Civil War created the modern national state in America. It also profoundly altered the federal government�s relationship to the American economy. To mobilize the North�s economic resources, the Lincoln administration instituted the first national banking system and national currency, the first national taxes on income, and the first highly protective tariffs, and laid the foundation for the first transcontinental railroad. Whether the war retarded or encouraged economic growth in the short run remains a point of debate among historians. But the economic policies of the Union forged a long-lasting alliance between the Republican Party, the national state, and the emerging class of industrial capitalists. The transfer of political power in Washington from southern planters to allies of northern industrialists and merchants created the political conditions under which the United States emerged by century�s end as the greatest economic power on earth.

Central to the war�s meaning was the abolition of slavery. Slavery lay at the root of the political crisis that produced the Civil War, and the war became, although it did not begin as, a struggle for emancipation. Union victory eradicated slavery from American life. Yet the war left it to future generations to confront the numerous legacies of slavery and to embark on the unfinished quest for racial justice.

The destruction of slavery�by presidential proclamation, legislation, and constitutional amendment�was a key act in the nation-building process. A war begun to preserve the old Union without threatening slavery produced one of the greatest social revolutions of the nineteenth century. The old image of Lincoln single-handedly abolishing slavery with the stroke of his pen has long been abandoned, for too many other Americans�politicians, reformers, soldiers, and slaves themselves�contributed to the coming of emancipation. In 1862, with military success elusive, Radical Republicans in Congress and abolitionists clamoring for action against slavery, and slaves by the thousands fleeing the plantations wherever the Union Army appeared, Lincoln concluded that his initial policy of fighting a war solely to preserve the Union had to change. The Emancipation Proclamation, issued on January 1, 1863, profoundly altered the nature of the war and the future course of American history. It was the Proclamation, moreover, more than any other single wartime event, that transformed a war of armies into a conflict of societies. Although it freed few slaves on the day it was issued, as it applied almost exclusively to areas under Confederate control, the Emancipation Proclamation ensured that Union victory would produce a social revolution within the South and a redefinition of the place of blacks in American life. There could now be no going back to the prewar Union. A new system of labor, politics, and race relations would have to replace the shattered institution of slavery.

Before the Civil War, the definition of those entitled to enjoy the �blessings of liberty� protected by the Constitution was increasingly defined by race. In the Dred Scott decision of 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney declared that no black person could be a citizen of the United States. The enlistment of 200,000 black men in the Union armed forces during the second half of the war placed black citizenship on the postwar agenda. From the war emerged the principle of a national citizenship whose members enjoyed the equal protection of the laws. That principle, which we know today as �civil rights,� originated in the Civil War and the turbulent era of Reconstruction that followed.

With Union victory, the status of the former slaves in the reunited nation became the focal point of the politics of postwar Reconstruction. In a society that had made political participation a core element of freedom, the right to vote inevitably became central to the former slaves� desire for empowerment and autonomy. As soon as the Civil War ended, and in some parts of the South even earlier, blacks who had been free before the war came together with emancipated slaves in conventions, parades, and petition drives to demand suffrage and, on occasion, to organize their own �freedom ballots.� Radical Republicans in the North supported black male suffrage both as an act of justice and as the only way to prevent former Confederates from dominating southern political life.

However, Andrew Johnson, who succeeded the martyred Lincoln as president in April 1865, inaugurated a program of Reconstruction that placed full power in the hands of white southerners. The new governments established during the summer and fall of 1865 enacted laws�the notorious Black Codes�that severely limited the rights of former slaves in an effort to force them to return to work as dependent plantation laborers. In response, the Republican majority in Congress in 1866 enacted its own plan of Reconstruction. In the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, they permanently altered the federal system and the nature of American citizenship.

For the first time, the national government assumed basic responsibility for defining and protecting Americans� civil rights. The Fourteenth Amendment enshrined in the Constitution the ideas of birthright citizenship and equal rights for all Americans. The Amendment prohibited states from abridging the �privileges and immunities of citizens� or denying them the �equal protection of the law.� This broad language opened the door for future Congresses and the federal courts to breathe meaning into the guarantee of legal equality, a process that occupied the courts for much of the twentieth century. Later, the Fifteenth Amendment barred the states from making race a qualification for voting. Strictly speaking, suffrage remained a privilege rather than a right, subject to numerous regulations by the states. But by the time Reconstruction legislation had run its course, the federal government had taken upon itself the responsibility for ensuring that states respected the equal civil and political rights of all American citizens. Reconstruction radicalism, however, had its limits. The right to vote, expanded to eliminate the barrier of race, was still restricted to men, despite the demands of the era�s woman suffrage movement. And no steps were taken to provide an economic underpinning for African Americans� new freedom�the �forty acres and a mule� former slaves insisted would guarantee them economic independence from their former owners.

Nonetheless, Reconstruction witnessed a remarkable political revolution in the South. In 1867, African American men in the defeated Confederacy were given the right to vote and hold office�a radical departure from pre-Civil War days, when blacks could vote only in a handful of northern states. A politically mobilized black community joined with white allies to bring the Republican Party to power throughout the South, and with it a redefinition of the purposes and responsibilities of government. The region�s first public school systems were established, and efforts were made to rebuild and diversify the shattered economy. For the first time in American history, black men held positions of political power, ranging from the US Congress to state legislatures, and local sheriffs, school board officials, and justices of the peace. The Reconstruction ideal of interracial democracy and color-blind citizenship eventually succumbed to a counterattack from violent organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the progressive abandonment of the principle of equality in the North and the idea of federal intervention to protect the rights of the newly freed slaves. Not until the �Second Reconstruction��the civil rights revolution of the 1960s�would the United States once again seek to come to terms with the political and social consequences of the destruction of slavery.

With the overthrow of biracial state governments in the South and the withdrawal of the last federal troops from the region by President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877, the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction came to an end. But conflict continued in the arena of historical interpretation and public memory. In the North, the Grand Army of the Republic, the organization of war veterans, became a fixture of Republican politics and a presence in every northern community. Even as the Republican Party abandoned its earlier idealism, the loyalties created by the war helped it retain national dominance well into the twentieth century. In the South, the Confederate experience came to be remembered as the Lost Cause, a noble struggle for local rights and individual liberty (with the defense of slavery conveniently forgotten).

By the turn of the century, as soldiers from North and South fought side by side in the Spanish-American War, it seemed that the nation had put the bitterness of the 1860s behind it. But the road to reunion was paved with black Americans� shattered dreams. With northern acquiescence, the Solid South, now uniformly Democratic, effectively nullified the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and imposed a new racial order based on disenfranchisement, segregation, and economic inequality.

Historical accounts of Reconstruction played an important part in this retreat from the ideal of equality. For much of the twentieth century, both scholarly and popular writing presented Reconstruction as the lowest point in the saga of American history. Supposedly, Radical Republicans in Congress vindictively fastened black supremacy upon the defeated Confederacy and an orgy of corruption and misgovernment followed, presided over by unscrupulous �carpetbaggers� (northerners who ventured south to reap the spoils of office), �scalawags� (white southerners who cooperated with the Republican Party for personal gain), and ignorant and childlike freed people. After much needless suffering, the South�s white community banded together to restore �home rule� (a euphemism for white supremacy). Originating in the political propaganda of Reconstruction�s opponents, this interpretation rested on the assumption that African Americans were by nature incapable of participating in democratic government and that black suffrage was the gravest error of the Civil War period. This quite inaccurate �memory� of Reconstruction was invoked for decades as a potent defense of the South�s racial status quo in the era of segregation and disenfranchisement. More recently, in the wake of the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, scholars have taken a far more sympathetic approach to Reconstruction, viewing it as an effort, noble if flawed, to create interracial democracy in the South. The tragedy was not that it was attempted, but that it failed.

Overall, the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction raised questions that remain central to our understanding of ourselves as a nation. What should be the balance of power between local authority and the national government; who is entitled to American citizenship; what are the meanings of freedom and equality in the United States? These questions remain subjects of controversy today. In that sense, the Civil War is not yet over.

[1] David Potter, �Jefferson Davis and the Political Factors in Confederate Defeat,� in Why the North Won the Civil War, ed. David H. Donald (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 93�114.

Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, is the author of numerous books on the Civil War and Reconstruction. His most recent book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010), has received the Pulitzer, Bancroft, and Lincoln Prizes.?

? CIVIL WAR LETTERS

Background on the Correspondence of the Civil War regarding the Union occupation of Atlanta

These are letters sent between Union General W.T. Sherman, Confederate General J.B. Hood, and the City Council of Atlanta, Georgia. The exchange of letters pertain to the status of Atlanta and its residents after Union forces captured the city in Sept. 1864.

? General J. B. Hood, Commanding Army of Tennessee, Confederate Army, �Letter to Major General W. T. Sherman, Commanding United States Forces in Georgia,� Sept. 9, 1864.

GENERAL:

Your letter of yesterday�s date, borne by James M. Ball and James R. Crew, citizens of Atlanta, is received. You say therein, �I deem it to be to the interest of the United States that the citizens now residing in Atlanta should remove,� etc. I do not consider that I have any alternative in this matter. I therefore accept your proposition to declare a truce of two days, or such time as may be necessary to accomplish the purpose mentioned, and shall render all assistance in my power to expedite the transportation of citizens in this direction. I suggest that a staff officer be appointed by you to superintend the removal from the city to Rough and Ready, while I appoint a like officer to control their removal farther south; that a guard of one hundred men be sent by either party as you propose, to maintain order at that place, and that the removal begin on Monday next.

