Uncategorized – Page 9 – American History to 1877

February 19, 2014

The Paradox of American Democracy

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America has long been celebrated as a country founded upon individual liberty and universal equality. However, as freedom expanded in early America, so did slavery. Exploring this paradox in their respective books, The Rise of American Democracy and Inhuman Bondage, both Sean Wilentz and David Brion Davis explain why this happened.

Davis highlights the apparent contradiction of the American Revolution by referencing Samuel Johnson’s quote on Americans during this momentous period: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” While the Americans attempted to promote liberty and free themselves from British “enslavement,” they also protected the institution of slavery of Africans (Davis 144). This paradox appeared in the drafting of the Constitution in 1787 as well, as slavery was intentionally avoided in the final draft. As the author of “Democracy and Slavery” mentions, slavery persisted in the early history of the United States because the infant government was not in the position to abolish it completely. Doing so would mean alienating the southern states whose economies depended upon the dehumanizing institution. Therefore, compromises had to be made if there was to be any Union at all (Davis 155).

The specifics of the compromises are covered well in Wilentz’s book. The delegates who met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1787 decided that the federal government had no say on slavery in the states, deemed slaves three-fifths of a citizen for the purposes of representation in both the House of Representatives and the Electoral College, promised slave owners the return of their runaway slaves, and guaranteed the transatlantic slave trade for another two decades (Wilentz 14). As a result, slavery became deeply embedded in America and would cause numerous problems in the near future – two points touched upon by the author of “Democracy and Slavery.” Davis brings up a fantastic point that if these compromises were not made, “the Founding Fathers could take no immediate and effective actions to secure America’s borders, or strengthen the nation’s shaky credit, or attract foreign investment and diversify the economy” (Davis 155).

In sum, both authors explain why the Founding Fathers compromised on slavery. For the most part, they were not the self-interested hypocrites that history has made them out to be. Instead, they were men who made a calculated decision to delay the emancipation of slaves in order to strengthen the Union. The rich political history that both Wilentz and Davis offer is something that has been noticeably absent from Taylor’s narrative.

February 19, 2014

Revolutionary Freedom

America was formed on the basis of freedom for all. One new bit of information that I learned from reading Davis’ Inhuman Bondage was that the “white colonists rose in revolt against what they perceived as British effort to ‘enslave’ them” (144). This being said, there is a double standard in how the revolutionaries perceived their oppression and how they oppressed their own slaves. How it is that men who so desperately wanted to be free were able to “own” another human being as property? Isn’t that what the whole point of what the revolution was about, so that Great Britain could not “own” the colonists anymore? As our classmate brought to our attention in “Freedom at Last?” how could we as a new nation base our constitution on freedom for all men, when slavery still existed and was such a large part of the economy? All of these questions are ones that I would have loved to ask to out forefathers and revolutionaries.

During the revolution, slaves were often entrusted with weapons and enlisted to fight. Or, slaves would manage to escape during the wartime and were enlisted to fight against their previous owners. Some owners who enlisted their own knew that their slaves would not want to fight for their owners freedom when they in turn would not get their own. Some owners went as far as promising their slaves their freedom if they chose to fight for their masters’.

I thought Davis did an excellent job in depicting how slaves were treated and their feelings during the Revolutionary War. I was surprised but enlightened at the fact that the revolution, based on the idea of freedom for all, was not in fact “freedom for all”.

February 19, 2014

Early Division Between the North and South

The opening chapter in Sean Wilentz’s The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln offers a description of the general state of the colonies in the 1770s. Throughout the chapter, Wilentz establishes his central argument that as a result of the Revolutionary War, Americans became enthralled with the idea of democracy. In particular, patriotism and democracy, two influential ideals that emerged during the Revolutionary War, inspired many people of middle class status to become involved in the political process. Wilentz notes that, “The Revolution’s democratic impact forever changed the context of American politics and culture and brought ordinary Americans into public and political life, which fundamentally altered how they perceived themselves and each other” (11). Wilentz goes on to categorize one example of this newfound middleclass political involve as being Shays Rebellion of 1786. In response to overbearing financial policies imposed on middle class workers, Daniel Shays led a group of similar working-class people to revolt and interfere with the local court system. While this example displayed the unregulated nature of democracy, Shays ability to create a formidable uprising at the grassroots level clearly shows the impact that even working class people had during this time.

