Julia's APUSH

Semester 1

Unit One

Chapter 1 - The world before 1492

30,000 years ago - Earliest signs of settlement in Western Alaska and California; Stone Age carvings dating to this area found in France and North Africa
c 750 - Mound-building cultures expand in the Mississippi River Valley
850-1100s - Rise and decline of the Anasazi in Chaco Canyon; founding of Acoma Pueblo
950-1400 - Rise and decline of Cahokia; by 1400, Cahokia was abandoned
1101 - Norse colony of Vineland established in North America
1142 - Potential date for the founding of the Iroquois Confederacy
1324 - Pilgrimage of Mansa Musa, Emperor of Mali, to Mecca
1325 - Rise of Aztec Empire; founding of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City)
1348-1350s - Bubonic plague begins in Europe
1350-1800 - Little Ice Age - the climate got colder; agriculture suffered; Europeans abandoned their settlements in places like Greenland; if the power of its priests and kings in Cahokia depended on their control of the sun and the seasons, the Little Ice Age eliminated that power
1415 - Portuguese begin exploration on the Atlantic coast of Africa
1421-1423 - Chinese explore the Indian Ocean and East Africa
1453 - Ottoman Turks capture Constantinople; the Hundred Years’ War between France and England ends
1458 - Songhay Empire captured Timbuktu
1469 - Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon marry
1485 - King Henry VII ends the War of the Roses, unifies England
1488 - Bartolomeu Dias rounds Cape of Good Hope
1492 - Granada falls to Christians, ending Islamic rule in Spain; Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain to the Americas
1493-1528 - Askia Muhammad ruled Songhay Empire at its heights
1498 - Vasco de Gama reaches India from Portugal

Bering Land Bridge - the name given to the land that connected Alaska and Siberia thousands of years ago, which is now under the current Bering Sea (Pacific Coast Theory)
Clovis people - the name of early residents of North America whose spear points were found near what is now Clovis, New Mexico, in 1929; they most likely lived around 13,000 years ago
Anasazi - Anasazi, meaning “ancient ones,” lived in modern day New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado 700 years before Columbus; they developed Chaco Canyon, which was a large city in New Mexico, its roads prominent in trade; Chaco Canyon was abandoned due to a prolonged drought
Cahokia people of the Mississippi Valley, also known as the Mound Builders - a name given to Native American tribes that built large burial and ceremonial mounds on which religious activities and sports took place
Anasazi and Cahokia similarities - tended to live comfortably with nature and in harmony with the sacred, which they found in every aspect of life; they saw time as circular - not a steady line from creation to the present and future but a recurring series of events to be celebrated in rituals that involved the retelling of ancient stories; honored shamans and priests, who had the special responsibility of helping result harmony when it was disrupted by disease, war, or climactic changes that brought famine; saw the community and not the individual as the focus of life and labor; farming was women’s work, hunting men’s; hunting, agriculture, trade were major aspects of economies

The Pueblo and Hopi people created thriving settlements in New Mexico and Arizona in place of the abandoned Anasazi centers; Taos Pueblo in northern New Mexico, along with many other Pueblo and Hopi communities in the region, is still inhabited; the Pueblo and Hopi diet relied on corn, brown beans, and various forms of squash, similar to the Anasazi; in the Hopi and Pueblo communities, members of special societies wore ritual masks called kachinas and danced in ceremonies designed to connect the community with its ancestors while seeking their presence and blessing on the crops; the Pueblo people spread out over Arizona and New Mexico, and despite their distance and differing languages, they remained connected to each other by trade and shared religious practices
The Iroquois Confederacy - the 5 nations: Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas; several families would live in a single longhouse
The Aztecs built Tenochtitlan on an island in the middle of Lake Texcoco in 1325; when the Aztecs first arrived in central Mexico, the Toltecs who then ruled the region viewed them as barbarians, but the Aztecs conquered them and destroyed their capital; in the huge markets of Tenochtitlan, 40 or 50 thousand traders met to exchange gold and jewelry, pottery and baskets, meat, fish, fruit, and vegetables; the Aztecs maintained an extensive trade network with other peoples but also made war on them to expand their empire and ensure a steady stream of prisoners for the human sacrifices their gods demanded; while the Aztecs built their empire by making strategic alliances with other tribes, the by mid-1400s, they relied on their own large army and attacked former allies, creating enemies who would help the Spanish conquer the Aztecs in the early 1500s
The Mayan culture had been developing for thousands of years when they first came into contact with Europeans; the Mayans lived in modern-day Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, Honduras, Belize, and Guatemala; the Mayans were the only American culture to develop a fully functional written language; they used math and practiced human sacrifice; they had an agricultural system that produced cotton as well as food, and cotton was a source of trade and wealth; when in decline, the Mayans were still a strong presence in western Mexico and Central America in the 1400s
The Inca Empire was larger than that of the Aztecs - it extended along the Pacific coast of South America from southern Columbia to northern Chile, and included all of modern-day Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia; the Incas ruled 32 million people from their capital of Cuzco, in Machu Picchu; the empire had a vast bureaucracy and army and 25 thousand miles of roads and bridges rivaling those of ancient Rome, all supported by heavy taxes; Inca religion was centered on the sun and its seasons; human and animal sacrifice was common; the Inca emperor and his family were considered divine; like the Aztecs, the Inca Empire was relatively new when the Europeans encountered it in the early 1500s; the main Inca conquests had occurred only in the 1400s

Black Death - the bubonic plague that devastated Europe in the 1300s, reducing the population by as much as half; the Jewish, religious nonconformists, and foreigners were scapegoats, and there were mass persecutions across Europe

The Ottoman Empire Changes Eastern Europe

In 1453, Muslim Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople and renamed it Istanbul; the Ottomans ruled an empire spanning from Hungary to include the Balkans and most of the Middle East and North Africa; Christian Europe was cut off from the land-based trade with Asia, as the Ottomans restricted others from using the land and sea routes across the eastern Mediterranean (closing of silk road)

The Rise of Portuguese Exploration

Prince Henry of Portugal (1394-1460) - known as “the Navigator,” he decided that Portugal should sail around Africa to establish a new trade route to Asia; in 1415, he commanded a Portuguese fleet, but for the rest of his life, he remained in his country and organized and/or commissioned voyages done by others; in 1498, Vasco da Gama reached India; because of these expeditions, there was flourishing trade with Asia and Africa by the early 1500s; the Portuguese developed a massive new African trade; Portuguese merchants virtually reinvented slavery in Western Europe, and Portugal became the first and most significant player in the African slave trade as well as in the spice trade with Asia; the wealth from Asian spices and other luxury goods and from African gold and slaves was making Portugal the richest nation in Europe; a main motive of Henry’s concerning the exploration and navigation of his country was the wealth to be made in Africa
Slavery had died out in most of Europe during the Middle Ages, but it persisted in the Middle East and Africa

The Unification and Rise of Spain

Reconquista “reconquest” - the long struggle (ending in 1492) during which Spanish Christians reconquered the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim occupiers, who first invaded in the 8th century
By 1400, the Iberian Peninsula was divided into four Christian kingdoms - Castile, Aragon, Portugal, and Navarre - and one Muslim kingdom in the South - Granada. In 1469, Isabella of Castile married Ferdinand of Aragon, and their marriage united the two most powerful Spanish thrones, and the two began a campaign to finish the reconquest of Spain. In January, 1492, their armies defeated Muslim Granada, and Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jewish from Spain, as they wanted their nation to be unified, and like most Europeans at the time, they saw religious uniformity as a key to that goal. In the same year, Isabella commissioned an “Italian” sailor named Christopher Columbus to find a route to Asia other than the Portuguese-African one

The Empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay

The kingdom of Ghana governed much of West Africa for hundreds of years. Ghana’s power was from trade and its mastery of metalworking to make weapons and tools. At the northern end of African trade routes, Ghana bought gold, ivory, and slaves out of the African interior and at the southern end of the desert routes where Muslim traders brought the slaves, gold, and ivory from south of the Sahara to North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe in exchange for salt, silk, and other goods. Control of that trade made Ghana rich. Royal and religious officials, soldiers, merchants, and iron workers dominated Ghana.
In 1050, King Barmandana of Mali began to extend his kingdom, and the empire of Mali slowly dominated and replaced Ghana as the leading power in the region. Barmanda converted to Islam. 200 years later, King Sundiata made Mali the master of West Africa. Mansa Musa, a successor, built new mosques and schools and established an Islamic university at Timbuktu that was respected throughout the Muslim world for its scholarship.
To the east of Mali, Songhay grew stronger, capturing Timbuktu in 1458 as the Portuguese were exploring the African coast. In the late 1400s, under two kings, Sunni Ali (r 1464-92) and Askia Muhammad (r 1464-1528), Songhay became the strongest military and economic power in West Africa. Sunni Ali, an effective military leader, brought stability and prosperity to his kingdom. His son and heir rejected Islam but was overthrown, and Askia Muhammad was a devout Muslim who, in addition, respected traditional customs. Songhay’s power was based on trade. Gold, ivory, and slaves were collected from the south and east and exchanged from silks and other fine goods. Trade created wealth, which allowed both lavish lifestyles and military power that extended the empires.

Kongo, Benin, and Central Africa

In the kingdoms of Kongo, Benin, and surrounding areas, government was powerful but less structured than in the empires of Mali and Songhay.
In the 1490s, Portuguese missionaries converted the king of Kongo to Catholicism. Although the Kongo kings were Catholic, most other Central Africans practiced traditional religions. The Africans who were taken to the Americas as slaves brought their religious and cultural traditions with them. Centralized government and the wealth from trade led to military power that allowed West Africans to resist Portuguese attempts at conquest.
In West Africa, the community, not an individual, owned land

Slavery in Africa

Slavery was a significant part of the African economy in the 1400s, long before the Portuguese arrived. When the Portuguese began their African trade in the 1400s, African slaves had been brought across the Sahara to Europe and the Middle East for over a thousand years. The Portuguese simply shifted part of the trade to Europeans on the coast and away from Arab-dominated overland routes across the Sahara. When the Portuguese first became involved in the slave trade, they merely built on existing trade and cultural traditions. Most African slaves were captured in war from other communities.

China

Chinese Emperor Zhu Di (r 1402-24); his army included 1 million soldiers armed with gunpowder while England’s army had 5 thousand soldiers armed with bows and arrows; Zhu Di commissioned Chinese fleets that mapped the Indian Ocean and brought back exotic animals, trade goods, and knowledge that made China a center of geographic studies in the early 1400s, but such commissions drained their timber and sailor supplies as well, and they were discontinued in 1424 by the new emperor Zhu Gaozhi. For the following 200 years, China became isolated from the rest of the non-Asian world, which is why China had no role in the initial creation of the new world.

CHAPTER 2 - First encounters, first conquests

Christopher Columbus
- After he returned with Taino slaves in January of 1493, Isabella and Ferdinand gave him 17 ships and 12 hundred men for a second voyage to seek slaves and gold. Upon arriving on Hispaniola in 1494, he found that the natives killed the sailors he had left behind in 1492. Word spread of the harsh ways of the Europeans, and the Native Americans became less friendly. The Caribbean had little gold, and many Tainos died from Spanish swords or from forced labor that the Spanish instituted.
- During his third voyage in 1498, he tried to set up a government in Hispaniola. He was sent back to Spain in chains. He had a fourth voyage in 1502, but he never governed again.
There was a Scandinavian settlement called L’Anse aux Meadows on Newfoundland somewhere between 900 and 1000 but was quickly forgotten.
America - the name given to the lands Europeans encountered across the Atlantic after 1492, in honor of the explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who sailed farther south than Columbus other did, and who was certain that he had reached a new continent.
Treaty of Tordesillas - treaty confirmed by the pope in 1494 to resolve the claims of Spain in Portugal in the Americas - in short, Portugal got Brazil
Columbian Exchange - the transatlantic exchange of plants, animals, and diseases that occurred after the first European contact with the Americas
- European diseases - smallpox, measles, influenza, yellow fever, typhus, scarlet fever, diphtheria
- American disease - Syphilis
- European animals - chickens, donkeys, cattle, goats, horses, pigs, sheep, cats
- American animals - turkeys, llamas
- European foods - wheat, barley, rye, oats, apples, peaches, pears, plums, apricots, cherries, bananas, coffee, tea, sugar cane, melons, lemons, oranges, cabbage, carrots, grapes, lettuce, onions, garlic
- American foods - corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, peanuts, pumpkins, pineapples, guava, squash, tomatoes, peppers, papayas, avocados, beans, cassava, blueberries, tobacco, cocoa, vanilla
Silk Road - the overland trading route first established by the Venetian trader Marco Polo between 1271 and 1295 (spanning from Venice to China)
Vasco Nunez de Balboa reached the Isthmus of Panama in 1513 and became the first European to view the Pacific. In 1519, 5 ships and their crews commanded by Ferdinand Magellan began a journey that led them around the tip of South America in 1520 and across the Pacific to the Philippines, where Magellan was killed (the first people to circumnavigate the globe)
Spanish Conquistadores
- Hernán Cortés and the Aztecs - Hernán Cortés sailed from Cuba to Mexico with 600 soldiers in 1519. Within two years, he conquered Tenochtitlan. When he first arrived, some of the Aztecs may have thought Cortés to be their lost god Quetzalcoatl, who had vanished from the place where Cortés landed. In their initial encounter, Aztec Emperor Motecuhzoma welcomed Cortés with an exchange of gifts, which Cortés saw as a sign of submission to Spain. In July 1520, the Aztecs turned on Cortés, and he and his soldiers fled the capital, but with support from thousands of non-Aztec tribes - people who hated Aztec dominance and who hated having their people being human sacrifices - the Spanish army regrouped, and Cortés completed his conquest of the city in August 1521. In place of the destroyed Tenochtitlan, Cortés ordered the “creation” of New Spain and within a generation, Mexico City, filled with great churches and government palaces, had become the home of the Spanish viceroy.
- New Spain - the name of Spain’s first empire in the Americas
- Pizarro and the Incas - In 1532, in Peru, Francisco Pizarro and his army of 168 Spanish soldiers defeated the Inca Emperor Atahualpa and his army of 80 thousand soldiers. The Inca Empire became the Viceroyalty of Peru, which had the purpose of supplying gold and silver to finance Spain’s European ambitions.
- The Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca Empires was possible:
  1. because Aztec resistance was undermined by a sense of fatalism fueled by early visions of their own defeat
  2. many non-Aztecs joined with Cortés, disliking the Aztecs
  3. the Incas could not imagine Pizarro’s initial surprise attack, believing his claim to come in the name of friendship
  4. Spanish horses, swords, and armor were found terrifying
  5. the Aztecs and the Incas could not match the Spanish strategies and tools of war
  6. smallpox - the disease traveled at a faster pace than the Spanish armies and often preceded them
Encomienda - in Spanish colonies, the grant to a Spanish settler of a certain number of Native American subjects, who would pay tribute in goods, labor
Bartolome de Las Casas - he opposed the conquistadores and their usage of slavery and his writings had the purpose of asking Spanish authorities to intervene to protect the Native Americans, which they did, in a minor sense

Martin Luther and his 95 Theses; the Protestant Reformation
Nation-state - a relatively new development in Europe during the 1300s and 1400s in which nations became the major political organizations, replacing both the smaller kingdoms and city states
Peace of Augsburg in 1555 - an agreement among different smaller kingdoms in Germany that no ruler would attack the kingdom of another on religious grounds
Treaty of Westphalia - a 1648 peace treaty between a number of European powers that significantly extended the ideas of the Peace of Augsburg

Ponce de Leon in Florida, 1513-21

Juan Ponce de Leon led the first known European expeditions to Puerto Rico and Florida. In 1508-09, he founded the first Spanish community near what would become San Juan and was named Governor of Puerto Rico. IN 1513, he led an expedition from Puerto Rico that arrived in what he thought was another island, which he named La Florida. Legend says he was seeking a Fountain of Youth. He was seeking an expansion of Spain’s empire in the Americas and a greater wealth for himself. In 1521, Ponce de Leon returned to Florida with some 200 Europeans, Africans, and Puerto Ricans. The Native Americans in Florida didn’t welcome them, and Ponce de Leon was wounded by a poison arrow and died.

Exploring Texas by Accident: Cabeza de Vaca, 1528-36

In 1528, Panfilo de Narvaez with about 400 men, Europeans and a few Africans, sailed to Tampa Bay. They were attacked by Native Americans. They returned to sea and, they thought, Spain, but came ashore from a storm on the coast of Texas. Native Americans provided them with food, water, and shelter. Of the 80 who survived the journey across the Gulf of Mexico, only 15 lived through the first winter on the Texas coasts. While others from the Narvaez expedition may have lived out their lives with the Native Americans, four of them, 3 Spaniards - Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, Andres Dorantes, Alonso del Castillo Maldonado - and an African Muslim slave named Esteban walked home to Mexico City. Their walk took 8 years. During their travel, they developed a reputation as healers and traders and collected information about Native Americans they found. In the Native Americans’ eyes, they were not the same as the other Spaniards who came to kill and take from them. The four men reached Mexico City in 1536.

Exploring the Southwest: Esteban, de Niza, and Coronado, 1539-42

Spanish exploration of American Southwest was inspired from and motivated by the travels of the 4, wanting to explore in search of wealth
A legend told about 7 Christian bishops who had fled from the Muslim invasion of Spain in the 700s and established 7 wealthy cities far to the west
Seven Cities of Cibola - the name given by early Spanish explorers to a number of Native American pueblos
Marcos de Niza led an expedition to find the fabled cities. He had Esteban scout for them. Esteban knew that Native Americans had never seen someone from Africa and he knew how to impress, so he took on aspects of a god. He had come upon wealthy towns until he came to the Zuni Pueblo of Hawikuh. They did not want him there, and when he threatened them, they killed him.
In 1540, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado led an expedition across what is now the US-Mexican border into modern Arizona. The Native Americans he and his men found assured them that the real wealth was just over the horizon in order to not submit to Spanish power or supply the Spanish with food and provisions. In 1541, the expedition set off into modern-day northern Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. They met Native Americans, but did not find any gold or European-style cities. Discouraged, they returned to Mexico City in 1542 with little to show for their efforts.

Exploring the Mississippi River Valley: The de Soto Expedition, 1539-42

Another Spanish explorer, starting in Florida in 1539, Hernando de Soto crossed the Mississippi River in 1541 and explored what is now Arkansas and probably modern-day Texas. Native Americans soon grew hostile to them, given the Spanish desire for slaves, and their populations lessened from European diseases. De Soto died on June 20, 1542. His fellow explorers, 311 survivors, left for Mexico.

Exploring California: The Cabrillo Voyage, 1541-43

Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo was commissioned to investigate the Pacific Coast. Cabrillo had come to New Spain as a young man and amassed a fortune, which he was prepared to use to outfit his own expedition in hope of great returns. In 1542, Cabrillo sailed north from Mexico along the Pacific Coast with three ships “to discover the coast of New Spain” and continue until he reached China, which was assumed to be relatively close by. Cabrillo’s three ships left Navidad, Mexico, in June 1542, and by September had reached San Diego Bay in California. They exchanged gifts with friendly Native Americans and reported seeing a beautiful land. He continued along the Pacific Coast as far as the Russian River in northern California. He overlooked modern-day San Francisco because of the heavy fog, but he did realize that in Monterey Bay, there was a fine harbor. After Cabrillo died of an injury while trying to rescue some of his men from an attack, the expedition returned to Mexico. They had found neither China nor gold.

Early Settlements in Florida: Fort Caroline and St. Augustine, 1562-65

In 1562, Gaspard de Coligny, a French Protestant nobleman and admiral, commissioned expeditions to Florida. As a loyal subject of the French king, Coligny wanted to secure lands for France, as well as wanting to create a safe haven for his fellow Protestants. In 1562, Coligny commissioned Jean Ribault to make an initial trip to Florida, and then commissioned a large French expedition, including many families with their livestock, supplies, and tools, which sailed in 1564. The settlers moved to the mouth of the St Johns River where Jacksonville, Florida is today and built a town they called Fort Caroline after King Charles IX of France, where they meant to stay and build their lives.
The Spanish considered this colony a major religious, political, and commercial threat to Spain’s control of the Americas. Pedro Menendez de Aviles was given jurisdiction of a new Spanish colony to reach from Florida to Newfoundland and told to establish cities in Florida and out the French Protestants. In 1565, Menendez de Aviles founded St. Augustine. All the lands north and west of it, he declared, now belonged to the king of Spain. He began a friendly trade with the Timucua who lived in northern Florida and sought to convert them to Catholicism. The Timucua valued Spanish goods and provided the colony with food, root vegetables, wild fruit, fish, oysters, game, and corn, but they resisted religious conversion. After establishing St. Augustine, de Aviles attacked Fort Caroline, killing all its inhabitants. When the French fleet coming to aid Fort Caroline was shipwrecked along the coast by a hurricane, de Aviles killed the survivors.
The Spanish colonies in Florida were settled by soldiers who didn’t want to create an empire but valued the independence that distance from imperial authorities gave them and by families of artisans and farmers who meant to build a richer life than they could have in Spain.
There were slaves in St. Augustine from the beginning. Although his royal commission had authorized him to bring up to 500 African slaves to St. Augustine, de Aviles brought about 50. There was also intermarriage among Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans in Spanish Florida. St. Augustine became a place where Europeans from other nations settled, whether from a shipwreck, to escape Europe, or to start a new life.

Settling New Mexico: 1598

In 1598, the Spanish viceroy in Mexico City appointed a new governor for what was called “New Mexico.” The rumors about the great wealth existing there had never died. The Spanish was also worried about the English.
In 1579, Francis Drake, an English privateer, sailed up the coast of California, duplicating Cabrillo’s route. Drake then turned west and duplicated the route of Ferdinand Magellan, sailing across the Pacific and on around the world before returning to London in 1580. To the authorities in Spain, this achievement was a real threat.
Privateer - a pirate working for the government
Don Juan de Onate was appointed governor of New Mexico with instructions not to follow the harsh policies of Cortés or Pizarro but rather to treat the natives nicely and convert them. Onate’s expedition included 400 men, women, and children, among them a few Spanish soldiers, Franciscan friars, and Native Americans, along with supply wagons, cattle, sheep, and mules. Onate’s wife, Isabel Tolosa Cortés Montezuma, was a granddaughter of Cortés and a great-granddaughter of the Aztec emperor Montezuma.
On April 30, 1598, the expedition stopped on the banks of the Rio Grande and claimed all of the lands and peoples to the north for Spain. Since Coronado’s day, the Spanish could be ruthless but seemed to have little staying power. With the Onate expedition, Spanish occupation of New Mexico would come closer to being permanent.
Onate sought political allegiance from the Pueblos of southern New Mexico. In July 1598, he asked Pueblo chiefs to swear allegiance to Spain and convert to Christianity. Onate chose to interpret their lack of hostility as agreement.
Onate also built a capital, which he named San Gabriel.
The peace did not last. Zutucapan, the leader of the Acoma Pueblo, attacked a Spanish scouting party in late 1598. In 1599, Onate struck back. After a fierce battle, the Spaniards, whose guns, swords, and horses gave them a huge advantage, burned Acoma to the ground. One thousand of its residents were killed, and the remaining 500 were taken as slaves. The male captives had one foot cut off. When the Jumano also resisted Onate, he hanged their chiefs and burned their village.
Onate’s cruelty and his failure to find riches led to his recall in 1609. The new governor Don Pedro de Peralta moved the capital to a new town that he created and named Santa Fe, in 1610. The colony’s attention turned from gold to farming. Churches were built at the center of each pueblo. The Spanish hoped these churches would become new centers of Native American life and faith, but tensions would continue that would eventually culminate some 50 years later in a revolt.

First French Visit to the Atlantic Coast of the US - Verrazano, 1525

In 1524, the French king commissioned an Italian sailor, Giovanni da Verrazano, to explore the Atlantic Coast and find a sea route to Asia for France. Verrazano left France in January 1524 and landed on what is now Cape Fear, North Carolina, two months later. On April 17, 1524, Verrazano became the first European to sail into New York Harbor. He continued north, visiting Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay, Maine, and Newfoundland, and he mapped much of the Atlantic Coast of the future US and Canada before returning to France.

Jacques Cartier Seeks a Sea Route to Asia, 1534

In 1534, France tried again to find a northern sea route to Asia. Jacques Cartier was authorized but didn’t find the route - which didn’t exist except through then-frozen Arctic ice - but he explored Newfoundland and the gulf of the St. Lawrence River, laying the basis for future French claim to these lands. He also began a trade in furs that would have great significance for French and English relations with Native Americans.
On a second voyage in 1535-36, Cartier explored the St. Lawrence River far upstream, coming to the sites of Quebec and Montreal. More than a thousand friendly Native Americans came to the river to greet him. He traded European goods, including knives, for food, beginning a trading relationship that would transform the lives of native tribes and Europeans. But Cartier stayed too long, and when winter arrived, he couldn’t return to France because the river was frozen. Cartier spent a terrible winter on the St. Lawrence, buried in deep snow and losing a quarter of his crew to disease and cold.

England’s Reformation Shapes the Country

Henry VIII was given, by the pope, the title “Defender of the Faith”
Anglicans - within the Church of England, one group of Protestants who wanted to establish a church that was led by the English monarchy
Puritans - individuals who believed that the reforms of the Church of England had not gone far enough in improving the church

Elizabethan Explorers and Pirates

By the 1580s, warfare and piracy became the dominant role of the English who visited the Americas. Building settlements was not a priority of the time. If powerful Catholic Spain was exploiting the continents for gold and silver, England saw no reason not to relieve the Spanish ships of some of their treasure without going to the trouble of mining it themselves.
Francis Drake was the most famous privateer, and he was licensed for piracy by Queen Elizabeth. Licensing individual captions to harass the Spanish treasure fleets was far cheaper than supporting a large royal navy, and the English government, at minimal risk, kept a fifth of whatever the pirates brought to England. Pirates may have supplied 10 percent of English imports in the 1590s. The decades of legalized piracy also helped expand the technical knowledge of English mariners. The role of this piracy was instrumental in laying a foundation for England’s sea power.
Francis Drake was an explorer as well as a privateer. During his voyage around the glove from 1577 to 1580 - the first commander of such an expedition to survive - he confirmed the contours of the Americas for the English. He then continued across the Pacific and around Africa before returning to London. In 1585, he attacked and burned St. Augustine, Florida. In 1588, he helped defeat the Spanish Armada. His exploits brought considerable wealths to Queen Elizabeth’s England while weakening Spanish control of the seas. By the time Drake died in 1596, while again harassing the Spanish is Central America, English sailors were confident that they could travel anywhere without trouble, even if Spain still controlled the most valuable land in the Americas.

Walter Raleigh and the Lost Colony of Roanoke

In 1584, Walter Raleigh was authorized by England to use his own funds to occupy lands in North America. Raleigh’s role was to fund and authorize the missions. At the time, England and Raleigh himself were most interested in establishing a base where privateers could easily operate and profit financially from these missions. The first mission in 1584 was a reconnaissance trip to identify potential sites. The group discovered Roanoke Island and was received warmly by the Algonquian people, and Manteo and Wanchese returned to England with the crew. In 1585, Raleigh sent 100 men to Roanoke along with the two Algonquian emissaries. When the man landed, one of their ships ran aground, and most of the food they had brought was ruined. The Roanoke Native Americans weren’t happy to feed the colonists that they suspected were trying to dominate them, and a battle broke out in 1586 in which the Roanoke chief Wingina was killed. When Francis Drake arrived later that spring to rest his crews and refit his ships, he found the survivors in disarray. Instead of refitting, he agreed to take the survivors back to England when they decided to abandon the colony.
Raleigh wasn’t discouraged, and decided that a colony of families would be successful than a colony of men. In 1587, he convinced English investors to create a new colony on the Chesapeake Bay, which would have more navigable waters than the shallows around Roanoke. Colonists were promised 500 acres per family. Some 100 people left England to create this new colony, but events along the way landed them back at Roanoke, amid the Algonquians who had fought their predecessors. Regardless, the colony was established, houses built, and the settlers began their new lives. Virginia Dare was born soon after the families arrived, the first English child born in the US.
The 1587 Roanoke colony failed mysteriously. The settlers had been left in what seemed like good shape with a promise that resupply ships would arrive the following spring. However, no ships were allowed to leave England in 1588 because of the threatened Spanish attack. The government commandeered every ship to oppose the Spanish Armada. Between 1587 and 1589, the worst drought in the area in 800 years struck. Drought increased tensions with the nearby Native Americans, who became much more reluctant to provide food when they faced their own shortages. When John White returned to Roanoke with the promised supplies in 1590, he found the colony abandoned. Whether the colonists were killed or melted into the surrounding tribes is unknown.

Unit Two

Chapter 3 - Settlements, alliances, and resistance

Initially, most European interactions with North America were towards filling the enormous European demand for codfish. Fishermen from France, England, and the Basque regions of Spain spent summers off the coast of Canada and Maine. Few stayed the winter, and no permanent colonies were founded. Most of the time, the Native Americans and the Europeans avoided each other.
In 1585, Richard Hakluyt the elder wrote Pamphlet for the Virginia Enterprise to convince his fellow Englishmen that a settlement would be beneficial. He wanted to convert Native Americans to Protestantism, which meant a rich profit and a military base for England against Catholic Spain, in his mind.
In the 1500s, explorers had come to and quickly left North America. In the 1600s, Europeans began to stay.

Significant Dates

1607 - Jamestown, Virginia, founded by English
1608 - Quebec founded by French
1610 - Santa Fe founded as Spanish capital of New Mexico
1619 - African slaves sold in Jamestown
1620 - Plymouth, Massachusetts, founded by English Pilgrims
1624 - Fort Orange (later Albany), New York, founded by Dutch
1626 - New Amsterdam (later New York City) founded by Dutch
1630 - Boston, Massachusetts, founded by English Puritans
1634 - Maryland founded by Lord Baltimore as a haven for English Catholics
1636 - Rhode Island founded
1637 - Pequot War in New England
1638 - First African slaves brought to Boston, Massachusetts
1639 - Fundamental Orders of Connecticut confirm government for Hartford-based colony (founded in 1637)
1642-1649 - English Civil War
1649-1658 - England governed as a Puritan Commonwealth
1660 - Charles II begins to rule in England
1661 - Maryland law defines slavery as lifelong and inheritable
1663 - Carolina colony founded by England
1664 - English capture New Netherlands colony, rename it New York
1675 - King Philip’s War in Massachusetts
1676 - Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia
1680 - Pueblo Indian Revolt in New Mexico
1681 - Pennsylvania founded by William Penn as a haven for English Quakers
1682 - La Salle claimed the Mississippi River Valley for France
1718 - French establish New Orleans; Spanish found San Antonio, Texas

The English Settle in North America

1603, James I is king of England, makes peace with Spain, ends the royal support for Queen Elizabeth’s legalized piracy
England wanted a larger role in the Americas. Investors seeking financial gain created the Virginia Company. Investors sent Englishmen to America to find minerals and to find a shortcut to China, and advised them to avoid a Spanish attack and locate their settlements accordingly (away from the coast) and to gain as much knowledge and food from the Native Americans as possible. Within about 30 years, England had settled or claimed large territories, and their claims continued to expand into the 1700s.

Colonizing Virginia: Jamestown

In 1607, 105 men from the Virginia Company arrived in North America and named their new community Jamestown in honor of the king. The company appointed a council of six to govern the colony and left it to the council to elect its own president.
They had a terrible water supply from the James River. 1607 and 1608 were drought years, which led to a severe shortage of food. The winter of 1607-08 was very cold, and the Native Americans were suffering from the same drought and cold and were hence reluctant to trade food with the colonists. Waterborne disease and and starvation weakened bodies, and few of the English escaped terrible bouts of sickness.
The members of the council constantly disagreed - they executed one of the councilors as a Spanish spy - and the rest of the colonists fought each other bitterly. Although the colony’s primary purpose was to enrich investors in London, those who were in Virginia didn’t really care whether the investors were enriched or not. John Smith was the only member of the council not from the British nobility. By 1608, only 38 of the 105 colonists were still alive.
By 1607, generations of Atlantic Coast Native Americans had substantial experience with Europeans. They had seen their ships, traded with them, fought them, and some had even traveled to Europe and brought back tales of how these white adventurers lived. Europeans who were shipwrecked or from failed colonies had melded into the Native American tribes and shared their knowledge with them. The Spanish at St. Augustine had tried to establish a northern outpost in the region. The Native Americans’ opinion of the Europeans was not favorable. For the Paspahegh tribe, on whose land Jamestown was built, the English were trespassing. Relationships between Jamestown and all of the local Native Americans, a confederation of Algonquian-speaking tribes of 13,000 to 15,000 people, were tense.
During its first weeks, the colony was attacked, and from that experience, the settlers built a stockade. The English learned that the Paspahegh and some 30 other nearby tribes were under the rule of an overlord called Powhatan whom the English described as an emperor over the tribal chiefs. If the colonists wanted to make a lasting accommodation, it needed to be with him.
By his own account, experienced soldier John Smith saved the colony.
During the early months of the settlement, while Powhatan was trying to understand what the Englishmen wanted, Smith was exploring the countryside and was taken prisoner by the Algonquians and brought before Powhatan. Smith was about to be executed when Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas (already known to Smith for her work as a negotiator with Jamestown) rescued him. Powhatan granted Smith a reprieve. Most historians now believe that Powhatan scripted the whole event. After his rescue, Powhatan acknowledged friendship with Smith and gave him an Algonquian name. Smith had been adopted.
Pocahontas married tobacco planter John Rolfe and was known in England as Rebecca Rolfe, the woman who rescued John Smith
Smith didn’t accept Powhatan’s offer to be in the Algonquian confederation although he didn’t formally reject it. The English offered Powhatan an English crown that symbolized his place in a world under rule by King James.
In the early years, Powhatan could have easily destroyed Jamestown by direct attack or withholding food. Instead, the Powhatan confederation fed the English and saw benefit in trade. The English brought valuable new goods. Powhatan wanted to use the English to strengthen his position against other tribes. The English avoided war and starvation and survived by making an alliance with Powhatan.
Smith became governor in 1608 and instituted a policy that “he who does not work, does not eat.” For the tiny colony to survive, the back-breaking labor of farming and stockade building was needed, and Smith set everyone to it. Without him, Jamestown would have failed.
Smith returned to England in 1609, and because of such, he wasn’t in Jamestown for the “starving time” of the winter of 1609-10 when the colony also died out from starvation and disease. Realizing that the peaceful trade he hoped for wasn’t happening, Powhatan withdrew contact with the Europeans, which meant the English couldn’t rely on the Native Americans for food. The English attacked the Native Americans, burned their houses, plundered their sacred sites, and store their valuables. A party seeking food was founded dead with their mouths stuffed with bread by the Native Americans.
In spring of 1610, the surviving colonists wanted to abandon Jamestown, so they burned the town and sailed down the James River, but before they reached the sea, they ran into an English fleet with 400 men led by the new governor Lord de la Warr and enough supplies to last a year. The colony was rebuilt where it had been.
While the Virginian colonists starved, the Virginia Colony had reorganized itself and sold stock to raise funds. It also enlisted clergy across England to preach on the importance of colonizing Virginia. The venture became a national mission; it was England’s duty to send missionaries and build a permanent Protestant base in the Americas that would convert Native Americans and serve England in future confrontations with Spain.
Jamestown survived. Thousands of colonists fleeing England arrived in Virginia, but disease and limited food reduced their population significantly. Jamestown’s investors were disappointed; no route to China had been found, there were no precious metals in the colony, farming returned little to the investors, and there wasn’t lucrative trade with the Native Americans.
Columbus brought tobacco to Europe. Within a few decades, smoking tobacco became popular in Europe. King James fundamentally opposed smoking tobacco but not enough not to profit from it; he created a royal monopoly. Virginia had the ideal climate and conditions for producing tobacco, and tobacco quickly became valuable.
In 1622, led by Powhatan’s brother and tribe’s new leader Opechancanough, the Algonquians attacked and killed some 300 of the 1,200 English settlers. The Native Americans didn’t like the continual encroachment of the English and the lack of trade or other benefits. Attacks went on for over a decade, and the conflict eventually backrupted the Virginia Company, but in 1624, Virginia had been converted to a royal colony by the king, so efforts to settle there continued.
The shift from trade with Native Americans to tobacco-based agriculture in the 1620s sealed the fate of the Native Americans who had been essential to the colony’s initial survival. Native American land became more valuable than the Native Americans themselves, and disease was decimating Native American populations. The emphasis on agriculture also meant that many Englishmen would settle and farm the land. Thousands of Africans were brought to the Americas as slaves to produce the new crops. Tobacco was a main factor in reshaping who would be a part of this new English-speaking nation and the role they would play in the society that emerged.

The Massachusetts Colonies: Plymouth, Boston, and Beyond

During the beginning of the 1600s, England was becoming overpopulated, and from that surplus of people, the idea arose to ship the poor to the colonies for agricultural work, as well as the Protestant extremists that King James disliked.
Protestants who wanted more of a reformation from the English Church became known as Puritans. The Puritans believed that the office of bishop had no base in the Bible and that each individual congregation should be self-governing. They believed each individual was responsible for reading and understanding the Bible.
The Church of England wanted religious unity. Puritans believed that they could purify the Anglican Church and work for change. Separatists, who believed that leaving England was better than trying to change the Anglican Church, thought that the church was hopelessly corrupt and that they needed to form their own religious communities. The Separatists were constantly in trouble with English authorities, as everyone in England was expected to be a part of the Anglican Church and worship every Sunday. To separate oneself from the church, to worship in a place or form not authorized by the church, was treason. King James wanted the Separatists out of his country, and they wanted to leave as well.
Pilgrims - a name given to the Separatists within the Church who settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts
The Pilgrims founded the second permanent English colony in North America at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620. The origins of Plymouth colony lay in a small community of Separatists who left England for Holland in 1607 where they were welcomed along with other English religious dissenters. The Separatists still considered themselves English and worried about raising kids in Holland who would be more Dutch than English. Eventually, they decided that North America would be the better place for them. In 1619, these Separatist Pilgrims secured a grant of land from the Virginia Colony, got financial backing from investors, and hired a ship. The Mayflower sailed from Plymouth, England on September 6, 1620 with 102 passengers. Half of the passengers were members of the congregation, and the others were along for adventure or profit.
After a stormy 2 month voyage, they reached land farther north than intended. Realizing that they were out of the Virginia territory and that their new community was split between its religious members and others, they made the Mayflower Contract.
Mayflower Contract - the 1620 agreement made among the Pilgrims and others (who the Pilgrims called Strangers) on board the ship that brought them to Plymouth. Future generations saw the Mayflower Contract as the beginning of government by consent of the people, while future historians saw it as merely an agreement among a diverse group of people to try to get along with each other through what they knew would be a difficult winter in a strange land.
The Pilgrims’ first landing in November 1620 was on the outer end of Cape Cod at what is now Princeton, Massachusetts. By December, they had moved across Cape Cod to a place they named Plymouth where a high hill offered protection and a large level area leading down to the harbor was a good place to build a town. Plymouth was empty when the Pilgrims arrived. In 1616, 1,000 or more Native Americans had lived around Plymouth, but an epidemic (European diseases from European fishermen and traders who traveled along the coast) wiped them out. The new community was quickly built on the empty land.
The Pilgrims had arrived too late to build the shelter they needed for a New England winter, and during the winter of 1620-21, about half the community died from disease, malnutrition, and cold. They didn’t have contact with Native Americans, but they knew there were being watched.
In spring 1621, a Native American walked into the heart of the Plymouth community, and when he arrived, he said, Welcome Englishmen! Their visitor was Samoset, a native of modern-day Maine, where English fishermen had been landing for a century, hence his knowledge of the language. He had been asked to visit them by Massasoit, the leader of the Wampanoags of the area. Massasoit was familiar with the English ships that had sailed along the coast and had sent exploring parties ashore. He was ready to make contact.
After Samoset’s visit, Massasoit arrived with many warriors and a translator named Squanto (he had been captured by previous English explorers and been taken to London; he became a go-between for Massasoit with the Pilgrims, although neither side every fully trusted him). Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to find hibernating eels in nearby creeks and how to catch herring and use them as fertilizer for planting corn, which was the salvation of the colony. The Pilgrims concluded an agreement with Massasoit that led to 54 years of peace.
In the fall of 1621, with peace concluded and the first successful harvest accomplished, Governor Bradford announced that it was time to rejoice together with the people who had helped them survive. The first Thanksgiving (the Pilgrims never used the word) was a weeklong time of feasting on the fruits of the harvest and on turkeys, geese, deer, and stews. The Pilgrims were recreating a traditional English harvest festival. Most of those present at the first Thanksgiving were Wampanoags, including Massasoit who brought gifts of freshly killed deer to the festivities.
Puritans - a name given to those more extreme Protestants within the Church of England who wanted to stay within the church but purify it of what they saw as Roman Catholic ways
King Charles I was extremely hostile to the Puritans. Advocating reform within the established church became more difficult and dangerous. A group of Puritans controlled a corporation, the Massachusetts Bay Company, to explore and settle North America. It was similar to the Virginia Company, only Puritan. They planted their first colony in Salem, north of present-day Boston in 1629 and soon wanted to expand. In late 1629, someone realized that wording in the charter would allow them to move the whole company (its charter and the control that went with it) out of England and into the colony that the Massachusetts Bay Company controlled. If successful, this move would create not only a self-governing Puritan company but also a company far away from the king and the bishops who were making things difficult for the Puritans in England.
John Winthrop, an ardent Puritan, was invited to be governor of the new colony. In spring 1630, 14 ships left England for Massachusetts Bay with their new governor and their charter on board. By the end of summer, more than 1,000 people and 200 cattle landed in the Massachusetts colony. In the next decade, known as the Great Migration, some 20,000 people followed. The Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony soon had more people than Plymouth and Jamestown combined.
The Massachusetts Puritans had a clear sense of purpose: the Puritan Commonwealth in New England could be a new model for old England.
The Charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company - the legal charter given to the London-based corporation that launched Massachusetts Bay colony
The Pilgrims had written their Mayflower Contract as a simple basis for the colony’s government. The Puritan migrants of 1630 meant to use the more detailed Charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company to organize a permanent self-governing colony in Massachusetts.
The first meeting of the Great and General Court (the colony’s governing body) on New England soil took place in August 1630. The business venture in England transformed into a government in Massachusetts. Annual elections chose the governor, deputy-governor, and members of the General Court (state legislature). Only church members in good standing could vote. This settlement was designed to be a model religious colony. When King Charles I realized what the Puritans had done, he sent a ship to recover the charter. Governor Winthrop called out the Puritan militia and mounted cannons at the entrance to Boston harbor, and those under royal command decided to not bring the charter back with them.
The Puritans valued literacy, as they needed to be able to read the Bible. In 1636, the colony’s legislature ordered the creation of a college that would soon be named Harvard. They created the Boston Latin School to prepare young men for college, and in 1647, the legislature required every town in the colony to provide for a school. While towns found ways to avoid the law, literacy was still important in Boston.
Fundamental Orders of Connecticut - the 1639 charter that Massachusetts authorities allowed a new separate colony based in Hartford to adopt, which confirmed its independence from Massachusetts
The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay had their differences with one another. Several splits occurred during the first decade of the colony. In 1637, Puritans on the Connecticut River found the government in Boston too restrictive and created their own independent colony in Connecticut based at Hartford. Two years later, with permission from the authorities in Boston, the Hartford colonists established a formal government for their colony known as the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut. The document offered more men the right to vote than did the rules then in force in Massachusetts Bay. Some have considered it has the first written constitution in the Americas, though others, looking at the Massachusetts Charter and other such documents, dispute that claim. Other Puritans found the Boston government not strict enough and created a more theocratic colony at New Haven the following year.
More troublesome to the puritans was Roger Williams, whose advocacy of freedom of conscience for every individual was almost unique in the 1600s. Williams was a supporter or the Puritan cause in England and arrived in Boston in 1632 only a year after the city's founding but he quickly got into trouble with Boston's magistrates because he asserted that civil authority could not enforce religious laws including a law against blasphemy. 1835 he was convicted of “erroneous” opinions. In the winter of 1636, he walked from his old home in Salem Massachusetts to the top of Narragansett Bay (more than 65 miles) and soon established a new colony called Providence where he invited all those “distressed of conscience” to the first colony that would separate church and state and grant full liberty to people of any religious opinion, a direct slap a Puritan efforts at religious uniformity. Williams established close working relationship with both the Wampanoag and Narragansett tribes and insisted on paying them for the land on which he established his colony, unlike the settlers of Boston or Plymouth. Under William’s leadership Rhode Island became a haven for religious dissenters.
In addition, Anne Hutchinson caused a stir with her charismatic preachings and her belief that God’s inspirations could be more immediate than most Puritans believed. While Puritans insisted that every man and woman should read and interpret the Bible, they expected the interpretation to follow certain paths. In addition, only men are supposed to preach. When Hutchinson said that she herself received direct revelations from God, she had moved beyond what the Puritans would tolerate and was banished from the colony. She and her followers made their way, first to Roger Williams’s colony in Rhode Island, and then to Dutch New Amsterdam where she was killed in an Indian attack in 1643.
While the first generation of New England’s founders argued about whose version of Protestant theology was correct, their American-born children and grandchildren sometimes wandered quite far from the theological interests of the founders. The first Massachusetts Puritans saw themselves as being on an “errand into the wilderness.” Religious fervor and conversions were less common in the next generations.
In Massachusetts in the 1600s, only those who could convincingly demonstrate that they had a true religious conversion could be church members, and only church members could vote. Since one had to convince a congregation that they had truly been converted to become a church member, many could not qualify for either church membership or the right to vote. People who were excluded from there privileges weren’t happy colonial residents.
Halfway Covenant - plan adopted in 1662 by New England clergy that allow adults who have been baptized because their parents were church members, but who had not yet experienced conversion, to have their own children baptized
In 1662, Massachusetts clergy adopted the Halfway Covenant. This compromise was it significant one for the community in which church membership was Central to all out. In time, that compromise also led to many Massachusetts churches allowing any who could demonstrate familiarity Christian doctrine and led a good life to be church members and therefore also voters.

Maryland

Proprietary Colony - a colony created when the English monarch granted a huge tract of land to an individual as his private property
After Virginia and the New England colonies, the next English colony to be established on the mainland of North America was Maryland. Earlier colonies had been founded by corporations or were royal colonies ruled by governors appointed by the king. Maryland represented something new, a proprietary colony. A proprietary colony, of which Maryland was the model, was essentially owned by one person and are two were, as the Maryland charter said, “true and absolute lords and proprietors.” The proprietor might allow others to own land and might take advice from local officials, but the whole colony was private property and, as such, could be passed from generation to generation within the proprietor's family. King Charles I established this model when he offered to give Maryland to George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore.
Lord Baltimore was a devout Catholic, and Catholics were persecuted in England. But King Charles was sympathetic despite popular opposition. Lord Baltimore, with the King’s support, was determined to establish Maryland as a Haven for English Catholics. After George Calvert died, his son, Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore developed the colony. He realized that he had to recruit more people than a Catholic-only colony would attract. So, in 1649, Maryland granted freedom of worship to all Christians, including Protestants of any type.
Headright system - a system of land distribution during the early colonial ear that granted settlers a set of land for each “head” (or a person) who settled in the colony
While the proprietors retained final authority in Maryland, they agreed in 1635 to call a representative assembly. After initially establishing a colony of large estates, they also decided, following Virginia’s lead, to give every European settler 100 acres, another 100 for each additional adult member of the family, and 50 acres for each child. This headright system made moving to Maryland very popular. From the beginning, Marylanders knew that, as in Virginia, tobacco would be the key to their economic success. With tobacco came the need for more workers. Thus, African slavery came early to Maryland. In 1661, Maryland was the first colony to formalize laws governing slavery. The laws included the stipulation that slaves inherited their status from their mother and that slavery for those born into it was for life.

Additional Colonies: Continued Settlement and Development

The first English colonies of Jamestown and Plymouth were models for what came later. The colonies also studied the prosperous English colonies that were developing on the island of Bermuda and in the caribbean. The island colonies attracted their own settlers from England and brought far more slaves from Africa than did the mainland colonies (to work on the expanding sugar plantations).

Connecticut and New Hampshire

After the creations of the colonies at Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and New Haven, the New England colonies continued to be reshaped. Connecticut was united with New Haven in 1662. Massachusetts Bay Colony merged with plymouth in 1685. New Hampshire became a separate colony under a royal governor in 1691. (Vermont didn’t separate from New York until after the American Revolution, and Maine was a part of Massachusetts until 1820.)

New York

New York was settled before Maryland, but not by the English. It became English only after the English Civil War from 1642 to 1649. What is now New York was settled by the Netherlands, or Holland, a new Protestant country carved out of what had been Spanish possessions in the late 1500s. Sailing for the Dutch, Henry Hudson had explored much of the Atlantic Coast in 1609. His voyage gave the Netherlands the basis for its claim to land in North America. The Dutch West India Company was set up in 1621, and it built a Dutch Trading Post at Fort Orange -- now Albany New York -- in 1624. The economic base of the Dutch colony was the fur trade. The Iroquois were happy to trade with the Dutch. They benefited from fostering competition between Dutch and French traders to see who would offer the best price for furs and be the best military allies.
In 1626, the Dutch built a settlement and commercial center called New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island, which, according to legend, was purchased from local Indians for 60 Dutch guilders (calculated at approximately $24 by a historian in the 1840s over $1,000 today but still exceedingly cheap). There is some debate about which tribe actually received any payment, though one was recorded in Holland. The payment reflected a European understanding of land ownership. Most Native American tribes did not think in terms of someone actually owning land. To them, the land, air, and water were open to all.
Despite efforts by its long-time governor Peter Stuyvesant to enforce religious uniformity and ban the Jewish, New Amsterdam soon became a haven for religious dissenters including the Jewish, Catholics, Quakers, and Muslims. It was also home to Dutch, German, French, Swedish, Portuguese, and English settlers. The Dutch were active in the slave trade. New Amsterdam had the largest number of African slaves in North America in the 1600s. As a trading center, New Amsterdam also saw many native Americans who came to the city to sell furs and buy European goods. Successive Dutch governors banned sexual relations between the Dutch residents and Native Americans, but the ban was not always honored.
Patroons - Dutch settlers who were given vast tracts of land along the Hudson River between New Amsterdam and Albany in return for bringing at least 50 immigrants to work the land.
While the heart of the Dutch colony remained on Manhattan Island, the Dutch authorities offered large tracts of land to wealthy Dutch citizens, known as patroons, to develop the lands along the Hudson River between New Amsterdam and Albany. Wealthy Dutch investors who promised to settle at least 50 people on their land were given huge tracts of land, which they controlled as private fiefdoms. Nevertheless New Netherlands never had more than 10,000 European and African residents.
In 1664, King Charles II gave New Amsterdam to his younger brother, the Duke of York (who later became King James II). That the Dutch already had a settlement on the land didn’t bother them. Having been “given” the colony, the duke sent a fleet to New Amsterdam to take it. There was little resistance to the English take over; Governor Peter Stuyvesant was unpopular, and the English promised to respect Dutch property. The Dutch briefly recaptured the colony in 1673, but it returned to English rule permanently the following year. The heart of Dutch oceanic empire was elsewhere; they didn’t want to fight the English over this remote outpost.
The Duke of york divided the colony, keeping New York for himself and giving New Jersey to two political allies. For the rest of the 1600s, New Jersey remained a colony of small farms of limited profit to its proprietors, although it attracted a diverse group of European settlers because its proprietors offered land at low prices and gave settlers significant religious and political freedom. But New York, with its great harbor and access to the interior via the Hudson River, quickly became one of the most valuable English colonies.

Pennsylvania and Delaware

Pennsylvania was a proprietary colony and a haven for persecuted religious group but also open to all. Pennsylvania’s proprietor was William Penn, the son of Sir William Penn, an admiral in the Royal Navy with close connections to King Charles II. William Penn the younger inherited the right to collect substantial debt that the king owed the Penn family. King Charles II repaid the debt in the form of land in North America. While William Penn inherited both fortune and royal connections, unlike his admiral father, he was a Quaker (their name originated because they quaked in the face of God). When they gathered for worship, Quakers sat in silence until someone was moved by the Spirit to speak. They didn’t have a formal clergy and gave women and men equal standing in their community, the Society of Friends. Quakers were also pacifists who wouldn’t serve in the military. Because they refused to serve in the military and attend the Church of England, the Quakers were constantly in legal trouble. Penn was briefly jailed for following his Quaker practices.
Penn received a grant from King Charles II in 1681, and in the following year, he traveled to Pennsylvania and founded Philadelphia (the City of Brotherly Love). Penn recruited settlers from England and the rest of Europe, especially in Germany. By 1700, 18,000 Europeans had arrived. Penn insisted on peaceful trade with the Native Americans. Although the king granted him the land, Penn paid the Native Americans for their land. During Penn’s lifetime, Pennsylvania was a peaceful place; tribes from other colonies found a new home there.
Penn didn’t outlaw slavery in Pennsylvania. In 1684 (2 years after its founding), 150 African slaves arrived in Philadelphia. Slaves were household servants, and by the early 1700s, slaves made of one-sixth of the city’s population. In rural communities, slaves worked in iron furnaces, mines, tanneries, salt works, and on farms.
Penn tried to create a prosperous colony based on high ideals, but he was also an aristocrat with absolute power. By the 1690s, many people (including the Quakers who appreciated their religious freedom) demanded more political freedom. In 1701, Penn agreed to a Charter of Liberties that established an elected legislature, although the legislature and the Penn family would continue to argue until the beginnings of the American Revolution.
The charter allowed the three most southern counties of Pennsylvania to create their own assembly, which became the core of the separate colony of Delaware. The first Europeans to settle in Delaware were Swedish and Finnish, creating the New Sweden colony at Fort Christina (today’s Wilmington, Delaware) in 1638. The Dutch of New Amsterdam conquered the colony in 1655 before they themselves were defeated by the English in 1664. The area was included in the land grant given to William Penn, but its separate history and geographical distance limited its relationship to the rest of Pennsylvania.

Carolina

The land was contested between England, Spain, and the Native American tribes who lived there, but England meant to claim the area. Soon after coming to the throne, Charles II rewarded eight of his supporters and sought to secure England’s land claims by creating a colony named Carolina. The proprietors developed an elaborate hierarchical society government that had the proprietors on the top followed by the local gentry, then poor white servants, with African slaves at the bottom. THe city of Charles Town, later Charleston, became the colony’s capital.
Carolina was a divided colony. The north composed of poor white farmers from Virginia, and the south, large-scale rice growing created a rich colony. Much of the colony’s commercial success focused on the city and harbor at Charleston and on trade with the British Caribbean colonies, especially Barbados. Many of the early immigrants were from Barbados, both wealthy Europeans who became the elite of the Mainland colony and African slaves who did the actual work of the rice farming. Following the model of the Barbados, which depended on plantations to grow sugarcane, the southern part of Carolina became one of the earliest plantation economies on the mainland of North America. The split between the north and south was finalized when King George II officially divided the colony in 1729.

Georgia

The last English colony that would later be part of the United States was Georgia, founded in 1733 for idealistic reasons. James Oglethorpe, a war hero in England, wanted to create a place where the poorest of England's poor, those in debtors prisons, could find new lives. He also believed that England needed a strong Frontier Colony on the border with Spanish Florida. These settlers, people whose alternative might be prison, would be inspired to not only be Farmers but also soldiers within this frontier border. Given this focus, Oglethorpe excluded Catholics, who might be secretly loyal to Catholic Spain, and Africans, free or enslaved, since they might be tempted to run away. With Georgia, the 13 colonies that went on to unite and 1776 were in place.

Africans and Indentured Servants in England’s Colonies

In 1619, a Dutch ship arrived at Jamestown. John Rolfe, anxious to expand the workforce for his tobacco farm, traded food supplies to the Dutch in return for 20 African slaves. Rolf's purchase of other humans is unusually given as the date for the beginning of slavery in the United States while the Spanish had African slaves in Florida during the 1500s. A census of Virginia in 1620 that didn't include Native Americans listed 32 Africans out of a total population of 982. Nevertheless, the exchange of American-grown foodstuffs for African people that took place in 1619 was significant. Although it would have been Impossible to predict it then, slave labor would become the economic foundation of the colonies and of the new nation that emerged from them.
The slavery that existed in British North America in the early 1600s was profoundly different from what slavery had been in the early 1500s or from what it became in the colonies in the early 1700s. In the earliest years, slavery, though very difficult, was less harsh and hopeless than it became after about 1680. When John Rolfe purchased those African slaves in 1619, it wasn't clear what their status would be. Slavery hadn't been codified either as a lifelong status or a something associated always with race.
The first generation of African slaves in Virginia off and worked alongside with English and Irish servants, many who had little choice about coming to America, but also with capture Native Americans. Race was always a factor, but racial lines were blurred. Servants and slaves lived together, created new families together, and resisted together when they felt ill-treated.
Indentured servants - An individual who contracted to serve for a period of four to seven years in return for payment of passage to America
In the small farms of the Chesapeake comma in the middle colonies, and a New England, slaves worked side-by-side with those who own the land and with indentured servants. Some of these indentured servants came to find a better life, and others came as an alternative to prison in England. During a term of indenture, a servant was treated like a slave. The difference between indentured servanthood and slavery was that servants were set free at the end of their term. Until the late 1640s, the majority died before completing their term and even after earning their freedom. Most of the newly freed were not able to earn much, although a few crossword and join the elite. Servants and slaves often intermarried and saw themselves as a united group.
The Africans, like the European servants, dreamed of being free to own their own land. That dream wasn’t impossible in the early 1600s. For example, Anthony Johnson was sold as a slave in Jamestown in 1621. After over a decade of labor, he was allowed to farm independently while still being a slave. He married a woman named Mary, had children, and eventually gained his freedom and later owned a farm.
On the eastern shore where the Johnsons lived, there were some 40 free black people out of a total black population of 300. 30% of the people of African descent in parts of Virginia were free in 1668.
In the North, slavery was more urban than rural. In the cities, slaves worked as household servants or worked on wagons and wharves. Northern slaves were more integrated into Euro-American society, had less contact with fellow Africans and African traditions, and had much more freedom than later generations of slaves.

England’s Wars, England’s Colonies

The religious and political battles in England fueled settlement in North America. England’s tensions spilled over into its American colonies.
In the 1670s, internal tensions burst into violence in the colonies. King Philip’s War in Massachusetts was one of the most vicious wars in North America. In Virginia, backcountry farmers took up arms against the royal governor in 1679. The growth, tensions, and violence all helped created the political and cultural structures of the colonies of British North America in the 1700s.

Civil War and Revolution in England

When King James died in 1625, his son became King Charles I (r. 1625-49). King Charles was known for his religious sincerity and lack of political skill. The king and his advisors pursued religious uniformity more strictly than any of his predecessors had. The puritan movement grew despite royal opposition. By the late 1620s, Puritans were a majority in Parliament. As a result, in 1629, King Charles dismissed Parliament.
In 1640, rebellion broke out in Scotland. To suppress it, Charles needed new taxes, and to get them, he had to call Parliament back into session. The Parliament that met in November 1640 was overwhelmingly Puritan and passed laws that favored the Puritans and limited royal authority.
By 1642, England was in a civil war. Parliament’s army defeated the king, who was executed in 1649. General Oliver Cromwell ruled England as a Puritan Commonwealth from 1649 to 1658. By the time Cromwell died in 1658, many in England were tired of Puritan rule. In 1660, Parliament invited the son of Charles I to reign as King Charles II. The Anglican Church became the official state church again, but the new king was more tolerant of religious differences than his father had been. King Charles II also took an interest in expanding his North American colonies.

