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Slide 2: N American N ew ation ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE
Slide 3: Editorial Board Paul Finkelman College of Law, University of Tulsa Jan Ellen Lewis Department of History, Rutgers University Peter S. Onuf Department of History, University of Virginia Jeffrey L. Pasley Department of History, University of Missouri John Stagg Department of History, University of Virginia Michael Zuckerman Department of History, University of Pennsylvania
Slide 4: N American N ew ation The Emergence of the United States, 1754-1829 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE 1 ABOLITION OF SLAVERY IN THE NORTH to EXPLORATION AND EXPLORERS PAUL FINKELMAN, EDITOR IN CHIEF
Slide 5: Encyclopedia of the New American Nation The Emergence of the United States, 1754–1829 Paul Finkelman © 2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. Thomson and Star Logo are trademarks and Gale is a registered trademark used herein under license. For more information, contact Thomson Gale 27500 Drake Rd. Farmington Hills, MI 48331-3535 Or you can visit our Internet site at http://www.gale.com ALL RIGHTS RESERVED No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, Web distribution, or information storage retrieval systems—without the written permission of the publisher. This publication is a creative work fully protected by all applicable copyright laws, as well as by misappropriation, trade secret, unfair competition, and other applicable laws. The authors and editors of this work have added value to the underlying factual material herein through one or more of the following: unique and original selection, coordination, expression, arrangement, and classification of the information. For permission to use material from this product, submit your request via Web at http://www.gale-edit.com/permissions, or you may download our Permissions Request form and submit your request by fax or mail to: Permissions Department Thomson Gale 27500 Drake Road Farmington Hills, MI 48331-3535 Permissions Hotline: 248-699-8006 or 800-877-4253 ext. 8006 Fax: 248-699-8074 or 800-762-4058 Since this page cannot legibly accommodate all copyright notices, the acknowledgements constitute an extension of the copyright notice. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Encyclopedia of the New American Nation : the emergence of the United States, 1754–1829 / Paul Finkelman, editor in chief. v. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-684-31346-4 (set hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-684-31347-2 (vol 1)—ISBN 0-684-31348-0 (vol. 2)—ISBN 0-684-31440-1 (vol 3) 1. United States—History—Colonial period, ca. 1600–1775—Encyclopedias. 2. United States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783—Encyclopedias. 3. United States—History—1783– 1865—Encyclopedias. I. Finkelman, Paul, 1949– E301.E53 2005 973’.03—dc22 2005017783 This title is also available as an e-book. ISBN 0-684-31469-X (set) Contact your Gale sales representative for ordering information. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Slide 6: F Stanley N. Katz, mentor and friend. or
Slide 7: Editorial & Production Staff Project Editor: Erin Bealmear Cover & Page Designer: Compositor: Pamela A. E. Galbreath Editorial Support: Imaging: Tables: Joann Cerrito, Stephen Cusack, Kristin Hart, Ken Wachsberger Datapage Technologies International, Inc. (St. Peters, Mo.) Shalice Shah-Caldwell, Margaret Chamberlain-Gaston, Jackie Jones Mary Beth Trimper Evi Seoud Randy Bassett, Dean Dauphinais, Lezlie Light, Mike Logusz, Christine O’Bryan Mark Berger, Standley Publishing (Ferndale, Mich.) Permissions: Manager, Composition: Assistant Manager, Composition: Manufacturing: Development Copyeditors: Jessica Hornik Evans, Michael Levine, Alan Thwaits Judith Culligan Carol Holmes XNR Productions (Madison, Wis.) Wendy Blurton Editors: Caption Writer: Proofreader: Roberta Klarreich, Lisa Vecchione Editorial Director: John Fitzpatrick Frank Cartographer: Indexer: Executive Vice President and Publisher: Wendy Allex Menchaca vi
Slide 8: Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii xxi Chronology . Agricultural Improvement Agricultural Technology Alabama Alaska Albany Albany Plan of Union Alcohol Consumption Alcoholic Beverages and Production Alien and Sedition Acts Almanacs America and the World American Character and Identity American Indians Overview Northern New England Southern New England Middle Atlantic Southeast Old Northwest Old Southwest Plains Far West American Indian Ethnography American Indian Policy, 1787–1830 American Indian Relations, 1763–1815 American Indian Relations, 1815–1829 American Indian Religions American Indian Removal Volume 1 A Abolition of Slavery in the North Abolition Societies Academic and Professional Societies Acadians Adams, John Adams, John Quincy Advertising Affection African Americans Overview African American Life and Culture African American Literature African American Religion African American Responses to Slavery and Race Free Blacks in the North Free Blacks in the South African Survivals Agriculture Overview vii
Slide 9: CONTENTS American Indian Resistance to White Expansion American Indians as Symbols/Icons American Indian Slaveholding British Policies Americanization American Philosophical Society Americans in Europe Anglicans and Episcopalians Annapolis Convention Anti-Catholicism Anti-Federalists Anti-Masons Antislavery Appalachia Archaeology Architectural Styles Architecture American Indian Greek Revival Parks and Landscape Public Religious Spanish Borderlands Vernacular Arithmetic and Numeracy Arkansas Army, U.S. Army Culture Arsenals Art and American Nationhood Articles of Confederation Asylums Aurora Authorship Autobiography and Memoir Blackface Performance Blount Conspiracy Book Trade Boston Boston Massacre Boston Tea Party Botany British Army in North America British Empire and the Atlantic World Bunker Hill, Battle of Burr Conspiracy 5 C Cabinet and Executive Department Camp Followers Canada Capital Punishment Cartography Cartoons, Political Catholicism and Catholics Cemeteries and Burial Character Charleston Chemistry Chesapeake Affair Chesapeake Region Childbirth and Childbearing Childhood and Adolescence Children’s Literature China Trade Chisholm v. Georgia Cincinnati Circuses Citizenship City Growth and Development City Planning Civil Engineering and Building Technology Class Overview Development of the Working Class Rise of the Middle Class Classical Heritage and American Politics Clothing Coinage Act of 1792 Colonization Movement Communitarian Movements and Utopian Communities Concept of Empire Congregationalists Congress 5 B Backsliding Balloons Baltimore Banking System Bank of the United States Bankruptcy Law Baptists Barbary Wars Barter Benevolent Associations Bible Bill of Rights Biology viii ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION
Slide 10: CONTENTS Connecticut Constitution: Eleventh Amendment Constitution: Twelfth Amendment Constitution, Ratification of Constitutional Convention Constitutionalism Overview American Colonies State Constitution Making Constitutional Law Construction and Home Building Consumerism and Consumption Continental Army Continental Congresses Contraception and Abortion Corporal Punishment Corporations Cotton Cotton Gin Courtship Creek War Crime and Punishment Currency and Coinage 5 E Economic Development Economic Theory Education Overview Elementary, Grammar, and Secondary Schools Colleges and Universities Professional Education American Indian Education Education of African Americans Education of Girls and Women Education of the Deaf Proprietary Schools and Academies Public Education Tutors Election of 1796 Election of 1800 Election of 1824 Election of 1828 Emancipation and Manumission Embargo Emotional Life Encyclopédie Environment, Environmental History, and Nature Epidemics Equality Era of Good Feeling Erie Canal Erotica European Influences Enlightenment Thought The French Revolution Mary Wollstonecraft Napoleon and Napoleonic Rule European Responses to America Expansion Exploration and Explorers 5 D Dairy Industry Dance Dartmouth College v. Woodward Death and Dying Debt and Bankruptcy Declaration of Independence Deism Delaware Democratic Republicans Democratization Demography Denominationalism Diplomatic and Military Relations, American Indian Disability Disciples of Christ Disestablishment Divorce and Desertion Domestic Life Domestic Violence Drugs Dueling 5 F Fairs Fallen Timbers, Battle of Fame and Reputation Farm Making Fashion Federalism Federalist Papers Federalist Party Federalists ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION ix
Slide 11: CONTENTS Fiction Firearms (Nonmilitary) Fires and Firefighting First Ladies Fisheries and the Fishing Industry Flag of the United States Flags Fletcher v. Peck Flogging Florida Folk Arts Food Foreign Investment and Trade Forts and Fortifications Founding Fathers Fourth of July Franklin, Benjamin Freedom of the Press Free Library Movement Freemasons French French and Indian War, Battles and Diplomacy French and Indian War, Consequences of Fries’s Rebellion Frontier Frontier Religion Frontiersmen Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 Fur and Pelt Trade Furniture 5 H Haitian Revolution Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton’s Economic Plan Happiness Hartford Convention Health and Disease Heating and Lighting Hessians Historical Memory of the Revolution History and Biography Holidays and Public Celebrations Home Homosexuality Horseshoe Bend, Battle of Hospitals Housing Humanitarianism Humor 5 I Iconography Illinois Immigration and Immigrants Overview Canada England and Wales France Germans Ireland Scots and Scots-Irish Anti-Immigrant Sentiment/Nativism Immigrant Experience Immigrant Policy and Law Political Refugees Race and Ethnicity Imperial Rivalry in the Americas Impressment Independence Indiana Individualism Industrial Revolution Inheritance Insurance Internal Improvements Interracial Sex Intolerable Acts 5 G Gabriel’s Rebellion Gambling Games and Toys, Children’s Gender Overview Ideas of Womanhood Geography Georgia German-Language Publishing Ghent,Treaty of Gibbons v. Ogden Government Overview Local State Territories Government and the Economy Gunpowder, Munitions, and Weapons (Military) x ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION
Slide 12: CONTENTS Inventors and Inventions Iron Mining and Metallurgy Iroquois Confederacy 5 M Madison, James Magazines Maine Malaria Male Friendship Manliness and Masculinity Manners Manufacturing Manufacturing, in the Home Marbury v. Madison Marines, U.S. Maritime Technology Market Revolution Marriage Marshall, John Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee Maryland Massachusetts Material Culture McCulloch v. Maryland Medicine Mental Illness Merchants Mesmerism Methodists Mexico Michigan Mid-Atlantic States Migration and Population Movement Military Technology Militias and Militia Service Millennialism Mint, United States Missionary and Bible Tract Societies Mississippi Mississippi River Missouri Missouri Compromise Monroe, James Monroe Doctrine Monuments and Memorials Moravians Mormonism, Origins of Museums and Historical Societies Music African American Classical Patriotic and Political Popular Muslims, Concepts and Images of 5 J–K Jackson, Andrew Jay, John Jay’s Treaty Jefferson, Thomas Jews Judaism Judicial Review Judiciary Act of 1789 Judiciary Acts of 1801 and 1802 Kentucky 5 L Labor Movement: Labor Organizations and Strikes Lafayette, Marie-Joseph, Marquis de Lake Erie, Battle of Land Policies Land Speculation Language Latin American Influences Latin American Revolutions, American Response to Law Federal Law Slavery Law State Law and Common Law Women and the Law Leather and Tanning Industry Legal Culture Lewis and Clark Expedition Lexington Lexington and Concord, Battle of Liberia Liberty Livestock Production London Louisiana Louisiana Purchase Louisville Loyalists Lumber and Timber Industry ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION xi
Slide 13: CONTENTS 5 N Naming of the Nation National Capital, The National Intelligencer Nationalism National Republican Party National Symbols Natural Disasters Natural History Natural Rights Nature, Attitudes Toward Naval Technology Newburgh Conspiracy New England New Hampshire New Jersey New Orleans New Orleans, Battle of New Spain Newspapers New York City New York State Niles’ Register Nonfiction Prose Norfolk North Carolina Northwest Northwest and Southwest Ordinances 5 O Ohio Oklahoma Old Age Olive Branch Petition Orphans and Orphanages 5 P Pain Paine, Thomas Painting Paleontology Panama Congress Panic of 1819 Parades Parenthood Parlor Parsons’ Cause Patent Medicines Patents and Copyrights Patriotic Societies Penitentiaries Pennsylvania People of America Personal Appearance Philadelphia Philanthropy and Giving Philosophy Phrenology Pietists Pioneering Piracy Plantation, The Poetry Police and Law Enforcement Politics Overview Party Organization and Operations Political Corruption and Scandals Political Culture Political Economy Political Pamphlets Political Parties Political Parties and the Press Political Patronage Political Thought Pontiac’s War Popular Sovereignty Post Office Poverty Presbyterians Presidency, The Overview George Washington John Adams Thomas Jefferson James Madison James Monroe John Quincy Adams Press, The Print Culture Printers Printing Technology Proclamation of 1763 Professions Clergy Lawyers Physicians Property xii ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION
Slide 14: CONTENTS Prophecy Proslavery Thought Prostitutes and Prostitution Providence, R.I. Public Opinion Richmond Riots Romanticism Royal Society, American Involvement 5 Q Quakers Quartering Act Quasi-War with France 5 S Sabbatarianism St. Lawrence River St. Louis Salem Santa Fe Saratoga, Battle of Satire Science Sectionalism and Disunion Seduction Seminole Wars Sensibility Sentimentalism Sexuality Sexual Morality Shakers Shays’s Rebellion Shipbuilding Industry Shipping Industry Shoemaking Siblings Slavery Overview Runaway Slaves and Maroon Communities Slave Insurrections Slave Life Slave Patrols Slavery and the Founding Generation Slave Trade, African Slave Trade, Domestic Smallpox Social Life: Rural Life Social Life: Urban Life Society of St. Tammany Society of the Cincinnati Soldiers Sons of Liberty South South Carolina Spain Spanish Borderlands Spanish Conspiracy Spanish Empire Stamp Act and Stamp Act Congress “Star-Spangled Banner” 5 R Racial Theory Radicalism in the Revolution Railroads Rape Rationalism Recreation, Sports, and Games Refinement and Gentility Reform, Social Regulators Religion Overview The Founders and Religion Spanish Borderlands Religious Publishing Religious Tests for Officeholding Revivals and Revivalism Revolution Diplomacy European Participation Finance Home Front Impact on the Economy Military History Military Leadership, American Naval War Prisoners and Spies Slavery and Blacks in the Revolution Social History Supply Women’s Participation in the Revolution Revolution, Age of Revolution as Civil War: Patriot-Loyalist Conflict Rhetoric Rhode Island ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION xiii
Slide 15: CONTENTS Statehood and Admission States’ Rights Steamboat Steam Power Sugar Act Supreme Court Supreme Court Justices Surveyors and Surveying 5 W War and Diplomacy in the Atlantic World War Hawks War of 1812 Washington, Burning of Washington, D.C. Washington, George Waterpower Water Supply and Sewage Wealth Wealth Distribution Weights and Measures Welfare and Charity West Whaling Whiskey Rebellion White House Widowhood Wigs Wisconsin Territory Women Overview Female Reform Societies and Reformers Political Participation Professions Rights Women’s Literature Women’s Voluntary Associations Writers Wool Work Agricultural Labor Apprenticeship Artisans and Crafts Workers, and the Workshop Child Labor Domestic Labor Factory Labor Indentured Servants Labor Overview Middle-Class Occupations Midwifery Overseers Sailors and Seamen Slave Labor Teachers Unskilled Labor Women’s Work Work Ethic 5 T Tariff Politics Taverns Taxation, Public Finance, and Public Debt Tea Act Technology Temperance and Temperance Movement Tennessee Texas Textiles Manufacturing Thames, Battle of the Theater and Drama Theology Tippecanoe, Battle of Town Plans and Promotion Townshend Act Trails to the West Transcontinental Treaty Transportation Animal Power Canals and Waterways Roads and Turnpikes Travel, Technology of Travel Guides and Accounts Treaty of Paris Trenton, Battle of 5 U–V Unitarianism and Universalism Vacations and Resorts Valley Forge Vermont Vesey Rebellion Violence Virginia Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom Voluntary and Civic Associations Voting xiv ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION
Slide 16: CONTENTS 5 X–Y XYZ Affair Yorktown, Battle of Systematic Outline of Contents . Directory of Contributors . Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 407 415 431 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION xv
Slide 17: Preface The Encyclopedia of the New American Nation is the last in a series of four encyclopedias that provide a detailed understanding of American history from the first European exploration of the New World to the beginning of the twenty-first century. The series—which also includes The Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies (1993), edited by Jacob E. Cooke, The Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century (2001), edited by Paul Finkelman, and The Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century (1995), edited by Stanley I. Kutler— provides comprehensive access to the history and development of the events, trends, movements, technologies, cultural and social changes, political ideas and systems, and intellectual trends that have shaped America. This encyclopedia completes this multivolume series by providing detailed information about the founding period of the United States—the era of the new nation. The bibliographies following each entry lead both students and specialists to the central literature surrounding the 667 entries in the three volumes that make up this encyclopedia. In 1754 the United States did not exist. There was no new American nation, or any American nation. Along the east coast of what is today the United States were thirteen British colonies and one Spanish colony. The Gulf Coast was divided between the Spanish and the French. The interior of the continent, from the foothills of the Appalachians to the Mississippi and beyond, was mostly inhabited by Indians, with a few settlements and scattered traders and trading posts. England claimed the lands east of the Mississippi and north of the Gulf of Mexico, but France challenged British interests in the Ohio River valley and on the eastern shores of the Mississippi River. France claimed and controlled most of the land north of the St. Lawrence River. West of the Mississippi most of the continent belonged to Spain and France. The largest city in British North America was Philadelphia, with about 13,000 people in 1740 and about 25,000 by 1760. Only three other cities—New York, Boston, and Charleston—had populations that
Slide 18: PREFACE exceeded 5,000. The thirteen colonies had a non-Indian population of about 1,200,000, of whom about 240,000 were slaves. By 1829 this world had been turned upside down. In 1763 England defeated France in the French and Indian War. The conflict was what might be considered the first “world war” in history, as it was fought in Europe, Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas. The peace treaty redrew the map of America. With the exception of Florida and the Gulf Coast, everything east of the Mississippi became British, and the rest of the continent went to Spain. France was defeated and expelled from the continent, and Indians who had sided with France were also weakened. Even those who fought for the British were hurt beyond repair. The American colonists, however, emerged strong and self-confident. In 1775, the thirteen colonies revolted against Great Britain, the most powerful nation on earth. After eight years of warfare, Britain gave up in her attempt to subdue these rebels. A new nation was born, proclaiming itself a self-governing republic. The row of tiny colonies was no longer ruled by a king and his parliament on a distant island. It was indeed the beginning of new era, not just in America, but in western Europe as well. In the next half century the new nation grew rapidly. Its population more than tripled, reaching 13,000,000 by 1830. The thirteen colonies of 1775 had grown to twenty-four states. By 1775 slavery was legal in all of the colonies, and by 1830 twelve states had either abolished it or were in the process of doing so. About 3,000 slaves remained in those states, almost all of them in New Jersey, which was the last state to begin gradual abolition. Twelve southern states, on the other hand, had more than 2,000,000 slaves. Slavery was the most obvious marker of the differences between the sections, but it was not the only one. Industrial production had begun in the North, and some parts of New England, and the Middle Atlantic states were, for the first time in the nation’s history, more urban and industrial than agrarian. In 1790 no American city exceeded 35,000 people and only about 160,000 Americans lived in a town or city of more than 5,000 people. By 1830 New York City’s population exceeded 200,000, and more than a million Americans lived in towns and cities. Baltimore, a city in a slave state that straddled the North and the South had grown from 13,000 in 1790 to more than 80,000 people, but it was the only southern city of any great size. In 1790 Charlestown was the South’s biggest city, with about 16,000 people. By 1830 the city had only grown to about 30,000 people. New Orleans, which had about 20,000 people when Louisiana became a state in 1812 had grown to 46,000 by 1830. Meanwhile Boston, which had 18,000 people in 1790, had more than tripled to over 60,000 by 1830, while in the same period Philadelphia had grown from 28,000 in 1790 to over 80,000. The geography of the nation had also changed. At the end of the Revolution the thirteen new American states were hugging the Atlantic seaboard; the nation itself extended to the Mississippi River in the West and the Great Lakes to the North, but not to the Gulf Coast. The southern portions of Mississippi and Alabama, called West Florida at the time, were still under Spanish control. By 1830 the nation was vastly larger. Florida and West Florida were now safely in American hands. The Gulf port of New Orleans was an American city; the nation stretched west from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains and beyond. Both the United States and Britain now claimed the Pacific Northwest, and eventually they would peacefully divide it. The Great Plains were populated by Indians, but by 1830 few Indians lived in the East. Tens of thousands of Indians had already been pushed west, into what later became Oklahoma and Arkansas, while others had been pushed north into New York, Michigan, and what would become Wisconsin. The stage was set for the final removal in the next decade—through Black Hawk’s War and the Trail of Tears—of most of the Indians in the Southeast and the Midwest. xviii ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION
Slide 19: PREFACE While the nation grew physically and prospered economically, it matured even more rapidly politically. The nation began with no political system at all. Each colony managed to create a system of self-government almost as soon as the Revolution began. Constitutions appeared in all but two of the new states; Rhode Island and Connecticut simply recycled their old charters. All the states experimented with the details of government, but all accepted basic principles: democratically elected representatives serving for defined terms of office. New states all had a governor, although the executive’s power varied from place to place, as did terms of office and voting rights. Massachusetts allowed almost universal male suffrage, without regard to property or race; South Carolina limited voting to propertyowning white men. Most other states were somewhere in the middle. About half of all states allowed free blacks to vote, and New Jersey initially allowed women to vote, but had taken that right away by 1812. At the national level the Americans at first had a weak central government with few powers and little ability to control the actions of the individual states. After 1787 the national government grew stronger, under a constitution that was, as John Marshall put it, “intended to endure for ages to come, and, consequently, to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs.” And so it did, at least for another three decades, until finally the pressure of slavery undermined the compromises at the Constitutional Convention and brought the nation to civil war. The ability of the nation, thirty years later, to survive the Civil War was in part due to the political structures created in the early national period. No one planned to have political parties, for example. In fact, the founders thought they were a bad idea. But they emerged quickly. More significantly, only a few of them emerged. The nation was not saddled with a plethora of parties, each holding a tiny slice of the political pie, collectively preventing a government from functioning. This lack of political options may have fostered a false sense of unity, as a majority of Americans denied class division and ignored racial oppression, but it had the advantage of creating a political system that worked. When Thomas Jefferson proclaimed in his inaugural address, “We are all Republicans—we are all Federalists,” he was fundamentally right. He called a hard-fought and vicious presidential campaign a “contest of opinion,” and noted that all Americans accepted the fundamental principles of self-government, freedom of expression, and the “sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.” Citizens, and especially public figures, of the new nation were not always able to follow these principles. Jefferson himself relished the persecution and prosecution of some of his critics. More important, Jefferson could not imagine any of his two hundred slaves or the million other blacks in the nation being entitled to the rights of the majority. Nor would he have wanted Indians—the first Americans— to be the beneficiaries of his ideology. But, others in the nation could imagine those things and more. The legacy of the new nation was one of democratic self-government and the belief that ideas could be turned into practical solutions to make the nation a better place. This encyclopedia is designed to explore these issues, and others, and to illuminate our understanding of how thirteen tiny colonies clinging to the Atlantic coast, evolved into a single nation spanning a continent. The completion of these three volumes would not have been possible without the participation of the many scholars who have contributed their time and expertise to write for this project. Without their cooperation and willingness to share their knowledge and understanding of American history it would simply be impossible to create a reference tool like this one. My editorial board was also essential to ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION xix
Slide 20: PREFACE this project. Jan Lewis, Peter Onuf, Jeff Pasley, John Stagg, and Michael Zuckerman are all superb historians, important scholars, and as I learned when they read the entries I wrote, first-rate editors in their own right. They are also good friends and colleagues. I am honored that they agreed to work on this project and help create these volumes. Rita Langford, my own administrative assistant at the University of Tulsa College of Law was invaluable in the management of this project, and in so many others that I have worked on. Similarly, I thank John Wright, who claims to be my agent, but is really a friend and advisor. My editors at Scribners/Gale, John Fitzpatrick, and the project managers I worked with, Roberta Klarreich, Lisa Vecchione, and especially Erin Bealmear, were enormously helpful, as were Linda Hubbard and her entire production team. Most of all, I owe a special thanks to Frank Menchaca, who changed job titles, office, and even the city he lived in during the project, but was always available for consultation. One of the great bonuses of this project was the opportunity to spend time with Frank, and learn from him. Paul Finkelman xx ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION
Slide 21: Chronology 1754: The British Crown charters King’s College in New York City; renamed Columbia College in 1784. New York Society Library established. French and Indian War begins when Virginia sends militia under Major George Washington to challenge French expansion in the Ohio valley; Washington surrenders after being surrounded by the French. Benjamin Franklin helps organize the Albany Congress to consider how colonists should respond to growing crisis in America between the English and the French. Franklin proposes coordinated efforts of the colonies through the Albany Plan of Union, which is rejected. Thomas Chippendale’s pattern book for furniture, The Gentleman and CabinetMaker’s Director, is published in London. French-speaking Acadians are deported from Acadia by the British; many migrate to Louisiana. The painter Gilbert Charles Stuart is born in North Kingstown, Rhode Island. Philadelphia Academy (later University of Pennsylvania) is chartered. General Braddock is defeated and killed in western Pennsylvania; Colonel George Washington leads defeated troops back to Virginia. 1757: William Pitt becomes the first minister of Parliament in England. He decides to focus war efforts on America, ultimately sending twentyfour thousand troops to America. This is probably the largest European army created since the fall of the Roman Empire. 1758: Treaty of Easton; Cherokees attack colonists on the Virginia frontier. The British fail to capture Fort Ticonderoga. General James Wolfe, with nine thousand British troops, takes Louisbourg, Canada. In Pennsylvania, the French evacuate Fort Duquesne, blowing it up; the British rebuild, calling it Fort Pitt, which eventually leads to settlement at Pittsburgh. The French are defeated in upstate New York at Fort Niagara and Fort Ticonderoga; at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, British General Wolfe captures Quebec City; the French are effectively defeated in America. Wolfe dies in battle. Indian clergyman and missionary Samson Occom becomes a fully ordained Presbyterian minister. 1759: 1755: 1760: 1756: War spreads to Europe. The Great Awakening in America ends. French forces capitulate at Montreal, surrendering Canada and its dependencies to Britain. Charles III becomes King of Spain; George III becomes king of Great Britain. Ottawa chief Pontiac rebels against the British. 1761: xxi
Slide 22: CHRONOLOGY 1762: 1763: Spain declares war on Great Britain. 1768: Treaty of Paris; Spain cedes Florida to Great Britain; France cedes Louisiana to Spain and Acadia, Canada, and Cape Breton to Great Britain. George Grenville becomes Prime Minister; Britain issues Proclamation of 1763 forbidding colonists to settle west of the Appalachian Mountains until further land can be acquired from the Indians. Pontiac initiates pan-Indian rebellion against the British in the Ohio valley and the Great Lakes region. The Touro Synagogue opens in Newport, Rhode Island. Pennsylvania frontiersmen, known as the Paxton Boys, massacre Conestoga Indians and march toward Philadelphia to attack Indians in protective custody there; they are dissuaded by Benjamin Franklin and others. The Massachusetts Assembly is dissolved for refusing to assist in the collection of taxes. The colonial General Court issued a circular letter to the other colonies calling the Townshend Duties unconstitutional. John Hancock’s ship, Liberty, is seized by the British for violating navigation acts. Additional British regiments arrive. The Cherokees agree to a new border, and the Iroquois relinquish some land claims in New York. Junipero Serra founds the first Spanish mission in California at San Diego. Spain colonizes Alta, California. Pontiac killed. George Washington introduces Virginia Resolves in colonial legislature (House of Burgesses). Written by George Mason, the resolves assert that only the colonists can impose taxes in the colonies. Virginia leaders adopt the Virginia Association, a nonimportation agreement. Various colonists, and ultimately merchants, in Philadelphia, New York, Charleston, and Boston join in the boycott of British goods; for the entire year, the value of imports from England drops by 40 percent to 50 percent throughout the colonies. Most import boycotts end as the Townshend duties are repealed for everything but tea; Bostonians boycott tea, but the movement does not spread to the other colonies. Riots in New York City between the Sons of Liberty and British troops; Boston Massacre leads to the death of five civilians. North Carolina “regulators” fight government forces at the Battle of Alamance, near Hillsboro; a few of the regulator leaders are executed. Permanent Moravian missions for Labrador Eskimos are founded. Conflicts between England and the colonies die down; trade resumes. 1769: 1763–1764: 1764: Rhode Island College (later Brown University) is founded. Widespread colonial protest erupts when the British Parliament passes the Sugar Act, which in effect gives Great Britain a monopoly on the Anglo-American sugar market; the duty is lowered two years later, ending the protest. Britain imposes the Currency Act on colonies; the first boycotts are held against English products in the colonies. The first American medical school is founded in Philadelphia. Britain passes Quartering Act in May. The Stamp Act generates outrage in the colonies and is repealed in response to widespread colonial protest, including first colonywide meeting, known as the Stamp Act Congress, in October. Sons of Liberty established to organize opposition to British colonial policy. In the Declaratory Act, Parliament asserts its “full power and authority over the colonies.” The Stamp Act is repealed. The Daughters of Liberty established. New York to Philadelphia stagecoach route is established; the journey takes two days. Queens College (later Rutgers University) is founded. Pontiac signs peace treaty with the British. 1770: 1765: 1771: 1766: 1772: 1767: The New York Assembly is suspended for refusing to provide quarters for troops, as required by the 1765 Quartering Act. The Jesuits are expelled from Spanish territories; Franciscans take over the western missions. Daniel Boone explores the land west of the Cumberland Gap, in violation of the Proclamation of 1763. The Townshend Duties Act places customs duties on a number of items imported from England. British revenue cutter Gaspe burns off the coast of Rhode Island; committees of correspondence established. In Massachusetts, Governor Thomas Hutchinson arranges to have his salary paid by Britain, thus eliminating part of the colonial home rule. In Somerset v. Stewart, Britain’s highest court declares that any slave brought to England can claim his or her freedom because slavery can only exist if there is a positive law to support it, which England does not have. The Boston Tea Party occurs; the colonists protest the duty on tea by dumping a shipload into Boston Harbor. A hospital for the insane is built in Williamsburg. Poems on Various 1773: xxii ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION
Slide 23: CHRONOLOGY Subjects, Religious and Moral by Phillis Wheatley of Boston, a slave taken from Senegal, is published in London; Wheatley is manumitted by her Boston master in the summer of 1773. 1774: Delaware River, surprises the British, and wins battles at Trenton and Princeton in early 1777. 1777: The British government fires Benjamin Franklin as deputy postmaster for the colonies because of his open hostility to English policies. The first Continental Congress meets at Philadelphia, with representatives from all of the colonies, except Georgia; Lord Dunmore’s War forces the Shawnee Indians into a peace that facilitates the British settlement of Kentucky. “Mother Ann Lee,” founder of the Shakers, arrives in America from England. The Coercive Acts close the port of Boston. The Quebec Act threatens the colonies by providing a permanent civil government and granting religious toleration to Catholics in Canada. The Quartering Act legalizes the use of private homes for quartering British troops. The colonies begin to prepare for armed resistance. Louis XIV reigns in France. 1774–1793: 1775: The Second Continental Congress assembles in Philadelphia, again without Georgia. British troops and American militia battle at Lexington and Concord, in Massachusetts. The American Revolution beings; George Washington is made commander in chief of the American army. The Americans capture Fort Ticonderoga. The Battle of Bunker Hill forces Americans out of Boston, but due to the high number of casualties British troops are unable to remain in city. King George III refuses the Olive Branch Petition. The Continental Congress establishes a navy and later the Marine Corps. In Virginia, Lord Dunmore offers freedom to slaves who will join the British army and fight against their masters. Americans invade Canada and are forced to retreat in 1776. Casimir Pulaski arrives from Poland to fight for Patriot cause. Bowing to military force, the Cherokee Indians cede lands to North and South Carolina. Vermont declares its independence from New York. New Hampshire adopts a constitution that prohibits slavery and allows all adult men to vote. European trained officers begin to arrive in America to fight on the Patriot side, including the Marquis de Lafayette, Johann De Kalb, and, Thaddeus Koscuiusko. Congress decides on a flag. The Americans are defeated at Brandywine, allowing the British to occupy Philadelphia and forcing Congress to flee in September. The Americans are defeated at Germantown; Washington retreats to Valley Forge for the winter. In the north, British General “Gentleman” Johnny Burgoyne invades New York state from Canada; the Battle of Oriskany stops the force of Indians under Chief Joseph and Loyalists in central New York; the British are defeated at the Battle of Bennington. In October, Burgoyne’s army is defeated and captured at Saratoga, which is often seen as the turning point of the war. Congress adopts the Articles of Confederation and sends them to the states for ratification. Captain James Cook explores the Northwest coast. Washington winters in Valley Forge. France approves alliance with America. Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Stueben arrives to join Washington’s army and to train troops. General Henry Clinton assumes command of the British forces in America, and in June the British evacuate Philadelphia. The Battle of Monmouth is effectively a draw, but shows that American troops are far better trained after working with von Steuben. General George Rogers Clark captures Kankaskia in the West; the British move south, and capture Savannah. In January, the British capture Augusta, which the Americans retake in May; Benedict Arnold begins to secretly work for the British; Spain declares war against Great Britain. General John Sullivan destroys Indians in Pennsylvania and New York who are supporting the British, and eliminates the Iroquois as a significant military threat. John Paul Jones defeats and captures the British ship Serapis off the coast of England; he returns a hero. The Americans fail to retake Savannah; Count Pulaski is killed in battle; French admiral, Comte Jean Baptiste d’Estaing is wounded. The British evacuate 1778: 1779: 1776: Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is published in London; Thomas Paine’s Common Sense is published in Philadelphia. The British evacuate Boston; the British army invades the South. In July, Congress adopts the Declaration of Independence. The British force Washington out of New York in a series of battles in and around New York City. Washington retreats to Pennsylvania after a series of defeats; on Christmas Eve he moves into New Jersey after the dangerous nighttime crossing of the ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION xxiii
Slide 24: CHRONOLOGY Rhode Island in an attempt to shift strategy to holding the South for the empire. Washington winters in Morristown, New Jersey. 1780: The British capture Charleston, taking about 5,500 Americans prisoner. French Comte de Rochambeau arrives with five thousand troops, landing at Newport, Rhode Island. The Americans are defeated at Camden, South Carolina, with about two thousand Americans killed or captured; Americans later defeat combined British and Loyalist forces at Kings Mountain, in North Carolina, forcing British troops under Cornwallis back to South Carolina. General Nathaniel Greene replaces Horatio Gates as the commander of the American troops in the South. The Benedict Arnold conspiracy is exposed; British courier Major John Andre is captured and hanged outside of New York City. Pennsylvania passes the first gradual abolition act in the country; the Massachusetts Constitution indirectly prohibits slavery in the state with a clause declaring that all people are born “free and equal.” gradual abolition laws. The first U.S. ships reach China, expanding American commerce to Asia. The U.S. capital is moved temporarily to New York City. 1785: Congress (under the Articles of Confederation) passes the Land Ordinance for the Northwest Territory; the United States and Spain begin negotiations, which ultimately fail, on the Florida boundary and navigation on the Mississippi River. John Adams becomes the U.S. ambassador for Britain; Thomas Jefferson becomes the U.S. ambassador to France. James Madison’s “Memorian and Remonstrance” on religious freedom undermines the concept of an established church in Virginia and elsewhere. Jean-Francois de Galaup, Comte de La Pesrouse, leads an expedition to the Pacific, exploring the coasts of Alaska and California before continuing west. Virginia effectively disestablishes its official church with the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. Delegates from five states meet at the Annapolis Convention to discuss revising the Articles of Confederation; the convention fails but sets the stage for the Constitutional Convention. Shays’s Rebellion in western Massachusetts closes courthouses and frightens elites in the United States before being suppressed. 1786: 1781: General George Washington defeats British troops led by General Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia, effectively ending any British hope of winning the war. The Articles of Confederation are ratified. Lord North’s ministry falls in Britain; peace talks begin in France, with Benjamin Franklin joined by John Adams and John Jay; preliminary peace pact, the Treaty of Versailles, signed in November. Great Britain recognizes the independence of the United States of America. Florida is returned to Spain. Britain begins to evacuate former colonies as war dies down; some fighting between Indians loyal to Britain and the United States continues. The war officially ends; British troops evacuate New York City, taking about four thousand former slaves with them; British troops leaving the Deep South evacuate about another ten thousand former slaves; more than one hundred thousand white loyalists also leave. The Continental Army disbands; Washington resigns as commander in chief and retires to Virginia declaring that he will never again seek public office. The New Hampshire Constitution contains the words “free and equal clause” which soon ends slavery there. 1782: 1787: 1783: Delegates from 12 of 13 states (Rhode Island never sends a delegation) meet in Philadelphia, and throughout the summer, write the U.S. Constitution. Congress meets in New York and passes the Northwest Ordinance to regulate settlement north of Ohio; the ordinance includes a ban on slavery in the territory. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay begin to publish the Federalist Papers to gain support for the Constitution. Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey ratify the new Constitution. Bread riots occur in France. 1788: 1788–1808: Charles IV reigns in Spain. By 11 July thirteen states have ratified the new Constitution; the tenth and eleventh states, Virginia and New York, are crucial for success of the new government, which goes into effect by September. Elections are held for a new Congress and the first president. The French Revolution begins. Presidential electors unanimously choose George Washington as the nation’s first president; John Adams becomes vice president; both are swornin at Federal Hall, in New York City, the tempo- 1789: 1784: The province of New Brunswick is established in British North America to accommodate Loyalists. Connecticut and Rhode Island pass xxiv ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION
Slide 25: CHRONOLOGY rary location for the national capital. Congress writes the Bill of Rights and sends it to the states for ratification. Congress creates various government departments. North Carolina becomes the twelfth state to ratify the Constitution. A Spanish expedition under Alejandro Malaspina explores the West Coast from Prince William Sound (Alaska) to Monterey (California); Alexander Mackenzie reaches the mouth of the Mackenzie River and then the Pacific Coast in two overland journeys from the East. 1790: ject to execution. The Supreme Court decision in Chisolm v. Georgia leads to a huge backlash and a proposed constitutional amendment. Jefferson resigns from cabinet. 1794: The U.S. government continues to be organized. Congress accepts Hamilton’s proposal to fund all of the state and national debts from the Revolution. Congress agrees to move capital back to Philadelphia, but only for ten years, and then to locate permanent national capital further south, along the Potomac River. The first national census is compiled. Rhode Island becomes the last of original states to ratify the Constitution. The Eleventh Amendment is ratified; the Neutrality Act is passed, which forbids United States’ citizens from serving in foreign armies. The Whiskey Rebellion is suppressed, showing the power of the U.S. government to enforce its own laws. Jay’s Treaty settles the remaining issues between England and the United States. The British finally evacuate forts in the Great Lakes basin. Slavery is abolished in the French colonies. 1795: 1791: The Bank of the United States is established over the objections of Madison and Jefferson. Congress passes the Whiskey Tax, which adversely affects Western farmers. Vermont enters the Union as the first new state. Arthur St. Clair is defeated by Indians in Ohio. The Constitution Act is passed; Britain divides the province of Quebec into Lower Canada (Quebec) and Upper Canada (Ontario). General “Mad” Anthony Wayne commissioned to suppress Indians in Ohio. Jefferson and Hamilton openly feud; political parties begin to emerge. Washington re-elected for second term. Kentucky becomes the fifteenth state. Captain George Vancouver explores the west coast of Canada. Following slave revolts in the French Antilles, Louisiana prohibits the importation of slaves from the French Caribbean colonies. The Parliament of Upper Canada votes for the gradual abolition of slavery. Congress passes the first fugitive slave law. Hamilton and Madison engage in newspaper debate over presidential power, Madison writing as “Helvidius” and Hamilton as “Pacificus.” Ely Whitney invents the cotton gin. Washington issues proclamation of neutrality in the war between France and England. The French envoy to the U.S., Citizen Genet, hints that there is a “French party” in the United States, which leads to a backlash against France; the United States plans to expel Genet, but does not when the “reign of terror” begins in France and he is sub- Washington’s cabinet is reorganized; Hamilton resigns. General Anthony Wayne defeats Indians in the Northwest, forcing them to sign treaties; the Cherokees sign a treaty in the South, ceding lands. Hearing rumors of Haitian independence and abolition in the French colonies, slaves in Pointe-Coupee (Spanish Louisiana) plan a revolt. Treaty of San Lorenzo (Pinckney’s Treaty) finally settles boundary with Florida and the United States, but fails to resolve questions of U.S. navigation rights on the Mississippi River. 1796: 1792: Washington refuses to seek a third term, setting a precedent for the next century and a half. Washington issues his farewell address, warning of foreign entanglements. The first contested presidential election occurs; John Adams wins, but his rival, Thomas Jefferson, becomes vice president. Adams inaugurated as the second president. The XYZ affair brings France and the United States to the brink of war. An undeclared naval war with France begins. Congress passes the Alien and Sedition Acts; the Alien Enemies Act is aimed at possible war with France; other Alien Acts and Sedition Act are aimed at suppressing support for Jefferson in upcoming election; Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions attack the legitimacy of the Sedition Act. Tennessee enters the Union. 1797: 1798: 1793: 1799: The Logan Act prohibits U.S. citizens not authorized by national government from conducting diplomatic negotiations with foreign powers. Fries’s Rebellion suppressed. Fries convicted of treason, sentenced to death, but sentence commuted by President Adams. The Russian-American Company is chartered and given a monopoly to conduct trade in Alaska. ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION xxv