And now, sir, permit me to say that the unprecedented measure you propose transcends, in studied and ingenious cruelty, all acts ever before brought to my attention in the dark history of war.

In the name of God and humanity, I protest, believing that you will find that you are expelling from their homes and firesides the wives and children of a brave people.

I am, general, very respectfully,

Your obedient servant,

J. B. Hood, General

? Major General W. T. Sherman, Commanding United States Forces in Georgia, �Letter to General J. B. Hood, Commanding Army of Tennessee, Confederate Army.� September 10, 1864

GENERAL:

I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of this date, at the hands of Messrs. Ball and Crew, consenting to the arrangements I had proposed to facilitate the removal south of the people of Atlanta who prefer to go in that direction. I inclose you a copy of my orders, which will, I am satisfied, accomplish my purpose perfectly.

You style the measure proposed �unprecedented,� and appeal to the dark history of war for a parallel as an act of �studied and ingenious cruelty.� I say that it is kindness to these families of Atlanta to remove them now, at once, from scenes that women and children should not be exposed to, and the �brave people� should scorn to commit their wives and children to the rude barbarians who thus, as you say, violate the laws of war, as illustrated in the pages of its dark history. In the name of common sense, I ask you not to appeal to a just God in such a sacrilegious manner. You, who in the midst of peace and prosperity, have plunged a nation into war�dark and cruel war�who dared and badgered us to battle, insulted our flag, seized our arsenals and forts that were left in the honorable custody of peaceful ordnance-sergeants, seized and made �prisoners of war� the very garrisons sent to protect your people against Negroes and Indians, long before any overt act was committed by the (to you) hated Lincoln Government. If we must be enemies, let us be men and fight it out as we propose to do, and not deal in such hypocritical appeals to God and humanity. God will judge us in due time, and He will pronounce whether it be more humane to fight with a town full of women and the families of �a brave people� at our back, or to remove them in time to places of safety among their own friends and people.

I am, very respectfully,

Your obedient servant,

W. T. Sherman, Major General, commanding

? Letter from the city leaders of Atlanta to General Sherman, Atlanta, Georgia, September 11, 1864

Major-General W. T. Sherman.

Sir: We the undersigned, Mayor and two of the Council for the city of Atlanta, for the time being the only legal organ of the people of the said city, to express their wants and wishes, ask leave most earnestly but respectfully to petition you to reconsider the order requiring them to leave Atlanta.

At first view, it struck us that the measure would involve extraordinary hardship and loss, but since we have seen the practical execution of it so far as it has progressed, and the individual condition of the people, and heard their statements as to the inconveniences, loss, and suffering attending it, we are satisfied that the amount of it will involve in the aggregate consequences appalling and heart-rending.

Many poor women are in advanced state of pregnancy, others now having young children, and whose husbands for the greater part are either in the army, prisoners, or dead. Some say: “I have such a one sick at my house; who will wait on them when I am gone?” Others say: “What are we to do? We have no house to go to, and no means to buy, build, or rent any; no parents, relatives, or friends, to go to.” Another says: “I will try and take this or that article of property, but such and such things I must leave behind, though I need them much.” We reply to them: “General Sherman will carry your property to Rough and Ready, and General Hood will take it thence on.” And they will reply to that: “But I want to leave the railroad at such a place, and cannot get conveyance from there on.”

We only refer to a few facts, to try to illustrate in part how this measure will operate in practice. As you advanced, the people north of this fell back; and before your arrival here, a large portion of the people had retired south, so that the country south of this is already crowded, and without houses enough to accommodate the people, and we are informed that many are now staying in churches and other out-buildings.

This being so, how is it possible for the people still here (mostly women and children) to find any shelter? And how can they live through the winter in the woods�no shelter or subsistence, in the midst of strangers who know them not, and without the power to assist them much, if they were willing to do so?

This is but a feeble picture of the consequences of this measure. You know the woe, the horrors, and the suffering, cannot be described by words; imagination can only conceive of it, and we ask you to take these things into consideration.

We know your mind and time are constantly occupied with the duties of your command, which almost deters us from asking your attention to this matter, but thought it might be that you had not considered this subject in all its awful consequences, and that on more reflection you, we hope, would not make this people an exception to all mankind, for we know of no such instance ever having occurred�surely never in the United States�and what has this helpless people done, that they should be driven from their homes, to wander strangers and outcasts, and exiles, and to subsist on charity?

We do not know as yet the number of people still here; of those who are here, we are satisfied a respectable number, if allowed to remain at home, could subsist for several months without assistance, and a respectable number for a much longer time, and who might not need assistance at any time.

In conclusion, we most earnestly and solemnly petition you to reconsider this order, or modify it, and suffer this unfortunate people to remain at home, and enjoy what little means they have.

Respectfully submitted:

James M. Calhoun, Mayor.

E. E. Rawson, Councilman.

S. C. Wells, Councilman.

? Reply from General Sherman to the city leaders of Atlanta, September 12, 1864

James M. Calhoun, Mayor, E. E. Rawson and S. C. Wells, representing City Council of Atlanta.

Gentlemen:

I have your letter of the 11th, in the nature of a petition to revoke my orders removing all the inhabitants from Atlanta. I have read it carefully, and give full credit to your statements of the distress that will be occasioned, and yet shall not revoke my orders, because they were not designed to meet the humanities of the case, but to prepare for the future struggles in which millions of good people outside of Atlanta have a deep interest. We must have peace, not only at Atlanta, but in all America. To secure this, we must stop the war that now desolates our once happy and favored country. To stop war, we must defeat the rebel armies which are arrayed against the laws and Constitution that all must respect and obey. To defeat those armies, we must prepare the way to reach them in their recesses, provided with the arms and instruments which enable us to accomplish our purpose. Now, I know the vindictive nature of our enemy, that we may have many years of military operations from this quarter; and, therefore, deem it wise and prudent to prepare in time. The use of Atlanta for warlike purposes is inconsistent with its character as a home for families. There will be no manufactures, commerce, or agriculture here, for the maintenance of families, and sooner or later want will compel the inhabitants to go. Why not go now, when all the arrangements are completed for the transfer, instead of waiting till the plunging shot of contending armies will renew the scenes of the past month? Of course, I do not apprehend any such thing at this moment, but you do not suppose this army will be here until the war is over. I cannot discuss this subject with you fairly, because I cannot impart to you what we propose to do, but I assert that our military plans make it necessary for the inhabitants to go away, and I can only renew my offer of services to make their exodus in any direction as easy and comfortable as possible.

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices to-day than any of you to secure peace. But you cannot have peace and a division of our country. If the United States submits to a division now, it will not stop, but will go on until we reap the fate of Mexico, which is eternal war. The United States does and must assert its authority, wherever it once had power; for, if it relaxes one bit to pressure, it is gone, and I believe that such is the national feeling. This feeling assumes various shapes, but always comes back to that of Union. Once admit the Union, once more acknowledge the authority of the national Government, and, instead of devoting your houses and streets and roads to the dread uses of war, I and this army become at once your protectors and supporters, shielding you from danger, let it come from what quarter it may. I know that a few individuals cannot resist a torrent of error and passion, such as swept the South into rebellion, but you can point out, so that we may know those who desire a government, and those who insist on war and its desolation. You might as well appeal against the thunder-storm as against these terrible hardships of war. They are inevitable, and the only way the people of Atlanta can hope once more to live in peace and quiet at home, is to stop the war, which can only be done by admitting that it began in error and is perpetuated by pride.

We don’t want your negroes, or your horses, or your houses, or your lands, or any thing you have, but we do want and will have a just obedience to the laws of the United States. That we will have, and, if it involves the destruction of your improvements, we cannot help it.

You have heretofore read public sentiment in your newspapers, that live by falsehood and excitement; and the quicker you seek for truth in other quarters, the better. I repeat then that, by the original compact of Government, the United States had certain rights in Georgia, which have never been relinquished and never will be; that the South began war by seizing forts, arsenals, mints, custom-houses, etc., etc., long before Mr. Lincoln was installed, and before the South had one jot or tittle of provocation. I myself have seen in Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi, hundreds and thousands of women and children fleeing from your armies and desperadoes, hungry and with bleeding feet. In Memphis, Vicksburg, and Mississippi, we fed thousands upon thousands of the families of rebel soldiers left on our hands, and whom we could not see starve. Now that war comes home to you, you feel very different. You deprecate its horrors, but did not feel them when you sent car-loads of soldiers and ammunition, and moulded shells and shot, to carry war into Kentucky and Tennessee, to desolate the homes of hundreds and thousands of good people who only asked to live in peace at their old homes, and under the Government of their inheritance. But these comparisons are idle. I want peace, and believe it can only be reached through union and war, and I will ever conduct war with a view to perfect and early success.

But, my dear sirs, when peace does come, you may call on me for any thing. Then will I share with you the last cracker, and watch with you to shield your homes and families against danger from every quarter.