Rebellion in New England -- King Philip’s War, 1675-76

Early in Plymouth’s history, when word came to Governor Bradford that their closest Wampanoag ally, Massasoit, was desperately ill, Bradford sent Edward Winslow to treat him as a gesture of goodwill.
While he was recovering, Massasoit told Winslow that another tribe, the Massachusetts Indians who lived north of Plymouth, were preparing to attack Plymouth. Whether Massasoit was telling the truth or merely using the Pilgrims is unclear, but Bradford took him seriously. Under the command of Miles Standish, Pilgrim soldiers killed two of the tribe’s leaders. The Massachusetts Indians decided to not retaliate and moved further north. The other tribes saw that the alliance between Massasoit and the Pilgrims ran deep. But from Holland, the Pilgrim’s spiritual guide Pastor John Robinson condemned the murders and warned bloodshed.
Pequot War - conflict between English settlers and Pequots over control of land and trade in eastern Connecticut
The Massachusetts Bay Puritans often traded with Native Americans, especially the Pequots of the Connecticut River Valley. When the captain of a trading vessel was killed in 1637, the Puritans (building an alliance with the Mohegans and Narragansetts) attacked a Pequot fortress on the Mystic River, set the houses on fire, and attacked anyone who fled. In the short Pequot war, 400 Pequots were killed, and their village was annihilated. Surviving Pequots were sold into slavery. The Mohegans viewed the conflict as an opportunity to expand their influence. The Narragansetts weren’t familiar with the annihilation of many rather than the death of a few and were hence terrified of the European fighting style.
Mestizo - people of mixed bloodlines, usually the children of European fathers and Native American mothers and their descendants
The English didn’t tend to intermarry or engage in sexual liaisons with Native Americans as frequently as the Spanish or the French. Many parts of New Spain and New France were conquered by unmarried men who had relationships with native women and created a mestizo community. These relationships often helped to strengthen ties between cultures and reduce tensions. Mixed-race people who bridged cultures were rarer in English colonies than elsewhere in the Americas.
The English wanted to convert the natives to their religion. Most Native Americans resented and resisted missionaries, whether English, Spanish, or French. Massasoit distrusted Christianity, despite his friendships with the Pilgrims. He saw the conversion of natives on Cape Cod as a rejection of his role as their supreme chief.
The constant growth of the European community fostered the most tension, however. By the 1660s, English settlements were everywhere and were beginning to dominate. European livestock ate Wampanoag corn. Land sales that had once seemed wise now seemed to confine a new generation of Wampanoags.
A new generation of Pilgrims and Wampanoags were coming to power, people who didn’t remember their early friendship. In 1657, Governor Bradford, who had led Plymouth for 37 years, died. At about the same time, Massasoit was succeeded, first by his son Alexander, and shortly after by his other son Metacom (known to the Pilgrims as King Philip).
Throughout the 1670s, rumors arose that Metacom was preparing for war. He died that, but he was also buying arms and ammunition. In January 1675, a Christian Native American, John Sassamon, told Josiah Winslow, Bradford’s successor as governor, that Metacom was preparing for war. Winslow refused to believe Sassamon and sent him on his way. Soon after, Sassamon's body was discovered. Metacom denied any role in the death and asked the authorities to allow the Wampanoags to settle what he saw as an internal matter, but the Plymouth authorities hanged three of Metacom’s associates.
King Philip’s War - conflict in New England (1675-76) between Wampanoags, Narragansetts, and other Native American peoples against English settlers
The first skirmishes of King Philip’s War took place within two weeks of the executions, in June 1675. People in outlying towns took refuge in fortresses. Abandoned homes were burned. When a father and son left the Swansea garrison and found Native Americans vandalizing their home, they fired on them. The Wampanoags didn’t want to draw first blood, but once shots had been fired, they fought furiously. Within days, at least 10 of the English were killed. When the Plymouth militia gave chase, the Native Americans simply melting into the woods, crossed a river, and lived to fight another day. Early encounters between Europeans and Native Americans had pitted matchlocks (difficult-to-fire guns that were unusable in the rain) against bows and arrows. However, in this war, both sides were armed with more modern flintlocks that they could use with deadly aim against the other.
As the war escalated, Europeans throughout new England lived in terror and died, whether in isolated settlements or larger towns. Colonial troops who didn’t understand Native American wars marched into ambushed and died. Native Americans died in even larger numbers, and the Wampanoag community was destroyed. Other tribes, even neutral ones, were decimated. In western Massachusetts, after Native Americans burned the town of Springfield, colonists turned on friendly or neutral tribes, forcing them to join Metacom’s side or die. Despite pleas from the missionary John Eliot to protect the “Praying Indians” (converts to Christianity who were loyal to the Massachusetts authorities), they were taken to relocation centers in Boston Harbor where many died of exposure and malnutrition.
In one of the bloodiest battles of the war, known as the Great Swamp Fight of December 1675, a combined Massachusetts and Plymouth force attacked a fortress of the Narragansetts after tracking through swamps to get there. Even though the Narragansetts had remained neutral throughout the war, the English force destroyed the fort, killing perhaps 300 Narragansett warriors and burning alive another 300 women, children, and elders.
Throughout the winter of 1675-76, the outcome of the war was unclear. The European communities in New England risked being wiped out that winter. But in the summer of 1676, the Native Americans were running out of food. Some of the tribes that had been allied with Metacom drifted away or shifted their allegiance. The end came in August when Metacom and a few dedicated supporters were cornered in a swamp and killed.
King Philip’s head was displayed on a pole in Plymouth for the next 20 years. Authorities in Plymouth and Boston expelled many of the Native Americans from New England. Over a thousand Wampanoags and their allies, including Metacom’s wife and son, were sold into slavery in the Caribbean. John Eliot opposed such, but in the hatred created by the war, voices such as his weren’t heard.
Of the 70,000 people of all races living in New England at the beginning of the war, some 5,000 people were killed -- 1,000 English and at least 4,000 Native Americans. For the Wampanoags, the war ended the independent nation that Metacom and Massasoit had led.

Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia, 1676

Bacon’s Rebellion - a 1676 rebellion in Virginia, led by English immigrant Nathaniel Bacon, in which a militia attacked not only Native American villages but also the royal governor before being defeated
Like the war in Massachusetts, Bacon’s Rebellion illustrated the instability of early colonial life and alliances that were constantly shifting.
By 1660, Virginia had 40,000 colonists, including a small elite and many poor workers -- Africans and Native Americans, some slave, some free, and current or former English indentured servants. At this time there were at least as many Native American as African slaves in Virginia. Most of the Virginia tribes kept their distance from the white settlements, except for occasional trade.
Sir William Berkeley was the royal governor of Virginia from 1642 to the 1670s. He brought order to the colony, but it was aristocratic order. He and an inner circle ran the government and retained most of the profits from the tobacco trade no matter who grew it. The corruption generated increasing tension among others as the social divide increased between rich and poor white settlers, between established landowners and newly arrived colonists (who could acquire land only along the western frontiers of the territory -- closer to hostile tribes than colonists nearer the coast), and among Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans. Even if slaves and indentured servants did earn the freedom, land was increasingly difficult to acquire, and many were limited to becoming tenant farmers for wealthier land owners.
In 1675, resentment came to a head. The economy was bad; neither the corn crop (essential for food) nor the tobacco crop (essential for money) was doing well. When the Doig tribe raided Thomas Mathew’s plantation because he supposedly hadn’t paid for items obtained from the tribe, area colonists retaliated with an attack. However, the colonists mistakenly attacked the Susquehanaug tribe instead of the Doigs. Violence was flaring.
At that point, Nathaniel Bacon, recently arrived in Virginia from a prosperous English family and already one of the largest landowners in the western part of the colony, organized a militia to attack the Native Americans. Bacon and his followers had heard news of King Philip’s War where many tribes had united. They feared unity among Virginia’s tribes, and Bacon and his militia began attacking Native Americans, seeing every Native American as an enemy. Governor Berkeley, however, believed that Virginia needed friendly tribes on its frontier to protect it from hostile tribes who lived further west. He refused to support Bacon’s militia, and Bacon refused to have his militia disperse. Berkeley had Bacon arrested and then released him. Bacon marched his ragtag army of free Africans, slaves, and poor whites into Jamestown and set it on fire. In the face of the militia, Governor Berkeley fled, calling for help from England. The crown set 1,000 English troops. Most rebels surrendered and were pardoned. In 1676, Bacon died at age 29 from dysentery. 23 leaders of the rebellion were hanged. Virginia’s poor had been crushed.
During his more than 30 years as governor, Berkeley made his disrespect evident for the majority of people in his colony. Bacon’s militia represented a racially diverse army of the dispossessed, but as the rebels were demanding more equal treatment from Berkeley for themselves, they were also demanding the right to kill Native Americans indiscriminately and steal their land.
Bacon’s rebellion was a major turning point in the history of slavery in Virginia. Wealthy landowners now feared uprisings among current and former indentured servants, and they began to prefer slave labor, which they could more strongly control. While Bacon and his followers were defeated, the arrival of so many well-trained British troops reduced the power of the tribes to bargain. In 1677, the Native Americans of western Virginia ceded their remaining lands in the colony and moved west, continuing a process of “Indian removal” that would eventually span a continent.

France Takes Control of the Heart of a Continent

During the long reign of King Louis the XIV (r. 1643-1715), New France expanded from a tiny isolated community around Quebec to dominate the St. Lawrence River Valley. French communities were founded throughout the heartland of North America. By 1715, New France claimed far more of North America than either the English or Spanish

Early French Settlement -- Quebec, Montreal, and the Fur Trade

Later in the 1500s, a new trade emerged between Europeans and Native Americans to compete with the cod that had been the only North American resource of interest to most Europeans. Beaver belts were becoming popular for fur hats in Europe. Trade in beaver fur transformed the economies of both Europe and the tribes of North America as surely the greed for gold and silver transformed South America. As tribes like the Montagnais and Hurons developed trading partnerships with the French, and the Iroquois with the English, trade and tribal warfare became more intense. Ancient rivalries among the Native Americans escalated as each tribe fought to control the supply of beaver furs that seemed insatiable demand in Europe. While these tribes had fought each other for honor, living space, and captives, they now had European weapons, acquired through trades, that further fueled the warfare. The first time, tribes seemed bent on annihilating their opponents. Even though the French and British fur traders preferred to make alliances with the Native Americans rather than enslave them, the results for many tribes were disastrous.
Samuel de Champlain began exploring the St. Lawrence River in 1603 and founded the city of Quebec in 1608 as a representative of a private fur company, only a year after the English founded Jamestown. With only 28 men in his colony, Champlain knew that he needed alliances if Quebec was to succeed. So he joined the Montagnais and Hurons in a war against the Iroquois and solidified an alliance that would be the foundation of Quebec’s trade. The Huron alliance also allowed Champlain to travel further west. He spent 1615-16 exploring the Great Lakes.
After 1612, Champlain was also appointed as the king’s Viceroy for New France, uniting his commercial and governmental positions. In 1635, when Champlain died, Quebec had a population of only 300, but it was there to stay. Montreal was settled in 1642 to expand trade. Jesuit missionaries arrived and lived among the Hurons learning their ways, and seeking to convert them to Catholicism. New France, and the missions it sponsored, were deeply Catholic, fueling tensions between them and Protestant English colonies.
During the early 1600s, Quebec and Montreal were small French towns, thousands of miles from any other such town, but with their own European families, parishes, and culture. These isolated centers were surrounded by villages of French farmers who wanted to make a life in New France. New France came close to being wiped out in the late 1640s when the Iroquois Confederation overran Huron villages, torturing, killing, or taking prisoner everyone in sight. Jesuit missionaries died along with their Huron hosts. Once a nation of over 10,000 people, the Hurons disappeared as a recognizable group after 1648. The defeat of the Hurons was a huge blow the French missionaries and to the French fur trade that was the economic anchor of New France.
The Iroquois also attacked French villages, and besieged Montreal itself. 200 French settlers were killed. Many more of the villagers left for France as quickly as they could. The future of New France was far from clear in 1650. Montreal and Quebec, however, remained militarily secure, and the Algonquians replaced the Hurons as the major French allies and the source of access to the fur trade.

Exploring and Claiming the Mississippi River Valley

In 1663, Louis XIV made New France into a royal Province and sent 1,000 French soldiers to protect Quebec from Iroquois attack and establish it as the seat of what he expected to be a vast French Empire. Plans were laid to make this expansion happen.
In 1672, Governor Louis de Frontenac sent Louis Joliet, who spoke a number of Native American languages, and Father Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit missionary, to find and explore the great waterway spoken of in Native American stories -- the Mississippi (Mitchisipi, great water), which he hoped might be the route to China. In June 1673, Marquette and Joliet paddled into Mississippi, the first Europeans known to do so. Early in their trip, they were welcomed by the Illinois tribe and given a great feast, the beginning of a long-term French-Native American alliance in the region.
Joliet and Marquette determined that the Mississippi flowed south into the Gulf of Mexico, not west to the Pacific and China as had been hoped, but they understood that they were in the midst of a land with great potential. They could develop a French colony that would allow a rich trade with the native Americans and block the expansion of the English.
Fear of hostile tribes and of being captured by the Spanish led Joliet and Marquette to turn back before reaching the mouth of the Mississippi. On the return trip, they visited Native American villages, including a Miami village of Checagou (Chicago). Joliet returned to Quebec to report and draw maps of their travels. Marquette continued his missionary work until he died in 1675. What would become the Midwest was first described for Europeans and mapped by these two explorers. While the authorities in France wanted to strengthen the settlements in the St. Lawrence River Valley surrounding Montreal and Quebec before expanding further, Governor Frontenac had no patience for such. In Robert de la Salle, he found a perfect ally for exploring the Mississippi Valley.
La Salle led a much large expedition than that of Joliet and Marquette down the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers in 1679. La Salle’s goals were to build an alliance with the Illinois and other tribes against the Iroquois and to establish a permanent French presence throughout the Mississippi Valley. In 1681-82, he and his men travelled down the Mississippi to the Gulf and Mexico. In the name of King Louis XIV, he claimed the country of Louisiana, which was over one third of North America.
La Salle continued as far west on the Gulf of Mexico as Texas. Eventually, he pushed his followers too hard, and some of them murdered him in 1687.
Working independently, French trappers and traders (coureurs de bois, runners of the woods) established relationships with various Native American tribes and brought wealth back to New France. Some of them established a base called Fort Arkansas at the confluence of the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers. French Jesuits built a mission at Chicago. In 1698, the bishop of Quebec appointed missionary priests to a new mission at the Natchez post on the Arkansas River. The French communities that dotted the Mississippi in the late 1600s and early 1700s were small, but they were there to stay.

Creating the French Gulf Coast - Biloxi, Mobile, and New Orleans

Louis XIV decided to secure the French claim to the mouth of the Mississippi. Pierre d'Iberville was commissioned in 1698 to scout the area. D'Iberville landed on the east bank of the Mississippi River and built a fort near a Bilochi settlement, which came to be called Biloxi. D’Iberville and his crew moved up the Mississippi River until they found a trail connecting the Mississippi to Lake Pontchartrain, and promised to return. To his surprise, D'Iberville also found a group of free blacks who were living with Native Americans and who didn't take kindly to the arrival of Europeans.
Queen Anne's war of 1702 to 1713 between England, France, and Spain made travel difficult and dangerous. With the coming of peace in 1713, D'Iberville’s younger brother Jean-Baptiste de Bienville expanded the colony. When a veteran of La Salle’s trip down the Mississippi arrived in the area in 1713, d’Iberville gave the French explorer command of another French city on the Gulf coast, which they named La Mobile (now Mobile, Alabama).
In 1718, de Bienville built a colony he called New Orleans on the land between the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain. New Orleans appeared on French maps, and stock was sold to develop it before any town existed. In March and April 1718, Bienville led some 50 men in tearing out cypress swamps and laying out a town on the crescent turn in the Mississippi River. After a hurricane destroyed the village in 1722, the French Quarter was laid out as a new street grid.
The only contact the residents of NOLA had with France was the occasional arrival of supply ships. Few volunteers moved to this isolated spot, even though French speculators, led by John Law, the most powerful banker in France, invested heavily in the NOLA venture and were desperate for the new colony to succeed. Most of the early immigrants from France were prostitutes and criminals, and many died in transit, but by 1721, NOLA had 178 European residents who enjoyed the freedom their isolation gave them.
The French introduced African slavery into the Mississippi Walley. While there had been slaves in Quebec, none of the early explorers coming south from Canada brought African slaves with them. But after 1700, slavery grew in Louisiana. The first slave ships arrived in NOLA in 1719. In 1721, ships brought 925 slaves from Haiti.
Most slaves brought to NOLA were from Senegal. These Africans, if not Muslim themselves, were familiar with Island and Muslim music that used chanting accompanied by stringed instruments. This music became part of the culture of NOLA. THe Senegalese also knew how to cultivate indigo, which thrived in Louisiana, and how to process it into dye. Early slave ships brought sugar and rice, which the slaves knew how to grow. Europe and Africa had been shaping each other’s cultures for generations by the time NOLA was founded, but the mix was especially deep there. With the French securely in control of both the headwaters and the mouth of the Mississippi River, France was in a strong position to be the dominant European power in North America, just as Spain was dominant further south.

Developments in Spanish Colonies North of Mexico

The government of New Spain established small but permanent colonies across the Southwest from Texas to California.

The Pueblo Revolt -- New Mexico, 1680

Pueblo Revolt - rebellion in 1680 of Pueblos in new Mexico against their Spanish overlords, sparked but Spanish suppression of native religious activity and excessive Spanish demands for Native American labor
In August 1680, an uprising of the normally peaceful Pueblo of northern New Mexico led by charismatic leader Popé resulted in the greatest defeat of a European colony in the history of the Americas. In the Pueblo Revolt, nearly all of the Spanish who lived on isolated ranches and farms were killed. Survivors from the outlying communities poured into Sante Fe, which was then besieged. The Native Americans cut the city’s water supply and burned outlying buildings. On August 21, Governor Antonio de Otermin decided to retreat to Mexico with the survivors.
The harsh workloads and religious repression towards the Pueblos were crucial in fueling the revolt, as was hope that life might return to a happier day before the Spanish arrived.
After the success of the revolt, Native American leaders lived in the governor’s mansion in Santa Fe. Churches were leveled, statues destroyed. Pueblo life returned to what it had been before 1598. The distant and defeated Spanish were mocked.
The Spanish eventually regained control of New Mexico, but it took 12 years. Nowhere else in the Americas was a revolt so successful or long lasting. In 1690, the Spanish viceroy in Mexico City appointed a new governor for New Mexico, Don Diego de Vargas, who had an ability to compromise that many of his predecessor has lacked. Vargas left El Paso with his army in 1692. He offered each pueblo a full pardon for their reconversion to Christianity, but he didn’t try to stamp out tribal religion. The Native Americans could retain both faiths and agreed to his terms.

San Antonio, Texas, and the Missions of California

Word that La Salle had claimed the coast of Texas for France frightened authorities in New Spain. When the French founded NOLA in 1718, the Spanish decided to act. They built a city of their own, San Antonio, to assert their claims to Texas. San Antonio remained a small and isolated outpost of a great empire, but it was the first permanent European settlement in Texas.
By 1769, the Spanish were also worried about English explorations and Russian fur-trading activities on the Pacific coast. The Spanish established a fort and then a mission in San Diego, the first permanent European settlement in California. From there, Spanish Franciscan missionaries created a string of missions from San Diego to San Francisco to convert the Native Americans and develop the economy of California. Before the American Revolution, permanent Spanish communities could be found on the Atlantic Coast in Florida, in Texas and New Mexico, and on the Pacific Coast in California.

English Settle Jamestown

1607 - Jamestown becomes first permanent settlement in North America
- New era for English (under James I); interested in colonization not just piracy
- Jamestown is in a poor location to start
Colonists caught by Algonquian leader, Powhatan
- Spared John Smith
- Lived in awkward peace for next decade
Jamestown suffered from disease and starvation in the winter of 1609
Tobacco became the chief export

Massachusetts

Religious separatists left Holland for America: Pilgrims
Receive grant from Virginia Company but end up in Plymouth, Massachusetts
- Form Mayflower Contract: regardless of affiliation, one body politic
Wampanoags begin friendly relationship with Pilgrims
Puritans later followed to nearby area; a more closed community forming Massachusetts Bay Colony
- Fled persecution from Charles I

French Exploration into North America’s Interior

French claimed St. Lawrence River, established fur trading outposts in Quebec and Montreal
Continued exploring the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River Valley
Began to threaten some Spanish claims in Texas and Gulf Coast region

Spanish Colonization in North America

New Mexico had been a colony since 1598
Pueblo Revolt - 1680
- Successful Native American revolt that rejected Spanish control over Pueblo Indians
- Spain returned 12 years later, offering a deal to Pueblo Indians asking for their conversion while allowing them to practice native beliefs
Fearing further French and English claims out west, Spanish develop missionary system in Texas and California

King Philip’s (Metacom’s) War

War erupted in 1675, following increased tensions, rumors, and eventually executions and murder
Puritans aggressively destroyed Native American towns with little regard for their affiliation
- Put Metacom’s head on a stake
Per capita, deadliest war in American history

Bacon’s Rebellion

Context: Virginia is very divided by social class; small elite population, many poor white people, slaves, and Native Americans below; 1675 sees economic downturn
Poor whites on frontier feared war with Native Americans and lack of colonial government support -- recruited slaves and indentured servants to cause and began attacking Native Americans
Governor William Berkeley orders British troops brought to suppress rebellion and disband Bacon’s militia
- Bacon died of dysentery; militia dissipated
After this war, there became strict definitions of who is a slave, people are born a slave, people of African descent are slaves, indentured servitude isn’t as preferred as slave labor

Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson

Religious dissenters in Puritan New England
- Williams preached religious tolerance; was removed from Puritan society in Massachusetts nad set up a new colony in Rhode Island
- Hutchinson was a woman who preached; kicked out as well, found place in William’s Providence until she fled our of fears from Puritans; killed by Native Americans in New York

Chapter 4 - Creating the culture of british north america

Significant Dates

1662 - Halfway Covenant in Massachusetts
1689 - The Glorious Revolution, James II replaced by William and Mary
1692 - Salem witch trials
1701-1713 - Queen Anne’s War
1704 - Mohawk Indians destroy Deerfield, Massachusetts; Esther Williams taken hostage; first regular colonial newspaper begins publication in Boston
1707 - Act of Union between England and Scotland
1715-1716 - Yamasee War in South Carolina
1721 - First smallpox inoculations advocated by Cotton Mather and administered in Boston
1730s - Jonathan Edwards leads religious revivals
1732 - George Established; Ben Franklin and Poor Richard’s Almanack
1734 - Beginning of First Great Awakening
1735 - John Peter Zenger acquitted in trial for libel
1739 - Stono slave rebellion in South Carolina
1739 - War of Jenkins’ Ear between England and Spain in the Caribbean
1741 - Slave conspiracy in NYC
1744-1748 - King George’s War between Britain and France
1754 - Albany Plan of Union advocated unifying the colonies for war with France

England’s Glorious Revolution and “The Rights of Englishmen,” 1689
Analyze the impact of England’s Glorious Revolution on the thinking and political organization of the British colonists in North America

Glorious Revolution - bloodless revolt that occurred in England in 1688 when parliamentary leaders invited William of Orange, a Protestant, and his wife Mary, the daughter of King James II, to assume the English throne in place of King James II.
Initially, news of the overthrow of James II brought rebellions in many of the colonies. Royal governors were arrested, and popular assemblies demanded new authority, just as Parliament had done in London. A new English government asserted its authority in colonial matters. In the process, a new sense of rights had been created on both sides of the Atlantic.

Parliament’s Decision to “Elect” a New King and Queen

King James II (r. 1685-88) was a Catholic, even though he was officially the head of the Protestant Church of England. As he expanded religious freedoms for Catholics and appointed some to high office, his moves aroused serious opposition in Britain’s Protestant majority, many of whom associated Protestantism with British independence and Catholicism with foreign domination, especially by the Spanish and French.
James wanted to assert royal authority, especially in the colonies. He appointed a single royal governor, Sir Edmund Andros, over a newly designated Dominion of New England, which comprised Plymouth, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey. He also abolished most of the local autonomy that the colonies had enjoyed.
Divine Right of Kings - a belief that the king or queen was selected by God through birth in the royal family and that it was irreligious to question either a monarch’s fitness to serve or a monarch’s decisions. During the 1600s, England overthrew two monarchs, and afterwards, few still held such a belief
The colonists resented the unwanted merger of their colonies as well as the new king and governor who were enforcing it, but they could do little about it. However, in England, Parliament turned against James II. Rather than risk losing his head like his father, James fled the country. Parliament invited James’s Protestant daughter, Mary, and her husband Prince William of Orange, rulers of the Netherlands, to come to England as joint sovereigns. This move by Parliament was a dramatic change that would have far-reaching effects. The concept of the divine right of kings was already in decline, but now, Parliament had decided not only to limit royal authority but also to take some control over the choice of a king or queen themselves.
To justify what happened, the English had to rethink how they understood themselves and their system of government. Kings and queens retained power after 1689, but their supremacy was now bound by law. After 1689, it was clear that Parliament, as representative of the people, was a deciding force in England.

John Locke ♡♡♡♡ - Defending the Right to Revolution

Natural Rights - political philosophy that maintains that individuals have an inherent right, found in nature and preceding any government or written law, to life and liberty
John Locke justified the revolution by insisting that all government rested on the natural rights of the governed. This concept was a new idea in 1689, and Locke was living in exile in Holland because of his opposition to James’s rule.

North American Responses

In England’s American colonies, news of the Glorious Revolution brought rejoicing. In New England, Governor Andros and sent him back to England, though he later returned as Governor of Virginia. William and Mary allowed the New England colonies to return to their former separate existences. However, when the king and queen reestablished the governments of Massachusetts and Connecticut, they included a clause in the royal charters granting “liberty of Conscience” to all Protestants -- but not Catholics. Baptists, Anglicans, and others were now free to build their own churches and worship as they wished. Some Puritans protested against this “tolerance for error,” as they called allowing other churches to conduct their own services, but the rules stuck in spite of their protests. Other Protestants were free to build churches -- at their own expense -- and worship freely, but everyone paid taxes to support the Congregationalists, and Catholic worship was not allowed in New England.
In New York, news of the change in England brought a general uprising. Those on the bottom of the social order -- merchants, dockworkers, and traders -- seized power under the leadership of a German immigrant, Jacob Leisler. Leisler held power for two years, but when he was slow in ceding power to the new royal governor appointed by the William and Mary, he was arrested and executed for treason. However, those loyal to Leisler remained a faction in New York politics for a generation to come.
In Maryland, there was also an uprising. The Catholic proprietor was driven from office and lost ownership of the colony. Maryland became a royal colony with a governor appointed by the king and queen, and the Anglican Church of England became the colony’s official church. After the Glorious Revolution, Maryland, a colony that had been chartered in 1632 to protect Catholics, excluded Catholics from public office.
After 1689, independent corporations like the Virginia Company and the Massachusetts Company as well as of colonial proprietors like Lord Baltimore or William Penn faced a decline in power. Catholics in England and Maryland lost hard-won political rights as the new monarchs asserted England’s status as a Protestant nation. All Protestants gained rights, and Protest men who had been excluded from the voting lists because they belonged to a dissenting religious group could now vote. Elected legislatures (elected by landowning male wasps) competed with royal governors to make the laws governing each colony. In all the colonies, changing one’s social and economic status was becoming more difficult. An English colonial elite, supported by English military authority, now dominated colonial life. The British communities became larger, more secure, and wealthier.

The Plantation World: From a Society with Slaves to a Slave Society
Explain why and how slavery developed as it did in the late 1600s and early 1700s
Seeking Stability by Creating a Slave Society

As the institution of slavery became more rigidly defined, it also become linked more closely to race. Africans were seen as slaves, and Europeans, whether rich or poor, were seen as free. Native Americans were simply excluded from the colonies. The Africans who had already achieved their freedom, and those who did so during the 1700s, lived in a dangerous world. While Anthony Johnson had moved from slavery to freedom and prosperity in the Virginia of the mid-1600s, his children and grandchildren fled from Virginia in the late 1600s to avoid the risks of slavery, some of them living with the Nanticoke Indians in a small community of African, European, and Native American origin.
Mixed-race children were marginalized or declared to be African slaves. Any child born to a black woman was automatically considered to be African despite the father. Mixed-race children born to white mothers were more problematic to marginalize or cast into slavery, so stringent efforts were made to prohibit sexual liaisons between white women and non-white men.
While there were slaves in all of England’s North American colonies, as slavery became institutionalized, the numbers of African slaves in the southern colonies rose dramatically. In the 1680s, approximately 2,000 Africans were shipped to Virginia. Between 1700 and 1710, approximately 8,000 arrived. In 1668, white indentured servants outnumbered African slaves five to one, and there were about equal numbers of Indian and African slaves. By 1700, nearly all tobacco and rice workers in Virginia and the Carolinas were African slaves.

The Atlantic Slave Trade, the Middle Passage, and the Nature of Colonial Slavery

North American slavery was always a relatively small part of the Atlantic slave trade. The sugar plantations of the Caribbean, Brazil, and New Spain needed many more slaves, and slaves died there much more quickly, so there was a constant flow of slaves to the islands controlled by the English, French, Dutch, Danish, and Spanish and to the South American mainland. Some 10-15 million Africans were forced across the Atlantic between 1500 and 1900, but only a fraction came to the mainland British colonies.
New states in West Africa -- Asante, Dahomey, and Oyo -- emerged along the African coast, fueled by the transfer of slaves from the interior of Africa to the coast for sale and shipment to the Americas. Some African states such as Benin refused to engage in the slave trade, but those that did grew rich as the slave trade grew rapidly. What had been a limited business now seemed to have no limit. For most West Africans, the huge growth of the African slave trade was a disaster. In addition to the warfare and fear among Africans that the slave trade inspired, the continent lost millions of people, which sapped its strength.
Once slaves arrived on the African coast, they were kept naked in cramped quarters in what were called slave factories. They were fed only bread and water. Sorted and branded, the slaves were held for sale to ship captains who would take them across the Atlantic.
Middle Passage - the voyage in which slaves were taken from West Africa to slave colonies in the Americas during which as many as a quarter died
The Middle Passage was a horrifying experience. Slaves were packed up to 400 on a ship. Men were chained shoulder to shoulder. Women were generally not chained but packed just as tightly for a voyage that took 7 weeks in a filthy ship’s hold that stank of human waste. 25 percent of slaves died on the voyage. Slaves were force fed to reduce the loss of valuable cargo to starvation. Slaves had a tendency to revolt aboard ships. Slaving was a dangerous and dirty but profitable business.
The first generation of slaves in North America, those arriving in the early 1600s, came from the coast of West Africa. They were familiar with each other and with European culture and languages since Europeans had been trading along the coast for over 100 years. Those who arrived later often had been captured much further inland. THey knew little about European ways or about each other.
The first generation of slaves were allowed some dignity, but by the late 1600s, every effort was made to rob slaves of their self-respect. Slaves were inspected like animals by those who bought and sold them. Masters used names as part of an effort to break the slaves’ spirits. Slave marriages weren’t recognized by law, and a master could sell husband away from wife or children from parents.
Olaudah Equiano was born around 1745. According to his autobiography, he was captured when he was 11 years old, shipped to America, and put to work first as a domestic servant in Virginia and then aboard a ship. He had much better luck than most slaves, eventually purchasing his freedom and writing a description of his experiences that became and early tract for the budding antislavery movement. Millions of other Africans suffered the same experiences but never achieved the freedom that Equiano did.
Most Africans faced a lifetime of slavery on a tobacco, cotton, or rice plantation. Their difficult lives weren’t long ones. Until the mid-1700s, one fourth of newly arrived slaves died within a year. Young children often worked in the fields alongside adults, and the labor for women and men was backbreaking from sunup to sundown. The law gave plantation owners a free hand in how they treated their slaves. Total and unquestionable authority became the order of the day for male owners, making them absolute monarchs over their slaves. By the early 1700s, a small group of plantation owners controlled nearly all aspects of life in the southern colonies. It was a society in which slaves were given no respect, a few wealthy white males had unlimited power, and the institution of slavery defined the social order.

The Fear of Slave Revolts: South Carolina and New York

In the early 1700s, British landowners, especially in the southern colonies, imported more and more slaves from Africa. The production of tobacco, rice, and indigo was growing quickly. Charleston, SC, became the largest slave trading center in mainland North America. Slaves didn’t accept their fate easily. They longed for and sometimes fought for their freedom. As more white colonists began to depend on slave labor for their growing prosperity, they also lived in constant fear of slave revolts, uprisings that were common in all of the colonies.

The Stono Slave Rebellion of 1739

England and Spain were often at war, making the border between Spanish Florida and British SC and Georgia a tense boundary. In 1693, Spain offered freedom to all fugitives from British territories who came into Spanish territory and converted to Catholicism. Many Carolina slaves heard about Spain’s offer, and the number of runaways increased.
Throughout the early 1700s, a steady stream of slaves managed to make their way to Florida and freedom. Some of these runaways were already Catholic because they came from parts of Africa, such as the Kingdom of Kongo ,long since converted by Portuguese missionaries. For others, converting to Catholicism was a route to freedom. At first, Spanish authorities were slow to carry out their promise, but they soon realized the value of their policy. The runaway slaves were a drain on the Carolina economy and an embarrassment to the British. In addition, the newly freed slaves were a strong line of defense on the Spanish side of the border. After all, as newly free people in Spanish Florida, they had a special reason to defend the territory from the British, who wanted to perpetuate their slavery
One of these former Carolina slaves, Francisco Menendez, won a special commendation from the Spanish in 1728 for his heroism in defending St. Augustine from English attack. When the Spanish authorities decided to create a separate settlement they called Mose -- to the north of St. Augustine -- as a buffer against further attacks, the Spanish governor placed Menendez in charge. Mose was more a fort than a town, but it was home to approximately 100 Africans who defended Florida and organized attacks on the British in SC.
Stono Rebellion - uprising in 1739 of SC slaves against whites; inspired in part by Spanish officials’ promise of freedom for slaves who escaped to Florida
A large effort by Carolina slaves to gain freedom in Spanish Florida in 1739 came to be called the Stono Rebellion, the largest slave uprising in the colonies before the American Revolution. It terrified slave masters throughout the British colonies. The rebellion began when some 60 slaves from the SC rice plantations, led by a slave named Cato, walked off their plantations, armed themselves, burned buildings of the slave owners, and killed whites who got in their way as they sought freedom in Spanish Florida. Fearful slave owners sent the SC militia to stop them. In a battle at Stono, SC, 50 miles from the then Florida border, many of the rebels and their white pursuers were killed. Other slaves were captured and returned to slavery, but some made it to freedom in Florida and joined the free black community there. In response, the white planer government of SC temporality restricted the importation of more African slaves and permanently curtailed the rights of slaves to assemble with one another.
After the Stono Rebellion was crushed, individual slaves continued to escape south across the across the border. Menendez had further adventures. Traveling to Spain, he was captured by the British and threatened with execution, but he eventually escaped and, by 1752, was again back leading the militia in Florida. By 1763, Mose had a population of 3,000, mostly escaped slaves. When Spain ceded Florida to Britain in that year, they moved the Mose Africans to Cuba, where they were given land, tools, a subsidy, and a slave for each leader in the community.

Tensions in New York City, 1741

In the 1700s, slavery was not limited to the southern colonies. NYC and Providence, Rhode Island, had some of the largest concentrations of slaves in North America at that time. New York’s African-American community included approximately 2,000 out of the city’s 10,000 residents. Slave labor in NY might not have been as backbreaking as on a Virginia or Carolina rice plantation, but it was slavery nonetheless. Slaves did the worst jobs, got no pay, and had limited freedom. They could also be sold south at any time. Nevertheless, unlike rural slaves, urban slaves had a chance to meet other slaves, either at their work or in those taverns that welcomed them. Some of these opportunities frightened whites, leading them to react to what they assumed was pending rebellion.
In the early months of 1741, fires swept NY, destroying businesses and homes including the governor’s house. Governor George Clarke became convinced that slaves were at fault. Whether or not slaves had anything to do with it, the 1741 fires were real. NYers were suffering through a harsh winter. News of SC’s Stono Slave Rebellion was in circulation, and memories of other slave revolts were fresh. There had been a slave revolt in the Caribbean in the 1730s. In 1712, NY slaves had killed 9 whites and wounded 6 more. Fear spread easily.
A zealous prosecutor became convinced that there was a conspiracy to kill the city’s whites, so he brought charges against targeted suspects, pitted accused against accused, and elicited confessions. 30 Africans, most of them slaves, and 4 whites were executed. 84 other suspects were transported to slavery in Jamaica. The degree to which NYers experienced an actual revolt as opposed to being caught up in a fear-induced mass hysteria will never be known, but the trials illustrate the way those who enslaved others also feared the reality that they had created.

Stability and Instability in the American and British Worlds
Analyze the changes in the ideas and daily lives of the people in British North America in the 1700s as a result of events within and beyond the colonies.

Act of Union - the 1707 vote by the Scottish and English Parliaments to become one nation of Great Britain. Although the 2 nations had been ruled by a single monarch since James I in 1603, they were separate nations with separate Parliaments, and the American colonies were English colonies. After 1707, England and Scotland were one country, and the English colonies became British North America. The act extended the political stability of the Glorious Revolution. By 1707, third and fourth generations of people living in the American colonies had never seen Britain, even though they were of English and occasionally Scottish descent. They were being joined by other Europeans, especially from Ireland and Germany along with unwilling and unfree Africans.
The British economy on both sides of the Atlantic was changing, and people were prospering. Although many people were still poor, the desperate starving time in Virginia and similar early struggles elsewhere were far behind. In British colonies, a growing social and economic elite lived comfortable lives, largely made possible by the slave trade and the backbreaking work of African slaves. The wealthiest colonial residents were those who lived on the tobacco, rice, and indigo plantations of Virginia and the Carolinas, including people like Charles and Anne Byrd Carter, whose families owned thousands of cares as well as many slaves and produced some of the goods most in demand in GB and Britain’s other colonies around the world.
Nevertheless, colonial life was still full of uncertainty. The hysteria that led to the Salem witch trials reflected these deep-seated fears that were just under the surface of much of colonial society. Rural women were often isolated, and even urban women were confined to domestic worlds, which could be boring and lonely. Fears and uncertainties were often shaped by information about events that took place in another colony. The ever-present danger of Native American raids continued to threaten the British colonies, just as raids by settlers were a constant danger for tribes living near the colonies. The wealthy elite feared slave revolts. In addition, European wars often led to North American battles.
By the early 1700s, England was the world's dominant sea power, bringing great financial benefits to those who controlled the trade in goods and people across the Atlantic and bringing prosperity to those who lived in port cities on both sides of the ocean. As trade and prosperity grew, the quest for commercial success began to replace the religious devotion as the prime focus of many people’s lives.

The Salem Witch Trials of 1692

Underlying tensions in colonial life surfaced in Massachusetts during the harsh unrelenting winter of 1691-91. The residents of Salem and the surrounding Massachusetts communities also lived in fear because New England was under siege from Native Americans allied with French Canada. In midwinter, Native Americans killed 50 residents of York, Maine, and took another hundred hostage. Residents of other Maine communities fled in terror and were living in or near Salem. Exiles from Maine may have been especially traumatized, but all of the residents feared further attacks. Moreover, other tensions were brewing in the port city of Salem. Many poorer residents resented their neighbors who formed a more prosperous commercial elite. In addition, women in Salem, like in all English colonies, lived, often unwillingly, within strict submissive gender roles; women who were unusually assertive, especially women who lived alone or were of non-English backgrounds, were not trusted.
Salem witch trials - the 1692-93 hysteria in Salem, Massachusetts, during which women and men were accused of being witches who had made a pact with the devil, some of whom were executed for the crime
As these tensions simmered, Salem fell into a kind of mass hysteria late that winter. Two young girls in the home of the reverend Samuel Parris of Salem Village -- his daughter Betty and her cousin Abigail -- began to suffer fits. The town doctor wondered if their disease might be a result of witchcraft. In March, the girls accused Tituba, the family’s Native American slave, of bewitching them. Thus began the Salem witch trials.
Soon other young women came forward with tales similar to those of Betty and Abigail. As a result, formal charges were brought, and court proceedings began. In time, some of those accused, including Tituba, confessed to being witches. Witnesses turned against one another, and convictions for witchcraft became common.
Between February 1692 and may 1693, legal action was taken against 144 people -- 106 women and 38 men. 6 men and 14 women were executed, including Tituba. That so many people in Salem believed their illnesses and troubles were the work of witches was not strange in the 1600s. Most people in Europe believed that there were witches -- people who made a compact with the devil and could appear as ghosts and make other people and animals sick. Hundreds of supposed witches were executed in England in that century, and many other accusations of witchcraft had surfaced in New England, although never on the scale of what happened in Salem. In Salem, the whole community became involved as the accusations spread quickly from one household to another. Virtually all of the accusers were young women under 25, most of the victims were also women, though often older.
The hysteria ended almost as quickly as it had begun. By the fall of 1692, Massachusetts authorities -- clergy and political leaders -- were starting to have doubts about the trials and executions. Most people in the colony probably still believed in witchcraft, but they were increasingly uneasy about what was happening in Salem. By spring 1693, it was all over. One of the judges, Samuel Sewall, publicly apologized for his role and asked God’s pardon. Reverend Parris was forced to leave Salem, and the Massachusetts authorities voted compensation for victims and families. The Salem witch trials were one of the last times that people were executed for explicitly religious reasons in North America.

Women’s Lives

By the middle of the 1700s, the white culture of British North America was generally divided between the public and private realms. Because women were generally relegated to the private realm, many of them lived cut off from society.
Urban women had much more opportunity for social contact with other women and men than those living in more isolated regions. In Williamsburg, Virginia, two women -- Anne Shields and Jane Vobe -- both ran their own taverns. Mary Channing ran a large store in Boston, and Lydia Hyde had her own shop in Philadelphia. While these women may have been the exception, city women did have many opportunities to interact.
However, more than 90 percent of the British residents of North America lived on farms, sometimes very isolated farms, and the lives of rural women could be frighteningly lonely. In more settled communities, especially in southern New England, women could often wind limited contact with other women in ways that allowed them to build some friendships, such as gathering to trade soap, candles, cheese, and butter or attending church. Growing commercial property also meant that some women were able to purchase imported goods including tea, china, and -- for a few -- even silk.
As the American population expanded, finding land often required moving to more isolated rural areas, which could make contact and community life more difficult especially for women. While male farmers also lived very isolated lives, they traveled to town to sell goods and buy necessities more often than women. These trips provided men far more opportunity to meet neighbors and participate in the social and political discussions. In contrast, women were limited not only by assumptions that they should stick to household matters and leave political discussion and trade to their husbands but also by the physical demands of pregnancy, birth, nursing, and child rearing as well as by the daily chores of a farm -- taking care of the animals, raising the vegetables, preserving food, preparing meals, spinning wool, weaving cloth, and making clothes. ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡
Women’s work also included playing the role of physician or pharmacist because most farm families didn’t have access to more formal medical care. Women also had to be familiar with medical information and herbal medicines. The opportunities women had to share medical and child-rearing information, provide medical care, and support each other through medical emergencies and childbirth were extremely important to women’s community life. Midwives and healers had special status, but any nearby farm wife might be summoned to attend a birth, and and a woman in labor might well have 6 to 10 female attendants. The times surrounding a birth were an important social occasion as women had time to sew, tell stories, and catch up with each other.
At the bottom of the social hierarchy were enslaved women. For women living in slavery, the usual gender distinctions of white society had less meaning. On farms and plantations, male and female slaves all worked long hours in the fields. In urban areas, where there might be greater gender distinctions in specific forms of work, enslaved women were still afforded little of the protections that were expected -- if not always enforced -- for white women.
There were exceptions to the general isolation that women living outside of cities experienced. Eliza Lucas (1722-93) was born to a wealthy English sugar-growing family on the island of Antigua. In 1722. She was educated in London and then joined her family in SC in 1738. She quickly became a popular member of Charleston’s elite. However, in 1739, war between England and Spain required her father to return to Antigua. She was left in charge of 3 Carolina plantations at the age of 16. In 1744, Eliza married CHarles Pinckney, who also traveled a great deal and left her in charge of the plantations. Like male plantation owners, Eliza Pinckney supervised a large labor force of slaves whose labor was the basis of her wealth and leisure. Her position gave her time and opportunity to develop her ag ideas and cultivate her intellect. She experimented with new crops and crop rotations. She also helped to develop cultivation of the indigo plant, which was used to create a blue dye that was popular in England and which soon rivaled rice as a source of wealth in SC.

The Growth of Cities: Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Charleston

In 1700, British North America had a population of approximately 250,000, including both Europeans and Africans but not Native Americans. Boston was the largest city with a pop of 8,000, followed by NYC with 6,000. Philadelphia and Charleston were both under 3,000, but Philadelphia was growing fast. By contrast, the capital of New Spain, Mexico City, had 100,000 residents, and London had over 500,000 in 1700. With growing trade and prosperity, the British North American population would dramatically increase.
By the 1770s, on the eve of the American Revolution, the total colonial population would be 2.5 million, including 500,000 slaves of African origin.
Many colonists responded to the growing trade and prosperity with pride in being part of the British Empire. In the 1690s, Virginia moved its capital to Williamsburg, complete with a new capitol building that reflected this pride. The structure had two wings -- one for the elected legislature, the House of Burgesses, and one for the royally appointed council -- just as the Parliament that sat in London had placed for the elected House of Commons and the hereditary House of Lords. The governor’s elegant Williamsburg residence reflected the status of the crown’s representative in the colony.
Although most people still lived on farms or in small towns, the port cities were becoming significant centers of trade and culture for the whole British Empire. Between 1701 and 1554, the cities of British North America moved from being rude outposts to cities that looked and felt very much like similar cities in GB. They were important to the British Empire’s commercial and maritime success, and residents were proud of their connection to the mother country. Blasted tories
In the early 1700s, NYC, Philadelphia, Boston, and Charleston all emerged as significant trading centers for the British world. The ocean-based commerce of these cities was based on their good harbors, Britain’s growing dominance of the world’s oceans, and industries that included Britain’s naval building, the tea trade, and the slave trade. Ships based in North America carried food (cornmeal, pork, beef) and naval stores (tar, pitch turpentine, lumber) to the great sugar plantations of the British West Indies. These prosperous plantations on Barbados, Jamaica, and other British-controlled islands were far richer than anything on the mainland. They also had many more slaves than any plantation on the mainland. But they depended on outsiders, often colonists living on the vast mainland of North America, to supply their food and building supplies. The ships returned to North American ports with slaves, sugar, rum, molasses, cotton, and fruit from the Caribbean; manufactured goods from GB; and letters of credit that expanded the cash in circulation in the colonies and in London.
Cities also became safer places to live after Boston clergyman Cotton Mather championed the first vaccinations against smallpox in 1721. While smallpox had been a major cause of death among Native Americans who had never developed immunity to the disease, many Europeans also died of it. Mather, a Puritan theologian and pastor, was also an acute scientific observer. He had read about a Turkish doctor who had produced light cases of smallpox by deliberately infecting healthy people with the disease, which produced immunity in them against more lethal strains.
When the smallpox epidemic of 1721 hit Boston, Mather advocated using that doctor’s inoculation approach, and a physician, Zabdiel Boylston ((((((((((((((((((whose descendants include J.A.)))))))))))))), tried it. Mather collected the statistics. Of some 300 people inoculated, only 5 or 6 died compared with 900 deaths among the the 5,000 who were not inoculated. Smallpox spread throughout the colonial world though it was another 30 years before smallpox inoculations were common in England.

Commercial Attitudes, Commercial Success -- Mercantilism and the New Trading Economy

Mercantilism -economic system whereby the government intervenes in the economy for the purpose of increasing national wealth
Capitalism - economic system best described by Adam Smith in 1776 in which trade is seen as the source of wealth rather than as the exchange of goods themselves; as a result, wealth can continually expand as trade expands
The economy of Europe and Europe’s American colonies changed drastically between 1689 and 1754. Since at least the time of Queen Elizabeth, the western world’s economy, and certainly the economy of GB and GB’s possessions, had been organized around mercantilism. But as trade developed in the colonies, the seeds of what would later be described in 1776 as capitalism were already taking hold. Advocates of mercantilism believed that economic transactions should be directed to increase the nation’s wealth without regard for other participants in those transactions, that the world’s wealth was finite, and that for any nation to grow in wealth some other nation needed to be the loser. Using this mercantile approach, the British Empire closely guarded the colonies so that their wealth went exclusively to GB and not to other European countries. Economists of the time believed that it was critical that the colonies be used only to produce raw materials that would enrich the European nation that claimed them and that colonies also consume manufactured products from their mother country. Any trade outside of this closed loop, they claimed, ran the risk of diluting the nation’s wealth. When the idea of capitalism emerged, advocates saw the economic world differently. Capitalists believed there was no limit to the world’s wealth because it was trade, not the goods that were being traded, that was the ultimate key to wealth. Thus, trade between individuals and between nations allowed continuing growth for all parties.
The 1660 British Navigation Act proclaimed that anything shipped to North America or to other British colonies had to be transported in English ships, and everything shipped from the colonies had to be transported in English ships bound for England. The goal was clear: the colonies would produce raw goods and ship them only to England. England would produce manufactured goods, and the colonies would be limited to buying goods only from England. The arrangement was a closed economic system, and it was designed to ensure that wealth from the colonies flowed only to London, not back to the colonies and not to any other country.
The problem with mercantilism was that it focused too much on the control of things and too little on the trade of things. Many Europeans wars of the era were fought over issues related to the mercantilism as each European power sought to control the greatest amount of what they saw as the world’s limited wealth. As the Navigation Acts made clear, more much of the 1700s, even as GB was beginning to focus on developing an economy based on trade, its government attempted to use mercantile principles to control that trade with the American colonies.
Triangle Trade - a pattern of trade that developed in the 1700s in which slaves from Africa were sent to the West Indies and mainland North America while goods and other resources were shipped between the West Indies and North America and GB. Sugar and rum were also shipped to GB, and goods manufactured in GB were whipped to Africa, the West Indies, and to the mainland of North America. But there was also significant trade directly between North America and GB. raw materials (eg fur, grain, tobacco, rice, indigo (the last three produced by slave labor) ) were shipped directly to GB in return for manufactured products that by law (not always in reality) could only be produced in GB.
For British colonists living in North America, the trade problems were more real life than theoretical. They hated mercantilism and the Navigation Acts, not because they opposed slavery or the introduction of slave labor into the colonies or because they preferred capitalism, but because the British policies were keeping them from getting rich. Molasses could be bought more cheaply from French colonies than from British. Slaves could sometimes be bought more cheaply from Dutch traders than from English. Goods produced in the colonies (tobacco, rice, food stuffs, and ships stores) could often fetch higher prices elsewhere in the world than GB. trading with a wider world, especially the rich colonies of the Caribbean, made more sense and produced greater profit than limited trade to GB alone.
Circumventing the Navigation Acts, either through finding legal loopholes or simply sailing off in a different direction than British laws allowed, became a major enterprise and source of wealth throughout all the British colonies. The involvement of the colonies in worldwide trade (even when that trade was illegal) foreshadowed not only American independence but also a shift in economic systems from the closed world of mercantilism to a more open and elastic world in which trade and commerce, rather than simply ownership of things, was the key to wealth.
Trade was also increasing the exchange of information. Cotton Mather learned about smallpox inoculations from Turkish physicians through contacts in London. NY’s traders interacted with merchants in Jamaica and Barbados as well as Africa and English. The Jewish individuals whose forebears had been exiled from Spain mingled on the streets of NY and Philly with Africans captured from Kongo and servants fleeing poverty in London. News of attacks by Native Americans allied with France or Spain sparked uncertainty among colonists. Slaves from the Carolinas heard offers from Spanish Florida and escaped to freedom. These kinds of exchanges gave many people new knowledge of a wider world. Although the world of British North America could be limited and most people didn’t travel very far, colonial society was very much an international society -- a context that shaped the life of every British North American resident in the mid-1700s.
At the same time, trade, travel, and communication among the colonies grew, even though London tried to tighten its control and its separate connections with each of the mainland British colonies. People along the Atlantic Coast, from New England to the Carolinas, began to take greater notice of one another, exchanging ideas and seeing ew reason to defend their common interests. By the 1750s, colonists were identifying some of those common interests even as they jealously guarded their own colony’s independence. The years between 1707 and 1754 were years of relative stability in British North America, but they were also years in which the availability of information, attitudes, and opinions about the value of British political power in colonial life change dramatically.

Changing Social Systems

As the economic systems gradually shifted, starting in the 1730s, social systems in British North America also began to change, reflecting those economic trends. Although society in North America was to as highly stratified as in GB itself, the strong sense of social class had been growing since the late 1600s. Among the many social gradations in British North America, those at the top believed that there were only 2 social classes in eh early to mid-1700s. A small class and gentlemen and gentlewomen, who didn’t have to work for a living, were on top. Gentlemen and gentlewomen might engage in public service, and the gentlemen might sit in legislative assemblies or engage in certain professions, but they did so as a sign of their social status and not because they needed the money. Below the elite, separated by a great gulf, were those who had to work for a living -- farmers and tradespeople known as mechanics, and below them, the servants and slaves. However prosperous the mechanics and farmers might become, they were still stigmatized. They were expected to know their place and maintain proper deference to society’s elite. At the very bottom were those in varying degrees of unfreedom -- slaves, indentured servants, or simply desperately poor people. Members of this group were disregarded in terms of having any say or influence. People in these classes typically acknowledged duty to those above them and deference to those below. The notion of society as a hierarchy was commonplace.
By the 1720s, some of the mechanics and farmers were beginning to recognize a new social class: the “middling sorts.” These prosperous working people earned their success through hard word and frugality, both of which the elite scorned. (the middle class) The middling social class, including printers, most physicians, small farmers, and those who sailed on ships, differentiated themselves from working people in the less prosperous trades and the servants and the slaves. A new perspective was taking shape. People began to question the notion of a society that expected deference to those of higher status. The assumption that one stayed in the class they were born into was quickly disappearing. Ben Frank, though much more successful than most, was far from the only resident of colonial America to move from one class to another. Of course, social movement was not the only in an upward direction. As class roles weakened, some also moved downward or moved outside of the class system altogether, such as the famous outlaw of the mid-1700s, Thomas Bell.
Thomas Bell was a thief and swindler, and he was ultimately hanged for piracy in 1771.

A Changing Religious Landscape -- From the Halfway Covenant to the First Great Awakening

With the first settlement in British North America, there was a sense that somehow this new land was a divinely planned opportunity to begin the world again and make it right. In 1702, Cotton Mather, perhaps the best known minister in Boston at the time, published a highly romanticized religious history of New England that confirmed this sense. The book reflected a theme that would be repeated throughout American history, the belief that the country had a special divine mission to fulfill. Mather praised God that Europe had made contact with the Americas after the Protestant Reformation so British North America was being built by Protestants not by Roman Catholics. At the same time, some Catholics saw their mission from the opposite side. Giovanni BOtero wrote in 1595 that it was only divine providence that led the kings of France and England to reject overtures from Columbus so that his initial “discovery” could be made while sailing for Catholic Spain.
Not all Europeans accepted their mission as a special part of divine providence. Roger Williams insisted that God didn’t choose special elect nations. By the early 1700s, the notion that America was part of a divine drama of salvation was widespread.
By the early 1700s, the sense of being on a divine mission had declined among many colonists. Religious fervor and religious conversions were less and less common, and many were much more tolerant of the growing religious diversity in all of the colonies. The growth of religious toleration in the 1700s prompted more Europeans to come to the British North American colonies in search of religious freedom that they couldn’t find in their homelands.
Age of Enlightenment - major intellectual movement occurring in Europe beginning in the 1600s that led many to look more to scientific advances and the role of human reason in understanding the world than to religion
Increasingly, more of those who already lived in the colonies began to consider alternatives to the religious dogmas of their parents and communities. The growth of philosophical ideas in Europe led many intellectuals to look more to science and human reason than to faith in trying to understand their world.
German Protestant minister Gottlieb Mittelberger may have been happy to leave Pennsylvania and return to his ministry in Germany. However, while many ministers expressed similar worries about a religious decline in the colonies in the early 1700s, especially New England, other preachers sought ways to religious religious energy. Prompting some of these religious stirrings were the sermons of Solomon Stoddard, who served as the minister of the Congregational church in Northampton, Massachusetts, and who had been one of the authors of the Halfway Covenant. By the 1720s, Stoddard’s sermons were leading to a resurgence in religion not only in Northampton but also in much of western Massachusetts and Connecticut.
First Great Awakening - a significant religious revival in colonial America begun by the preaching of Solomon Stoddard and Jonathan Edwards in eh 1720s and ‘30s and expanded by the many tours of the English evangelical minister George Whitefield that began in the 1730s
Stoddard’s grandson and successor, Jonathan Edwards (1703-58), became famous for leading even larger religious revivals. Edwards’s sermons in western Massachusetts, like those of John Wesley in GB, led many to report that they were experiencing a new sense of divine presence. The First Great Awakening had begun.
Edwards prided himself on preaching in a low voice and seeking to convert people solely by the power of the logic of his words. Although revivals led by Edwards and others of his day resulted in a significant emotional release for many, they were nothing like the revivals of later times. If there was music, it was not central, and sermons were designed to be long rational arguments for the importance of changing one’s life that depended less on the preacher’s charisma than any ability to persuade. But by the 1730s, these logical sermons were creating their own dramatic results. Many in Edwards’s congregation were undergoing deeply emotional experiences while listening to his sermons, taking religion seriously in a way that they never had before. In a short period of time, 300 conversions were reported, increasing church membership considerably.
For Jonathan Edwards, the purpose of revival preaching was to convince individuals of their sinfulness and move them through an emotional catharsis of conversion to a new life and a new relationship to God. edwards was urgently pleading with his hearers to rethink the direction of their lives.
Later in the 1730s, George Whitefield (1714-70) became the most powerful preacher of the Great Awakening. Whitefield lived in GB but preached to huge audiences in both GB and North America. His first trip to North America began in Georgia in 1738. In 1739 and ‘40, he crossed the Atlantic again, making a preaching tour that started in Georgia, moved through the middle colonies, and progressed to Boston. Whitefield also visited Northampton and preached at Edwards’s church to great acclaim.
Whitefield had high regard for Edwards and Presbyterian ministers like Gilbert Tennent. He had a much lower opinion of the majority of preachers.

Cutler was not the only minister to resist the emotionalism of Whitefield and Edwards. The leaders at Harvard and Yale didn’t like the revivalists whom they saw as emotional and divisive. Churches were split. The Presbyterian Church was split into New Light (pro-Awakening) and Old Light (anti-Awakening) bodies. Many Congregational churches were split, and towns that had supported one church for much of the past century now supported 2, 3, or even 4. In contrast, the Baptists, who generally sided with the Awakening, grew dramatically.
The Great Awakening changed American society. Many who had previously shown little interest in religion became converted. Many who thought of themselves as deeply religious now saw their faith in more emotional and ethical terms. The revivals of the Great Awakening cut across many of the traditional divides of class, race, and gender. While more women than men responded to the religious energy, some of the rules segregating classes and races seemed to have been suspended for these revivals. Africans - slave and free - and Native Americans were also converted and became enthusiastic members of religious bodies.
The Awakening transformed American higher education, which at that time was closely connected to the churches. Harvard resisted the movement, while Yale eventually moved into the Awakening camp. Prorevival ministers founded Dartmouth -- initially meant to serve Native Americans -- and Princeton to support the revival cause and help prepare a new gen of revival-oriented ministers.