Slide 26: CHRONOLOGY 1800: The United States population is 5.3 million, 1 million of whom are African American. Approximately 75 percent of the U.S. labor force is engaged in agriculture. The federal government moves to Washington, D.C. The Harrison Land Act offers sale of lands in the public domain at two dollars per acre for 320-acre tracts. In May, Congress divides the original Northwest Territory, creating the Indiana Territory to the West, as a response to the swift migration of Americans to take up settlements under the Land Act. Gabriel Prosser plans a large-scale slave uprising in Virginia, but slave informants and torrential rains avert the rebellion. Southern farmers produce seventy-three thousand bales of cotton. Pacific Ocean. Alexander Hamilton is killed by Aaron Burr in a duel. 1805: 1801: Thomas Jefferson is inaugurated as the third president of the United States; it is the first time in the history of the modern world that an opposition party replaces an existing government in a peaceful transition. The first Barbary War, a four-year conflict between the United States and Tripoli, begins when President Jefferson refuses to pay increased demands for tribute to pirates. The Cane Ridge Revival in Bourbon County, Kentucky, draws thousands of participants and marks the beginning of the religious revivalist movement known as the Second Great Awakening. The Essex decision by the British admiralty rules that neutral ships with enemy cargo aboard are liable to capture even if the cargo is being transshipped via U.S. ports; British warships and privateers begin patrolling the U.S. coast to seize American ships carrying French and Spanish goods; Britain increases impressment of U.S. sailors (alleging them deserters from the Royal Navy). Unitarianism, the theological “left wing” of Congregationalism, becomes the official religious position at Harvard College when the liberal Henry Ware is appointed to the Hollis Professorship of Divinity. Thousands attend a Methodist camp meeting at Smyrna, Delaware. The Free Public School Society of New York is established. 1806: 1802: President Jefferson oversees acts of Congress establishing the Library of Congress and formally establishing the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. Washington, D.C., is incorporated as a city. Nathaniel Bowditch publishes The New American Practical Navigator. Tlingit Indians capture and destroy the Russian town of New Archangel (Sitka) on Baranof Island. Congress passes the Non-Importation Act (effective in December 1807) prohibiting the importation from Britain of items that can be produced in the United States or imported from other countries. The Lewis and Clark expedition returns in September, having demonstrated the feasibility of traveling overland from the East to the Pacific Ocean. Zebulon Pike leads an expedition to the headwaters of the Arkansas and Red Rivers (sighting Pike’s Peak in Colorado along the way) that lasts into 1807 and results in a report that stimulates expansion into Texas. Asher Benjamin’s American Builder’s Companion is published. The U.S.S. Chesapeake is sunk by British ships in American water. American trade with Britain is prohibited by the Embargo Act, which forbids U.S. ships from sailing to foreign ports. Former vice president Aaron Burr, who in 1806 was charged with conspiring to raise troops and build a personal empire from disputed Spanish territories in the West, is acquitted after a sensational trial; Supreme Court Justice John Marshall leads the decision that Burr’s actions did not meet the strict constitutional definition for treason. Robert Fulton’s Clermont inaugurates commercial steamboat navigation with a round trip on the Hudson River between New York and Albany. 1807: 1803: Ohio is admitted as the seventeenth state in the Union (the first state carved out of the Northwest Territory). The United States takes possession of the Louisiana Territories (828,000 square miles), purchased for $15 million from France, doubling the area of the United States. Marbury v. Madison establishes the Supreme Court’s power to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional. Ratification of the Twelfth Amendment institutes separate ballots for president and vice president. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark leave St. Louis in May on a federally funded expedition to explore the lands acquired in the Louisiana Purchase and find a water route to the 1804: 1808: The slave population reaches one million. Congress formally abolishes the Atlantic slave trade. Jefferson increases the size of the U.S. Army to control smuggling into Canada. A massive internal improvements plan proposed by Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin calls xxvi ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION
Slide 27: CHRONOLOGY for $30 million in federal financing to construct a turnpike from present-day Maine to Georgia, an intercoastal waterway running roughly parallel to the turnpike, and a system of roads crossing the Appalachian Mountains at several key places; the plan aims to make major improvements to the navigability of the major east-west river systems of the Appalachians and to develop a system of canals linking these rivers to the Great Lakes. Congress grants a monopoly on trade throughout Minnesota to John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company. The Bible Society of Philadelphia, the first Bible society in the United States, is founded. Andover Seminary, America’s first postgraduate theological school, opens to safeguard conservative Calvinist theology in response to Harvard’s Unitarianism. 1809: 1812: In April, the United States burns Toronto and takes control of the Great Lakes at the Battle of York. At the urging of the president and a small number of “war hawks,” but with all Federalists in opposition, the United States declares war (“Mr. Madison’s War”) on Great Britain (18 June). The first war bonds are issued, and the first interest-bearing Treasury notes are authorized. Louisiana is admitted as the eighteenth state in the Union (the first state created from the lands of the Louisiana Purchase). The Russian-American Company maintains a base at Fort Ross, in northern California. 1813: James Madison is inaugurated as the fourth president of the United States. The NonIntercourse Act bans trade with Great Britain and France; the economically disastrous Embargo Act is repealed. U.S. parochial school education is introduced with the founding by Elizabeth Ann Seton of a free Catholic elementary school in Baltimore. The American Indian chief Tecumseh is killed, leading to the fall of the Native American federation and the end of Indian support for the British in the war with the United States. Simeon North is awarded a U.S. government contract for twenty thousand pistols, to be made with interchangeable parts. The first ironclad ship is built by John Stevens, in Hoboken, New Jersey. The British capture Washington, D.C., burning the White House and the Capitol building and forcing President Madison to flee the city. New England Federalists opposed to the War of 1812 assemble at the Hartford Convention and reverse the party’s earlier nationalist position by calling for states’ rights and a weak central government. The Treaty of Ghent on 24 December ends the stalemated war between the United States and Great Britain, restoring prewar territorial conditions. Emma Hart Willard opens Middlebury Female Seminary in Vermont to offer young women classical and scientific studies at a collegiate level. Ferdinand VII becomes King of Spain. 1814: 1810: The United States population is 7.2 million. Western Florida declares independence and is annexed by the United States. The Supreme Court in Fletcher v. Peck invalidates a state law as unconstitutional for the first time. Dissident Presbyterians form the evangelical, prorevivalist Cumberland Presbyterian Church. The tradition of the American agricultural fair is initiated with the opening of the Berkshire Cattle Show in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The First Bank of the United States (created by Congress in 1791) is allowed to expire. Congress meets secretly to make plans to annex Spanish East Florida. An uprising of more than four hundred slaves is put down in New Orleans; sixty-six blacks are killed. The Cumberland Road from Maryland to Wheeling, Virginia, is started as part of the federal program to improve canals, roads, and bridges, but the rest of the 1808 Gallatin Plan is tabled. General William Henry Harrison defeats Shawnees in Indiana at the Battle of Tippecanoe. The fur baron John Jacob Astor and a group of settlers found the first white community in the Pacific Northwest, at Astoria, Oregon; another group of colonists settles at Cape Disappointment, Washington. 1811: 1815: Unaware that a peace treaty has ended the War of 1812, General Andrew Jackson’s troops defeat British forces at the Battle of New Orleans and Jackson becomes a national hero. Stephen Decatur leads a successful expedition to end the Second Barbary War, a conflict between the United States and Algeria that began during the War of 1812 when the dey of Algiers plundered American commerce in the Mediterranean. The United States has a total of thirty miles of railroad track. The Second Bank of the United States is chartered by Congress and creates a uniform national currency. Indiana (formerly part of the Northwest Territory) is admitted as the nineteenth state in the Union. Congress passes a tar- 1816: ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION xxvii
Slide 28: CHRONOLOGY iff bill that imposes a high import duty on foreign manufactures in order to give American industries a competitive advantage in the domestic market. The Supreme Court case Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee establishes the Court’s power to review the constitutionality of state civil court decisions. The American Colonization Society is established with the aim of returning free blacks to Africa. The African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) is organized in Philadelphia. The American Bible Society is established. 1817: by agreement that Missouri will enter the Union (in 1821) as a state with no restrictions on slavery. The federal Land Act sets the price for public lands at $1.25 per acre and the number of acres for purchase at eighty. Southern farmers produce 334,000 bales of cotton. The first African Americans from the United States to be recolonized in Africa arrive in Liberia. Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” introduces a new literary form, the short story. George IV becomes King of England. 1821: James Monroe is inaugurated as the fifth president of the United States. Mississippi is admitted as the twentieth state in the Union. The Rush-Bagot Agreement between the United States and Great Britain sets limits on naval power on the Great Lakes. The First Seminole War begins, with Seminole Indians battling American settlers along the border of Georgia and Spanish Florida. The New York Stock and Exchange Board (renamed the New York Stock Exchange in 1863) is created. Illinois (formerly part of the Northwest Territory) is admitted as the twenty-first state in the Union. The Convention of 1818 establishes the forty-ninth parallel as the northwest boundary between American and the British territory from Lake of the Woods (on the Minnesota-Ontario border) to the Rocky Mountains. The U.S. flag is adopted, with thirteen red and white alternating stripes and a star for each state. Missouri is admitted as the twenty-fourth state in the Union. Spain sells eastern Florida to the United States for $5 million. The Santa Fe Trail, blazed by William Becknell, opens the Southwest to trade. The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church is organized in New York City. The first public high school in the United States is established by vote at a special town meeting in Boston. Mexican independence is proclaimed by the Mexican Assembly. 1822: 1818: Denmark Vesey, a free black, and thirty-four other blacks, mostly slaves, are hung in Charleston, South Carolina, for an alleged conspiracy to start a slave rebellion. Stephen Austin founds the first settlement of Americans in Texas (“the Old Three Hundred”) with the legal sanction of the Mexican government. The first section of the Erie Canal, stretching from Rochester to Albany, opens in New York State. President Monroe gives an address (the Monroe Doctrine) warning European powers to stay out of the Western Hemisphere and advising that colonization or interference by European governments in the internal affairs of North and South America would be considered an act of aggression against the United States. Clement Moore’s Christmas poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” appears anonymously in a Troy, New York, newspaper and becomes an overnight sensation that launches the American idea of “Santa Claus.” 1823: 1819: Alabama is admitted as the twenty-second state in the Union. Spain cedes Florida to the United States as a result of the Adams-Onís Treaty. The Civilization Act formalizes federal policy to assimilate Indians into American society. The Supreme Court case of Dartmouth College v. Woodward establishes constitutional protection for corporations. Financial panic sets off an economic depression that lasts into 1822. The Savannah, sailing from Savannah, Georgia, to Liverpool, England, becomes the first steamship to cross the Atlantic. Jethro Wood patents a cast-iron plow that features replaceable parts at points of greatest wear. The United States population is 9.6 million; the U.S. Bureau of Census begins recording immigration statistics. The Missouri Compromise admits Maine (formerly a district of Massachusetts) to the Union as a nonslave state (the twenty-third state in the Union), balanced 1824: 1820: No contender in the presidential election (among candidates Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, William H. Crawford, and Henry Clay) gains a majority of the vote; the election is decided by the House of Representatives. Congress passes the Tariff Act to protect American industry from foreign competition. Thomas L. Kenney is appointed to head the newly created Bureau of Indian Affairs, an administrational entity within the U.S. War Department. The American Sunday School xxviii ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION
Slide 29: CHRONOLOGY Union is formed. Russia relinquishes claims to territory in the Pacific Northwest. 1825: Party, is formed in Batavia, New York. The American Temperance Society is founded. 1827: John Quincy Adams is inaugurated as the sixth president of the United States. Completion of the Erie Canal, 363 miles from the Hudson River to Lake Erie, gives farmers near the Great Lakes access to New York City. The first woman’s labor organization is formed by women working in New York City’s garment industry. The American Unitarian Association is founded in Boston as an institution separate from the Congregational Church. Stephen F. Austin begins migration of Americans to Texas. Father Ivan Veniaminov builds the first church in the Aleutian Islands. Founding fathers Thomas Jefferson and John Adams die on the same day, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Light sentencing for the murderers of a renegade Freemason who had threatened to reveal fraternity rituals creates an anti-Masonic backlash; the first national third party, the Anti-Masonic The Supreme Court rules in Martin v. Mott that the president has sole authority to call out the militia. John James Audubon publishes the first volume of his five-volume Birds of North America. 1828: Congress passes the Tariff Act, which is called the “Tariff of Abominations” by its southern opponents. Construction of the first passenger railroad in America, from Baltimore to Ohio, begins. Noah Webster publishes his American Dictionary of the English Language. Andrew Jackson is inaugurated as the seventh president of the United States; an unruly crowd of celebrants mobs the White House at his reception. The postmaster general is elevated to cabinet rank. Congress authorizes construction of the first post office building, in Newport, Rhode Island. America’s first true locomotive runs on the Delaware and Hudson Railroad. 1829: 1826: ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION xxix
Slide 30: A ABOLITION OF SLAVERY IN THE NORTH The American Revolution is regarded as the precipitating factor in the abolition of northern slavery. However, more than a century of arguments and measures to restrict both the trade in slaves and the institution of slavery preceded the emergence of Revolutionary-era antislavery sentiment, and abolition met powerful resistance in nearly every northern colony and state. less, religious opposition grew slowly through the eighteenth century. People of color themselves were the most vehement opponents of slavery. Beginning in the early 1700s, slaves sent a steady stream of freedom petitions to colonial assemblies and pressed lawsuits seeking their freedom based on a variety of arguments. ABOLITION IN THE REVOLUTIONARY ERA COLONIAL ANTISLAVERY SENTIMENT Several colonies periodically attempted to restrict the importation of slaves out of fear of slave rebellions, to encourage European immigration, or to prevent miscegenation. There were also a few very early attempts to prohibit slavery outright, but these were widely ignored. Among religious sects, the Society of Friends led the opposition to slavery, and by 1787 northern Quakers had become the one major sect whose members did not hold slaves on principle. Some Puritans, too, became convinced that slavery was incompatible with Christianity. Judge Samuel Sewall’s pamphlet, The Selling of Joseph (1700), provoked a brief interest in abolition in Massachusetts but ultimately convinced few slaveholders to free their slaves. Nonethe- The American Revolution finally produced conditions under which the cause of abolition could gain public support. Antislavery advocates argued that the Revolutionary ideology of natural rights applied equally well to slaves, and the war itself disrupted trade and made slavery less important economically. As first steps toward abolition, many colonies moved to prohibit the importation of slaves. In 1774 the first Continental Congress banned the importation of slaves into all the colonies as part of a general trade boycott designed to force Britain to repeal the Intolerable Acts. Other measures included banning the participation of state residents in the international slave trade and removing or softening restrictions on manumitting slaves. During the war a few states, notably Rhode Island and Connecticut, also offered freedom in exchange for enlistment. 1
Slide 31: ABOLITION OF SLAVERY IN THE NORTH Measures intended explicitly to bring slavery to an end took several forms, including constitutional prohibition, legislative enactment, and judicial decision. In Vermont, the constitution of 1777 declared all men to be born equally free and independent and is generally considered to have abolished slavery outright; however, the first chapter of its bill of rights, stating that no person should be held as a “servant slave or apprentice” after reaching twenty-one years of age if male or eighteen if female, suggests that this was a conditional abolition. After several failed attempts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Connecticut enacted post nati or “after birth” statutes that limited the period of servitude of children born to slaves after a specific date but left slaves born before that date enslaved for life. In Pennsylvania, the 1780 gradual abolition bill freed slaves’ children at twenty-eight. It also freed slaves not registered by their owners by 1 November 1780. In 1840 there were still more than forty slaves in Pennsylvania, and a few persons may have remained enslaved there until the Civil War. Both Rhode Island and Connecticut freed children born to slaves after 1 March 1784 upon reaching their majority—eighteen for females and twenty-one for males in Rhode Island, twenty-five (reduced to twenty-one in 1797) for all children in Connecticut. Unlike Pennsylvania, these two states brought slavery to a definitive end by passing final abolition bills in 1842 and 1848, respectively. Massachusetts and New Hampshire enacted state constitutions with declarations of rights that seemed to prohibit slavery. In Massachusetts, a series of freedom suits brought on behalf of Quok Walker eventually resulted in a 1783 court decision that the 1780 constitution granted rights incompatible with slavery and therefore slavery was abolished “as effectively as it can be without resorting to implication in constructing the constitution.” The wording of this decision was so ambiguous that slaves continued to be sold in Massachusetts for several years. In New Hampshire, no records survive of legal cases construing a similar clause in the 1783 constitution. Slaves were taxed as property there until 1789, and 158 slaves were reported in the state census in 1790, although by then the institution was all but dead in the state. twenty-eight if male, twenty-five if female. Abandoned children were to be supported by the state (but could be bound out to masters, who would be paid for their support—a thinly disguised form of compensated emancipation repealed in 1804). In 1817 a new statute provided that all slaves born before 4 July 1799 would be free in 1827, thus ending slavery in the state in that year. In New Jersey, a gradual abolition statute was passed freeing children born to slaves after 1 July 1804, at the age of twenty-five if male and twenty-one if female. Here, too, an abandonment clause provided the equivalent of compensation to owners but was repealed later in the year. In 1846 the New Jersey legislature passed a bill that ostensibly emancipated all remaining slaves but placed them in a state of permanent apprenticeship. The last “apprentices” in New Jersey were freed by the Thirteenth Amendment. There were slaves in the territories of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, too, even though slavery was formally prohibited there by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. When Ohio was admitted to the Union in 1803, its new constitution outlawed slavery. The territorial governments of Indiana and Illinois recognized a “voluntary” system of servitude whereby slaves were indentured to their masters for long periods. While the Indiana constitution of 1816 and the Illinois constitution of 1818 officially prohibited slavery, the prohibitions were widely interpreted not to apply either to voluntary servitude or to descendants of French slaves present when the territories were organized. In Indiana, a few slaves were still reported in the census of 1840. In Illinois, slavery was finally abolished by the state supreme court in the case of Jarrot v. Jarrot in 1845. Once free, many people of color continued to work for their former owners and also to live in their houses, but within a few years most moved elsewhere, forming communities on the margins of white society in northern cities and towns. The slow demise of slavery and the ambiguity surrounding the status of people of color fostered a transfer of whites’ behaviors and attitudes toward slaves to an emerging population of free people of color. Throughout the North, state laws regulating the behavior, limiting the movement, and restricting the suffrage of free people of color came into effect as formal slavery ended, and more than one hundred violent attacks by whites on communities of color were recorded between 1820 and 1850. Nonetheless, many northern blacks succeeded in forming schools, churches, and other institutions and in mounting an aggressive rhetorical attack on southern slavery. OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION ABOLITION IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC In New York and New Jersey, abolition was bitterly resisted and several abolition bills were defeated. New York finally passed an act providing that all children born to slaves after 4 July 1799 would be free at 2 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 32: ABOLITION SOCIETIES See also Abolition Societies; African Americans: Free Blacks in the North; Slavery: Slavery and the Founding Generation. BIBLIOGRAPHY Barnhart, John D. Valley of Democracy: The Frontier versus the Plantation in the Ohio Valley, 1775–1818. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1953. Dunn, Jacob P. Indiana: A Redemption from Slavery. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1888. Harper, Douglas. “Slavery in the North.” Available at http:// www.slavenorth.com. McManus, Edgar. Black Bondage in the North. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1973. Nash, Gary B., and Jean R. Soderlund. Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Zilversmit, Arthur. The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. Joanne Pope Melish closing decades of the eighteenth century, other religious dissenters had joined Quakers to form the foundations of early American abolition societies in Pennsylvania, New York, Rhode Island, Delaware, and even Maryland and Virginia. As David Brion Davis, the leading scholar of antislavery movements, has argued in The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (1975), “in the 1760s, black slavery was sanctioned by Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian and reformed churchman and theologians.” But even if most Americans did not join abolitionist groups, by the 1800s antislavery debates had occurred not just among Quakers but also Methodists, Baptists, Anglicans, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians. While Quakers formed the backbone of the PAS, the leading antislavery organization of the early Republic, they “reached out to every neighborhood and church” in Philadelphia for “additional members,” according to Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderlund in Freedom by Degrees (1991). In New York City, Quakers and Anglicans together provided over half of the membership of the New York Manumission Society. In Rhode Island, both Quakers and Congregationalists supported gradual abolition laws in the 1780s. ABOLITION SOCIETIES While America’s first abolitionists remain relatively anonymous when compared to their famous antebellum counterparts—including William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and Lydia Maria Child—they are no less important. Indeed, even a man like Garrison would have saluted his predecessors in the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery (PAS) for initiating the antislavery struggle in the nation’s earliest years—an era when many citizens and statesmen wished to avoid national attacks on slavery for fear they would split apart the new Republic. These early abolitionist groups, which operated most consistently in the North and, fleetingly, in various southern locales, organized national conventions beginning in 1794. They represented endangered blacks in myriad legal cases in both the North and South and petitioned both state and federal governments on issues ranging from ending the overseas and domestic slave trades to eradicating bondage in the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. RELIGIOUS AFFILIATIONS OF ABOLITIONISTS LOCATIONS OF ABOLITION ORGANIZATIONS While attacks on bondage by enslaved people, religious figures, and pamphleteers date as far back as the 1600s, abolitionism as an organized movement began in the late colonial era when Pennsylvania Quakers decided to ban slaveholding members from attending meetings of the Society of Friends. By the ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW Early abolitionism operated primarily in northern urban locales. The PAS was formed in Philadelphia in 1775 (and reformed in 1784), the New York Manumission Society was established in New York City in 1784, and the Rhode Island Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery was created in Providence in 1789. Abolitionist groups also formed in Connecticut (1790) and New Jersey (1793). By 1793, smaller societies existed in Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. The growth of abolitionist movements throughout the North and Upper South (no group existed in Georgia or South Carolina) led to the creation of the American Convention of Abolition Societies in 1794. Over the next forty years, abolitionists would meet annually and biennially (often in Philadelphia) to share abolitionist laws and literature, plot strategies and tactics, and address free black communities. The PAS remained the single largest abolitionist group of the early national era, with annual membership often reaching over one hundred people (and sometimes much more). Additionally, the PAS could count both middling men (artisans and shopkeepers) and “worthies” (including Benjamin Franklin, who served as the group’s president before his death in 1790) among its ranks. NATION AMERICAN 3
Slide 33: ABOLITION SOCIETIES GRADUAL ABOLITION The nation’s first abolition groups sought to end slavery gradually. As Gary B. Nash has put it in Race and Revolution (1990), “the view developed by post1830 abolitionists that no man should be rewarded for ceasing to commit a sin had little currency at the time.” In other words, few early abolitionist leaders embraced the immediate ending of bondage. Emancipation statutes passed in northern states at the close of the eighteenth century reflected prevailing gradualist beliefs. These state laws provided that slaves would be liberated only at a future date. In Pennsylvania, which adopted the world’s first gradual abolition law in 1780 (revised in 1784), freedom came for women at age nineteen and for men at age twentyone. Most northern locales passed similar gradualist statutes over the next twenty years, with variations on the deadline for the liberation of enslaved people. Rhode Island passed such a law in 1784, as did Connecticut (revised in 1797). New York followed in 1799 (revised in 1817) and New Jersey in 1804. Vermont’s Constitution of 1777 had gradualist language but was interpreted to have outlawed bondage, while New Hampshire eradicated slavery via constitutional interpretation. Massachusetts famously ended slavery by judicial decree in 1783 after several slaves sued for freedom in state courts. New northern states like Ohio, Illinois, and Maine entered the Union with constitutional bans on slavery. Southern abolitionists tried to make their states follow these examples, but with little success. Operating in a circumscribed arena (Virginia and Maryland alone accounted for nearly 300,000 slaves in 1790), their calls for gradual emancipation laws appeared too radical in the South. As late as the fall of 1827, for instance, one could still find abolitionists in Alexandria, Virginia. Nevertheless, as they wrote to the PAS, their group attracted only nineteen members and was forced by the prevailing local opinion to concentrate not on agitating slavery’s end by legislation but on helping free blacks illegally held in bondage and on gently “diffusing among our fellow citizens more just views on the subject of slavery.” The very name of the group—the Benevolent Society of Alexandria for Improving the Condition of the People of Color—suggested the tricky line southern abolitionists walked. Nevertheless, abolition societies from Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, and Kentucky sent representatives to national abolition conventions. And while no southern state ever adopted a gradual abolition statute, some did ease emancipation restrictions during the early Republic. In 1782 Virginia rescinded a law that forbade private manumissions without legislative approval. The result over the next several decades was the liberation of perhaps as many as from four thousand to six thousand enslaved people. If early abolitionists failed to end slavery nationally, they did help to sectionalize the institution politically and legally by sending northern slavery on the road to extinction. The total number of slaves liberated in northern locales was roughly forty thousand (although hard numbers are difficult to come by, for devious masters often sold slaves South before emancipation statutes matured). By the early 1800s, enough fugitive slaves had attempted to reach “free” Pennsylvania from various Chesapeake locales that masters increasingly complained about northern abolitionist “meddlers.” During the 1820s, the Maryland legislature even petitioned Pennsylvania to curtail abolitionist legal maneuverings on blacks’ behalf. One of the most neglected achievements of early abolitionists, then, was their protection of state abolition laws. Pennsylvania reformers had to hold the line against several slaveholder-inspired efforts either to curtail gradual abolition statutes in the legislature or have them declared unconstitutional at the state supreme court. The PAS also remained vigilant against masters’ efforts to find loopholes in state abolitionist laws. In the 1790s, for example, Pennsylvania legislators considered whether or not to let Haitian slave masters enter the state with temporary immunity from abolition laws. That measure was defeated after abolitionists mobilized opposition. (However, Haitian masters were allowed into slave states such as South Carolina.) LEGAL ASSISTANCE TO BLACKS Perhaps the most neglected aspect of early abolitionist activism was legal aid to African Americans. The PAS and New York Manumission Society took the lead in representing kidnapped blacks and, on certain occasions, runaway slaves in courts of law. Early abolitionist legal maneuvering stemmed from black activism on the ground. When northern masters attempted to subvert abolition laws (for example, by claiming that they had moved to a northern locale only recently and were thus immune from emancipation laws), abolitionist lawyers stepped in, often garnering slaves their freedom. In other cases, abolitionist lawyers protected slaves from underhanded masters who tried to abrogate manumission contracts with bondspeople. Because slave runaways began taking a toll on both northern and southern masters, many slaveholders resorted to freedom agreements with their OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 4 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 34: ABOLITION SOCIETIES slaves: if bondspeople pledged not to run away, masters promised to liberate them in perhaps five to seven years. In essence, enslaved people in Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, Delaware, and even Virginia began converting slavery into indentured servitude through manumission agreements. Not only did the PAS and New York Manumission Society officiate at the signing of such contracts, they also confronted masters who attempted to ignore them. In 1788, for example, the PAS obtained freedom for several slaves who were emancipated during the American Revolution but subsequently reenslaved by recalcitrant masters. In 1800 the organization freed a single black Virginian on the same grounds: his mistress had once freed him and then summarily declared that “he is [still] my slave.” After working with local reformers in Winchester, Virginia, the PAS secured the freedom of the man known in court records simply as “Abraham.” man then in Baltimore named William Lloyd Garrison. BLACK ABOLITIONISTS EXPANSION OF ACTIVITIES Although formally excluded from groups like the PAS, black activists formed a parallel abolitionist movement before 1830. Led by the inaugural generation of free blacks emerging in the North and Upper South (including Prince Hall in Boston, Richard Allen and James Forten in Pennsylvania, William Hamilton in New York, and Daniel Coker in Baltimore), African American reformers created a vibrant abolitionist movement revolving around public protest tactics and moralizing strategies. Centered largely in newly independent black churches in Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, Providence, and Baltimore, black reformers appealed to Americans as a whole to tackle racial injustice and make it a national priority. “My bosom swells with pride whenever I mention the name of James Forten,” Frederick Douglass once declared of one of his early abolitionist heroes. As these examples suggest, early abolitionist activity often revolved around state laws and courts. But pre1830 abolitionists expanded their activism to national matters on two key issues: the overseas slave trade and the ending of slavery in the District of Columbia. Pennsylvania abolitionists sent their first anti–slave trading petition to Congress in 1790—a petition that aroused considerable, if short-lived, debate. Between that date and the early 1820s, abolitionists—largely through the aegis of the American Convention of Abolition Societies—memorialized Congress roughly a dozen times on the ending of the international slave trade or, after the federal government had banned the trade in 1808, on violations of the law. The Constitution stipulated that Congress could consider banning the trade in 1807, but such a provision was not mandated. Early abolitionists felt it their duty to agitate Congress to fulfill an anti–slave trading pledge—and then to make the nation honor it. By the 1820s the American Convention of Abolition Societies focused on ending slavery in the nation’s capital. Led by Pennsylvania reformers, advocates of District emancipation argued that congressional power reigned supreme in Washington. Because slavery and slave trading stained Americans’ national image, it was argued, they should be prohibited in the capital (though significantly, this did not mean southern emancipation would follow). Pennsylvania abolitionist Thomas Earle, who would later become the Liberty Party’s vice presidential candidate in 1840, became one of the spokesmen for District emancipation. So too did a young newspaperENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW FROM GRADUALISM TO IMMEDIATISM Great transformations occurred in American abolitionism during the 1820s and 1830s. For one thing, a new generation of reformers that questioned the efficacy of gradualism ascended to prominence. Slavery grew at a stunning pace, more than doubling since the founding of the first abolitionist groups. (Slaves numbered 700,000 in 1790 and two million in 1830.) While this growth extended to the south and southwest of the Atlantic seaboard, it intensified concerns among second-wave abolitionists about both slavery’s place in the Republic and African Americans’ claim to equality. Also, religious revivals focused many Americans’ concerns on eradicating sin; this massive movement pointed many new faces—including those of women—towards a more radical conception of abolitionism known as “immediatism.” Finally, the colonization movement expanded rapidly in both northern and southern states, often ostracizing free blacks. While gradual abolition societies expressed little or no opposition to colonization, free black activists mobilized as never before, holding public demonstrations against it, founding the first black newspapers, and holding national conventions. They also reached out to new generations of white reformers to create what were termed “modern” antislavery societies in the early 1830s. Indeed, with the inauguration of the New England Antislavery Society in 1832 (with its integrated membership and dedication to immediate abolition), the heyday of early abolitionist organizations ended. NATION AMERICAN 5
Slide 35: ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL SOCIETIES See also Abolition of Slavery in the North; African Americans: African American Responses to Slavery and Race; African Americans: Free Blacks in the North; Emancipation and Manumission; Quakers; Slavery: Slave Trade, African; Slavery: Slavery and the Founding Generation; Women: Female Reform Societies and Reformers. BIBLIOGRAPHY Society, the AAAS was a learned society with wideranging interests that encompassed astronomy, mathematics, natural philosophy, geology, geography, and history. It began publishing its Memoirs in 1785. The Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences received a state charter in 1799 and proceeded along similar lines. Among other general interest organizations were the Literary and Philosophical Society of South Carolina (1814) and the Literary and Philosophical Society of New York (1814). Institutions dedicated to more specific ends were also organized in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Agricultural societies, in particular, were prominent in an economy based on commercial farming. The Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of Agriculture (1785), the Agricultural Society of South Carolina (1785), New York’s Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Arts, and Manufactures (1791), and the Massachusetts Society for the Promotion of Agriculture (1792) disseminated information about improvements in crops, livestock, and cultivation to their members and the larger public. The Berkshire Agricultural Society (1811) organized the first agricultural fair in the United States and served as a model for other regional and county associations. Groups concentrating on the natural sciences included Philadelphia’s Chemical Society (1797), Columbian Chemical Society (1811), and the Academy of Natural Sciences (1812); Boston’s Linnean Society (1814) and Society of Natural History (1830); New York’s American Mineralogical Society (1798) and Lyceum of Natural History (1817); the American Geological Society (1819) in New Haven, Connecticut; the Delaware Chemical and Geological Society (1821) in Wilmington; and the Maryland Academy of Science and Literature (1826) in Baltimore. Studying and collecting the sources of America’s history—national, local, and natural—were the goals of the Massachusetts Historical Society (1791) in Boston; the New-York Historical Society (1804); the American Antiquarian Society (1812) in Worcester, Massachusetts; and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (1824) in Philadelphia. Like their colonial predecessors and their European contemporaries, the members of these groups were dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of useful knowledge and to the betterment of society and the state. They delivered and listened to papers, published proceedings, corresponded with peers, collected curiosities, and awarded premiums to foster invention and improvements in the practical and the fine arts. Learned societies in the new United States combined a cosmopolitan Enlightenment OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975. ———. Slavery and Human Progress. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Hodges, Graham Russell. Root and Branch: African Americans in New Jersey and East Jersey, 1613–1863. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1999. Litwack, Leon F. North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Nash, Gary B. Race and Revolution. Madison, Wis.: Madison House, 1990. Nash, Gary B., and Jean R. Soderlund. Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Newman, Richard S. The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Stewart, James Brewer. Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery. New York: Hill and Wang, 1976. Zilversmit, Arthur. The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. Richard S. Newman ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL SOCIETIES Although a number of learned societies, such as the American Philosophical Society (1743), were active in eighteenth-century British North America, far more were established in the wake of the Revolution. In March 1776, Congress endorsed a resolution by John Adams for “erecting and establishing, in each and every colony a society for the improvement of agriculture, arts, manufactures, and commerce.” Few states followed this recommendation, but Adams’s Massachusetts did incorporate the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) in 1780 and provided funds for its support. Its founding members were drawn from the commonwealth’s elite: public officials, clergymen, merchants, educators, and physicians. Like the American Philosophical 6 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 36: ACADIANS ethos of progress with provincial emphases on economic development and nationalist pride in America’s achievements and prospects. They were among the most important cultural and scientific institutions in the new Republic. See also American Philosophical Society; Magazines; Museums and Historical Societies; Natural History; Professions. BIBLIOGRAPHY thus developed a tradition of autonomy. They also built good relations with the aboriginal peoples of the area, the Mi’kmaq and the Maliseet, and established trade links with the English colony of Massachusetts. During the imperial wars between France and England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Acadians’ autonomy proved difficult to maintain. In 1713 the Treaty of Utrecht permanently transferred the mainland of Nova Scotia to England. Acadians had often declared themselves neutral in wars between France and England, and the English attempted, with little success, to have Acadians take an oath of allegiance to the British Crown. In 1749 the English founded Halifax as a counterweight to Louisburg. In 1754 another war began between France and England, and in 1755—after continued efforts to have Acadians take an oath of allegiance— Governor Charles Lawrence began forcibly deporting the Acadians, expelling approximately eleven thousand by 1762. While some Acadians avoided expulsion, the majority found themselves expatriated to France or dispersed to other English colonies. Louisiana, a French colony until ceded to Spain in 1762, became a popular destination of exiled Acadians, where they became known as Cajuns. In 1764 the Acadians were allowed to return upon taking an oath of allegiance. However, during the Acadians’ exile, approximately twelve thousand New England colonists, known as the Planters, had taken over much of the Acadians’ former lands. Returning Acadians thus settled on marginal farming areas in southwest Nova Scotia, eastern New Brunswick, parts of Cape Breton Island, and Prince Edward Island. The English forced the Acadians to settle in marginal areas to develop frontier regions and because they believed that weak Acadian communities might be assimilated. However, the Acadians preserved their language, religion, and folk traditions, and in the 1830s and 1840s they began collectively to reassert themselves. More Acadians entered politics, where they insisted on the recognition of Acadian identity, especially their language and religion. The American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow assisted this nascent Acadian nationalism when he published his famous poem, Evangeline, in 1847, in which he told the story of lovers torn apart by the expulsion. See also Canada; Louisiana; New Orleans. NATION Baatz, Simon. “Venerate the Plough”: A History of the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, 1785–1985. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, 1985. ———. Knowledge, Culture, and Science in the Metropolis: The New York Academy of Sciences, 1817–1970. New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1990. McClellan, James E., III. Science Reorganized: Scientific Societies in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Oleson, Alexandra, and Sanborn C. Brown. The Pursuit of Knowledge in the Early American Republic: American Scientific and Learned Societies from Colonial Times to the Civil War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. University of Waterloo Library. Scholarly Societies Project. Available at http://www.scholarly-societies.org. Martin J. Burke ACADIANS Acadia consisted of what became three provinces of Canada: Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. It was distinct from the French colony around the St. Lawrence River known as New France. In 1604 an expedition of about eighty men from France settled on an island in the St. Croix River and the following year moved to Port Royal on mainland Nova Scotia. The early settlers suffered from scurvy, and many colonists returned to France in 1607. Only a handful of French settlers pursued minor commercial pursuits from then until the core group of what became the Acadian population settled in the 1630s under the leadership of Governor Isaac de Razilly. Between 1670 and 1750, the Acadian population grew from approximately five hundred to some twelve thousand. The majority of Acadians lived in small agricultural communities around the Bay of Fundy. They quickly cultivated very productive land by using dikes to reclaim wetlands. Until the construction of the massive fortress of Louisburg on Île Royal (Cape Breton Island) in the 1720s, no other French community was within easy reach of the Acadians, and they ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN 7