While colonial political power extended to the common white man and wasn’t left solely to aristocrats, there certainly existed a divide between the northern and southern colonies. As Olivia highlights in her blog post entitled “The Revolutionary War as a Precursor to the Civil War?” the rift between the two sides was clearly attributed to slavery. As we discussed in class yesterday, however, it is possible that other factors may have been at play during early colonial independence that formulated the division between the two regions. Although southern delegates eventually were allowed to continue slavery under the education, a source of division between the two sides could also be attributed to the Revolutionary War’s key events occurring primarily in the north. For example, while Wilientz highlights the increased democratic processes that began to take shape in everyday colonial life after the Revolutionary War in the north, similar events in the south were not recounted. While there most likely are examples of the increased sentiments of democracy seen in the south as well, the lack of evidence in Wilentz’s text begs the question as to whether a grassroots uprising like Shays Rebellion would have had the same effect in the south. If not, one could make the argument that the ideals of democracy did not permeate as deeply in southern colonies as they did in the north which, in addition to their varying opinions of slavery, would further divide the two sides.

February 19, 2014

The Paradox of the Revolutionary War

Both in chapter 7 of Inhuman Bondage by Davidson Brion Davis and chapter 1 of The Rise of American Democracy by Sean Wilentz, the authors outlined the struggle and strife in the colonies during the Revolutionary War. Calling out for freedom, British colonists fought for freedom under the oppressive British rule and started forming democratic ideas for the future. As Wilentz describes in his chapter, it was not an easy transition from a split social system to equal democracy for all.

During the Revolutionary War when colonists cried for liberty from England, and while yeomen, artisans, and elites were struggling to find a balance in democracy, slaves were watching and observing these political movements. Learning from the people who were subjugating them to slavery, African Americans learned to fight for their own freedom and liberty. The paradoxical nature of this time period puts into motion the ideas that would lead to the Civil War. Many of the freed colonists realized contradiction of keeping slaves, especially after they too had just fought for their own freedom. Davis’ story about the slave named Prince was the perfect example of this paradox. Having served under George Washington during the Revolutionary War, Prince told his master that it was unfair that the colonists could go to war for their liberty but Prince and other slaves did not have any liberties.

Like Mike talks about in his blog post titled, “Democracy and Slavery,” Davis points out that the United States were too weak to be able to abolish slavery without the destruction of the Union. The South was economically dependent on the use of slaves in fields, and slavery was such a big issue that if the United States were to abolish it at this point in history, the Union might not have formed. Although slavery would last for a few more decades, the Revolutionary War and its aftermath acted as a catalyst for the war by showing the inconsistency in the ideas of the American people.

February 19, 2014

Unnoticed Tension in Revolution

I found Gordon Wood’s ideas in his piece Radical Possibilities of the American Revolution to be a good reminder that sometimes the unstated obvious can provide new revelations about history. Reminding us that there was “no mass poverty, no seething social discontent, no grinding oppression”, the sentiment established in the Taylor readings of a successful colonization process is revisited (Wood 110). The foreground for political participation at this time came at the whim of the gentry elite. The reading describes this as encouragement from above to participate in politics, which seems to be derived from the upper class desire to gain even more independence and wealth at the expense of the lower classes.

Furthermore, he parallels a number of social groups experiencing the revolution differently. For instance, Wood mentions the social assault between the couriers and the patriots. These opposing groups seemed to provide a basis for the desired political system of the elite gentry. The paper also makes the connection between the independence that these colonists were fighting for and the continued dependence, which the disenfranchised peoples at the time were experiencing. Specifically, women and African Americans experienced the fight for independence without the benefit of independence.

Wood evokes another paradoxical relationship when relating how the aristocratic landholders in the colonies were fighting for independence (something they had a substantial amount of compared to the lower class colonists) from fellow aristocrats in England. This seemed to be a classic case of the rich getting richer and establishing themselves as the “natural aristocracy” while the poor fell to the wayside. This is not to discount the fight waged for independence in the war to come but as Wood points out there is much more to the equation than seems at first glance. There seems to be social tension within the colonies themselves, although it may have gone unnoticed by the lower-middle classes.