Ongoing Wars in Europe and British North America

Between
France still claimed St. Lawrence River Valley and the Mississippi Valley -- an area spanning from Minnesota to NOLA. Despite the large population of the British colonies, many colonies were afraid that GB’s colonies were encircled by French ones. They also worried because Spain controlled Florida, many Caribbean islands, and the rich lands of Central / South America, giving Spain great power and wealth in its confrontations with GB on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition, Native American tribes, many French-allied, were often the dominant power in territory from western NY through Pennsylvania and into the western portions of the Carolinas and George.
It was not always clear who was winning and who was losing in the ongoing struggles, but war was a fact of daily life for much of the colonial era, sometimes devastating close to home and sometimes more generally reflected in concerns about who would control the future of North America. When William and Mary came to the throne in England in 1689, King Louis XIV of France objected to their elevation by Parliament. Louis, a Catholic, had already fought William, a Protestant, in Holland, and now he did so again in what the British colonists called King William’s War. It lasted from 1689 to 1697. The war’s outcome was inconclusive, but the battles had devastating consequences of towns in the northern British colonies as French-allied Native American tribes attacked English settlements. It was as part of these battles that York, Maine, was attacked, sending residents fleeing to Salem, Massachusetts. European settlement of Maine was delayed for a generation.
Soon after that war ended, another war began in Europe, the War of the Spanish Succession, over rival claimants to the Spanish throne, one of whom was strongly backed by France, which sought to tighten its alliance with SPain. The other claimant was supported by GB because GB feared a strong French-Spanish alliance. The war lasted from 1701 to 1712. The British North American colonists called this war Queen Anne’s War. during this conflict, major battles took place between Spanish and British forces in Florida and the Carolinas. In the same period, battles continued to erupt between French and British forces in Canada and New England, with various Native American tribes allied on all sides. In one attack, French-allied Native Americans devastated the town of Deerfield, Massachusetts.
As GB, France, and Spain fought their wars in the 1600s, the Iroquois were allied with the English and against the French and France’s Native American allies. By the beginning of Queen Anne’s War, some Iroquois were beginning to believe that their British alliance meant that the Iroquois did all the fighting and received little in return. In 1701, Iroquois leaders signed a treaty of peace with the French that gave them new trading rights.
For the next several decades, most of the Iroquois tried to keep clear of the continuing British-French tensions. Despite their long alliance with the English, a group of Mohawks settled near Montreal and converted to Catholicism. Among these settlements were also settlements of refugees from non-Iroquois tribes who had been defeated in Metacom’s War. These refugees hated the English, especially the Massachusetts English. They and their Canadian-based Iroquois allies nurtured a desire to show their support for France and seek revenge on Massachusetts for the loss of Native American lives in Metacom’s War.
In February 1704, Canadian-based Mohawks destroyed the town of Deerfield, Massachusetts, and a frontier outpost near the NY border. 50 colonists were killed, and perhaps 70 more were taken captive. By the end of the day, the town was a burning ruin. Deerfield’s Congregational minister, Rev John Williams ,as well as his wife and remained children, were taken hostage after one of the children was killed in the attack. His wife died on the forced march to Canada where the captives were taken. Eventually, Massachusetts officials ransomed Williams and most of the captives. The minister wrote an account of the attack and his captivity that became a bestseller at the time.
To the utter surprise of Rev Williams and the Massachusetts officials, some of the Deerfield captives preferred to stay in Canada with the Mohawks. Among them was Eunice Williams, the minister’s daughter. She married a Mohawk, changed her name to A’ongote Gannenstenhawi, converted to Catholicism, and was the mother of 3 Mohawk children. She lived a long life among her adopted community and died there in 1785 at the age of 95.
Even when there were periods of relative peace among the European powers, Native American tribes fought their own battles with the colonists. As white settlement expanded in the Carolinas, the Tuscarora tribe began to resist. In 1711, the Tuscaroras captured a leader of Swiss and German immigrants, Christoph von Graffenried, and the Carolina surveyor-general, John Lawson. Graffenried was freed, but the Tuscarora executed Lawson. In response, the SC authorities declared war on the Tuscarora and enlisted the Yamasee tribe as their allies. Within 2 years, most Tuscarora villages were burned, and 1000 of its tribe were killed. The remaining Tuscaroras moved west to avoid white settlement and affiliated with the Iroquois in 1722, enlarging the Iroquois Leave to 6 nations.
After the war, the Yamasee expected to be rewarded by the Carolina authorities for supporting their efforts. When no rewards were coming, and when whites continued taking Yamasee as slaves, the Yamasee, in alliance with the Creeks, attacked Carolina plantations, killing settlers and traders in one of the bloodiest wars in colonial history. For a tine, it was unclear whether the Carolina colony would survive, but officials sought an alliance with the Cherokees, who had quickly become dependent on trade with the British for clothes and riffles. The Cherokees quickly defeated the Yamasees. Those Creeks and Yamasees who survived fled to Spanish Florida, leaving virtually no Yamasee or Creeks in the Carolinas. The British community also suffered significant loss of life in the Yamasee Wars, but it was clear they won.
In 1739, GB and Spain want to war -- War of Jenkins’ Ear -- when Spain claimed a right to search British ships in the Caribbean for contraband goods and GB objected. The nickname of the war referred to a British ship capt, Robert Jenkins, whose ear was cut off by a Spanish boarding party. The British defeated Spain in this war, which confirmed the dominance of British sea power in the Atlantic and Caribbean and made colonial trade with GB and GB’s Caribbean colonies much easier.
Before the war of 1739 had ended, GB and France were fighting again in the War of Austrian Succession (King George’s War). much of NY and New England were engulfed in that war. The result was modest victories and land transfers, but with considerable loss of life to British and French colonists and to the Native American allies.
By 1754, the Seven Years’ War (the French and Indian War) erupted. Unlike the previous wars, the British would be decisively victorious at the end of the war in 1763. However, the consequences of expanding British North America would be significant.
The many wars between 1689 and 1763 disrupted life in North America. Colonial militias were called up. Colonial shipping was attacked. Settlements were damaged or ruined. Native American alliances shifted. Various tribes were either decimated or fled their homelands. Many colonists and Native Americans died, and for many of those who survived, life was far from secure.

The Unifying Effects of the Wards on British Colonies

During the many wars that took place in the 1700s, many English colonists developed a deep sense of patriotism to the British cause, often linked to an equally strong dislike of all things French and of the Native American nations allied with France. At the same time, they came to realize that the British army was sometimes far away when it was most needed and that they needed to develop their own militias. The British monarchs were distracted by these wars and were inclined to neglect the colonies in the intervening years. As as result, colonial governments grew stronger and more independent through the early decades of the 1700s.
For most of his life, Ben Frank was a tory. In 1754, Ben wrote that his greatest desire was for the people of GB and the people of British North America to consider themselves as one. In 1754, many colonists agreed with him.
Albany Plan of Union - plan put forward in 1754 by Massachusetts governor William Shiley, Ben Frank, and other colonial leaders, calling for an intercolonial union to manage defense and Native American affairs
By the early 1750s, it was clear to many who were living in British North America that the tension between England and France on both sides of the Atlantic would soon lead to another war. In the early summer of 1754, several of the North American colonial governments appointed commissioners to meet in Albany to negotiate stronger mutual defense treaties with the Six Nations of the Iroquois and to discuss the common defense of the British colonies. The particulars of the Albany Plan of Union included a provision that each colony would retain its own government, but that the new united colonies would be led by a council of reps from the 13 colonies and a single president general appointed by the Crown. The unified government would have authority to raise soldiers, build forts, and regulate trade with Native Americans. It would help the 13 colonies realize Ben’s dream of being one community with one interest in relation to each other as well as GB. Ben couldn’t understand why the colonists couldn’t borrow an idea from the Iroquois with whom they were negotiating.
Ben’s proposed plan was defeated resoundingly by the colonies. Everal colonial legislature rejected the plan, fearing it meant giving up too much control to the other colonies and especially to the crown. At the same time, London officials rejected they plan because they saw it giving too much power to the colonies. Nevertheless, quite a few colonial leaders met each other for the first time at the Albany gathering, and the possibility of a union had been mentioned and considered.
Tensions continued to grow between GB and France and between GB’s Iroquois allies and the French-allied tribes. As the British colonies saw the world moving toward a war between GB and France -- a war they knew would be fought in large part on the border between British North America and New France -- colonial legislatures sought to raise taxes to provide for their defense. This need was especially urgent in Pennsylvania where French-allied Native Americans were within a day’s desistance of Philly.
Even in this desperate situation, the Penn family, which still controlled the colony, refused to allow their own lands to be taxed. Although William Penn had founded the colony as a refuge for Quakers, his son Thomas saw it mostly as a source of income. By 1757, the Pennsylvania legislature decided to send a delegation to GB to negotiate directly with Thomas Penn to get him to pay his fair share of the funds to protect his colony or to request to the GB government to give them a royal governor rather than one appointed by the Penn family. The obvious rep for Pennsylvania to send was Ben Frank. He sailed for GB that summer and lived there until 1775. He didn’t get the funds from Penn but remained a very loyal tory. However, beginning in the early 170s, the pressure of war as well as issues of politics, trade, and taxes began to drive GB and the colonists apart.

Unit Three

Chapter 5 - The Making of A revolution

Significant Dates
1754 - 1763 -- French and Indian War
1763 - 1766 -- Pontiac’s Rebellion; Baxton Boys attack Penn. Indians
1765 -- Stamp Act crisis
Mid-1760s -- Regulator movement in NC and SC
1770 -- Boston Massacre
1772 -- Slavery declared illegal in England
1773 -- Boston Tea Party
1774 -- Closing of the Port of Boston, Quebec Act and other Intolerable Acts; first Continental Congress meets in Philly
1775 -- First battles of the Revolution at Lexington and Concord; second Continental Congress convenes at Philly; Battle of Bunker Hiller; British governor of VA, Lord Dunmore, declares freedom for slaves who join the British cause
1776 -- Thomas Paine’s Common Sense ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡; British evacuate Boston but take NYC; Congress adopts the Declaration of Independence; Washington's troops capture Trenton, NJ
1777 -- Congress adopts the Articles of Confederation to govern the new United States; American victory at Saratoga, NY
1778 -- France and US agree to an alliance
1779 -- Washington’s troops attack British-allied Iroquois villages; Spain enters war against GB
1780 -- British victories in the South; British take Charleston, SC
1781 -- American victory at Cowpens, SC; Lord Cornwallis surrenders to G.W. and allied French forces
1783 -- Treaty of Paris
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Preludes to Revolution
Explain Britain’s victory over France in the French and Indian War and what conflicts followed the victory
The French and Indian War, 1754-1763

The French and Indian War - known in Europe as the Seven Years’ War and in French Canada as the War of Conquest, this war was fought in North America between 1754 and 1763 and ended with the defeat of the French
The English and the Iroquois allies were in constant tension with the French and their Ottawa, Delaware, and Shawnee allies, and both sides hated each other and were ready for war.
In Jan 1756, England and Prussia agreed to defend each other’s territory. In response, Austria signed a treaty with France. War among these countries was declared in May 1756, and the French navy defeated a British fleet in the Medit. the next month. Counting on his English allies to provide support, King Frederick the Great of Prussia then attacked Austria and Russia. Sweden and Saxony joined the French alliance against Prussia.
The war quickly spread to Asia. the British East India Company and the French Compagnie des Indes each controlled parts of the Indian subcontinent, either directly or through alliances with local rulers. Suraj ud Dowlah, the French-allied ruler of Bengal, used the situation to attack and capture British Calcutta. A British force under Robert Clive retook the city and the French post at Chandernagor. British control of Bengal, won in that war, laid the foundation for GB’s 200-y-rule in India.
The British also attacked the main African slave-trading island of Goree off the coast of Senegal and took control of it from the French, hurting the French economy but having no impact on the island’s slave trade. Goree had been the port for transshipment of slaves since the Portuguese founding in the 1500s and was valuable no matter which government controlled the island because many nations purchased slaves there.
While battles took place in North America, Europe, India, and Africa, much of the Seven Years’ War was fought in the Caribbean. British warships based in Jamaica captured the Fr islands of Grenada, the Grenadines, St. Vincent, Dominica, and Tobago as well as Martinique and Guadeloupe with their rich sugar plantations. At the war’s end in 1763, Martinique and Guadeloupe were returned to Fr in exchange for concessions in North America, but GB kept the remaining islands. After Spain entered the war on the French side in 1761, the British captured Havana, Cuba, and Manila in the PHilippines, all of which were retained to Spain in 1763 in exchange for Florida.
The war changed the landscape of North America. In 1758, after a Fr force defeated the English at Fort Ticonderoga in NY, a British force -- with G.W. as one of its officers -- took Fort Duquesne, renaming it Fort Pitt (Pittsburgh) in honor of WIlliam Pitt, who had led GB as prime minister during the war. That same year, Teedyuscung, leader of the Delaware tribe, decided that his Fr allies couldn’t be trusted and sought an alliance with the English and the Iroquois. Although Teedyuscung and the Delaware didn’t get the Penn lands they sought, they and the Iroquois received a British promise that after the war there would be no white settlement west of the Alleghenies -- a promise the British attempted to keep until the American Revolution.
In the most significant North American battle, a British army under Gen James Wolfe defeated a French army led by the Marquis de Montcalm and captured Quebec in Sept 1759. The British victory ended Fr control of all of Canada.
By the early 1760s, both GB and Fr were exhausted from the fighting. Although GB had won major victories, its new king George III (r. 1760-1820) wanted peace, and in 1763, the 2 nations signed the Treaty of Paris to end the war. (there were two Treaties of Paris for the record)
The world war had many outcomes. All of the governments that fought the war emerged deeply in debt. In Europe, little land changed hands, but in other parts of the world, the changes were dramatic. GB made concessions to bring hostilities to an end, but was still the biggest winner. Its dominance of India was secure, and the British presence on the coast of Africa and in the Caribbean was enhances. In addition, Spain ceded Florida to GB. The war eliminated Fr as a North American power, although Fr did regain its control of the rich sugar-producing islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique. Fr ceded Canada and the land east of the MS to the British. To compensate its Spanish allies for their support, Fr also ceded its claim to the west of the MS River, along with NOLA, to Spain. The Fr threat to New England and NY ended. GB now controlled most of North America east of the MS.

Pontiac and Indian Responses

The end of the Fr and Indian War was a unmitigated disaster for Native Americans living between the MS River and the Atlantic. For the tribes further south -- including the Cherokee and the Chreeks -- the Spanish presence in Florida had allowed them to play a 3-way balancing act between GB, Fr, and Spain, but with the Fr and Spanish out of eastern North America for the time being, the potential for bargaining virtually disappeared.
Although they were allied with GB, Iroquois power had partly come from GB’s need for Iroquois allies in its competition with the Fr. after 1763, the Fr were gone. Without the presences of the Fr in Canada, the British governors of VA and Penn had little reason to ask the Iroquois for anything. The British general Lord Jeffrey Amherst, seeking to save money for his government and seeing no reason to placate the Indians, refused to provide the gifts of ammunition and gunpowder that various tribes had come to see as a king of rent for the use of their lands. The Native Americans considered the move to be both an insult and a fundamental threat since the tribe’s survival depended on the gunpowder to hunt deer.
Pontiac’s Rebellion - Indian uprising (1763-66) led by Pontiac of the Ottawas and Neolin of the Delawares
Pontiac, an Ottawa chief, was inspired and heeded by Neolin’s “”patriotic”” call, sparking Pontiac’s Rebellion. In the spring of 1763, only months after the Treaty of Paris was signed, Pontiac convened a meeting of Ottawa, Chippewa, Potawatomi, and Wyandot people near Detroit. Pontiac told his listeners of his vision in which he had been promised that, if they would cleanse themselves of the ways of the whites, they would see their lands and old powers restored.
Pontiac and his followers attacked British forts across the region. The British held Detroit and Fort Pitt, but many other forts surrendered to the Native Americans: Fort Miamis, Fort Wayne, Fort Ouiatenon, Fort Michilimackinac, and most of the old Fr posts in Indiana and Ohio. Most of the Ohio country was again in Indian hands. The British were caught off guard but fought back.
The English commander Jeffrey Amherst ordered his troops to put “every Indian in your Power to Death.” His troops won several battles. Amherst also encouraged the distribution of smallpox-infected blankets to Indians. In Oct, Pontiac received a letter from the Fr telling him that the Fr weren’t going to come to his aid. On receiving this news, Pontiac initiated a peace process. He met with the British authorities in Oswego, NY, in July 1766 and signed a peace treaty. 3 years later he was murdered good riddance.

The Proclamation Line of 1763

Soon after the French and Indian War, the new British monarch King George III and his first minister Geo. Grenville tried to ensure peace in North America. They meant to honor the commitments they had made in 1758 to the Delaware and Iroquois tribes and protect them from white settlement. Already embroiled in Pontiac’s conflict, which largely involved formerly Fr territories, they didn’t want other rebellions, and they were war that land-hungry settlers would quickly begin to expand into Indian-dom. areas. In Oct 1763, the king issued a proclamation that there should be no settlement west of the crest of the Appalachian Mts., and that Indians rights to western lands would be protected forever. The proclamation also directed any colonists who had already settled in these lands to remove themselves. For many of the tribes who lived on the western slopes of the mts and beyond, the Proclamation Line fulfilled what they believed had been promised.
The Proclamation Line - royal proclamation of 1763 designed to protect Indian tribes by setting a boundary at the peaks of the Appalachian Mts beyond which no western white settlement was to take place
The Grenville administration replaced Amherst with the more conciliatory General Thomas Gage, who immediately resumed negotiations and gift giving with the tribes. The Grenville admin also strengthened the authority of the superintendents of Indian affairs, who had sought accommodations with the tribes since the 1750s.
The Proclamation Line slowed white settlement into western Penn, Ohio, and what would become Kentucky. But it also infuriated the British colonists -- both land-hungry farmers and rich speculators -- and did far to little to protect the Indians. Grenville and Parliament were too far away, and despite the British military outposts, their efforts to enforce the line were ineffectual, which had fateful consequences in the next decade.

The Paxton Boys and Rural White Responses

In the town of Paxton in Penn’s Lancaster County, a group of farmers decided that the way to end warfare between whites and Indians on the frontier was to get rid of all Indians, regardless of alliances. They called themselves the Paxton Boys or the Hickory Boys.
In Dec 1763, the Paxton Boys attacked a Delaware village, killed 6 people, and burned the town. Then they killed 14 Indian survivors who were in protective custody in Lancaster. They began a march to Philly to find other Indians, especially Delawares, who had taken refuge there. Before the mob got to Philly, Ben Frank and a delegation of the colony’s leading citizens negotiated an end to the rebellion, but the hatred of Indians would haunt the inhabitants of North America for a long time to come. After 1763, many white residents of British north America began to lump all American Indians together as an enemy race, even though their parents and grandparents had viewed different tribes quite separately, depending on a tribe’s relationship to the British cause. Like many earlier wars, the fighting in the Fr and Indian War was between the British and the Iroquois allies on one side and the Fr and Ojibwa, Ottawa, Shawnee, Wyandot, and other tribes allied with them. Soon after the war, the lines came to be seen as much more racial, with all whites allied against virtually all Indians. This change in attitudes had far-reaching consequences for the residents of North America.

Threats of New Taxes

Relations between the British colonists and the Native Americans were not the only concern of British authorities after 1763. Victory in the war had virtually drained the kingdom’s treasury. GB’s national debt was double what it had been when the war began. In 1764, Geo Grenville and the majority in Parliament asked GB’s North Am. colonists to pay what the London authorities thought was a fair share of the war’s cost. Their argument was that the war had protected colonists far more than anyone in GB. what seemed just and equitable in GB, however, was seen quite differently in the colonies. These differences on who should bear the cost of war would soon have significant consequences.

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“The Revolution Was in the Minds of the People”
Explain why, in the 15 years before the Revolutionary War began, support for the patriot cause spread so quickly among many different groups of North Americans who opposed GB for different reasons

J.A.: “The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected from 1760 to 1775, in the course of 15 years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington”
Loyalists - tories, turncoats; one fifth to one third of the total population
Sailors and shop owners in Boston, NY, and Philly as well as backwoods farmers in western Penn, VA, and NC and Sc were sometimes much more ready for the revolution, much sooner, than their better known leaders.
Some slaves and free black people saw in the revolutionary rhetoric the possibility of their own freedom. Other black people saw the British government as a potential protector and even liberator against slave owners who embraced the patriot cause. Potential for freedom wasn’t a guarantee in any scenario, however.
The Iroquois, Cherokee, and other tribes knew that frontier writes had little use for the king’s ban on white settlement and, if freed from British authority, would stream west. As the possibilty of expanded settlement fueled revolutionary fervor among frontier whites, it also fed fears among Indians, most of whom sided with the British after 1776.

Transit from the “Rights of Man” to Revolt

Many residents of the British colonies had grown up reading John Locke’s defense of GB’s Glorious Rev of 1689. Long before tensions between the colonies and the government in London reached a crisis, colonists believed, as Locke said, that the people always retained “a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative” authority when they wanted to. Throughout the 1770s, Locke’s ideas guided individuals such as Tom Jeff, J.A., Ben Frank, and Ethan Allen. Thy used Locke’s ideas to justify armed resistance.
Republicanism - a complex, changing body of ideas, values, and assumptions that held that self-government by the citizens of a country, or their reps, provided a more reliable foundation for the good society and individual freedom than rule by kings or any other distant elite
Revolutionary leaders also read and cited French philosophers -- Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu -- and authors from ancient Greece and Rome, all of whom advocated a commitment to liberty et the need to overthrow unjust authorities. Leaders of the patriot cause became convinced that GB represented the evils of empire while the colonists represented the virtues of republicanism.
Leaders on both sides of the Atlantic, those who argued for independence and those who opposed such, all read the same literature. Nearly all of them believed that Geo III ruled only by the consent of Parliament, not from any divine right. For a hundred years before the American Rev, British subjects in the old and new worlds constituted to a community of people who valued “the rights of Englishmen” and distrusted efforts to undermine those rights. When in 1776 T.J. wrote that the colonies had a right to independence because it was a self-evident truth that “all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights,” he was reflecting a way of thinking that was familiar in the US and GB.
Those who shared common ideas about rights, liberty, and freedom extended beyond residents of GB and North America. The world that was at war in the 1750s and ‘60s became a world involved in rev in the 1770s and ‘80s and beyond. Although the government of King Louis XVI of Fr would play an essential role in the American victory, Louis XVI himself would lose his throne and head to a Fr rev within the next decade. The Fr and American Revs led to further rev efforts across much of Europe as people in Germany, Poland, Scandinavia, and Italy attempted their own revs. Jemmy wrote in 1792 that “America has set the example and Fr has followed it, of charters of power granted by liberty.”
Jemmy didn’t mention that another rev that was much closer to the US than those in Europe. In 1791, slaves in the Fr colony of St. Domingue (Haiti) rebelled. St. Domingue was one of the richest and most oppressive slave systems in the world, where some 500,000 African slaves grew sugar and coffee that made the 40,000 Fr owners very rich. A free black man, Toussaint L’Overture -- who quoted the same philosophers as North American revolutionaries -- led the rebels in Haiti to win a series of victories. L’Overture himself was captured and died in Fr, but a new free Republic of Haiti was proclaimed in 1804. The rebellion was the most successful slave revolt in history and another in a long line of revs against distant authorities.
In addition, not long after the American Rev, between 1810 and ‘26, most of Latin America expelled its Spanish and Portuguese colonial masters. Simon Bolivar led rev movements in Venezuela and helped establish the Republics of Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. His 1812 Manifesto of Cartagena expressed the same philosophical ideas as those of his counterparts in North America and Europe. The American Rev, then, was part of a worldwide rev against distant authorities and old ideas, and it was based on a new philosophical understanding of “the rights of man” and the way the world should be organized.

The Accompanying Revolution in Religion

In 1740, a Presbyterian minister, Gilbert Tennent, one of the leaders of the Great Awakening, preached a sermon on “The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry” in churches throughout NY and Penn. Tennent’s sermon, with its plea to test the personal faith of ministers, was a direct challenge to the leaders of the major Protestant denominations -- Presbyterian, Congregational, and Episcopal. As a result of the Great Awakening, church members claimed permission and responsibility to judge their ministers. It wasn’t a great leap for the citizens to claim the same permission and responsibility for judging those in civil authority.
One visiting revivalist asserted that Patrick Henry, rector of the Episcopal church in Hanover, VA (and uncle to the patriot leader Patrick Henry), was a “stranger to true religion.” Rev Henry demanded that VA’s governor stop these “strolling preachers” who were “a set of incendiaries, enemies not only to the Established Church, but also common disturbers of the peace.” In a way, Henry was right. The Great Awakening disturbed the peace, split churches, and undermined all authorities.

Seaport Radicalism -- from the Stamp Act to the Boston Massacre and Boston Tea Party

Impressment - the British policy of forcibly enlisting sailors into the British navy against their will. It had long been a source of resentment toward the British government in port towns (since the 1690s)
When a warship was short of sailors, which happened often due to high rates of death and desertion, the captain had the authority to impress (or kidnap) likely sailors from merchant ships or ports and then sign them up for naval service. Commercial sailors were paid higher wages than those in the navy and often had better working conditions, so impressments were a source of hatred and a spirit of rebellion for many who lived along the waterfront.

A year later, resistance to the Stamp Act of 1765 was stronger, and it united colonists of many social classes. The act required legal and commercial documents, including magazines, newspapers, and playing cards, to be printed on special paper showing an official stamp. Payment for the stamped paper had to be in British currency. In the spring of 1765, Patrick Henry asked VA’s legislature, the house of Burgesses, to pass resolutions that came to be known as the VA Resolves opposing the tax. Middling and upper-class NYers -- including lawyers and merchants who would have to pay the highest taxes if the law was enforced -- began writing articles against the tax in the city’s many newspapers, which circulated widely.
Sons of Liberty - secret org in the colonies formed to oppose the Stamp Act. from 1765 until independence, members spoke, wrote, and took direct action against British measures, especially the Stamp Tax and the tax on tea.
9 colonies sent delegates to a gathering known as the Stamp Act Congress in NYC in Oct 1765, where they issued a Declaration of Rights and Grievances, which said that Parliament had no right to tax the colonies, and they petitioned for a repeal of the Stamp and Sugar Acts.
The appeal to unity was a new sentiment in colonies that had up until now jealously guarded their independence from each other. GB’s parliamentary action had provoked this increasing unity.
While colonial leaders met and wrote petitions, some of the strongest resistance to the stamp tax developed in the working-class taverns where laborers and sailors gathered. Poor people had little reason to actually pay the tax because they didn’t use many legal docs or paper products that would require the stamped paper, but the tax was a symbol of British arrogance and threatened to slow the colonial economy, which would put sailors and laborers out of work. To the poor, the haughty British authorities were becoming intolerable.
When Lt Governor Cadwallader Colden placed the embossing stamps in Fort Geo until the new tax went into effect on Nov 1, 1765, public protests mounted into what came to be known as the NY Stamp Act Riot. NY merchants and groups like the Sons of Liberty agreed not to import any British goods while the Stamp Act was in force. In taverns across the city, angry citizens shared their discontent with the British. On the evening of Nov 1, a crowd paraded around the city with torches as well as effigies of the lt governor and the devil. They dared the British troops to fire on them and burned Colden’s coach. Next the crowd broke into the home of Major James of the Royal Artillery, drank his considerable supply of liquor, and burned the house. Calling themselves the Sons of Neptune to distinguish themselves from the more middle class Sons of Liberty, the crowd resisted efforts to end the violence. Months later, when news reached NY in May 1766 that the Stamp Act had been repealed, celebrating crowds fired guns, broke windows, and erected a “liberty pole” to taunt British authorities.
Similar riots by the “lower sorts” took place in other colonial cities. In Boston, a ransacked the governor’s home, and in Annapolis, MD, a crowd burned the stamp distributor’s warehouse and forced him to flee the colony. In Wilmington, NC, a mocking angry crowd paraded the stamp collector through the streets. In Charleston, SC, a crowd of workers and seamen burned effigies of the stamp distributor.
In response to the unrest, British authorities under the new prime minister the Marquess of Rockingham decided to repeal the Stamp and Sugar taxes but also to show force. In 1766, while repealing the taxes, Parliament also voted the Declatory Act, which claimed its right to tax and regulate the colonies “in all cases Whatsoever.” In addition, Parliament passed the Revenue Act of 1766, restricting trade in sugar, which helped British and Caribbean merchants at the expense of colonial merchants.
A year later, Charles Townshend, chancellor of the Exchequer (treasurer) in a new British government, imposed new taxes on lead, paint, paper, and tea, known as the second Revenue Act of 1767 (also known as the Townshend duties of 1767). The new British government was desperate to find a way to pay off the war debt but also wanted to assert Parliament’s authority over the colonies. In particular, Parliament wanted to curtail smuggling by some of the most prosperous colonial merchants and to control the mobs that kept rioting in Boston and NY. In Sept 1768, the warships of the Royal Navy arrived in Boston, and British troops marched through the town in a show of the government’s authority. The presence of so many troops created a sense of siege in Boston.
A year and a half later, British soldiers were still stationed in Boston, creating constant tensions with residents who resented their presence. One source of the tensions was the fact that off-duty soldiers were allowed to work on their own part-time, increasing competition with colonists for jobs by accepting lower wages. On the evening of March 5, 1770, an angry crowd began to throw snowballs at British soldiers. They taunted the lone British sentry at the State House, Priv Hugh White. As the crowd around White grew, more people joined in the taunting or watched from the sidelines.
British Captain Thomas Preston sent more soldiers to support while the crowd grew to 300 or 400. Preston asked the crowd to disperse, assuring them that the soldiers wouldn’t fire since he was standing directly in front of them. However, someone threw something that knocked one of the soldiers down, and some of the soldiers started firing, even though no one heard Preston give any orders. 3 men were killed, including a seaman, Crispus Attucks, a former slave who was part African and part American Indian who would be celebrated as the first man and first black person to die in the Rev. 2 more later died of their wounds. The Boston Massacre fueled anger at the British authorities. To avoid further confrontation, the Royal Governor pulled the troops out of Boston. His action also left most of the town in the hands of an increasingly anti-British population.
Boston Massacre -- after months of increasing friction between townspeople and the British troops stationed in he city, on March 5, 1770, British troops fired on American civilians in Boston who were throwing “projectiles” at them, killing 5 and stirring even greater hatred toward the British army
Some of the British troops involved were accused of murder. JA defended them in a subsequent trial in which they were found not guilty. Later, JA said that his defense of the soldiers, those highly unpopular, was “one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested Actions of my whole Life.” Nevertheless, JA also said that there was “no Reason why the Town should not call the Action of that Night a Massacre.” Paul Revere described the event as a deliberate military attack on a peaceful crowd. SA ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡ created a “committee of correspondence” to encourage resistance in other colonies. With such rhetoric, many Bostonians would likely never again be loyal British subjects.
In 1773, GB decided to maintain the tax on tea, but repeal the other Townshend duties. The Tea Act of 1773 not only asserted Parliament’s authority to levy whatever taxes it wished but also attempted to protect the almost-bankrupt British East India Company, which was struggling because customers were purchasing cheaper, smuggled tea elsewhere. Under the act, the East India Company could ship large quantities of tea to the colonies without paying required duties, making the tea cheaper for the colonists, even with the Townshend tea tax. The plan was to encourage colonists to buy the taxed British East India Company tea instead of smuggled teas.
Given the tension and anger in Boston, the city’s response could easily have been predicted. City residents had no intention of paying that tax, even on discounted tea. In NY, Philly, and Charlestown, patriotic groups, often led by the Sons of Liberty, convinced merchants not to allow the tea to land from the British ships. No taxation without representation.
In Nov 1773, a shipment of British tea arrived in Boston on the ship Dartmouth. Even before it arrived, crowds had forced the tea merchants to barricade themselves in their warehouse. Once the Dartmouth appeared, a crowd forced the ship to move to Griffin’s Wharf where dockworkers, sailors, and merchants, not British authorities, controlled the dock. The customs commissioners fled rather than risk getting tarred and feathered. Governor Thomas Hutchinson wouldn’t led the Dartmouth sail back to GB, and the crowd wouldn’t let the tea be unloaded. The stand-off lasted into Dec.
On Dec 16, angry citizens met at the Old South Meeting House. When the governor wouldn’t back down, SA ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡ said, “This meeting can do nothing more to save the country.” The crowd's response, probably well rehearsed, was a series of faked Indian war whoops, a shout of “Boston harbor a tea-pot tonight,” and a call to gather at Griffin’s Wharf. As thousands watched from the shore, men “slightly” disguised as Mohawks boarded the Dartmouth and dumped the tea into the Boston Harbor.
The Boston Tea party galvanized anti-British sentiment in other colonies, and the city was seen as the incubator of the rev activity long before the next shots were fired. In response to the incident, the British closed the port of Boston to all shipping, creating a financial crisis that led to further anger and unrest among not only dockworkers but also the merchant elites who depended on the port for their wealth.
Daughters of Liberty -- organized as a women’s response to the Sons of Liberty, the Daughters opposed British measures, avoided British taxed tea, spun their own yarn, and wove their own cloth to avoid purchasing British goods
Women, too, became increasingly involved in leading their own protests. New England women organized spinning bees to make their own cloth so they could avoid buying British textiles. Among the elite and working people, wearing homespun clothing became a symbol of loyalty to the patriot cause. Their efforts cont to strengthen and spread, especially with the strong support they received from newspapers. In 1774, 51 women in Edenton, NC, promised not to consume British goods, including tea, and other women organized similar boycotts elsewhere. When war broke out and many goods became scarce, women protested when colonial merchants hoarded goods or demanded higher prices. In 1777, women in Poughkeepsie, NY, broke into the house of a merchant they thought was hoarding goods. As the war continued, women led food riots throughout the colonies.

Revolts in the Back Country

Rural people on the frontier from NY to the Carolinas were also taking matters into their own hands, but for different reasons. Backcountry VAns had rebelled in various ways against royal authority since Bacon’s Rebellion, and in all of the colonies, major splits reflected gaps between coastal areas that had more access to, and more rep in, colonial government than rural inland settlements.
In the mid-1760s, feeling ignored and cheated by what they saw as distant and corrupt coastal authorities, farmers in the western regions of NC and SC created the Regulator movement. In SC, Regulators attacked when gangs of outlaws stole from isolated farms. The governor eventually agreed to create circuit courts in the back country, which diminished the violence. In NC, the movement protested corrupt practices of sheriffs and court officials who forced settlers to pay illegally high taxes and legal fees. Regulators rallied settlers, who refused to pay the taxes, closed the courts, and attacked officials. The governor sent in state milia from the coastal areas, and in their largest encounter with the Regulators, 29 people were killed and 150 wounded.
Throughout the colonies, however, the most contentious issue for inland communities was relationships with Indians tribes. Inland people complained those those on the coast used inland settlers as a buffer from the Indians. In Penn, there were also ethnic splits between the regions. Penn’s mostly English Quaker elite had settled around Philly. As pacifists, they tried to maintain peaceful relations with the Indians. But between the Quakers and the Indians was a zone inhabited by Scots-Irish and Germans who didn’t share the pacifism and found themselves much closer to potential Indians hostility.
The rapid growth of the white population exacerbated the conflicts between frontier whites and Indians. The ever-increasing pressure for more land could be satisfied only by white movement into areas that belonged to Indian tribes. As white encroached, attacks by Indians increased. Settlers wanted and expected the British to protect them. But after 1763, King Geo’s Proclamation Line halted further movement west, at least legally. The British-imposed barrier caused intense anger on the frontier.
British agents sought not only to relieve the pressure among land-hungry white settlers but also honor the king’s commitment to the Indians. A 1768 treaty allowed white settlement in W.VA and KY. A similar treaty opened parts of western Penn and NY to white settlement, but colonists wanted much more land and were prepared to fight to get it, whether with Indian tribes or with the king’s reps.
Violence extended all along the lines of settlement. A German immigrant, Frederick Stump, was arrested for murdering 10 Indians in western Penn in 1768 and then freed from jail by a white mob. In VA, vigilantes who called themselves the Augusta Boys killed Cherokees.
General Thomas Gage, the senior British commander in North America, found the situation intolerable. He complained to London that, “all the people of the frontiers from Penn to VA inclusive, openly avow, that they never find a man guilty of murder for killing an Indian.” In response to the frontier resistance, Parliament passed the Quebec Act of 1774, assigning all lands north and west of the Ohio River to the British-controlled Province of Quebec. That action effectively took Indian policy out of the hands of frontier agitators or royal governors along the coast. The Quebec Act also recognized the legal rights of the Catholic Church, which deeply offended the overwhelmingly Protestant Americans. Colonists saw the Quebec Act as one of the Intolerable Acts, a series of laws that included the act that closed the port of Boston until the price of the tea and the tax on it was paid, a revision of the colonial charter of MA, and a Quartering ACt that allowed governors to place troops in any uninhabited building. Patriots insisted that because Parliament was enacting these laws with no rep from colonists, GB was violated the rights of British subjects in North America. Parliament’s actions, including closing the port of Boston and challenging frontier farmers, were unintentionally provoking a common sense of grievance among people who had previously been quite separate in their complaints.

Growing Unity in the Colonies -- The First Continental Congress

First Continental Congress - meeting of delegates from most of the colonies held in Philly in 1774 in response to the British efforts to tax the colonies
While people began to organize and challenge British authorities from VA to Massachusetts, leaders of the rebellion in Massachusetts asked the other colonies to join it in united action against what they saw as British tyranny. All of them except Geo (which was fighting Creek Indians and wanted GB’s support) sent delegates to Philly in Sept 1774 to the First Continental Congress.
Most of the delegates who came to Philly agreed that Parliament had no right to tax the colonies without their consent. The delegates also sought unified opposition to the British treatment of Boston. However, few were ready for a break with GB. the VAns wanted to continue to export tobacco, and SC depended on the rice and indigo. Finding common ground wasn’t easy, but the delegates did gain experience working together, even when they argued, which they did a lot.
There was little talk of war or independence at the gathering. But before they adjourned on OCt 26, the delegates declared that their rights were based on the laws of nature, the British constitution, and the colonial charters, and weren’t to be trifled with. They also agreed to a ban on British exports to take effect in Dec ‘74, a ban on exports that would take effect in Sept ‘75 (after the tobacco and rice crops were safely on their way to GB), and -- for symbolic reasons -- an immediate ban on the consumption of tea from the East India Company. They agreed to meet again in May ‘75 if relations with GB didn’t improve.

Talk of Freedom for Slaves

Somerset Decision - a 1772 ruling by GB’s Lord Chief Justice in the case of James Somerset that set him free and essentially declared slavery illegal in GB, though not in GB’s colonies

For African slaves in British North America, the most rev moment of the 1700s took place in London in July 1772. An American slave named James Somerset had been taken from VA to GB as a personal servant by his master Charles Stewart. In London, Somerset befriended free blacks and white abolitionists. In Oct 1771, he ran away. He was caught and put on a ship bound for Jamaica. But Somerset’s white friends petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus, requiring that Somerset be brought before a judge to determine whether he was imprisoned lawfully. They insisted that he was held against his will. The decision was that Somerset had to be free, and slavery was ended in England.
Legal challenges weren’t the main ways in which slaves sought freedom before and during the American Rev, however. Slaves heard about the protests of the Stamp Act and how effective mob action was. Some 107 slaves ran away from a plantation near Charleston to join other runaways who were creating their own communities in hard-to-penetrate swamps.
Whites on both sides of the Atlantic noted the absurdity of colonists protesting their own perceived enslavement by Parliament, while, as one wrote, those same colonists enslaved “thousands of tens of thousands of their fellow creatures!” The most consistent voice for abolition in the 1760s and 1770s came from the Quakers, who made it mandatory for members of their denomination to free their slaves or allow them to purchase their freedom. In the 1700s, the slave trade was still a profitable institution. While some whites wrote anti-slavery letters and pamphlets, 7k were imported to Charleston in 1765. The debate around slavery was as heated as the the debate around British rule, and no one living through these years could fail to notice the contradiction of fighting for liberty and enforcing slavery.

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The War for Independence
Explain how political and military strategy, support for the patriot cause, and American alliances with France and Spain led to an American victory in the war for independence
From Lexington and Concord to Bunker Hill -- Revolt Becomes War

General Thomas Gage understood the growing rebellion. When Parliament passed the Intolerable Acts, Gage was charged with moving British troops back into Boston and allowing no trade until MA submitted to the crown. Gage recommended to London that efforts be made to conciliate the colonists. But the leaders in Parliament didn’t want to, and Gage received orders to restore order at all costs. As he moved his troops, Gage kept a close eye on the MA rebels who kept an equally close eye on him. Paul Revere, who had helped lead the Boston Tea Party, now led an informal group of unemp artisans who noted every troop movement in Boston.

The Battles of Lexington and Concord, April 1775

In the inland towns of Concord and Worcester, the colonial militia was collecting arms, and Gage knew it. Hoping for secrecy, he ordered troops to prepare to march to Concord to seize the troop movements by hanging lanterns in the steeple of the North Church. When the British troops started to move, Revere had two lanterns hung in the steeple. Then he and Wm Dawes began their rides through the night to alert the colonial militia. Revere was arrested by British troops, but Dawes woke SA ♡♡♡♡♡ and John Hancock, who made it to Concord to organize the militia.
When the British reached Lexington Town Green at little after 4h30 am on April 19, 1775, they were met by colonial militia. Shots were fired, killing 8 militiamen and wounding 10 others. Only one British soldier was wounded in this first battle of the Rev.
There was no further gunfire until the British entered the town of Concord where they found few arms. As they left to march the 16 miles back to Boston, militiamen hidden behind trees, buildings, rocks, and fences attacked their easy targets. At the end of the day, the British had 273 casualties, the militia 95. What had been unrest was now a war.
Word of the battles of Lexington and Concord spread quickly. Many shared tj’s belief that “the last hopes of reconciliation” had now ended. People who weren’t sure about independence felt they had to make decisions. Many began to commit to what they saw as a patriotic cause, some even taking matters into their own hands. Ethan Allen, who since 1770 had led his Green Mt Boys in challenging royal authority in Vermont, and Benedict Arnold of CT, then in the patriot cause, organized their own militia and captured Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain on May 10, 1775. The cannons from the fort would play a large role in the coming struggle.

From the Battle of Bunker Hill to the Formation of the Colonial Amy

In the weeks after the battles at Lexington and Concord, the MA militia, fortified with recruits from CT, began to dig in on the hills surrounding British occupied Boston - Dorchester Heights to the south and BUnker HIll and Breed’s Hill to the north. Col Wm Prescott of the MA militia was put in charge of fortifying the northern hills.
General Gage again feld he had to act. On June 17, Gage ordered an attack on Breed’s hill. It was a British victory, but at a high cost - 226 British dead and 828 wounded compared with 140 militia killed and 271 wounded. A Pyrrhic victory, truly
The battle, later known as the Battle of Bunker Hill, even though it had taken place on Breed’s Hill, had been between ill-organized militia and regular units of the British army. After that battle, however, the American forces became better organized and gained support from all 13 colonies.

African-Americans in the Armies of Both Sides

The outbreak of war opened a new avenue of freedom for American slaves. While some, like Wheatley, embraced rev for liberty and freedom, others heeded different words. Jeremiah, a free black man in Charleston, heard the rumor that the British intended to help black people. He didn’t wait for the help but began to org one of several slave uprisings in the Carolinas in 1775 and ‘78. Jeremiah’s plans for an insurrection were discovered, and he was hanged and burned at the stake in Aug 1775 by prorev authorities in SC.
There was a good reason for the rumors among the slaves. In 1775, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of VA, under attack from the rebels, fled Williamsburg. In Nov of that year, from his refuge on a rish warship, he announced freedom to anyone who joined the British.
The proclamation terrified whites. With it, the slaves’ perspective of the rev struggle was transformed into a struggle about who would give them their liberty. In SC where there were 80k slaves, 60 % of the pop, such liberty would be a radical rev indeed.
Many slaves responded to the invitation. Between 800 and 1k slaves joined the British army. An american col Joseph Hutchings was captured by two of his own former slaves. When the British landed on Staten Island in ‘76, NY and NJ slaves joined them.
Runaway slaves built forts, tended the wounded, carried supplies, and fought alongside white soldiers. British gens understood that in recruiting slaves they were also disrupting the economies of the colonies. Although disease took a terrible toll among black soldiers and their families, and those many were captured and reenslaved, the loyalty of slaves to the British cause eventually brought freedom to some of them. Approx 300 former slaves sailed with Dunmore when he left VA in 1776, and by the end of the war, British forces had relocated some 3k more in Canada or in colonies in West Africa.
The American army was much slower to enlist free blacks or slaves than the British. Black individuals did serve along the colonial troops at Lexington and Concord in 1775, including Lemuel Haynes, who became one of the leading ministers in MA after the war.
Gw was reluctant to arm black soldiers, fearing not only the reaction of white troops but also the possibility that arms given to black soldiers might eventually support a slave revolt. By the winter of 1777-78, when things looked grim for the Rev, gw finally embraced black volunteers. Shortly after, in Fed ‘78, RI offered freedom to every slave who joined the British. Perhaps one in four male slaves in the state eventually enlisted in what was known as RI’s Black Regiment. Those who survived the war were given their freedom in 1783.

Moving Toward Independence

Second Continental Congress - an assemblage of delegates from all the colonies that convened in May 1775 that eventually declared independence, adopted the Articles of Confederation, and conducted the Rev War
When the delegates to the Second Continental Congress gathered as promised in Philly on May 10, 1775, the Battles of Lexington and Concord had changed everything. They knew they had to manage a war and attempted to create the Continental Army. The obvious choice to command it was gw, a respected member of Congress and a vet of the Fr and Indian War.
Gw took command of the colonial militia, such as it was, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on July 2, 1775, shortly after the Battle of Bunker Hill. American resistance would be more coordinated than it had been during the early skirmishes. Gw commanded between 9k and 14k troops -- he was never sure -- while Gage led about 5k in Boston. Despite the difference in numbers, the Royal Navy controlled the water, and Gage’s troops were highly disciplined soldiers. Gw’s troops were a ragtag army, capable of effective guerilla fighting and great courage, but hard to discipline, easily bored, and ready to return to their homes if fighting dragged on.
After selecting gw and beginning to find the money (mostly in foreign loans) to support an army, the Second Continental Congress turned to another question: what did they want from the war? John Dickinson of Penn wanted reconciliation with GB if Parliament would respect the rights of the colonists. JA and most of the VA delegates wanted independence. Others weren’t sure. It took a year for the debate to be resolved, and before that, other matters intervened.

Thomas Paine’s Common Sense ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡

Declaring Independence, 1776

The Articles of Confederation

Articles of Confederation -- written doc setting up the loose confederation of states that made up the first natl government of the US from 1781 to ‘88
In 1777, the Articles of Confederation created a national government. Although 11 of the colonies ratified the Articles within a year, the last, MD, didn’t do so until 1781. With the Articles of Confed, the states banded together in a formal alliance to prosecute the war and govern the nation in the peace they hoped would follow. With the Declaration of Independence, the 13 colonies declared themselves to be 13 independent states that agreed to work together for certain limited common purposes. Although they were committed to cooperate, the reps were distrustful of a centralized government. Under the Articles of Confed, there would be no national executive or court system in the new nation. Congress could raise money through taxes only if every state agreed. This government was able to coordinate its fight and win the Rev.

George Washington and his Victorious Patchwork Army

The American Rev was a long and bloody war between 2 different armies. One side was GW’s patchwork Continental Army and various rebel militias -- later supported by troops from Fr and Spain. In the course of the long war, some 200k out of the 350k men who could have served participated in some military activity, but the turnover was such that no more than 25k served at any one time. Fighting against them was a corp of well-trained British troops, supported by the org units of Tories and hired soldiers from Germany.
Most of the rev Minute Men who fought at Lexington and Concord (called Minute Men because they pledged to be ready on a minute’s notice) were farmers who owned their own weapons and knew how to shoot. As the war continued and as gw and his officers created the kind of discipline necessary for an effective army, more and more of the early volunteers faded away, replaced by recently indentured servants, impoverished transients, or prisoners.
Despite being ill-trained, ill-fed, ill-clothed, and restless, these troops cont to fight. These often forgotten men are who won the independence that others celebrated.
A few women also took a direct role in the war. Armies in the 1700s usually included women known as camp followers. Some were the wives of soldiers who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave their husbands. Others were single women seeking adventure or simply survival in army life and army rations. Camp followers carried water to the battlefield, fed and supported the troops, nursed the wounded, and occasionally fought in battles. Mary Ludwig Hays, known as Molly Pitcher, also loaded her husband's cannon after he was wounded. Deborah Sampson disguised herself as a man, joined the army, and fought for years until a doc discovered her identity after she was wounded.
GW understood that though his army could fight, they couldn’t withstand a direct battle with British regulars. He told Congress that he needed to fight a defensive war and avoid any general action. For much of the war, his goal was to avoid a decisive loss. The longer gw was able to keep his army together and out of too many battles, the better the chance that the British would tire of war.

The British Evacuate Boston

After the Battle of Bunker Hill, the British controlled Boston but were hemmed in there. Through the winter of 1775-76, GW commissioned a promising soldier, Henry Knox, a young Boston bookseller, as a col in the Continental Army and sent him and his men to move the guns captured at Fort Ticonderoga on sleds over snow-covered mts to Boston. On the night of March 1, 1776, GW’s troops assembled the guns on Dorchester Heights and then bombarded the city until March 17 when the British finally evacuated Boston.

The War in the North -- Manhattan, Trenton, and Valley Forge

The victory in Boston was one of the few outright victories GW would achieve. GW’s goal was to engage in more indirect strategies that would wear down the British while preserving his own limited troops.
Just as the American Congress was declaring independence in Philly in 1776, Sir William Howe, who had replaced Gage as the British commander, landed his army on Staten Island. Howe had some 32k troops, including 8k German mercenaries known as Hessians. During the war, some 30k Hessians fought for the British, approx a quarter of all their soldiers. Hessian troops were recruited, often by force, from among the poorest Germans, and German princes would rent them out as units, especially to the British. Many Hessian soldiers had little interest in the British cause, but had little choice except to fight for it. GW had his own morale problems, but his soldiers were somewhat more willing to fight.
As the two sides watched each other, GW’s troops dug fortifications to defend Brooklyn and Manhattan. In late Aug, Howe’s larger and better-trained force attacked Brooklyn. Rather than risk battle and capture, GW abandoned Brooklyn and brought all 9.5k of his troops across the East River to Manhattan on the night of Aug 30. When Howe attacked Manhattan in Sept, GW again retreated. Throughout the early fall, GW continued a retreat, and the British advanced through NJ. As they settled down for the winter, the British held most of NJ, while GW’s army was across the Delaware River in Penn.
Then, on xmas night of 1776, GW and 2,400 troops made a daring raid across the Delaware River and captured Trenton, NJ. They also captured many Hessian soldiers, some of whom quickly joined the rebel side. In Jan, they would go on to successfully attack a British force in Princeton. By the winter of 1776-77, GW controlled southern NJ while the British held northern NJ and NYC, which they would control throughout the war.
In May 1777, British General John Burgoyne assembled a large army in Canada. His plan was to proceed down the Hudson River and smash the rebellion in NY and New England. Initially, the plan went well. Burgoyne had some 8,300 men, including 3k German troops. He led his army across Lake Champlain, overran the Americans at Fort Ticonderoga, and cont south into NY’s Hudson River Valley, an exhausting effort that involved moving a large army with heavy supplies through dense forests. As he moved through the area Burgoyne’s sometime pompous pronouncements to colonists and the German troops’ inability to communicate with them bred additional colonial resentment and motivated fresh volunteers for the American cause.
In Sept 1777, near Saratoga, NY, Burgoyne’s army encountered American troops under the command of an experienced general, Horatio Gates, and the still patriotic Benedict Arnold. The British were surprised that their bayonet charge couldn’t break the American lines. Both armies suffered heavy losses, but neither won a decisive victory. Burgoyne’s army was now cut off from its winter quarters, and, shortly after, was forced to negotiate. Some 5,800 British troops were captured and held as prisoners until the end of the war. The Battle of Saratoga was a turning point for the colonial cause. It eliminated a significant British force, and it proved to the world that the Americans could stand up to GB’s toughest troops. As a result, American diplomats were able to negotiate an agreement with the Fr and later the Spanish to recognize the united colonies and provide military assistance.
The British wanted to now only but split the colonies and to capture GW and his army, but also the catch members of the Continental Congress by overtaking Philly where the Congress met. In Sept 1777, British troops captured Philly but the members of Congress escaped before the British arrived. GW was able to block supplies into the city, and the following spring, the British abandoned Philly, which remained in colonial hands for the rest of the war, though there were continued riots between patriots and Tories in the city.
Before the British left Philly, the American forces had to survive perhaps their most difficult winter. GW selected Valley Forge, Penn, 18 miles northwest from Philly as a place to keep and eye on the British in the city. His army was exhausted, cold, and hungry, and they got colder and hungrier as the winter continued. For weeks, there was little to eat. In time, GW was able to appoint commissary officers who found and clothing for the soldiers. A Prussian officer volunteering in the American cause, Baron von Steuben, began training the troops in close order drills. Von Steuben possessed expertise in military training and hoped to make a name and a home for himself in a free America. In addition, Marquis de Lafayette ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡ was recruited to lead forces that harassed the British. By the time the British sailed out of Philly, the American troops were better fed and clothed, better trained, and ready for new battles.
In 1778, General Sir Henry Clinton replaced Howe, and a new British strategy took shape. Clinton ordered the Royal Navy to harass the colonists up and down the Atlantic coast and encouraged GB’s Indian allies to attack frontier settlements. In addition, he sent he main British land force south to overrun the Carolinas and Geo. If he could detach those 3 colonies, the Rev might crumble. After 1778, the major battles of the war would be in the colonies’ western and southern regions.

The Importance of Fr and Spain

The rev was won by the rebels for many reasons, including the fact that Fr and Spain were willing to help. The two countries had their own reasons for wanting to embarrass GB and reduce GB’s power on the world stage. Both wanted greater access to trade with America. By the 1770s, the Fr still resented the British victory in the 7 Years’ War and wanted to ensure that Fr was the dom power in Europe. As early as 1775, Fr sent agents to America to see what might be gained from assisting in the rebellion. Spain started to supply the colonists with food and gunpowder from NOLA and Cuba.
While they were willing to support the rebellion, neither Fr nor Spain wanted to engage in war with GB unless the colonists were serious.
In 1776, Ben Franklin led an American delegation in Paris to see further help. Ben with his simple fur cap and plain specs yet sophisticated manner charmed the Fr. however, Ben needed much more than Charm to win real help. With the Americans’ declared independence and victory over GB’s troops at Saratoga, Fr leaders started to take him more seriously. His diplomatic efforts secured important supplies, and in Feb 1778, a full Fr alliance with the USA, the first diplomatic recognition of the new nation. A few month later, Fr formally declared war on GB. For the rest of the war, GW could count on the Fr army and navy to fight the British.
Once Fr and Spain went to war with GB, the American Rev became a world war. The Fr and British navies fought in the English Channel, Spain attacked British Gibraltar, and all of them fought battles in the Caribbean. Most important for the American cause, the Fr supported GW’s troops throughout the latter part of the war while Spanish funds and smuggling efforts provided badly needed supplies.

The Iroquois and the British

The Iroquois were divided about how to respond to the rebellion, and at the beginning of the war, most sought to remain neutral. However, many saw GB as the key to their independence, and as the war continued, neutrality faded. Beginning in the summer of 1777, Mohawks under the leadership of Thayendanegea, also known as Joseph Brant, attacked white communities across NY and Penn. The attacks on farms threatened a crucial colonial food supply. In response, in the summer of 1779, GW sent perhaps a third of his army to attack the Iroquois. From GW’s perspective, the Iroquois had to be stopped. For the Iroquois, GW’s fierce response was proof that the American leadership would always be an implacable enemy. Both sides adopted brutal scorched-earth tactics that left long-lasting hatreds.

British Loyalists

Colonists who remained loyal to GB formed their own militia, and in the Carolinas, an army of over a thousand Tories challenged rebel forces. Other Tories joined British regiments. American rebels had nothing but contempt for them. In the NY-NJ area, Catherine and Philip Van Cortland, one of the area’s leading families, remained loyal to GB. When G.W. gained control of their part of N.J., he ordered that the Van Cortland house be used as an army hospital. With her husband away, Catherine and her children were told to leave.
In some cities, including Newark, NJ, in 1777 and Philly in 1780, the wives of missing Tories were exiled by the American forces. Some Tory families were able to blend back into their old homes after the war, but many left for Canada or GB and never returned.

Women’s Support for Washington’s Army

In 1780, at a particularly bad time for the Continental troops, Esther De Berdt Reed (wife of the governor of Penn) and Sarah Franklin Bache (Ben Frank’s daughter) asked patriot women to give up all luxuries and contribute to a fund for the Continental Army. Eventually, the women raised $300,000, a huge sum at the time.
The women’s goal was to give $2 in hard cash to every soldier. GW refused the offer and asked the women instead to buy cloth and sew shirts for the soldiers. The women agreed and produced thousands of shirts for the ill-clad troops. The experience also led to the creation of the Ladies Association, the first intercolonial organization of women in American and a model for future national organizations of women.
Women throughout the colonies found additional ways to support the cause. In Fishing Creek, SC, young girls went from farm to farm, asking “Is the owner out with the fighting men?” If the answer was yes, then they harvested the land. In 5 or 6 weeks, they had completed the harvest for the whole county, saving patriot farmers from economic ruin and providing food stores for the rev cause. Stories of similar efforts abounded.

The War in the South -- From Charleston to Yorktown

After capturing Savannah, Geo. in Dec 1778, the British attacked Charleston, SC, in 1780, and on May 12, 1780, the city surrendered. The loss was significant. If the British took control of Georgia and the Carolinas, it would be hard to continue the resistance in the name of the united colonies and the strategy seemed to be working.
As the battle for control of the south continued, GW named one of his gens, Nathaniel Greene, to lead a southern campaign. Greene divided the American forces, taking command of half and assigning others -- a contingent of MD and VA militias -- to Daniel Morgan, an experienced VAn officer. The British commander, Lord Cornwallis also divided his army between himself and Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton, who had a reputation for cruelty.
While the two armies maneuvered, smaller independent units fought their own battles. Not every resident of SC supported independence, and local Tories fought against colonial units. Throughout 1780 and /81, the SC backcountry was filled with ugly and often personal conflicts. Unlike other colonies, the civilian death toll was high in SC.
Morgan made a stand against the British forces in SC pasture known as Cowpens in Jan 1781. In one of the last full-scale battles of the war, the American troops defeated Tarleton’s army and captured some 800 British soldiers -- a crucial American victory. Although the British still held Charleston and small units loyal to the British harassed the revs, after Cowpens, the Americans were in control of the SC countryside.
Cornwallis saw little chance of further success in the Carolinas and marched into VA in May 1781. He decided to fortify Yorktown on the york River where he thought he could count on being resupplied by water. As Cornwallis’s troops dug in at Yorktown, GW was in the north planning another attack on NYC. Greene’s army was far to the south. At the prodding of the Fr, GW moved quickly to take advantage of the situation. In Sept, the Fr navy blockaded the York River and cut Cornwallis off from resupply. Then, supported by Fr troops under the Count de Rochambeau, GW marched his own mary from NY 450 miles south at surprising speed. On Sept 28, GW’s 16,000 troops attacked Yorktown. The siege continued for the next 2 weeks, but after failing at an attempted escape, Cornwallis surrendered on Oct 17, 1781.