Slide 37: ADAMS, JOHN BIBLIOGRAPHY Daigle, Jean, ed. Acadia of the Maritimes: Thematic Studies from the Beginning to the Present. Moncton, New Brunswick: Université de Moncton, 1995. Griffiths, Naomi E. S. The Contexts of Acadian History, 1686– 1784. Montreal, Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992. R. Blake Brown ADAMS, JOHN John Adams (1735–1826), was born in Braintree, Massachusetts. A graduate of Harvard College (1755), he became a lawyer. Adams served in the First and Second Continental Congresses (1774, 1775–1777), in diplomatic missions to France, the Netherlands, and Britain (1778–1788), and as the first vice president (1789–1797) and second president (1797–1801) of the United States. He married Abigail Smith of Weymouth, Massachusetts, in 1764, one of the singular women of the era. He died on 4 July 1826. REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS John Adams’s political career began in earnest in 1765. In response to that year’s Stamp Act, which required that the colonists pay a “stamp fee” for all legal documents (in addition to some other items), Adams penned a series of essays published later as the Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1768). Just as no man was born with the keys to heaven, so too, Adams argued in the Dissertation, was no man born in possession of the right to rule others on earth. Adams also made his first major appearances on the public stage in 1765. In the autumn of that year, he wrote several resolutions in response to the Stamp Act and presented them to his local town meeting. The Braintree Resolves, as they became known, soon spread throughout the colony. Not long thereafter, the leaders of Massachusetts’s “patriot party” asked Adams to join the colony’s other top lawyers in making their case to the governor. In early 1766 he also published a series of newspaper essays in defense of colonial rights, “From the Earl of Clarendon to William Pym.” The repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766 heartened Adams, but when Britain’s Parliament the following year passed the Townshend Acts, which placed duties on glass, lead, paper, paint, and tea, Adams realized that the strife between the colonies and the mother country would not end anytime soon. He served as John Hancock’s lead counsel in the Liberty trial of 1768, named after John Hancock’s ship, the Liberty, John Adams. The first vice president and second president of the United States, depicted in an engraving (1797) by James Smither, after a painting by John Singleton Copley. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. which British customs agents had seized. In 1770 Adams defended the British soldiers who stood accused of murder in the Boston Massacre trial. Not long after the soldiers were set free with a mild reprimand, Boston selected Adams as one of its representatives in the colony’s assembly. In the fall of 1774 Massachusetts sent Adams to the first Continental Congress, where he helped to draft the declaration of rights. Massachusetts included Adams in its delegation to the Second Congress, which convened in the spring of 1775 in the wake of the battles of Lexington and Concord. Adams thought the time had come to declare independence. For over a year he pushed, cajoled, and lobbied his colleagues, until events and changes in the membership of Congress conspired to give his side a victory. On 1 July 1776, Adams gave a great speech in defense of the resolution that “these colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states.” That speech clinched his status among his countrymen as the leader of the independence forces. Two of his peers dubbed him the “Atlas of Independence” for his efforts. The resolution carried on 2 July. Congress approved the public Declaration of Independence two days later. OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 8 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 38: ADAMS, JOHN WAR, FOREIGN AFFAIRS, AND CONSTITUTIONS After the colonies declared independence, Adams remained one of the most active men in Congress, serving as chairman of many committees, including the congressional War Committee. From early in 1776 until the Battle of Saratoga in October 1777, that made Adams a one-man war department. For most of the decade following 1777, Adams served the United States in Europe. In 1778 Congress sent him to France to help negotiate an alliance with that nation. He arrived after the treaty was signed and returned home in the early summer of 1779. Later that year Adams returned to France with powers to negotiate a treaty to end the war with Britain. He remained in Europe until 1788, serving in the Netherlands and in Britain, in addition to France. Adams’s tenure in France is best remembered for its stormy nature. Most historians explain Adams’s difficulties in Paris by highlighting his sensitivity to personal slights, along with his tempestuousness. The charge is not entirely unfair, but they seldom note that the British spy cell in the American legation stirred up a good deal of the trouble. To his credit, Adams saw quite clearly that American and French interests were only aligned against Britain, not in favor of a free and independent United States. France wanted to make the United States a dependent client state. Naturally, the French wished to replace Adams with someone more pliable. Frustrated in Paris, Adams went to the Netherlands in an effort to open a second diplomatic front that would lessen America’s dependency upon France. Ultimately, he secured official recognition of the United States by the Dutch government and loans from the bankers in the Netherlands. In 1782 he returned to Paris to help John Jay and Benjamin Franklin negotiate a peace treaty with Britain. They secured land clear to the Mississippi and preserved the right to dry fish on the shores of Newfoundland. In 1785 Adams became the first American minister to Britain. Adams’s other preoccupation between 1776 and 1789 was the theory and practice of constitution writing. When he returned home in the summer of 1779, Massachusetts happened to be drafting its new state constitution, and Adams became its primary draftsman. The Massachusetts constitution was the first to be drafted by a special convention called by the people for that purpose and then ratified by the people. Adams heartily approved of that system of ratification. Massachusetts’s constitution was also the first to feature two tripartite sets of checks and balances: among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government, and between the three branches of the legislature (a lower house, an upper ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW house, and an executive with a qualified veto). Adams was also the best-known advocate of such political architecture in his era. Since Adams’s lifetime, his constitutional thought has been a matter of controversy. In early 1776 his influential pamphlet, Thoughts on Government, was printed. Partly written to correct what he considered to be the excessive democratism of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776), Adams’s Thoughts on Government advocated the model of government he would enshrine in the Massachusetts constitution a few years later, featuring separations of power and checks and balances. The pamphlet, which was both popular and influential, laid the seeds of the controversy that was to engulf Adams’s political thought. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Adams defined the term “republic” according to its ends, rather than its means. In Thoughts on Government, Adams wrote that “there is no good government but what is republican” and “the very definition of a republic is ‘an empire of laws and not of men.’” He made similar statements in 1787 and 1788 in the three-volume Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, his contribution to constitutional reform in America and Europe in the 1780s. Good republican governments could not be simple, representative democracies, he asserted, since a majority “may establish uniformity in religion; it may restrain trade; it may confine the personal liberty of all equally, and against the judgment of many, even of the best and wisest, without reasonable motives, use, or benefit.” The way to prevent these dangers was by checking and balancing power. To ensure liberty under law, “orders of men, watching and balancing each other, are the only security; power must be opposed to power, and interest to interest.” Many people mistook Adams’s discussion of the defects of popular government for an argument against popular government. THE FEDERALIST ERA Not long after his return from Europe, Adams became the first vice president elected under the new federal Constitution. He soon became a lightning rod for criticism from Thomas Jefferson’s party. From his post as president of the Senate, Adams lectured his colleagues about the need for high-toned titles to attract capable men to government and to secure respect for American officials in European courts. Instead of carrying the issue, Adams became the butt of jokes about his own air of superiority and endured accusations that he secretly supported monarchy and aristocracy. That Adams criticized the French NATION AMERICAN 9
Slide 39: ADAMS, JOHN Revolution from the start only added fuel to the fire. Since the French called their new regime a republic, most Americans believed that the cause of the France was the cause of America. In 1790 and 1791 Adams published a series of essays that are known to history as the “Discourses on Davila.” The basic point of the “Discourses” was that political men were driven by the “passion for distinction” (or spectemer agendo)—the desire to be seen and loved by others. This passion led men to do both grand and unspeakable things. The only way to secure peace in society was to manage conflict; the attempt to escape it was futile. Thomas Jefferson, then serving as secretary of state, denounced Adams’s ideas as “heresies.” After publishing the “Discourses,” Adams rode out the remainder of Washington’s terms outside the limelight. He supported the Jay Treaty of 1795 with Britain because it was better than war, but he was not closely associated with it. Adams remained the man most likely to succeed Washington, and he did so in 1797. Unlike Washington, who was elected unanimously, Adams won the presidency by a mere three electoral votes. Around the time Adams became president, France reacted to the Jay Treaty by attacking American ships on the high seas. Adams responded firmly. When French agents (code-named X, Y, and Z) demanded a bribe before the start of negotiations, Adams was furious, as were most Americans. The XYZ affair inflamed opinion against France, and Adams used American anger to rally his countrymen to oppose French depredations in the Quasi-War with France. A firm believer in the old adage that “if you wish peace, prepare for war,” Adams used American resistance to France to bring about a settlement, which was negotiated in Paris. News of it arrived in America in the fall of 1800, too late to keep Adams from losing the presidential contest by eight electoral votes. Caught in the middle of a struggle between Federalists and Republicans, Adams’s presidency was a political disaster. He alienated the Republicans by warring with France and alienated the Federalists by making peace. He upset the Republicans by signing the Alien and Sedition Acts and angered the Federalists by pardoning John Fries after the rebellion he led had been stopped. Just before leaving office, President Adams appointed John Marshall, then serving as secretary of state, as the chief justice of the United States, and several lesser officials. These “midnight appointments” angered Thomas Jefferson, who viewed them as politically unfair and personally unkind. RETIREMENT In his last quarter century, Adams remained on or near his farm in Quincy, as his part of Braintree, Massachusetts, had been renamed. He watched with pride as his eldest son, John Quincy Adams, rose in the nation’s political firmament. In addition to walking about town and working the land, Adams read and wrote a great deal. When Massachusetts called a convention to revise its constitution in 1820, the town of Quincy sent Adams. He hoped that the state was finally ready to get rid of its religious establishment, but to his chagrin, he could not convince the convention on that point. Adams made some efforts to vindicate his reputation. He started and abandoned an autobiography a few times. When his erstwhile friend Mercy Otis Warren published a history of the American Revolution, Adams fired a barrage of letters at her, complaining that she had attacked his character and slighted his accomplishments. In 1810 and 1811 he published a series of essays in the Boston Patriot that defended his presidency against criticism by Federalists and suggested that many of them were not committed to the Union. In 1812 Adams resumed contact with Thomas Jefferson. Before they died, the aged patriarchs would exchange more than one hundred and fifty letters. These letters were Adams’s final effort to explain his republican faith and to vindicate his reputation before the court of history. He wrote his final letter to Jefferson in April 1826, a few months before he died, only a few hours after Jefferson, on 4 July 1826. See also Boston Massacre; Constitutionalism: State Constitution Making; Declaration of Independence; Election of 1796; Election of 1800; Presidency, The: John Adams; Quasi-War with France; Revolution: Diplomacy; Treaty of Paris; XYZ Affair. BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, John. The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, with a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations. Edited by Charles Francis Adams. 10 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1850–1856. ———. Diary and Autobiography of John Adams. 4 vols. Edited by L. H. Butterfield. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961. ———. Legal Papers of John Adams. 3 vols. Edited by L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965. ———. Papers of John Adams. 8 vols. Edited by Gregg Lint and Robert Taylor. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977–1989. Ellis, Joseph. Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams. New York: Norton, 1993. 10 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION
Slide 40: ADAMS, JOHN QUINCY Haraszti, Zoltán. John Adams and the Prophets of Progress. Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard University Press, 1952. Howe, John, Jr. The Changing Political Thought of John Adams. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986. Hutson, James H. John Adams and the Diplomacy of the American Revolution. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1980. McCullough, David. John Adams. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001. Smith, Page. John Adams. 2 vols. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962. Thompson, C. Bradley. John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998. Richard Samuelson ADAMS, JOHN QUINCY The eldest son and second child of John and Abigail Smith Adams of Braintree, Massachusetts, John Quincy Adams (1767– 1848) had one of the longest and most diverse careers in American political history. Between 1781, when he accompanied Francis Dana on his mission to Russia, to his collapse and death in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1848, Adams served as a diplomat abroad (1794–1801, 1809–1817), Massachusetts state senator (1802–1803), a member of the U.S. Senate (1803–1808), secretary of state (1817–1824), and president of the United States (1825–1829). He was a congressman from 1831 until his death. Like his father, he received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard College (1787) and was admitted to the bar in Massachusetts (1790). Adams was also a gifted rhetorician, a student of the classics, a diarist, and a scientist. He was Harvard’s first Boylston Professor of Rhetoric (1806–1809), and, while serving as secretary of state, he compiled a report on weights and measures that is a classic in the field. Adams first gained political notoriety in 1791 when he published the letters of “Publicola”—a series of essays defending his father in particular and the Federalist Party in general against Jefferson’s charge of political “heresy.” Publicola and subsequent writings impressed President Washington, and in 1794 he made young Adams U.S. minister to the Netherlands. Washington raved about Adams’s talents, proclaiming that, “I shall be much mistaken if, in as short a period as can well be expected, he is not found at the head of the diplomatic corps, let the government be administered by whomsoever the people may choose.” Adams remained in the Hague throughout the rest of Washington’s tenure and ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW John Quincy Adams. Diplomat, congressman, and sixth president of the United States, depicted in an 1826 engraving by Asher Brown Durand, after a painting by Thomas Sully. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. served in Berlin during his father’s presidency (1797– 1801). Throughout these years Adams sought to maintain America’s independent yet engaged stance in Europe. Rather than serve under President Jefferson, Adams returned to the United States with his bride, Louisa Catherine Adams, the daughter of the American consul in London, whom he had married in 1797. (They would have three sons—George Washington Adams, John Adams II, and Charles Francis Adams.) Adams soon found his way back into politics, winning a seat in Massachusetts’s state senate in 1802. Federalist Party managers had trouble with Adams, so they moved him up and out, to a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1803. Adams’s term was stormy, for he was too independent to be a good partisan. He believed in a party system in the abstract but never could work within a party himself. Republicans were disinclined to trust the son of the man they had just defeated for president. Meanwhile, the growing antiUnionist sentiment in the Federalist Party dismayed Adams. The final break came in 1808 when he attended a Republican caucus to nominate a presidential candidate. Massachusetts Federalists thereupon NATION AMERICAN 11
Slide 41: ADAMS-ONÍS TREATY repudiated Adams, appointing his successor before Adams had even finished his term. Facing dishonor, Adams resigned. President Madison named Adams the American minister to Russia in 1809. He remained there until 1814 when Madison sent him to Ghent to chair America’s peace commission to negotiate an end to the War of 1812. After Adams and his colleagues signed the Treaty of Ghent on 24 December 1814, Madison sent Adams to London to serve as America’s minister. While there, he began the negotiations that would culminate in the Rush-Bagot Treaty of 1817. That treaty, which removed armed ships from the Great Lakes, was a landmark in the history of disarmament. In 1817 Adams returned home to serve as secretary of state under President Monroe. Seeing Spain’s weakness in America, Adams pushed every advantage. Hence, in a negotiation that at first concerned only the Florida territory, Adams secured America’s claim to land from Florida to the edge of Texas, and then across the West to the Oregon territory along the Pacific Ocean. Samuel Flagg Bemis notes that the Adams-Onís, or Transcontinental, Treaty “was the greatest diplomatic victory won by any single individual in the history of the United States.” Secretary of State Adams also played a key role in the creation of the Monroe Doctrine. He thought America should play an active role in the Western Hemisphere but a passive one outside of it. In an oration delivered on 4 July 1821, he described how the United States should respond to the Greek independence movement: America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” The presidential election of 1824 was the first closely contested election since 1800. No candidate received a majority, so the decision went to Congress; after much arm-twisting by Henry Clay, Congress made Adams president, even though Andrew Jackson had a plurality of votes. Adams thereupon made Clay secretary of state. For the next four years Jackson and his allies made an issue of the “corrupt bargain.” Adams was an ineffective president. Wishing to be above party politics, he kept some of Jackson’s partisans in office, and they actively campaigned against him. Meanwhile, he called for an extensive plan of internal improvements, claiming that “liberty is power” to improve the nation. He wanted to use the latent powers of the federal government to integrate the nation, which he feared was too divided among North, South, and West. Even though some of Adams’s specific programs were popular, his overall scheme was not, and Jackson crushed him in the election of 1828. Adams took defeat hard. In 1837 he wrote, in a letter to Charles W. Upham, that “the great object of my life . . . as applied to the administration of the Government of the United States has failed.” The American union, he feared, would be the plaything of slaveholders rather than an engine for the spread of liberty. In 1830 he entered Congress, representing his native district in Massachusetts. He held the seat until his death in 1848. Throughout these years he sought, with some success, to return the Union to its antislavery foundation. Antislavery forces would dub him “old man eloquent” for his rhetorical service in their cause. See also Adams, John; Antislavery; Election of 1824; Election of 1828; Federalist Party; Ghent, Treaty of; Jackson, Andrew; Jefferson, Thomas; Monroe Doctrine; Presidency, The: John Quincy Adams. BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, John Quincy. Diary of John Quincy Adams. Edited by David Grayson Allen et al. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981. ———. Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1795 to 1848. Edited by Charles Francis Adams. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1874–1877. ———. Writings of John Quincy Adams. 7 vols. Edited by Worthington Chauncey Ford. New York: Greenwood Press, 1968. Bemis, Samuel Flagg. John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy. New York: Norton, 1973. ———. John Quincy Adams and the Union. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980. Richards, Leonard L. The Life and Times of Congressman John Quincy Adams. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Richard Samuelson ADAMS-ONÍS TREATY See Transcontinental Treaty. ADOLESCENCE See Childhood and Adolescence. OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 12 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 42: AFFECTION ADVERTISING Advertising has existed in one form or another for centuries. From stone tablets to Internet pop-ups, people have advertised goods and services available for the use and benefit of others. In the early years of the United States, most advertisements appeared in printed form, primarily in broadsides or newspapers. Unlike today’s advertising, the purpose of these advertisements was to provide information about events or available goods and services rather than to stimulate demand. Broadsides were single sheets produced to spread information about a particular topic. They often advertised products available in local stores or services provided by local professionals, but broadsides were more often used to announce something unique and short-term. During the American Revolution, officials used broadsides to recruit soldiers for the Continental Army. The poems that became the songs “Yankee Doodle” and, following the War of 1812, “The Star-Spangled Banner” appeared in broadsides and spread rapidly along the Atlantic Coast. Broadsides could be produced quickly and used to spread information rapidly through a community. More typical advertisements appeared in the weekly newspapers published in colonial America and the early Republic. From the time the first successful American newspaper appeared in 1704, printers depended on the income from advertising to help keep their publications solvent. Up to one-half of any given issue could be given over to advertisements. To modern readers, the newspaper advertisements of the early Republic look like today’s classifieds. Woodcuts of a ship or a hat could indicate the type of advertisement but did not really give much information. Potential customers had to read the advertisements in order to know what was being offered. A great variety of advertisements appeared, ranging from lists of goods for sale in a local shop, to announcements of local dance instructors or dame schools (schools for boys and girls set up by women teachers in their homes), to want ads for various jobs, to announcements of runaway slaves. The advertisements did not appear in any particular order or place but rather were scattered throughout the newspaper wherever they fit. Two primary factors explain the apparent lack of creativity in newspaper advertising in the early Republic. First, the available technology produced limitations. Printing presses prior to the 1830s had changed little from the days of Gutenberg. Type had to be set by hand and printing across columns was prohibitively expensive. Illustrations could be printENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW ed only by using woodcuts that had to be handcarved. Hence, advertisements appeared primarily in narrow columns with few illustrations. Second, although advertising constituted an important income source and gave readers information they sought, newspaper printers at the time gave as much space as possible to politics. From the beginnings of the arguments with Great Britain in the 1760s until at least the middle of the nineteenth century, newspaper producers aimed the material they published at audiences involved in political debates. See also Newspapers; Print Culture; Printers; Printing Technology. BIBLIOGRAPHY Goodrum, Charles, and Helen Dalrymple. Advertising in America: The First 200 Years. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990. Presbrey, Frank. The History and Development of Advertising. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1929; New York: Greenwood Press, 1968. Wood, James Playsted. The Story of Advertising. New York: Ronald Press, 1958. Carol Sue Humphrey AFFECTION The late eighteenth century was marked by revolutions in both political and personal life. While the American Revolution challenged patriarchical and tyrannical forms of government, models of democratic union also reshaped family life and personal relationships. The new nation was dedicated to “the pursuit of happiness,” and affection was a fundamental component of this social and political vision. In friendship, courtship, marriage, and child rearing, men and women began to privilege emotional standards that stressed a warm egalitarianism. These shifting ideals deeply influenced and affected how early national Americans experienced their most intimate and emotionally fulfilling relationships. The emerging emphasis on affection was influenced by the “culture of sensibility,” which encouraged individuals to relate to the feelings, concerns, and sufferings of others. The culture of sensibility asserted that individuals should develop strong bonds of connection with others that would enable them to greater appreciate both the joys and sorrows of life. Stressing intense, emotional reactions to even the most everyday events of life, sensibility privileged a world of affectionate interaction between inNATION AMERICAN 13