Now you must go, and take with you the old and feeble, feed and nurse them, and build for them, in more quiet places, proper habitations to shield them against the weather until the mad passions of men cool down, and allow the Union and peace once more to settle over your old homes at Atlanta. Yours in haste,

W. T. Sherman, Major-General commanding.

? General J. B. Hood, Commanding Army of Tennessee, Confederate Army, �Letter to Major General W. T. Sherman, Commanding United States Forces in Georgia,� Sept. 12, 1864

GENERAL:

I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the ninth inst., with its inclosure in reference to the women, children, and others, whom you have thought proper to expel from their homes in the city of Atlanta. Had you seen proper to let the matter rest there, I would gladly have allowed your letter to close this correspondence, and without your expressing it in words, would have been willing to believe that, while �the interests of the United States,� in your opinion, compelled you to an act of barbarous cruelty, you regretted the necessity, and we would have dropped the subject; but you have chosen to indulge in statements which I feel compelled to notice, at least so far as to signify my dissent, and not allow silence in regard to them to be construed as acquiescence.

I see nothing in your communication which induces me to modify the language of condemnation with which I characterized your order. It but strengthens me in the opinion that it stands �preeminent in the dark history of war for studied and ingenious cruelty.� Your original order was stripped of all pretenses; you announced the edict for the sole reason that it was �to the interest of the United States.� This alone you offered to us and the civilized world as an all-sufficient reason for disregarding the laws of God and man.

You order into exile the whole population of a city; drive men, women, and children from their homes at the point of the bayonet, under the plea that it is to the interest of your government and on the claim that it is an act of �kindness to these families of Atlanta.� You issue a sweeping edict covering all the inhabitants of a city, and add insult to the injury heaped upon the defenseless by assuming that you have done them a kindness. And, because I characterize what you call a kindness as being real cruelty, you presume to sit in judgment between me and my God, and you decide that my earnest prayer to the Almighty Father to save our women and children from what you call kindness is a �sacrilegious, hypocritical appeal.�

You came into our country with your army, avowedly for the purpose of subjugating free white men, women, and children, and not only intend to rule over them, but you make Negroes your allies and desire to place over us an inferior race, which we have raised from barbarism to its present position, which is the highest ever attained by that race, in any country, in all time. I must, therefore, decline to accept your statements in reference to your kindness toward the people of Atlanta and your willingness to sacrifice everything for the peace and honor of the South, and refuse to be governed by your decision in regard to matters between myself, my country, and my God.

You say, �Let us fight it out like men.� To this my reply is�for myself, and I believe for all the true men, ay, and women and children, in my country�we will fight you to the death! Better die a thousand deaths than submit to live under you or your government and your Negro allies!

Having answered the points forced upon me by your letter of the ninth of September, I close this correspondence with you and, notwithstanding your comments upon my appeal to God in the cause of humanity, I again humbly and reverently invoke His almighty aid in defense of justice and right.

Respectfully,

Your obedient servant,

J. B. Hood, General

? Major General W. T. Sherman, Commanding United States Forces in Georgia, �Letter to General J. B. Hood, Commanding Army of Tennessee, Confederate Army.� September 14, 1864

GENERAL:

Yours of September 12 is received and has been carefully perused. I agree with you that this discussion by two soldiers is out of place and profitless; but you must admit that you began the controversy by characterizing an official act of mine in unfair and improper terms. I reiterate my former answer, and to the only new matter contained in your rejoinder add: we have no �Negro allies� in this army; not a single Negro soldier left Chattanooga with this army or is with it now.

I was not bound by the laws of war to give notice of the shelling of Atlanta, a �fortified town with magazines, arsenals, foundries, and public stores;� you were bound to take notice. See the books.

This is the conclusion of our correspondence, which I did not begin, and terminate with satisfaction.

I am, with respect,

Your obedient servant,

W. T. Sherman, Major-General, commanding

?

? EMANCIPATION

? Manisha Sinha, �Allies for Emancipation: Black Abolitionists and Abraham Lincoln,” History Now 18 (Dec. 2008) The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History 49 W. 45th Street, 6th Floor � NYC, NY 10036 (646) 366-9666 � 2009�2014 All Rights Reserved [https://www.gilderlehrman.org/]

Abraham Lincoln was not an original advocate of abolition. In fact we know that his journey to what he called �the central act of my administration, and the great event of the nineteenth century� was a relatively slow, though continuous, one. Emancipation was a complex process that involved the actions of the slaves, the Union army, Congress, and the president. Historians have argued over the relative roles of the slaves and Lincoln in the coming of emancipation. It is my purpose to shift the terms of this debate by drawing attention to a third group of emancipators, abolitionists, particularly black abolitionists, and Radical Republicans.

African Americans had demanded freedom from bondage as early as the American Revolution and in the thirty years before the Civil War, a strong interracial movement had called for the immediate abolition of slavery and black rights. Lincoln himself came under enormous pressure from abolitionists and radicals within his own party during the first two years of the war to act against slavery. But when it comes to the contemporary history of emancipation, the influence of abolitionists has been somewhat undervalued.

Black and white abolitionists, as both supporters and critics of the President, played a crucial part in leading the movement for emancipation. Abolitionists enjoyed unprecedented access to the White House during Lincoln�s presidency. Lincoln�s famous ability to listen to all sides of the story may not have served abolitionists well when it came to border state slaveholders and northern conservatives, but it did bode well for their own role as the staunchest supporters of emancipation. Not only did black abolitionists strenuously advocate the cause of the slave, they also made the President give up on his long cherished plan of colonizing free blacks outside the country and to contemplate civil and political rights including suffrage for African Americans. Abolitionist influence on Lincoln must be gauged in terms of ideology and philosophy. In their view, the Civil War was a revolutionary struggle against slavery, not, as Lincoln argued early on, just a war for the Union, but an abolition war, a position that he came to accept in the last years of the war.

Lincoln, of course, was not an empty receptacle into which others poured their views or a man who had no prior convictions We know that Lincoln held at least two beliefs on slavery and race on the eve of becoming the President of the United States. He abhorred slavery as a moral and political blot on the American republic even though he did not advocate political equality for black people. Like most nineteenth century Americans who revered the Union and Constitution, Lincoln did not sympathize with the abolitionist goal of immediate emancipation. But in viewing slavery as an unmitigated evil, he already shared important ground with abolitionists. Lincoln, a moderate, antislavery Republican, was committed only to or the non-extension of slavery, the lowest common denominator in antislavery politics, with a rather nebulous hope in its �ultimate extinction.� But it was a position that he adhered to with great tenacity. Without these prior antislavery convictions, it is difficult to imagine how Lincoln would have come to accept the logic of emancipation during the Civil War.

Lincoln�s position on black rights on the eve of the Civil War put him behind many abolitionists and Radical Republicans and led him to flirt continuously with the idea of colonization, but it put him far ahead of most hardened racists in the North and South who would expunge African Americans from the human family. Ironically, it was Lincoln�s belief in a democratic America that made him an opponent of slavery as well as a believer in the colonization of African Americans because his ideal republic would not accommodate inequality. It was precisely in this area that black and white abolitionists would exercise their greatest influence on him, pushing him to come to grips with civil and political rights for African Americans and the consequences of emancipation. African American leaders, abolitionists, and radical Republicans, who had long envisioned the establishment of an interracial democracy in the United States, played an indispensable role in pushing the President to accept the logical outcomes of his own views on slavery and democracy: abolition, black rights, and citizenship.

With the outbreak of the Civil War in April, 1861, abolitionists and radical Republicans immediately urged Lincoln to use his war powers to strike against slavery. They were doomed to disappointment. Preoccupied with retaining the loyalty of the border slave states and engendering northern unity and support for the prosecution of the war, Lincoln insisted that his primary goal was the reconstruction of the Union and he gave short shrift to the abolitionist agenda. Lincoln�s revocation of John Fremont�s and David Hunter�s emancipation orders, the appearance of the President lagging behind Congress, and what was perceived as his general tardiness to move on the slavery question, aroused strong criticism among abolitionists. The government�s refusal to enlist black men in the Union Army further dampened African American and abolitionist enthusiasm for the war.

Other actions, which did not garner so much attention, however, indicated that the President was not averse to the idea of emancipation. He approved of General Benjamin Butler�s policy of designating runaway slaves �contraband� of war, the rescinding of the Dred Scott decision, he signed the two Confiscation Acts that confiscated slaves used for military purposes by the Confederacy and all slaves of rebels, the acts abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia and the federal territories, and proposed plans for gradual, compensated emancipation for the border states. Most African Americans were pleased with the initial antislavery steps taken by the Republicans. Furthermore, the Lincoln administration, pledged to enforce the suppression of the African slave trade, hanged the first American slave trader for participating in the illegal trade and extended diplomatic recognition to the black republics of Haiti and Liberia. African Americans hailed the news of emancipation in the capital especially as a portent of general emancipation.