The Treaty of Paris

The surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown did not end the war, but it virtually guaranteed that it would eventually end favorably for the Americans. British troops still controlled NYC, Charleston, Savannah, and parts of the countryside, but many in Parliament were tired of the war, and public opinion in GB had turned against continued hostilities. In June 1780, Congress had sent John Jay to join Ben Frank and J.A. in Paris to negotiate peace. After news of the Yorktown surrender arrived, the British delegates agreed to a draft treaty that began, “His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States… to be free Sovereign and independent States.” The two sides continued to negotiate boundaries, fishing rights, and legal claims, and GB concluded separate treaties with Fr and Spain. The final treaty was signed in Paris on Sept 3, 1783. The Rev War was over, and a new nation had been born.

Preludes to Revolution: Summary
The Seven Years’ War (the Fr and Indian War) was fought in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. There were many outcomes of the world war of 1754-63. GB victory secured its dominance of India and enhanced the British presence on the coast of Africa and in the Caribbean. Most significantly, the 1763 Treaty of Paris that officially ended the hostilities eliminated Fr as a North American power. For American Indians living between the MS River and the Atlantic coast, the end of the war was an unmitigated disaster, particularly because they could no longer play one country against the other to gain bargaining power. GB’s victory came a high financial cost -- soaring debt from the war itself as well as new and expensive military obligations in North America. The British government was determined that colonists should shoulder some of the burden of these costs.

“The Rev was in the Minds of the People”: Summary
For many British North Americans, a rev change in outlook occurred between 1760 and 1775, and it took place for many different reasons. Some colonists were inspired by the ideas of the Enlightenment. Others were moved by religion to take a more skeptical view of authority. Sailors and shop owners in Boston, NY, and Philly as well as backwoods farmers in western Penn, VA, SC, and NC were often much more ready for rev, much sooner, than their better known leaders because British actions were seriously affecting their lives. For African slaves, the growing spirit of rev had both potential and daner. Some slaves and free blacks saw in the rev rhetoric the possibility of their own freedom. Other African-Americans saw the British government as a protector and even liberator. Most Indians, fearing the colonists would expand their settlements, sided with the British governments.

The War for Independence: Summary
British efforts to ensure the enforcement of the Intolerable Acts led to the first battles of the Rev War at Lexington and Concord in April 1775. After these battles, the Continental Congress began to prepare for war. By the summer of 1776, Congress was ready to declare independence. The Articles of Confederation that Congress agreed on a clear, though weak, national government. gw’s first task was to transform his forces into a real army. The American victory at Saratoga in 1777 brought the Fr in on the American side. After 1778, the British strategy shifted, and most of the fighting took place in the West and South. Fr and Spanish support proved crucial to the winning of the Rev War. The decisive battle of the war was fought at Yorktown, VA, in the fall of 1781. The final treaty ending the war was signed in Paris on Sept 3, 1783.

Chapter 6 - Creating a nation

Significant Dates

1783 - The Newburgh Conspiracy among Rev War officers; Treaty of Paris recognizes US independence
1784 - Treaty of Fort Stanwix between Iroquois and the US; post-rev war economic downturn
1786 - Annapolis Convention
1786-87 - Shays’s Rebellion in MA ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡
1787 - Constitutional Convention in Philly; Northwest Ordinance
1787-88 - The Federalist papers published; state conventions about the Constitution

The State of the Nation at War’s End
Explain how the outcome of the American Rev affected different groups in the new US.
For the Revolutionary Army Officers: the Newburgh Conspiracy

Democracy - a form of government in which power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of rep
During the long months between the victory at Yorktown in late 1781 and the treaty that ended the war in March 1783, the army that had won the war came close to a military takeover of the government -- a coup d’etat and a military dictatorship. Once the army had won its final battle, the Continental Congress asked the soldiers to wait, but the army didn’t wait patiently in the year and a half that followed.
By the spring of 1783, the soldiers and officers had many reasons to complain. The northern army was in barracks in Newburgh, NY. They were bored. By Dec 1782, they hadn’t been paid for months. Pensions that the Congress had promised looked like they might never be paid. General Alexander McDougall and Cols John Brooks and Matthias Ogden took a petition from Newburgh to the Congress in Philly that said they needed money and couldn’t wait any longer, and borrowing money from friends to survive didn’t sit well with the officers.
The petition arrived in Philly at a crucial moment. The new nation was governed by the Articles of Confederation that had been adopted during the Rev. Under the Articles, which did ensure a democratic government, led by a Congress of reps elected by voters, the national government couldn’t levy taxes or raise funds without the unanimous approval of all the states. In late 1782, some of the states had rejected a proposal to tax imports. Hammy wrote, “Without certain revenues, a government can have no power.” The government that received the petition from the officers was in just that situation.
Those in the Congress who supported the idea of a powerful central government used the army’s petition to demand that the Congress be given the power to tax so it could raise its own funds and not have to depend on the generosity of state legislatures. These Federalists (later to form the Federalist Party led by Hammy), made it clear to the army’s reps that they needed to support the move to give Congress the power to tax if they were ever going to get paid. The other main faction in Congress (later to form the Republican-Democrat Party in the 1790s) feared maintaining a standing army and opposed a larger government fueled by national taxes. They wanted to maintain the national government just as it was -- as a weak alliance of individually strong states.
Deadlock followed. It was a dangerous movement. The threat by the army’s officers to use force was real. They had been promised payment. Congress had now linked the payments to other agendas and postponed action. While most of those in the army were angry, there were also significant differences among them. A group of young officers were ready for action. They thought that gw was far too moderate. Their hero was Horatio Gates, who had led the victory at Saratoga and who disliked gw. Some around Gates, perhaps in consultation with some Federalists in Congress, began planning for a military takeover of the new Republic. In March 1783, Major John Armstrong Jr published the first of what were called the “Newburgh Addresses,” anonymously belittling the “milk and water style” and “meek language” of the previous petitions to Congress and calling for a meeting of the officers to discuss the situation.
General gw was horrified. Military action would undermine everything for which he and the officers had fought. But gw was a crafty politician. He simply asked the officers to postpone their meeting by a few days, invited Gates to preside, and requested a full report, implying that he wouldn’t be there. The officers who wanted action thought they had won and that they could meet with gw’s blessing.
But when Gates called the meeting to order, gw entered the room and requested permission to speak. Despite being furious, Gates knew he couldn’t refuse gw in front of the other officers. Gw then attacked the anonymous “Newburgh Addresses” as “unmilitary” and “subversive of all order and discipline.”
The speech worked. The officers cheered gw. All threat of military action against the weak civil government was over. Congress voted to give a lump sum payment to all the officers who had been promised a pension and passed a tax on imports to pay off the national debt, including the debt to the army.
The Newburgh Conspiracy was defeated. In Nov, the last British troops left NYC and the American officers marched into the city and began its transition to civilian leadership. Instead of seizing power, the Continental Army began to disband, with payment as promised. Gw made a triumphal entry into the city, and on Dec 4, 1783, gave an emotional farewell to his officers. He then returned to Mt Vernon. By Jan 1784, the army had shrunk to some 600 soldiers, ensuring a transition to civilian rule.

For Poor White Farmers: Shays’s Rebellion ♡♡♡♡♡

The poor of the new nation were unhappy, in some cases violently unhappy. Some had served as enlisted soldiers in the Rev army and had their own complaints about salaries. Beginning in 1784, the influx of imported goods that came with the war’s end created an economic depression that hit hardest those who were already poor. The most famous response to this unhappiness in the first years of the new Republic took place in MA. those who participated in the rebellion called themselves Regulators -- not to be confused with those in NC and SC who had taken the law into their hands before the Rev, but simply people who wanted to regulate the power of the new state governments.
Shays’s Rebellion - an armed movement of debt-ridden farmers in western MA in the winter of 1786-87 who objected to the state’s effort to tax them to pay off the Rev War debt ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡
In 1786, farmers in western MA began petitioning the state legislature for relief from the economic hardships brought on by a significant increase in their taxes as the legislature tried to pay off Rev War debts and by the postwar economic depression that reduced the value of farm products. For farmers who were used to being self-sufficient, the reduction in their income and demands for taxes to be paid in cash were too much to accept. They were being threatened with foreclosure and their way of life was being destroyed because they couldn’t raise the money demanded of them. They had to do something.
When faced with the petitions of the farmers, the MA legislature, dominated by commercial leaders from the eastern part of the state, blamed the farmers for their own plight. In response, the farmers decided on direct action. They simply stopped the courts from issuing foreclosure rulings. On Aug 29, 1786, 1.5k farmers armed with clubs and muskets shut down the court in Northampton as it attempted to hear cases. They also stopped courts in four other towns.
The governor and legislature reacted by passing a Riot Act that prohibited 12 or more armed persons from gathering and authorized county sheriffs to kill those who disobeyed the law. They also suspended the writ of habeas corpus and authorized the governor to arrest and hold without bail “any person or persons whatsoever.”
But the farmers, many who had fought as soldiers in the Rev, were prepared to fight a second time for their rights as free citizens. From their perspective, the MA legislature was acting like the former royal governor. Daniel Shays ♡♡♡ and several thousand of his fellow citizens now took up arms, fearing for “our lives and families which will be taken from us if we don’t defend them.”
By Jan 1787, the regulators had decided to overthrow the government of MA. Shays ♡♡ himself planned to attack the federal arsenal in Springfield and then march to Boston to “destroy the nest of devils, who by their influence, make the Court enact what they please, burn it and lay the town of Boston in ashes.” He came close to succeeding.
By late Jan, thousands of well-armed farmers surrounded by the federal arsenal in Springfield, which was defended by 1k state militia under the command of Major General Wm Shepard. Unfortunately for the rebellion, different groups thought the assault was set for different days, so on Jan 25, as a smaller group than expected marched on the arsenal, Shepherd's troops fired over their heads but then directly into their ranks. 4 or 5 were killed, and the rest retreated. They didn’t immediately give up their idea of overthrowing the state government, but no other attack came as close to doing so.
As 1787 wore on, the rebellion slowly ended. The Regulators had few friends in the MA government or the surrounding states and were unable to established a political base. In 1788, the economy began to recover, which made life more tolerable for farmers. Some of the rebels left MA for more remote places. Shays ♡♡♡ settled in Vermont. But the rebels had terrified the nation’s elite and hastened the movement toward a stronger national government.
Fears of the rebellion in MA inspired other rev leaders to act. When he first heard news of Shays’s Rebellion, gw told Henry Lee of VA that the rebellion was “proof of what our trans-Atlantic foe has predicted… that mankind when left to themselves are unfit for their own Government.” But, despite their worries, men like gw and Lee were determined not to let such a proof stand. The convention that met in Philly in the summer of 1787 was a direct result.

For White Settlers Moving West

The new nation was huge compared to the territorial size of the European powers. The Treaty of Paris recognized the eastern border of the US as running along the Atlantic coast from ME to Geo. Since GB had returned Florida to Spain at the end of the Rev War, the new nation was cut off from the Gulf of Mexico, and Spain wasn’t always a friendly southern neighbor. The Treaty of Paris also made the eastern shore of the MS River the nation’s western boundary. The British proclamation line that had protected Indian tribes in the Ohio region and caused so much tension wasn’t mentioned in the treaty. Control of the MS River (the right to travel on it) would remain contested, especially since the river ended at NOLA, which Spain zealously guarded.
American Indians dominated the interior of the vast territory, but without even the modest protection from white settlers that gb had provided. More whites were crossing mts and claiming western lands despite lack of government approval and the dangers of Indian attack. Royal charters gave many of the states’ claims to lands far into the interior. But soon after the Rev ended, the Continental Congress began resolving conflicting land claims and creating new states and territories west of the 13 states.
One of the first issues to be resolved was over the conflicting claims of NY and NH to the land on the eastern side of Lake Champlain. Many of the whites who had settled there region wanted independence from both. Local heroes, such as Ethan Allen and his Green Mt Boys, had fought for the American cause in the region and wanted to control their home. As a result, Vermont became the first new state in 1791.
One of the most significant accomplishments of the Congress that operated under the Articles of Confederation was the creation of the Northwest Territory out of lands claimed by Penn, NY, CT, and MA. Between 1784 and /87, Congress set up territorial governments for what would become Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and WI. It took years of difficult negotiations before the original states gave up their conflicting claims to the interior lands, but ordinances passed between 1784 and ‘87 created a new structure for the future Midwest. Wish it never happened rip. In 1785, Congress ordered that the lands be surveyed, set off into a grid pattern with most sections to be sold, while some were reserved for future government needs and specifically for the support of schools. The grid system established in 1785 was used in future territories, creating clear and well-organized boundaries for farms and towns, but encouraging widely dispersed settlements rather than compact communities.
The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 - Legislation passed by Congress under the Articles of Confederation that provided for public schools, the sale of government land, and prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territories
The Northwest ordinance of 1787 banned slavery in these territories as well as mandating religious freedom and the development of public schools. The act also said to be nice to the Native Americans and not steal their lands, but little was done to enforce that.
♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡ Further south, white settlement was proceeding faster. An accomplished soldier, hunter, and trapper, Danny Boone ♡♡♡♡ ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡ first explored the trans-Appalachian territory that would be known as Kentucky in 1767 when it was still off limits to whites. As the Rev was starting in 1775 and the British ability to stop settlement was ebbing, Boone blazed the Wilderness Trail through the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachians and established a settlement called Boonesborough. During and after the war, many more settlers followed the Wilderness Trail. VA gave up its long-standing claims to the region, and the federal government, recognizing that there were already slaves in the territory, admitted Kentucky to the union as a slave state in 1792 and Tennessee in 1796.
Even further south, the land west of Geo that would eventually become the northern two-thirds of Alabama and MS was organized as the MS Territory in 1798, but the territorial government there was ineffective, and Geo didn’t give up its own claims until 1802. (The southern third of Alabama and MS was known as West Florida, part of the Spanish-controlled territory on the country’s border.) While the Congress tried to settle conflicting claims to the western lands, the Indians, who had the oldest claim to the land, had no inclination to give it up.

For American Indians

For the federal Congress, the greatest threat to the new US came from American Indians. For most of the tribes who lived between the Atlantic coast and the MS River, the end of the American Rev was one more disaster among many. Despite the loyalty of the Iroquois to the British during the Rev, the king’s government agreed to the Treaty of Paris in 1783, which ceded all the lands between the Atlantic coast and the MS and south of the Great Lakes and Canada to the new US, without consulting with their old allies. The Proclamation Line limiting white settlement was gone. Among the many Indian tribes, even among the Iroquois, there were differing responses to the British failure to honor their loyalty. Many Indian leaders saw no reason to honor a treaty that didn’t acknowledge them and continued to act as if much of NY and Penn and all lands west of the Ohio River belonged to them.
Under the leadership of Joseph Brant, the Mohawks, who had fought so hard for the British between 1776 and 1781, petitioned the British authorities in Quebec for land on the British side of the new border and were granted a large tract in Canada. But they, like other tribes, didn’t let an international boundary limit their range of hunting or living. NY and Penn petitioned the Congress for help with the Indian tribes on their western frontiers, and the NY legislature considered expelling all the tribes of the 6 Nations because of their alliance with the British during the war.
Through the Treaty of Paris, the British also promised to withdraw from all forts south of the Great Lakes. As a result, a power vacuum was looming in the region, though the British were slow to honor their commitment to leave their western forts. Rather than depend on state militia, Congress in 1783 began to create the US Army to occupy Fort Niagara near today’s Buffalo, NY, and Fort Pitt, today’s Pittsburgh. Although Congress could create an army, its difficulty in raising funds meant that the Sec of War, former General Henry Knox, had to beg for money to keep the army paid, fed, and supplied, which strengthened the hand of Indian leaders committed to resisting white expansion. And many meant to tresist.
The Iroquois were far from the only Indians who began to resist American expansion violently. These tribes had never formally agreed to peace with the new nation, and they attacked both the army and the settlers. The small battles (individual attacks, kidnappings, and destruction of property) continued as they had during the Rev. The US Army was far too small, ill-trained, and ill-supplied to be much of a deterrent. Given how weak the army was, the Indians held the upper hand in the Northwest Territory and Kentucky.
Treaty of Fort Stanwix - a 1784 treaty between one faction of the Iroquois and the US government that sought to end the violent battles over land in NY, Penn, and the Ohio River Valley to the west
A temporary peace along the NY border was secured in Oct 1784 by the Treaty of Fort Stanwix between some of the Iroquois and the US government. But many, including Sagoyewatha (Red Jacket) of the Seneca and Joseph Brant, opposed the treaty, and it didn’t hold. In fact, the Indians of the Northwest Territory would remain virtually at war with the US from 1785 until 1795.
After the Treaty of Fort Stanwix was signed, Brant sailed for London where he met with many high-ranking British officials and had an audience with King Geo III. He sought financial support for his people as a compensation for their role on the British side in the Rev, and he -- and his British hosts -- also seem to have developed a plan for Indian resistance to the new American nation.
In 1785 and ‘86, Brant began to create an Indian confederation that could successfully resist the US. The confederation included not only reps of the Iroquois but also many other tribes who had been traditional enemies of the Iroquois as well as Cherokees from much further south and small tribes who resided in the Ohio River Valley. It would be one of the most unified and effective adversaries that the US would face. The Indians demanded that the Congress ensure that white settlement ended at the Ohio River.
While the Indians and Congress negotiated fitfully, the frontier remained a violent place. In the late 1780s, 1.5k white settlers and at least as many Indians in Ohio and Kentucky were killed. The US had no intention of ceding as much land to the Indians as they demanded, but under the Articles of Confederation, it was difficult to organize an army to enforce the government’s claims. The need to create a government strong enough to counter the Indians led many to support the Constitution in 1787.

For Slaves, Former Slaves, and Those Who Claimed Ownership of Them

In 1791, Benjamin Banneker, a free black man whose parents had been slaves, wrote to tj, then gw’s sec of state, reminding him that in ‘76 tj had written, “that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.” Banneker wouldn’t let tj forget the contradiction at the heart of the new American enterprise and tj’s own life.
Many slaves and former slaves understood that the words freedom and liberty also ought to count for them. By the end of the Rev, many whites agreed. In ‘75, Thomas Paine ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡ asked how Americans could complain about British tyranny “while they hold so many hundreds of thousands in slavery?”
The issue of freedom and liberty seemed to be gaining ground for some slaves after 1776. News traveled slowly, but word spread that in 1794, in the midst of the Fr Rev, the Fr National Convention had abolished slavery, and then what slaves in Fr Haiti had won independence.
When Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown in 1781, he had between 4k and 5k former slaves with his army. Many more were in other British-held areas, especially NYC. As the war ended, the British returned some slaves to old masters, gave others to new masters in the Caribbean, or simply abandoned them. But many former slaves also sailed with the British when they left the colonies, some settling as free people in Canada, GB, or West AFrica. Life wasn't easy for black people in Nova Scotia, but they were free.
By the time gw was inaugurated president in 1789, slavery had been abolished in MA, NH, Vermont, and was slowly dying throughout the north. Northern slaves worked as household help and labored in factories and farms. NY had the most slaves in the north, concentrated in Manhattan but also working on the great estates of the Hudson Valley. NJ and RI were next in number. In the north, however, more money was made on the slave trade than on slave labor. The Northwest Ordinance prohibited slavery in the Ohio region. Many thought slavery would also die out in Delaware, MD, and VA. Only in SC, NC, Geo, and the new western areas of Kentucky and Tennessee was slavery still strong.
Despite the regional differences, by 1789, one in 10 black people was free. Some had won their freedom through the army. Some had won through state action. Some had been set free by individual slave owners. But in 1789, one couldn’t assume that to be black was to be a slave. That truth was a significant change from 1776 when free black people were a definite exception in the colonies.
After MA, NH, and Vermont abolished slavery, other northern states with more slaves moved exceedingly slowly towards gradual emancipation. The Penn law of 1780 declared slavery “disgraceful to any people,” but then set up a system in which the first slaves would be freed in 1808 and the last in 1847. NY’s abolition law of 1799 and NJ’s of 1804, and similar laws in CT and RI, were equally slow in their operations. Although every northern state had started the process of ending slavery before 1800, it was almost 1850 before slavery disappeared in the north.
Free black people sometimes found work in the same households where they had been slaves. Black men worked on merchant ships, whaling vessels, or in the navy. In Philly, NY, Providence, and Boston, many black people worked on the docks. Throughout the northern states more and more free black people referred to themselves as Africans or, as the Free African Society of Philadelphia said, “free Africans and their descendants.”
In the region encompassing Delaware, MD, VA, and NC, slavery didn’t die out, but slave life changed after the Rev. Some masters heeded the rev language of freedom. Jemmy freed one slave named Billy because he came to fear that Billy’s love of freedom meant he was no longer “a fit companion for fellow slaves.” gw wrote often of his wish that slavery could gradually abolished and left instructions in his will that all his slaves should be free after he and Martha died. Other planters in the region also freed slaves. Slaves who had run away during the war managed to established new identities and maintain their freedom, especially in cities like Baltimore, Richmond, and the new DC, and 6 or 7 % in VA and NC were free. A thriving community of free people of African descent emerged. As a sign of their growing confidence, in 1792, Thomas Brown, a black Rev War vet in Baltimore, ran, although unsuccessfully, for the MD legislature, promising to “represent so many hundreds of poor Blacks.”
In this region, slaves and free black people worked in an economy that was more diverse than before the war. By 1790, slaves in VA and MD, for example, were increasingly engaged in growing a wheat, a crop that required horses that needed tending, plows, and fertilizer. They also worked in flour mills and the ironworks, blacksmith shops, and other enterprises that were springing up in the region. Some slaves were “rented out” and moved from job to job, giving them a chance to learn more skills, travel short distances, make a little money, and gain a taste of freedom.
Other slaves from the region were far less fortunate. In the years after the Rev, with the plantation of VA and MD stabilized in size, slave owners needed fewer slaves. So they increased their wealth by developing a new internal market in humans. They encouraged slaves to have more children and then, as those children reached adolescence, sold them, as they sold other ag products, for transport to places that needed more and more slave labor. Slaves were taken to join the white settlers who established the new states of Kentucky and Tennessee. Other slaves were transported to SC and Geo.
Further south, in SC and Geo, life for slaves was very different. Some of the fiercest fighting of the Rev had disrupted almost every aspect of life in SC and Geo, and slaves had more opportunities to run away. With the coming peace, the planter elite in these states was determined to reestablish a way of life that depended on slavery. Slaves represented between 40 and 60 % of the pop in SC and Geo. Slave labor had produced great fortunes for the plantation owners before the war, and it would produce new fortunes for them after the war ended.
Whereas many planters in Delaware, MD, VA, and NC felt the need to consider the rhetoric of freedom and perhaps modify the tyranny of slavery, planters in SC and Geo made it clear that they believed such language didn’t apply to slaves. As a result, the few free black people in the southernmost states, often people who had black, white, and Indian heritage, were kept as far away from the slave community as possible so the slaves wouldn’t hear the contagious language of freedom.
In the 20 years after 1790, the number of slaves doubled in SC from 100k to 200k, and in Geo it more than tripled from 30k to over 100k. The rapid growth of the slave pop in SC and Geo at the end of the 1700s also led to a new kind of community life in the slave quarters of these large plantations. Unlike those who owned a lone slave or a single slave family, which could be closely supervised, the largest plantations in SC and Geo had hundreds of slaves in the 1790s. Slave labor created great wealth, and the owners of these plantations were the economic elite of their states, but they were often away, preferring the social life of Charleston or Savannah. Slaves, though driven by overseers, were able to develop their own community lives and norms within the slave quarters, which hadn’t been possible on the smaller farms and plantations of an earlier era. Having their own vegetable gardens sometimes gave slaves limited economic freedom. Religious gathering provided communal support.

For Women: the Rise of Republican Motherhood

In April 1776, Abby wrote to ja while he was attending the Congress that would issue the Declaration of Independence in Philly and she was managing the family and farm in Quincy, MA, from which he was so often absent. She told him to “remember the ladies.” And she warned, “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands... If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which he have no voice or representation.” Abby was serious in her demand, but ja didn’t take her seriously because he was a bit of a loser.
Women, of course, fell into all of the different groups that men did. American Indian women, most of whom like the the men had supported the British, often paid a high price for their loyalty to GB. Mary (Molly) Brant, Joseph Brant’s sister, convinced many Iroquois to support an Iroquois-British alliance during the war. When the war ended, she found a new home in Canada, reminding the British authorities that they weren’t providing the support they had promised her people.
Slave women also sided with the British more often that the American Revs. With British armies operation in the southern colonies, and the British welcoming slaves to their side, women as well as men fled to freedom with the British. Of the 23 slaves who ran away from tj’s plantations during the Rev, 13 were women. More than 40 % of all the former slaves who left with the British at the end of the war were women.
Some white women -- rich and poor -- also supported the British cause and paid dearly for it. With the coming of the war, many Tory wives stayed behind to mind the homes when their husbands joined the British army or fled to Canada. These women faced hostile neighbors and local governments, and many lost their homes.
For white women who supported the Rev, life was also hard, but the outcome was usually better. The Rev War shaped the lives of most women who had supported it. For some, it changed virtually every aspect of life. After the war, Deborah Sampson who had pretended to be a man and fought in the war, married and lived in Sharon, MA, but she was also entertained by gw, was granted a rev soldier’s pension by Congress, and became something of a national hero. Other women didn’t easily return to their old ways, limited to the private sphere of their families. With many men away for months or years, women took on household duties that were, by long tradition, men’s exclusive sphere. Mary Bartlett, whose husband rep NH in Congress, reflected a changed attitude experienced by many. In her first letters in 1776, she wrote about “your farming business,” but by 1778, it had become “our farming business.” The difference of one word that made it clear she now included herself in the ownership of their farm was an important change.
Many women who had coped with years of isolation during the war found that the political independence of the US brought personal independence, too. More women postponed marriage, demanded divorces from unhappy marriages, and sought high education as well as new -- if limited -- political involvement in the new republic.
For many American womens, women and men, the book, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, written in 1792 by Mary Wollstonecraft, gave words to ideas that had been taking shape since the Rev. In her appeal for equality, Wollstonecraft called for equal education and coeducation for girls and boys. In the US, Judith Sargent Murray expanded Wollstonecraft’s arguments and insisted that women are indeed “in every respect equal to men.”
Republican Motherhood - the belief that women should have more rights and a better education so that they might support husbands and raise sons who would actively participate in the political affairs of society
Important as they were, the ideas about total equality developed by Wollstonecraft and Murray didn’t become the dom ideology of the new nation. Instead, some much more moderate, Republican Motherhood, came to dom public discussions of women’s place in the new US. As the ideology of Republican Motherhood was developed in pulpits and magazines after the Rev, women would have an important role, but a limited one -- on full citizenship but also no return to a merely passive role in the domestic sphere that had been prescribed before 1776. Republican Motherhood was a kind of middle positions. Its advocates suggested that women would advise their husbands and raise their sons to be active citizens and their daughters to be part of another general of republican mothers who shaped the nation from home. But to play this role, its advocates insisted that women also needed an education, perhaps a different education from men, but a better one than that given to their mothers and grandmothers.
In 1778, Abby wrote, “I regret .. how fashionable it has been to ridicule female learning.” After the war, she and many others planned to do something about it. Private academies, which had often education white male leaders for a century, began to open their doors to women, or more often, separate private academies for women were founded like the Young Ladies’ Academy of Philly that Benjamin Rush opened in 1787. Rush, whose views reflected his belief in the ideology of Republican Motherhood, believed that the “attention of our young ladies should be directed as soon as they are prepared for it to the reading of history, travels, poetry, and moral essays … to the present state of society in America.” When Priscilla Mason graduated from Rush’s Young Ladies’ Academy in 1794, however, she condemned the arbitrary limitations that “have denied us the means of knowledge, and then reproached us for the want of it.” She continued, “The Church, the Bar, and the Senate are shut against us. Who shut them? Man, despotic man.” An education that produced such a speaker may have been more than Rush envisioned when he proposed the school.
Women also took a more direct role in politics when they could. NJ’s 1776 Constitution gave women the right to vote, but the provision was repealed in 1807. The Bill of Rights that was added to the fed Constitution in 1791 gave all citizens the right to “petition the government for a redress of grievances,” and women regularly petitioned Congress and state legislatures. After the Rev, women also gained significant new rights to control their own property, which they hadn’t had before the war. It would be a long time before law and culture would support the equality that Abby or Judith Sargent Murray advocated. But attitudes had begun to change.
Within the ideology of Republican Motherhood, however, two double standards emerged. First, middle and upper class white women were expected to be the guardians of sexual morality. Men might stray, but women were expected not to. And if men did stray, it was expected they would do so only with the lower class or poor white women or with black women, slave or free. Second, servants and working women were included in either the rules or the opportunities for education and influence that the ideal of Republican Motherhood gave to supposedly all women, but in reality the increasingly well-educated and active women of high social status and economic status.

Creating a Government: Writing the US Constitution
Explain the needs, pressures, and compromises that led to writing and adopting the Constitution.

In the years following the Rev, farmers were angry about taxes, frontier whites and Indians fought for control of land, many women were agitating for their own rights, and some of the most famous rev leaders -- including gw, Ben, and Hammy -- were determined to end the growing chaos and reshape the new nation they had helped to create.

The Crisis of the 1780s: The Failure of the Articles of Confederation

The problems that the nation faced in the 1780s had many sources. The Articles of Confederation that governed the nation were essentially a treaty among 13 independent nations. All 13 states needed to agree to levy any taxes, and 9 states had to agree to pass a law. Real sovereignty -- in this case, the ability to make the most important decisions about how Americans should govern themselves and pay for their government -- rested with the state governments.
The separate colonies had experienced over a century of independent relationships with London. Until the 1760s, the links between each colony and GB were much stronger than the ties between the various colonies. When Americans looked to Europe, they saw that small independent states and cities were the rule in what is now Germany and Italy. In that context, viewing MA, NY, and VA as independent states that were linked only in a loose confederation didn’t seem odd.
Nevertheless, leading citizens were concluding that the American confederation wasn’t working. They believed that it was too weak, the state legislatures too strong, and that this imbalance was causing serious problems. Unlike their European models, the American confederation had acted as a unified front to achieve independence, and that effort had a ripple effect on subsequent actions. Under the treaty that ended the Rev, the US -- all the states together -- had promised to pay debts that it had incurred during the war -- pensions for soldiers as well as the repayments of loans to US citizens and foreign creditors. But Congress had no money and couldn’t seem to raise any, given the requirement that all 13 states agree to any tax. The credit rating of the new nation was dropping quickly, and the lack of faith in the government’s ability to pay its debts was strangling the national economy. If the government couldn’t pay off the loans negotiated during the Rev, many European creditors thought, why loan any more money to either the American government or American commercial enterprises?
The financial crisis had additional impacts. Indian tribes along the frontier were growing stronger, and the new nation risked losing control of its western lands because it couldn’t afford a strong army to protect them. In 1785, a Shawnee leader, Piteasewa, told commissioners sent by Congress, “We are aware of your design to divide our Councils, but we are unanimous.” Although the tribes weren’t actually unanimous, in the 1780s they were still more than a match for the US Army or the various state militias.
Moreover, many state legs not only failed to raise taxes or pay their state debts but also often simply gave in when mobs of farmers like those in MA took control of the court houses and stopped trials of those who had failed to pay debts or taxes. Charles Lee, one of VA’s leading citizens, complained to gw in 1788 of the leg’s willingness to grant too much tax relief: “the public debts and even private debts will in my opinion be extinguished by acts of the several Legs.”
Annapolis Convention - conference of state delegates that issued a call in Sept 1786 for a convention to consider changes to the Articles of Confederation
In Sept 1786, 5 states sent delegates to a convention in MD, known as the Annapolis Convention, to try to deal with yet another weakness of the Articles of Confederation, economic rivalry between the states that had led to a battle over navigation rights on the Potomac River between MD and Va and to a violent boundary dispute between NY and what would become Vermont. The convention never had a quorum and did no business, but it did give some leaders a chance to talk about the nation’s problems. As a result, Hammy wrote to the Congress asking that the states appoint delegates to meet in Philly in May “to devise such further provision as should appear to them necessary to render the constitution of the fed government adequate to the exigencies of the union.”
In Fed 1787, 5 months after receiving Hammy’s letter, the Congress agreed to call a convention, but with limitations. They voted to ask the states to send delegates to Philly “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation, and reporting to Congress and the several legs such such alterations and provisions therein as shall when agreed to in Congress and confirmed by the States, render the fed Constitution adequate to the exigencies of Government and the preservation of the Union.” On the surface, this call was hardly a mandate for wholesale change. But it launched the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and the Convention would far exceed its authority. Some, including Jemmy and Hammy, planned it that way from the beginning. The result would be a radically different form of government than the one under which the US had won its freedom.

The Constitutional Convention of 1787

Constitutional Convention - Convention that met in Philly in 1787 and drafted the Constitution of the US
The 55 white men who gathered in what later came to be known as Independence Hall in Philly in spring of 1787 for the Constitutional Convention had instructions from Congress merely to propose amendments to the Articles of Confederation. The group represented the elit of the US. They had been appointed by 12 states; RI’s leg distrusted any effort to strengthen the central government and refused to send anyone to Philly. Most were fairly young. 29 had college degrees at a time when that achievement was rae. Only 8 had signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Except for gw and Ben Franklin, some of the most prominent leaders of the Rev were absent. VA’s Patrick Henry and MA’s John Hancock and SA refused to attend because they worried that the convention would undermine the rights of individual states. Tj was away as a US ambassador to Fr, ja to GB. Women, rebels of western MA who had marched with Daniel Shays, slaves and free black people, and American Indians weren't represented. But in that summer gathering in 1787, the delegates produced a frame of government that has served the US well for more than 200 years.

Decisions on the Structure of a Unified Government

Coming to agreement at the Constitutional Convention involved long arguments and difficult compromises. The final result that the convention produced in Sept 1787 disappointed many. Surprisingly, all the delegates, even those who left in anger, kept to a pledge to keep their deliberations secret. All of the delegates wanted to be sure they had the time and freedom to talk through the difficult issues of the day without undue pressure from outside groups. No one outside the convention, including members of Congress that were still meeting in NY, had a clue what the distinguished group in Philly would recommend.
A relatively young VAn delegate, Jemmy, who had served in the VA leg during the Rev and had authored the VA Statute of Religious Freedom, was the key architect of the Constitution that emerged, although he never held a special office at the convention. In preparation for the convention, Jemmy privately arranged for the VA and Penn delegates to arrive in Philly a week before the convention opened. He used that week to craft a plan that could be presented as soon as the convention got underway.
Virginia Plan - the first proposal put forward at the Constitutional Convention, which included two houses of Congress, both elected by a proportional rep, and a national executive and judiciary
On May 29, the first day of business at the convention, VA’s Governor Edmund Randolph, following Jemmy’s plan, presented what came to be known as the VA Plan -- the first outline of the new constitution. In Randolph’s plan, a new Congress with 2 houses, whose members would be elected based on proportional rep reflecting pop of the various states, would replace the current Congress. The new government would represent the people, not necessarily 13 equal states. If more people lived in certain states, especially VA and MA, then those states would have more votes in the Congress. The Congress would have the power to levy taxes, regulate interstate commerce, and veto state laws. Randolph also proposed creating a “national executive” and judiciary, or a set of fed courts.
Separation of Powers - a core aspect of the Constitution that by which different parts of the new national government would have their authority always limited by other parts
Federalism - a system of government in which power is clearly divided between state governments and the national (federal) government
The next day, May 30, the delegates endorsed a resolution from Penn’s Governor Morris that “a national government ought to be established consisting of a supreme leg, executive, and judiciary.” The basic outline of a strong new national government -- one that included the separation of powers between the Congress, the executive branch, and the courts -- had emerged quickly. The new system that Jemmy, Randolph, and Morrison was also known as federalism. But there would be many days of meeting in a hot and stuffy Independence Hall before the details would be resolved and the Constitution itself would be completed.
Proportional Representation - a way of selecting reps in Congress based on the total pop of a state, as opposed to having each state receive equal votes in Congress
NJ Plan - a proposal of the NJ delegation to the Constitutional Convention by which both houses of Congress would be elected by states, with equal size delegations for every state
From the opening day, there was a battle between those, generally from larger states, who wanted the new Congress to have proportional rep and those, generally smaller states, who wanted Congress to be made up of resps of the states themselves, so that each state would have an equal number of votes. The VA Plan called for proportional rep, but a subsequent plan put forward by NJ’s Wm Paterson (the NJ Plan) called for a Congress in which both houses would be made up of delegates elected by state legs with an equal number from each state. While the delegates from the largest states, especially Jemmy and Edmund Randolph, insisted that proportional rep was essential to a strong and democratic national government, Paterson, along with delegates from Delaware and some from NY and MA, insisted that members of Congress should rep only state governments and that each state should be treated equally.
Connecticut Plan or the Great Compromise - plan proposed for creating a national bicameral legislature in which all states would be equally repped in the Sentate and proportionally repped in the House
A compromise, first proposed by CT’s Roger Sherman (aka the CT Plan) was to split the difference and create a House of Reps with members elected by districts based on pop and a Senate made up of 2 senators from each state no matter the pop, elected by the state leg. But adopting this Great Compromise, which was the key to the future Constitution, didn’t come easily.
Other issues were even more difficult to resolve. The convention came to a standstill over the office of president. Everyone assumed that the convention’s presiding officer, gw, would be the first president in the new government, but few could agree on the details of the office or how to select his successors. Some wanted an executive of several individuals in a cabinet of equals, while others insisted on a single leader. Most wanted to ensure that only the “wisest and best” citizens voted for the president, and almost none trusted the people to elect the president by a direct popular vote. But how to select the president seemed impossible to resolve until Jemmy proposed the Electoral College. He suggested that each state select presidential electors according to the number of its senators and reps in Congress by whatever method it preferred, and that these electors would then select the president. If a majority of the electors didn’t agree on any one candidate, the choice would fall to the House of Reps -- but with each state delegation in Congress having only 1 vote. This proposal seemed like a compromise that could work. The convention also decided on a 4-year term for the president, with no limit on the number of terms that could be served.
Electoral College - a system in which each state selects presidential electors according to the number of its senators and reps in Congress by whatever method it prefers, and these electors then select the president
There were many arguments about how much power to give the president. Delegates remembered that they had just fought a war against the tyranny of Geo 3’s government. On the other hand, after a decade on chaos, they wanted a strong executive who could make tough decisions and have the authority to make them stick. The delegates compromised and agrees that the president could veto leg, but that a ⅔ vote of each chamber of the COngress could override a veto. Those wanting a strong executive won, though it would fall to gw and subsequent presidents to flesh out the job.
The delegates spent almost no time on the judiciary. They created a Supreme Court and lower courts but left the details to subsequent gens. While they considered an arrangement whereby the judges of Supreme Court an the president together might declare both fed and state laws unconstitutional they dropped the idea. Only later, after John Marshall became chief justice in 1800, did the Supreme Court take on its role as arbiter of the constitutionality of laws.

The Effects of Slavery on a Unified Government

While the convention spent much of its time debating that divided large states from small ones, Jemmy understood that the real divide was concerning slavery. The existence of slavery in the US embarrassed most of the framers of the Constitution. They were careful not to use the words “slave” or “slavery” in the final document, but they were equally careful to protect the institution and appease slaveholders.
Jemmy, like his fellows VAns tj and gw, embodied all the contradictions of slavery. Jemmy owned slaves, yet despised slavery. He told the convention that the “distinction of color” represented the basis for “the most oppressive domination ever exercised by man over man.” Nevertheless, he later assured the VA convention that ratified the Constitution that the Constitution offered slavery “better security than any that now exists.” He was right in his assurance.
Although many of the delegates, including some who were slaveholders, understood that slavery was incompatible with “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” they were willing to live with the contradiction. The framers of the Constitution were also willing to live with slavery because of their belief that a key to securing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was ensuring the inviolable right of private property. Slaves were seen fist as the private property of their owners, and only second as human beings, if humans at all. For many at the convention, all private property, including property consisted of other humans, was sacrosanct. Without the security of property, they didn’t think any of their rights were secure. They were willing to sacrifice their moral qualms about slavery to protect their rights to their own property.
The first time slavery intruded into the convention was when the delegates argued about representation in Congress. If representation was to be by population, then who would be counted as people. Defenders of slavery wanted slaves to be counted in equal numbers with free citizens in assigning seats in the House of Reps to states. Delegates from states where slavery was shrinking or gone wanted to count only free citizens. Penn’s James WIlson offered a compromise resolution, quickly seconded by SC’s Charles Pinckney (who owned more slaves than almost any other delegate) that came to be known as the 3/5ths clause.
Three-fifths clause - another compromise from the Constitutional Convention by which slaves -- though the term was never used -- would be counted as 3/5ths of a person for purposes of establishing a state’s rep under the proportional rep plan
Some delegates objected. Penn’s Governor Morris condemned the 3/5ths clause as a nefarious practice, but in the end, the nefarious practice won.
Moreover, the 3/5ths clause was far from the only concession to slaveholders. The first draft of the Constitution included a clause that said Congress could neither tax nor prohibit “the migration or importation of such persons as the several States shall think proper to admit.” Such persons referred to slaves, and the insistence that Congress couldn’t tax or prohibit their migration or importation meant that the new government couldn’t limit the slave trade. However, the wording of the final draft did allow Congress to change the policy after 1808, and when that year arrived, Congress did end the slave trade and stop the importation of slaves from Africa. Nevertheless, between 1787 and 1808, over 200k Africans were forcibly taken from Africa and sold into slavery in the American South. In that 21-year period, half as many slaves were brought to the US as the 400k Africans who had been brought to America over the previous 177 years between 1610 and 1787.
The final compromise about slavery came quickly. The draft of the Constitution prepared by the Committee of Detail had said that each state had an obligation to “deliver up” any person charged with a serious crime in another state. Delegates from SC and Geo asked the convention to add a clause that required “fugitive slaves and servants to be delivered up like criminals.” Delegates from Penn and CT objected, but when it came time to vote, the convention embraced the request without a single dissent. It was the end of Aug. The delegates were tired and anxious to end their work, and the issue of slavery wasn’t as important to northerners as it was to southerns. As a result, the final version of the Constitution contained a clause that required to extradite criminals from one state to another and a separate clause that stated: “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.” The word slavery didn’t appear but was implied.
The fugitive slave clause gave slaveholders a new and powerful tool. As the 1800s wore on, it led to increasing strife because many northerners resented it, and southerners became angry at northern slowness in complying with one of the planks of the Constitution that united them.
The delegates who met in Philly in 1787 compromised on many issues -- slavery most of all -- but one area where they didn’t compromise, despite the pleas of several delegates, would bedevil them for some time. On Sept 10, only a week before their final vote, Geo Mason of VA said he wished “the plan had been prefaced with a Bill of Rights,” a guarantee of freedom of speech, pression, religion, trial by jury, and so on, that would “give great quiet to the people.” Mason had been the author of the VA Declaration of Rights, and he anticipated that the lack of a formal guarantee of rings in the final doc would create strong opposition. But not a single state delegation approved Mason’s proposal through several states now had their own bills of rights. Some delegates argued that such guarantees were unnecessary, but more of them were hot, tired, and ready to be done with their work. It was too late to add something new, but the failure to include a Bill of Rights in the original doc almost derailed the whole plan for a new federal government.
41 of the original 55 delegates gathered for the final vote. Edmund Randolph who had introduced the VA Plan to the convention wouldn’t sign the final doc. The Constitution gave far more power to the fed government than he ever imagined it would. Geo Mason worried about the lack of a Bill of Rights. Elbridge Gerry of MA objected to the Constitution because of the 3/5ths clause and the power to raise armies was a dangerous step toward a military establishment. The remaining 38 were ready to sign the doc. Many perhaps agreed with Ben Franklin, who said that there were “several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve, but “the older I grow the more apt I am to doubt my own judgement and pay more respect to the judgement… I doubt too whether any other Convention we can obtain may be able to make a better Constitution.”

Debating and Adopting the Constitution

As mandated by the call to the Constitutional Convention, once the 38 delegates had signed the draft Constitution, it ws sent to the Congress that was meeting in NY. 10 of the delegates from the Philly convention were also members of that Congress, and they transported the doc. The delegates meeting in Philly had far exceeding their instructions to propose amendments to the Articles of Confederation, but those members of the Congress who hadn’t participated in drafting the new doc were in no meet for a fight. They simply sent the proposed Constitution to the states for their consideration, even though they understood that it replaced rather than amended the Articles of Confederation and were aware that the Constitution itself stated the conditions for its national launch: ratification by only 9 of the 13 states. However, the members of the Congress did require that the battles about whether to adopt this radical new experiment in government would be fought on a state-by-state basis in conventions of specially elected delegates who would choose to ratify or not ratify the Constitution. This approach would increase the power of voters in each state to decide instead of reps in the political bodies of the legs. In the fall of 1787, the outcome wasn’t clear.
To ensure that the doc they had worked so hard to create actually became the fundamental law of the US, delegates from the Constitutional Convention quickly went to work. Jemmy set out to persuade the state conventions to adopt it. In the fall of 1787, he along with Hammy and John Jay (who normally didn’t get along) wrote 85 newspaper articles to support the Constitution, later published as The Federalist Papers. In these articles, the 3 argued that the new nation needed a strong national government and described the problems that they believed the Constitution addressed.
Federalists - supporters of the Constitution; those who favored its ratification
The Constitution’s advocates, Feds, entered the state conventions with important advantages. They had a specific doc and specific arguments on how theirs was a clear plan for improving the government. The new Constitution addressed the fears of many who would vote for delegates to the conventions and sit in with them. For those afraid of another Shays’s Rebellion, for those wanting a strong US Army to protect them from Indians along the Allegheny frontier, and for those worried about the nation’s credit rating, the Constitution provided reassurances not found in the Articles of Confederation.
Antifederalists - opponents of the Constitution; those who argued against its ratification
In contrast, for the Antifeds, people who worried that a strong national government would trample on the rights of sovereign states and the liberties of individual [white, male] citizens, the Constitution offered little to calm their fears. The Constitution, which lacked a Bill of Rights and shifted significant powers from the states to the fed government, provoked attacks by many who had fought hardest against British authority in the Rev. Like many Antifeds, VA’s Richard Henry Lee feared that a new “consolidated government” had been created and would be dommed by a “coalition of monarchy men, military men, aristocrats, and drones.” Ratification wouldn’t be easy.
The Penn leg, which met upstairs in the same building as the Constitutional Convention had met in, ordered the election of delegates even before Congress officially sent the Constitution to the states. Although backcountry farmers in Penn resisted strong government in any form, the majority of delegates to the Penn convention wanted to ratify the doc and be the first state to do so, possibly securing the seat of the national government in Penn. But while Pennians debated, a convention in Delaware unanimously adopted the Constitution after only 5 days of discussion, beating Penn as the first state to ratify. Delegates to NJ’s convention who liked the idea that taxes on imports arriving through NY Harbor would now be paid to the fed government instead of to the state of NY also ratified quickly. They were joined by Geo, which wanted immediate protection from Indian raids, and by CT, which had a strong Fed party. Decisions among other states got more difficult.
In MA, the outcome was far from certain. Although reaction to the rebellion of western MA farmers had helped launched the Constitution, these farmers themselves sent delegates to Boston who didn’t trust the Feds. 2 of the state’s most respected revs -- Governor John Hancock and SA -- believed that the Constitution sought to solve problems that weren’t serious and that the states, not the national government, were best situated to protect individual liberty. In the end, the MA convention adopted the Constitution by a close vote of 187 to 168 but only on the condition that it be immediately amended to further protect the people’s liberties and the rights of state governments. The Constitutional Convention’s failure to add a Bill of Rights to the Constitution was already creating problems.
The next states to consider the doc faced even more difficulties. The ratifying convention in NH adjourned without taking action. In addition, just as they had refused to attend the Constitutional Convention, the RI leg refused to call a convention. MD’s convention approved the doc, but also called for 28 amendments to limit the power of the fed government. SC approved the Constitution despite delegates’ fears about the government’s potential to limit the state’s slaves. Because of these fears, SC’s convention voted for an amendment that would guarantee that states “retain every power not expressly relinquished by them.”
VA, the largest state in the Union, was divided. Jemmy and gw were strong advocates for the Constitution, but others weren’t enthusiastic. Geo Mason worried about the lack of a Bill of Rights. Patrick Henry, perhaps the most respected VAn after gw, adamantly opposed the Constitution. His loyalty was to the sovereign state of VA. he was willing to be part of a loose fed of states, but only one that ensured that the real authority rested with a government close enough to its citizens to ensure the rights. In the end, VA ratified the Constitution in June 1788, partly because its opponents were split among themselves. VA’s convention also demanded a Bill of Rights as soon as possible. With the vote in VA and a positive vote in NH earlier that month, the Constitution was ratified with its 9 supporting states.
Although enough states had supported ratification to launch the Constitution, no national government would thrive without NY. NY was already emerging as the financial center of the new nation, and the state sat in a strategic location between New England and the rest of the nation. The NY convention debate was long and bitter. Hammy led the charge for the Constitution, but Antifeds were strong in NY. Given what was happening in other states, it would have been hard for NY to reject the Constitution, especially when many NYers still hoped that the fed capital would remain in NYC. In the summer of 1788, the NY convention considered 55 possible amendments, a call for a second convention to revise the Constitution after its adoption, and a conditional vote that would ratify the doc only if it were amended. In the ends, however, only by a slim margin, NY ratified the Constitution in July 1788, the 11th state to do so.
The last states to ratify the Constitution, NC and RI, made their choice only after the new government was already functioning. By the time they acted, there was no practical way for any state to remain outside of the new US or its government. Refusing to ratify would have made a state a foreign government amid the formal US. it remained for Americans to translate the doc into an actual government and work out their complex relationships across divisions of class, race, gender, and degrees of freedom and unfreedom as well as the extraordinary distances in geography and the belief that separated them.

The State of the Nation at War’s End: Summary

For people of all classes, races, and political persuasions in British North America, the Rev brough extensive, though not total, change. Great inequality remained, but few people were as willing to defend it as they had in the colonial era. Nonetheless, the American victory meant different things to different people, and the national unity was fragile in the years immediately following the war. Congress’s delay in providing pay and pensions for vets came close to sparking a military coup. Farmers in western MA were driven to rebellion by high taxes and hard economic times. The new states moved quickly to settle lands to the west of their established boundaries, sparking new conflicts and tensions with Indian peoples. Free black people sought to create strong communities as slavery greatly declined in the northern states, but slavery became even more entrenched in the southern states. Women throughout the states began to question their roles in this newly independent nation, and many supported the idea that education for women would strengthen their contributions. Others were wary of elevating women’s status and limited those trends through the ideology of Republican Motherhood, which shaped the lives of women in complex ways.

Creating a Government: Writing the US Constitution: Summary

In the years after the Rev, many leading citizens came to believe that the Articles of Confederation were insufficient to meet the economic and political challenges facing the new nation. The delegates who gathered at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 represented the white male elite. Key issues at the convention included the structure of the national leg, slavery, and the powers of the executive branch. After considerable debate, the delegates arrived at a new framework for the national government, which went far beyond the task they had been asked to do -- revise the Articles of Confederation. When the Constitution was presented to the members of the Congress that was in session, they first debated whether to censure those who produced the unrequested document, but ultimately decided to ask each state to convene a special convention of specially elected delegates to decide whether or not to ratify the Constitution. The battle over ratification pitted Feds against Antifeds. The Fed promise to move quickly to create a Bill of Rights for the Constitution helped secure ratification.

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Chapter 7 - Practicing democracy

Significant Dates

1789 - New House and Senate elected; gw elected and inaugurated as first US president; Fr Rev begins
1790 - Fed government assumes state Rev War debts; Washington DC selected permanent US capital (the government actually moved there in 1800); Judith Sargent Murray’s On the Equality of the Sexes published
1791 - Bill of Rights ratified; First Bank of the US chartered; Ohio Indian tribes defeat US Army in Northwest Territory; Hammy’s Report on Manufactures
1793 - gw reelected president; Citizen Genet arrives as ambassador to the US
1793-94 - Whiskey Rebellion
1794 - Western Indian Confederation is defeated at Battle of Fallen Timbers; Jay’s Treaty negotiated between the US and GB (ratified by the Senate in 1795 and effective in 1796)
1795 - Treaty of Greenville ends Indian Wars on Ohio frontier; Pinckney’s Treaty with Spain
1796 - ja elected president
1797 - Beginning of the Quasi-War with Fr
1798 - XYZ Affair; Congress passes Alien and Sedition Acts; Kentucky and VA Resolutions declare Alien and Sedition Acts unconstitutional
1799 - gw dies
1800 - ja concludes peace with Fr and signs Judiciary Act; tj defeats ja for president

Convening a Congress, Inaugurating a President, Adopting a Bill of Rights
Analyze the first federal elections and the adoption of the Bill of Rights
Congress and President Washington: Setting to Work

By early spring the new Congress began to assemble in the nation’s temporary capital, NYC. Congress was supposed to conved on March 4, but it wasn’t until April that either house of Congress could muster a quorum -- a majority of the total members, which was required to do business. Much business awaited. The Constitution required each house to set up its own rules of operation. The Senate had to confirm the election of the president. The Constitution also gave the new government the power to set and collect taxes. The need for a tax law was urgent: each day that Congress delayed, thousands of dollars went uncollected.
On April 14, Charles Thomson, the sec of Congress, arrived at Mt Vernon to officially inform gw of what he already knew: he had been unanimously elected potus by the 69 presidential electors who also elected ja as vp though by a smaller vote. Gw quickly traveled to NY where he and ja were formally inaugurated on April 30, 1789. He then set to work creating the executive branch of the fed government.
The 58-y-o gw had no precedents to guide him. An independent republic with an elected citizen at its head was an unprecedented development for the world of 1789. Some, led by Hammy who loved British models, recommended that gw established a court similar to that of King Geo III. Others, including vp ja, recommended a more egalitarian approach. Gw steered a middle course, insisted on formal state dinners and fairly formal relationships with those who came to call on him, but avoiding a throne or robes of office. He was simply called “Mr. President” instead of “your Highness.” Although he was the only president never to live in the White House, he did help design it, although African slaves did most of the work building it. While in office, he maintained a formal presidential residence in NYC and in Philadelphia when the capital moved there in 1790.

The Bill of Rights

On May 4, 1789, only a month after the House of Reps had begun its work, Jemmy told the House that he would soon fulfill his promise and propose amendments to the Constitution. On June 8, he offered amendments that included line-by-line changes in the Constitution. Proposing amendments was easy. Getting them passed wasn’t. Some of Jemmy’s strongest partners in getting the Constitution adopted were neutral or hostile to amending it. Gw, at Jemmy’s request, made a brief reference to the amendments in his inaugural address. Some Feds in Congress thought it was far too early to amend the Constitution, especially when other issues, like balancing the budget, were pressing.
Bill of Rights - the first 10 amendments to the Constitution passed by Congress in 1789 and ratified by the states in 1791
During the ratification process, Jemmy had promised to add a Bill of Rights to the Constitution, guaranteeing citizens important rights under a fed government. Without a promise for those added rights, key states wouldn’t have ratified the Constitution. While he was determined to fulfill his promise, Jemmy also knew that Antifeds sought more far-reaching changes, and he wanted to act faster than those opponents. Rep Theodorick Bland, a close ally of Patrick Henry, proposed a 2nd convention to consider “the defects of this Constitution.” If Congress didn’t act to quiet this movement, the whole constitutional structure could unravel.
Jemmy quickly abandoned his original proposal for new clauses to be included throughout the body of the Constitution and decided instead to propose amendments to be added at the end of the doc. The House initially passed 17 amendments, but the Senate changed them, and on Sept 25, Congress sent 12 amendments to the state for ratification. It was fast work for a boyd that hadn’t existed 6 months earlier. An amendment setting the size of the House wasn’t ratified; neither was an amendment limiting Congressional pay (it was ratified finally in 1992). The other 10 amendments became the BIll of Rights, added to the Constitution in 1791 after ¾ths of the state legs approved them.
The Constitution had replaced a weak national government with a strong one, but the amendments meant that the new government would operate within clear limits.

Creating an Economy: Alexander Hamilton and the US Economic System
Analyze the enduring argument begun by Hamilton’s economic vision for the US and the alternative vision of tj and Jemmy

The inability of the fed government under the Articles of Confederation to collect taxes meant that fed debts weren’t being paid and that the financial status of the US was in serious trouble.
Although the Continental Congress has adopted the dollar as the national currency in 1785, there was no official currency; Congress, state governments, and private banks had printed a variety of paper notes, all of which could be easily counterfeited, and the ease with which they were put into circulation led to inflation.
In the summer of 1789, Congress adopted a 5 % customs tax on all imports into the US, creating a solid financial footing for the new government. It also set up a system of fed courts and approved the establishment of 4 senior positions within the executive branch: secretaries of state, war, and the treasury, and an attorney general. These 4 officials became the first presidential cabinet.
Gw appointed tj, then US Ambassador to Paris as his sec of state; General Henry Knox, his dep in command throughout the Rev, as sec of war; and his friend, the former governor of VA, Edmund Randolph, as attorney general. Gw appointed Hammy as sec of treasury.

The Secretary of the Treasury’s Key Role

On his first full day of the job, Hammy negotiated a $50k loan from the Bank of NY to keep the government solvent. He also set about creating a Customs Service to collect the 5 % import tax that Congress had already passed, and he organized what would become the US Coast Guard to be sure that the imports weren’t smuggled into the country without being taxed. 10 days after his appointment, the House of Reps asked him for a report on the public credit of the US -- the most pressing national issue -- and gave him until Jan to prepare it.