As Alex writes in his post from early today, there is a “broad spectrum” of factors to be considered when looking at the revolution occurring in America. I found the approach that Wood takes to be very interesting and very novel as compared to the other readings regarding the political and social environment surrounding the revolution.

February 19, 2014

American History from a Canadian Perspective

I found it fascinating to read Wilentz from somewhat of an outsider’s perspective, not being American and having never studied American history or read the American constitution. I have been told repeatedly told by American students at Davidson that I should not be considered an international student because “there’s really no difference better Canada and the US”. Reading Wilentz, the cultural differences and the historical roots of those differences become abundantly clear. Even Wilentz writes, “The Revolution’s democratic impact forever changed the context of American politics and culture and brought ordinary Americans into public and political life, which fundamentally altered how they perceived themselves and others.” Though I share many of the American cultural values including freedom, independence, property rights and class mobility, these values are not tied to my identity as a Canadian, but my identity as human being. I think these values are rooted in American identity because they are directly rooted in the events and teaching of American history, in a way that they are not in Canada – we got our independence in 1867, the last province joined in 1949 and we didn’t have a national flag specified by statue law until 1965.

Of all the texts we have read this semester, the first chapter of The Rise of American Democracy by Sean Wilentz comes closest to what I think of as how American (and North American) history is traditionally told. Each page is peppered with the names of white men in prominent economic or political positions. (I also wonder if this is how American history is told because of the US culture often values individual identity, representation of every individual and the possibility of upward mobility for everyone) Even when the chapter discusses class differences, the discussion is limited to a comparison between the lifestyles and beliefs of urban and rural dwellers. At the end of the chapter, Wilentz does briefly discusses slavery in the context of the Philadelphia convention and summarizes the results as “the final draft avoided explicitly mentioning slavery […] But delegates effective barred the government from taking any action against slavery in the states”. But, Wilentz does not discuss the impact of these events, nor does he mention anywhere the efforts by slaves of free Blacks to fight for and promote democratic values. By contrast, David Brion Davis focuses exclusively slaves and free blacks in this time period in chapter seven of Inhuman Bondage. He details attitude towards slavery and changes to slave ideals of freedom, as well as chronicling the roles slaves played in revolutionary effects and the misgiving of many whites to involve slaves. Davis provides a parallel history that fills in many of the gaps in Wilnetz chronicle. Olivia provides a really valuable analysis of in her blog post “The Revolutionary War as a Precursor to the Civil War?” of Davis and the role of slavery in both the Revolutionary and Civil wars, demonstrating the value of analyzing history from multiple perspectives.

Still, these chapters were the only historical texts you had read on American history, you would never know that there were Native peoples living in North America. Admittedly, we have moved forward on the timeline from European arrival an early interactions and I don’t mean to imply that Wilentz or Davis are responsible for telling those parts of American history, however having read Taylor with his attention to marginalized populations, I am left wondering in what ways Native people were directly or indirectly involved in shaping the new American state.

Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Wilentz, Sean. The Rise of American Democracy. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005.
*Olivia Rosen, “The Revolutionary War as a Precursor to the Civil War, http://sites.davidson.edu/his141sp2014/the-revolutionary-war-as-a-precursor-to-the-civil-war/

February 19, 2014

Freedom at Last?

Chapter 7 in Inhuman Bondage discusses the impact of slavery in the American Revolution. Whenever I think of the American Revolution, I think of the colonists and Britain. This chapter helped to gain a new insight- the plight of the slaves. One key point the author was trying to make in this chapter is that the colonists were rebelling against Britain for feeling like they were being enslaved, but yet they were enslaving others. “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” (144) I never thought of it this way. It is ironic that the colonists felt that their rights are being infringed upon, when they enslaved Africans. This point truly is one of the most important in the entire chapter, and it drives the entire revolution. It is really persuasive because America is supposed to represent freedom and a new life, yet it doesn’t.

Warfare is a time of chaos for slaves. Slaves can rebel against their owners and escape, or can be enlisted and fight against their enemies. Why would slaves want to fight if in the end they didn’t even receive their liberty? Both sides tried to use slaves in their favor. The colonists didn’t necessarily want the slaves to fight for them, but they were in need of numbers. Britain tried to get slaves to leave their masters and join them. They said that “all slaves captured while they were serving the rebels were to be sold for the benefit of their captors; but all slaves who deserted the rebels were given an assurance that was hardly clear.” (150) Slaves took this as emancipation, and thousands took advantage of it, leaving Georgia’s economy in ruin.