By the summer of 1862, Lincoln decided to issue an emancipation proclamation. It was not simply that he was wisely biding his time and waiting for northern antislavery sentiment to mature in order to move on emancipation. He himself had to be convinced of the failure of his appeasement of border state slaveholders and northern conservatives and of the military necessity to free the slaves and enlist black men. The emancipationist arguments of abolitionists and radical Republicans, especially those who shared a personal relationship with the President, like Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, made headway when border state slaveholders proved to be completely obdurate regarding the President�s proposals for gradual, compensated emancipation and the war reached a stalemate amid heavy Union losses. Abolitionists realized that Lincoln�s presidency and the war presented them with a golden opportunity to make their case for emancipation anew. During the Civil War, the long-reviled abolition movement, gained new respectability in the eyes of the northern public. Abolitionist leaders, branded as disunionists and fanatics until the very eve of the war, acquired public authority as influential proponents of the policy of emancipation especially as the war dragged on. They revived their earliest tactics and deluged Congress with petitions as they had not done since the 1830s. The crucial difference was that an antislavery party now controlled Congress and their petitions were read with respect rather than gagged as incendiary documents. Abolitionists, who had been political outsiders as radical agitators throughout the antebellum period, now walked the halls of power as influential advocates for the slave, though a sizeable minority advocated emigration outside the United States in the 1850s.

Lincoln also became one of the first American presidents to receive African Americans in the White House and the first to solicit their opinion in matters affecting them. African Americans had served as domestic workers in the White House since the inception of the republic and the Presidency but they had never before been consulted on matters of state. (One exception was James Madison who met with the black Quaker captain Paul Cuffe, whose ships had been impounded during the 1812 war.) For black abolitionists, as much as their white counterparts, a Republican presidency meant having for the first time the political opportunity to pressure the federal government to act on abolition. Perhaps no other black abolitionist leader was more influential in this regard than Frederick Douglass, who used his monthly magazine and speeches to vent his views on abolition, black rights, and military service. When Lincoln met Douglass, he acknowledged having read his criticisms of Lincoln�s slowness to act on emancipation. African Americans who struggled to have their voices heard both within and outside the abolition movement had gained the President�s ear and Lincoln�s ability to meet with black people without any condescension impressed them. It also enabled him to listen to the opinions of black abolitionists on some important occasions.

While black abolitionists formed one part of the chorus of voices that pressured Lincoln to act on emancipation, they were foremost in opposing his ideas on colonization. The President had long recommended the colonizing of all free blacks outside the country. Colonization was a project that had been supported by the founding fathers like Jefferson, Madison and prominent politicians such as Henry Clay, Lincoln�s �beau ideal� of a statesman. Lincoln�s support for colonization was not merely a clever tactic to win support for emancipation, but a long held belief predating the Civil War on how to solve the country�s so called race problem. On the other hand, black abolitionism had come of age in the 1820s by opposing the American Colonization Society, which was founded in 1816.

Well aware of abolitionist antipathy toward colonization, Lincoln invited five African Americans, four of whom were former slaves and none of whom were prominent in black abolitionist circles, to persuade them to support his plans for the colonization of black Americans in August 1862, just before issuing his preliminary proclamation. The reaction among black abolitionists was swift and hostile. Strong black opposition to colonization did not deter Lincoln from experimenting with questionable plans to colonize African Americans in Chiriqui in Panama, Liberia, and Haiti. The failure of the Lincoln administration�s many colonization schemes, African American non-compliance and abolitionist pressure forced the President to give up on colonization as a viable option for freed people. Lincoln�s eventual abandonment of colonization after he had decided to free the slaves was a triumph of abolitionism, particularly black abolitionism. Black abolitionists had played no small part in uncoupling colonization from emancipation in his mind.

On January 1, 1863, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation he had come to abolitionist ground. For abolitionists, the President would become permanently identified with the moment of liberation, living on as an icon of black freedom in African American celebrations of emancipation in years to come. By this time, Lincoln came to share the abolitionist and African American view of the Civil War as a providential, apocalyptic event that would not only end slavery but redeem the American republic and its founding principles. The abolitionist insistence on tying the cause of the slave with that of American democracy influenced Lincoln�s overall conception of the war. He would immortalize this understanding of the war in the Gettysburg Address as the second American Revolution, as representing a �new birth of freedom� in the republic. The abolitionist interpretation of the war gave meaning and purpose to it in a way that simply a war for the Union never could. Lincoln eloquently gave words to the abolitionist view of the Civil War in his Second Inaugural Address.

Even more than emancipation, it was in regard to black rights and citizenship that Lincoln �grew� during the war. The contributions of African American soldiers to Union victory made him amenable to the idea of black citizenship. The exigencies of the war and shortage of manpower as the conflict dragged on led the Lincoln administration to recruit African Americans, including slaves, and grant freedom to those who served and their families. Abolitionists like Massachusetts� Governor John Andrews and the wealthy George L. Stearns, a proponent of black military service, hired prominent African American abolitionists like Douglass, William Wells Brown, Charles Lenox Remond, John Mercer Langston, Henry Highland Garnet and Martin Delany as recruiting agents. By the end of the war, nearly 200,000 black Americans had served in the Union Army and Navy. Despite initial inequalities in pay and rank, abolitionists supported recruitment of black soldiers. Protests over racial inequalities in the Union Army prepared African Americans and abolitionists for the long fight for equality and citizenship rights. Black heroism at the battles of Fort Wagner, Milliken�s Bend and Port Hudson impressed both the President and the northern public. Indeed Lincoln adopted nearly all the abolitionist arguments on the value and significance of black military service. When peace arrives he wrote, �there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind onto this great consummation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it.�

Lincoln soon came to sympathize with the idea that one could not possibly deny citizenship rights to black soldiers who had fought on behalf of the Union. According to the precepts of republicanism, in which Lincoln, abolitionists and the soldiers themselves were well versed, one deserved the rights of citizenship after performing the duties of citizenship. As early as November, 1863 New Orleans� politically active free blacks asked the military Governor for the right to vote. Lincoln received their two representatives, Jean Baptiste Roudanez and Arnold Bertonneau, and their visit must have made some impression on the President. Soon after, Lincoln penned his famous letter to Louisiana�s Governor Michael Hahn, suggesting that �the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks� be given the franchise.

By the time of his death, Lincoln�s views on slavery and racial equality had evolved greatly. Abolitionists, African Americans and Radical Republicans challenged him to abandon colonization and accept both abolition and black rights. Their ideas on interracial democracy and equal citizenship, largely forgotten in the history of emancipation, forced both the President and the nation to accept the consequences of abolition and helped set the agenda for Reconstruction. Precisely because Lincoln had come around to the idea of immediate, uncompensated abolition and black rights during the war, his historical legacy would be inextricably bound with the African American struggle for freedom and with the movement to abolish slavery.

Manisha Sinha is Associate Professor of Afro-American Studies and History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (2000) and co-editor of African American Mosaic: A Documentary History from the African Slave Trade to the Twenty First Century Two Volumes (2004) and Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race and Power in American History (2007).

? Frederick Douglass, �Cast off the Millstone,� Douglass� Monthly, September 1861

We are determined that our readers shall have line upon line and precept upon precept. Ours is only one humble voice; but such as it is, we give it freely to our country, and to the cause of humanity. That honesty is the best policy, we all profess to believe, though our practice may often contradict the proverb. The present policy of our Government is evidently to put down the slave-holding rebellion, and at the same time protect and preserve slavery. This policy hangs like a mill-stone about the neck of our people. It carries disorder to the very sources of our national activities. Weakness, faint heartedness and inefficiency is the natural result. The mental and moral machinery of mankind cannot long withstand such disorder without serious damage. This policy offends reason, wounds the sensibilities, and shocks the moral sentiments of men. It forces upon us in consequent conclusions and painful contradictions, while the plain path of duty is obscured and thronged with multiplying difficulties. Let us look this slavery-preserving policy squarely in the face, and search it thoroughly.

Can the friends of that policy tell us why this should not be an abolition war? Is not abolition plainly forced upon the nation as a necessity of national existence? Are not the rebels determined to make the war on their part a war for the utter destruction of liberty and the complete mastery of slavery over every other right and interest in the land? And is not an abolition war on our part the natural and logical answer to be made to the rebels? We all know it is. But it is said that for the Government to adopt the abolition policy, would involve the loss of the support of the Union men of the Border Slave States. Grant it, and what is such friendship worth? We are stronger without than with such friendship. It arms the enemy, while it disarms its friends. The fact is indisputable, that so long as slavery is respected and protected by our Government, the slaveholders can carry on the rebellion, and no longer. Slavery is the stomach of the rebellion. The bread that feeds the rebel army, the cotton that clothes them, and the money that arms them and keeps them supplied with powder and bullets, come from the slaves, who, if consulted as to the use which should be made of their hard earnings, would say, give it to the bottom of the sea rather than do with it this mischief. Strike here, cut off the connection between the fighting master and the working slave, and you at once put an end to this rebellion, because you destroy that which feeds, clothes and arms it. Shall this not be done, because we shall offend the Union men in the Border States?