Debt and Taxes

Hammy’s Report Relative to a Provision for the Support of Public Credit was the foundation of the economic development of the new nation. Hammy had read widely in philosophy and economics, as if preparing for the moment when he would be asked to design a new economic system. As he looked at the national debt from the Rev -- $54 mill in fed debt and $25 mill more in state debts -- he knew that radical action was required. Few people, including foreign and domestic investors and foreign governments, trusted the new nation’s ability to pay its bills. As a result, neither the state nor fed governments nor private businesses could borrow money. The government couldn’t finance desperately needed activities, including creating an army. Private businesses couldn’t restart commerce, which had mostly been frozen since the Rev. Rev War vets who had been paid in government promissory notes had sold them for as little as 15 cents on the dollar rather than trust a government that seemed untrustworthy to pay what it had promised. In this crisis, Hammy saw only one solution. The fed government, he believed, needed to assume as of the Rev War debt -- state and fed -- and promise to pay it all off, dollar for dollar, while establishing a tax policy that would show wary observers that the government would meet its obligations.
Not everyone in Congress agreed. To Hammy’s surprise, Jemmy led the opposition to debt assumption in the House, and more quietly, sec of state tj led similar opposition within the administration. States like VA and NC that had paid off most of their own war debts didn’t want to pay taxes to dover the debts of what they considered less responsible states like MA and SC. Vets who had sold their government promissory notes at highly depreciated rates during the 1780s to eat and live were appalled that the civilian speculators to whom they had sold them would get rich on the 100% payment of the debt. And for those who shared tj’s view of a democratic nation of small farmers, Hammy’s plan created a national government that was too big, would raise too much in taxes, sustain a standing army, and shift power from farmers to urban and commercial interests. They would have none of it.
In the spring of 1790, the House, led by Jemmy, rejected Hammy’s proposals each of the 4 times he submitted it. Ever the wily politician, Hammy sought a compromise and sec of state tj made it happen. Many years later, tj told the story of how he hosted a dinner at his home in NY at which he, Jemmy, and Hammy struck a deal by which each one got something that he considered important. Hammy wanted NYC, his home and the nation’s commercial center, to be the permanent US capitol. But others -- especially tj and Jemmy -- wanted a capitol farther south. They disliked the difficult travel to NY as well as urban life. They feared that a northern capital would fuel northern antislavery tendencies in Congress. Not incidentally, Jemmy, like gw, owned land on the Potomac River that would become more valuable if the capital were nearby. If Hammy would agree to support tj and Jemmy on the capital’s location, then the 2 would support Hammy’s economic plan.
In July, Congress made the compromise official. Philadelphia, not NY, was designated as the new temp capital and the law also stipulated that a 10-sq-mile site on the Potomac River between MD and VA should become the nation’s permanent capital. They gave gw a free hand to select the specific site and plan the new center of government. Congress also passed Hammy’s financial plan, including the assumption of state debts by the fed government. The new nation would have a government on a solid financial footing with a guaranteed credit rating, just as Hammy wanted.
The compromise solved the immediate issues, but the split on economic policy would lead to the creation of two hostile political parties -- the Feds and the Demo-Repubs (Antifeds) -- that would dom the nation’s politics for the next decade. Those in the government and the newspapers who supported Jemmy’s and tj’s opposition to Hammy’s plans called themselves Demo-Repubs, claiming that they, not those following Hammy, were the true defenders of the republic. Most everyone, including Hammy, tw, Jemmy, and gw, abhorred the idea of opposing political parties, but such parties were beginning to form before gw finished his first term in office, though no one yet called them that.
To a degree, the political divisions reflected a sectional split. Supporting Hammy were bankers in NY and Philadelphia as well as merchants, especially those in engaged in seagoing trade based in Boston or other ports. Those tending to support the Demo-Repub cause included southern plantation owners, who always worried that the new government would move against slavery and who saw little value in banks and commercial development; farmers, ranging from supporters of Daniel Shays ♡ to farmers in the backwoods of Kentucky; and small-town merchants who were less dependent on international credit. Supporters of each side also had their own newspaper. John Fenno had launched the Gazette of the US in 1789 to support the Fed cause. 2 years later, Jemmy and tj convinced Philip Freneau to launch the staunchly Antifed National Gazette. To support that paper, tj, to his later embarrassment, also put Freneau on the fed payroll as an official of the State Department. The lines between the 2 groups were growing stronger.

The First Bank of the United States

Bank of the US - the first federal bank, chartered in 1781, issued currency for the country and stabilized the economy
Once he had resolved the debt issue, Hammy’s next move widened the divide between those who wanted an activist government and a robust commercial economy and those who preferred an agrarian nation made up of small independent farmers with a very modest national government. In Dec 1790, Hammy submitted another report to Congress that called for creating a Bank of the US, modeled on the Bank of England. Hammy’s fondness for British models was one reason many Americans never trusted him. But Hammy didn’t want to be a part of GB, he wanted to use GB’s economic model to build a nation that would become as powerful as GB. Achieving that vision meant creating a fed bank that would manage the economy and fund a strong government, as GB’s bank did for that nation. As with the debt, not everyone agreed.
The Bank of England was a joint public-private venture. Most of its shareholders were private investors, but it played a key role in guaranteeing and repaying GB’s public debt, and its paper bank notes were accepted as official currency in GB. Hammy didn’t trust Congress or the states to issue paper currency. He feared that Congress and the states would solve financial problems by printing more currency and quickly debase its value and recreate the inflation that the nation faced in the 1790s. But Hammy was confident that no investors would risk their funds by allowing more currency to circulate than they could afford to redeem. He was anxious to have those Americans who had funds to invest become strongly attached to the new government. Currency from a semiprivate bank could be trusted because the bank would have to redeem its paper currency in gold or silver. Hammy believed the US could have a stable currency that everyone trusted if the Bank of the US were chartered.
A central bank could also make loans, thus expanding the amount of credit available. With resources backed by both private investors and government guarantees, the bank could ease the credit squeeze and stimulate commerce and trade. Businesses could get loans. Investment in new enterprises could begin. Much of the bank’s financing would also be promissory notes from the government itself -- notes that Hammy had just guaranteed would maintain their full value.
For southern plantation owners like tj and Jemmy, the bank plan was much worse than the plan to assume all debt for the Rev War. The bank plan would centralize power in the big northern cities -- Philadelphia, NY, and Boston -- where the nation’s largest banks were. Tj didn’t like cities. He preferred small rural communities, which he believed were far more democratic places. Tj, like most Demo-Repubs, didn’t like banks. The battle over the Bank of the US was a key battle in a way between those who wanted an urban commercial nation and those who wanted a nation based on independent farmers. It wouldn’t be the last such a battle.
Tj feared that banks would keep the poor in poverty and enrich those who were already wealthy through ill-gotten gains based on speculation rather than hard work. For most farmers, who were always in debt given their need to buy seed and fertilizer before they could plan and reharvest a crop, banks were the distant institutions that hounded them to repay loans. For tj, Jemmy, and ja, the thought that the government they had worked so hard to create was now about to create a bank was galling. Although Hammy and Jemmy had both helped write and defend the Constitution, they now parted company forever over their interpretation of it.
Despite the opposition of some of the nations’ most eloquent leaders, the bank bill sailed through Congress. Almost all northern reps voted for it, and almost all southern ones against it. The sectional lines, and the lines between the Fed and Demo-Repub factions were clearly emerging.
Once the bill passed both houses of Congress, gw had to decide whether to sign it. For Jemmy, who had been operating as gw’s key spokesperson in Congress, the bank was an unconstitutional extension of fed power, and he argued privately and persuasively that gw should veto the bill. GW then turned to his cabinet for advice. Attorney General Randolph and sec of state tj both urged a veto. The Tenth Amendment was clear, they said, that anything not mentioned in the Constitution was left to the states, and the Constitution certainly did not authorize a federal bank. For Secretary of the Treasury Hammy, the bank was essential, and the Constitution, he said, gave Congress the authority to do everything “necessary and proper” for the smooth functioning of the nation. He warned gw that if the national government didn’t invoke the “necessary and proper clause,” then Americans would become “a people governed without a government.” Gw signed the bill in Fed 1791, and the US now had a bank and deeper political divisions than previously imagined.
After the bank bill, Hamilton proposed a federal mint to create uniform coins for use throughout the country. For almost twenty years after the Revolution, people had used foreign coins. Hamilton wanted U.S. coins based on the U.S. dollar, rather than the British pound. It was not a controversial proposal, and the federal mint was soon established. With the federal mint in place, Hamilton then resigned as Secretary of the Treasury in 1795, and President GW appointed Oliver Wolcott in his place. Through he remained a close presidential advisor until the end of GW’s term, Hamilton preferred to make money as a private citizen.

Hamilton’s Commercial Nation vs. Jefferson’s Agrarian Vision

Hammy’s last major report to Congress was his Report on Manufactures. Unlike the earlier reports, this one wasn’t a plea for immediate legislation but rather a blueprint for the future of the nation as Hammy saw it. Where tj wanted an agrarian nation that exported raw materials, Hammy wanted a more complete economy within the US. He, too, saw farming as the backbone of the economy, but he also wanted to support factories that would create finished goods from the products of the fields, forests, and mines for both domestic consumption and export. In addition, he wanted the nation to make everything its military might need, from uniforms to gunpowder and warships.
Hammy was a harsh critic of slavery yeah right. Although he didn’t mention slavery in his Reports on Manufactures, the doc was suffused with what 70 years later a new Republican Party would call “free labor.” Hammy’s vision promoted open immigration. European immigrants would work in the emerging factories, Hammy said, and a plentiful supply of new workers would keep wages low and factories profitable for their owners. He had no fear of child labor either.
Hammy wanted a fed government that would shape the nation’s economy rather than leave economic development to individuals. He believed that higher tariffs should protect new industries and that government incentives should help launch those ventures when private investment wasn’t sufficient. He saw strong patent protection as essential to invention. Moreover, he wanted to build a network of roads and canals to help commerce flow.
These ideas frightened tj and Jemmy. At one point, tj told gw that he thought his treasury secretary was expanding the “general welfare” clause of the Constitution to give Congress the authority to regulate every aspect of the nation’s economy. Tj would continue to worry, especially as gw sided with his treasury secretary more often that not.
Although Hammy was a “brilliant” if sometimes unscrupulous leader, not all of his ideas were his alone. He was regularly looking to Europe, especially GB, for ideas, and there were many economic ideas ready for export. Hammy greatly admired the British industrialists who were creating mechanized production on a scale never seen before. He was also influenced by Adam Smith.
In the economic world that Smith described, wealth was generated by the free trade of goods and services and by competition to expand trade. As people competed to make a profit on their transactions, they increased the circulation of money, lowered the cost of goods, and created general prosperity. Competition, Smith said, was the key to wealth.
Smith’s book was a direct attack on the earlier ideas of mercantilism. In the near world of a capitalist system, GB, with its growing factories and its Royal Navy controlling the oceans, was destined to great wealth. As Smith was trying to describe the economic system in GB, Hammy was trying with surprising success to duplicate the system in the US. what a tory

Settling the Pace: the Washington Administration
Explain the precedents set by gw’s presidential administration
The President Tours the Nation

To use his personal prestige to consolidate public support for the new government, gw went on tours of the nation, not an easy task at a time when roads were poor and horses and carriages were the only means of transport once one left the waterways.
Nevertheless, between 1789 and 1791, he rode by carriage and horseback from NY through much of New England and across the South. The trip allowed him to address important issues such as religious freedom, hear from citizens, and personalize a distant national government. Welcoming the nation’s greatest hero and leader was the social event of the season for these small-town residents, and for many it consolidated the sense of belonging to one nation. Privately, gw sometimes complained about the accommodations, but he was convinced that his speeches and meetings had done much to build good will for the nation and his administration.

Indian Wars: Building the US Army

Gw was deeply concerned about how to handle the frontier Indian tribes. He blamed much of the problem on the “turbulence and disorderly conduct” of settlers who wouldn’t wait for permission or protection to enter the new territories but then who complained bitterly when Indians attacked them. Still, he needed to act with caution because he wanted these new settlers to be loyal citizens despite his frustration with them. On a personal level, he himself, like many members of Congress, had speculated in western lands and stood to make money if the land could actually be opened to white settlement. But given the poverty of the fed government -- including only 600 soldiers in the army when gw became president -- the president hardly commanded a force that could make much of a difference in the vast western territory.
The chief rep of the US government on the western frontier, Arthur St. Clair, was both the appointed governor of what were then the Northwest Territories of the US -- lands Indians claimed -- and a major general in the army. Congress had ordered him to end all Indians titles to the lands between the Ohio and MS Rivers, but St. Clair lacked the resources to do his job. His strategy, as he wrote to gw, was to divide and conquer -- to seek many treaties with individual tribes rather than 1 overall treaty with all the tribes. But this strategy didn’t go well. In 1789, just before gw’s inauguration, St. Clair negotiated several treaties with one group of Indian leaders at Fort harmar, but most other leaders and tribes rejected these treaties, making them virtually useless.
In 1790, gw asked Congress to expand the army so it could force the tribes of the Ohio region to “sue for peace before a blow is struck at them.” Congress agreed to expand the army to 1k men and added 1.5k state militia from Kentucky, VA, and Penn. This increased force was still not strong enough to win the victories the president thought essential.
In Sept 1790, 1,450 troops under General Josiah Harmar marched into the territory of the Miami and Shawnee to destroy villages and crops as a show of force that might stop the attacks on frontier settlements. In Oct, Harmar’s army was attacked by Shawnees, Miamis, and Pottawattamies, and 500 of the Americans were killed before the rest retreated. After this defeat, attacks on white settlements continued, and attempts at negotiating peace failed. Although some Indians, led by a Seneca named Cornplanter, sought to make a separate peace for their tribes, most others rejected the government’s proposed treaties.
In 1791, gw ordered a new attack. General St. Clair led 2k troops in a direct assault on the miamis on the Wabash River in what is now Indiana. On Nov 4, 1791, 1.5k Indians from several tribes led by Michikinikwa (Little Turtle) of the Miami and Blue Jacket of the Shawnee killed over 500 troops and most of the expedition’s female camp followers. Gw was shocked that St. Clair had allowed such to happen and relieved St. Clair of his command. As 1792 began, most of the area the US called its Northwest Territory was in Indian hands.
Throughout 1792, the gw administration and many of the Indians tried to negotiate. In June 1792, Joseph Brant, the Mohawk leader who had earlier traveled to London to meet with Geo III, went to Philadelphia and met with gw, becoming one of the few to meet with both national leaders. The meeting with gw was cordial but didn’t lead to any final agreements, and Brant continued to strengthen his ties with GB. Brant and most of the Iroquois, Shawnee, and Miami leaders were determined to allow no white settlement west of the Ohio River and demanded that the US abandon its forts in that territory, but white settlement continued to move across the Ohio River. They and their government wanted more land. Some of the negotiations were good faith efforts. Some were a sham. All failed.
While some in Congress and the press argued for peace and an end to the waste of money and lives in western military campaigns, gw called for a full-scale war on the Indians. Sec of War Knox began to create a truly professional army of 5k men. In late 1793, he launched a 3rd military campaign in the Northwest Territory.
In place of the disgraced St. Clair, gw appointed “Mad” Anthony Wayne as major general of the US Army. Wayne trained his army, and during the winter of 1793-94, they built a new base, Fort Recovery, on the site of St. Clair’s defeat. In Aug 1794, Wayne’s army defeated a large Indians force led by the Shawnee Blue Jacket at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, near present-day Toledo, Ohio. After fierce fighting among twisted tree limbs and trunks, the Indians broke ranks and retreated. British forces at the nearby Fort Miami didn’t support their Indian allies, and Wayne decided not to attack the British fort.
Treaty of Greenville - a treaty agreed to in 1795 in which Native Americans in the Northwest Territory were forced to cede most of the present states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and WI to the US
A year later, the Treaty of Greenville ended major hostilities between Indians and whites in the future states of Ohio and Indiana. The treaty established Indian reserves while ceding most of the remaining lands to white settlers. For tribes of the Northwest, the Battle of Fallen Timbers and the Treaty of Greenville were the end of their control of the territory. After Fallen Timbers there was little that the tribal leaders could do. Many Indians moved to British Canada or further west into the LA Territory, still formally controlled by Spain. Although groups of Indians and settlers continued minor skirmishes for another 20 years, 1795 was the end of the Indian Wars in the Ohio region. Efforts to survey settlements and create local governments came quickly.
Gw’s goals for the Northwest Territory and for dealing with the Indians were mostly accomplished. White settlers got the lands they wanted, the British lost their most powerful ally in the region, and the power and prestige of the US Army were enhanced. Settlement continued long after gw left office, and Ohio was admitted as a state in 1803. Indiana in 1816. Illinois in 1818. Michigan in 1837. WI in 1848.

Whiskey Tax, Whiskey Rebellion

When a compromise by Hammy, tj, and Jemmy led Congress to pass Hammy’s economic plan in 1782, it solved one set of problems but created new ones. Paying off the debt required more income for the fed government than the customs tax alone could raise. After considering several options, Hammy hit on the idea of taxing whiskey. If there were to be new taxes, a tax on whiskey seemed less undesirable than most options. Even Jemmy supported it. Like the “sin taxes” of later gens, the tax of whiskey seemed an easy call. However, what seemed easy in NY and Philadelphia was seen by farmers in western Penn as a direct attack on their livelihood.
Western Penn and neighboring parts of Appalachia and been settled long before the Rev, primarily by Scots-Irish Presbyterians who were willing to fight Indians for land and who wanted to maintain their culture, including their love for whiskey. Turning corn, their staple crop, into whiskey was also the best way to get the crop to market. A farmer could distill corn into whiskey at home and then transport a key or several kegs on a horse or mule over the mts and sell the liquid corn at $16 a key in East Coast markets, making a considerable profit. It was much easier and more profitable than trying to transport raw corn over the mts, and between 1783 and 1795 when Spain closed the port of NOLA to American goods, transporting any products down the Ohio and MS Rivers wasn’t an option.
Hammy’s tax ate up the profit. Since the tax was applied uniformly to all producers, small producers of whiskey ended up paying a higher % of their income than did those producing larger amounts. The tax singled out these whiskey-making farmers and not others such as land speculators (eg gw). Western farmers complained that the tax discriminated against them, and it did. They were already angry. Most frontier farmers had opposed adopting the Constitution when it was being debated in 1787 and 1788. Now only a few years later, the first administration elected under that doc wanted to destroy their best home of economic prosperity. They rebelled.
Whiskey Rebellion - armed uprising in 1794 by farmers in western Penn who attempted to prevent the collection of the excise tax on whiskey
The Whiskey Rebellion began with modest protests. The Penn, NC, MD, VA, and Geo legs passed resolutions opposing the tax. When these actions weren’t heeded by the administration, protests escalated quickly. Tax collectors were shot at, tarred and feathered, or beaten and threatened with scalping. In a mass meeting in Pittsburgh, rebels agreed to right for the repeal of the tax and to treat tax collectors with the “contempt they deserve.” In 1793 and ‘94, no fed taxes were collected in Kentucky or Penn’s western counties. A convention of over 200 farmers at Parkinson’s Ferry debated armed resistance to the national government. In 1794, a fed marshal, David Lennox, and John Neville, gw’s friend from the Rev, were attacked by armed men when they tried to collect the tax. Neville’s house was burned, and he and his family barely escaped. On Aug 1, 6k rebels met outside of Pittsburgh and, modeling their behavior on revs in Fr, created a Committee of Public Safety, erected guillotine, and made plans to attack the government garrison at Pittsburgh to gain weapons.
GW worried about losing the westerners’ allegiance to the US. Throughout 1792 and 1793, he sought to negotiate with the whiskey makers. Gw’s overtures were seen as weakness by some of the Whiskey Rebels. Farmers who paid the tax were attacked and their stills destroyed.
By the summer of 1794, as the riots spread and after the attack on Neville, gw had had enough. He saw the attacks on fed officials and the refusal to pay the taxes as a part of a plot to overthrow the Constitution. He decided to act.
Given the size of the insurgency, gw called for 12k troops to be drawn from the militias of NJ, MD, and VA. Gw himself took command of the force, and with Hammy at his side marched across Penn.
In the end, the sheer size of gw’s army frightened the rebels and ended the rebellion. Most of the rebel farmers either accepted gw’s offer of amnesty if they would swear loyalty to the US or melted away into the woods and hollows. The army arrested 150 rebel leaders, but only 2 were convicted of treason, and gw pardoned both of them. But the back of the rebellion had been broken. Fed authority was supreme.

The French Revolution Comes to America

News and ideas moved slowly in the 1700s. People had to wait weeks to hear about developments in another state and months to hear about foreign events. Yet to a surprising degrees, Americans in the 1790s were well informed about and influenced by developments in Europe, most of all by the Fr Rev about which most Americans had strong opinions.
If much of gw’s first term was taken up with economic matters and Indian wars, his second term (1793-1797) was dommed by the Fr Rev. If the rev hadn’t erupted in Fr, gw might have served only 1 term and retired as he had wanted.
By 1792, gw believed that he had stabilized the nation and would have been happy to retire.however, both Hammy and the, by then bitter enemies, told gw that the country still needed him, in part because they each saw gw as a buffer against the other’s policies. Most of their followers agreed. The most powerful argument for a second term was gw’s realization that rev Fr would soon be at war with Austria and GB, and that war would make American diplomacy much more difficult. His personal popularity exceeded any disagreement with his policies, and he was reelected unanimously.
When word of the war reached Philadelphia in the spring of 1792, the gw administration issued a formal Proclamation of Neutrality. Where gw had seemed to favor Hammy in economic matters, he favored tj -- and tj’s successor Edmond Randolph -- on foreign policy. When Fr’s rev government asked for the US to pay off debt from the Rev War earlier than negotiated, gw agreed. When the Fr announced plans to send a new ambassador, just after the execution of King Louis 16 in Jan 1793, gw agreed to receive him. Gw was determined to maintain neutrality. He wouldn’t let Hammy’s pro-British views draw him into a war, much as he disliked some of the news from Fr.
However, the new Fr ambassador, Edmond-Charles Genet -- Citizen Genet as he was called, using the title that every Fr person adopted if they wanted to keep their head -- was an undiplomatic as a diplomat could be. He landed in Charleston, SC, and immediately began commissioning American vessels to attack British shipping in direct violation of gw’s neutrality policies. He also purchased munitions for Fr and enlisted volunteers to attack Spanish Florida. Then he went to Philadelphia to meet gw.
Citizen Genet Affair - the efforts of Edmond-Charles Genet, Fr ambassador to the US (1793-94), to stir up military support for Fr and the Fr Rev among Americans, leading to long-term anti-French sentiment
Gw had long mastered the art of showing icy displeasure. Having heard about Genet’s actions in Charleston, he met Genet with great formaily, standing under a picture of Louis 16, America’s ally during its Rev, whom Genet’s government had just executed. In the nation’s capital of Philadelphia, Genet continued to raise arms for privateers to attack the British and recruit soldiers from Kentucky to attack Florida. Gw then demanded that the Fr government recall Genet, which it did in 1794. Fearing execution if he returned to Fr, Genet then asked for asylum and settled in NY as a private system. But in Genet’s brief tenure as ambassador, the Citizen Genet Affair, did lasting harm, inspiring hostility towards Fr among gw, vp ja, and other officials, while arousing more enthusiasm for the Fr Rev among some Americans.
While gw found it easy to dismiss Citizen Genet, he couldn’t as easily dismiss Americans’ support for the Fr Rev. In the first years of the Fr rev, most Americans strongly supported developments in the nation’s oldest ally. When Fr citizens stormed the Bastille prison in July 1789, Gilbert du Motier ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡ sent the keys to the former prison to the president. Feds joined with Antifeds in celebrating the emergence of a new constitutional state in Europe.
Some Feds soon began to have doubts about the Fr Rev, however. For those who worried that deference and hierarchy were disappearing all too fast in the US, news of riots and killings in Fr were terrifying. For the emerging repub movement, the news from Fr was most encouraging. Tj never stopped believing that the rev was a grand moment in history, even if he was uncomfortable with what he viewed as its excesses. Once GB joined the war against rev Fr, many Americans sided with Fr despite official neutrality.
Demo-Repub Societies supporting the Fr Rev sprang up across the US. the first society was established in Philadelphia, but before long there were dozens, from Maine to SC and from coastal cities to backcountry hamlets. These grassroots societies were more radical than anything even tj was comfortable with. Some of those who joined the Demo-Repub Societies were farmers who were angry with the fed government and ready for some rev activity of their own. But the largest societies were in East Coast cities, where anti-British sentiment still ran deep. There, small-time merchants and manufacturers, mechanics, and other citizens were angry at the arrogance of an older, Fed aristocracy and anxious to make their own place in the new nation. Members of these societies had great hopes for the ideals of the Fr Rev and wanted to defend it. Most of the members also dislike Hammy’s economic policies and supported the tj opposition, even if the Demo-Repub leaders in Congress kept their distance from them.
Regardless of their differences, gw was generally considered above politics, so dissenters usually avoided direct criticisms of gw himself. Even so, the demo-repub societies became bastions of hostility to many of his policies and closest allies. The Fr Rev divides solidified the org of the Feds and the demo-repub societies and inspired the creation of the demo-repub party in the US. the fed were pro-GB and wanted a strong fed government and army and economic politics that supported commercial development. The demo-repubs were pro-Fr and wanted a small fed government, more independence for the states and individuals, less commercial development, and more focus on independent farmers. The feds were anti slavery but the demo-repubs were slaveholders : (
Gw, who hated the very idea of permanent factions or parties, tried hard to stay “above the fray” and unite the factions. For a time he succeeded, which explains part of the reason he was unanimously reelected in 1792, but by the end of his 2nd term in office in 1797 more people were coming to see him as another fed leader. If he had run for a 3rd term, his election wouldn’t have been unanimous, though he was too popular to lose to anyone.
US anger at Gw wasn’t fueled only be memories of 1776. In the 1790s, British soldiers still hold Fort Detroit and Fort Niagara in violation in the Treaty of Paris. In the summer of 1793, fearing that American neutrality was a cover for selling American grain to all sides in the European war, the British government issued Orders in Council that banned all American commercial links with Fr or the Fr Caribbean islands. By 1794, the Royal Navy had taken 400 merchant sailors prisoner. Farmers couldn’t sell their wheat, and dockworkers had no jobs. There were growing calls for war with gb, which might help fr, rid the frontier of the british, and end the restrictions on shipping. Gw was determined to avoid war. He sent Chief Justice John Jay to London to resolve the problems. For a short moment, Jay’s appointment as US rep to London quieted calls for war.
Jay’s Treaty - a treaty with GB, negotiated in 1794, in which the US made major concessions to avert a war over the British seizure of American ships
But the treaty Jay negotiated with GW late in 1794 accomplished little of what gw wanted. GB did agree to pay compensation for its attacks on shipping since 1793 but not to end the ban on neutral shipping to Fr or to pay compensation for earlier American losses. While GB also promised again to remove its troops from the MS Valley, it had been ignoring its own promises to do so for a decade, and there was little reason to assume that it would now change policy. Gw was bitterly disappointed that Jay hadn’t accomplished more but sent Jay’s Treaty to the Senate for ratification anyway. The Senate vote in 1795 showed the growing divisions in the US. All 20 Senators identified with the feds in the Senate voted for the treaty, and all 10 demo-repubs voted against it. The public attacks against gw, which had been muted up to this point, now became much louder.
Pinckney’s Treaty - a treaty with Spain that set the border between the US and Spanish Florida
In the final year of the gw administration, one significant diplomatic victory helped to balance out the previous controversies. While Jay had been in London, gw had sent Thomas Pinckney to Madrid. Where Jay had failed, Pinckney’s Treaty succeeded beyond expectations. Worrying that GB and the US might settle their differences at Spain’s expense, the Spanish agreed to a treaty that pushed the northern border of Florida farther south and westward to the MS and, far more important, opened the MS River and port of NOLA to US commerce. Access to NOLA was very important. During the colonial era, Spain had allowed travel on the MS but, fearing the rising power of the new US, had closed the port to all American citizens after the Rev. With Pinckney's Treaty, western farmers could again ship goods down the MS through NOLA to world markets instead of having to struggle across the Appalachians. In addition, for all the uproar over Jay’s Treaty, the British actually honored it, removing their soldiers from Niagara and Detroit. Gw believed he could now retire in confidence that the nation was secure.

The Birth of Political Parties: Adams and Jefferson
Explain the growing split between the Federalist and Democratic-Republican Parties, including how the French Rev and the personal differences between Hammy, ja, and tj affected American politics.
John Adams’s Difficult Presidency

By 1796, ja, though never a close friend or political ally of hammy, had come to rep the Feds, those who supported the gw administration’s foreign policy and most of hammy’s economic politics. Most feds also supported Thomas Pinckney of SC for vp and a few, including hammy, tried to maneuver Pinckney into the presidency.
Tj was the logical candidate of the demo-repubs, the large group who sympathized with the Fr Rev and thought hammy had shifted too much power to the fed government and to the urban economic elites of NY and Philadelphia. Although Aaron Burr of Ny wasn’t an official running mate, many demo-repubs supported him as the vp candidate. Advocates of these views had formed demo-repubs societies in all parts of the country, organized their own newspapers, sympathized with the Whiskey Rebels, and adopted the Fr tricolor. They were ready to become a political force in presidential politics.
Ja and tj remained at home throughout 1796 -- actually wanting to be president after gw was considered unseemly -- but many others campaigned for them.
Gw also entered the campaign, though without formally endorsing a candidate. In Sept 1796, gw gave his farewell address 6 months before he left office. Later gens saw the speech as the grand nonpartisan benediction of the nation’s founder. Contemporaries understood it differently.
In 1796, most people took the speech to mean vote for ja not tj. Although he would never say so directly, gw wanted his vp to be his successor. He got his wish.
Of the 139 electoral votes cast in the 1796 election, ja received 71, all from New England, ny, and nj, while tj received 68, all from Penn and the southern states. Ja and tj became pres and vp, respectively.
The anger of the 1796 campaign cooled quickly. Tj and ja exchanged cordial letters, and ja invited the vp to sit in the Cabinet (which gw had never done for him) but tj declined. The 2 dined with gw just after ja’s inauguration, and in his inaugural address, ja insisted that it was his inflexible determination to maintain peace with all nations.
But the split between the feds and the demo-repubs went too deep for soothing words to heal. Differences came to a head in Congress in Jan 1798 when Matthew Lyon, a d-r from vt, ridiculed the ceremonial greeting for pres ja and insulted fed Roger Griswold of CT. Griswold then insulted Lyon who spat in Griswold’s face. Griswold attacked Lyon with his cane, and Lyon grabbed a pair of fireplace tongs to fight back on the floor of the House of Reps. The 2 were pulled apart, but the incident symbolized the hatred between the 2 parties and the depths to which public discourse had sunk.
Nothing repped the split as much as their attitudes toward the fr rev. Barely a week after his inaug, ja received news that the fr Directory, the 5-member council then ruling rev Fr, had refused to receive ja’s choice as US ambassador to fr. ga had chosen Charles Cotesworth Pinckney )brother of the fed candidate for vp) to improve the US-fr relationship, but the Fr didn’t see it that way. The Directory also launched an undeclared war on US shipping. In the following months, the fr captured 300 American merchant ships. From jqa, who was serving as US ambassador to Prussia, ja also heard of a fr plan to stir up revolt and secession in the western US territories. The fed press called for war against fr while the d-rs claimed it was a false crisis made up by the pro-GB feds.
Ja, who was more nonparison than his fed backers had hoped, sought a middle ground. He sent Elbridge Gerry of MA and John Marshall of VA to join Pinckney in Paris and try to reopen negotiations. But he also asked Congress to establish a navy and provide funds to prepare for war if it came. The response to the new pres’s actions broke along partisan lines, with the feds supporting and the d-rs opposing. But ja won authorization for a new Department of the Navy and funds to build and support 3 medium-sized warships called frigates.
However, ja’s peace overtures to the fr didn’t go well. When his new delegation arrived in Paris, the fr foreign minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand arranged for agents, whom ja identified only as “X, Y, and Z” to inform the American that the negotiations could proceed only if Talleyrand was paid a bribe of $250k and the fr government received a loan of $10 to 12 million as well as an apology for what the fr considered ja’s delligerent tone. Pinckney refused. The commissioners were prepared to pay a bribe, not an unusual part of diplomacy at the time, but the amount demanded was far too high.
XYZ Affair - diplomatic incident in 1798 in which Americans were outraged by the fr demand for a bribe as a condition for negotiating with American diplomats
When word of the XYZ Affair reached Congress and the American public in March 1798, ja’s popularity soared, and many called for a war against fr to avenge US honor. Feds in Congress voted to increase the size of the army and shift its focus from the western frontier to a presumed threat of fr invasion on the Atlantic coast. Given British naval supremacy, a fr invasion was improbable. Even if the British didn’t like the US, they didn’t want fr to control any territory in North America. Ja, unlike most feds, feared a large standing US Army, especially after jammy won appointment as a major general within it. Ja prefered to strengthen the Navy to protect US interests.
Quasi-War - an undeclared war (1797-1800) between the US and Fr
In 1798 and 1799, though there was no formal declaration of war, the US engaged in the Quasi-War with France, or as ja called it, the Half-War. Treaties with fr dating back to the American Rev were repealed, and the US began a trade embargo against fr. the US also supported Haiti’s independence, something it hadn’t done during the gw administration. Congress created the Marine Corps along with the Navy and armed merchant ships so they could attack fr ships near the US coast or in the Caribbean. Even if fr had the most powerful European army, Talleyrand didn’t want war with the US and began to make peace overtures. In Talleyrand’s mind, US neutrality would be important if fr were to launch a planned invasion of GB.
Alien and Sedition Acts - a series of 3 acts passed by Congress in 1798 that made it harder for new immigrants to vote and made it a crime to criticize the president or Congress
The war also led Congress to pass the Alien and Sedition Acts that irreparably hurt ja’s rep even though he didn’t directly request any of them.
To make sure that fr efforts, aided by tj’s d-rs, couldn’t undermine the government and its fed leaders, Congress passed the Naturalization Act and the Alien Friends Act in June 1798, which were referred to as the Alien Acts. these laws lengthen the time to time to qualify for citizenship from 5 to 14 years (to ensure that recent pro-fr immigrants couldn’t vote) and allowed the government to deport anyone deemed dangerous to the US. While no one was actually deported under the acts, many fr citizens left the US on their own rather than wait to see what might happen.
A month later, on July 14 1798, Congress passed the Sedition Act by a slim majority, and ja signed the law. The Sedition Act made it a crime to criticize the government. Unlike the Alien Acts, the Sedition Act was vigorously enforced. D-r Congressman Matthew Lyon was convicted under the law for criticizing the ja administration and spent 4 months in a VT jail. (His constituents made it clear what they thought of the act when they overwhelmingly reelected Lyon to Congress once he was released.) All old, 17 people were tired under the act. But newspapers weren’t silenced, and the attack on free speech undermined support for the feds.
Kentucky and VA Resolutions - resolutions written by tj and jemmy that criticized the Alien and Sedition Acts and asserted the rights of states to declare fed law null and void within a state
The d-rs attacked the Alien and Sedition Acts. vp tj soon came to view the Alien Sedition laws as a fundamental threat to democracy. In the fall of 1798, he drafted resolutions, and his friends and supporters in Kentucky leg adopted his words of state’s rights. Va’s leg adopted similar resolutions drafted by jemmy. Both legs invited other states to join them, but none did. The Kentucky and VA Resolutions drew a sharp line between the 2 political factions. On the d-r side, jemmy saw the resolutions as an appropriate protest within the framework of the Constitution he had helped write, and both men saw them as the basic right to state legs to nullify fed law. But the feds saw both resolutions as a fundamental attack on the basic authority of the fed government and the Constitution itself.
While ja never repudiated the Alien and Sedition Acts, he did end the war fever. Through emissaries, ja received a signal that fr didn’t want war, and after British Admiral Horatio Nelson destroyed the fr fleed in the Battle of the Nile in Oct 1798, any remote possibility of a fr invasion of the US disappeared. Ja had become convinced that hammy was trying to stir up a war for his own political ambitions. Ja called him “a man devoid of every moral principle.” In Fed 1799, ja told the Senate that he was committed to preserving or restoring tranquility, and he also asked them to improve a new ambassador to fr to replace Pinckney. Many feds were enraged that ja would try yet again for peace, and he had to endure a shouting match with hammy. He also had to fire his own sec of state Timothy Pickering, who was ready for war, and replace him with a close political ally, John Marshall. But the Senate approved Wm Vans Murray as the new ambassador, and the new mission worked. It took all of 1799 and 1800 to negotiate, during which the fr government changed from the Directory to the dictatorship of Napoleon, but peace came. The Convention of Mortefontaine ended the Quasi-War and protected US shipping. Ja disbanded part of the army in May 1800 over the opposition of his own party. He also pardoned John Fries who had led a nonviolent rebellion against fed war taxes in Penn in 1799 and had been sentenced to death for treason. These actions cost ja dearly, particularly among feds, but he considered the choice for peace against war his crowning achievement.

The Election of 1800

The political differences between the 2 leading candidates for president in 1800, pres ja and vp tj, couldn’t have been clearer. But the methods for actually selecting the next pres and vp in 1800 couldn't have been more convoluted. None of the problems with the Electoral that were seen in 1796 had been resolved. At that time, political parties had been informal alliances of like-minded individuals. By 1800, however, the feds and d-rs were much better organized. They had come to rep 2 distinct philosophies and sets of personal allegiances. Nevertheless, Americans still distrusted formal political parties. Within the parties, advocates of different positions schemed to defeat not only the other party but also rivals within their own party. In Dec 1799, just as the maneuvering for the 1800 election was startings, news came that gw had died in Mt Vernon. People of all political factions mourned the loss of a unifying leader but also knew that the next election would be more divisive than ever.
Despite the fact that most of the Constitution’s authors didn’t want noms of pres candidates to occur before the selection of presidential electors, in 1800, each party’s Congressional delegations nommed the candidates in semisecret caucuses. When the d-r caucus met on May 11, 1800, it was clear that tj would be their pres nominee. Several candidates were considered for vp, but the d-rs wanted someone who would help them win ny, which they decided was Burr. few politicians, including tj, trusted or respected Burr, but tj wanted to be president. In an ill fated decision, the caucus and party leaders pledged that every elector would vote for both tj and Burr. Everyone simply assumed that somehow tj would receive the most votes and become pres with Burr vp, but that assumption proved to be a mistake.
Fed maneuvering was equally complicated. There was a general agreement that not supporting ja would split the party, but they split the party anyway but also choosing Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of SC. Behind the scenes, hammy hoped that he could somehow engineer Pinckney’s election as pres, and once again, ja found out and was furious.
Because the Constitution gave each state the right to choose its presidential electors any way it wished, the actual voting for those electors was spread out over most of the year. In an early but crucial test, Burr was able to ensure ny’s electoral votes for the tj-Burr ticket. Penn’s d-r governor also promised to deliver its electoral votes for the tj-Burr ticket, or, if that failed, to simply prevent a vote to choose electors from taking place in that state so ja couldn’t receive any Penn votes.
As the other states cont to select their presidential electors in the summer and fall of 1800, the contest remained fierce. The Sedition Act made direct attacks on pres ja dangerous, but the press was far from neutral, and anger at that act added fuel to the d-r fire.
Slaves couldn’t vote, and slavery hadn’t been a major issue in the previous presidential campaigns, but it was in 1800. Gabriel Prosser and Jack Bowler were slaves on a VA plantation not far from Richmond. Throughout the summer, they were planning a slave uprising. Prosser promised death to all whites except Quakers, Methodists, and French people, that is, whites known to support abolition. Over 1k slaves were involved, forging swords from sickles, making their own bullets, and designing a flag that read Death or Liberty. The uprising was set for Sat Aug 30, when they planned to meet at the Prosser plantation, kill the white owners, and march on Richmond. However, a terrible storm on Aug 30 scattered the slave army, and Governor James Monroe discovered the plan and called out the state militia. The leaders of the uprising were quickly tried and executed, but the prospect of a slave uprising terrified the southern states.
The issue slavery also complicated the presidential campaign. Both political parties were divided internally over it. Ja hated slavery, but Pinckney was one of the largest slave owners in SC. Both tj and Burr owned slaves, but tj had also written in opposition to slavery. He needed northern d-r votes in Penn and NY where abolitionism was gaining ground. Governor Monroe and tj feared that too many slave executions would spark an abolitionist upheaval and cost them votes. Leniency would cost them votes in the fearful southern states where ja and Pinckney suddenly looked like the force of stability.
Some slaves saw the ironies of the situation. Most of those arrested, including Prosser, simply remained silent, knowing that nothing they said would save them. The tension between American freedom and American slavery, which was at the heart of the republic, surfaced in the 1800 contest.
Tj’s religious beliefs also became a major election topic. Many clergy and laypeople claimed that tj had renounced the basic beliefs of Christianity. In fact, tj was a deist who believed that God tended to leave the universe on its own. Ja tended to agree with tj in religious matters but didn’t say anything publically during the heat of the campaign.
The hammy-ja feud could be kept so quiet. Hammy wrote A Letter From Alexander Hamilton, Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams, Esq., President of the United States. Hammy meant the 54-page doc for the private use of a few electors, but a d-r press found the doc and it became public. : ) The feds were split between ja to Pinckney.
In 1800, the candidates campaigned openly, unlike 1796. Ja seemed to enjoy campaigning, giving speeches in key states. Tj considered similar campaign stops but was dissuaded by VA’s Governor Monroe. Instead, he engaged in a nonstop correspondence with supporters and in less public forms of campaigning, offering financial and editorial advice to friendly newspaper editors.
Given the advantages that the d-rs held, randing from the unpopularity of the Alien and Sedition Acts to the fed split, the election was surprisingly close. Ja swept New England and most of the northern states while tj held strong in in NY and Penn and most of the southern states. The 3/5ths clause gave the southern states an advantage in the electoral college that ultimately tipped the election for tj.
Because the d-rs had been so well organized, tj and Burr each received 73 electors votes, putting them well ahead of Adams and Pinckney. But because tj and Burr had each received 73 votes, the House of Reps would now have to decide between the 2 candidates who had tied in the election. In addition, though the d-rs had also won a majority in the new Congress, the old Congress, with a fed majority, would decide the elections. Many d-rs thought that Burr had engineered this outcome to make himself pres. Many feds gave Burr a second look. Burr didn’t negotiate with the feds, but he also didn't give way to tj. The country was stuck.
When Congress heard the tally of electoral votes, the outcome was 73 for the, 73 for Burr, 65 for ja, 64 for Pinckney, and 1 for John Jay. The House then began to vote between the top 2. But it remained deadlocked. Finally, hammy convinced his fellow feds that Burr was a dangerous man of too much ambition and too little morality. On Fed 17, tj was a elected pres by a vote of 10 state delegations to 4, with 2 not voting. Burr became vp. It had been a long year and long election cycle, and it could never be repeated in quite the same form.

Summaries:

Convening a Congress, Inaugurating a President, Adopting a Bill of Rights

When VA and NH voted to ratify the Constitution in June 1788, it became the law of the land. By the spring of 1789, the members of the new Congress had been elected and gw had been unanimously elected president by the 69 presidential electors. As the first president, gw was well aware that every choice he made would set a precedent for future presidents. In the summer of 1789, the House of Reps went to work on the Bill of Rights, sending 12 amendments to the states on Sept 25. 10 of these amendments were ratified and became the Bill of Rights. Collectively, these amendments placed clear limits on the power of the new fed government.

Creating an Economy: Hammy and the US Economic System

When gw took office, he faced difficult problems, many of them economic. Under the Articles of Confederation, the fed government was unable to collect taxes, which meant that fed debts weren’t being paid and that he financial status of the US was in serious trouble. Gw appointed Hammy as his sec of the treasury, placing him in charge of solving the financial crisis. In his report to Congress on the public credit of the US, Hammy argued that the fed government should assume all rev debt and agree to pay all government promissory notes in full. Hammy’s plans faced significant opposition and were passed only after a deal in which the capital would be moved to a site on the Potomac River. In 1791, again over considerable opposition, Hammy gained Congressional approval for a Bank of the US. Hammy’s last major report to Congress was his Report on Manufactures. In contrast to tj’s vision of an agrarian republics, Hammy imagined a diverse economy, with the fed government playing an important role in the stimulation of manufacturing growth.

Setting the Pace: the gw Administration

Although economic issues were the top priority, gw also faced many other challenges during his terms in office. Gw was deeply concerned about how to handle the frontier Indian tribes. Between 1790 and 1793, gw mixed approaches, using military invasions and diplomacy. The American victory at the Battle of Fallen Timbers led to the signing of the Treaty of Greenville the following year. The treaty paved the way for white settlement of the Northwest Territory. Hammy’s tax on whiskey sparked an uprising in Kentucky and western Penn in 1793. In 1794, gw led a fed army into the region to squash the rebellion. Gw’s second term was dommed by the Fr Rev. The rev complicated the US’s relations with Fr and GB. Domestic politics were also shaped by the rev, with political factions developing around support for either Fr or GB.

The Birth of Political Parties: ja and tj

In 1796, fed ja was elected pres and demo-repub tj was elected vp. Factional division, particularly over US relations with Fr, shaped the ja presidency. In 1788 and 1789, following the XYZ Affair, Fr and the US fought the Quasi-War. War hysteria leg Congress to pass the Alien and Sedition Acts, which targeted the Feds’ political opponents. In response, tj and jemmy produced the Kentucky and VA Resolutions, respectively, which argued that states had the right to nullify fed laws, although his resolutions didn’t pass in the Congress. In 1799, ja began negotiations that led to peace with France in 1800. The unpopularity of the Alien and Sedition Acts, as well as a Fed split, contributed to tj’s victory over ja in the presidential election of 1800.

Bill of Rights -- Amendments 1 - 10
Freedom of Religion, Speech, and the Press
1. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
The Right to Bear Arms
1. A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
The Housing of Soldiers
1. No soldier shall, in time of peace, be quartered in any house without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
Protection from Unreasonable Searches and Seizures
1. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.
Protection of Rights to Life, Liberty, and Property
1. No person shall be held to answer for a capital or otherwise infamous crime unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.
Rights of Accused Persons in Criminal Cases
1. In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor; and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.
Rights in Civil Cases
1. In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States than according to the rules of the common law.
Excessive Bail, Fines, and Punishments Forbidden
1. Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
Other Rights Kept by the People
1. The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Undelegated Powers Kept by the States and the People
1. 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.
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Following Ratification: a New Government
Constitution ratified in 1788 (last states to ratify did so in 1789 and 1790)
Outgoing Articles of Confederation called for elections for Congress and Pres, to be held early 1789
- Constitutionally, the right to vote defined by the states themselves
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Bill of Rights
Rep Jemmy made it clear that he would provide one to make people happy
Amendments quickly passed House and Senate (17 and 12 respectively); 10 would make it through the state conventions
Rights now seen as fundamental to American liberty were granted
10th Amendment would become a hotly debated one over time
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Hamly and the Economy
Debt was a pressing economic issue
States, fed government, businesses faced issues stemming from lack of credit
Hamly suggested that the debt was the priority of the government, and that fed government should absorb the states’ debts
Compromise with Congress: capital moved from nyc to a district on Potomac River
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The Growing Political Divide
Hamly continued to press on with economic reform: proposing a First Bank of US
- Wanted a central authority for currency and banking instead of Congress or states handling this
- Modeled after British system
Planters, small farmers, Southern elites feared a shift of power
The bank bill passed and was signed into law by gw
Underlying the debate were the formation of 2 political parties at odds with each other
- Feds (Hamly) vs d-rs (Jemmy, tj)
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Congress convened April 1789; gw elected pres by electoral college unanimously
4 departments created in administration (Cabinet) : Sec of War, Sec of State, Sec of Treasury, and Attorney General

Unit Four

Chapter 8 - Creating a new people, expanding the country

Significant Dates

1800 - tj elected president
1803 - Louisiana purchase; US Supreme Court’s Marbury v. Madison decision; Ohio admitted to the Union
1804-06 - Lewis and Clark Expedition ♡♡♡♡♡♡
1807 - Chesapeake-Leopard affair; Congress passes Embargo Act
1808 - jemmy elected pres
1812-15 - War of 1812
1812 - American defeat at Detroit
1813 - American victories on Great Lakes and Battle of the Thames; death of Tecumseh
1814 - Jackson victory over Creeks at Battle of Horseshoe Bend; the British burn DC; Treaty of Ghent signed (rat. 1815)
1815 - US victory at Battle of New Orleans
1816 - Monroe elected pres
1817 - Rush-Bagot Treaty demilitarized the Great Lakes between the US and Canada
1818 - Anglo-American Convention set the border between the US and Canada and included an agreement for temp joint ownership of the OR Territory
1819 - Adams-Onis Treaty - Spain cedes FL to the US
1822 - plans for slave revolt in Charleston led by Denmark Vesey
1823 - Monroe Doctrine

Jefferson and the Republican Ideal
Explain how tj’s republicanism shaped and reflected the nation’s democratic culture

Republicanism - a complex, changing body of ideas, values, and assumptions that developed in the US in the late 1790s and early 1800s around tj and jemmy’s political organizing and their campaigns for the presidency.
Tj, whose lack of religious orthodoxy was an issue in his campaigns, led the nation during one of the great revivals of religion. Tj, the sophisticated aristocrat in his personal life, presided over White House events with a sense of informality that many officials found insulting. Tj, a slaveholder, led the country during the time when slavery became stronger and more entrenched as well as a source of bitter divisiveness. Tj, believer in an agrarian vision, presided over a growing commercial economy that saw an expansion of US territory as well as the rise of cities, banks, and corps.

Jefferson the Political Leader

Tj shrank the fed bureaucracy while doubling the landmass of the US. tj thought the bureaucracy he had inherited from ja was too big and too costly and vowed the cut it, though that government wasn’t that big. The largest fed office, the War Dept, included the sec of war, one accountant, 14 clerks, and 2 messengers. The sec of state had one chief clerk, 6 other clerks, and a messenger. The attorney general didn’t have a clerk. But tj though it was too big and cut it. Having always feared the impact of a standing army, tj cut the size of the army in the west and the size of the navy that patrolled the Atlantic. He founded the military academy at West Point only because he wanted to replace fed officers with a thoroughly professional and repub officer corps. Tj’s sec of the treasury persuaded him to keep hamly’s Bank of the US, but tj never liked that bank, and a repub Congress refused to renew its charter in 1811, after he had left office.
Tariff - a tax on imports into any nation
While he kept the tariff, tj abolished all internal taxes. Most Americans dealt with the fed government only through the post office during the tj, jemmy, and Monroe administrations. DC had fewer than 10k residents, most of whom lived in boarding houses. For tj, the states, not the fed government, were supposed to have the “principal care of our persons, our property, and our reputation.”
Midnight judges - the name the tjian d-rs gave to those judges appointed by the outgoing fed pres ja
The new tjian majority in Congress repealed the Judiciary Act of 1801, which had expanded the number of fed judges which ja had signed just before leaving office. Following tj’s views, Congress wanted fewer fed judges, and it especially disliked the midnight judges. Congressional leaders and pres tj virtually dared the Supreme Court, particularly, Chief Justice Marshall, a Fed whom ja had appointed, to declare Congress’s actions unconstitutional. They promised that if the Court did so, Congress would reduce the Court’s authority. Marshall waited for the right case to make his decision. One of the midnight judges was to name Wm Marbury a justice of the peace for DC, but ja left office before Marbury’s commission was delivered, and pres tj and sec of state jemmy refused to deliver it. Marbury sued, and in 1803, the Supreme Court, led by Marshall, issued its decision in the case of Marbury v. Madison.
Marbury v. Madison - Supreme Court decision of 1803 that created the precedent of judicial review by ruling part of the Judiciary Act of 1789 as unconstitutional
Judicial review - a power implied in the Constitution that gives federal courts the right to review and determine the constitutionality of acts passed by Congress and state legs
Marbury v. Madison was a complex decision with far-reaching consequences. Marshall said that the Court could do nothing because the clause in the Judiciary Act of 1789 giving the fed courts the right to issue writs required government action was unconstitutional because the Constitution didn’t give the judiciary such authority. As a result, Marbury didn’t get his job; while the Court slapped tj’s wrist, it also gave him the legal victory because he wasn’t forced to appoint Marbury; and Marshall made a point of saying that the Court had the authority to declare an act of Congress unconstitutional it was the first time the Court asserted this power of judicial review. Marshall had dramatically expanded the authority of the fed courts while also ensuring that they wouldn’t be challenged by tj or the repub Congress.

Rural America and the Agrarian Ideal

In 1801, the occupations, opinions, and manners of most American voters were compatible with tj’s agrarian ideal of a nation of independent farmers, and they provided a solid foundation on which to build a political consensus. The pop of the US when tj took office was just over 5.3 million, almost 900k of whom were African slaves. 90 % of whites lived on farms.
However, far from being permanently attached to their isolated rural communities, many moved often, seeking more and better land in OH, KY, and TN. Older farms were sold and resold regularly. A Fr observer, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, visited the US just before tj’s inaug. He wondered whether American farmers had any of the Fr peasant's attachment to a particular piece of land, but when he asked the Americans, they said that such attachment repped a lack of pluck.
For many in the Republic, all forms of authority, in government and in manners, were suspect. Republican virtue was to be found in equality among white men. While voting restrictions related to race and gender continued, and even grew in the early 1800s, virtually all property qualifications for voting disappeared, and many people now wanted to vote. As a result, the number of voters, which had previously included around 20 % of the white male pop, expanded in most states to 70 and 80 %. Compared to any earlier era, the white male electorate was large. It was also opinionated and individualistic.
European visitors were fascinated and appalled by the manners and morals of Americans. An Englishman, Charles Wm Janson, who lived in the US from 1793 to 1806, called Americans “the only remaining republicans in the civilized world,” but he also found them “in every respect uncongenial to English habits, and to the tone of an Englishman’s constitution.” Everyone in the US, Janson said, from the poorest and least educated to the most elite, “consider themselves on equal footing with the best educated people in the country.”
The US of the early 1800s was also a violent place. Political arguments were often settled with fists. Urban riots weren’t usual when crowds poured out of a tavern, theater, or factory. Observers worried that the country was losing its cohesion. Fighting was as common in rural communities and was ruthless as well. Men of higher social standing often settled minor grudges with a duel.
One cause of the violence was the high level of alcohol consumption. Most Americans with access to alcohol -- which did not include slaves -- enjoyed a drink during the colonial era. But in the early 1800s, drinking doubled from an average of 2.5 gallons per person per year in 1790 to 5 in 1820. One doctor complained that 40 out of the 100 physicians in NYC were drunks.
The violence, lack of manners, and shouting and swearing weren’t limited to duels among the elite or fist fights on the frontier. Interracial violence between white Americans and Indians continued long after the Indian Wars had ended. Individual Indians were easy marks for attack. Similarly, slaves could do little to protect themselves against the violence that was always a part of the slave system.
Family life wasn’t exempt from violence. When NYer Stephen Arnold was tried for the murder of his adopted daughter, many saw it as government intrusion into a family matter. But while violence towards wives and children may have increased, it was also resisted as it hadn’t been earlier. Divorce rates increased as women refused to stay in violent or unhappy marriages or remain legally connected to a man who had left them long before.

Jefferson the Individual

While Americans debated the many meanings of freedom and unfreedom in the democratic experiment of which they were a part, they also debated the personal life of their president.
While tj insisted on a simplified social scene at the White House, his life at Monticello was anything but. At Monticello, he entertained lavishly and served the finest food and wine, while continually expanding the house and the library. Slaves did all of the hard work and took care of his every need. The defender of republican equality in social relations lived an aristocratic private life.
Sally Hemings deserved better.

The Ideal of Religious Freedom
Explain how Americans applied new individualist ideals ideals in their religion and how the expansion of faith-based orgs supported, yet also challenged tjian republicanism.

Wall of separation between church and state - a phrase coined by tj to make clear his belief that the First Amendment guaranteed the governments should not interfere with the work of churches, and churches should not interfere with, or expect support from, government
Religious establishment - the name given to a state-church or to the creation of an “established church” that might play a role in and expect support and loyalty from all citizens
CT, NH, MA, and MD had a religious establishment in 1802, requiring taxes to support certain churches in the respective state.

The Separation of Church and State at the State Level

Tj and jemmy had convinced the VA leg to end public financial support for the Episcopal Church in va in 1786, 5 years before jemmy helped shepherd the First Amendment through Congress.
The fiercest battle over state support for specific churches was in ct. Tim Dwight, pres of Yale since 1795, was a Fed who hated tj’s views and wanted a state church. Lyman Beecher, a Yale student, organized the CT Society for the Suppression of Vice and the Promotion of Good Morals and published the ct Evangelical Magazine and Religious Intelligencer in an effort to maintain the special status of the Congregationalist churches. But he lost. In 1817, Oliver Wolcott, who opposed a state church, defeated a Fed for governor, and ct would end its state support for all religious bodies. Beecher was heartbroken, but years later, he changed his mind. Religion in ct survived and flourished without state support, and, not long afterward, ma, the last holdout, separated church and state.

New Religious Expressions

Direct government support for churches disappeared in the early 1800s, but the importance of religious freedom did not. The ideals of individual freedom in all areas of life generated an amazing growth in religious orgs and ideas in the same era.
Deist - one who has a religious orientation that rejects divine revelation and holds that the workings of nature alone reveal God’s design for the universe
Church attendance in America dropped during and after the Rev. Many of the elite were deists; many working people ignored religious matters altogether. During tj’s presidency, Americans participated in an outpouring of evangelical Christianity - the beginning of the Second Great Awakening. Although major developments of the Second Great Awakening occurred largely in the 1820s and 1830s, the movement began in the late 1790s and early 1800s.
Second Great Awakening - a series of religious revivals in the first half of the 1800s characterized by great emotionalism in large public meetings

Cane Ridge and the Revivals of the Early 1800s

In 1796 a presbyterian minister named James McGready moved from the Carolinas to Kentucky. Most of those who had moved across the Appalachian Mountains had left their religion at home, if they ever had any at all. McGready described Rogue’s Harbor in Logan County, KY as a place of horse thieves, murderers, robbers, counterfeiters and runaways. He set out to make them good church going christians and was surprisingly successful. In 1799, he and other preachers held a church service at the Gaspar meeting house. Revivalist preachers often called those who experienced emotional conversion the slain because they were seen as having died to their old sinful lives.
The revival of 1799 led to more religious gatherings and they grew so big that they needed to be held at outdoor campgrounds. In one of the largest religious gatherings before the Civil War perhaps 20,000 people, ten percent of the state’s population, gathered at Cane Ridge in Bourbon County, KY for a five day camp meeting in August 1801 that was led by Presbyterian and Methodist ministers. Preaching continued from dawn to midnight with little time for meals or rest.

Methodists, Baptists, and Other Protestants

Although Cane Ridge was a joint Presbyterian Methodist endeavor, it was the Methodists and Baptists who grew the most from the revival movement. The revivals that began in the early 1800s made these two denominations the largest Protestant groups in the country during that time.
Methodism had come to America through John Wesley who founded the Methodist movement in England along with his brother Charles the hymn writer. John Wesley had also preached in Georgia. But it was the first American Methodist bishop, Francis Asbury, who established American Methodism. Asbury created a new form of Protestant ministry, the Methodist Circuit Riders, who moved from community to community preaching with great fervor and organizing churches at every stop.
John Wesley believed that it was in the power of every person to decide whether they wanted to experience salvation. His emphasis on the need for free individuals to make their own decisions appealed in freedom-loving Jeffersonian America. Wesley’s experience of having his heart strangely warmed allowed a level of emotionalism in Methodism that was lacking in other denominations.
Baptists had been in North America for almost as long as the Puritans. They were the largest religious body in Rhode Island where they founded Brown University. The Baptist of the Second Great Awakening were a different breed from their earlier New England Baptist counterparts. Their religious events were more emotional and they were more individualist and determined to assert local authority.
Where Methodism was tightly organized from bishops to preachers to congregations, Baptist organization was highly decentralized, with each congregation retaining total control. While Methodists were largely united until the Civil War, Baptists tended to splinter into rival groups. The model Methodist minister was the circuit rider. The typical Baptist minister was a farmer preacher who grew up in a particular congregation and was selected to lead it while he continued to support himself by his own labor. Despite their differences both Methodist and Baptist ministers were highly effective in changing the religious outlook of the country after 1800.

Faith in the Slave Quarters and Free Black Churches

White communities were not the only ones experiencing a revival of religion in the early 1800s. Revivals in some parts of the South, especially in the 1800s, were seen as a kind of holiday and many of the rules of daily life, including racial segregation, were suspended.
Many plantation owners organized religious services for slaves that focused on the virtues of submission and obedience. But slaves passed along memories of another form of worship - congregations that met often at night in secluded places.
Any unsupervised meeting of slaves frightened whites. Denmark Vesey, a free black Sunday school teacher who saw himself as a latter day Moses ready to lead his people to freedom, led a slave revolt in South Carolina in 1822. In 1831, Nat Turner would lead the largest slave revolt before the Civil War. When Turner told the authorities that he knew he was ordained for some great purpose in the hands of the Almighty, and that the great day of Judgement was at hand, he confirmed what they had feared about slave religion.
The longing for freedom usually took less violent paths. Slavery depended on hopelessness and religion gave slaves hope that could lead to resistance. The songs of the slave quarter are often songs of freedom.
At the same time, northern free black people began to form their own religious organizations. Richard Allen was born a slave in Delaware. He converted to Methodism and was able to purchase his freedom and begin preaching. Allen preached to white and black congregations.
Because white churches were not always welcoming, Allen became convinced that a racially integrated congregation was impossible. In response, he organized the Bethel church in Philadelphia in 1794 which became the American Methodist Episcopal Church. African American Baptists also created their own congregations. Fear of religiously inspired slave rebellions led Southern governments to block the growth of independent Black churches. But in the North, free black churches thrived, as their members exercised leadership, developed their own ideas, and worshiped among themselves.