Slide 43: AFFECTION dividuals who felt an acute sense of affinity. In their various personal and social relationships, individuals increasingly valued expressive, candid communications with one another that would heighten this ideal of shared experience and feeling. In particular, these shifting emotional standards ushered in significant changes in the experiences and expectations of romantic love, courtship, and marriage. Throughout the eighteenth century, it was not uncommon for parents to influence, and at times actively control, their children’s marital choices with larger economic and social goals in mind. But in the post-Revolutionary period, parental interference lessened as couples began to exercise more autonomy and individualism regarding matters of the heart. In the process, the expectations that men and women brought with them into marriage also grew. No longer conceived of in terms of patriarchal authority and wifely submission, marriage became invested with affectionate ideals that stressed egalitarian relationships between loving partners. The emerging ideal of “companionate marriage” celebrated affection, affinity, and mutuality. Men and women came to expect unparalleled happiness and fulfillment in their unions with one another as affectionate bonds of intimacy and friendship became the cornerstones of happy marriages. Yet throughout the early national period, tensions existed between older models of patriarchal authority and newer ideals of affectionate companionship. While marriage was idealized in terms of partnership and equality, wives were still encouraged to defer to their husbands in order to maintain domestic harmony. And while affectionate bonds between parent and child heightened the emotional experiences of childhood, husbands and fathers still maintained legal and cultural authority over the household unit. Ultimately, the emphasis given to emotional bonds of affection in family life helped to obscure the continued existence of power dynamics that sustained male privilege in economic and political spheres. In essence, women were urged to abandon claims for equality and to settle instead for affection within their personal relationships. Yet these affectionate ideals often proved difficult to sustain, creating tensions between expectation and experience. Further, those women and children who endured abuse or abandonment in the absence of their husbands and fathers’ “true” affection were often left with few legal or economic protections. Despite tensions between emotional ideals and lived experience, individuals continued to idealize affectionate relationships as sources of deep fulfillment and personal happiness. At once an expression of and a conduit for individualism, affection offered men and women the chance to reveal their innermost selves with like-minded individuals who shared deep, expressive bonds of sensibility and affinity. Such highly charged, emotionally fulfilling relationships served as bulwarks against more impersonal, disingenuous encounters that individuals might also experience in their daily lives. Although men and women feared being betrayed by another’s duplicity or false affection, many took the risk of being disappointed or deceived in the hopes of actualizing the ideals of affectionate companionship. The emotional stakes were high as relationships increasingly were invested with intense expectations and imaginative ideals. Affection revolutionized how men and women made sense of themselves and the world around them and reshaped both personal and political life. Throughout the early national period, affectionate ideals for personal relationships were used as models for political and social harmony. As friends and couples freely entered into affectionate unions with one another, they created egalitarian forms of interaction that influenced the nature of political participation in the young Republic. Bonds of affection, rather than authority, became the organizing device for both politics and the family. In many ways, America’s sense of itself as a people and a nation rested in this persistent belief in the power of affection. See also Childhood and Adolescence; Courtship; Domestic Life; Marriage; Women: Overview; Women: Rights. BIBLIOGRAPHY Burstein, Andrew. Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America’s Romantic Self-Image. New York: Hill and Wang, 1999. Fliegelman, Jay. Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Jabour, Anya. Marriage in the Early Republic: Elizabeth and William Wirt and the Companionate Ideal. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Lewis, Jan. The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson’s Virginia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Lystra, Karen. Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Stearns, Peter N., and Carol Z. Stearns. “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards.” American Historical Review 90 (1985): 813–836. Lucia McMahon OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 14 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 44: AFRICAN AMERICANS AFRICAN AMERICANS This entry consists of seven separate articles: Overview, African American Life and Culture, African American Literature, African American Religion, African American Responses to Slavery and Race, Free Blacks in the North, and Free Blacks in the South. Overview No single group had higher hopes followed by greater disappointments during the time of the establishment of the new American nation than African Americans. In the 1750s, nearly everyone of African descent in the British North American mainland colonies was enslaved, but the libertarian spirit of the Revolutionary era offered hope for freedom. A number of African Americans did become free between the 1760s and 1810s. But any window of opportunity that opened for some blacks of the Revolutionary generation slammed shut for most African Americans as slavery persisted and spread into new areas and as racism (to justify enslavement and exploitation in a nation grounded in personal freedom) gained in strength. By 1829, although importation of slaves into the United States had ended over two decades earlier and half the states had abolished slavery, 90 percent of African Americans remained enslaved, a slave-based economy was thriving, and prospects for liberty and justice for American blacks were as remote as they had ever been. But the perceived economic necessity of the southern planter class kept liberty from reaching enslaved African Americans where their numbers were greatest: southern and eastern Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. As in more northerly states, slaves in the Deep South did what they could to gain freedom during the war—mostly by absconding to the British, the backcountry, or Spanish Florida. But peace, after 1783, found southern planters eager to return to prosperity by re-creating a plantation economy, using the slaves they had and acquiring more. So set on resting their future on slave production were southern leaders that, when time came for the states to “form a more perfect union” that would secure “the blessings of liberty,” they insisted that the Atlantic slave trade remain open, that slaves be counted toward representation in the new government, and that the government help secure their human property. Compromises in the new Constitution kept African slaves pouring into southern ports until 1808, prescribed counting three-fifths of all slaves for apportioning representation, and required states to return fugitive slaves to their owners. The Constitution’s framers actually solidified human bondage by guaranteeing individual property rights, since land and human laborers were the property most important to white southerners. In allowing the states to decide whether or not to condone slavery and in providing federal power to enforce the law, the Constitution strengthened ownership and control of slaves and allowed for slavery’s extension into new territories. SLAVERY IN THE REVOLUTIONARY ERA The period of the American Revolution was disruptive for everyone in the British mainland colonies. For African Americans, it was also contradictory, confusing, and in the long run damaging. Revolutionary ideology and economic gain for slave owners were at the heart of these matters. The rationale for the break with Britain—the enlightened perspective on human equality and natural rights—was not a smooth fit in a land where, in 1776, nearly half a million persons of African descent were owned by, and forced to work for, others. A small proportion of slave owners acted on the libertarian ideal and freed their slaves. Once warfare with Britain was under way, however, some slaves ended their bondage by fleeing to British or Patriot forces and fighting or working as auxiliaries. In the northern states and Upper South, a noticeable number of free African Americans began to appear over the last three decades of the eighteenth century. ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW HEIGHTENING RACISM The words “slaves” and “slavery” do not appear in the Constitution because human bondage is inconsistent in a land of liberty. The way in which slaveholders and others worked out a rationale for slavery involved manipulating notions about race and ignoring claims of liberty in favor of economic selfinterest and political expediency. Racist feelings about Africans were a factor in establishing slavery in the colonies and condoning the brutal punishments required to exact hard work from slaves, but race was not of overriding importance in the daily workings of colonial society. Through the 1750s and beyond, African Americans and white Americans continued to mix and share values, customs, and personal relationships. But once the new nation became a land where all were supposedly born free, white southerners began looking to racist assumptions about blacks’ “nature and character” to justify NATION AMERICAN 15
Slide 45: AFRICAN AMERICANS their enslavement. Persons of African descent were racially inferior, many argued; of lower intelligence and morals; inherently lazy; sexually depraved; and dangerous. Slavery’s controls were thus necessary to keep people in a free society safe from blacks. In this fashion, a deeper and more debilitating racism burrowed into the tissue of white America. The descent of white racism to new depths fell hardest initially on free African Americans. As their numbers grew, particularly in the Upper South, southern whites began to exhibit a fear and loathing of free blacks, whose very existence undermined racist justifications for slavery. Therefore, southern state legislatures began limiting the number of free African Americans (by banning African American immigration) and then taking away many of their rights—to bear arms, vote, or even congregate. And where, in the judgment of local whites, laws and ordinances did not adequately restrict free African Americans, mob violence did. White rioting in black sections of northern cities occurred frequently in the 1820s. Beyond this, in cities where populations mingled, whites moved to separate persons of African descent in, or exclude them from, public facilities, social events, schools—even churches and cemeteries. The issue now was not slavery; it was race. sition from Spain (1798) and France (1803) of territory that would become southern Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana meant new, fertile land for cotton production. After defeat of the Creek Nation in 1814, planters with cotton on their minds steadily moved into these new lands. A reinvigorated transatlantic slave trade provided 170,000 Africans for the expanding plantation economy between 1783 and the trade’s end in 1808. (This would amount to one-fifth of all African slaves ever brought to the North American mainland.) Thereafter, African Americans would fill that role, coming from growth of existing slave populations in Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. A domestic slave trade involving purchase of slaves in the Upper South to sell in the Deep South furnished African American hands—fifteen thousand each year of the 1820s—for cotton production. The movement of so many would eventually turn the states of the Deep South into the center of the African American population, and the mingling of blacks from different regions would lead to the forming of a more homogenous African American culture. AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE A HOUSE DIVIDED As the new nation was coming into being, northern and southern sections of the country diverged on slavery. Beginning with Vermont in 1777, New England states outlawed slavery in their constitutions, and in the mid-Atlantic states, Pennsylvania in 1780 led New York and New Jersey in passing laws to end slavery gradually. Also, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 banned slavery in states formed out of the Northwest Territory, west of the Alleghenies and north of the Ohio River. The result by the 1820s was slavery’s almost complete disappearance north of Maryland and the Ohio. At the same time, slavery was proceeding with renewed vigor in the southern states. In the wake of the Revolutionary War, from the mid-1780s, planters in Maryland and Virginia opened new western lands and carved out plantations to grow tobacco and grain, while those in coastal South Carolina and Georgia resumed plantation rice production. Meanwhile, British cotton mills were mass-producing cotton cloth in the first stage of the industrial revolution, causing increased demand and rising prices for raw cotton. Machines to remove seeds from shortstaple American cotton, copying Eli Whitney’s 1793 model gin, helped make the crop pay, and the acqui- The continuation and expansion of slavery in the nation’s southern states affected the culture of all African Americans. Between the mid-1780s and 1808, the great influx of persons straight from Africa’s west coasts helped “re-Africanize” African American culture. Thereafter, it developed regionally according to local circumstances that affected demography, which in turn had an effect on personal relationships and the ability to form and live in families. Because work dominated slaves’ existence, varied work situations affected how enslaved men, women, and children lived. In northern Virginia and Maryland, where tobacco and grain farming declined from the 1790s, slaves were separated on small farms and performed a variety of tasks. Farther south in Virginia, large-scale tobacco and grain production continued, with slaves working in gangs. When tobacco prices fell, especially after 1815, planters in these areas often decided to sell slaves to traders taking them south. Nowhere in the early national period did family disruption threaten previously stable slave communities more than in southern Maryland and Virginia. In South Carolina and Georgia, the postwar rejuvenation of rice plantations; the massive importing of Africans through the early 1800s, which made blacks an even greater majority; the task system of labor, which allowed slaves their own time once a day’s tasks were completed; and greater family seOF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 16 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 46: AFRICAN AMERICANS curity than in the Upper South allowed African Americans to create their own, distinctive social realm. The low country black culture included more African elements, including language (Gullah), folklore, religious practices, art, music, and burial ceremonies. Sugarcane plantations in Louisiana were sites of the hardest work in the worst conditions, and since African American men tended to outnumber women there because of their ability to do heavier toil, birthrates were low, death rates high, and families more difficult to create and maintain. In the Georgia-Alabama-Mississippi lands where the Cotton Kingdom emerged after 1815, life was hardest in the early years, when work involved clearing land while living in primitive conditions. By the late 1820s, a more mature phase of cotton production brought more varied diets, better housing and clothing, and work that was less onerous than on tobacco farms and rice or cane plantations. Contrary to what whites wanted to believe, the new nation’s slave community was not a contented lot. African Americans grasped greedily the intellectual currents of the time, making bondage all the harder to endure in an age when freedom was spreading on both sides of the Atlantic. When slaves successfully rebelled on the French island of Saint Domingue, starting in 1791 and leading to the creation of the Republic of Haiti in 1804, striking for liberty took on new urgency. In addition to three of the largest slave conspiracies ever on American soil—one led in 1800 by a Virginia slave named Gabriel; a second near New Orleans in 1811 by slave Charles Deslondes; and a third in Charleston, South Carolina, during 1822 by Denmark Vesey, a former slave— America’s earliest decades witnessed a slave population that held, in Benjamin Franklin’s words, a “plotting Disposition.” Running away toward freedom in the North was only beginning in the latter part of the early national period, but running south toward Spanish Florida or west to live with Indians was popular. Those lacking other ways to express their anger were likely to set fires, kill livestock, damage tools, or otherwise hurt their owners’ enterprises. One aspect of culture that African American slaves shared with free blacks—increasingly as the nation matured—involved religion; both groups were predominantly Christian and brought their own influences to the religion. At the time of the country’s beginning, a good portion of the African American population was practicing some form of Christianity, but the religion spread widely and deeply among slaves over the first decades of the nineENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW teenth century. The Great Awakening that moved across the rural South after 1800 brought evangelical fervor, especially to the newer Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian denominations. Southern blacks and whites had common religious experiences that helped shape the nature of these churches. Their practices could include shouting, dancing, and spiritual travel, all having West African roots. As it turned out, these expanding Protestant denominations would be the major vehicles for converting plantation slaves as the nineteenth century progressed. At the same time, free blacks, nearly all Christians, were realizing the impossibility of experiencing human brotherhood in biracial churches. Beginning with Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, who left St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia in 1787 to form their own “African” churches, free African Americans had formed independent churches in many urban areas by 1815. These churches, and mutual aid societies that affiliated with them, quickly became the centers of free black culture and the engines for driving a movement to educate young African Americans for the perilous world they would encounter. HOW FREE IS “FREE”? In more than cultural matters—in challenges faced and ideas developed about their circumstances— slavery’s existence and growth affected free African Americans. Most originally saw opportunity in free status. Through the first decade of the nineteenth century, many former slaves or offspring of former slaves held positive feelings toward their country and an optimistic outlook. But as restrictions based on race began to limit them, some came to view their future in the United States as hopeless and therefore began to consider relocating. The major scheme for doing so originated among whites who wished to rid the country of free blacks they considered potentially troublesome, both for social order and the well-being of slavery, and to relocate them where they might prosper, spread Christianity, and create commercial opportunities. Organized in Washington, D.C., by some of the nation’s most prominent political leaders in 1816, this American Colonization Society soon selected a spot along Africa’s west coast and by the early 1820s was transporting free blacks to the settlement that, two decades later, would become the Republic of Liberia. But the inclination to leave rather than to work to change their situation did not permeate the free African American community. In fact, it steadily beNATION AMERICAN 17