But we have good reasons for believing that it would not offend them. The great mass of Union men in all those Border States are intelligently so. They are men who set a higher value upon the Union than upon slavery. In many instances, they recognize slavery as the thing of all others the most degrading to labor and oppressive towards them. They dare not say so now; but let the Government say the word, and even they would unite in sending the vile thing to its grave, and rejoice at the opportunity. Such of them as love slavery better than their country are not now, and have never been, friends of the Union. They belong to the detestable class who do the work of enemies in the garb of friendship, and it would be a real gain to get rid of them. Then look at slavery itself�what good thing has it done that it should be allowed to survive a rebellion of its own creation? Why should the nation pour out its blood and lavish its treasure by the million, consent to protect and preserve the guilty cause of all its troubles? The answer returned to these questions is, that the Constitution does not allow the exercise of such power. As if this were a time to talk of constitutional power! When a man is well, it would be mayhem to cut off his arm. It would be unconstitutional to do so. But if the arm were shattered and mortifying, it would be quite unconstitutional and criminal not to cut it off. The cause is precisely so with Governments. The grand object, end and aim of Government is the preservation of society, and from nothing worse than anarchy. When Governments, through the ordinary channels of civil law, are unable to secure this end, they are thrown back upon military law, and for the time may set aside the civil law precisely to the extent which it may be necessary to do so in order to accomplish the grand object for which Governments are instituted among men. The power, therefore, to abolish slavery is within the objects sought by the Constitution. But if every letter and syllable of the Constitution were a prohibition of abolition, yet if the life of the nation required it, we should be bound by the Constitution to abolish it, because there can be no interest superior to existence and preservation.�

Another evil of the policy of protecting and preserving slavery, is that it deprives us of the important aid which might be rendered to the Government by the four million slaves. These people are repelled by our slaveholding policy. They have their hopes of deliverance from bondage destroyed. They hesitate now; but if our policy is pursued, they will not need to be compelled by Jefferson Davis to fight against us.�

A third evil of this policy, is the chilling effect it exerts upon the moral sentiment of mankind. Vast is the power of the sympathy of the civilized world.�

Our policy gives the rebels the advantage of seeming to be merely fighting for the right to govern themselves. We divest the war on our part of all those grand elements of progress and philanthropy that naturally win the hearts and command the reverence of all men, and allow it to assume the form of a meaningless display of brute force.�

Another evil arising from this mischievous slaveholding policy, is that it invites the interference of other Governments with our blockade.� Let the war be made an abolition war, and no statesman in England or France would dare even, if inclined, to propose any disturbance of the blockade. Make this an abolition war, and you at once unite the world against the rebels, and in favor of the Government.

? Letter from Lewis Douglass, July 20, 1863.

Lewis Douglass was the son of Frederick Douglass and a member of the black regiment, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry. He wrote this letter to the woman he would later marry.

MY DEAR AMELIA:

I have been in two fights, and am unhurt. I am about to go in another I believe to-night. Our men fought well on both occasions. The last was desperate we charged that terrible battery on Morris Island known as Fort Wagoner, and were repulsed with a loss of 3 killed and wounded. I escaped unhurt from amidst that perfect hail of shot and shell. It was terrible. I need not particularize the papers will give a better than I have time to give. My thoughts are with you often, you are as dear as ever, be good enough to remember it as I no doubt you will. As I said before we are on the eve of another fight and I am very busy and have just snatched a moment to write you. I must necessarily be brief. Should I fall in the next fight killed or wounded I hope to fall with my face to the foe.

If I survive I shall write you a long letter. DeForrest of your city is wounded George Washington is missing, Jacob Carter is missing, Chas Reason wounded Chas Whiting, Chas Creamer all wounded. The above are in hospital. This regiment has established its reputation as a fighting regiment not a man flinched, though it was a trying time. Men fell all around me. A shell would explode and clear a space of twenty feet, our men would close up again, but it was no use we had to retreat, which was a very hazardous undertaking. How I got out of that fight alive I cannot tell, but I am here. My Dear girl I hope again to see you. I must bid you farewell should I be killed. Remember if I die I die in a good cause. I wish we had a hundred thousand colored troops we would put an end to this war. Good Bye to all Write soon Your own loving LEWIS

Source: Carter Woodson, The Mind of the Negro (Washington, D.C., 1926), 544. Accessed from History Matters.

? Excerpt from Mary Boykin Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie,�1905

Chesnut was the daughter of a prominent, well-to-do family and married to a South Carolina politician and Confederate leader. She kept a detailed diary of her experiences and observations during the Civil War. This excerpt was written in Portland, Alabama in July of 1863. �Dick� was a house slave on the family plantation.

General Lee and Mr. Davis want the negroes put into the army. Mr. Chesnut and Major Venable discussed the subject one night, but would they fight on our side or desert to the enemy? They don’t go to the enemy, because they are comfortable as they are, and expect to be free anyway.

When we were children our nurses used to give us tea out in the open air on little pine tables scrubbed as clean as milk-pails. Sometimes, as Dick would pass us, with his slow and consequential step, we would call out, “Do, Dick, come and wait on us.” “No, little missies, I never wait on pine tables. Wait till you get big enough to put your legs under your pa’s mahogany.”

I taught him to read as soon as I could read myself, perched on his knife-board. He won’t look at me now; but looks over my head, scenting freedom in the air. He was always very ambitious. I do not think he ever troubled himself much about books. But then, as my father said, Dick, standing in front of his sideboard, has heard all subjects in earth or heaven discussed, and by the best heads in our world. He is proud, too, in his way. Hetty, his wife, complained that the other men servants looked finer in their livery. “Nonsense, old woman, a butler never demeans himself to wear livery. He is always in plain clothes.” Somewhere he had picked that up.

He is the first negro in whom I have felt a change. Others go about in their black masks, not a ripple or an emotion showing, and yet on all other subjects except the war they are the most excitable of all races. Now Dick might make a very respectable Egyptian Sphinx, so inscrutably silent is he. He did deign to inquire about General Richard Anderson. “He was my young master once,” said he. “I always will like him better than anybody else.”

?

? THE POST BELLUM PERIOD

? State Convention of the Colored People of South Carolina, Proceedings of the Colored People�s Convention of the State of South Carolina, Held in Zion Church, Charleston, November, 1865

FELLOW CITIZENS:�We have assembled as delegates representing the colored people of the State of South Carolina, in the capacity of State Convention, to confer together and to deliberate upon our intellectual, moral, industrial, civil, and political condition as affected by the great changes which have taken place in this State and throughout this whole country, and to devise ways and means which may, through the blessing of God, tend to our improvement, elevation, and progress; fully believing that our cause is one which commends itself to all good men throughout the civilized world; that it is the sacred cause of truth and righteousness; that it particularly appeals to those professing to be governed by that religion which teaches to �do unto all men as you would have them do unto you.� �

We feel that the justness of our cause is sufficient apology for our course at this time. Heretofore we have had no avenues opened to us or our children�we have had no firesides that we could call our own; none of those incentives to work for the development of our minds and the aggrandizement of our race in common with other people. The measures which have been adopted for the development of white mens children have been denied to us and ours. The laws which have made white men great, have degraded us, because we were colored, and because we were reduced to chattel slavery. But now that we are freemen, now that we have been lifted up by the providence of God to manhood, we have resolved to come forward, and, like MEN, speak and act for ourselves. We fully recognize the truth of the maxim that �God helps those who help themselves.� In making this appeal to you, we adopt the language of the immortal Declaration of Independence, �that all men are created equal,� and that �life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness� are the right of all; that taxation and representation should go together; that governments are to protect, not to destroy the rights of mankind; that the Constitution of the United States was formed to establish justice, to promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to all the people of this country; that resistance to tyrants is obedience to God?are American principles and maxims; and together they form the constructive elements of the American Government.

We think we fully comprehend and duly appreciate the principles and measures which compose this platform; and all that we desire or ask for is to be placed in a position that we could conscientiously and legitimately defend, with you, those principles against the surges of despotism to the last drop of our blood. We have not come together in battle array to assume a boastful attitude and to talk loudly of high-sounding principles or unmeaning platforms, nor do we pretend to any great boldness; for we know your wealth and greatness, and our poverty and weakness; and although we feel keenly our wrongs, still we come together, we trust, in a spirit of meekness and of patriotic good-will to all the people of the State. But yet it is some consolation to know (and it inspires us with hope when we reflect) that our cause is not alone the cause of five millions of colored men in this country, but we are intensely alive to the fact that it is also the cause of millions of oppressed men in other �parts of Gods beautiful earth,� who are now struggling to be free in the fullest sense of that word; and God and nature are pledged in its triumph. We are Americans by birth, and we assure you that we are Americans in feeling; and, in spite of all wrongs which we have long and silently endured in this country, we would still exclaim with a full heart, �O America! with all thy faults we love thee still.� �

Thus we would address you, not as enemies, but as friends and fellow-countrymen, who desire to dwell among you in peace, and whose destinies are interwoven, and linked with those of the American people, and hence must be fulfilled in this country. As descendants of a race feeble and long oppressed, we might with propriety appeal to a great and magnanimous people like Americans, for special favors and encouragement, on the principle that the strong should aid the weak, the learned should teach the unlearned.

ZION CHURCH, Charleston, S. C., November 24, 1865.

? Excerpts from the Testimony of Benjamin �Pap� Singleton.Washington, D. C., April 17, 1880 before the Senate Select Committee Investigating the “Negro Exodus from the Southern States”

Singleton was a founder and promoter of the movement of African-Americans from the South to the West during and after Reconstruction. He helped more than 7,000 black citizens move, mostly to Kansas, during the period from the end of the Civil War to 1880.

Q. Yes; What was the cause of your going out, and in the first place how did you happen to go there, or to send these people there?