American Catholic and Jewish ♡♡♡ Communities

In the early years of the Republic, there were few Roman Catholics or Jewish individuals in the areas of the original 13 colonies. During the late 1700s and early 1800s, the largest number of Catholics in n.a. lived in nola, which had become part of the u.s. Only in 1803 and in tx, nm, and ca, which were still part of Mexico until the 1840s. Nearly all white immigrants to the British colonies had been wasps, except for Catholics going to the MD. Religious freedom in the Jeffersonian era was important to those in the smallest minorities.
In 1790, John Carroll was appointed the first Catholic bishop in n.a. He was based in MD, where Catholics, having lost to govern the colony, had again gained religious freedom after the rev. Carroll was later promoted to Archbishop of Baltimore when the Vatican appointed bishops for Boston, ny, and Bardstown, ky. Carroll worked hard to build Catholic strength and to fit into the democratic spirit of America. He established the first American Catholic college at Georgetown, md (later dc), and a Catholic seminary at Baltimore. In many places, Catholic laypeople created their own churches, appointed themselves trustees, and when possible hired their own priests. Vatican responses to the radical secularism of the Fr Rev led to pressure on Carroll to curtail this trend among the American laity, and, instead, agree to the hierarchical appointment of priests, bu throughout the early 1800s, American Catholicism had remarkably strong lay leadership.
At the time of the Rev, most of the few Jewish Americans lived in East Coast cities such as Newport, Philadelphia, and NYC. between then and 1820, new congregations and synagogues were formed in Richmond, nola, Cincinnati, and Baltimore. Jewish religious communities, like those of Catholics and Protestants, took on republic sentiments.

Beyond the MS: the Louisiana Purchase and the Expedition of Lewis and Clark
Explain what effects the LA Purchase and the westward expansion had on how Americans saw themselves.
The Louisiana Purchase

Once nola was under American control, tj was confident that he would have solved a long-term problem for his western constituents and won and important political victory.
While tj worried about control of nola, Napoleon was concerned with money. When the Americans offered $6 million for nola, Napoleon’s government offered to sell all of la for $15 million.
Louisiana Purchase - the 1803 US purchase of the vast land holdings that Fr claimed along the west side of the MS River beginning in NOLA and extending through the heart of North America to the Canadian border.
Tj was thrilled with the offer, but he worried that the fed government didn’t have the authority to do such. Regardless, the practical benefits overcame his doubts. Most Americans were enthusiastic. Congress acted quickly, and the treaty confirming the transaction was easily ratified.

The City of New Orleans

Nola was unusual for an American city. Many of its inhabitants spoke Fr or Spanish but now lived in an English-speaking country. It was a Catholic city now part of a primarily wasp country.
Slavery in Spanish and French colonies varied widely. Some of the harshest slavery in the world was in the sugar plantations of Haiti and Cuba, but slaves in cities like Havana and pre-1803 nola could maintain stable families, enjoy their own holidays, and earn money to buy goods and sometimes their freedom. In nola, slaves and free black people could gather at Congress Square on Sundays to dance, play drums, and sing in their own langs under the watchful eye of whites but with a freedom of action unimaginable elsewhere in the us.
There was also considerable racial mixing in nola. Mixed-race people faced discrimination, but many black women regardless became long-term partners to white men. Such unions were an avenue of upward mobility for some black women in ways that weren't true in British colonies or in the us. That African women could maintain their own gardens, buy and sell goods, and be involved in intimate relationships with white men led to complex family negotiations.
The nola that tj purchased in 1803 had a pop of 8k with their own churches, dance halls, theater, newspapers, and police force. ⅓ of all people of African origin in the city were free.
Many of the francophone women and men in nola tended to refer to any us citizens as Kaintucks. Kaintucks were the tough backwoods farmers and slaves who crewed flatboats. Although the racial and cultural diversity of nola frightened some Americans, its essential geographic location made it the prize of the LA Purchase.

The Lewis and Clark Expedition

Tj wanted to assert American dom in north america. In 1803, before he even knew the outcome of the Monroe-Livingston neogitionations for nola that he had authorized, he asked congress to support a scientific expedition to study the people, lands, and animal and plant species of the north american continent across the la territory and on to the pacific ocean. While he wanted the scientific information, tj was even more interested in a full report on spanish and french military power in the region. The expedition was to be led by his private sec Meriwether Lewis and an army Wm Clark. Before lewis and clark could depart, word came of the la purchase. Suddenly, the us owned much of the land the expedition was authorized to explore. The news changed nothing’ the order still stood: learn as much as possible about the new American lands and the places beyond them, and make treaties with as many of the original inhabitants as possible. It was a daunting assignment that would become one of America’s most celebrated exploits.
Corps of Discovery - the name given to the expedition led by Lewis and Clark in 1804-06 that explored the LA Purchase and the OR lands extending to the West Coast
French trapper Toussaint Charbonneau and his Shoshone partner Sacagawea ♡
While Lewis and Clark were exploring the northern parts of the la purchase and the or coast, tj launched other expeditions. Zebulon Pike led an expedition that departed from St Louis in the fall of 1805 to explore the ms and ar rivers and much of present day co. in 1806, tj appointed a third expedition led by Thomas Freeman, an astronomer and surveyor, to track the Red River Valley in the southern portion of the new territory. The reports from these expeditions opened the way for other adventurers and traders, some of whom, like ny’s John Jacob Astor, made a fortune in the fur trade. The result for the Mandans, Nez Perce, and other tribes was far too often disease, war, and the loss of lands and a way of life.

The War of 1812
Analyze the causes and impacts of the War of 1812.

Tj expanded the US, but he had been able to do little about the British and Fr navies that threatened the nation as a result of conflicts between the two nations. The actions tj took to protect the US on the seas actually hurt the us economically. What had begun as an irritating concern to tj escalated into the War of 1812 during the pres of jemmy.

Renewed Tension Between the US and GB

For the british, troubles in na were a sideshow to a world war with fr that had begun in 1689 and continued until 1815. English colonists fought on the british side until the fr and indian war ended in 1763. In 1778, fr had come to the aid of the american colonists in the rev. With the coming of the fr rev in 1789 and the rise of napoleon in 1799, the war between gb and fr took on a deeper ideological tone. While earlier wars had primarily been territorial disputes, after their rev, the fr saw themselves as agents of democracy against a despotic coalition led by gb. After the rise of napoleon, the british saw themselves as defenders of the free world against napoleonic tyranny. In the us, the Feds were pro-gb and the d-rs were pro-fr. By early 1806, napoleon’s armies controlled most of Europe while the british royal navy controlled the oceans. For the us, british control of the seas was a larger threat.
With gb and fr each casting itself as the defender of freedom while fighting for national preservation, the war was intense. To survive, gb depended on its navy, but the royal navy was always short of sailors, and british sailors tended to desert and join the Americans. The british regularly stopped us merchant vessels and occasionally warships on the high seas to search for their own sailors and force any able-bodied seaman into service.
This policy as seizing sailors, or impressment, was seen as vital to gb but was a direct threat to the us. Impressments had long infuriated Americans. The practice was an assault on individual liberties that challenged everything the american rev stood for.
Embargo Act - an act passed by Congress in 1807 prohibiting American ships from leaving for any foreign port
Tj and Congress knew that the us was too weak for a fight in part because of the cupbacks tj had authorized in the navy and army. Congress initially passed an Non-Importation Act, hoping that boycotting british goods would be effective but it failed. Tj urged the Embargo Act. he was confident that the major impact would be on gb, which he thought wouldn’t survive without american foodstuffs and that the american people would be willing to suffer short-term loss to gain peace. He was wrong. Most americans were anxious to maintain the income that commerce provided. Smugglers became active by land across the border to Canada and by sea, eluding the us navy that tried to enforce the embargo. The ma and ct elgs declared eth embargo illegal in their states.
Non-Intercourse Act - an act, passed by Congress in 1809, designed to modify the Embargo Act by limiting it to trade with GB and Fr si as to extend US commerce in the rest of the world
As a compromise meant to appease New England merchants, Congress replaced the embar with the non-intercouse act.
During jemmy’s first term as pres, tension continued to grow between the us and gb. In 1810, a further mod of the non-inter act, known as Macon’s Bill No. 2, created new tensions, especially between the us and gb. British impressments of us sailors continued unabated while each new act continued to hurt commercial ties between them.

Renewed Tension Between Whites and Indians

While tensions mounted between the us and gb, warfare between the US and Indians broke out in the oh county. A new tribal alliance led by Tenskwatawa (the Prophet) and Tecumseh frightened white settlers and challenged the small us army. Tecumseh and the Prophet were aided by the british.
After their losses from the treaty of greenville, many Shawnees came to believe that they had displeased the Good Spirit. In the early 1800s, the Prophet told the tribes that their dependence on white culture was the source of the Good Spirit’s unhappiness. The Prophet promised that, if his people would renounce European ways and goods, they could renew their culture and drive whites out of their country. He and Tecumseh created Prophetstown.
While the Prophet preached, Tecumseh prepared their war. Tecumseh traveled throughout the oh terr and sought help from British authorities in Canada. Tecumseh ♡ was willing to negotiate with the us, but his goal was an all-Indian alliance to drive all whites from the land south of Canada and from between the Alleghenies and the MS.
Whites on the frontier were frightened. In sept 1807, thom kirker (governor of oh) met with Tecumseh, and the 2 agreed to peace. But in nov 1811, the Battle of Tippecanoe… : (

War and Its Consequences

War Hawks - members of Congress, mostly from the South and West, who aggressively pushed for a war against GB after their election in 1810
As hostilities grew between the US and Gb and its Indian allies, some war hawks saw a war with gb as what the nation needed. Republicans, led by henry clay of kt and felix grundy of tn, argued that war was key to territorial expansion. They were confident that if the us went to war with gb, those fr who remained canadians would revolt, allowing the us to seize canada. The war hawks also wanted to attack the small spanish colonies in fl and claim that terr for the us. With gb and spain out of the picture, the us could then settle things on the Indian frontier.
Feds saw war as just one more step in a a d-r hostility with gb. When jemmy asked congress for a dec of war in june 1812, it passed by the smallest margin of any us dec of war. The nation didn’t agree in its commitment to war, and the war didn’t go well.
Jemmy was confident the the war would be quick and cost little in terms of money or American lives. He was terribly wrong. The attack on canada was a disaster. Tj and jemmy had kept the army weak while many in congress who had voted for war had also voted against every military appropriation in the time leading up the war. Far fewer of the people in canada, english or french, wanted to become part of the us than the americans expected. In addition, the british army was strong and had been cultivating Indian alliances.
In july 1812, detroit fell to british soldiers and indians led by Tecumseh ♡ and an American attack on british forts on the niagara river failed. The opening battles of the war had left the northwest more open to attack by the british and Tecumseh’s tribal alliance.
Tecumseh was killed in Oct 1813 when the us army won a significant victory at the Battle of the THames.
By 1814, the war turned further against the us. Napoleon’s abdication in april 1814 freed the british for a full-scale fight. In aug, british troops raised dc and burned the white house.
On the Indian front, American forces were achieving some important victories. The War of 1812 was a disaster for Indians living east of the MS. Tecumseh’s death ended the fragile coalition he had built and opened all of oh and indiana terr to rapid white settlements. In the Treaty of Fort Jackson, the Creeks were forced to give up almost 25 million acres in geo and alabama, half their total land.
Treaty of Ghent - a treaty signed in Dec 1814 between the US and GB that ended the War of 1812
An american peace delegation of Henry Clay, Albert Gallatin, and jqa met with their British counterparts in Ghent, Belgium to negotiate the Treaty of Ghent. Despite its strong position in the war, gb feared that peac wouldn’t last with fr, and it wanted to end its battles with the us to conserve resources. The british agreed to a treaty that essentially returned all borders and issues to their status quo before the war.
Hartford Convention - a meeting of Fed delegates from the New England states to protest the continuation of the War of 1812
Many new englanders saw little value in the terr expansion and were convinced that new lands would only mean new d-r reps in Congress. The war had devastated the new england econ, which depended on international shipping. In protest, new england governors ordered their state militias to serve only within their state borders. During the Hartford Convention, new england considered succeeding from the union if peace did not come quickly. While a majority of the delegates ultimately opposed secession, the convention insisted on the right of nullification, the right of state governments to impede Congressional actions within their own boundaries, and proposed amendments to the Constitution to protect new england’s power. Delegates to the convention expected the jemmy administration to give in, but when news arrived of Jackson’s victory in nola and then the peace treaty, the convention did more to discredit the Feds than support their cause. Nevertheless, it signaled the level of hostility to what many came to call Mr Madison’s War.
Far more Americans, Indians, and British soldiers and sailors died in the War of 1812 than anyone expected. Indian tribes from the SHawnees to the Creeks would never have significant power again. The us was virtually bankrupt as a result of the war.
Nevertheless, news of the Treaty of Ghent an dof Jackson’s victory in nola was met with national celebrations. The end of gb’s long war with fr also brought an end to gb’s war with the us, which had continued in various forms of conflict for 40 years.
Almost immediately after the war ended, gb and the us negotiated a commercial treaty that gave the us trading rights with gb and much of gb’s empire. 2 years later, in 1817, the Rush-Bagot Treaty guaranteed the disarmament of the Great Lakes, and the year after that, another treaty, the Anglo-American Convention, resolved much of the border between the US and Canada. These treaties were the beginning of long-lasting peace on the northern border of the US. After 1815, both Europe and America settled into a long period of relative peace and mutual prosperity.
In spite of all the complaints about the war, the years during which the region’s ports were closed were a time when some residents began manufacturing enterprises that in the years ahead would fuel rapid industrialization of the region. The US was considerably more self-sufficient at war’s end than it had ever been before. Still, trade with Europe after the war’s end not only resumed but also quickly exceeded all previous levels. In addition, with peace came further territorial expansion and an extraordinary economic and commercial transition that fundamentally changed the nation. The overall effect of the war left the US a much more confident and proud nation than it had been up to at that time. Men like Webster and Clay who were prophets of that confidence and pride would be national leaders for the next several decade of the nation’s life.

Expanding American Territory and Influence
Analyze how the US acquired new territory and increased influence abroad

In spite of wars and tensions, terr expansion continued under jemmy and Monroe as it had under tj. During this 24-y-period, 3 men who were political allies from the same political party and the same state governed the nation, seeking many of the same goals. Rapid growth fundamentally changed the country. In 1799, Danny Boone ♡ moved across the MS into Spanish-controlled Missouri. Other American settlers from KT followed, seeking ever more land. They assumed that their rights as American citizens went with them and that American sovereignty would follow. The LA Purchase confirmed Boone’s assumptions.
Other Americans followed Boone’s pattern in fl, tx, nm, and ca. Americans ventured far beyond the borders of the US and expected that the US government continue to protect them and eventually annex new lands to the Union. Many in the government agreed with the settlers, and successive governments approved.
During the War of 1812, the military victories of whh over the Shawnee in the Old Northwest finalized the opening of oh and the future states of in and il to white settlement. At the same time, Andrew Jackson’s defeat of the Creeks and Cherokees in the Old Southwest opened up huge tracts of land in ms and al. With the lands ceded by gb in 1783 and the vast la purchase now under us control, the most obvious pieces of real estate left for further us annexation were fl, still controlled by SPain, and the or terr that several European powers claimed.

Florida and Oregon

West fl was the southern third of what would be ms and al while east fl was today’s fl. To the US, foreign control of those lands repped multiple threats. It gave Spain control of most access t other Gulf of Mexico, which was a threat to US shipping. Slaves and others seeking to escape us jurisdiction could easily escape south along the border and melt into the vast unruly lands of fl. Seminole Indians, already refugees from the growing white pop north of fl, often welcomed escaped slaves and created new communities united in their dislike of the Americans. Americans just north of the fl border were hungry for more land. Many ignored international boundaries and crossed into fl to farm and build settlements. These settlers demanded us protection from the Seminoles and Creeks, who had been displaced by the Treaty of Fort Jackson and were determined to defend their new land in fl.
In 1817, Andrew Jackson told pres monroe and sec of state jqa that he could seize fl in 60 days. They didn’t want a war with spain but told him to attack the Seminoles who were harassing the white settlers.
Jackson’s army marched into fl. They couldn’t find many Seminoles, who were adept at disappearing into swamps and marshes, but they burned their villages and crops. They also seized Spanish forts and arrested a Scots trader named Alex Arbuthnot and another british subject, robert armbrister, charged them with assisting the Seminoles, and after a quick trial executed both. When his troops did find Seminole and Creek leaders, Jackson simply executed them, including Hillis Hadjo, a Creek spiritual prophet who had been part of Tecumseh’s movement.
The executions of Indians went unnoticed, but an American general executing British subjects in Spanish territory caused an international incident. Monroe and jqa distanced themselves from jackson and used his immense popularity after his victories in the War of 1812 to bring pressure on Spain.
In fact, Spain didn’t care about fl but were concerned about independence movements in mexico and s.a. The Spanish authorities wanted assurance that the us wouldn’t aid or recognize theses revs. Spain was also deeply worried about its control of the land from tx to ca. It was willing to trade fl for assurances about texas and the revs further south. Monroe briefly considered making a bid for texas, but he decided that it was more trouble than it was worth and agreed to the treaty.
Instead of pursuing a claim to Texas, Monroe and jqa decided to ask spain for its support in the areas that lewis and clark had explored. Spain, gb, and russia all claimed the same or territory. by the late 1700s, explorers from new spain were making claims as far north as ak. At the same time, russian fur traders and explorers had established permanent russian settlements, complete with orthodox churches, in ak and almost as far south as san francisco. British sea capts, notably James Cook in the 1770s, had explored the or coast. British explorers coming overland from Canada made lands claims, along them the Hudson’s Bay Comp trading post at the mouth of the Columbia River, which repped the largest European settlement in the region. An earlier us claim, based on lewis and clark’s explorations, was weak in comparison, and there were no us settlements in or. Of course, native peoples of the region had little use for any of the claims, though they traded with all the claimants. Nevertheless, despite its weak claim, the us had an interest in or.
Adams-Onis Treaty - an 1819 treaty between the US and Spain that led to American acquisition of FL and American rights in the OR Territory in return for a $5 million payment to Spain
In the 1819 Adams-Onis Treaty with spain, spain not only ceded fl to the us but also agreed to transfer spanish rights to the or terr to the us. The us paid $5 million in spanish debts, and the deal was done. All of fl was now a us territory. While the us was negotiating with spain, it was also negotiating with gb about or. In 1818, adams negotiated the anglo-american convention in which gb and the us agreed to join control of the pacific northwest for 10 years and to resolve other issues in the future. The 2 treaties with spain and gb gave the us as strong a claim to or as either gb or russia, a claim it wouldn’t forget. Just before he ended as sec of state, adams agreed to an 1824 treaty with russia that set the border of ak much farther north, leaving the us and gb to resolve questions about or, which they finally did, only in 1846.

The Monroe Doctrine

Having taken fl and asserted a claim to or, the us agreed to stay out of spain’s way in texas and ca. Nevertheless, the Monroe administration took further steps to consolidate us power in the americas. In 1822, despite earlier promises to spain, the us officially recognized the new independent states of Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. if Latin America was going to be independent, then the us meant to be both the region’s benefactor and prime trade partner.
Monroe Doctrine - a declaration by Monroe in 1823 that the Western Hemisphere was to be closed off to further European colonization and that the US wouldn’t allow European interference in the internal affairs of independent nations anywhere in the Americas
Going a big step further in a speech to congress in dec 1823, pres monroe declared that, henceforth, the us wouldn’t allow european intervention or the acquisition of any new territory by a european power in the americas. Coming less than a decade after the us had almost lost its independence in the War of 1812, it was a bold announcement. A complex set of international developments led monroe and sec of state jqa to formulate this stance, which became known as the Monroe Doctrine.
On the Pacific coast, russian tsar alexander i was pressing russian claims not only to ak but also to much of the or terr in the pacific northwest. In 1821, alexander issued an imperial edict that claimed much of the pacific coast and gave the russian-american comp the right to trade there. The russians threatened to confiscate american ships that travelled too far north, even through more american than russian sailors were actually taking the sea lions and whales and trading with he alaskan natives. Nevertheless, for the us, russian actiosn repped a dangerous european intrusion.
Greek patriots declared independence from the Ottoman Empire, and liberal constitutionalists briefly took power in Spain. The greek and spanish revolts were trickly for monroe and jqa. Many americans were sympathetic with the greeks, but the administration also wanted good relationships with eht ottomans. In addition, american sentiment was on the side of a rev in spain. This situations in europe, those not the center of American concern, still had to be responded to carefully, given the strength of public opinion. Much more pressing was the rev activity in the americas. Taking the wrong side in the revs of latin america could hurt the us politically and economically for a long time to come while little could be gained from interfering in Europe.
At the tense moment when the us was considering ways to respond to Russian pressure and to revs around the world, British Foreign Sec Geo Canning proposed a join British-American dec in which both nations would oppose European intervention in the Americas, including efforts to restore Spain’s control, and that neither gb nor the us would have any territorial interests in the americas. Canning’s proposal was a problem for monroe and jqa. They didn’t want Spain to reassert power in the Americas, and gb’s influence would be helpful in preventing it. But both the pres and sec of state had their eyes on eventual us takeover of parts of the spanish emp, from texas to ca and perhaps Cuba. canning’s hands-off agreement would jeopardize long-term American interests.
In the end, Monroe and jqa concluded that they would leave it to the Europeans to deal with Greece and Spain and essentially declared noninvolvement in the internal affairs of Europe. On the other land, they used monroe’s doctrine to say that any nation of the Americas was independent would be considered independent. Many Europeans were amazing at what they saw as the arrogance of the new and still relatively weak us. It wasn’t clear that the nation could enforce the new policy. But the Monroe Doctrine became a bedrock of US foreign policy. The independence of not only the US but of all of the independent Americas from European control was the nation’s business. The new policy had no impact on gb’s control of Canada or Russia’s dom of Alaska or Spanish colonies in Latin America. But it did announce that the US would oppose any new colonies anywhere in the Americas. With the Monroe Doctrine, the us government was against reflecting tjian pragmatism. It might be a small country of farmers, but the us was claiming vast new influence in all of the americas. It was a diplomatic expansion that was being matched by an era of economic expansion, growth that was unimagined when tj took office in 1801.

Summaries
Jefferson and the Republican Ideal

Tj’s style and tone reflected his commitment to republicanism. As president, he cut taxes except for the tariff, shrank the fed government, and cut the size of the army and navy. D-r efforts to prevent the apptmnt of a Fed judge led to the Marbury v. Madison decision, a Supreme Court ruling that established the court’s right to declare an act of Congress unconstitutional. In 1801, the occupations, opinions, and manners of most American voters were compatible with tj’s agrarian ideal of a nation of independent farmers. Over the course of the early 1800s, virtually all property qualifications for voting disappeared, a reflection of the national consensus that had emerged around republican ideals.

The Ideal of Religious Freedom

By by early 1800s, more and more Americans were coming to the conclusion that the republican ideal required a strict separation of church and state. By 1833, state support for specific religious orgs had disappeared in the US. Between 1760 and 1800, Americans had grown less and less religious. In the early 1800s, a religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening swept the nation. The revivals of this period marked the emergence of Methodist and Baptist churches as major forces in AMerican religious life. Black people, both free and enslaved, participated in the religious revival of this time by joining white congregations and by forming their own churches. During this same period, limitations on the political rights of Catholic and Jewish Americans were removed.

LA Purch and Lewis and Clark

Economic and political concerns led tj to offer to buy nola from the Fr. When Napoleon offered to sell the entire la territory, tj jumped at the chance, despite his misgivings about whether the Constitution allowed him to make that decision. Through this purchase, the US almost doubled its land area. It gained control of nola and both sides of the MS from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Tj commissioned lewis and clark to conduct an expedition whose mission was not only a scientific initiative but also a mission to help secure American dom in n.a. Sacagawea played a key role in the success of their Corps of Discovery. The expedition's reports opened the way for a general of traders and explorers to head west.

The War of 1812

The tensions that led the US and GB to go to war in 1812 had been consistent since the Battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775. In spite of treaties, the 2 nations were never fully at peace and each made alliances with Indian tribes to make trouble for the other. The Fr Rev and the Napoleonic Wars led to increased conflict between GB and the US. British naval and trade policies produced intense resentment in the US. Efforts of the tj administration to apply economic pressure on GB failed. At the same time, new warfare between the US and American Indian tribes broke out in the OH country. A new tribal alliance, supported by GB and led by Tenskwatawa (the Prophet) and Tecumseh, brought fear to white settlers and tough challenges to the US Army. in 1812, congressional war hawks pressured pres jemmy into asking Congress for a dec of war. After 3 years of bloody fighting, the war ended with agreements that officially returned all matters to their prewar status but actually benefited the US. as with the previous wars, the War of 1812 was a disaster for American Indians.

Expanding American Territory and Influence

With the end of the War of 1812 in 1815 came further territorial expansion. The era of tj’s successors, jemmy and Monroe, was one of rapid growth that fundamentally changed the nation. In the Adams-Onis Treaty with Spain of 1819, Spain agreed to ceded fl to the us and also transfer Spanish rights to the oregon territory to the us. In 1822, in spite of previous promises to Spain, the us officially recognized the new independent republics of Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. in Dec 1823, pres Monroe declared through the Monroe Doctrine that, henceforth, the us wouldn’t allow European intervention in any of the affairs of the independent nations of the Americas.

♡
♡ Jefferson
Inconsistencies
- Simple life in public at DC; extravagant life in private at Monticello
- Valued small government; purchased LA
- Valued states’ rights; didn’t care for state-supported churches
- Valued equality and freedom; owned slaves personally
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♡ Marbury v. Madison - 1803
Main outcome: Judicial review
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♡ 2nd Great Awakening
The movement started in the 1790s, reaching its peak in the 1820s and continued through the 1840s
Began in Kentucky: many who moved to the frontier left their religion on the East Coast
Main denominations: Methodists and Baptists
- Methodists: more organized, respected individuality
- Baptists: more local authority and different Baptist groups
Why was the 2nd Great Awakening appealing to tj’s America?
- Appealed to the frontier
- Respected individuality and autonomy of groups formed naturally by the people
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♡ Monroe Doctrine - 1823
Proclaims that any nations in the Western Hemisphere of “free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth no to be considered subjects for future colonization by any European powers”
No new colonies; already existing colonies are okay but no new ones
Context - claim of Oregon Territory; new republics are being claimed (Latin Independence movement)
Doctrines are a merely statement to the world
Addresses neutrality with Europe; not intervening with European affairs and Europeans not intervening with North and South American ones
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♡ War of 1812
Purposes:
- Expansion
- National defense
- Economic security
- Sovereign nationhood
Patriotic mood following the war; fed party is gone following the war
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Chapter 9 - New Industries, new politics

Significant Dates

1794 - Eli Whitney patents the cotton gin
1812 - Francis Cabot Lowell returns from gb after memorizing plan for Manchester's mills
1813 - Boston Manufacturing Company chartered to build mills in US
1815 - the end of the War of 1812 launches era of economic prosperity
1816 - beginning of Alabama Fever - developments of al and ms cotton plantations
1817 - ny leg authorizes construction of Erie Canal
1819 - financial panic; Dartmouth College v. Woodward and McCulloch v. MD Supreme Court cases
1820 - MO Compromise
1823 - Lowell, MA laid out as a new mill town
1824 - jqa elected
1825 - Erie Canal completed
1828 - Tariff of Abominations; Andrew Jackson elected

Creating the Cotton Economy
Explain the role of cotton in transforming the land and the lives of diverse people in the US.

Cotton’s dom role in the econ came about quickly. In 1800, a few southern plantations grew enough cotton to make cloth for their own use and ship a few bags to gb, but the dom plantations cash crops were rice, indigo, tobacco, and in southern la, sugar. But after the War of 1812, cotton quickly outstripped every other American export and remained a major American industry until the 1930s.

Demand and Technology

2 developments in the late 1790s set the stage for the rapid expansion of cotton production in the us. First, during this period, many Europeans began to prefer cotton clothing to wool or linen. Most of Europe’s cotton came from India via gb’s East India Comp, but India couldn’t produce enough cotton to meet Europe’s growing demand.
The 2nd development was a set of tech changes that launched the worldwide expansion of cotton. In England in 1733, John Kay invented a flying shuttle that made weaving cloth much faster and allowed a single weaver to handle a loom. In 1764, James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, which could run multiple spindles, each spinning cotton into thread. By 1800, a single jenny could be operating up to 120 spindles at once. In 1769, Richard Arkwright patented a water frame that used waterpower to drive the spinning process, a major step toward mass production, while James Watt’s coal-powered steam engine, designed in 1763, added steam power to the English mills, expanding their size long before it provided the nrg for railroads and ships.
Although developed in England, much of this tech was soon brought to the us through transfers. British authorities knew that their new means of production were key to their industrial and political might. They provided patents for their inventors and kept their production process secret. However, in 1789, and Englishman Sam Slater, have been sworn to secrecy and apprenticed in Arkwright’s textile business, sailed to ny to bring the industry to the us. Slater ignored the patents and recreated the mechanical spinning mills in ri. More tech transfers followed.
Despite the worldwide demand for cotton and England’s growing industrial capacity for turning raw cotton to cloth, American farmers and plantation owners were skeptical that they could make money on it. Green-seed, or upland, cotton was the only kind that would grow in the American south, except for a few places on the coast or coastal islands where a more profitable variety of long-stem cotton grew. But each ball of cotton produced on a green-seed cotton plant contained many of those green seeds. They had to be removed by hand before the cotton could be spun into threads. A slave, working hard all day, could clean about 1 lb of cotton, hardly enough to make a meaningful profit. Many people sought a mechanical way to clean cotton. Eli Whitney lived on the Greene family plantation at Mulberry Grove in ga where he became interested in devising a machine to clean cotton. He gained fame, if not fortune, for his patent on the cotton gin.
Cotton gin - originally designed by Eli Whitney in 1793-4, the cotton gin (gin is short for engine) allowed the inexpensive processing of cotton
While serving as a tutor and tinkering with how to clean cotton, Whitney decided to try pulling the picked cotton through a screen that would allow the seeds to fall out and the clean cotton fibers to be baled for shipment. When the first model failed because the wooden teach were too brittle, Catherine Greene, the matron of the plantation, suggested wire from her bird cage and a brush to keep the seeds from clogging the works. Whitney’s cotton gin could clean 50 lbs of cotton a day. Others quickly improved on Whitney’s model, and manufacturing cotton gins became a big business. Whitney didn’t make his fortune from this invention; too many others were improving it too quickly, but he did become rich developing the idea of interchangeable parts and manufacturing rifles with such parts for the us government.
The cotton gin transformed the nation. The us now had an export crop that could make it prosperous. The cotton market and the tech that made it possible led to the rapid development of new lands, especially the great plantations of al, ms, and la. In turn, the new england factory system that began in ri expanded to the great mill center of lowell, ma, in 1823, and then to factories and factory towns all over the region. As the cotton market continued to grow, coastal and transatlantic shipping also expanded as more and more southern cotton was brought to the mills of New England and to the even larger mills of manchester and birmingham in gb. This rather plain and simple product was a driving force for econ and tech in the period, and it seemed to have no limits.

The Land of Cotton

Black belt - the cotton growing region that was developed in the early 1800s, stretching from ga through al, ms, and la, named for its rich black soil
While some of the nation’s first export, the long-stem variety, was grown along the Atlantic coast and especially on the Sea Islands off the coast of the Carolinas and ga, the greatest cotton production involved the green-seed variety on the plantations of the black belt. The quality of the soil made it perfect for growing cotton.
Within this black-belt area, only ga was 1 of the 13 original states. The northern parts of al and ms were part of the land gb ceded to the us at the end of the reve. The la purchase added la. Andrew Jackson’s defeat of the Creeks during the War of 1812 and the Creek Cession that he negotiated in 1816 opened much new land to white settlement, while the 1819 US treaty with Spain placed the Gulf Coast of ms and al under us control. White settlers from ga, tn, nc, sc, and Europe, especially many Scots-Irish, poured in and brought black slaves with them. A land rush known as Alabama Fever began in 1816 just as the War of 1812 ended. Al was admitted as a state in 1819 with a non-Indian pop of 128k, 5 times what it had been in 1810. La and ms were admitted in 1812 and 1817, respectively.
The fed government played a central role in the development of these lands. The first European settlers were illegal white squatters moving onto farms recently abandoned by Indians, but after the coming of peace in 1815, the fed government quickly began official surveys and legal sales of the land. Before the War of 1812, the largest sales of fed lands in 1 year had been 350k acres. In 1815, a million acres of newly acquired lands were sold at $2 per acre, and in 1818, 2.5 million acres were sold as the government acquired new lands from the Creeks and then from Spain and quickly made it available for sale. These sales helped the fed budget, and white settlement surged. The government spent some of the revenue from land sales on maintaining the army that protected the new lands. It also aided settlement by building a road from Columbia, sc, to Columbus, ga, and then farther into the black-belt region.
The new land was fertile. Planters who had grown 300 lbs of cotton per acre in sc could grow 800 to 1k lbs an acre in the black belt. In 1801, 9 % of the world’s cotton came from the us while 60% came from India. By 1820, the us was exporting more cotton than India. By 1850, the American South was producing more than 2/3rds of the world’s cotton. The new tech, the new land, and the institution of slavery created great wealth for some; a poor, hard-earned living for others; and backbreaking, torturous misery for slaves.

The People Who Worked the Land -- Cotton and the Transformation of Slavery

The white settlers who were able to buy large parcels of land in the rich new territory of what was known as the Old Southwest didn’t do most of the hard work of actually planting, hoeing, and picking the cotton that would be grown there. Other Americans did that work: African slaves, whose lives were also transformed by the explosive growth of cotton production and whose value to their white owners increased even more than the value of the new land on which they labored.
Between 1800 and 1860, more than 1 million black Americans were forced to move to new homes in the interior cotton-growing lands of ga, al, ms, and la and later ar and tx. While slavery slowly disappeared in the north after 1800 and the slave pop of md, va, nc, and sc stabilized or declined, slavery exploded in the new land. In the 60 years before the Civil War, more slaves made the journey from coastal states to inland plantations than had made the Middle Passage in the previous 200 years.
In some ways similar to the Middle Passage, the journey from a settled community in va, md, nc, or sc to the new interior plantations was a terrible ordeal. As more slaves were sold into the interior or sold from place to place within, slaves on the coast lived in terror of being sold and losing all connections to family and birthplace. Slave owners used the treat of sale to maintain discipline in the slave quarter. Slaves often pleaded with masters not to be sold. Sometimes the pleas were successful but often not. Jeff Randolph, the executor of tj’s estate, was considered humane because he refused to sell the slaves to a buy from ga but sold them instead to other vans. The sale of a spouse broke up one slave marriage in 5, and ⅓ of all slave children were sold away from their parents. Men were sold more often than women; planters wanted male muscle, and slave owners in older regions were happy to keep women who could bear more children who could also be sold. Slaves between ages 14 and 35 were sold much more often than the very young or the aging.
Once sold, either to a plantation owner who had come east for additional slaves or more often to a slave trader, slaves were organized in groups called slave coffles to walk west. Coffles of 20 to 50 trudging west became a normal sight of southern life. Walking 15 to 20 miles a day, it could take the slaves 2 months to go from va to the ms valley, often longer when rain flooded streams and turned roads to mud. In later years, more slaves were transported by ship to nola, which became the largest slave-trading center in the us by the 1820s.
When they could, slaves rebelled. Slave trading was a dangerous business, and stories of slaves murdering slave traders were well known. More often, slaves simply ran away when they could, through many went home to their family where they were recaptured and sold again.
Once slaves arrived at their destination, they often faced difficult and unfamiliar work. Work in cotton fields was backbreaking. While tobacco and rice required more skill, cotton required long hours of hard work. Cotton was planted in the early spring and required constant attention and weeding throughout the growing season. On most plantations, there was a divide: men plowed, and women and children hoed. Harvest began as early as Aug and lasted through sept and oct. slaves worked the longest hours to get the whole crop in before storms could hurt it. Prickly cotton pods cut their hands, and slaves who didn't produce their quota were beaten at day’s end. With the full crop in, there was a brief respite. But the winter was the time for the women to work the cotton gin and pack the cotton for market while men cleared more land and repaired buildings.
Most cotton was grown on relatively small farms. Many of those who first settled and began growing cotton on the new rich lands owned relatively small plots of land and 1 or a few slaves. These white owners worked in the fields with the slaves or, if the farm was larger, served as their overseers. Less than 1 % of the pop owned the great plantations for which the South became known. In the largest plantations owned by the most wealthy planters, slaves worked in large gangs with certain slaves appointed as drivers to get the work done and poor whites employed as overseers to manage the whole labor force. It was on the large plantations, with constant pressure on the overseers to ensure profits, that slaves faced some of the worst conditions.
Slaves established new communities within the slave quarters. Young slaves met new partners, children were born, and the rhythms of community life were reestablished, but always under threat of dissolution. New leaders emerged within the slave community, often preachers and deacons selected by other slaves. Although legally banned from learning to read or write, slaves sometimes secretly did both and taught others to do so. As memories of Africa or the African-American communities on the east coast faded in later gens, a new culture was created in the slave communities, drawing on older traditions and adapting to new contexts. Often with the permission of their owners, slaves grew their own food, made cloth for better clothing than their owners gave, and even earned cash by selling surplus food and clothing to the free people in surrounding communities or to their own masters. While owners saw slaves exclusively as a source of muscle and work, many slaves and ex-slaves made it clear through their stories that for them, family, community, faith, and the hope freedom were the highest priority. Slaves never stopping running away never how far they might have to fun. Small and large scale slave revolts never stopped.

Cotton in the North -- Factories and the People Who Worked in Them

The tech that made cotton the core of the Industrial Rev in the US developed in England and NA during the 1700s. Just before the War of 1812, American Francis Cabot Lowell, who had spent 2 years working in and observing the British mills in Manchester, brought the tech he learned there to the US. When he left gb, customs agents searched his baggage to be sure he wasn’t bringing with him drawings or plans from the British mills, which were a closely guarded national secret, but Lowell had simply been memorizing the plans. Like Slater did in 1789, Lowell was ready to build a British-style mill in MA. Lowell also brought with him a second, equally important idea -- the multishare corp that could raise more money than any more individual could provide and could offer less risk to investors.
In 1813, Lowell incorped a new business with Pat T Jackson and Nathan Appleton: the Boston Manufacturing Comp. Lowell and his mechanic Paul Moody recreated a British-style power loom in MA. With these steps, they established what would be the heart of American manufacturing for the next century: the multiowner corp that produced cotton fabric in a large factory.
The partners build their first factory, or mill, at Waltham, MA, on the Charles River. After Lowell’s death in 1817, they then created a new city in 1823: Lowell, MA, that housed an even larger complex, using the 30-foot drop of the Merrimack River to power mills that could turn cotton into cloth for a domestic and international market at an astounding rate. Similar large ops strang up on nh rivers in Manchester, Dover, and Nashua and on other ma rivers in Chicopee, Holyoke, and Lawrence. While Sam Slater’s mills in RI had been rather small family affairs, the factories and towns that Lowell and his colleagues built transformed the industry and lives of the people involved in it. With the creation of Lowell as a new industrial city, the American Industrial Rev was born.
The Boston Associates needed workers for their giant looms and mills. They first turned to young women from the farms where most New Englanders still lived. More men than women had been heading west for decades, and New England had a surplus of young women. Farm life was hard, young women were kept in subservient positions, and the independence and the potential to earn their own money appealed to many young women. To avoid the squalid conditions of the English factories, Lowell and his colleagues build clean comp boarding houses for their female employees, complete with chaperones and opps for religious and educational activities. For the most part, they hired only single young women whose living conditions they could control.
The young women who worked in Lowell’s mills in the early 1800s were known as factory girls. Lowell was a show town, and its owners published the Lowell Offering to tell the world about the success of the venture and the good life the women who worked there enjoyed. The LO attracted new investors to the business and new young recruits to work in the mills. But life at Lowell and the other mill towns was left rosy than the LO reported. Conditions may have been better than in gb, but the ward was hard, the hours long, and the conditions harsh.
The first strikes in 1834 did not last long and did not win concessions. The comp had too much power and the women too little. Still, news of the unrest tarnished the image of Lowell as a benevolent community run in the interest of its workers. A second strike 2 years later also failed.
By the 1840s, conditions had become much tougher in Lowell. The mill owners’ benevolence had worn off. The option of quitting to return home, which had provided a way to escape the mill life during the 1830s, was disappearing because of an ag depression in New England. Young women stayed in Lowell, not necessarily because they wanted to, but because they had few other choices. Period pubs like the Voice of Industry published their letters and articles, which described the challenges they faced and what hopes they had.

New York and the International Cotton Trade

As significant as the mills of New England were in cotton production, most American cotton was shipped in its raw state to Manchester and Leeds in gb. The permanent peace that had been established between the US and gb after the end of the War of 1812 made this trade easy. Nyc became the center of the shipment of cotton across the Atlantic and became the nation’s largest city and commercial center.
Nyc enjoyed several advantages that allowed it to play such a dom role in the nation’s cotton economy, even though no cotton was grown within 100 miles of the city and few cotton mills were ready. First, ny had an extraordinary deep water harbor. Ships could dock directly in Manhattan and Brooklyn without needing to anchor offshore and upload goods to smaller boats. The port was also easily accessible by coastal vessels from southern ports. As the production of cotton expanded after 1815, most of the South’s cotton was shipped north to ny and then reshipped either across the Atlantic to English ports to up Long Island Sound to Boston for the New England mills. Second, ny already had the infrastructure necessary to accommodate this level of shipping, including miles of docks and a community of merchants. Third, ny, an established port already, had experienced workers, including dockworkers and longshoremen (who handled cargo), to handle the hundreds of ships that did business there. The already large numbers of workers grew rapidly as ny grew 6 times its size between the American Rev and 1820. In 1820, it mushroomed again from 125k residents to over 500k in 1850.
Ny businesses sent agents called factors to Charleston, Savannah, Mobile (al), and nola to buy cotton for shipment to ny. In turn, the cotton was transferred from coastal ships to larger transatlantic ships that sailed to ports in gb, racing each other to make the trip in the shortest amount of time.
On the return trip from gb, these ships brought cash from the sale of cotton and all sorts of British and European goods -- iron and steel tools from gb, wine from fr, and manufactured goods that the us needed and could often be bought in ny for less than it cost to make them elsewhere in america. While american manufacturers disliked this reality, merchants from across the nation flocked to ny to stock up on cheap goods, enhancing the city’s commerce.
In 1818, shipping across the Atlantic was improved when Quaker businessman Jeremiah Thompson founded the Black Ball Line and established a fixed schedule of weekly departures of fast ships from ny to Liverpool. Until that time, commercial vessels waited to fill their holds with cargo, however long that took, before sailing. Now with the fixed schedule, passengers and goods could be sure of leaving on time, and factories in gb could be sure of a steady flow of cotton to keep their mills operating.
The new ships were called packet ships because the line had a contract with the fed government to carry packets of US mail. These packet ships became a regular feature of world commerce and ny’s waterfront. Any packet ship captain who made the trip to liverpool in under 22 days or the return trip to ny (which took longer because of less favorable winds) in under 35 days would be rewarded with a new coat and dress for his wife, courtesy of Thompson. Competition with the Black Ball Line soon developed, and the passenger cabins became elegant as different lines competed for business. Shipwrights along ny’s East River changed the construction of new ships so they could make the voyage even more quickly than the original schedule. But most important, the Black Ball Line’s ships and its many competitors that emerged in the 1820s and 30s ensured a steady supply of cotton for English mills and steady profits to us cotton growers.
Ny was also the place in the us to raise money. From the time hamly established the first Bank of the US in nyc in 1791, some nyers grew rich financing commercial activities that were far away from the city itself. Many farmers had long needed to borrow money for seed and fertilizer to plant a crop. After industrialists began creating giant new corps to build the factories for producing the cotton cloth that launched the industrial rev, they too needed ways to borrow much larger amounts of money as well as longer periods of time to make profits and pay off the loans. Without such financing, the Industrial Rev would never have happened. Financial brokers had agreed to work together in ny in 1792, and the ny stock exchange was founded in 1817, to support this large scale commerce by allowing investors to pool funds and create new industries as well as commercial enterprises that were larger than any 1 person could fund alone.
Ny was also home to many banks, investment houses, and insurance comps that helped finance the cotton industry. Nautilus Ins Comp wrote over 300 life insurance policies on slaves, which protected the investments of plantation owners even if those policies did nothing for the slaves themselves. The investment house that became Brown Brothers, Harriman loaned millions of $ to southern growers to finance the planting and shipping of cotton as well as the buying of slaves. In general, ny financiers made their profits in trade and commerce and kept their distance from slavery and the risks of cotton growing. Jeremiah Thompson of the Black Ball Line made his fortune transporting slave-drown cotton, though as a Quaker, he opposed slavery itself.
The extraordinary growth of cotton production in the South, the shipment of cotton within and beyond the us, and the seemingly insatiable European demand for cotton cloth resulted in a rapid growth of the industry. In 1800, gb imported 56 million lbs of raw cotton, 16 % from the us and most of the rest from india. After an economic downturn that disrupted the entire industry and more, production once again to pick up, and by 1830, gb imported 264 million lbs of cotton, 77 % from the us. Once again, the demand seemed endless, but many were now a bit closer.

The Panic of 1819

The boom in the industry was not a continual progression. As more Americans invested in land or slaves to grow cotton or in the commercial activities that flowed from cotton, the optimism led them to become financial overextend. Suddenly in 1819, the growth came to a sudden if temp halt. After 4 years of peace, Europe was growing more food, and a good harvest in 1818 meant less need for imported American grain. In addition, more raw cotton was being delivered to Liverpool than the mills could process, and new mills took time to build. The value of cotton fell from 32.5 cents a lb in Oct 1818 to 24 cents a lb in Dec. By early 1819, it was only 14 cents a lb. at that price, it wasn’t profitable to grow cotton, to invest in land to plant more cotton, or to ship cotton either to ny or Europe.
Unfortunately, the Bank of the US decided to protect itself by limiting credit and calling in loans. State banks followed suit, and investors and farmers couldn’t pay their debts. Small businesses failed, farms were foreclosed, and people across the nation lost their jobs. The great migration west came to a half, at least for the time being, and the business cycle slowed dangerously. At the time, no one knew when or if prosperity would return. A national econ was new to the US, and it wasn’t well understood. In earlier eras, what happened to New England shipping had little impact further south, and a crisis in southern tobacco never had much impact further south. By 1819, however, the nation’s econ was interconnected as never before and as a result a widespread depression affected all Americans. The boom-and-bust cycle of this young industrial econ was also new, and people were shocked. Eventually, the econ and the country recovered, but it took years and much hardship. In the middle of that first national depression, Americans worried about the future. The price of cotton and the value of the cotton industry eventually rebounded and grew beyond anything imagined before the panic, but those successes would be at least partly tempered by what had happened.

Commerce, Technology, and Transportation
Analyze the tech and financial changes that led to the emergence of a new market economy in the US

While cotton was the prime factor in growth of the US economy after 1815, it wasn’t the only one. Na wheat and corn had been feeding gb and Europe long before na cotton began to clothe them. Trees from na forests provided wood for ships and buildings on both sides of the Atlantic. Na furs remained in demand as they had been before the American Rev. As more Americans moved further into the interior, improvements in internal transportation became essential for the nation’s commercial development.

The Erie Canal

The Hudson River offered easy north-south connections between nyers in Manhattan and Brooklyn and farmers along the river valley up to Albany and beyond, but the heartland of ny, far to the west of the Hudson, was isolated. The Mohawk River had never been navigable, and rural roads were in terrible shape. The treaties with the Iroquois after the Am Rev opened up tens of thousands of acres, many of them rich lands that white farmers could settle, but these farmers faced terrible isolation and difficulty in selling their crops. Beginning in the 1790s, many nyers wanted a way to ease transport across the state, but no easy approach seemed possible. Indeed, Americans throughout the rest of the growing nation had similar needs and a similar lack of know-how.
After Congress refused to fund a canal linking rural upstate ny with the Hudson Valley, former nyc Mayor DeWitt Clinton ran for governor in 1816 with a promise to build a canal using state funds. The canal that Clinton proposed avoided the hard-to-navigate Mohawk River and Lake Ontario. Instead, he proposed a canal that would follow an old Mohawk trading route and run from the Hudson Valley directly to Buffalo on Lake Erie. Such a canal would give farmers along its route a link to the markets and would connect all of ny to the growing Ohio region and eventually to the MS. it would make nyc the commercial capital of the nation.
The plan called for unimaginable engineering feat, which didn’t discourage Clinton or the canal’s backers.
Erie Canal - completed in 1825, the canal linked the Hudson River with the Great Lakes and gave farmers all along its route new ways to be part of a global economic system of trade (363 miles from Albany to Buffalo)
At dawn on July 4, 1817, a gala groundbreaking celebration was held in Rome Ny, when the symbolic first shovel of dirt was dug to build the Erie Canal. Clinton made sure that many different contractors got a piece of the action digging the canal. He built political support by ensuring that up to ¾ of the 9k men who did the actual digging were Dutch or English farmers and laborers from ny and future Clinton voters. As soon as the section near Rome was completed, Clinton used the revenue it gened to cover the interest on the $7 million in bonds that had been floated to pay for the canal, reducing the cost to taxpayers.
Clinton found contractors willing to experiment with new approaches to construction. In one section, near the town of Lockport, locks needed to be constructed to raise and lower the boats over changing elevations. Contractors used gunpowder to blast out the rock, and horses hauled away the debris. By 1825, the canal was completed. Governor Clinton traveled from Buffalo across the state on the canal and then down the Hudson to mark the official opening by pouring water from lake Erie into NY Harbor.
Many admired the engineering of the canal and many more enjoyed its econ impact. Goods and exports that had cost $100 a ton to ship from Lake Erie to nyc before the canal now shipped for $9 or even $3 a ton. Farmers in distant upstate ny and oh could get their wheat to international markets through ny Harbor. Formerly isolated farm families could now send letters and even visit friends and relatives. They could also import goods that had earlier been unimaginable luxuries because they had been too heavy or perishable to transport. By the 1830s, the Erie Canal carried more than twice the freight of the MS, and Rochester, Syracuse, and Buffalo boomed. Where cotton had made nyc the nation’s commercial center, foodstuffs and other products from upstate ny and even western pa and oh now cemented the city’s role as the place where the nation’s trade, commerce, and finance met. Other shorter canals were built, but none had the commercial impact of the Erie Canal.

Steamboats, Roads, Travel, and News

Erie Canal boats were pulled by horses walking along the bank. The packet ships were powered by sail as ships had been for thousands of years. But the invention of the steamboat revolutionized water transportation. In 1807, Robert Fulton built the first commercially successful steamboat, the Clermont, which significantly cut the travel time from ny to Albany. Within 2 decades, ny Harbor and adjacent areas had become a hive of steamboat activity for both commerce and passengers, and many steamboat lines competed for the trade, none more successfully than the line Cornelius Vanderbilt owned.
Steamboats also transformed trade on the MS. In the early 1800s, farmers floated down the river on large riverboats and then sold the boats for lumber when they reached their destination and walked or rode horses home. Steamboats could travel up the river against the current. In 1817, a steamer went from nola to Louisville, ky, in 25 days, an unheard-of speed. In less than a decade, the travel time had been cut to 8 days as faster boast competed for the MS River business and became a colorful part of America in the 1800s.
In certain areas, water transport was the fastest and easiest way to travel through and around the us, but roads were also important. In 1802, Congress authorized the use of funds from the sale of government lands in oh to build a gravel road to the interior of the country. Beginning in 1811, at Cumberland MD, the National Road was built across the Appalachian Mts. When it reached its org terminus at Wheeling, VA, in 1818, it not only crossed the mts but also had linked the Potomac River with the Oh River, which flowed into the MS, and from there to the Gulf of Mexico. Later, slowly, the National Rd was extended across oh, in, and il, connecting to the MS River itself. While many argued for more fed financed construction, preses tj, jemmy, and Monroe doubted whether the national government could finance such undertakings without an amendment to the Constitution. Va, with a long coastline, benefited more from coastal shipping than from canals or roads. On occasions, the vans put their doubts aside and signed bills providing fed funding for specific projects, but none of the VAns were enthusiastic about fed support for a transport infrastructure for the nation.
In addition, states built their own roads, but travel by road was slow and expensive throughout the 1820s and 1830s. A stagecoach could travel 6-8 mph on a good road. Wagons could haul goods as far as the next river or canal. Tollbooths collected fees to pay for the roads, but on a poor road in the wilderness, it was easy to detour around the tollbooth. Until railroads arrived in the 1840s, proximity to a canal, river, or coast was essential for the productive commerce in goods and services. People who lived near land or water routes for transport were able to get their goods to market, receive newspapers, and stay connected to an increasingly national econ and culture. Those who lived farther away lived isolated lives.
With increased speed in travel, news also moved more quickly. For southern coastal cities, the travel time was slower, and for inland towns, much slower. Newspapers sprang up across the country, and the fed government developed an extensive post office system that helped Americans connect for personal and business matters. Commercial leaders and traders on the ny Stock Exchange were anxious to have the latest news, especially about crops, but also about European and American demand for goods. They supported the post office and newspapers as essential for the growing unified market econ.

Banks, Corporations, and Finance

In the early years of the Repub, many Americans harbored deep distrust of large business enterprises. The family farm was the business model with which most people were familiar, and other businesses were expected to be small, individual or family ventures. People might join together to finance a voyage or a project, but these efforts were short-term partnerships. At the time of the Am Rev, there were only 7 American corps, each chartered by colonial legs. State legs chartered 40 more corps in the 1780s and some 300 in the 1790s, but gaining a corp charter remained difficult. In general, such charters were given only to colleges or other nonprofit agencies to serve the public good. Commerce was considered as being for individual gain and therefore not something worthy of a state charter.
Some of the first corps were banks. Congress had chartered the nation’s first bank, the Bank of North America, at hamly’s urging in 1781. By 1815, the US had 200 state-chartered banks. Banks offered 2 essential services. First, they printed paper currency -- bank notes -- that were backed by the bank’s gold and silver deposits (known as specie), making commercial transactions much easier than hauling actual gold and silver around. Second, banks also made loans and collected interest, making funds available to people who wanted to develop a new enterprise and making banks themselves profitable investments. Soon, banks also began to issue bank notes not only on the species they held but also on the loans in their portfolio. This development made banking more risky but expanded the amount of money in circulation and the credit available, essential elements in the growth of a commercial republic.
As commerce developed, larger commercial and industrial ventures were too large and risky to be financed solely by individuals, even if those individuals could secure large bank loans. A new idea, that of a corp as a free-standing commercial venture with multiple stockholders, took hold slowly. 2 key elements in a corp -- limited liability for individual stockholders and the corp’s freedom from having its charter withdrawn or altered by the government -- were new in the us. Individually owned businesses came and went, but corps with their many stockholders and secure charters eventually became a permanent and important feature of American econ life after 1815.

The Reality of the New Market Economy

Many people in many parts of the land moved from isolated family businesses to work in large nationally and internationally connected industries. They went from a slow-paced world of barter to a cash econ based on trade, and they moved from rural isolation to participate in the exchange of information within a much larger world.
Before the Am Rev, most farmers lived in a barter econ in which most goods and services were traded. In that econ, life moved at a slow and predictable pace, and little money was transacted. By the 1820s, the barter econ had disappeared in all but the most remote areas. Farmers sold their goods on the world market and used the cash they received to purchase not only necessities but also luxuries that their pre-Rev forebears never imagined.
To many Americans, distances seemed shorter, money more important, and politics more omnipresent after 1815 than one would have thought possible even a few years before. Visitors to remote farm settlements in il in the 1820s found that cloth coats and calico dresses purchased from a trader or a store were replacing homespun and buckskin. Once 1 family made the shift, everyone in the village felt pressure to earn enough money to keep up. As people worked harder and longer, public clocks became more prominent.

From the Era of Good Feelings to the Politics of Division
Explain the political developments in the US during the 1820s, including the shift of power toward the South and West that resulted from the changing economic situation

Era of Good Feelings - the period from 1817 to 1823 in which the decline of the Feds enabled the d-rs to govern in a spirit of seemingly nonpartisan harmony
Monroe’s 2 terms from 1817 to 1825 were known as the Era of Good Feelings because of the lack of rancor in his virtually unanimous election and reelection during a time when the opposing Fed party had almost disappeared. This period was quite a change. But even during the Era of Good Feelings, all was not calm on the political front. The Supreme Court was rapidly expanding its reach and the reach of the fed government into new aspects of the us. Political tensions over the cotton econ, terr expansion, and slavery exploded with surprising force in the 1820s. The good feelings weren’t destined to last.

The Supreme Court Defines Its Place

John Marshall served as chief justice of the Supreme Court from 1801 to ‘35. Throughout his long tenure on the Court, Marshall was usually able to convince a majority of the justices to go along with his views no matter what their prior political beliefs were. He used his position to define the role of the court as arbiter of the Constitution, and he expanded the role and power of the fed government in many aspects of national life.
Early in his tenure, Marshall’s 1803 Marbury v. Madison decision claimed a role for the Supreme Court in reviewing the constitutionality of acts of Congress. Marshall never again invoked that right, but in a series of subsequent decisions, he created the same right for the court in relationship to state legs and state courts. 2 1819 decisions from the Marshall court were especially important in expanding the role of the Supreme Court and the fed government.
In an appeal to the Supreme Court in the case of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), Marshall reviewed a decision by lower courts that had been when the d-r-dommed NH leg revised the original charter of Dartmouth, converting the school from a private to state college. The Supreme Court ruled that state charters, including charters from colonial legs like Dartmouth’s, were contracts, and that contracts, once agreed to, were inviolable; thus, the leg’s actions were unconstitutional. The case was important not only because it asserted the right of the Supreme Court to review the actions of state legs, not just Congress, but also because it asserted the inviolability of contracts. As a result, it became an important gbedrock of the American econ system. After the Dartmouth decision, the nation’s growing businesses and industries were able to be certain that their contracts, once agreed to, couldn’t be overturned by leg action.
The other imp 1819 decision was McCulloch v. Maryland. Congress had chartered the 2nd Bank of the US at the end of the War of 1812 to stabilize the nation’s finances. But the bank wasn’t popular with many people, especially farmers and others who saw it as an instrument of the commercial elite. In response to the general opposition to the bank and to charges of irregularities in the bank’s md branch, the state of md imposed a tax on the bank as a way to drive it out of md. In response, the bank brought suit in the fed courts and the case worked its way up to the Supreme Court. With McCulloch v. MD, the Supreme Court declared that states couldn’t interfere with the workings of the fed government.
The Marshall Court continued to expand fed authority in subsequent cases. In Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), the court ruled that the state of ny didn’t have a right to give Ogden a monopoly of ferry service in ny harbor since the harbor connected ny and nj and thus involved interstate commerce, which only Congress could control. Later, in Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the court ruled that the state of ga could not regulate private dealings by US citizens within the terr controlled by the Cherokees since tribes had their own sovereign rights, subject only to the authority of the fed government. In these and author decisions, the court affirmed a “loose construction” of the Constitution, which enabled the Constitution “to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs” to preserve its relevance through time. Not everyone agreed with Marshall’s perspective, but many felt that both the Constitution and the rights of the people were stronger for his efforts.

