Unit 6 Reading notes

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Unit 6 Reading notes During the War for Independence, African Americans were loyal not to a place nor to a people but, to a principle 4.2 African Americans and the Rhetoric of Revolution - Thomas Je ff erson one of the many leader of the revolution - They studied f natural rights from European Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke. - They used the natural rights theory to incorporate into the declaration of independence. - Natural rights, such as the right to be free and pursue one’s own “happiness,” are rights all human beings possess that are not granted by government and cannot be revoked or repealed. - natural rights are “truths” that are “self-evident” and “unalienable” such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” - Colonists also resented that this tax was imposed on them without having a voice in Parliament, which led to cries of “No taxation without representation!” - 1773 a record number of antislavery pamphlets were published - Black Americans continued to petition for their freedom during the Revolutionary War, which broke out in 1775 in Massachusetts Thomas Je ff erson - Like George Washington, Je ff erson was part of Virginia’s slaveholding aristocracy. - When the Revolution broke out, Je ff erson owned just under 200 slaves on his central Virginia plantation, Monticello. - Je ff erson saw slavery as a regrettable institution and hoped a process of gradual emancipation would eventually lead to its permanent demise. - Je ff erson wrote the Declaration of Independence in the summer of 1776 - “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that there are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. (US, 1776)” - Natural rights include freedom happiness and property. - Despite Je ff erson’s recognition that slavery violated the natural rights of Africans and African Americans, he only freed a very small number of his slaves during his life and left hundreds still in bondage at his death in 1826.

- Je ff erson feared racial “mixture” and the corruption of white racial purity, despite maintaining a sexual relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, a woman who bore him five children and who herself was the product of a sexual encounter between Je ff erson’s father-in-law and Hemings’s mother, Betty. 4.3 Fighting Their Way to Freedom - In addition to filing freedom petitions and writing pamphlets advocating for the abolition of slavery, African Americans fought for their freedom during the colonial and revolutionary era by serving in the military. - Before the Revolution, between 1675 and 1739, the southern colonies were almost constantly involved in fighting Native Americans or the Spanish. - In 1703, the South Carolina assembly o ff ered to free any slave who captured or killed hostile Native Americans. Beginning as early as 1705, free blacks became eligible for enrollment in the militia. Unlike white persons, they were required to muster for service without bringing arms. - All enslaved people fought in order to gain freedom. Black Loyalists in the Revolutionary War - Black Loyalists in the Revolutionary War - The hope of freedom in return for service led many enslaved African Americans to leave the plantation to follow the British Army. No exact statistics are available on the number of enslaved people who reached British sanctuaries, but Thomas Je ff erson estimated the number at 30,000 in 1778 alone (Tate 1865:119). Black Patriots in the Revolutionary War - In the 1850s, the free black abolitionist, William C. Nell of Boston, published the nation’s first histories of African Americans – about military service on the Patriot side during the American Revolution - about 5,000 black soldiers ultimately fought on the patriot side. - The use of black men as soldiers, whether freemen or slaves, was avoided early in the war by Congress and George Washington, General of the Continental Army. - After the war, the black soldiers and seamen of Virginia were liberally rewarded in money, land bounties, and granted them pensions. 4.4 The Impact of the Revolution on Slavery

- Though the Revolution did not lead to abolition of slavery, it set o ff a process of both immediate and gradual emancipation in northern states. - South’s slave system su ff ered because of the war - In 1775 Quakers founded the world’s first antislavery society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. - at least thirteen of anti-slavery societies came into existence in America by 1788. (5) - In 1777, Vermont outlawed slavey Massachusetts and New Hampshire followed. - the state of Delaware would not abolish slavery until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, 31 percent of its African American population were free by 1790 because of the anti-slavery activism of Quakers and Methodists. (Carson, 2019) - The Revolution’s rhetoric of equality also created a “revolutionary generation” of slaves and free black Americans that would eventually galvanize the antislavery movement well into the nineteenth century. - free blacks established their own social institutions including churches, schools, and benevolent societies. - It failed to reconcile slavery with these new egalitarian republican societies, a tension that eventually boiled over in the 1830s and 1840s and e ff ectively tore the nation in two in the 1850s and 1860s. Slavery and the Constitution - summer of 1787 - political leaders of the United States met in Philadelphia to debate the creation of a new federal constitution to replace the Articles of Confederation. - The ardent nationalists, such as Virginia’s James Madison, met in Philadelphia in 1787 to propose a new federal constitution they hoped would create “a more perfect union.” - Americans generally perceived the trans-Atlantic slave trade as more violent and immoral than slavery itself. - New England and the Deep South agreed to what was called a “dirty compromise” at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. - As a result, the Atlantic slave trade resumed until 1808 when it was outlawed for three reasons. First, Britain was also in the process of outlawing the slave trade in 1807, and the United States did not want to concede any moral high ground to its rival. Second, the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), a successful slave revolt against French colonial rule in the West Indies, had changed the stakes in the debate. The image of thousands of armed black revolutionaries terrified white Americans. Third, the Haitian Revolution had ended France’s plans to expand its presence in the Americas, so in 1803, the United States had purchased the Louisiana Territory from the French at a fire-sale price.

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Conclusion - The Revolution brought change for some black people, although nothing approaching full equality. The courageous military service of African Americans and the revolutionary spirit ended slavery in New England almost immediately. The middle states of New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey adopted policies of gradual emancipation from 1780 to 1804. Many of the founders opposed slavery in principle (including some whose wealth was largely in human property). Individual manumissions increased following the Revolution.