A. Well, my people, for the want of land — we needed land for our children — and their disadvantages — that caused my heart to grieve and sorrow; pity for my race, sir, that was coming down, instead of going up — that caused me to go to work for them. I sent out there perhaps in ’66 — perhaps so; or in ’65, any way — my memory don’t recollect which; and they brought back tolerable favorable reports; then I jacked up three or four hundred, and went into Southern Kansas, and found it was a good country, and I though Southern Kansas was congenial to our nature, sir; and I formed a colony there, and bought about a thousand acres of ground — the colony did — my people.

Q. And they went upon it and settled there?

A. Yes, sir; they went and settled there.

Q. Have they any property now?

A. Yes; I have carried some people in there that when they got there they didn’t have fifty cents left, and now they have got in my colony — Singleton colony — a house, nice cabins, their milch cows, and pigs, and sheep, perhaps a span of horses, and trees before their yeards, and some three or four or ten acres broken up, and all of them has got little houses that I carried there. They didn’t go under no relief assistance; they went on their own resources; and when they went in there first the country was not overrun with them; you see they could get good wages; the country was not overstocked with people; they went to work, and I never helped them as soon as I put them on the land.

Q. Did you do that at the instance of Governor St. John and others in Kansas?

A. O, no, sir; no white men. This was gotten up by colored men in purity and confidence; not a political negro was in it; they would want to pilfer and rob at the cents before they got the dollars. O, no, it was the muscle of the arm, the men that worked that we wanted.

Q. Well, tell us all about it.

A. These men would tell all their grievances to me in Tennessee — the sorrows of their heart. You know I was an undertaker there in Nashville, and worked in the shop. Well, actually, I would have to go and bury their fathers and mothers. You see we have the same heart and feelings as any other race and nation. (The land is free, and it is nobody’s business, if there is land enough, where the people go. I put that in my people’s heads.) Well, that man would die, and I would bury him; and the next morning maybe a woman would go to that man (meaning the landlord), and she would have six or seven children, and he would say to her, “Well, your husband owed me before he died” and they would say that to every last one of them, “You owe me.” Suppose he would? Then he would say, “You must go to some other place; I cannot take care of you.” Now, you see, that is something I would take notice of. that woman had to go out, and these little children was left running through the streets, and the next place you would find them in a disorderly house, and their children in the State’s prison.

Well, now, sir, you will find that I ahve a charter here. You will find that I called on the white people in Tennessee about that time. I called conventions about it, and they sat with me in my conventions, and “Old man,” they said, “you are right.” The white people said, “You are right; take your people away.” And let me tell you, it was the white people — the ex-governor of the State, felt like I did. and they said to me, “You have tooken a great deal on to yourself, but if these negroes, instead of deceiving one another and running for office, would take the same idea that you have in your head, you will be a people.”

I then went out to Kansas, and advised them all to go to Kansas; and, sir they are going to leave the Southern country. The Southern country is out of joint. The blood of a white man runs through my veins. That is congenial, you know, to my nature. that is my choice. Right emphatically, I tell you today, I woke up the millions right through me! The great God of glory has worked in me. I have had open air interviews with the living spirit of God for my people; and we are going to leave the South. We are going to leave it if there ain’t an alteration and signs of change. I am going to advise the people who left that country (Kansas) to go back.

Q. What do you mean by a change?

A. Well, I am not going to stand bulldozing and half pay and all those things. Gentelmen, allow me to tell you the truth; it seems to me that they have picked out the negroes from the Southern country to come here and testify who are in good circumstances and own their homes and not the poor ones who don’t study their own interests. Let them go and pick up the men that has to walk when they goes, and not those who have money.

There is good white men in the Southern country, but it ain’t the minority (majority); they can’t do nothing; the bulldozers has got possession of the country, and they have got to go in there and stop them; if they don’t the last colored man will leave them. I see colored men testifying to a positive lie, for they told me out there all their intgerests were in Louisiana and Mississippi. Said I,”You are right to protect you own country,” and they would tell me, “I am obliged to do what I am doing.” Of course I have done the same, but I am clear footed.

? Ellen DuBois, �Reconstruction and the Battle for Woman Suffrage,� History Now 7 (March 2006) The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History 49 W. 45th Street, 6th Floor � NYC, NY 10036 (646) 366-9666 � 2009�2014 All Rights Reserved [https://www.gilderlehrman.org/]

The origins of the American women�s suffrage movement are commonly dated from the public protest meeting, held in Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848. At that historic meeting, the right of women to join with men in the privileges and obligations of active, voting citizenship was the one demand that raised eyebrows among the 100 or so women and men attending. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the meeting�s prime organizer, remembered it, many in the audience, even including the distinguished radical Lucretia Mott, worried that the demand for political equality was either too advanced or too morally questionable to include on the launching platform of the new movement. Joined only by abolitionist and ex-slave Frederick Douglass, Stanton argued for the importance of women�s equal participation in the electoral process. In the end, the suffrage resolution passed, the only one of the meeting�s thirteen demands not to be unanimously embraced. From that point it was another three-quarters of a century to the 1920 ratification of the nineteenth constitutional amendment, which prohibited the states from �disfranchisement on the basis of sex.�

Given the seventy-two years between the one event and the other, a full third of our history as a nation, the story of the demand for equal suffrage involves many stops and starts, and numerous shifts and splits. Moreover, the exact terms and times of the triumphant end were not — and could not have been — envisioned by those present at the beginning. Differences in and conflicts over leadership, shifting political environments, and various strategies and tactics all mark the long and complex history of the women�s suffrage movement, which lasted far longer than its instigators imagined and yet was shorter than it could have been (when we consider, for instance, the additional three and a-half decades that elapsed before women won the right to vote in that other eighteenth-century revolutionary nation, France).

This essay will consider the impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction epoch on the American battle for women�s suffrage. As of 1860, the right to vote was not the primary demand of the women�s rights movement, which focused much more on the economic rights of women — and especially of wives � to earn, inherit, and hold property. In addition, because the common reading of the federal Constitution was that it was up to the separate states to determine how to establish the electorate, women�s rights activists assumed that women�s suffrage — along with women�s economic and other rights — had to be fought for and won state by state. Thus, it was not anticipated that winning the right to vote would involve an epic battle over the federal Constitution. We should remember that as of 1860, only twelve amendments — ten of them consisting of the Bill of Rights dating from 1787, and the other two of largely procedural significance — had been ratified. What we know now — that the history of American federal constitutionalism would be marked by alternating periods of interpretation and amendment, of fierce battles waged far beyond Congress and the Supreme Court to alter and augment the shape and meaning of our foundational political document — was not obvious then; nor was it obvious that women�s suffrage would be the most prolonged of all these constitutional wars.

The very first of those periods of constitutional struggle occurred during the era of postwar Reconstruction, which is when the women�s suffrage movement took on many of the characteristics that it was to maintain for the next half century. Emerging out of the Civil War, the issue of political equality for women was inextricably bound up with the unsettled political status of the former slaves. When the Thirteenth Amendment passed Congress (with the help of a massive petition campaign engineered by the women�s rights movement) and was ratified by the states, the former slaves were freed, but the absence of chattel slavery did not specify what the presence of freedom meant legally and constitutionally. To resolve the anomalous position of the freed population, the Fourteenth Amendment declared that �all persons born or naturalized in the United States were citizens thereof,� with all the �privileges and immunities� of national citizenship. Without specifying exactly what these privileges and immunities were, the second section of the amendment went on to address the crucial question of voting rights for the freedmen, a question of particular concern to the ruling Republican party, which looked to them as a loyal constituency in the states of the former Confederacy.

The Fourteenth Amendment addressed the question of enfranchisement in an indirect, elaborate, and ultimately ineffective way: by pinning a state�s number of seats in the House of Representatives to the proportion of the adult population that was permitted to vote. There were, however, two qualifications to this population basis for determining representation: �Indians not taxed� were excluded, and the amendment specifically defined the potential electorate as �male.� Here, for the first time, was an explicit reference to gender in the U.S. Constitution. Since the women�s rights movement was now in its second decade and included a call for political equality in its platform, the amenders of the Constitution could no longer assume, as had the Founders, that �we the people� simply meant men, and did not include, in any politically significant way, women. Women had to be explicitly excluded or they would be implicitly included.

Women�s rights activists objected strongly to what Elizabeth Cady Stanton angrily called �that word �male.�� They sent petitions to Congress while the amendment was still being drafted, begging for a change in language, but the amendment passed Congress and was sent to the states for ratification with the disturbing qualification of gender intact within it. Women�s rights activists objected and criticized, but were caught between their recognition of the importance of political rights for the freedmen and their dedication to their own cause of women�s rights. So they stopped short of calling for non-ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Later, because the measures used in the Fourteenth Amendment to encourage black enfranchisement were too weak, a third postwar amendment was designed, this time to address the issue of suffrage directly. The Fifteenth Amendment, passed by Congress in 1869 and ratified two years later, explicitly forbade the states to deny the right to vote to anyone on the basis of �race, color or previous condition of servitude� and authorized Congress to pass any necessary enforcement legislation. The wording, it should be noted, did not transfer the right to determine the electorate to the federal government, but only specified particular kinds of state disfranchisements � and �sex� was not one of them — as unconstitutional.