Granted, some colonists realized the ironic nature behind their resentment of Britain. “The period from 1765 to the early 1790s produced countless numbers of tracts, pamphlets, broadsides, sermons, speeches, and editorials that challenged the basic core of slavery: the belief that human beings could be ‘animalized.’ (156) Because of this, the revolutionary war can be seen as the precursor of the Civil War. The North generally was against slavery, and many states even made it illegal. The South was dependent on it. They needed the slaves for their economies, and it even mentioned they would start a war if the government tried to make slavery universally illegal. It was only a matter of time before the two conflicting sides battled again. In my classmate’s post below Democracy and Slavery, they made a very interesting point that the Civil War could possibly have been avoided if the 1784 Continental Congress outlawed slavery in Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Ohio. While this is an interesting point, I can’t help but disagree because the other regions of the south were so explicit on their desire for slavery, and that is stated within the text.

February 19, 2014

Democracy Comes to America

The first chapter of Wilentz gave a basic outline of the process in which democracy came about in post revolution America. He starts out speaking of the basic form of democratic meetings taking place, paying particular attention to the groups that met in the Philadelphia area. He speaks of the Continental Congress, as well as the Pennsylvania Provincial Conference and the Pennsylvania Convention. Benjamin Franklin was an elected member of all three of these conferences, displaying how people of influence were elected to take charge of these initial meetings of Democracy. This was effective in giving the reader a basic understanding of how democracy quickly became a likable system in early American history.

Wilentz then went on to speak of how the Constitution was eventually crafted with the different influences of people. In this section of the chapter, he did a good job making references to different situations that occurred. However, he completely lacked giving adequate detail on such topics. When looking at the problem with the Articles of Confederation, the only mention he made was “under the loosely knit Articles of Confederation, was so feeble that it had become nearly impossible to conduct a foreign policy”(12). Yes that was true, but there were many other issues that the articles contained that played an even larger role than this. For example, the articles did have the power to tax. This crippled Americas economy because we had a significant war debt from the Revolution and had no way to bring money in to help counteract this debt. Also, there was no intra state currency established. So money in North Carolina would be different than the money in Pennsylvania. This greatly inhibited intra state communication and cooperation. This caused the states to act as 13 individual entities, and not as one nation. This clearly demonstrated how a confederacy model did not work in America, with the basis of state governments having more power than the national.

Off of that, he did explain how the constitution came into effect after the Articles did eventually fail. Yet he failed to mention the new constitution was intended to be a federalist model, in which the states and the federal government have the same amount of power. He did make mention of federalist 51, yet a more in depth depiction of these documents would have been nice, as these documents my Madison, Hamilton, and Jay significantly outlined the intention for the government, in hopes of winning over public support for the constitution. I also would have liked him to go into more detail about the struggle for the Bill of Rights. As my classmate pointed out in “Democracy and Slavery”, the rural yeoman and farmers wanted to make sure their fundamental rights were not in jeopardy. The Bill of Rights would pass, which he pointed out, but it was a long process that I would have preferred him to go more into more detail on.

Overall, this chapter lacked sufficient information about a pivotal point in our history.

February 19, 2014

Democracy and Slavery

Achieving American Democracy was not as simple of a process as writing the Declaration of Independence and then the Constitution. According to Wilentz there were many obstacles involving class warfare that did not make it a smooth transition. Yeoman, gentleman, merchants, and artisans, whether they are city dwellers or rural countrymen, all wanted their rights protected. To me, a key turning point was when the Berkshire Constitutionalists proposed the plan of equal representation that was not rooted in how much wealth or property you had. Another key for democracy in the reading was Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, which put to rest early the idea of an elected monarch for life. As Thomas stated in his post, to really bind the United States Democracy together as a nation, Shay’s Rebellion was instrumental in getting a stronger federal government planned in the 1787 Constitutional Convention.