The Politics of Cotton and the Missouri Compromise of 1820

Although mo was too far north to be a cotton-growing state, its pop also grew as a result of America’s westward movement, and by 1819, mo applied to Congress to be admitted as a new state. A bill to authorize a state constitutional convention was introduced in Congress with a little fanfare early in 1819. However, Congressman James Tallmadge jr of ny introduced an amendment to the mo statehood bill to prohibit the introduction of new slaves and gradually free those who were already there. His amendment created a huge crisis in which southern reps and senators attacked it and its author.
When the Constitution was adopted, many from both the south and north believed that slavery was dying; even its defenders tended to describe the institution as a sad though nec evil. When gw and others of his general freed their slaves, the econ impact was limited since slaves weren't of great value. But that period was before cotton transformed the econs of slavery. The price of slaves were much higher than in 1814. Slaves had become valuable, whether as workers or as products to be sold. If va and n/sc planters couldn’t use all the slaves they owned, instead of freeing them, they could now sell them to cotton growers in ga, ms, and al at a substantial profit. Mo had few slaves, but by 1820, slave owners weren't about to allow an attack on slavery. Although much of the debate about mo was spoken in the lang of pop will and the sovereign right of white people there to decide their own policies, it took place econ and racial realities were changing quickly.
In the north, hostility to slavery was growing. Many northerners hated the ideal of slavery and disliked a constitutional system that protected it. Even before 1820, some people were starting to call themselves abolitionists. Many other northerns had more strategic objections to the constitutional protection of slavery. The 3/5ths clause in the Constitution gave the slaveholding south 17 mores eats in the House of Reps and thus 17 more electoral vote in pres elections than an allocation of reps based only on free people would have done. The nation was becoming divided between a commercial north and an ag south, and although neither region was purely for or against slavery, the fact that slavery gave the south a political edge came across to many northerners as being unfair.
The debates about mo were not as bad as future debates would be. There weren't yet many radical abolitionists in the north, and so far, few in the south were saying that slavery was a positive good. But already in 1819, neither side would back down, and Congress adjourned without doing anything about mo.
Before Congress reassembled in 1820, pres Monroe and speaker of the House of Reps Henry Clay of ky designed a compromise to resolve the issue. While the north had a solid and growing majority in the House, the Senate was evenly divided between slave and free states. Because of such, the Senate was split half and half on the issue of slavery. In addition, while congress had debated what to do about mo the region known as the District of Maine, within the Commonwealth of ma, was also petitioning for statehood with the blessing of the ma leg. The compromise proposed that if me and mo were admitted at the same time, and if mo was allowed to be a slave state, then the balance in the Senate would be maintained. However, this proposed compromise would also restrict the spread of slavery. Although most northerners in the House and Senate voted against itt, some supported the compromise, as did almost all of those from the south, and the MO Compromise passed Congress, allowing mo and me to be admitted to the Union. The crisis had been averted. The success would be the first of many such compromises for which Henry Clay would become known as the “great compromiser” over the next 3 decades. However, the need for this compromise signaled more clearly than ever before that slavery had become a divisive issue that wouldn’t go away.
Missouri Compromise - a compromise in Congress in 1820 that admitted mo to the union as a slave state and me as a free state as well as prohibited slavery in the rest of the la purchase terr above 36-30 north lat

The Contested Election of 1824

As pres monroe came to the end of his 2nd term, the political good will that had marked his tenure disappeared. Although no constitutional limitation had yet been set on presidential terms, gw had set a precedent for stepping down after 2 terms, which others had followed. In 1824, as the nation sought a new pres, the us experienced one of the most contested and confusing presidential elections in its history. For citizens of a nation that had elected monroe almost unanimously in 1816 and 1820, the ill will of 1824 was a surprise.
In one sense, the election of 1824 proceeded just as the writers of the Constitution -- who hated political parties -- envisioned: a contest in which members of the House, which each state’s delegation having 1 vote, would decide on a pres from among several of the nation’s leading citizens who had been identified by the votes of the Electoral College. With the demise of the Feds, the d-r party was the only party in the nation. It had been as that party’s candidate that Monroe had been elected by an almost unanimous vote since the Feds didn’t nom a candidate in 1820 or anytime after that.
By 1824, the usual process in which a party caucus within Congress would select a presidential nominee had broken down, and 3 members of Monroe’s cabinet along with the speaker of the House of Reps all sought the presidency. A 5th candidate from the d-r party, Senator Andrew Jackson, the national war hero from tn, also joined the race. In this type of contest, personal animosity and political intrigue were inevitable.
At first, many though Sec of the Tres Wm H Crawford of ga was the obvious choice. Crawford had stepped out of the way to support Monroe’s election, and he and many of his supporters though it was now his turn. The congressional caucus that traditionally nommed presidential candidates did choose Crawford. However, in what was clearly a warning of trouble to come, less than a 4th of the members of Congress showed up to vote in the caucus. Others, in Congress and outside of it, would find other candidates and other ways to support them.
Sec of state jqa of ma had a good claim to consideration. Many considered the office of sec of state as the natural stepping stone to the presidency. Monroe had been jemmy’s sec of state as jemmy had been tj’s and tj’s had been gw’s. In addition, jqa had served the nation well. He had acquired fl for the us, arranged treaties that opened vast new lands to settlement, and handled s american revs and potential European interference skillfully. As a former ambassador, senator, son of a former pres, and fav of the antislavery north, jqa had much going for him.
Sec of war John C Calhoun from sc was another candidate. Calhoun hadn’t yet become the fierce advocate of states’ rights that he later was. In 1824, he was a strong nationalist. He advocated for a strong army and for using army engineers to conduct a national survey that would lead to fed supported roads, bridges, and canals connecting all parts of the us. He also supported the Bank of the US. Calhoun initially backed jqa, but when he became convinced after the mo crisis that southern and border state electors would never support a New Englander, his own ambition was fired up and he campaigned actively.
Henry Clay of ky, also a contender, was speaker of the House of Reps and an ardent nationalist. Like Calhoun, he supported an expansive fed government that controlled the currency through a strong national bank and that built roads and bridges as well as supported commerce. From his political base in ky, Clay hoped to be the first pres from west of the Alleghenies. He was also shrewd enough to guess that with so many candidates in the race, the House of Reps, which he controlled, might make the final decision.
Finally, there was Andrew Jackson of tn. At first, Jackson seemed an unlikely candidate for pres. Unlike any pres after gw, Jackson had never served in the cabinet or repped the nation abroad. Instead, he was the hero of the Battle of nola. He had served for 1 year in the Senate and in other government posts, but his primarily public role was as a military leader, and in the 1820s, the military wasn’t always a pop institution. His wife Rachel Jackson strongly opposed his seeking the presidency. In 1822, however, the tn leg formally nommed Jackson as a candidate for pres, primarily as a way to block the then frontrunner Crawford. At that point, Jackson probably supported jqa, in part, because jqa had supported Jackson’s actions in fl while Crawford and Clay hadn’t.
No one, including Jackson, counted on how pop he would be with the electorate.
The Constitution allows each state to decide how to choose pres electors. By 1824, most states allowed voters to select electors pledged to a specific candidate, this greatly democratizing the pres selection process. That electorate had changed since the Constitution was adopted in 1789. Since 1808 when nj retracted its decision to give women the right to vote, only men voted. Property restrictions on voting, still common when gw was elected, were long gone in most states, so nearly all white men could now vote, and in some northern states, so could free black men. In nyc, free blacks sometimes held the balance of power among various factions. Excluded from voting were women of all races, most blacks including all slaves, and Indians. Nevertheless, this broad male electorate valued widespread pop as more important in selecting a pres than the voice of a few members of the social and econ elite. By 1824, the white male pop will was coalescing behind Jackson far more than anyone expected.
In a nation increasingly divided by sectional issues, a nationally respected war hero had great appeal. In addition, a fierce opponent of banks like Jackson was pop with many people who were convinced -- at least partially rightly -- that the bank of the us had brought on the panic of 1819. In places like ms and al where some people were growing rich on farmlands that Jackson had taken from their Indian owners, he was a local hero. Particularly in a nation where an elite’s econ decisions had hurt many farmers and workers, a candidate who had grown up poor, though he had become wealthy as an adult, had deep appeal. Pop appeal had not been a major factor in the elections of jemmy and monroe, but it was the factor in 1824.
In the 1824 election, Jackson won the pop vote. Calhoun, who had withdrawn from the campaign after deciding that Jackson was too pop to beat, was easily elected as vp since the 12th Amendment, rat in 1804 in the aftermath of the tj-burr fiasco, mandated that pres electors cast separate ballots for pres and vp candidates. In addition to pa, Jackson easily carried the black-belt states of ga, al, ms, and la as well as most of the rest of the south, a region benefitting from its pop of nonvoting slaves, which strengthened its electoral votes as a result of the ⅗ clause to the Constitution. Jackson defeated jqa in nj, Crawford in nc, and Clay in in and il. Jqa carried New England, some of the mid-Atlantic region, and the Northwest. However, although Jackson won the most pop votes, no one had the 131 electoral votes needed for a majority. Clay’s prediction was right: the election had been tossed into the house of reps. Not since 1800 had the house of reps been called on to decide the outcome of a pres contest.
Ironically, since the Constitution required the House to choose from among the top 3 candidates, Clay had been eliminated. Moreover, although his supporters had kept it hidden, Crawford had had a stroke and couldn’t assume the presidency. So the election came down to jackson and jqa, and jqa was determined to fight for the office, despite ranking 2nd in the pop and electoral votes. The Constitution mandated a process, and jqa wanted to follow it. Many of jqa’s followers, and the supporters of other candidates, saw jackson as a would-be american napoleon who would undermine american democracy. No one held that concern more strongly than henry clay -- who was master of the house and determined that jackson shouldn’t be pres. When the house met on Fed 9, 1825. Jqa was elected pres by a vote of 13 states.
Whether jqa had made any secret agreement with clay will never be known. But 5 days after the vote, jqa appointed clay to be his sec of state. Jackson denounced both men for making a “corrupt bargain,” resigned from the Senate, and returned to his home in Nashville to begin what was essentially a 4-y campaign against jqa, clay, and their administration, as well as a campaign for his own election to the office that he and his followers believed he had won in 1824. Jqa and clay had underestimated the pop feeling for jackson. The animosity of the campaign and jackson’s rancor would make the next 4 years difficult for an administration led by 2 of the nation’s most gifted political and diplomatic leaders.

The Adams-Clay Agenda

It was jqa’s goal to unify the nation and improve all parts of the nation. He struggled unsuccessfully to avoid the creation of political parties and permanent national divisions.
Jqa proposed a list of national improvements to be implemented by the fed government. Support for the fed funded improvements such as roads, canals, and so on would be a hallmark of the jqa administration. An emerging political faction that supported national development and strong fed actions to deal with national problems agreed with the direction that the jqa administration was taking. Jackson and another emerging faction would strongly oppose this sort of activist fed government, advocating instead for states’ rights.
Improvement, both personal and political, was a pop ambition in the 1820s. Jwa worried about becoming a better person, and he swam naked in the Potomac every day to improve his boyd. But he also wanted to improve the nation, and he saw the money freed from paying off the rev war debt and the income from sales of fed lands as the perfect opp for investing in the nation. The General Survey, conducted by army engineers when John C Calhoun was sec of war, was the blueprint. Jqa, with an eye to southern voters, proposed a 2nd National Road to link dc to nola. He proposed, and Congress approved, building the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal that would connect with the org National Road to link the Potomac with the Oh and MS Rivers. Postmaster General John McLean built post offices in rural areas and subsidized the stagecoach industry to carry the mail and connect the nation’s far-flung people to one another. Jqa also proposed a new national uni to be based in dc and a national observatory. All of these activities were designed to knit the nation together, advancing knowledge and making it easier to transport goods. In addition, the intent was to unite the nation in a single political entity and a market econ, especially after the divisions sparked by the debates around the mo compromise.
American System - the program of government subsidies to improve roads and canals and to foster econ growth and protect domestic manufacturers from foreign competition
Sec of state clay was involved in all these efforts, and during the pres campaign, had described a program that came to be known as the American System. In clay’s mind, the American System would reduce poverty by linking all Americans (all white Americans’ clay considered neither his own 50 slaves nor others’ slaves to be Americans) in a prosperous commercial community. The system was American because it made the fed government an agent of econ development. Clay believed that the roads and canals, and the support of interstate commerce that he and jqa wanted to foster on a fed level, would make a stronger and more united america, commercially, geographically, and socially. Ultimately, clay wanted transport and commerce to bridge traditional sectional divides and create a thriving commercial nation united by common national investments. Moreover, the system was potentially a way to protect the nation by building an infrastructure that could serve military needs, allowing troops to move quickly from one part of the us to another when necessary. Finally, the American System would protect infant american industries through a strong tariff that would allow them to develop and thus reduce american dependence on cheaper foreign imports.
In one of his last acts as speaker in 1824, Clay led an effort to increase the av tariff from 20 to 25 %. The new higher tariff made him a hero to New England mill owners and their workers whose jobs it protected. It was also pop in commercial centers like Cincinnati, and Clay’s hometown of Lexington ny, where new industries needed protection. But the improvements and tariffs of the American System weren’t pop in other parts of the nation. A high tariff raised the cost of everything southern cotton planters had to buy but did nothing to raise the price of their cotton in the market. They saw the tariff and jqa’s antislavery opinions as a sign of a fed government that was working against their econ interests, and many in the south hardened their opposition to jqa, clay, and the American System.
As the 1828 pres campaign built steam, jqa and clay continued their pitch for the costs and benefits of the American System. Jackson had a more focused agenda: to replace jqa with the man who had rightfully won in 1824. Although jqa had wanted to avoid political parties, it was during his term that new American political parties were born.

The Jackson Victory of 1828 and the Rebirth of Political Parties

From the day he left dc in 1824, Jackson was running to become pres in 1828. He believed that he and his supporters had been cheated, and he meant to be vindicated. Nevertheless, it took time for the campaign to take shape. it's easier to understand the birth of political parties in retrospect than it was at the time. Many Americans were glad to see the old Fed Party gone; at the same time, they dated to see the d-rs splinter. At first, the 2 factions in Congress were described as Adams men and Jackson men. After the midterm Congressional elections of 1826, the Jackson men controlled Congress. The Adams men then started to call themselves National Republicans, that is, d-rs who supported the national administration led by jqa. This group, primarily led by henry clay, would become the core of the new Whig Party. The Jackson men continued to call themselves d-rs, emphasizing that they were the rightful winners of the last election and repped the democratic will of the people, which had been thwarted by jqa and clay in the 1824 election. Soon, the Jacksonians dropped the Republicans in their name and were simply known as Democrats, forerunners of the Democratic Party.
Whig Party - political party that began to take shape in support of the Adams-Clay American System and was first known as the National Republicans, but became the Whig Party in the 1830s in opposition to the Jacksonian Democrats
Democratic Party - a political party that favored states’ rights and a limited role for the fed government, especially in econ affairs
Neither party was fully organized in the 1828 election and though each that newspapers that were strongly on their side, other hallmarks of national political parties like national noming conventions came later. Nevertheless, from 1828 on, most Americans expected pres elections to be hotly contested by 2 or more candidates repping their respective political parties and running on specific promises. The era of electing a few wise men to select the best pres was over.
The prime architect of Jackson’s campaign wand his political agenda was Senator Martin Van Buren of ny. Van B was a strict constructionist of the Constitution who believed that the American System violated the Constitution because it involved the fed government in many matters not specifically assigned to it by the Constitution. Although a nyer, Van B was closely allied with many in the south who liked his commitment to a small fed government because they feared that if the fed government could involve itself in shaping the nation’s econ, it could also interfere with slavery, a threat that terrified the slaveholding class.
The campaign of 1828 was as nasty as any in American history. Newspapers took on a larger role than ever before endorsing candidates and spreading slander about the opposition. The National Repubs reminded voters of Jackson’s temper and his many brawls and duels, which they said were unpresidential, as well as the times he may have exceeded his authority in attacking Indians or executing British subjects. In addition, they attacked his marriage. More than 30 years earlier, the Jacksons had been married before Rachel jackson’s divorce from her 1st husband was final, so she was guilty of bigamy. The attack on their marriage infuriated Jackson and deeply hurt Rachel. When she died shortly after the election, Jackson never forgave his adversaries.
The campaign organized by Jackson and Van B was equally nasty. They reminded voters of the supposed “corrupt bargain” that had put jqa in the White House and claimed -- with no proof - -that jqa, as ambassador to Russia, had procured young American women for the Tsar’s pleasure. They portrayed jqa as cold and elitist and attacked his Unitarian beliefs as un-Christian compared with Jackson’s devout Presbyterian faith. For the Democrats, the campaign was not about the American System but a choice “Between JQ Adams, who can write, and Andy Jackson, who can fight.” The fighter won easily.
The pop vote nearly tripled between 1824 and 1828, and 57.5% of all eligible voters actually voted. All but 2 states, de and sc, chose pres electors by pop vote for states pledged to 1 candidate or another in 1828. Campaigning had risen to new heights, and more voters believed that their votes counted. Political parties organized a new get-out-the-vote effort, which for the first time included election materials such as buttons, mugs, posters, and slogans. In the end, Jackson won 56% of the pop vote and 178 electoral votes, and jqa won 83 electoral votes. There was no need for the House of Reps to be involved. A new style of electioneering had emerged.

Summaries
Creating the Cotton Economy

2 developments in the late 1790s set the stage for the rapid expansion of cotton production in the US. First, in the late 1700s, many Europeans preferred clothing made of cotton. Second, a series of tech innovations revolutionized the production of cotton cloth. The invention of the cotton gin greatly increased the econ viability of processing cotton in the us. Increased cotton cultivation had a transformative effect on the American econ, both in the north and south, and fueled the expansion of slavery. The acquisition of new lands for cotton cultivation was made possible by the LA Purchase, Jackson’s military victories, and jqa’s negotiations. While slavery slowly disappeared in the north after 1800, and the slave pop of md, va, nc, and sc stabilized or declined, slavery exploded in the interior cotton growing lands. The production of cotton textiles in the north was at the core of the Industrial Rev in the us, and nyc played a key role in linking the us to the international cotton trade. However, slumping demand for American cotton in Europe led to the panic of 1819. Banks’ reactionary responses worsened the problem; the interconnected nature of the country’s national econ wasn’t yet well understood. Fortunately, the econ eventually recovered and thrived.

Commerce, Technology, and Transportation

As more white and black Americans moved further into the interior of the country, the need for improvements in internal transport became essential to the us’s commercial development. The Erie Canal linked the growing regions of upstate ny, western pa, and oh to the eastern seaboard, particularly nyc. Steamboats revolutionized water transport, producing particularly dramatic changes in the role of the MS in commerce. Fed and state efforts to improve roads also contributed to better internal transport. With increased speed in travel, news also moved much more quickly. As a result of a series of leg actions and court decisions in the early 1800s, corp became a permanent and important feature of American econ life after 1815. Some of the first and most important corps were banks. Banks played an essential role in the market econ by printing paper currency and making loans. The changes brought about by the growth of the market econ touched almost every aspect of American life.

From the Era of Good Feelings to the Politics of Division

Monroe’s presidential administration that began in 1817 was known as the Era of Good Feelings because of the lack of rancor in his election and subsequent reelection. However, the same years saw growing political tensions that would explode in the 1820s. Conflict over an amendment to the 1819 mo statehood bill prohibiting the introduction of new slaves into the state and gradually freeing those who were already there led to the MO Compromise of 1820. The election of 1824 marked the end of the Era of Good Feelings. The election revealed deepening sectional divisions within the us. When no candidate received a majority of the electoral vote, the election was decided in the House of Reps, declaring jqa the winner. Supporters of Andrew Jackson, winner of the pop vote, saw this decision as a “corrupt bargain” between jqa and Henry Clay, then speaker of the House of Reps. Pres jqa and his newly appointed sec of state, Henry Clay, argued that the fed government should play an active role in the promotion of econ growth and improvement. Jackson spent the years between his defeat in 1824 and the election of 1828 building a political org capable of defeating jqa. The election of 1828 was a nasty affair, pittin jqa and the National Repubs against Jackson and the Democrats. Jackson’s eventual victory was also a victory for a new kind of party politics.

King Cotton

In the early 1800s, cotton came to transform the national economy and the many people involved

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Cotton and Slavery

Slavery is reinvigorated
- Either stabilized or even declining in areas after the Rev, slave labor becomes valuable and essential to the cotton economy after the cotton gin (after ~1800)
Intracontinental slave trade takes off
- Not only did their labor bring a value, the slaves themselves carried tremendous value; families often broken up in slaves; the journeys could be long and dangerous as well
Brutal working conditions
- Labor intensive, profit-driven; slave owners and overseers showed even less mercy than in previous decades
Still, passive resistance was commonplace
- Slaves formed culture, communities, and resistance that expressed their desire to be free

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Market Revolution

A period in which the American economy diversified, industrialized, and opened all goods and products to markets at home and abroad (~1815~1840)

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Era of Good Feelings - Monroe 1817-25

Monroe’s administration saw a nation that was more connected politically, socially, economically on paper than ever before
MO Compromise, 1820
- Mason Dixon Line
- Political rather than ethical squabble
- Tries to end the slavery debate
Skepticism of using fed government for national development (roads, canals, etc)
Competing politicians / ambitions within d-r party
Adams Tariff, 1828 & Adams-Clay “American System”
Andrew Jackson’s outsider run…

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Elections of 1824 and 1828

1824 - Candidates: jqa, Jackson, Henry Clay, Crawford
- Jqa wins from House of Reps; Henry Clay becomes sec of state; the corrupt bargain
1828 - Jackson won
- Steaming from the belief that he should have won
- Democrats and Whigs

Chapter 10 - Democracy in the age of jackson

Significant Dates

1826 - Charles B Finney leads religious revivals in western NY
1828 - Tariff of Abominations; Jackson defeats jqa for pres
1829 - Andrew Jackson inaugurated president
1830 - Congress passes Indian Removal Act; Nullification Crisis begins; Joseph Smith founds the Church of Jesus Christ of the LDS
1832 - Jackson vetoed recharter of 2nd Bank of the US; sc leg nullifies fed tariffs; Black Hawk’s War in il
1833 - Congress passes compromise tariff; nullification debate ends
1835 - Treaty of New Echota; Catharine Beecher published Essay on the Education of Female Teachers
1836 - First McGuffey Reader published; Second Creek War in al
1837 - Horace Mann elected Sec of the MA Board of Education
1838 - Waldo Emerson “Divinity School Address”
1838-39 - Trail of Tears

Jacksonian Democracy, Jacksonian Government
Analyze Jackson’s advocacy for Indian Removal, his opposition to the Bank of the US, his support for a tariff, and the impact of these policies on other Americans

Spoils system - a way of selection people for government jobs based on the idea that “to the victor belongs the spoils”
With Jackson in office, experienced officials, including 24 customs collects and 423 postmasters, were fired from what had been a small, stable, fed bureaucracy. Services deteriorated, and the quality of some fed services like the postal service didn’t recover until civil service reform took hold in the 1880s.
Van B became sec of state. Others of Jackson’s cabinet officers were less talented, and Jackson often ignored them. Instead, he surrounded himself with informal advisors who came to be known as his Kitchen Cabinet, longtime friends and advisors who worked closely with the pres, particularly to accomplish removing Indians from wanted lands, revoking the charter for the 2nd Bank of the US, and preserving the authority of the fed union against radical supporters of states’ rights.

Jackson’s Presidential Agenda

Nullification - a constitutional doctrine holding that a state has a legal right to declare a national law null and void within its borders.
Jackson had several interlocking but not entirely consistent priorities. He distrusted government at all levels but had unbounded trust in his own ability to govern. He meant not only to be an activist pres - jqa and other preses had also followed strong agendas - but also to make the presidency the center of the American government. He wouldn’t defer to Congress in ways that all of his predecessors had done. He vetoes more congressional bills than all of his predecessors combined and made it clear that Congress would have to reckon with him. As he had announced before the election, he was determined to force the Indians who lived in northern ga, al, and ms to move west to clear the land for white settlement. Although he supported a modified tariff, he meant to scale back the size of the fed government. He hated the Bank of the US and was determined to destroy it. He saw its charter as an inappropriate use of fed authority was was convinced that the bank had contributed to jqa’s campaign. And perhaps most of all, Jackson was determined to preserve the Union at a time when southern leaders were insisted that each state had the right of nullification. Jackson was a slaveholder and a defender of slavery, but if slaveholders threatened national unity, they would have to deal with him.
In his 2 terms as pres, Jackson realized most of his goals, despite fierce opposition. He established permanent precedents for presidential authority. He was a hero and some and an evil genius to others. For most historians, he remains one of the most complex American leaders, expanding the roles of poor and working-class whites in the political process and of the presidency in American life, while reducing the rights of Indians, slaves, fed employees, bankers, and indeed anyone who disagreed with him.

The Indian Removal Act, the Trail of Tears, and the Settlement of Oklahoma

For some white Americans, Indian Removal was a great achievement. For the tribes caught in Jackson’s web, the policy led to war within the tribes, terrible losses, resistance, resignation, and reinvention. Their white supporters were ineffective against Jackson.
Five Civilized Tribes - the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, who had established treaty agreements with the US in the late 1700s or early 1800s, lived in peace with their neighbors, and adopted more of the ways of the whites than most Indians
Known as the Five Civilized Tribes, they had for generations lived in the region known as the Old Southwest -- ga, al, ms -- as well as in ar and fl. These tribes had traded and fought with Spanish, French, and English settlers and hoad sold or ceded much of their land, but based on treaties with the US government, they still owned huge tracts of land in the heart of the cotton-growing south.
Far more than Indians of the Northwest or West, the 5 Civilized Tribes had adopted many white ways and customs, intermarried with whites, and created a unique culture based on farming and trade. Of the 5 tribes, the Cherokee Nation had the most sophisticated, political, economic, and cultural institutions. Stretching over northwest ga, al, tn, and nc, the Cherokees expected to be treated as a sovereign nation. The Cherokees, who had supported the British during the Rev, had signed a treaty with the new US government in 1785 and never again waged war against the US. They supported Jackson in his battle with the Creeks and lived at peace with their neighbors, but that did them little good once Jackson determined his course of action.
After making peace with the US in the 1780s, the Cherokees took well to the European-style of communication and farmings. A Cherokee warrior, Sequoyah invented an alphabet. The Cherokees set up a large and effective trading network with other tribes and whites. In 1827, they adopted a written constitution for the Cherokee Republic,
Beginning in the 1790s, missionaries came to live among the Cherokees. The Cherokees welcomed them, thought most never became Christians. Using Sequoyah’s alphabet, the missionaries translated the Bible into Cherokee and later became some of the most heroic defenders of Cherokee rights.
Cherokees also cultivated cotton as their white neighbors did, and some owned African slaves. Of all the Indian tribes, the Cherokees were the model of assimilation that presidents from gw to tj claimed to want. But white settlers and pres Jackson decided to ignore the assimilation. They wanted the land.
Ga took the lead in seizing Indian land. In 1824, Governor Geo Troup announced that he was ending treaty rights for the Cherokee and Creek tribes. When pres jqa opposed him, citing the tribes’ treaties with the US government, Troup and his successor John Forsyth campaigned for Jackson in 1828. In Dec 1828, the ga leg declared that, starting in June 1830, ga state laws would extend to all parts of the Cherokee Republic despite fed treaty agreements to the contrary. White gans then began moving into Cherokee lands, and Jackson withdrew US troops who had been protecting the Cherokees.
Indian Removal Act - leg passed by Congress in 1830 which provided funds for removing and resettling eastern Indians in the West. It granted the pres the authority to use force if necessary and resulted in the involuntary transfer of thousands of Native Americans to new homes in Oklahoma.
It was in this context that Jackson addressed Congress, advocated an Indian Removal Act to “protect” the Cherokees from ga laws. The pres gave the tribes what seemed like a choice: “voluntarily” move west to new lands where their independence would be honored or choose to stay where they were. But if they chose to stay, they would be subject to the laws of ga, laws that said Indians couldn’t vote, own property, testify against a white person in court, or obtain credit. It wasn’t much of a choice.
The land that the government offered to the tribes was completely unfamiliar to the tribes of the Old Southwest. Many people thought of it as simply a desert where farming would be impossible. Indian Territory, which eventually would become Ok, was a portion of the La Purchase just north of Tx. The land wasn’t empty, thought the government tended to treat it that way. Some of the plains tribes -- the Wichitas, Kiowas, Kiowa Apaches, and Osages -- had lived there for gens. Some tribes from the Ohio-Il area - Shawnees, Delawares, Miamis, Kickapoos, Sacs, and Fox - had been relocated to that territory after defeats by the US Army. In addition, there were a few white settles and some slaves and former slave seeking refuge in the region. Nevertheless, under Jackson’s plan, the government was now offering the region to the 5 Civilized Tribes.
While Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole leaders had long feared such a move and had been protesting against it, many whites now rallied to their side. In Congress and the national press, Indian Removal became a major fight. Catharine Beecher organized women across the Northwest to defend Indian rights and flooded Congress with petitions. Missionaries campaigned against the bill so vigorously that ga sentenced 2 of them to prison at hard labor for refusing to abandon the Indians.
In the Senate, Theo Frelinghuysen of nj, long a supporter of Protestant missionaries and reform efforts, led the opposition to the Indian Removal Bill. He insisted that the government was bound by its treaties and that, if need be, should use the US Army to force ga to retract its claims to the Indian lands. Henry Clay, who hadn’t previously spoken in favor of Indian rights, joined the anti removal forces. In the end, the removal bill passed. Among those voting no was Congressman Davy Crockett of tn. But Jackson signed the law 5-28-1830, making half a century of treaties void. The tribes would have to move. While all of the tribes resisted, negotiated, and ultimately had to surrender, the Cherokees went to US courts to assert their claims to their lands. Initially, they won. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. GA (1832), the US Supreme Court, under Chief Justice John Marshall, ruled that the Cherokees were a “domestic dependent nation” and couldn’t be forced by the state of ga to give up land that treaty rights had agreed to by the US government had given them. Jackson simply ignored the court. No other pres before or after ignored the Supreme Court in that way.
The Indian Removal Act and implementation that followed was a disaster for the 5 Civilized Tribes. The government had seized their homes and offered in return land that was thousands of miles away and completely foreign to them. Moreover, the tribes were divided about how to respond. While most of the nation was focused on the Cherokees, Jackson sent sec of war John Eaton to negotiate with the Choctaws. By excluding those he considered troublemakers and bribing others, Eaton got a small group of Choctaw leaders to agree for the tribe to leave its homes in ms, but most in the tribe considered those who negotiated the removal treaty to be nonrepresentative and refused to abide by it. The fed troops enforced it regardless.
Al and ms followed ga’s lead and voted to end tribal rights for the Creeks. In March 1832, the Creeks surrendered all land east of the ms, and most of them moved to ok. Those who took advantage of a promise that they could stay in the east as private citizens soon lost their lands. Some of the remaining Creeks began violent resistance to state and fed authorities, but the so-called 2nd Creek War of 1836-37 ended quickly when Jackson’s sec of war ordered fed troops to expel all Creeks from lands east of the ms. The Creeks who were deported after the 2nd Creek War suffered higher mortality rates than the Cherokees; perhaps half lived to see ok.
Among the Cherokees, a civil conflict broke out about how to respond to the demand that they move to ok. Principal Chief John Ross and most of the Cherokees were determined to fight for their lands. A minority, some of whom were among the rising middle class and slave holders within the tribe, decided that a compromise was better than forced expulsion. John Ridge and Elias Boudinot signed the Treaty of New Echota in Dec 1835, trading land in ga for the new land in ok and $5 million. The US Senate barely rat the treaty after Daniel Webster and Henry Clay pointed out how fraudulent it was since the majority of the Cherokees opposed it.
After Ridge and Boudinot and their followers departed for ok, or Indian Territory as it was called, the US Army put most of the remaining members of the tribe in detention camps. A few were able to flee into the wilderness and remained in their homelands but without their land. Others fought, but in the end, Chief Ross and General Winfield Scott negotiated a settlement to avoid further bloodshed. Although Jackson had left office by then, his successor Van B was determined to enforced his predecessor's policy. From the detention camps, soldiers forced 12k Cherokee men, women, and children to march west in the fall and winter of 1838-39. It was an especially cold winter and a terrible time to make a march of over a thousands miles into the unknown. The Cherokees never had enough food, blankets, or warm clothing, and as they moved in large groups, disease and exposure took a terrible toll. On the Trail of Tears, perhaps a ¼ to ⅓ of the marchers died before reaching ok.
Trail of Tears - the forced march in 1838 of the Cherokee from their homelands in ga to the Indian Territory in the West; thousands of Cherokees died along the way
Seeing what was happening to other tribes, the Chickasaws moved west quickly on their own. The Seminoles of fl terr had no intention of moving, however. Although a minority of Seminoles agreed to move, most stayed in fl, disappearing into the swamps and hiding places they knew well. When soldiers tried to force them out, the Seminoles annihilated them. The 2nd Seminole War wasn’t resolved until 1842. Fewer Seminoles than members of any other tribe moved to ok.
In the meantime, the Sac and Fox tribes, already exiled to the Indian Territory, weren’t too happy about life there. In Apr 1832, a chief named Black Hawk led 1k-2k Sac and Fox people back east across the ms, closer to their old homelands. The Sac and Fox were moving mostly to escape from hostile Sioux groups on the Great Plains and ia territory. The il governor took the tribes’ move into il as an attack, called out the militia, and asked for fed troops. In Black Hawk’s War, fed and state troops on the east of the ms and Sioux warriors on the west virtually annihilated the Fox and Sac tribes, to the delight of the whites who were happy to see these tribes completely out of their way.
In fact, Jackson had meant to use the removal law for ga to force all Indians east of the ms out of their lands. When the forced exile reached its goal by the end of the 1830s, only the Iroquois in ny and a few Cherokees in nc, and scattered small communities remained legally east of the ms, although others like the Seminoles simply melted into the woods and couldn’t be found by the government. All in all, 46k Indians were forcibly removed during the Jackson administration, and subsequent administrations removed as many more.
The Cherokees and other tribes tend to disappear from history books after the Trail of Tears. But the Cherokees, Choctaws, and Creeks were resilient people. Forced onto an inhospitable, alien land, they sought to reestablish their communities and culture. To a surprising degree, they succeeded. As the last Cherokees arrived in Indian Terr in 1839, the tribe adopted a new Constitution and established Tahlequah as their capital. In 1844, they began publishing the Cherokee Advocate in both English and Cherokee. They also set up a school system with elementary schools as well as higher education institutes and seminaries to prepare teachers for their school. In the US Civil War, parts of each tribe favored ea side, and the divided tribe fought internally. But again they rebuilt after the war.

Jacksonian Economics -- the War on the Bank of the United States

The Second Bank of the US - a national bank chartered by Congress in 1816 with extensive regulatory powers over currency and credit
In his campaign for pres, Jackson pledged to do something about the Bank of the US, which he and many others blamed for the Panic of 1819 and saw as an elitist threat to democracy. The 2nd Bank of the US was patterned on the first. The first bank had been chartered in 1791 for a period of 20 years. In 1811, the tjian repubs refused to extend its charter and it closed. Henceforth, it seemed, state banks would issue currency in the form of banknotes backed by gold or silver, fed funds would be deposited in state banks, and the fed government would borrow money from these banks when needed. Then came the War of 1812.
As the War of 1812 threatened to bankrupt the nation, some of the nation’s richest men, led by John Jacob Astor, met with Treasury Sec Albert Gallatin and offered to loan the nation the funds it needed if the Bank of the US were rechartered. They believed that only a national bank could build long-term prosperity and ensure that their loan would be repaid. As a result, a charter for a 2nd Bank of the US passed Congress in 1816. The Jemmy, Monroe, and jqa admins were strong advocates for a unified national market econ that could foster prosperity and stability, and they had used the bank to support that econ. Jackson wanted prosperity, but he disagreed about the government’s role in the nation’s econ.
The 2nd bank of the US was never without enemies. The Constitution never mentioned a bank, and strict constructionists -- who thought the government should limit its role to things specifically in the Constitution -- always opposed it. The bank was also seen by many as a way to expand the power of the commercial elite based in ny and Philadelphia and was seen as an enemy by farmers whether they lived on small out-of-the-way farms in the still very rural country or on the burgeoning plantations of the cotton-growing South. In the opinion of many farmers, whether small or large scale, Jackson was the defender of their interests against threatening commercial elites. Particularly since the Supreme Court’s ruling on McCulloch v. MD that Congress had the right to charter a bank if it thought it was in the national interest, pop support for the Bank that weakened. Many farmers didn’t believe “the national interest” that Congress saw was in their interests.
During his first months in office, Jackson didn’t stay a lot about the bank, but in Dec 1829 he told Congress that banks are bad. Regardless, the bank’s charter ensured that it could continue for 7 more years, but Jackson had fired a warning shot. Before long, he would do much more.
Many of Jackson’s strongest supporters disagreed with him about the bank. The country was prospering, credit was solid, and the soundness of the currency, despite Jackson’s words, seemed secure. The fed bank’s policies of calling in loans may have helped start the Panic of 1819, but Nicholas Biddle, the bank’s pres, had done as much as anyone in the nation to end the hard times after the Panic of 1819. Nevertheless Jackson was a populist, intending to rep the common people politically. Although the nation’s elite supported the bank, many citizens didn’t like any banks. Jackson’s attack on the bank was as emotional as it was calculated.
For the next few years, Biddle led the bank in continued efforts to stabilize the currency, help state banks through difficult times, and expand the nation’s credit, something that both northern mill owners and western land promoters liked. The bank also concentrated wealth and power within the econ in the lands of a commercial elite and strengthened the nation’s unified market econ based on currency and trade. That uneven concentration of wealth and power was something Jackson would not forgive.
In 1832, Jackson launched his campaign for reelection. For the first time, something resembling modern political parties played a role. Under Jackson’s leadership, the d-rs had simply become the Democrats. They easily nommed Jackson for a 2nd term and his handpicked running mate, sec of state Van B, for vp. The opposition to Jackson, sometimes known as the National Repubs because they had supported a strong national government, now became known as the Whig Party. They nommed Henry Clay for president and John Sergeant of pa as vp. Unlike the Jacksonian Ds, the Whig Party was committed to Hamly’s vision of a fed government that took an active role in shaping the economy, so they strongly supported the 2nd Bank of the US. The Whig nom, Henry Clay, urged Biddle to secure the bank’s future as well as that of the pro-bank Whig Party. If Biddle were to request an extension of the bank’s charter, even though the original charter wouldn’t expire for 4 years, Clay would promise to make the bank an issue in the campaign. Either Biddle would win the recharter fight immediately, or he would provide Clay a weapon with which to attack Jackson. Biddle, who was astute at counting votes in Congress, took Clay’s advice and applied for a new charter. The charter bill passed both houses, but Jackson vetoed it. In Nov 1832, Jackson defeated Clay 219 electoral votes to 49. Congress refused to override the president’s veto.
Biddle still tried to rally support in Congress. He made arguments, offered congressmen loans, and ensured that the bank’s lead attorney was elected to Congress from Philadelphia. Biddle loosened credit across the nation, ensuring short-term prosperity but provoking an eventual reckoning. He was desperate to save his bank.
Jackson ordered his treasury sec to remove fed deposits from the bank and place them in 23 state banks that he selected (Jackson’s pet banks). The move was meant to destroy the 2nd Bank of the US, but the law said that fed funds could be withdrawn iff there was clear evidence that the deposits weren’t secure. Even Jackson’s hand picked auditors couldn’t find any evidence. When Treasury Sec McLane refused the president’s order to move the funds, Jackson promoted him to sec of state. When another treasury sec also refused, Jackson fired him.
Finally, Jackson’s 3rd treasury sec, Roger Taney, who also had doubts about the legality of removing fed funds, hit on a compromise. He wouldn’t actually remove fed deposits from the bank, but he would do something just as effective to undermine the bank. Going forward, Taney regularly paid the government’s bills with funds from accounts in the Bank of the US, but he stopped depositing new fed rev in the bank. Instead the government’s income went to the state banks. It was a mortal blow. The fed government’s accounts slowly shrunk to 0 and the 2nd Bank of the US was dead, though it took a few years to die.
Led by Clay, the Sen censored the president, but the censure didn’t hurt Jackson or save the bank. The 2nd Bank of the US became a wholly private bank and soon went bankrupt. The combination of inflation caused by Biddle’s too-easy credit and the loss of a national bank that could stabilize the currency caused financial distress. By 1837 -- just after Jackson left office -- the nation experienced another financial panic, and there was no national entity to help stabilize the economy. Nevertheless, efforts to revive the bank failed. For decades, all of the paper currency in circulation would be issued by state banks, some of less than solid credit.

The Tariff, the Union, and the Nullification Crisis

The battle over the tariff began as a modest disagreement over fed tax policy. Before it ended, that battle was the greatest constitutional crisis the nation faced between the adoption of the Constitution in 1789 and the Civil War in 1861. To a degree, it was a personal between 2 stubborn men, Andrew Jackson and John Calhoun. In another sense, it was a battle about the fundamental nature of the US government.
Andrew Jackson vs. John C Calhoun

John C Calhoun of sc had been elected vp when jqa won the presidency in 1824, and he was reelected to that office in 1828 to serve with Jackson. Because separate ballots were cast for presidential and vp candidates after the passage of the 12th Amendments in 1804 and before the rise of party nomming conventions in 1832, no one thought it strange that 2 leaders as hostile to each other would have the same vp. As a congressman and as sec of war under Monroe, Calhoun had been a nationalist who favored internal improvements as much as Henry Clay or jqa. He sought a strong national government and had supported the Bank of the US. although his views differed from Jackson’s on some issues, everyone expected Calhoun and Jackson, as proslavery southerners, to have a close partnership. It wasn’t to be.
One of the first wedges between them was purely social. Jackson’s sec of war John Eaton had married the recently widowed Margaret O’Neale Timberlake, but rumors arose that she was a widow only because her first husband killed himself when he learned of her adultery with Eaton. Jackson, who had been hurt by attacks on his own marriage, defended the Eatons. Others in dc, led by Mrs Calhoun, snubbed Peggy Eaton. When Emily Donelson, Jackson’s office White House hostess, joined with Mrs Calhoun, Jackson temp banished her from the White House. He never forgave the Calhouns.
Another reason for the growing split between Jackson and Calhoun centered on the fact that Calhoun’s political beliefs were changing. By 1828, Calhoun was becoming the nation’s strongest defender of states’ rights against fed authority. This new stance may have reflected an honest change of heart, but it also served a political purpose. Regardless, it guaranteed a clash with Jackson since no matter how much Jackson may have favored states’ rights in the past, he wouldn't tolerate any challenge to his authority as president.
Many leaders in sc, Calhoun’s home state, were becoming very fearful of the fed government, and sc was developing the strongest anti-fed stance in the Union. Th sc Radicals, as they were called, dommed state government. They advocated the rights of states to declare any fed law null and void or even to secede from the Union. The reason was clear: scians feared for the future of slavery more than any other state. 54 % of sc pop were black slaves. In some rice-growing regions of the state, it was close to 90%. A wealthy but deeply fearful white elite governed these slaves and depended on their labor to generate continuing wealth. In 1827, a pamphlet called The Crisis; or, Essays on the Usurpations of the Federal Government argued that fed tariffs, internal improvements, and other fed activities were all means to enable the national government, if it chose, to abolish slavery. As word spread that gb abolished slavery, the fear grew that Congress might try to do the same. Calhoun had to decide whether he was with his state’s planter elite or against them. He might have dreamed about being president someday, but in the meantime, he would have to win elections in sc. He made his choice.

Nullification and the Future of the Republic

In 1828, Calhoun wrote a pamphlet arguing that a state could declare a tariff or any other fed law null and void. Calhoun claimed that since state-by-state conventions had rat the Constitution, state conventions, not the Supreme Court, had the authority to decide what was constitutional. In his view, once a state convention declared a fed law void, other states would have to weigh in, and only a new amendment could force the law on the dissenting state. Calhoun didn’t advocate secession as many of the sc Radicals did. Instead, he hoped nullification in response to a tariff or to restrictions on slavery would make secession unnecessary. He was thus more moderate than many scians, but that moderation wouldn't continue to be the case.

The tariff, not the issue of slavery, brought the issue of nullification to the for. The tariff had been the major source of financial support since the gw administration, and it had been an issue in the 1828 election. As Jackson’s supporters prepared for that election, Van B realized that, even though he and Jackson opposed a high tariff -- because they thought the fed government needed less money and because the tax raised the cost of foreign-made consumer products in the US -- the Adams-Clay tariff was pop in many parts of the nation because it protected local industries from foreign competition and because many people like the internal improvements that the tariff helped finance (ie roads and canals). Adams and Clay might want to fight the 1828 election on the issue of tariffs, but Van B didn’t. When the jqa administration suggested a new tariff, Van B and his allies decided to reshape it rather than oppose it. They knew they couldn’t win New England, so they didn’t hesitate to mod the proposed tariff by reducing the protection for the cotton produced by N England mill owners, allowing foreign-made cotton to be sold more cheaply than otherwise. They also raised tariffs to protect the exports of products like molasses, hemp, iron, and wool, which were produced in the mid-Atlantic states, especially pa, to woo voters there by protecting their industries and jobs from foreign competition. The result was a tariff that raised the price of products that many Americans bought from foreign sources and that angered the cotton mill owners who orig wanted the tariff but now saw the protection of their industry disappear. The new tariff also infuriated rural interests, especially southern plantation owners, who saw costs increase while no protection was provided to the price of the goods they produced and sold. The 1828 tariff was known as the Tariff of Abominations, but it passed Congress and set the state for a confusing presidential campaign and the crisis that followed.

Tariff of Abominations - a revised fed tariff that lowered the tax on cotton products but raised it on many of the products made in the mid-Atlantic states (unfair in the industries and regions it protected)
Planters in sc saw the tariff as a terrible hardship and an unfair use of fed power. To a degree, they were right. A tax on imports raised the cost of virtually everything the planters needed. Planters worried that a tariff on imported goods might cause other nations to purchase less cotton either in retaliation or because, with Americans buying less from abroad, other nations might not have the funds to purchase American cotton. With their state’s economy hurting, public opinion in sc supported the nullification of the tariff.

The issue of states’ rights v the rights of the fed government was argued on the floor on the US Sen in Jan 1830. Sc Sen Rob Hayne claimed that the fed government was making the north the winner and the south the loser and that pro-northern policy “has invaded the state of sc, is making war upon her citizens, and endeavoring to overthrow her principles and institutions.” Everyone understood that Hayne was talking about the tariff and slavery. He was determined to defend the right of sc to nullify fed law and, if still dissatisfied, to secede from the Union if Congress ever made a move against slavery. Ma Sen Dan Webster’s “Second Reply to Hayne” pleaded for a strong fed union that no state should be allowed to undermine.

At first, people wondered how the president would respond to the debate. Jackson had campaigned for reducing the fed role in people’s lives, but he didn’t like to be crossed. He wasn’t elected to see the government pushed aside. As a military man, he wouldn't countenance mutiny. As a politician, he despised Calhoun’s self-serving strategic maneuvering. To the surprise of some, Jackson embraced Webster’s speech in spite of the fact that it was giving by the sen from ma.

Nevertheless, as strongly as Jackson believed in asserting fed authority, he was still prepared to compromise about the tariff itself. The actual rate charged in the tariff mattered far less to Jackson than the principle that no state had a right to nullify fed law. A compromise seemed possible when Congress convened in 1831. Jqa had been elected to the House of Reps from ma, and the congressional leaders asked him to write a new tariff to replace the Tariff of Abominations. Jqa reduced the duty on goods not produced in the US and therefore not in need of protection, but retained tariffs to protect growing US industries, especially iron and cotton textiles. He also reduced the tariff on cheap woolens (which slaves wore) from 45% to 5%, a significant concession to the slave states.

Most of the south found jqa’s tariff reasonable. Much of the cotton-growing south was prospering, despite the tariff, because of other Jacksonian policies, especially from the new land that Indian Removal had made available for growing cotton. Other states were in no mood to press the nullification issue.

But sc was different. Much of the state’s farmland had been exhausted by decades of overuse, and its dependency on slave labor made its leaders more fearful of fed intervention in the institution of slavery than of any other state. Led by Calhoun, the state’s leaders believed that they had to win the right to nullify the tariff to established the larger principal that states could nullify any law. For them, the jqa tariff wasn’t enough. In Nov 1832, a sc state convention declared that both the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 were unconstitutional. They also said that the state would secede if the fed government tried to force it to back down. The sc leg elected Robert Hayne as the governor to lead the state through these difficult times and elected Calhoun to replace Hayne in the Senate. Calhoun would essentially be sc’s ambassador to the fed government for the next 2 decades. Calhoun resigned as vp in Dec 1832, a little more than 2 months before his term ended, and returned to the Senate as a member. The state was set for a major confrontation.

In Nov 1832, the sc leg also raised a state militia of 25k volunteers. According to Jackson, they had no right to nullify fed law and certainly not to raise their own army and, he said, “Disunion by armed force is treason.” Jackson also lobbied to ensure no other southern state supported sc and pushed Congress to keep the tariffs low.

In the end, no shots were fired. On Mach 1, 1833, Congress passed a compromise tariff that Henry Clay had crafted based on jqa’s proposals and gave the president the authority to put down the rebellion. Wiser heads in sc decided to compromise. The state convention reconvened and declared victory based on the new Clay tariff. For spite, they also nullified the congressional vote of new military authority, which they called the Force Bill, but that was meaningless since sc was no longer resisting fed authority.

Jackson won the nullification battle, but it was an incomplete victory. He made it clear, in words and actions, that no state could nullify fed law and that the US government would use force to assert its authority. He was treated as a hero in many parts of the country. Even so, neither Calhoun nor the sc leg admitted defeat. The leg passed a new law in 1834 requiring anyone holding state office to swear primary loyalty to sc and only conditional loyalty to the fed government. This law effectively barred Unionists, those moderates who disagreed with nullification, and perhaps ⅓ of the state’s voters, from state office for the next 30 years.

Democratized Religion: the Second Great Awakening
Analyze the diversity of American religious experience and how the freedom of the era gave rise to diverse religious expressions

Most Americans had strong opinions about Andrew Jackson. They might love or hate him, but they followed his career. However, politics was far from the only interest of most people. Many things closer to home, and sometimes closer to their own souls, mattered more. For many Americans in the 1820s and ‘30s, the growth of a more popular democracy and popular social movements led by ordinary citizens was far more important the Jackson’s policies or opinions.

Charles G Finney and NY’s “Burned-Over District”

In 1821, Charles Grandison Finney, a 29-y-o lawyer in Adams, ny, not far from the Erie canal, was struggling with the question of whether true religious belief was consistent with his legal career. He decided to leave his law practice, and began to preach in churches in upstate ny, eventually becoming one of the most influential preachers in the us.
In july 1824, Finney was ordained a Presbyterian minister despite his lack of formal training. In 1826, the spirit of revivalism hit upstate ny, and in 1830, Finney led the largest religious revival ever seen in Rochester, ny. 600 people joined 1 of the town’s 3 Presbyterian Churches, and the other denoms were also strengthened.
Finney didn’t seem an emotional catharsis from his congregants but, like an attorney, argued his case logically using wit and wisdom. Nevertheless, in his preaching, the rigid religious orthodoxy that dommed Congregational and Presbyterian churches gave way to a more egalitarian spirit. Finney called people to change their lives, not necessarily to agreement with specific creeds. Because of his preaching, hundreds then thousands took religious more seriously, joined churches, participated in reform movements, and changed ny and American society.
By the late 1830s, the area along the Erie Canal where Finney preached had become known as “the burned-over district” because of the fires of religious enthusiasm that rolled over the region. Finney was far from the only revivalist in ny. However, he gave the ny revivals a distinct tone -- different not only from the emotionalism of frontier revivals but also from the staid life of many established churches. The Erie Canal made communications easier and faster than before, so word of the revivals traveled fast.

Lyman Beecher and the Growth of Voluntary Societies

As a young minister, Lyman Beecher had been one of the staunchest defenders of state support for the Congregational churches in ct. Once the ct churches lost their government support, Beecher embraced the new situation and supported revivals and voluntary actions for moral reform in New England and the nation. As the 2nd Great Awakening grew in force in the 1820s and ‘30s, a series of voluntary societies or interdenominational organizations that Beecher helped launch grew in their influence. These societies weren’t owned by any one religious body but rather depended on the voluntary contributions of members of several different religious bodies. They represented a new form of cooperation across traditional religious lines in the service of a larger goal to change the culture of the US.
By the early 1830s, Beecher had become convinced that the key to transforming the nation lay in the MS Valley. He became pres of the Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati to fulfill this goal. Beecher helped prepare future ministers, strengthened religious colleges, and placed Protestant pastors in hundreds of Midwestern churches. He also helped create the public school system of oh and supported schools and teachers across the Midwest.
The goal of all of this activity was to strengthen the moral way of Congregational-Presbyterian Protestantism against the individualism of the Jacksonian Democrats, Catholics, and other Protestants who disagreed with them. In the world that Beecher and his fellow Protestant evangelists were creating, the separation of church and state meant that specific denoms wouldn’t wield political power, but together these Protestants would help build a culture in which these churches, voluntary societies, and public schools would help reinforce common beliefs and practices.

Revivalism and Moral Reform Movements

Most converts in the revivals were preachers like Finney and Beecher led, perhaps 3/4ths of them, were women who then prayed and lobbied for their husbands and families to convert. Finney and his closest lt, Theodore Dwight Weld, encouraged women to be active in their religious communities. Where New England churches had urged women to keep silent except at home, the new gen of revivalists welcomed them as prayer leaders and preachers. Such speaking may have been familiar in Baptist or Methodist churches, but it was new in the more middle class Presbyterian and Congregational churches. Women who became religious leaders in the revivals often also became leaders in their communities. The movement demanding women’s rights in the 1840s sprang from the same areas of upstate ny called the burned-over district. The link wasn’t surprising.
For Finney, conversion meant that one needed to show their new faith in ethical behavior, and no ethical behavior was more important to him than opposing slavery. For the next 30 years, the Finney-Weld brand of revivalism spread across the nation and was one of the streams of abolitionism that inspired northerners to fight a war to end slavery.
The rights of women and opposition to slavery were not the only reform causes to spring from the revivalism of the 2nd Great Awakening. Other reformers began to advocate for important changes in the way prisoners were treated. Too often, they said, overcrowded prisons were simply schools for crime, and the focus on punishment did little to redeem or reclaim prisoners to reenter society. At first, reformers advocated the building of prisons in which each prisoner would be confined to a solitary cell where they would have time to reflect on their past, be taught new habits, and prepare to reenter society. But too often the solitary confinement led to insanity rather than reform. In response, prison reformers built a new kind of prison in which each prisoner had a separate cell but also had access to common dining quarters, workshops, and a chapel. In all of these spaces, the authorities sought to teach prisoners a new way of behaving as preparation for reclaiming them. In the 1830s, the ny state penitentiary at Auburn was redesigned to foster the new approach, and soon thereafter, a large new penitentiary at Sing Sing on the Hudson River was built with 1k cells plus the common areas. Reformers hoped that the new, more humane approach would change lives and ultimately society. Other states quickly followed in adopting the new models.
Many mentally ill people were treated very much like prisoners before the reforms, and they often found themselves in similar circumstances. Reformers quickly took up the cause of those they said were insane. Dorothea Dix was the most prominent of advocates for better treatment of the mentally ill. The result, beginning in ma, was that a system of state hospitals for the insane replaced the earlier prisons.
Many other reforms also blossomed. Although the campaign against alcohol would peek decades later, it began during the 2nd Great Awakening. Lyman Beecher preached temperance sermons that were widely reprinted. Many, including members of Congress, took the pledge to stop drinking, the US Army stopping the old tradition of a ration of alcohol, and refusing to drink became a mark of religious observance in many circles. At the same time, the American Peace Society advocated an end to all wars. The American Sunday School Union distributed not only Bible stories but also basic reading books in places where there were no schools. Schools opened for the deaf and blind. Efforts were made to rescue prostitutes. Countless reforms designed to created a better, more humane, and sometimes more tightly controlled society emerged from the enthusiasm of the awakening.

Utopian Religious Communities

The religious enthusiasm of the early 1800s also inspired untraditional ways of thinking about religious matters. Large American spaces that allowed people to develop their own communities relatively distributed and the American emphasis on liberty made the US fertile ground for the radical experiments and utopian religious religious communities. Some of these religious experiments were short lived. Others lasted for generations. A few have continued to the present.
Mother Ann Lee and the Shakers
- The founder of the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, or the Shakers, was Ann Lee -- known as Mother Ann Lee -- who before the Am Rev gathered a few supporters in England and came to America in 1774. Lee was convinced that she was receiving a special revelation from God that human sexuality was the basis of all sin and celibacy was the only way to live a godly life.
- Lee inspired Shaker communities in ny and New England. Shaker worship reflected Lee’s spirituality and included “shaking and singing, hopping and turning, smoking and running, groaning and laughing.” Shaker communities at New Lebanon, nh; Sabbath Day Lake, me; and elsewhere thrived, and the Shakers became one of the largest and most successful of the pre-Civil communitarian movements.
- Shaker theology placed Ann Lee on a par with Jesus and committed the society to the equal leadership of women with men. But Shakers were united by their community life more than by theology. They demanded celibacy, a requirement that limited the community’s appeal and prevented increasing membership by means of childbirth. Instead, all new members had to be converts attracted to Shaker life. The revivals produced many such converts who sought a deeper spiritual life than they found in traditional churches. Shaker beliefs were reflected in their commitment to making things of beauty, and Shaker furniture remains a reminder of their beliefs. The things they created were owned in common, not individually, a requirement that some found as difficult to accept as celibacy.
John Humphrey Noyes and the Oneida Community
- The Oneida Community also had its roots in the 2nd Great Awakening and flourished in Oneida, ny, between 1848 and 1879. Its founder and spiritual guide was John Humphrey Noyes, who was born in vt in 1811. As a student for the ministry, he became convinced that repentance from sin wasn’t enough and that people should simply stop sinning.
- Gathering a small community in Putney, vt, he expanded his definition of Christian perfectionism to include what he called “complex marriage,” an arrangement in which monogamy was replaced with many sexual companions. Noyes argued that sexual pleasure was a gift from God and that Christianity demanded the sharing of that gift without any exclusive or jealous reservations.
- Vermont authorities took a dim view of these sexual practices and beliefs, and Noyes and his followers moved to Oneida, ny, where they thrived for decades, supported ultimately by producing and selling silverware. Oneida eventually fell victim to Victorian morality and to its dependence on Noyes as its single charismatic leader. Between 1875 and ‘79, Oneida was torn by debates as ny authorities began threatening arrests for Oneida’s flouting of the marriage laws. Noyes fled to Canada and the community dissolved although the silver business supported former members for gens.
Robert Owen and the New Harmony Community
- After making a fortune in London, Robert Owen founded a model factory at New Lanark, Scotland, in which he sought to put the spirit of universal welfare into practice. In the early 1820s, Owen decided to relocate his utopian vision of a community designed to benefit all of its members and established it in the US.
- In early 1825, 900 people arrived at New Harmony, in, where Owen had purchased land. But New Harmony failed within a year. The community couldn’t attract enough skilled workers to make it econ successful. As one disaffected resident recalled, the “aristocrats” quarreled, and the fields went to ruin. Owen lost most of his fortune, which he had invested in New Harmony, but returned to England to continue to advocate his version of social reform.
Joseph Smith and the Church of Jesus Christ of the LDS
- Joseph Smith (1805-44) was as much a product of ny’s burned-over district as Charles Finney. Smith was born in 1805 and moved with his family to a farm in Palmyra, ny, when he was 11. In 1827, word spread along the Erie Canal that Smith had found a treasure that would unlock the Indian history of the area. He had, he said, found golden plates and magical stones known as Urim and Thummim with which to read and translate what was written on the plates by an ancient prophet-historian named Mormon. He published the result, the Book of Mormon, in 1830. With that book, a uniquely American religious tradition was born, one that its followers believed presented a rebirth of true Christianity.
- Smith, however, did much more than publish a new book. He organized a community. Within a month of the book’s publication, the first Mormon community began to form near Palmyra, ny, with Smith as its leader. Some responded with hostility to his efforts, but converts seeking religious truth poured in, a temple was built, and the community grew.
- In response to the hostility, Smith and the Mormon community moved first to mo and then in the late 1830s to Nauvoo, il, which became the largest and fastest growing city in il because of Mormonism. The city’s 15k residents became a virtually autonomous state, and their militia was recognized by state law. But Smith’s political involvements and religious teaching, especially his suggestion that all members participate in marriages involving 1 husband and multiple wives, brought renewed hostility. On June 27, 1844, a mob killed Smith and his brother Hyrum.
- With Smith’s death, Brigham Young became the new leader of the Mormons in 1847 and led them on a cross-continent trek to the shores of the Great Salt Lake in what is now Utah. Salt Lake was then on the northern edge of the Republic of Mexico, which was soon to be annexed by the US. There, far from any governmental authority, they set up settlements in a tight church-regulated community. They also embraced Smith’s revelation that a man could take as many wives as he could support.
- But the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago, which marked the end of the US War with Mexico from 1846 to ‘48, brought Salt Lake City and the mormon community under the control of the US government. For a while, the US government left the Mormons alone, but in 1857, Pres Buchanan replaced Young with a non-Mormon territorial governor, and the Mormon War broke out as fed authorities tried to enforce monogamy on the Mormons and the Mormons fought back. Only in 1890, after an intense time of prayer and new revelation, did the Mormon leadership abandon polygamy. Relations with the government improved, and Utah became a state in 1896.