At this point, the delicate balance between the political agendas of the causes of black freedom and women�s rights became undone. The two movements came into open antagonism, and the women�s rights movement itself split over the next steps to take to secure women the right to vote. Defenders of women�s rights found themselves in an extremely difficult political quandary. Would they have to oppose an advance in the rights of the ex-slaves in order to argue for those of free women? At a May, 1869 meeting of the American Equal Rights Association, a group that had been organized three years earlier by women�s rights advocates to link black and woman suffrage, Elizabeth Cady Stanton gave vent to her frustration, her sense of betrayal by longstanding male allies, and her underlying sense that �educated� women like herself were more worthy of enfranchisement than men just emerged from slavery. She and Frederick Douglass had a painful and famous public exchange about the relative importance of black and women�s suffrage, in which Douglass invoked images of ex-slaves �hung from lampposts� in the South by white supremacist vigilantes, and Stanton retaliated by asking whether he thought that the black race was made up only and entirely of men. By the end of the meeting, Stanton and her partner Susan B. Anthony had led a walkout of a portion of the women at the meeting to form a new organization to focus on women�s suffrage, which they named the National Woman Suffrage Association.

A second group, under the leadership of Massachusetts women Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe, formed a rival organization, known as the American Woman Suffrage Association. This wing counted on longstanding connections with abolitionism and the leadership of the Republican Party to get women�s suffrage enacted once black male suffrage had been fully inscribed in the Constitution. Over the next few years, both the American and the National Woman Suffrage Associations spread their influence to the Midwest and the Pacific Coast. The National Woman Suffrage Association linked political rights to other causes, including inflammatory ones like free love, while the American Woman Suffrage Association kept the issue clear of �side issues.� For the next few years, the two organizations pursued different strategies to secure for votes for women. Starting with an 1874 campaign in Michigan, the American Woman Suffrage Association pressed for changes in state constitutions. Because these campaigns involved winning over a majority of (male) voters, they were extremely difficult to carry out, and it was not until 1893 that Colorado became the first state to enfranchise women.

Meanwhile, the National Woman Suffrage Association refused to give up on the national Constitution. Doubtful that any additional federal amendments would be passed, the group sought a way to base women�s suffrage in the Constitution�s existing provisions. Its �New Departure� campaign contended that the Fourteenth Amendment�s assertion that all native-born or naturalized �persons� were national citizens surely included the right of suffrage among its �privileges and immunities,� and that, as persons, women were thus enfranchised. In 1871, the notorious female radical Victoria Woodhull made this argument before the House Judiciary Committee. The next year, hundreds of suffragists around the country went to the polls on election day, repeating the arguments of the New Departure, and pressing to get their votes accepted.

Among those who succeeded � at least temporarily – was Susan B. Anthony, who cast her ballot for Ulysses S. Grant. Three weeks after the election, Anthony was arrested on federal charges of �illegal voting� and in 1873 was found guilty by an all-male jury. Anthony was prevented by the judge from appealing her case but another �voting woman,� Virginia Minor, succeeded in making the New Departure argument before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1874. In a landmark voting and women�s-rights decision, the Court ruled that although women were indeed persons, and hence citizens, the case failed because suffrage was not included in the rights guaranteed by that status. The 1875 Minor vs. Happersett ruling coincided with other decisions that allowed states to infringe on the voting rights of the Southern freedmen, culminating over the next two decades in their near-total disfranchisement.

Although these various Reconstruction-era efforts failed to enfranchise women, they did leave various marks on the continuing campaign for women�s suffrage: a shifting focus on state and federal constitutional action, a legacy of direct action, a women�s suffrage movement that was largely cut off from the efforts of African Americans for their rights, and, perhaps most fundamentally, an independent movement of women for women, which turned the campaign for suffrage into a continuing source of activism and political sophistication for coming generations of women.

Ellen DuBois is a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the co-editor, with Richard Candida Smith, of Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Feminist as Intellectual (2007); co-author, with Lynn Dumenil, of Through Women�s Eyes: An American History with Documents (2005); and author of Harriet Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (1997).

? Susan B. Anthony, �Is it a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?�, 1872

Suffragist Susan B. Anthony was arrested in 1872 for voting illegally in a federal election. She was convicted and sentenced to pay a fine of $100 and court costs. After her arrest she undertook a speaking tour in which she gave the lecture excerpted here.

Friends and Fellow-citizens: I stand before you to-night, under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last Presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus voting, I not only committed no crime, but, instead, simply exercised my citizen’s right, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the National Constitution, beyond the power of any State to deny.

Our democratic-republican government is based on the idea of the natural right of every individual member thereof to a voice and a vote in making and executing the laws. We assert the province of government to be to secure the people in the enjoyment of their unalienable rights. We throw to the winds the old dogma that governments can give rights. Before governments were organized, no one denies that each individual possessed the right to protect his own life. liberty and property. And when 100 or 1,000,000 people enter into a free government, they do not barter away their natural rights; they simply pledge themselves to protect each other in the enjoyment of them, through prescribed judicial and legislative tribunals. They agree to abandon the methods of brute force in the adjustment of their differences, and adopt those of civilization.

Nor can you find a word in any of the grand documents left us by the fathers that assumes for government the power to create or to confer rights. The Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the constitutions of the several states and the organic laws of the territories, all alike propose to protect the people in the exercise of their God-given rights. Not one of them pretends to bestow rights.

“All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Here is no shadow of government authority over rights, nor exclusion of any from their full and equal enjoyment. Here is pronounced the right of all men, and “consequently,” as the Quaker preacher said, “of all women,” to a voice in the government. And here, in this very first paragraph of the declaration, is the assertion of the natural right of all to the ballot; for, how can “the consent of the governed” be given, if the right to vote be denied. Again:

“That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundations on such principles, and organizing its powers in such forms as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

Surely, the right of the whole people to vote is here clearly implied. For however destructive in their happiness this government might become, a disfranchised class could neither alter nor abolish it, nor institute a new one, except by the old brute force method of insurrection and rebellion. One-half of the people of this nation to-day are utterly powerless to blot from the statute books an unjust law, or to write there a new and a just one. The women, dissatisfied as they are with this form of government, that enforces taxation without representation,-that compels them to obey laws to which they have never given their consent, -that imprisons and hangs them without a trial by a jury of their peers, that robs them, in marriage, of the custody of their own persons, wages and children,-are this half of the people left wholly at the mercy of the other half, in direct violation of the spirit and letter of the declarations of the framers of this government, every one of which was based on the immutable principle of equal rights to all. By those declarations, kings, priests, popes, aristocrats, were all alike dethroned, and placed on a common level politically, with the lowliest born subject or serf. By them, too, me, as such, were deprived of their divine right to rule, and placed on a political level with women. By the practice of those declarations all class and caste distinction will be abolished; and slave, serf, plebeian, wife, woman, all alike, bound from their subject position to the proud platform of equality.

The preamble of the federal constitution says: “We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and established this constitution for the United States of America.”

It was we, the people, not we, the white male citizens, nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed this Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings or liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people-women as well as men. And it is downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government-the ballot.

The early journals of Congress show that when the committee reported to that body the original articles of confederation, the very first article which became the subject of discussion was that respecting equality of suffrage. Article 4th said: “The better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and intercourse between the people of the different States of this Union, the free inhabitants of each of the States, (paupers, vagabonds and fugitives from justice excepted,) shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of the free citizens of the several States.”

Thus, at the very beginning, did the fathers see the necessity of the universal application of the great principle of equal rights to all-in order to produce the desired result-a harmonious union and a homogeneous people.

We no longer petition Legislature or Congress to give us the right to vote. We appeal to the women everywhere to exercise their too long neglected “citizen’s right to vote.” We appeal to the inspectors of election everywhere to receive the votes of all United States citizens as it is their duty to do. We appeal to United States commissioners and marshals to arrest the inspectors who reject the names and votes of United States citizens, as it is their duty to do, and leave those alone who, like our eighth ward inspectors, perform their duties faithfully and well.

We ask the juries to fail to return verdicts of “guilty” against honest, law-abiding, tax-paying United States citizens for offering their votes at our elections. Or against intelligent, worthy young men, inspectors of elections, for receiving and counting such citizens votes.

We ask the judges to render true and unprejudiced opinions of the law, and wherever there is room for a doubt to give its benefit on the side of liberty and equal rights to women, remembering that “the true rule of interpretation under our national constitution, especially since its amendments, is that anything for human rights is constitutional, everything against human right unconstitutional.”

And it is on this line that we propose to fight our battle for the ballot-all peaceably, but nevertheless persistently through to complete triumph, when all United States citizens shall be recognized as equals before the law.

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? WOMEN IN THE WEST

Background on the Letters of Mattie Oblinger

Uriah and Mattie Oblinger met in Indiana before the Civil War and were married in March of 1869. Uriah and two of his wife’s brothers, Giles and Samuel Thomas, journeyed west to settle in Nebraska. The three young men acquired land under the Homestead Act. Uriah filed for land approximately eleven miles west of Geneva in Bennett Township, Fillmore County, Nebraska. Giles and Sam took claims nearby. Mattie joined her husband in Nebraska in 1872 and, together, they worked their farm and raised their three daughters. Mattie died in childbirth in February 1880 at age thirty-six.

These sources are letters written from Nebraska in 1873 by Mattie Oblinger. They are transcriptions of the original handwritten letters and generally are not corrected for spelling, grammar, and punctuation. You may notice some unfamiliar or indecipherable words or phrases; there may be extra spaces in some words.