In Davis’s Inhuman Bondage, I believe his point was that American Slavery lasted longer here than in other countries because they were too weak as a union to withstand abolition in the early years of the country, and as a result slavery was able to take strong roots into the culture. As Thomas also wrote, keeping slavery was a huge contradiction to the American Revolution. I agree with what Olivia stated, that white colonists wanted liberty from a British oppressor and that was the same logic the slaves followed, but they did not receive it. On of the most interesting take always for me from the Davis reading was that the 1784 Continental Congress was one vote away from outlawing slavery in Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Ohio. If that had passed I think the United States might have been better able to avoid a Civil War because it would have divided the Confederacy in a big way. Ultimately, it was the fear of a Civil War for a just born country that led to the creation of free soil and slave holding places. I also found very interesting in Olivia’s post about how it was the act of making slaves property that led to such a strong slave system.

February 19, 2014

The Revolutionary War as a Precursor to the Civil War?

In Chapter 7: “The Problem of Slavery in the Revolution” of Inhuman Bondage, David Brion Davis adds a new dimension to how Americans understand the American Revolution. Davis analyzes the Revolution through the lens of the institutionalization of slavery in America, arguing that enslaved Africans were acutely conscious of the hypocrisy that the colonists’ rebellion presented with respect to their own enslavement. Slaves recognized colonists’ battle for liberty from the British as evidence of slavery’s injustice, and used the American Revolution as a platform to encourage and attain freedom.

The colonists, however, considered the enslavement of Africans to be a necessary facet of the American economy. While colonists’ opinions regarding slavery differed along regional lines, the Founding Fathers recognized that targeting the slave system would marginalize the South at a time when the unification of America was crucial to its survival. Thomas characterizes Northern concessions to slavery as an essential compromise of democracy, which “manifested itself in the form of Northern ‘protection’ of Southern slavery in order to protect unity.” This system of compromise perpetuated the institutionalization of slavery. Although it is not wise to read history backwards, we know that the “compromise for democracy” was limited. The annexation of new territories in the mid-1800s reintroduced slavery to the forefront of political discussion, eventually escalating into the Civil War.

In addition to our U.S History course, I am enrolled in the 300-level history course, Civil War and Reconstruction. This course has sparked my interest in studying the development of slavery in America and identifying the point when Civil War was inevitable (if it ever was). I believe that the constitutional arguments regarding slavery, particularly slaves as property, shaped the slavery debate and served as a justification for Southern states’ secession and Lincoln’s decision to abolish slavery. Davis’s reading corroborated my claim, as he outlined how both the British and colonists manipulated the slave’s status as property to benefit their respective causes. Specifically, both sides contemplated the use of slaves as soldiers in the war. The Continental Congress enlisted and armed 3,000 slaves from South Carolina and Georgia under the pretext that the British army would utilize the slaves if they did not. The slaves were considered property of their slave-owners, and the Congress feared that seizing property would undermine the rule of law and cause dissention among slave-owners (Davis, 148).

The arming of slaves during the American Revolution mirrors the Civil War, in which thousands of fugitive slaves escaped into Union territory seeking freedom. This brought the question of slaves as property to a head. If slaves were indeed considered property under the Constitution, then it was imperative that the Union returned slaves to their rightful owners. Since the South was a “belligerent nation,” many Unionists argued that Southern slaveholders’ constitutional rights as American citizens were void, and their slaves should not be returned. Similar to the fears of colonists during the Revolutionary War, Unionists recognized that returning slaves would ultimately aid the Confederate’s war effort, as slaves would be used for the Confederate cause. General Benjamin Butler named fugitive slaves to be “contrabands of war,” who would remain in the Union so as not to benefit the Confederates. In order to legitimize Butler’s action, Congress passed the Confiscation Act of 1861, which ordered that “confiscated” slaves were not to be returned to their owners but had to participate in the Union war effort. Again concerned with the notion of slaves as property, President Lincoln clarified that slaves from border-states were exempt from the Confiscation Act, recognizing that marginalizing the border states would impel them to join the Confederacy. The similarities between the use of slaves in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, particularly with respect to slaves as property, illustrates the political complexity of slavery in America. The Revolutionary War had enormous influence on the institutionalization of American slavery, and as a result, in-depth study of the war is necessary to understand the causes of the Civil War.

Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

**Information also taken from Dr. Sally McMillen’s lectures in History 346: Civil War and Reconstruction.