Transcendentalism ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡

In 1838, Waldo Emerson gave a speech at harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, ma, that had as much impact as any revival sermon. Emerson had been ordained as a Unitarian minister but had resigned when he came to believe that the Lord’s Supper and public prayer were barriers to direct experience of the divine.
In the Divinity School Address, Waldo told an audience of future Unitarian ministers that too often in formal worship, “The soul is not preached.” Waldo’s call to preach “throbs of desire and hope” rather than formal theology offended most of his audience and he was never invited back to the Divinity School, but the speech represented a new approach to religious life that was developing in America in the 1830s.
While Waldo continued to develop his ideas for another 40 years, the Transcendentalist movement with which he is most associated blossomed in the 1830s. In 1836, a group that came to call themselves the Transcendental Club met at the Boston home of George Ripley, another Unitarian minister, to discuss ideas. The members of the club created a theology that reflected a powerful personal experience of life.
In 1841, under Ripley’s leadership, members of the Transcendental Club founded Brook Farm, a utopian community in West Roxbury, ma, where the residents sought to support themselves through manual labor. Women and men shared work equally, and an effort was made at true gender equity. But few of the residents of Brook Farm actually knew much about farming, the farm didn’t prosper, and the community disbanded in 1847. Nevertheless, Waldo’s writings and the Transcendental movement he helped launch reflected an impatience with old ways and a desire and immediate experience of the divine that continued to impact American religious life.

Democratized Education: the Birth of the Common School
Explain the development of public education as a result of, and in response to, the cultural currents of the 1820s and 1830s

The years during which Andrew Jackson dommed American politics were also years in which the nation’s public school system was radically transformed, though the transformation was mostly the work of Jackson’s opponents. Many of the most prominent education reformers were Whigs who didn’t share Jackson’s vision for American society. They often sought to change the ways schools were organized and conducted for the same reasons they opposed Jackson politically. Schools, Whig educators believed, could build a new American culture more to their liking than the Jacksonian brand of democracy that most school reformers found too individualistic and unlikely to transmit the kind of moral code they thought was essential to a well regulated national life.
Various individuals with their own agendas contributed to what came to be known as the Common School Crusade. Catharine Beecher sought to empower women by opening the doors for them to become school teachers. Horace Mann, a Whig Party leader, helped launch a new and more tightly organized school system in ma -- a system that came to serve as a model for much of the nation. The transformation of the nation’s schools in this period was a key dynamic of the changing culture of the US between the 1820s and the 1840s.

Women Become Teachers

In 1835, Catharine Beecher, daughter of Lyman, was already well known for founding the Hartford Female Seminary to help educate women and for her petitions seeking to stop Jackson’s Indian Removal. In her Essay on the Education of Female Teachers published in that year, Beecher argued that women were much better equipped than men to be teachers, but she also wanted to educate them of the work. She saw teaching as an extension of motherhood, a nurturing role. At a time when most teachers were still men, Beecher argued not only that women actually made teachers than men but also that including women as teachers would expand the supply of teachers for the nation and open the door to a professional life for middle-class women who had few employment options.
Beecher’s impassioned views reflected those as Emma Willard, who had founded Troy Female Seminary in 1821 in upstate ny to prepare women to be teachers. She believed that women should get the same education as men and modeled the curriculum at Troy on what men studied at college, thought she added courses on how to teach. In 1837, Mary Lyon founded Mt Holyoke Female Seminary in ma to give future female teachers a college education.

New Structures for Schooling

While Catharine Beecher and her colleagues were transforming the gender of the teaching profession, other reformers sought to transform the structure of schools. None of these leaders was more important than Horace Mann. in 1836, Mann, a rising star in the ma Whig Party, helped shepherd a bill through the ma leg that created a state Board of Education. He then became the board’s full-time, paid sec. Mann spent the next 12 years advocating tighter state standards for education, more money for schools and teacher salaries, and a better education for children. He became the best-known spokesperson for public education of his gen.
Mann believed in state standards for schools. He also believed that it was in the responsibility of all citizens to pay taxes to support schools. Looking at the condition of the state’s schools when he took office, he didn’t think that they padi nearly enough at the time in such taxes. Like Beecher and Willard, Mann wanted educated teachers and created a system of state-sponsored teacher prep schools, called normal schools, that offered 1 year of state-funded prep to any young man or woman who wanted to be a teacher. Mann’s greatest concern was the moral education of the state’s citizens. He believed that there needed to be a public guardian or morality, and since the US had no state church, that guardian had to be the public school.
While Mann was the best-known education reformer, almost all Whigs also came to advocate the same changes he did: state systems of education, state support for teacher prep, and state efforts to ensure a common morality. Like many reformers, Mann and his allies couldn’t understand why anyone would oppose them. Yet even in ma, there was opposition. Democrats in the leg tried to abolish to Board of Education and the office of sec. They saw the state control that Mann advocated as expensive, unnecessary, and an unwarranted interference by the state in local affairs, which would undermine local support for each town’s school.
Roman Catholics were especially unhappy with the growing influence and cost of the public school system. Catholics saw the public schools as essentially a Protestant venture, something that Protestants like Mann could never understand. Mann advocated teaching the Protestant Bible in school “without note or comment,” leaving it to churches or parent to interpret it. But Catholics believed that the Bible should be read in light of the teachings of the Church and not left to individual interpretation. They found anti-Catholic bias in many of the textbooks the public school used. To pay taxes only to have their children read such material outraged them. Catholics in ny and around the nation started their own parochial system at the own expense.

The Nation’s Textbook: McGuffey’s Reader

In 1836, the small Cincinnati publishing house of Truman and Smith brought out a new textbook for schools. The first McGuffey’s Reader became part of a series, the McGuffey’s Primer, McGuffey’s Speller, and the First through the Sixth McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers. By 1920, when most school districts had turned to other materials, 122 million copies of the book had been sold.
The McGuffey Reader offered lessons in reading and public speaking designed to create a unified, literate, and patriotic society. They reflected the same morality that Mann and Beecher wanted the schools to teach. They included patriotic speeches by Patrick Henry and stories of gw as well as tales of the poor boy and his faithful dog or the poor boy who worked hard and made good. The texts also included ethical instruction, for example, don’t steal apples from someone else’s tree, and instruction in how to speak and present oneself. The goal was a citizenry that could speak well, participate in a common democratic dialogue, and use a common national language instead of regional dialects.
The US that the Readers portrayed was white, middle class, hardworking, and willing to sacrifice for the common good. They also demanded a high standard in reading ability and moved students step by step to attain it. In one-room schoolhouses, often staffed by teachers with little training, which was the national norm throughout the 1800s, a teacher could encourage different students to move from reader to reader in a careful order and be confident that, by the time the student had mastered the Sixth Eclectic Reader, they would be fluent in the English language and in the nation’s ethic norms. Not everyone agreed with the specific values the textbooks taught, and reformers were often tone-deaf to complaints, but the public schools and their teachers shaped American culture as significantly as any of the religious, political, or commercial ventures of the Age of Jackson.

Summaries
Jacksonian Democracy, Jacksonian Government

Andrew Jackson began his first term as president by replacing senior fed office holders with his political allies. Jackson was intent on making the presidency the center of American government. Jackson’s priorities were Indian removal, the scaling back of tariffs and government projects, the destruction of the Bank of the US, and the preservation of the Union in the face of southern advocates of nullification. Although the 5 Civilized Tribes (the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles), living in the Old Southwest, ar, and fl, had adopted many white ways and customs, intermarried with whites, and created a unique culture based on settled farming and the production of goods, white settles and Jackson were determined to seize their land. Indian leaders rallied many whites to their side, but Indian Removal was approved by a narrow margin by Congress and was a disaster for the 5 Civilized Tribes.
In terms of econ, Jackson blamed the Bank of the US for the Panic of 1819 and saw it as an elitist threat to democracy. Jackson waged war against the rechartered bank, a war that culminated in the bank’s destruction. Another battle over the issue of nullification pitted Jackson against John C Calhoun of sc, who had been vp during Jackson’s first term. The so-called Tariff of Abominations, passed in 1828, brought to the fore the issue of a state’s right to declare any fed law null and void. Despite efforts at compromise, in 1832 the sc leg declared the tariffs of 1828 and ‘32 unconstitutional and raised a state militia. Jackson responded with a proclamation denying sc’s right to nullify a fed law, and he prepared to send fed troops to the state. In the end, sc backed down, but either side admitted defeat. In his 2 terms in office, Jackson realized most of his goals, establishing permanent precedents for presidential authority in the process.

Democratized Religion: the 2nd Great Awakening

The 2nd Great Awakening began in the 1790s and reached its height in the decades between 1820 and 1850. The fervent and emotional Protestantism that was at the heart of the movement came to have an enormous influence on the nation’s cultural and political life. The religious revivals led by ministers like Charles G Finney epitomized a number of aspects of the 2nd Great Awakening, including support for abolitionism, the participation of women in society, and links to social reform. This period also saw the emergence of numerous utopian religious communities, including the Shakers, the Oneida Community, the New Harmony Community, and the Mormons. Transcendentalism offered yet another alternative to traditional religion.

Democratized Education: the Birth of the Common School
American women became to argue that teaching was a natural fit with women’s nature and aptitudes, and schools to train women to be teachers proliferated in the first half of the 1800s. Male reformers sought to transform education itself. Horace Mann led the right for mandatory, standardized public education. Mann’s Jacksonian opponents saw public schools as undemocratic and unnecessary. Many Roman Catholics opposed public schools because they saw them as tools for the conversion of their children to Protestant values. The McGuffey Reader became the standard reading and public speaking textbook in the US. The Readers combined practical instruction with indoctrination into the ethical norms of white middle-class Protestant America.

Populism

Political movement with its basis on appealing to the common man and to the people v the elites who have kept them down; often deep-rooted in the emotions of the electorate and tapping into their emotions
eg Jackson

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Public Education

McGuffey Readers
Began in ma, led by Horace Mann
Promoted [Protestant, Whig] morals and values
anti-Catholic (Democrats were largely Irish Catholic)
Propaganda : (

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Utopian Communities and Moral Reform

Born out of the 2nd Great Awakening
Issues of Moral Reform:
- Prison reform
- Mental health
- Temperance (anti-immigrant, particularly Irish and Germans)
- Education
- Abolition
- Women’s rights

Utopian societies were a response to the effects of the market revolution

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The Jackson Agenda

Shake up the administration (spoils system, Kitchen Cabinet)
- Gave his friends and allies posts in the government
Destroy the 2nd Bank of the US
Remove Indian nations occupying territory in the Black Belt
- Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, Chickasaw)

Jackson was a prisoner of war during the American Revolution, and as a result of which, he hated the British and everything associated with the British and so when he in that prisoner of war prison and saw the British giving guns to Indians...

Defeat any politician, court, congressional opposition, or state that stood in his way
- The authority of the president is not to be questioned
- Whig Party, court orders, and nullification be damned

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2nd Bank of the US

Created following the War of 1812 to finance government and pay back loans to creditors; had 20 year charter set to expire in 1836
Jackson’s opposition to the national bank:
- Jackson opposed a large fed government
- The bank was modeled off of the 1st national bank which was modeled after the British system
- The common man views bank as centralizing wealth; the common bank viewed banks as the enemy
Opposition: Congress, under the thumb of the Whig Party led by Henry Clay, wanted to renew the charter
Jackson defeated by bank by veto and Clay in the 1832 presidential election
Jackson gradually weakened the bank by refusing to put new deposits in it by legally dubious means

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Nullification Crisis 1828-33

Tariff of Abominations
- Disadvantages states like sc and favors middle states that Jackson wanted support from
- Caused sc to want to cede
Nullification is the main part of the Tariff of Abominations, in order to preserve slavery, the most important state’s right in sc’s mind

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The Jacksonian Era

Jackson’s populism and its supporters
The opposition from different communities, Whig Party, and reform movements

Chapter 11 - Manifest destiny: Expanding the nation

Significant Dates

1821 - Mexico gains independence from Spain; first American colony established in texas
1829 - Mexico abolished slavery, including in texas
1830 - Revolts against Mexican authority begin in texas
1835 - Americans in tx capture the Alamo, drive out Mexican army
1836 - Narcissa and Marcus Whitman helped found the first Protestant mission in Oregon; texas declares independence from Mexico; fall of the American forces in the Alamo to Mexico army; Treaty of Velasco recognizes independent Republic of Texas; Congress passes gag rule forbidding discussion of slavery
1837 - Financial Panic of 1837
1842 - Webster-Ashburton Treaty resolves US-Canadian border dispute
1844 - Treaty of Wang-hsia gives US open trading rights in China
1845 - the term Manifest Destiny becomes popular; James Polk inaugurated as president; US annexation of texas
1846 - beginning of US War with Mexico
1848 - Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended war with Mexico; Gold Rush in ca
1849 - Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience published ♡♡♡♡♡
1851 - Melville’s Moby Dick published
1853 - Commodore Perry entered Tokyo Harbor, began opening Japan to US; Gadsden Purchase, last acquisition of land in continental US

Manifest Destiny - The Importance of an Idea
Explain why Manifest Destiny meant and how it led the US to involvement in Texas, CA, and OR

Manifest Destiny - the doctrine, first expressed in 1845, that the expansion of white Americans across the continent was inevitable and ordained by Dog and was a means to spread Protestant Christianity and Jacksonian Democracy to more people
The acquisition of so much new territory in the 1830s and 1840s, as well as other developments in people’s thinking, changed the lives of those who lived in the US. The pop of the nation was expanding as dramatically as its geographical borders.
Between 1845 and ‘48, the US would almost double in size, from 1.8 million square miles to almost 3 million.
Many Americans supported versions of Manifest Destiny for their own reasons. Land speculators and those promoting the extension of the nation’s railroads wanted to exploit the vast lands in the West. Farmers dreamed of starting over in reach but cheap new lands. Workers believed that rapid national expansion would guarantee industrial profits and thus their jobs, or give them a chance to start over if necessary. Protestant leaders and missionaries saw US control of the new lands as an opportunity to ensure that a Protestant US, not a Catholic Mexico, controlled the continent. Manifest Destiny also referred to a patriotic belief that the nation had a divine mission to become a world power.
Many other Americans opposed the whole idea of a manifest destiny. Democrats tended to support expansion, but most Whigs, led by Henry Clay, had grave reservations. Clay’s goal wasn’t necessarily a larger nation but a better developed one with roads, canals, railroads, and industries knitting it together and ensuring its prosperity. Antislavery advocates opposed the acquisition of new land, especially texas, since they were certain that new lands meant new slave states. However, some proslavery advocates, notably John Calhoun, wanted texas but worried that other incorporated lands, especially ca and or, might become free states peopled by darker-skinned citizens, which would shift power away from white slaveholding regions.
Some Americans also saw the violence associated with expansion as simply wrong. Many residents of the lands from texas to ca didn’t want to become part of the US.
Californio - person of Spanish descent -- and after 1821, citizen of Mexico -- living in ca
While many Americans debated Manifest Destiny in Congress, the press, and the pulpits, other Americans, especially trappers and farmers, moved into the regions, just as a generation before, the same types of people had expanded beyond the ms. Regardless of whether the US, Mexico, or GB claimed the land, these frontiersmen and women were confident that their government would follow them.

The Birth of the Texas Republic

The tensions between Americans living in texas and the Mexican government that governed it had been building before Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821. When the US purchased la from France in 1803, the western border of the territory was disputed. Spain thought it was the Sabine River, but French officials hinted that the us might claim land further west. Tj had wanted la to include from texas to the Rio Grande but wasn’t prepared to fight Spain over it. In the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819, Spain ceded fl to the us, along with Spanish claims to or, in exchange for us recog of the Sabine River border between la and texas, though some in Congress criticized the treaty for that reason. Despite treaties, Americans still crossed the Sabine in the early 19th century settling in texas.
Soon after the Adams-Onis treaty was signed, a rev uprising began in Mexico. The Mexican rev lasted from 1810 to 1821 and decimated the Mexican economy. In Texas, the Tejanos pop fell from 4k in 1800 to 2.5k in 1821. Comanche and Apache tribes dommed large parts of texas, and much of the desert lacked human habitation. Regardless, after 1821, Mexico had won its independence. Mexico’s leader was Agustin de Iturbide.
Tejanos - people of Spanish or Mexican descent born in texas
Even before Mexican independence, the Spanish government had given mo merchant permission to start a colony in texas, believing that more settlers would help stabilize a border area far from the pop centers of either Mexico or the us. In 1821, Moses’s son Stephen Austin, along with Erasmo Seguin, a Tejano with liberal political views, rode into texas to build the new settlement. A month later, Austin and his party learned that Mexico had won its independence. He then went to Mexico City where he, in April 1823, received confirmation of his claims to a huge swath of land in texas and his right to act as an empresario for the land. He was the only American to get such rights.
Empresario - an agent who received a land grant from the Spanish or Mexican government in return or organizing settlements (colonizing agent)
At first, the new American colony grew slowly, but Austin continued to recruit settlers. Aware that it could do little to stop settlement and anxious for a buffer against Indian tribes and the us, the Mexican government hoped that settlers in texas would create a stable pop of loyal citizens.
Few Europeans and even fewer Mexicans moved into texas, but a lot of Americans came. By 1830, 20k American colonists had arrived with 2k slaves. The Americans generally ignored the requirement of Catholicism, though they didn’t build Protestant churches, and most refused to free their slaves despite Mexico abolishing in 1829. Many Tejanos profited from trade with the Americans and identified with their independent streak. Others clung to their connection to Mexico. Distance, difficult travel conditions, and an unstable government in Mexico City with more pressing concerns closer to home allowed an American community to develop in texas that was officially governed by one set of laws but lived by its own rules.
The Mexican government’s benign neglect on the texan American community ended in 1830 when the Mexican Congress closed texas to further American immigration and the importation of slaves. Mexico also insisted that trade be routed through established ports further south in Mexico rather than directly between texas and the us. The government stationed more soldiers in texas to enforce the rules. Revolts broke out in the English-speaking colonies, a few of which drew Tejano support.
In 1832, Mexican troops defeated an American effort to take control of an army garrison, but in Oct, American colonists met at San Felipe and called for autonomy for texas within Mexico. In 1833, they organized an army commanded by Sam Houston and sent Austin to Mexico City to negotiate for them. Tejanos weren’t repped in these meetings, and most of the 5k Tejanos probably opposed these actions. But by now, there were 30k Americans in texas. Austin had little success in Mexico City; he was arrested in the fall of 1833 and released in the summer of ‘35.
Although revolt had been brewing since 1830, the campaign for texan independence became a war late in 1835 when American volunteers captured the Alamo fortress at San Antonio de Bexar from its Mexican garrison. In Jan and Feb 1836, James Bowie and Wm Travis took joint command of the Alamo, while another Texian force remained in Goliad under the command of James Fannin. Austin went to DC to try to secure American support for the insurrection while Sam Houston took command of a volunteer army based at the Texian’s temp capital of Washington-on-the Brazos.
In response, Mexican president Santa Anna ordered the Mexican army north, capturing the Alamo and killing its defenders in March 1836. The nearly 200 defenders of the Alamo, including Davy Crockett, were killed. An estimated 600 Mexican soldiers were also killed. Remember the Alamo.
After his victory at the Alamo, Santa Anna marched his army to the second texan garrison at Goliad, which surrendered in late March. Santa Anna ordered his soldiers to execute all of the Goliad troops and some 341 died on the spot.
While Texian volunteers fought against the Mexican army, political leaders in convention at Washington-on-the-Brazos and on March 2, 1836, declared the independence of Texas and adopted a constitution. Having defeated the Alamo and Goliad, Santa Anna didn’t care and turned on Sam Houston’s army, the only remaining defenders of Texas. Houston began a slow retreat. Then, after Santa Anna’s troops had been marching for days with an increasingly thin supply line, Houston turned on them. In April 21, 1836, Houston defeated Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto. Houston’s troops executed hundreds of Mexican prisoners. The next day, Santa Anna was captured and forced to sign the Treaty of Velasco, promising to withdraw all Mexican troops from Texas, end the war, and recognize the independence of Texas. The Mexican Congress refused to recognize the treaty, but neither the Mexican government nor the Texians wanted more fighting.
In the early fall of 1836, Sam Houston, hero of the Battle of San Jacinto, was elected president of Texas, Austin sec of state. Both men and most of their followers didn’t want long-term independence and wanted to be absorbed by the US but the US was reluctant. Texas would be a huge slave state, and many in DC worried about the destabilizing impact on the nation have having such a powerful addition to the slave states in the Senate. US trade with Mexico was too important to trifle with. Jackson didn’t want to risk annexing Texas, especially in 1836 when Van B was in the midst of the presidential election. After the election, Jackson officially recognized the Republic of Texas, but that was as far as they would go. The Texas Republic would stand on its own for the immediate future.

Distant California

While texas was declaring its independence from Mexico, Alta California was a sleepy and distant outpost of Mexico, and most people in Mexico and the us were okay with that. California had wonderful harbors, large and prosperous rancheros, and a string of missions, but it was a long way from the heart of either nation. In the 1830s, the pop there included not only Mexicans but also a much smaller no of Americans. Neither groups thought seriously about independence. A majority among the declining number of Indians in california were doing their best to maintain their tribal ways and keep their distance from settlers, though some were living under the supervision of the missions.
Although Spanish explorers had sailed the coast of california and claimed the lands in the 16th century, meaningful European settlements in california began in the mid-18th century. In 1769, a Franciscan priest Father Junipero Serra was sent to Alta California with instructions to found a chain of missions that would help convert the california Indians to Catholicism, put them to work for the Spanish, and establish a stronger Spanish presence to protect against possible Russian expansion.
Father Serra and his Franciscan successors succeeded in establishing a chain of missions from San Diego to San Francisco. The Franciscan friars meant to save the Indian souls and bring them the gifts of Spanish culture, but they also worked them hard to ensure a good economic return for the missions, maintaining tight control and a tough discipline. When Serra arrived in california, there were ~ 300k Indians in the area, but by the time Spanish rule ended in 1821, the pop reduced to 200k. From the Spanish government’s perspective, the missions were significant in asserting sovereignty as they controlled the Indian work force and managed the colony’s cattle, grain, and trade.
The Franciscans administered the california missions until 1833 when the Mexican government, which had seized power from Spain in 1821, transferred ownership of the missions from church to state and eventually to private hands. Mexico’s rev was partially a rejection of the power of the Catholic Church, and seizing the missions was a means to that end. Missions were sold off or awarded to powerful ranchers.
As late as 1821, california’s total Mexican pop was about 3k, though it grew to between 10 and 15k by 1846. The majority lived on large ranches spread along the coast. Some few immigrants from the us also moved to california in theses years. Most of the americans arriving before 1840 learned Spanish, converted to Catholicism, took on Mexican citizenship, and became part of the local culture of Alta California.
Beginning in the 1840s, a different group of us immigrants began to arrive who were interested in making california part of the us. Even before the war with Mexico began, President Polk advocated to Congress the beneficial aspects of california’s harbors. Polk’s sec of the navy Geo Bancroft anticipated the coming of war with Mexico and ordered Commodore John Sloat, commander of the US Pacific squadron, based in Hawaii, to land in San Francisco if war came. At the same time, US Army Captain John Frémont led what he claimed was a military map-making expedition overland from St Louis, arriving in Monterey, california, in late Dec 1845. Frémont told the Mexican authorities he was simply exploring. They had their doubts that he was just making maps but allowed him to remain. In April 1846, a us warship arrived at Monterey, with orders for Frémont and the us counsel in california, Thomas Oliver Larkin, to stir up a pro-american revolt in california. The once distant outpost was quickly becoming an important focus of attention in the growing tensions between the us and Mexico.

Manifest Destiny and American Presidential Politics

The creation of the Dem Party as a vehicle to continue his political philosophy and support his hand picked successor was one of Jackson's most sig achievements. The twin pillars on which the party rested were a small fed government and the idea of Manifest Destiny. The Feds and d-rs were long gone. America’s founding gen, including all presidents up to jqa, disliked party spirit. Van B, who had built on the base of the older d-r orgs to create the new Dem Party that elected Jackson and who followed him as its candidate, didn’t feel that way.
As part of their effort to build a strong political party, Jackson and Van B called the first national political convention to be held by a major party. The event was held in Baltimore in 1835, a year before the election. The Dems borrowed the idea of a national convention as part of their prep for the 1839 election, and their tight political org allowed the Dems to win most presidential contests until the Civil War when the party splintered. At the 1835 convention, Jackson stage-managed Van B’s nom as the Dem candidate for what some said was basically a 3rd term for Jackson. The outgoing president also managed to ensure the nom of his choice for vp, Richard Mentor Johnson of ky, in spite of an effort by va’s delegates to derail his nom.
The core principle of the emerging Whig Party was opposition to Jackson, though it also wanted a larger fed government that could manage internal improvements. The Whigs continued to support a Bank of the us. But the Whigs dislike Van B’s ideas of political parties and continued to distrust the growing sense of party spirit. Given this, the Whigs weren’t well org’ed enough to have a national convention to prep for the 1836 election, instead relying on state conventions. They reasoned that, even if the various states didn’t nom the same candidate, they might sue a number of pop candidates to gain enough electoral votes to throw the election into the House of Reps where they were confident they could control the outcome. Having lost with Henry Clay in 1832, most Whig leaders wanted a diff candidate.
- Whh was a popular choice in the north and west.
- Southern whigs nommed Hugh Lawson White of tn
- Ma whigs nommed Sen Dan Webster
- The whig effort to appeal to diverse constituencies with diff candidates failed. In Nov 1836, Van B.
Van B faced several challenges as he began to govern. He pledged to continue Jackson’s policies and did so, in particular, presiding over the final removal of the Cherokees to OK and a long and bloody war against the Seminoles in fl. Given his difficulties with the Seminoles, Van B decided against removing Iroquois tribes from ny. He avoided a war with gb when Canadian rebels recruited volunteers along the American side of the great lakes. In spite of his ties to Manifest Destiny, he had no inclination to deal with tx or or.
Gag rule - a procedural rule passed in the House of Reps that prevented discussion of antislavery petitions from 1836 to 1844
In addition, issues of nullification and abolitionism continued, unresolved. Like Jackson, Van B opposed nullification or nay effort to disrupt the Union. He also opposed abolitionism, which he saw as another attack on the Union along with nullification. Southerners supported Van B, and he repaid them by supported a gag rule in congress. The gag rule was a promise by congressional leaders in the house of reps to ignore abolitionist petitions. In the end, the gag rule only highlighted the divisions over slavery. Through the 1830s and ‘40s, jwa and other whigs began to introduce antislavery petitions at each session of Congress before the house adopted its rules, including the gag rule. Then, during sessions, he reg interrupted other debates to ask the Speaker whether this or that petition ran afoul of the gag rule while knowing it did but using the occasion to describe both the petition and the gag rule. Perhaps more effectively than sans the rule, jqa used these manipulations of the gag rule to change the public opinion on slavery, even if he couldn’t get the votes he wanted from the house.
Panic of 1837 - a major economic downturn brought on by temp excesses in international trade and the inability of the US to control the currency or make credit available after the closing of the 2nd Bank of the US
Specie Circular - a proclamation issued by president Jackson in 1836 stipulating that only gold or silver could be used as payment for public land
Most challenging for Van B’s political fortunes was the fact that some of the economic policies Jackson had advocated for had their greatest yet worst impact during Van B’s term. Only 2 months after Van B’s inaug, the Panic of 1837 hit the nation. The init cause of the panic was a sudden drying up of credit. Without the ability to borrow money, cotton brokers failed, banks failed, and the great ny mercantile house of Arthur Tappan an Comp failed. In his hatred of banks and distrust of debt, Jackson had paid off the national debt -- sending a great deal of us currency to bond holders in gb and reducing the currency available in the us. Jackson had also closed the 2nd Bank of the US, which had the ability to expand credit when needed. In addition, he had issued a Specie Circular in 1836, which reflected Jackson’s distrust of banks, but once the economy began to decline in 8137, many Americans began to think that if the us wouldn’t trust bank notes, then they shouldn’t either. There was a run on banks, and few banks had sufficient reserves of silver and gold to redeem all the issued bank notes. Banks failed, and credit became even scarcer, crippling the economy.
A second panic iht in 1839, this the result of overspeculation in cotton and cotton-producing land. When british investments and international trade stalled, the value of cotton, land, and slaves all plummeted. The sale of public lands, and fed rev from these sales, virtually stopped. Northern textile and shoe industries laid off thousands of workers. More banks closed. The panic lasted until 1843.
Given his commitment to small government, Van B could and would do little about the economy. His position enabled the Whigs in the 1840 election to describe him as cold and heartless. In 1840, the Whigs held a single national convention that unified them behind one presidential candidate: whh, and John Tyler of va for vp. Tyler was a Whig only because he found Jackson high handed, not because he disagreed with most of his policies.
Whh died good riddance
Before he became seriously ill, whh had called a special session of Congress to deal with the economic crisis. When the whig-dommed congress convened, it recreated the Bank of the US so that there could be fed control of the currency and credit, thus easing economic conditions from the removal of the bank. President Tyler, a believer in small government, vetoed the bill. Congress then created a fiscal corp that would have more limited powers, which Tyler vetoed. Tyler did sign the Land Act of 1841, which made it much easier for homesteaders to buy fed land or keep land on which they were squatters, and he signed the first fed Bankruptcy act. The whigs were furious at him. In sept 1841, the entire cabinet save sec of state Webster resigned in protest over the veto of the bank bills, and the whig congressional caucus expelled tyler from the party.
Webster-Ashburton Treaty - the treaty signed by the US and gb in 1842 that settled a boundary dispute between the US and Canada and provided for closer cooperation in suppressing the African slave trade
Expanding the size of the US remained an issue throughout the Tyler presidency. Webster had refused to resign as sec of state primarily because he was negotiating with gb to resolve a dispute that came close to war over where to locate the border between Maine and Canada. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842 resolved the border with Canada as far west as Minnesota. Tyler supported Webster because he didn’t want problems with gb when he turned to his real priority: tx.
Tyler had 2 paramount goals: the annexation of tx (which succeeded) and his own reelection (which failed). In sept 1843, tyler began secret negotiations with tx over annexation. In april 1844, tyler’s new sec of state, john calhoun, only a whig because he hated jackson over nullification, presented a treaty to the Sen for the annexation of tx. Calhoun justified the treaty in explicitly proslavery terms, insisting that if the us didn’t annex tx as a slave state, gb would take it over and end slavery there, blocking the expansion of us slavery. But the nation’s leading whig Henry Clay and Dem Van B both announced their opposition to annexation largely because of slavery. The Sen rejected the treaty.
The link between tx and slavery doomed the presidential hopes of both tyler and calhoun since both were seen as using a political gimmick to gain their way. The whigs nommed Henry Clay. have been expelled by the whigs, tler tried for the Dem nom, but the party spurned him. Jackson still dommed the Dem Party and wouldn't allow him to be their candidate nor van B from his opposition to the annexation of tx. The Dems ended up nomming Jackson’s choice James K Polk of tn.
James K Polk had served as a speaker of the house from 1835 to ‘39 but had twice been defeated for governor of tn. Few besides Jackson thought he would be president. His whig opponent Henry Clay was one of the best-known political leaders in the us. If van b had been the dem nom, the election would have been found over clay’s support for fed financed internal improvements and his advocacy for the bank of the us, which van b opposed. With polk as their nom, the dems planned to focus the election on manifest destiny, claiming themselves a the party of national expansion and the whigs as timid defenders of the status quo. This focus on manifest destiny, especially as it applied to texas, assured polk dhte support of Jackson and president tyler and calhoun’s proslavery partners who included whigs and dems in the south. Many Catholics saw the whigs as protestant, while the dems courted Catholic voters, especially recent immigrants. In the end, polk won. Expansion in or and texas was going to be at the top of polk’s agenda.
Because the new president wouldn't take office until March 4, tyler still had 4 months to serve in office. Tyler, with Jackson’s advice and Polk’s support tried to admit texas as a state. Instead of a treaty with tx, both houses of Congress passed a resolution admitted tx as a state in feb 1845, leaving it to the president to negotiate the tx border with mexico. 5 senators, led by mo’s Th Hart Benton, who had opposed annexation, now supported the statehood resolution based on a promise that president polk would conduct the negotiations about the texas border. Tyler didn’t feel bound by the promise. On march 1, 1845, tyler signed the resolution admitting texas, sent envoys to texas offering immediate statehous sans negotiations, and held a gala white house party to celebrate. Benton was furious, and most whigs were equally distraught.

54°40’ or Fight -- the US and Oregon

Until the mid-1830s, few Americans had explored or settled in oregon. The Canadian Hudson’s Bay Comp dommed the fur business in oregon, and Indian tribes traded furs to the comp for rifles and other goods. In 1836, 2 missionaries, Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, became first-rate publicists for the beauties of the oregon territory.
The Whitmans’ letters about oregon attracted further american settlement, but the claim to the or terr had been shared by the us and gb since a series of treaties negotiated by then sec of state jqa between 1818 and 1824 created the joint american-british governance of oregon. The or terr stretched along the Pacific coast from the northern border of Spanish-Mexican california to the southern border of Russian America (alaska) and included the present us states of oregon, washington, and idaho and British Columbia and the Yukon Territory. By the 1840s, both governments wanted to resolve the border and end the joint ownership of the territory.
In the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842, the us and gb had already negotiated a us-canadian border. Continuing that border west would split the oregon territory between the 2 nations. Tyler’s ambassador in London proposed making the 49th parallel the boundary all the war to the Pacific but giving the british the southern tip of Vancouver Island and giving both nations the right to navigate the Juan de Fuca Strait between Vancouver and the mainland.
In his 1844 campaign, polk promised to win all of oregon up to the alaskan border (54°40’). But polk needed his army for the war that he expected to have with mexico and didn’t want to also fight gb. The coalition that elected him was divided about oregon. Calhoun and the southern planters would have given all of oregon to gb, not wanting a war or tension to interrupt the cotton trade with gb. From calhoun’s perspective, any future states from the oregon territory would most likely be free states. Mo’s sen the hart benton wanted oregon and would hold polk to his promise. Jqa, now a power in the house of reps, agreed with benton. Although he opposed to annex texas because of slavery, he was still an american expansionist.
The British government, led by Prime Minister Rob Peel, also wanted a compromise that would support the Hudson’s Bay Comp but also guarantee an uninterrupted flow of american cotton to british mills and avoid war with the us. Peel also faced other issues more pressing than oregon, but others in london wanted more of oregon and insisted that the southern border of british oregon should be the columbia river, which recreated the disputed triangle of land that both nations claimed.
The Peel and Polk administrations eventually compromised along the 49th parallel in spring 1846. The agreement was an obvious compromise, but it meant that the us was free to pursue actions that polk considered more important.

The US War with Mexico, 1846 - 1848
Analyze the causes, strategies, and outcomes of the US War with Mexico

2 years before Presidents Tyler and Polk had managed the us annexation of texas, mexico had warned the us that such would mean war because mexico still claimed the territory. After tyler signed the annex leg, mexico severed diplomatic relations with the us.
Although the vote to make texas a state was passed in march of 1845, texas didn’t rat the agreement until july 1845, and congress didn’t rat until dec. meanwhile, Mexican President Jose Joaquin Herrera agreed to negotiate with the us. He knew his country didn’t have the resources to fight a war, but he also knew that public opinion in Mexico would never accept the loss of texas. Polk sent former la congressman John Slidell to Mexico City to negotiate.

Fighting the War in Texas and Mexico, Responding to Resistance

Although there were tensions between Americans and the Mexican government from texas to california, the heart of the concerns in 1846 had to do with texas. Texas had never governed any land west of the Nueces River. Many in the us and Mexico considered that river to be the western boundary, but polk and many texans claimed that the Rio Grande was the border. Herrera didn’t accept that. Polk really wanted texas and also nm and california. He would purchase it if he could, but war was an option.
While negotiations continued, Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to cross the la-texas border at the Sabine River in June 1845 and from there to continue to approach the Rio Grande. Taylor initially moved only to the Nueces where he halted at Corpus Christi to train his 4k troops. But his orders were clear: any Mexican movement across the Rio Grande would be considered an act of war. It took almost a year for the war to start, but in April 1846, Taylor’s army moved to the northern edge of the Rio Grande. On April 25, 1846, 11 Americans were killed in a battle with Mexican troops who had crossed the Rio Grande. Polk announced the war to congress on May 11, 1846
Not everyone in Congress agreed. Most Whigs opposed war, though they wanted to support the troops and didn’t want to be seen as unpatriotic. President Polk declared that a state of war existed between the US and Mexico on May 13, 1846.
The war that a divided Congress declared was fought by a divided nation. Polk and his supporters expected a quick victory. Polk got a longer and more costly war than he bargained for.
The war provoked strong opposition. A decade before it began, jqa warned congress that the annexation of texas would bring on a war in which the us would be in the wrong. Jqa voted against the war in the House of Reps.
Once the war began, others joined jqa in opposition. Lincoln voiced his suspicions about the war. Lt Col Ethan Hitchcock wrote that the war is a pretext for taking california and as much of this country as it chooses.
♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡Henry David Thoreau ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡ ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡ believed that the war with Mexico was immoral. ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡
In the first battles of the war, Taylor defeated a larger Mexican force and occupied the Mexican town of Matamoros in May 1846. The Mexican army fought bravely, but the Americans had superior tech (rifles and artillery). The US Navy blockaded Mexican ports on the Gulf and Pacific coasts, so Mexico couldn’t import supplies from abroad. Taylor’s army moved slowly into Mexico, but heat and disease took a toll. 1 in 8 US soldiers died in a 6 week encampment in Camargo despite the lack of battle. Bad water was a cause. In sept 1846, Taylor defeated another larger Mexican force and captured the crucial Mexican town of Monterrey. With both armies now exhausted, Taylor allowed the Mexicans to withdraw peacefully and declared a truce, which infuriated Polk
After the victory at Monterrey, Polk tried to open peace negotiations, but the Mexican government wasn’t interest. A surprise because the us had secretly helped the former mexican dictator Santa Anna seize power in Mexico City, based on his promise that he would conclude a peace treaty. But once in office, Santa Anna prepared to fight rather than bargain.
Santa Anna marched north to engage Taylor, whom he knew was now short of troops. In feb 1847, the 2 armies met at the Battle of Buena Vista. It was the largest engagement and a draw, which meant that Santa Anna had failed to defeat the Americans on Mexican soil. Taylor’s army remained intact.
Many of Taylor’s best troops had been moved further south. As Polk realized he was in for a long fight, he also knew that Taylor couldn’t march across the deserts to Mexico City. the distance was too long to supply an invading army. Polk also worried about making Taylor a war hero and political rival. So he turned to the experienced prof soldier Winfield Scott to plan an invasion of Mexico. In March 1847, Scott landed troops at the port of Veracruz. His army then marched to Mexico City. After hard fighting, Mexico City surrendered in Sept 1847. Polk, still worried about military heroes, then removed Scott from command in early 1848. The US had lost 12,518 soldiers and spent almost $100 million in the war. Mexico had lost more lives, and its economy was devastated.

From New Mexico to Alta California and the Bear Flag Revolt

While the major focus of the fighting in the us war with mexico took place on the texas border and in the heartland of mexico, nm and california were locations too, though they were of smaller scale than anything seen elsewhere. In 1846 General Kearny won Sante Fe (there was no battle) (Ch Bent, an American already living in Taos, appointed territorial governor) and in 1846 there was a US victory in california. Although a bloody rebellion against us rule by Hispanics and Indians broke out later that year, and Bent was killed by rebels, us troops soon suppressed it, and most armed resistance to annexation ended.
Bear Flag Revolt - a revolt led by recent American immigrants who temp declared california to be an independent Republic until US forces took control of the territory
Emboldened by this show of support, a group of armed American immigrants in the inland town of Sonoma arrested General Mariano Vallejo, the symbol of Mexican authority in Sonoma to Americans, and jailed him. Vallejo had retired from active duty with the Mexican government and was quite friendly to a possible american takeover. But to the americans, Vallejo symbolized Mexican authority. With no other Mexican leader in sight, the rebels org’ed what they called the Bear Flag Revolt by declaring california to be independent. They also designed and raised a flag that had a grizzly bear on it. To the mexicans like vallejo, the bear flag was a symbol that these new immigrants were the bears who came as a thief to take their cattle and land. Soon after vallejo’s arrest, Sloat’s US Navy squadron sailed into Monterey Bay and proclaimed US conquest of California as a victory in the war with Mexico. The independent california was short lived. The rebels replaced the Bear Flag with the US flag.
The American conquest of california was much easier than the war along the Rio Grande in texas. The mexican government was less interested in california than in texas, which had allowed a unique california culture to develop in the early 19th century. Mexican citizens of california had a decidedly ambivalent attitude toward annexation by the us. Regardless, some native californians opposed the american takeover and fought against the Bear Flag rebels and the american forces led by Navy Commodore Robert Stockton, who had replaced Sloat, and Captain Fremont. Those californians saw themselves as citizens of Mexico and the Americans as invaders. In a series of skirmishes between 1846-47, 35 of those fighting on the American side died in battle while ~8 Californios were killed. Later, the californios suffered greater losses in property and their way of life.
There were many reasons for the limited nature of the warfare in california. The total non-Indian pop of california was small, and most of the reg Mexican forces had abandoned the region before hostilities began. Most of the Mexican leaders in california were hoping for an American takeover to replace the distant and inept Mexican administration and the lawlessness of the American Bear Flag frontiersmen. In Jan 1847 Andres Pico’s troops marched into Los Angeles and disbanded. The American control of the region was complete.

Negotiating the Peace, Defining the Borders

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo - the treaty, signed in 1848, ended the us war with mexico and grants the US control of all tx, nm, and california
In april 1847, Polk had sent diplomat Nicholas Trist to accompany Scott and negotiate a treaty with the Mexican government. After the fighting in Mexico City had ended, Trist began serious negotiations. With Mexico City, Nm, and california already in the hands of the US Army, Polk decided that Trist wasn’t good enough and recalled him. Instead of returning, Trist warned the Mexican authorities that his replacement would demand more. The Mexicans were anxious to end the US occupation of Mexico City and the nation’s key ports. On Feb 2, 1848, Trist and the Mexican commissioners signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The treaty was for less land than Polk had wanted.
Realizing he was stuck with the treaty Trist had negotiated, Polk submitted it to the Senate, which ratified it. Polk refused to pay Trist. Regardless, with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, peace had come. The us war larger, now including 90k new citizens.
In 1853, President Pierce sent James Gadsden to Mexico City with instructions to buy a strip of land south of arizona and nm for a southern transcontinental railroad from nola to El Paso to Los Angeles, which needed to be south of the Rocky Mts. Gadsden was also told to purchase as much additional land as possible. Mexican authorities suspected that. In the end, Mexico sold only the min that the us wanted.
Gadsden Purchase - the final acquisition of land in the continental US was completed in 1854 when the US paid Mexico $10 million for a strip of land in what is now southern NM and Arizona
In his own eyes, Polk had a successful term. He had made the us a continental nation. He had completed the job he had promised to do and didn’t seek a 2nd term. For the election of 1848, Polk’s Dems nommed Lewis Cass of Michigan. The Whigs nommed General Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore as his running mate.
- Taylor - nationalist, slaveholder
- Cass - expansionist
- Northerners did not like Taylor or Cass
- Northerners created the Free Soil Party - all new territories would be free of slavery (didn’t propose abolishing preexisting slavery but opposed the expansion of it)
- Free Soilers nommed Van B
- Taylor won.

The Whigs had opposed Polk throughout his term, especially on the issue of the War with Mexico, and the president feared creating military heroes throughout the war. In the end, a Whig war hero succeeded him. A little over a year into his term, on july 4, 1850, Taylor died and vp Fillmore took his place. There were no major policy shifts when Fillmore took office.

West into the Pacific
Analyze the causes and outcomes of US expansion in CA and into the Pacific region, including establishing new relationships with HI, China, and Japan

Early in his term of office, President Polk had told Congress that he was interested in acquiring California’s harbors from Mexico because, he said, these ports would shelter American ships and open up the Pacific to trade with Eastern nations. Gold was discovered in California, and the resulting Gold Rush made into thriving commercial centers not only gold camps but also cities around harbors. These harbors quickly became home to American ships that had been domming much of the Pacific Ocean. In the 1840s, American whaling ships led all other nations in the whaling trade in the Pacific, and the US Navy led the way to American negotiations for a role i trade with Hawaii and China, and eventually Japan.

The Gold Rush to California

On Jan 24 1848, James Marshall (on Johann Sutter’s land) found a gold mine in california. His was the first discovery of gold that would led to the California Gold Rush.
California Gold Rush - the rush to find gold that brought thousands of new residents to california and produced millions of $ in new wealth for the region and the US
Sutter and Marshall tried to keep the discovery a secret, but word spread. While communications were still slow, prospective miners from all over california -- Indians, Mexican residents, and American settlers -- and immigrants from Oregon, Hawaii, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Australia, France, and parts of China moved into the gold fields of the Sierra Nevada mts. ⅔ of the white men in Oregon went to california. Recently discharged soldiers from the Mexican and American armies went as well. In the earliest days, California Indians who knew the land best made excellent gold prospectors. That didn’t last.
President Polk, determined to show the value of the newly acquired territory, included a mention in his Annual Message to Congress. $10 million in gold was produced in california in 1848, and within 3 years, the revenue grew to $220 million. So much gold changed the economic calculations of the US and much of the world. There was a great deal of gold in circulation everywhere.
Thousands of people wanted to get rich quickly by finding gold in california. California’s non-Indian pop was around 7k in 1845 and grew to almost 93k in 1850. The cheapest way to get to california was a continental trip, despite being long and dangerous, and the most expensive way was sailing around south america, which was the safest but long.
The gold camps were harsh places. Fortunes were made and lost on the fields and at gambling tables and through theft and intimidation. White Americans resented the competition from non-white immigrants. Within a short time, most Chinese and Indian miners had been driven from the gold fields through violence and intimidation, though some Indians were retained to work for subsistences wages mining gold for others while the Chinese found other work, eventually building the western railroads and developing service industries for miners and others.
The incredible jump in california’s immigrant pop came at a terrible cost for the california Indians. Their pop, already declining in the face of the missions, declined much more rapidly after the beginning of the Gold Rush because of disease and murder, decreasing by almost 85% between 1848 and 1880 to 23k. African slaves were rare because slave owners knew it was too easy for a slave to escape in california and because other miners hated all competition.
Few women were able to succeed as miners; fewer women than men came to california in the gold rush. Mining camps were primarily male. Some women who did come to california were forced to tricked into prostitution to pay for their passage from Europe, China, and Latin America.
The most freewheeling era of the gold camps was short lived. By 1851, the chances of stumbling upon gold had pretty much ended. Gold mining was transformed into large-scale hydraulic mining, which required large corp investments and reduced most miners to hired labor. For hired laborers, there was no possibility of making a fortune. Gold mining continued and fortunes were still made in the gold fields, but the Gold Rush was over.

Whaling in the Pacific Ocean

In general, the whaling industry was a source of wealth to some Americans while supporting many others and contributing to the American economy. The gold age of the American whaling industry began after the War of 1812 and continued until Civil War in 1861. During these years, hundreds of American ships moved from their earlier and safer whale hunts in he Atlantic to 2,3, and 4 year voyages to the Pacific. Whale oil was used for lamps across the globe. Whale products provided oil for the industrial rev and bone for hoop dresses and corsets. By 1830, ⅘ of all the whaling ships in the world were American.
The owners and captains of most American whaling whips were mostly New England English men, many Quakers, but there were exceptions. A few African-Americans (eg Paul Cuffee and Absalom Boston) became captains, and Cuffee became a ship owner. The crews came from almost every corner of the globe -- Pacific Islanders, West Indians, South Americans, or Portuguese. Whaling was one of the few occupations where black people were paid the same as white people. 10 % of those who worked on whaling ships were black. Most sailors in the whaling business were white men.
Few women served on whaling ships. Some captains took along their wives and children.
Whaling ships also explored parts of the world unknown to previous gens of Americans. The first Americans to enter Japan were whaling sailors. US whaling ships explored much of the South Pacific, sailed off the coast of Australia, and explored Antarctica. Honolulu and San Francisco became major American ports, rivaling New Bedford, Boston, and nantucket.

The Navy and Diplomacy Across the Pacific

While many American whaling ships had been sailing the Pacific since 1815, the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo added a string of Pacific ports to the us. The push for Pacific ports had been part of the driving force behind President Polk’s push for war. The acquisition of those ports expanded us interest in the Pacific and beyond.
Central to the “command” of the Pacific was securing US influence in Hawaii. Many Protestant missionaries and merchants began arriving in Hawaii in the 1820s where they built churches, schools, and businesses. Missionaries, merchants, and whalers boosted the Hawaiian economy, but they also brought alcohol, gambling, prostitution, and disease, including venereal diseases that killed many Hawaiians and reduced their ability to maintain their independence.
On occasion, the US did protect the Hawaiians. American missionary Wm Richards advised King Kamehameha II on ways to maneuver among the great powers and play the us, gb, and fr against each other. In 1842, sec of state Dan Webster added Hawaii to the protections of the Monroe Doctrine. In 1851, Webster negotiated a secret treaty with King Kamehameha III that, in the event of war, Hawaii would become a us protectorate. Webster’s priority was securing trading rights and the use of Honolulu as a coaling station for US steamships on their way to trade with China and Japan.
Just as the US gained San Francisco and influence in Hawaii, gb was forcing China to open to the west. China saw itself as the center of the world. Foreigners were barbarians who might be allowed to trade in a limited way through the port of Guangzhou but would never be treated as equals. Despite, American merchants wanted access to trade with China, and American missionaries wanted access to its people. Regardless, both were mostly shot out. In the Opium War (1839-42), the British forced China to open its ports to British products, including opium from British India, and cede Hong Kong Island as a British colony. US Ambassador Caleb Cushing negotiating the treaty of Wang-hsia in 1844, which gained the us the same trade rights as the British.
While gb took the lead in China, the us forced Japan to open to the west. The us wanted Japan as another coaling station beyond Hawaii on the route to China and wanted to trade with Japan for its own sake. President Fillmore sent Commodore Mathew Perry to “open up” Japan. In July 1853, Perry led 4 warships with nearly 1k sailors into Tokyo Bay and began negotiations. He returned in March 1854 with a larger fleet. He did everything he could to impress the Japanese. The Japanese grudgingly agreed to the Kanagawa Treaty that opened 2 relatively isolated ports to the us. Only in 1858 did Japan open more ports and establish formal diplomatic relations with other nations. Gb quickly became a larger economic and military force in Japan than the us. Regardless, the us had established a solid presence in Japan and China by the late 1850s.
Kanagawa Treaty - an 1854 agreement -- the first between the US and Japan -- it opened 2 Japanese ports to American commerce, protected shipwrecked American sailors, and ended Japan’s 200 years of isolation
As a result of expansion in the 1840s, the nation’s border was extended to the Pacific, and US ships sailed everywhere on that ocean. The Pacific and every nation on its shores were in much closer contact with the US than they had been a short time before. After 1848, the US was an emerging force in the world.

Summaries
Manifest Destiny - the Importance of an Idea

The term Manifest Destiny strongly implied that American rule over the heart of North America was part of a divine plan. For supporters of Manifest Destiny, American expansion was closely linked to the spread of Jacksonian democracy and Protestantism. Many Americans, from farmers to missionaries, supported versions of Manifest Destiny for their own reasons. Opponents of Manifest Destiny, including most Whigs and abolitionists, saw more problems than opportunities in expansion. Tensions between Americans living in Texas and the Mexican government led to war and the establishment of the Republic of Texas. Jackson and Van B worked hard to increase the strength of the Democratic Party. They used that strength to secure Van B’s election to the presidency in 1836. Van B supported the efforts of southerners to prevent congressional debate about slavery. However, economic problems caused by actions taken in the Jackson administration undermined Van B’s presidency.

The US War with Mexico, 1846 - 1848

The desire of the US to acquire NM and CA led to hostilities with Mexico. The specific event that caused the US War with Mexico was a dispute over the border between Texas and Mexico. In 1846, President Polk responded to a clash between American and Mexican soldiers at the Rio Grande as a pretext for war. There was considerable opposition to the war, particularly among Whigs. Perhaps the most influential response to the war came from H♡nry D♡v♡d Th♡r♡♡♡ when he wrote Civil Disobedience. The war took longer and cost more in men and resources than American leaders had anticipated. The terms of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo added an enormous amount of new territory to the US. American settlers and some Mexicans took steps to separate Alta California from Mexico in the years before the US War with Mexico. The US supported their efforts with aid in their Bear Flag Revolt. The US War with Mexico and the discovery of gold transformed Alta Ca. The fed government played an active role in the transfer of Mexican-owned lands into the hands of American settlers, although the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo promised otherwise. The 1848 Gold Rush brought a huge influx of immigrants into Ca and enormous wealth to some.

West into the Pacific

The whaling industry made considerable contributions to the American economy in the mid-19th century. By 1835, ⅘ of all the whaling ships in the world were American. Whaling ships were crewed by sailors from almost every corner of the globe. In the process of hunting whales, whaling ships also explored parts of the world unknown to previous gens of Americans. The addition of Pacific ports after the US War with Mexico fueled the expansion of the American merchant and whaling presence in the Pacific. Hawaii became an important part of the American economic network in the Pacific. The US pushed for economic access to China and Japan.

Manifest Destiny
An idea that became the rallying cry of expansionists in the mid-1800s
First coined by John O’Sullivan in “The Great Nation of Futurity,” 1839
- The US is significantly different than the rest of the world
- Value of equality
- Can’t justify what the old world represents (new is better than old)
- America is the defender of liberty everywhere
- The US is the nation of progress and chosen by God
- The US will continue to grow throughout the Americas
- The US’s mission is to bring freedom and equality to all
Presidential Politics
After Jackson, politics got a little messy. He managed to get his vp Van B elected in 1836
Dems held first national political convention for a major party
Dems were much better organized than the Whigs
Whigs hoped numerous candidates would throw election into the House
Van B’s presidency plagued by the after-effects of Jackson’s presidency, and a bad economy (Panic of 1837)
Whigs organized their first convention in 1840
- Whh and Tyler as vp elected
Parties are divided over the issue of expansion; dems generally for it, whigs generally opposed or split over it
Whh
Rotting in hell
Successor John Tyler began to break from Whig party’s expected views
- Didn’t support a national bank
- Supported annexation of tx as a slave state
- Cabinet resigned in protest in 1841
- Whigs expelled him from the party
Dems seize the office again with Polk in 1844; Polk’s platform: pure expansion
The Expansion Issues of the Day
Texas (an independent republic as of 1836, formerly Mexico) (wanted to be a part of the US)
Concerns:
- Legally annexed as a state from being a nation?
- Free or slave?
- Mexico’s reaction?
- Border disputes
Oregon Territory (determining the border with British Canada)
- 54-40 or fight (Polk)
- 49, ultimately
Texas becoming a US state
New and weak Mexican government
Expansions having a foothold in American politics
American settlers seizing land for themselves (legally or not)
Mexican American War
Tensions
- Hastily drawn border of tx, including territory Mexico claimed
- Us military likely prompting Mexican fire in disputed territory (near Rio Grande)
US declaring war
A hungry and ready president Polk, along with Dems in Congress
Some Whig opposition: too little, too late
The war itself
- Longer and more expensive than desired
- Mired by disease and being caught in a foreign land (mostly fought in Mexico)
- Aggressive pursuit of victory eventually won it for the US
Results
- Texas claims confirmed
- California is incorporated to US (following brief Bear Revolt government - American led)
- US gained more Mexican territory in the Southwest, completing the continental empire imagined
  - Wasn’t enough for Polk
  - Treaty of G-H gave Mexicans and Indians US citizenship
    - Their land was stripped, their rights disrespected
    - Not per the treaty
- Zach Taylor ran as a war hero for president, a slaveholding expansionist Whig
11.3
Acquiring California opened the US to a new coast with new potential, and planted the seeds for future expansion across the Pacific. At the end of the century and into the 20th, the US will be a major player in the Pacific and into Asia.

Unit Five

Chapter 12 - Living in a Nation of changing Lands etc

Chapter 13 - the politics of separation

Chapter 14 - And the war came: The Civil War

Chapter 15 - Reconstruction

Unit Six

Chapter 16 - Conflict in the west

Chapter 17 - The gilded age

chapter 18 - Responses to industrialism, responses to change

Chapter 19 - Progressive movements, progressive politics

Semester 2

Unit Seven

Chapter 20 - FOreign Policy and war in a progressive era

Chapter 21 - a unique, prosperous, and discontented time

Chapter 22 - Living in hard times

Chapter 23 - Living in a world at war

Unit Eight

Chapter 24 - The world the war created

Chapter 25 - Complacency and change

Chapter 26 - Lives Changed

Chapter 27 - Rights, reactions, and limits

Unit Nine

Chapter 28 - The reagan revolution

Chapter 29 - a new World order

Chapter 30

Julia is a current first-year at a university in Boston. She has a pet guinea pig, Gilberte, who she would argue is better than Harold. I would care to refuse. Gilberte is named after the Marquis de Lafayette.
Julia's favorite band is Judas Priest, and in her spare time, she likes to write. She speaks French, Spanish, and Japanese, and her favorite food is jambalaya. Her favorite president is Jimmy Carter.
Say thank you to Julia below!

Julia's AP US History​2018-2019

Semester 1

Unit One

Unit Two

Unit Three

Unit Four

Unit Five

Unit Six

Semester 2

Unit Seven

Unit Eight

Unit Nine

Julia's AP US History
2018-2019