? Letter from Mattie V. Oblinger to Thomas Family, May 19, 1873

At Home in our own house and a sod [house] at that And just eat dinner

Dear friends as I have an opportunity to send a letter to the office I will send you a few hastly composed lines Billie Mote come to our house saturday evening morning he is going to Grafton this afternoon so I will not have time to write much We have considerable of rain since I came here Saturday night it rained very hard It is too wet to plant corn some are ready but have to wait a day or so for the ground to dry off The plants and shrubery that I brought I put on Giles place I was looking at them last evening they look very promising the Dialetre especialy We went to Mr Cambels yesterday to church and sabbath school They live seven miles south of here The minister failed to come so there was society meeting Mr Cambels are real Kentuckians wish you could hear them talk We took dinner with them Uriah & Billie are talking U A C is lying on the bed Lounge and Ella is teasing him for his book We moved in to our house last Wednesday (U. W. O birthday ) I suppose you would like to see us in our sod house It is not quite so convenient as a nice frame but I would as soon live in it as the cabins I have lived in and then we are at home which makes it more comfortable I ripped our Waggon sheet in too have it arround too sides and have several papers up so the boys think it looks real well the Uriahs1 made a bed stead and a Lounge so could have some thing to sleep on The only objection I have we have no floor yet will be better this fall I got one tea cup & saucer and the corner of the glass on the little hero picture broken Pretty good luck I think my goods got here two days before I did Uriah had taken them out to Mr Houks Uriah was plowing sod this fore noon talks of planting some this after noon he has twenty acres surounded have ten of it broke Doc & Billie & Uriah C stayed with us I know you would have laughed to see us fixing their bed we set boxes to the side of the Lounge and enlarged Uriahs bed for all of them We enjoyed the fun and they enjoyed their bed as much as if they had been in a nice parlor bed room U. C.2 & Doc sung while I got supper They call Doc Sam out here sounds very odd to me wish you could see his whiskers shaved all off but what is on his chin an lip I told him I wanted some to send you but he could not see it He has worked one day at his house I have got acquainted with some here They are not hard to get acquainted The boys went to Sutton Saturday after noon I went along to see the town and country on our way we seen three Antelopes U C shot at them for fun Charlie if you was here you would never get done looking for you can see ever so far comeing from Sutton we could see the Co seat which was eleven miles from us We got a letter from you U C says tell Kate D that he gloreis in her spunk and for peace and joy to go with her but She must not do so when she comes to Neb There is some here looks as though they would like if some girls would come around I am real sorry to hear of Aunt Elizas ailments Hope she may get well I saw J Arn u ot on the cars He told me that Two of the Swg Swigart boys and their wives started to Oregan the same morning I started so Rose Thomas has gone farther west than I have The other woman was a Larose. I am washing to day This after noon is little cloudy with the sun shineing occasionaly Ella is as hearty as she can be and has an appetite like a little horse I never cooked for such appetites as I have since I been here some times I think I will cook enough of some things for two meals but the boys clean them every time. We are all well I must close for this time I am as ever your sister & daughter Our love to all

M V O

Editor’s note(s)

1. Uriah Oblinger and his cousin, Uriah A. Cook, the son of Eliza and John Cook, Uriah Oblinger’s paternal aunt and uncle. Uriah Cook escorted Mattie and Ella to Nebraska in 1873, then went to Rice County, Minnesota.

2. The initials stand for Uriah Cook.

? Letter from Mattie V. Oblinger to George W. Thomas, Grizzie B. Thomas, and Wheeler Thomas Family, June 16, 1873

Fillmore County Neb

June 16th 1873

Dear Brother & Sister & all of Uncle Wheelers

Thinking you would like to hear from us and hear how we are prospering I thought I must write you a letter and to fulfill the promise I made when I last saw you. The reason I have not written sooner I have not had the time I have wrote a letter almost every sunday to send home and that has occupied most all my leisure time Sunday is rather a poor day for us to get a chance to write too for we have went to Church and sunday school every sunday I have been here two sundays we went about 9 miles the rest of ther time we went to Giles the next preaching will be at Giles which is in two weeks The man that preaches is quite old and is a baptist minister but when he preaches he makes no distinction in denominations We have a good sunday school in progress now I suppose there must be about fifty enrolled We have not the means yet to carry on sunday school yet as they do in older settlments but we have our bibles and hymn books and we all gather together and read a lesson and then ask questions and sing and offer prayers and I think we do about as much good as any sunday school I know it is not quite so interesting as if we had money to buy papers and books I think we have Just as enterpriseing people here as any where There was methodist preaching yesterday about four miles from here Mr Elliotts and us had intended to go but it threatened rain and it was so late when our sunday school and society meeting was out that we did not go I think there will be a methodist preaching place established in the neighborhood before long as there was a methodist preacher around a few days ago hunting up the scattered members in the country He said the conference had sent him here so you see we are not entirely out of civilizatian I know if you was here you would not think so I have just as good neighbors as I ever had any where and they are very sociable I was never in a neighborhood where all was as near on equality as they are here Those that have been here have a little the most they all have cows and that is quite a help here I get milk & butter from Mrs Furgison who lives 1/4 of a mile from us get the milk for nothing and pay twelve cents a pound for butter she makes good butter Most all of the people here live in Sod houses and dug outs I like the sod house the best they are the most convenient I expect you think we live miserable because we are in a sod house but I tell you in solid earnest I never enjoyed my self better but George I expect you are ready to say It is because it is somthing new No this not the case it is because we are own on our own and the thoughts of moveing next spring does not bother me and every lick we strike is for our selves and not half for some one else I tell you this is quite a consolation to us who have been renters so long there are no renters here every one is on his own and doing the best he can and not much a head yet for about all that are here was renters and it took about all they had to get here Some come here and put up temporary frame houses thought they could not live in a sod house This fall they are going to build sod houses so they can live live [sic] comfortable this winter a temporary frame house here is a poor thing a house that is not plastered the wind and dust goes right through and they are very cold A sod house can be built so they are real nice and comfortable build nice walls and then plaster and lay a floor above and below and then they are nice Uriah is going to build one after that style this fall The one we are in at present is 14 by 16 and a dirt floor Uriah intends takeing it for a stable this winter I will be a nice comfortable stable A little ways from the door is a small pond that has watter the year round we use out of it for all purposes but drinking and cooking We have the drinking water cary about 1/4 of a mile and the best of water We have two neighbors only 1/4 of a mile from us

I must stop and get supper

Supper is over and dishes washed I wish I had a cow or two to milk I would feel quite proud then think will get one after harvest Uriah is going up near Crete to harvest The wheat l and Oats looks well here but there is not so much sown as in older settlements each man calculates to do his own harvesting in this neighborhood this year there is several men going from this settlement in to older ones to get harvesting Mrs Elliot and I are talking of staying together while our men go harvesting Almost every man here does his own work yet for they are not able to hire I think it will be quite different in a few years Uriah has 23 acres of sod corn planted it looks real well I tell you it is encourageing to have out a lot of corn and all your own We have a nice lot of Squashes and Cucumbers & Mellons & Beans comeing on There was a striped bug worked some on our squashes but did not bother our other vines We have our Potatoes and cabbage up at Giles as they do not so well on sod I set a hundred & thirty cabbages last week they are every one growing We have the nicest patch of early rose potatoes in the neighborhood will not be long until we will have new potatoes We have fared pretty well in the potato line as Uriah bought ten bushel when I come to Crete he bought for seed and to use we will have plenty until new potatoes come If nothing happens we will have a nice lot this fall I have nice Tomato es plants comeing on I want to set more Tomatoes and Cabbage this week I get Garden vegetables in Giles garden I could not make garden here as we had no sod subdued and I have such good neighbors they said they would divide their garden vegetables I planted a lot of beet seed in Mrs Alkires garden they look real nice Uriah is breaking sod to day he will soon have 40 acres turned over then it will be ready to go into right next Spring It looks like it was fun to turn the sod over here there are no roots or stpumps to be jerkinking the plows out It has been very warm for a few days and it makes old buck pant considerable he is almost fat enough for beef old bright is not so fat so he gets along the best

We have had an immense lot of rain here this season but I guess this has been the general complaint every where I think we had the hardest storm saturday night or evening that has been since I come the wind blew very hard I do not know how long it lasted for I went to sleep and the wind was blowing yet We can not notice the wind so much in a sod house as in a frame Giles a Doc came home with us yesterday I heard them & Uriah laughing about going out to see if the fences was blown down I looks very strange to me to see Crops growing here and no fence around them They have a herd law here and the stock a man has for use about home he must Lariett them out his other cattle he puts them in herds in the neighbor hood gets them herded for 25 cts per month The prarie looks beautiful now as the grass is so nice and green and the most pretty flowers I can not tell how many different kinds I have noticed I have seen three Antelopes one Jack Rabbit and one swift and lots of prarie squirrels I thought when I left the timber I would not see any more birds but there are lots of them here some that are entirely different to any I ever saw in Ind There is more Rattle snakes here than there are garter snakes in Ind Uriah has killed two on our place there are not so plent right in our neighborhood as they are three miles east of here near a prarie dog town some men over there have killed as high 18 & 20 John how is this for high hardly any one gets bit with them they are mostly black rattle snakes We send our love and best wishes from

U W O & M V Oblinger

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