Slide 47: AFRICAN AMERICANS came less popular as more free blacks began identifying with their race, which led them to realize that so long as some African Americans remained enslaved, none would be truly free. As early as 1817, three thousand free African Americans met in Philadelphia to state their opposition to colonization. Then, when Missouri’s admission to the Union as a slave state was debated across the land in 1819–1820, free blacks faced the reality that slavery, a burden to all Americans of their race, was not going to wither away. In this background, throughout the 1820s a certain militancy entered into their opposition to colonization and to slavery itself. Denmark Vesey, the free black in Charleston who in 1822 planned a rebellion to free slaves in the region and lead them to Haiti, was thus a person of his time. In his wake would appear African Americans, free and slave, who were increasingly ready to take on slavery, verbally or physically, to advance the race and reinterpret the nation’s stated beliefs in liberty. By this time, African Americans were not organizing, arguing, and striking against slavery out of an optimistic sense of hurrying their nation along in its natural movement toward granting blacks the same rights it guaranteed in theory to all its citizens. As the African American population had grown, matured, and developed its own distinct ways, most of its members had come to believe that the country would continue to separate its citizens by race and discriminate against those of African descent. Change, they knew in 1829, would not come without a long and difficult struggle by blacks, for blacks. It is an idea that, once formed, would remain in the African American consciousness for a long time. See also Colonization Movement; Constitutional Convention; Cotton; Cotton Gin; Liberia; Missouri Compromise; Revivals and Revivalism; Slavery: Overview; Slavery: Slave Insurrections; Slavery: Slave Trade, African; Slavery: Slave Trade, Domestic. Deyle, Steven. Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Egerton, Douglas R. He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey. Madison, Wis.: Madison House, 1999. Finkelman, Paul. Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996. Frey, Sylvia R. Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991. Frey, Sylvia R., and Betty Wood. Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Horton, James Oliver, and Lois E. Horton. In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. McMillin, James A. The Final Victims: Foreign Slave Trade to North America, 1783–1810. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. Melish, Joanne Pope. Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998. Moore, John Hebron. The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest: Mississippi, 1770–1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Nash, Gary B. Race and Revolution. Madison, Wis.: Madison House, 1990. Walsh, Lorena S. From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997. Wright, Donald R. African Americans in the Early Republic, 1789–1831. Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1993. Donald R. Wright African American Life and Culture On 28 February 1829, Freedom’s Journal, the nation’s first black newspaper, reported a resolution of the U.S. House of Representatives regarding the importation of slaves into the District of Columbia. The resolution stipulated, “In all sales of slaves made in said District by the authority of law . . . it shall and may be lawful, when such slaves . . . consist of a family or families, to sell them by families: and it shall not be lawful, by any such sale, to dispose separately of thus husband and wife, or of a mother and her children under ten years of age.” The government’s 1829 resolution was one of hundreds that shaped the ways in which both enslaved and free people of color experienced family life during the early national period. The first provision regulating the status of families in slavery came in 1663, when OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION BIBLIOGRAPHY Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. ———, and Philip D. Morgan, eds. Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. Chaplin, Joyce E. An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. 18 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 48: AFRICAN AMERICANS a Virginia court declared all children born to an enslaved mother would be considered slaves, thus making slavery hereditary. From that point forward, issues of race and slavery influenced every aspect of domestic life for African Americans—from the food they consumed to where they lived to their interactions with their children and spouses. FAMILIES IN SLAVERY As debates over slavery escalated during the first decades of the Republic, they put increasing pressure on both enslaved and free black family dynamics. The debates led to increases of racial tension between blacks and whites, and often to outbursts of racially motivated violence, as in Philadelphia in the summer of 1838, when angry white protestors burned the Pennsylvania abolitionist hall, the colored orphan asylum, and attempted to burn the Mother Bethel American Methodist Episcopal Church. The increasing restrictions on the movement of both free and enslaved blacks that these debates produced also affected families’ ability to maintain contact (whether between towns or plantations). While slaves faced the constant threat of physical punishment or separation from familiar communities, free black families faced their own problems of racial prejudice, unemployment, and financial instability. Courtship and marriage. In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Thomas Jefferson claimed that among slaves, “love seems . . . to be more an eager desire, than a tender . . . sentiment.” Jefferson’s comment underscored a common eighteenth-century misconception about African American courtship rituals and relationships that ascribed them to biological urges rather than to sentiment. Twentiethcentury scholars have noted that African American courtship rites differed sharply from those of their white American counterparts. For example, while a white couple might engage in a private dance as part of their wooing, slave courtships on the plantation often began within the “ring” of the slave community, at a social event such as a corn shucking or hog killing. Members of the community formed a ring around the eligible man or woman, who would then perform both for his or her intended and the rest of the group, whose members would shout out their approval or comments. Relationships among slave couples often evolved in a context that mirrored those of traditional African communities and that integrated both social and spiritual elements. ships by masters interested in “breeding” new slaves, most slave couples chose partners with the hope, if not the certainty, of sustaining a long-term relationship. Slave marriage celebrations varied widely. Some incorporated Christian rites and were performed in the presence of local preachers. Others involved the ceremony of “jumping the broom,” a ritual probably derived from African marriage traditions in which the newly married couple leapt over a broom as a symbol of their transition from their unmarried state into their new life together. Although some masters allowed their slaves to make “broad” marriages (when one slave married another living on a different plantation), many masters were reluctant to allow their slaves to form these kinds of unions. A male slave with a “broad wife” on another plantation could prove problematic, since, for example, he might seek additional time away from his duties to travel to his family, and since any children born out of the union would become the property of the wife’s master. While slave couples on the same plantation might live together, pooling their resources and labor, they had little control over the external factors that could affect their relationship. Traveling through the United States in the early nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “there exists . . . a profound and natural antipathy between the institution of marriage and that of slavery. A man does not marry when he cannot exercise marital authority.” Enslaved husbands could not prevent the forcible rape of their wives by either their white masters or other white male visitors or members of the master’s household. Slave narratives often record male slaves’ frustration and anxiety at their inability to protect their partners and children. Children. Despite the harsh conditions, plantation slaves forged successful family relationships with their spouses and children. Some masters allowed slave mothers a month of light duty before and after the birth of their child, and often mothers were permitted to nurse their infants three or four times during the day (receiving time off from their labor to do so). After children were weaned, they were cared for by a slave working as the plantation nurse, who might have as many as twenty or thirty children to look after. Masters seldom assigned children to any challenging or sustained labor before the age of ten or twelve. Children generally lived in their parents’ cabins until they started their own families. Extended family. Since slaves had no legal status within the new nation, they could not legally marry. However, while many were undoubtedly forced into partnerENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW Kinship networks formed a vital part of sustaining family life within the institution NATION AMERICAN 19
Slide 49: AFRICAN AMERICANS of slavery. Despite laws passed to ensure that slave families would be sold together, a master could simply choose not to record the names of a slave child’s parent, thus effectively eliminating the connection. As a result, many slave families developed patterns of naming and of passing along family lore as a means of memorializing those who might be sold or traded away from the home plantation. Records of unions and births on the larger plantations suggest that slave families continued to intermarry through successive generations, so that while the first generation of slaves on a plantation might consist largely of unrelated individuals, by the third generation, cousins might begin marrying cousins. Some slaves might eventually boast as many as seventy or eighty grandchildren and greatgrandchildren on a single plantation. Food and housing. Aspirations. The greatest hope of every slave was freedom. In the decades after the Revolution, northern states began transforming their slave laws. Pennsylvania, for example, passed a gradual abolition act in 1780, though any black Pennsylvanians born to slave parents after 1 March 1780 had to serve their masters until age twenty-eight. Slave owners that wanted to keep their slaves could register them with the government. Those slaves who were not registered were automatically freed. Similarly reluctant to free its entire slave population at once, New York instituted a gradual emancipation law in 1799, which meant that children born after 4 July 1799 were legally free but were placed under an “indenture” to their parents’ masters until the men reached age twenty-eight and until the women reached age twenty-five. Those already in slavery were not to be freed until 1827. Food and housing on the plantation were controlled largely by the master, who meted out supplies of grain, meat, and other staples to the community. Slaves often augmented their diet with family gardens behind their cabins, where they might grow vegetables that they could either consume or sell. Additionally, slave men often used their free time to hunt or fish. Celebrations such as a corn shucking or Christmas often meant an increase in rations or a special meal. Additionally, while many masters deplored the potentially negative effects of alcohol use by their slaves, many also regularly supplied slaves with whiskey or rum. Some masters doled out alcohol as an incentive for work, while others offered it in recognition of a holiday. In the last decades of the eighteenth century, slave housing was more haphazard than the traditional rows of cabins or “quarters” that dominated the nineteenth century. House slaves might occupy space in the barn, the attic of the main house, the kitchen floor, or the hallway outside their masters’ rooms. Field slaves might be crammed into dormitorylike cabins, with up to sixteen slaves occupying the same open space. By the 1820s, plantation owners realized that these kinds of barrack-style quarters allowed for rapid spread of illness, and some reformers argued that it also promoted immorality. Families began to occupy individual cabins consisting of one room measuring perhaps fourteen by eighteen feet with a cooking fire and such furniture and pottery as their inhabitants were able to build or barter for. Archaeologists have suggested that some slaves built extensions onto their cabins in an effort to create a sense of privacy for husbands and wives away from their children. These laws had a powerful impact on both free and enslaved families. The increase in the free black population affected free black churches, the free black workforce, and the free black schools in communities ranging from Philadelphia to New York to Boston. The increase of a freed population increased both the competition for survival and it meant greater possibilities for growth and solidarity, as cities such as Philadelphia were able to develop their own united black elite. While some states moved slowly toward emancipation, others—in the South—worked to embed the system of slavery even more firmly in their legislative and economic structures. This too had a powerful impact on both enslaved and free families, since it meant that one of the only ways a family in Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina, or other southern slave state might achieve freedom was by escaping to the North. Slaves often ran away either upon hearing a rumor that they were to be sold away from their families or to reach loved ones who had already been sold off the plantation. Though escaping in pairs or groups, especially with children, was extremely difficult, many slaves risked the perilous journey and the potential punishment if caught in order to bring their families to freedom. SLAVES AND FREE BLACKS Interactions between slaves and free blacks depended largely on how a particular state’s legislation affected both populations. In states with gradual emancipation acts such as New York and Pennsylvania, by a certain date parents in slavery were giving birth to free children. Despite the difference in their legal status, many slaves and free blacks in the North worked OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 20 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 50: AFRICAN AMERICANS side by side during the early national period. Emancipation, while it meant freedom, did not automatically confer a change in economic status or earning power. In an effort to support their families, many newly freed African Americans found themselves reduced to a state of near indenture in the years following the Revolution as former slave owners exploited this ready source of cheap labor. However, by the first decades of the nineteenth century, some urban centers such as Philadelphia had also begun to witness the formation of a black elite—a class of free blacks with sufficient wealth and property to create their own social rituals. During the 1820s, the vicious cartoon series, “Life in Philadelphia,” satirized what the artist perceived as black pretensions to white gentility, mocking black couples strolling down the streets in fashionable clothing or black men and women dancing at parties or courting in the parlor. What the cartoons recognize, however, is the emergence of a class division between wealthy free black families and poor or enslaved ones. The Upper South experienced a different pattern in the relationships between free and enslaved African Americans in the years after the Revolution. In part, the universal oppression of any person of color by the white legislative and social systems forced free and enslaved blacks into alliances against a common enemy. Additionally, free and enslaved blacks in the South were much more likely to share either kinship ties or community relationships forged by the church. The most obvious exception to this pattern was the phenomenon of free blacks holding other African Americans in slavery, a practice most prevalent in the Deep South—in Louisiana and South Carolina, for example. There, large Creole populations, comprising native free black populations and occasionally refugees from Saint Domingue, created sizeable and profitable slave plantations. FAMILIES IN FREEDOM color connoted higher social status, and thus among couples free to choose marriage partners, color made some potential mates more desirable than others. The urban North. The first years after the Revolution witnessed a slight decline in the North’s free black population as there was a comparatively low birth rate during the late 1770s and 1780s. By the late 1790s and early 1800s that trend had reversed, and although free black birth rates still remained below those of whites and infant mortality rates stayed high, the black population began to climb in urban areas as men and women took advantage of the opportunities offered there for social and economic mobility. Many free blacks moved to urban areas seeking work that would allow them to purchase other members of their families still in slavery, a trend that produced an increase in two-parent families by the end of the 1820s. Former slaves were often able to acquire positions as artisans, building a stable living for their families as well as a broader free community. As historians of the early national period have noted, the free black population of the urban North grew at such a pace that by the first decade of the nineteenth century, schoolmasters for a new generation of African American children were in high demand. Extended family. Though black families in freedom were often able to exert greater control over their living arrangements than their slave counterparts, they often lacked the same intricate kinship networks formed on the plantation. Greater mobility and access to economic opportunity meant that free black children could settle at a greater distance from their families. Historians have estimated the free black population of the United States in 1800 hovered somewhere around 100,000. Free black families dwelled in both rural and urban regions and lived in every imaginable socioeconomic condition, from wealth to abject poverty. Courtship and marriage. Some historians have found a tendency among free black couples to marry partners with the same skin color; that is, light-skinned men or women tended to seek light-skinned partners, while dark-skinned men or women married dark-skinned partners. In some regions, light skin OF THE NEW Food and housing. Free black families had access to a much greater range of foodstuffs than families in slavery, which produced a greater variety (if not necessarily a better quality) in diet. Some of the most intriguing evidence concerning patterns of free black nutrition and living conditions has come from analysis of skeletons found in African American burial grounds. That analysis suggests widespread anemia (produced by lack of meat or green vegetables in a diet) but comparatively few instances of rickets or scurvy (produced by lack of dairy or vitamin C). Such data can help historians to understand the kinds of foods free blacks might have had access to on a regular basis. Alcohol was one of the foodstuffs most frequently mentioned in connection with free blacks during the early national period. Abolitionist tracts called upon slaves to avoid alcohol, lest they confirm NATION ENCYCLOPEDIA AMERICAN 21
Slide 51: AFRICAN AMERICANS whites’ worst prejudices concerning the morality of the African American population. Tracts and newspapers noted the danger of alcohol to the stability of family life as well. Housing conditions for free black families varied widely during the early national period. While some families were able to establish their own independent homes (whether on black-owned plantations in the South or residential communities in the North), many more free blacks in urban areas occupied crowded, tenementlike dwellings that allowed families little space or privacy. Aspirations. So long as racial prejudice remained firmly entrenched in the American legal and social system, the aspirations of free black families were necessarily limited. However, by the first decades after the Revolution, free black families had begun to establish networks of community through their churches and other social organizations that allowed them some participation in the formation of the early Republic. For those couples or families persuaded that the Republic would never grant them the rights and citizenship they deserved, the growing colonization movement presented another choice for establishing a life in liberty. Blacks, 1700–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Morgan, Philip D. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Nash, Gary B., and Jean Soderlund. Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Philadelphia and Its Aftermath. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Rankin-Hill, Lesley M. A Biohistory of Nineteenth-Century Afro-Americans: The Burial Remains of a Philadelphia Cemetery. Westport, Conn.: Bergin and Garvey, 1997. White, Shane. Stories of Freedom in Black New York. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. Winch, Julie. Philadelphia’s Black Elite: Activism, Accommodation, and the Struggle for Autonomy, 1787–1848. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988. Heather S. Nathans African American Literature The rich tradition of what became known as the African literary diaspora in North America originated from, and has since been developed by, West African cultural practices of dance, song, and storytelling. These practices, pre-dating European colonialism and the slave trade, were the means by which West Africans relayed important information from one generation to the next. The griot, or storyteller, held what was regarded as one of the most important positions in her or his respective tribe. The stories were seen as both didactic and as a way to preserve the memories of ancestors and fallen warriors. They offered explanations as to why and how the earth was created, stressed the importance of religious and cultural practices, and emphasized strong kinship ties within the community. The griot relied heavily upon cadence, meter, song, and dance to convey the emotion of her or his story. These tactics made it easier for the listener to understand and remember its underlying message. The arrival of European merchants on the coast of West Africa, a mass of land that stretched from Cape Verde to the equator, dramatically changed the nature of what is known as the African oral tradition. The merchants that came to trade various goods with the tribal chieftains also traded in information. The merchants recorded what they saw and heard and returned to their respective countries with stories that underscored the extreme cultural differences between “civilized” Western Europe and “barbaric” Africa. These recordings not only laid the theoretical and ideological groundwork that was employed to excuse the enslavement of millions of OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION See also Abolition of Slavery in the North; Law: Slavery Law; Plantation, The; Slavery: Overview; Slavery: Runaway Slaves and Maroon Communities. BIBLIOGRAPHY Abrahams, Roger D. Singing the Master: The Emergence of African American Culture in the Plantation South. New York: Pantheon, 1992. Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Curry, Leonard P. The Free Black in Urban America, 1800– 1850: The Shadow of the Dream. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Franklin, John Hope, and Loren Schweninger. Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage Books, 1976. Gutman, Herbert G. The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925. New York: Vintage Books, 1977. Hodges, Graham Russell. Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Horton, James Oliver, and Lois E. Horton. In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest among Northern Free 22 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 52: AFRICAN AMERICANS Africans, but also created a need for Africans to record their stories and their histories in refutation of their supposed barbarism. Thus, we begin to see a transition from a tradition that was once exclusively oral to one that would eventually become written. This transition in African storytelling tradition continued to occur under slavery in the United States. Africans brought to America were stripped of their languages, religious practices, and families. The stories they had previously told, which enriched their cultural pride, were now preserved as memories in songs about the atrocities of slavery. The slave songs and spirituals that evolved from the African experience in America have become another rich and important addition to their oral tradition. Initially, slave masters and overseers believed the songs to be signs of happiness and contentment among the slaves. The slaves would use this belief to their advantage by passing on pertinent information regarding resistance, warnings, and eventual paths to freedom through their lyrics. These lyrics would later inspire escaped and freed slaves to record their own experiences under slavery. Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753–1784), who was stolen into slavery at a very young age, recorded in her poems the life of a well-educated house servant living in eighteenth century Boston. Influenced heavily by the poetry of John Milton, Wheatley received much acclaim in the 1760s for her poetry regarding salvation through Christianity. Wheatley’s poems were the first to touch upon the injustices of slavery and appeared in print before anyone dared to speak about the African American experience in slavery. Autobiographical works, such as Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African (1789) and William Grimes’s Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave (1825), recounted the inhumanity of slavery; retold the authors’ own personal narratives; and exposed the cruel behavior of slave masters, mistresses, and overseers. Equiano’s narrative gained particular attention for his use of language and became the model on which all other slave narratives would base their structures upon. By emphasizing his movement from ignorance to self-awareness, Equiano illustrated in his text that the acts of reading and writing were the strongest weapons of defense against those that claimed Africans were only capable of being beasts of burden. In 1829, David Walker took the movement from ignorance to self-awareness through the act of writing one step further. In his political treatise An Appeal to Coloured Citizens of the World, Walker mimics the rhetoric of Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of InENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW dependence and asserts that “all men are created equal,” regardless of race. Walker’s “appeal,” of course, was not to African Americans, for they were already well-acquainted with the cruelty and inhumanity of slavery. He addressed, rather, a white audience that either was ignorant or wished to be ignorant of the plight of the slave. Walker explicitly called for slaves to revolt against masters who would not grant them their full rights. One of the earliest overt political papers regarding anti-slavery and antiracism, Walker’s written work was championed by abolitionists and weakened the links in the chains of slavery. The evolution of African American storytelling practices, from an oral tradition in Africa to a written tradition in response to slavery, was a slow and oftentimes painful process. Regardless, though, of the form these stories took, the messages remained clear. Hope, humanity and dignity were essential components to the telling of African and African American history. Whether to remember ancestors passed or to compel the compassionate to take action against slavery, each story was intricately woven so that the listener or reader would never forget. See also Autobiography and Memoir. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bontemps, Arna, ed. Five Black Lives: The Autobiographies of Venture Smith, James Mars, William Grimes, the Rev. G.W. Offley, and James L. Smith. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1971. Carretta, Vincent, ed. Olaudah Equiano: The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings. New York: Penguin, 1995. Chambers, H. A., ed. The Treasury of Negro Spirituals. New York: Emerson, 1963. Jones, Gayl. Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. Stephanie J. Wilhelm African American Religion African American religion during the period from 1754 to 1828 constituted a vibrant spiritual and institutional force that allowed African Americans to cope with and adapt to the circumstances confronting them in America. It enabled African Americans to resist white supremacy and even to engage in dialog with white Americans. It also provided an avenue for blacks to express their understandings of spirituality and to develop institutions that helped organize communal life. At the same time, some white Americans attempted to use this religion to oppress their black NATION AMERICAN 23
Slide 53: AFRICAN AMERICANS Lemuel Haynes. The Reverend Haynes (1753–1833), pictured here on a tray painting (c. 1810) by an unknown artist, was a Revolutionary soldier, a writer, and a preacher, and one of the first African Americans to serve as the pastor of a predominantly white congregation. THE GRANGER COLLECTION, NEW YORK. counterparts, while blacks deployed it in an effort to offset white supremacy. AFRICAN BACKGROUND By the mid-eighteenth century, Africans had already been taken to the Americas as slaves for approximately two centuries. Slaves coming from Africa brought virtually nothing with them in the way of possessions, but they did bring religious beliefs. Although scholars debate the degree to which African religious culture survived in the Americas, its influence impacted the development of African American religion. Africa itself was not monolithic regarding religion. Although the vast majority of Africans adhered to a variety of traditional religions, a few had embraced Christianity and Islam while still in Africa. But although Christianity was not unknown to all Africans as they began to encounter it in the Ameri- cas, they now engaged it from the standpoint of minorities brought forcefully to a new land and possessing little social and political power. To those Africans who had no knowledge of Christianity, it represented a new and strange religion. Yet, these individuals would also encounter established slave communities where some people had significant experience in dealing with their masters’ religion. While relatively few African Americans had converted to Christianity, these numbers were beginning to increase by the mid-eighteenth century and would accelerate through the early part of the next. Adherents to West African religions believed in a High God who was the Supreme Creator of all things. This understanding may have had some compatibility with Christian beliefs, but the context of the two religions weakened the connection. Whereas Christianity adhered to monotheism, West OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 24 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 54: AFRICAN AMERICANS African religions placed the High God within a web of lesser gods and spirits. These lesser gods and spirits were far more active in human affairs than the High God. Efforts to manage the power of and human relationship with these gods and spirits, especially by magic, constituted an important part of the African religious tradition. Dancing and singing were common ritual expressions. This context, combined with their position as slaves in a new world, composed the vantage point from which Africans understood and related to Christianity. Slaves born in the Americas, though, generally did not possess direct and unimpeded or unchallenged exposure to the African religious heritage, Africans and African Americans nonetheless had to grapple with the challenges presented by Christianity from similar, but not identical frames of reference. masters. Whether African Americans converted in order to present a challenge or whether they discovered Christianity’s usefulness for challenge some time after conversion is not always clear. The extent to which personal spiritual reasons prompted conversion is also not for the most part known, particularly regarding early converts. That the proliferation of evangelical expressions of Christianity contributed to increased conversion rates among African Americans probably reflects the appeal of these religions in contrast to Anglicanism or Roman Catholicism (although a relatively large number of blacks in Maryland and Louisiana were Roman Catholic). Evangelical Christianity extended hope to slaves by emphasizing a coming millennial kingdom that offered the promise of a better world. The stress placed on personal and immediate conversion (as opposed to one centered on a process that involved learning proper beliefs), combined with the growing use of emotion in the religious experience, also proved attractive. Within this context, African Americans began to exert their own expressions of Christian religious commitment and experience, often incorporating elements related to traditional African religions. The prominence and importance of singing, dancing, and emotional expression within African religions manifested itself in African American Christianity. The Exodus theme. AFRICAN AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY The colonial period, particularly during its latter years, produced the initial developments toward an African American Christianity. Some blacks held tenaciously to their traditional religions. Others, particularly those born in America, began to embrace Christianity in varying degrees. Seldom, however, did this embrace constitute a wholesale rejection of traditional religious beliefs and practices. More often, an amalgamation occurred. At first, traditional religions provided the framework from which the incorporation of Christianity occurred. Later, Christianity provided the framework for absorbing the vestiges of traditional religions. An African American Christianity distinct from, but intimately related to, that of white Christianity eventually emerged. Conversion rates. Initially, conversion rates to Chris- tianity were low, but as evangelicalism began to proliferate after 1740, so too did African American converts. Beginning in the 1760s, the Baptist and Methodist movements reached out to African Americans in tangible ways, as did the Moravian Brethren at about the same time. It was not, however, until the post-Revolutionary period that Christianity began to become a significant factor in the African American community. By 1815 it was a dominant religious force, and by 1830 African American churches had established firm institutional foundations in the community. While it is difficult to know precisely all the reasons involved in an individual’s decision to convert, it is apparent that many did so as a means of coping with their poor conditions or in an effort to provide justification for their being freed. The latter reason rarely worked. Others, however, used Christianity as a way to challenge their ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW The evangelical emphasis on the individual allowed African Americans eventually to interpret and use the Bible in ways that challenged white interpretations and uses. The Bible provided African Americans powerful symbols with which to cope with and critique their environment, as well as to express their own understandings. Chief among these images was the biblical Exodus wherein the Israelites, under the leadership of Moses, overthrew Egyptian bondage and became the divinely chosen nation. White Americans had freely invoked the Exodus theme in their struggle against Britain, labeling the English monarch a pharaoh and envisioning America as a new Israel coming out of British bondage. White Christians also commonly used it to describe the experience of spiritual salvation. African Americans appropriated the theme in ways that appeared similar to their white counterparts but had quite different implications. While both white and black Christians could jointly explore their spiritual experiences and aspirations through the language of the Exodus, this same motif divided them in the social and political realms. When a slave named David told a racially mixed audience in 1775 in Savannah, Georgia, that NATION AMERICAN 25
Slide 55: AFRICAN AMERICANS God would deliver “Negroes” from their masters in the same way that he had delivered the Israelites from their Egyptian masters, the slave owners wanted him hanged. Denmark Vesey, a former slave who had purchased his freedom with money won in a lottery, envisioned himself as an African Moses leading the Israelites out of bondage as he attempted a slave rebellion in 1822. The plot, however, was foiled, and Vesey and others were executed. These incidents illustrate the danger African Americans incurred when they employed the Exodus in realms outside the spiritual. Nonetheless, the Exodus became the most significant theme in the nineteenth-century African American experience. Its influence contributed to effective, albeit less brazen, uses of the Exodus theme. The spiritual, Oh Mary, Don’t You Weep, Don’t You Moan, did not confront the slave system directly, but instead used the Exodus theme to articulate a general hope for both spiritual and physical freedom; implied in this yearning was an abolition of slavery. The biblical story of the Exodus also provided African Americans with a way to express their suffering that cast them as God’s people to whom a deliverer would be sent. One important African American minister, Absalom Jones (1746–1818), took Exodus 3:7–8 as the text of a sermon in which he celebrated the abolition of American participation in the transatlantic slave trade in 1808 as one indicator that God had heard the slaves’ cries and would liberate them. David Walker, in his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829), assured his audience that God had heard the cries of African Americans just as he had heard those of the Israelites. The Exodus theme, therefore, took on great significance in articulating the spiritual and physical experiences and hopes of African Americans. The period from 1754 to 1828 laid the foundation for an even greater use of that theme in the subsequent decades, during which white abolitionists would join African Americans in invoking it. White Southerners employed it at the same time to buttress slavery by portraying their attempt at secession in terms of the Exodus, while also calling attention to the differences between the Israelite exodus and contemporary colonization and abolitionist schemes. These differences were used to demonstrate that the African American exodus was not endowed with divine approval and support. The figure of Jesus also operated alongside the Exodus in African American Christianity. Both motifs allowed whites and blacks to share a spiritual space that manifested itself in drastically different ways in the physical realm. Black churches, white control. The formation of African American churches and denominations illustrates another avenue of self-expression, protest, and assertion of African American authority. As the consequence of a 1787 incident in which black members of St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia were physically forced to sit in seats designated for blacks, two black churches were eventually formed: St. Thomas African Episcopal Church and Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Similar occurrences happened in other cities as blacks and whites struggled over authority and power. One of the participants in the Philadelphia episode, Richard Allen (Absalom Jones also participated in the 1787 event), along with other leaders such as Daniel Coker, founded in 1816 the first national black denomination in the United States, the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The denomination and its churches grew rapidly as African Americans increasingly took control of their spiritual lives on an institutional basis. Using the Bible as their authority, Allen and others proclaimed the biblical doctrines of equality and inclusiveness in the eyes of God in their protest against white supremacy. African American churches in other denominations also proliferated, but not without resistance from whites. Black Baptist churches and preachers were especially prominent, with the first churches being founded in Virginia and Georgia. Typically in Baptist churches (as well as others), blacks and whites participated in joint, but segregated, worship. Often African American members exceeded whites numerically, and sometimes African American services were held separately from whites when the number of blacks grew too large. Some separate African American churches, such as the Baptist church in Silver Bluff, South Carolina, formed in the 1770s, arose before 1800. Yet by the 1820s whites maintained control over most black churches, either through white pastors or white representatives at associational meetings. Two African American pastors, Gowan Pamphlet and Moses, founded the African Baptist Church in Williamsburg, Virginia, during the 1780s. It became one of the largest churches in the Dover Association by 1830, but was closed by whites in 1832 after the Nat Turner slave rebellion the preceding year. White pastors often oversaw black churches in an effort to regulate more closely their activities and teachings. The Gillfield Baptist Church in Petersburg, Virginia, for example, had become the largest church in the Portsmouth Association by 1821. Yet it continued to be pastored by white ministers, and the Association even attempted unsuccessfully to merge it with a white church. Although whites continued to OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 26 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 56: AFRICAN AMERICANS exercise dominance in black churches, African Americans made great strides during the postrevolutionary period in establishing their own authority. Black churches helped shape and foster an African American Christianity that shared certain beliefs and practices with white Christians while at the same time developing into a distinctive religion. African Americans contested biblical interpretations and congregational practices and increasingly took charge of their own spiritual instruction. While blacks were unable to exercise complete freedom in these matters, African American religion in 1828 differed substantially from that of 1754. It had developed from a conglomeration of African religious understandings held by slaves who were being taught Christianity as practiced by whites to an organized expression of black Christian spirituality that challenged the existing social order and white Christian practices and theology. White Christianity itself changed as a result of contact with African American Christianity. Black Christians, therefore, could confront the challenges of the upcoming decades with established religious institutions, practices, and theology. See also Religion: Overview. African American Responses to Slavery and Race In the seven decades before 1830, African American life underwent significant changes. In particular, African Americans developed and explored new methods to challenge the slavery and racial inequality that characterized late colonial America and the new nation that emerged from the American Revolution (1775–1783). AN ERA OF REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE BIBLIOGRAPHY Frey, Sylvia R., and Betty Wood. Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon, 1974. Glaude, Eddie S., Jr. Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. ———. Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2001. Sensbach, Jon F. A Separate Canaan: The Making of an AfroMoravian World in North Carolina, 1763–1840. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Sernett, Milton C. African American Religious History: A Documentary Witness. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999. Weisenfeld, Judith. “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks: Margins, Center, and Bridges in African American Religious History.” In New Directions in American Religious History. Edited by Harry S. Stout and D. G. Hart. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. The coming of the Revolution prompted many colonists—black and white—to openly question the morality of slavery for the first time. African Americans imbibed the rhetoric of natural rights that sounded from the lips of white American patriots. They responded to the Revolution in a variety of ways. There were a few attempts at slave rebellion. Following Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation of 1775 promising freedom to slaves who flocked to the British banner, about 100,000 slaves made personal declarations of independence by running away from their masters in the South. About a fifth of these eventually shouldered arms for the king in Virginia and the Carolinas. Many who did left with other Loyalists at the end of the Revolution for British colonies in Canada, Florida, and the West Indies. Another five thousand enlisted on the American side, fighting valiantly in battles from Lexington and Concord to Yorktown. Nearly all were motivated by the hope of liberty. In the North, dozens of slaves brought freedom suits to local courts or petitioned colonial assemblies or new state legislatures for personal or universal emancipation. This was particularly the case in Massachusetts, where blacks petitioned the legislature for a general emancipation five times between 1773 and 1777. At the start of the 1780s, two Massachusetts slaves—Mumbet (later known as Elizabeth Freeman) and Quock Walker—initiated freedom suits in the courts of Massachusetts. The suits were based on the language of natural rights embedded in the state constitution of 1780, which was in turn based on the Declaration of Independence. In 1783 their suits ended in victory when Massachusetts’s chief justice outlawed slavery in the state. Others, most notably the poet Phillis Wheatley (1753?– 1784), raised the call for freedom in the colonial press. The post-Revolutionary decades brought dramatic changes in the context of American slavery. Between 1780 and 1804, northern states gradually ended their involvement in the institution through explicit bans on slavery in state constitutions, court NATION Scott M. Langston ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN 27
Slide 57: AFRICAN AMERICANS action, and the passage of gradual emancipation acts by state legislatures. In the Upper South, Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia eased their laws concerning private manumission. As a result, free blacks increased to about one-tenth of the African American population during this era, concentrated in the North and Upper South—particularly in Atlantic seaports such as Boston, Providence, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, where sizeable black communities formed. Faced with discrimination in the larger society, these communities soon developed their own institutions, often in specific acts of protest. Prince Hall (c. 1735–1807) founded an African Lodge in Boston in the 1770s, leading to the formation of similar fraternal organizations in other cities. These often became centers for African American politics and protest. Independent black churches performed a similar role. Richard Allen (1760–1831) and Absalom Jones (1746–1818) founded Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church after leaving a white church in 1792 because of segregated seating and other racial mistreatment. Other withdrawals led to the formation of black congregations in Baltimore, New York, and many other cities. By the early nineteenth century, independent black Baptist, Methodist, and other congregations existed in most black communities in the North and Upper South. In 1816 Allen created the first all-black denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). Often such churches provided the impetus for the creation of black schools. After a period of relative calm in the 1780s, those remaining in slavery increasingly found ways to register their discontent with the institution. Some slaves attempted to rise up against their masters. News of the Haitian Revolution filtered through slave communities in the South beginning in 1791 and inspired a wave of conspiracies and revolts over the next four decades, including those instigated by Quillo in North Carolina (1794), Gabriel in Virginia (1800), Charles Deslondes in Louisiana (1811), and Denmark Vesey in South Carolina (1822). Other slaves sought to run away to freedom. In the Lower South, many ran to Spanish Florida or to Maroon communities along the frontier or in nearby swamps. Those in the Upper South, however, increasingly looked to the North. With the ending of slavery there, that region became a haven for runaway slaves. Perhaps as many as a thousand fugitives reached the free states each year. A few even continued on to Canada. THE POWER OF THE WORD nation. With voting and other means of political influence usually closed to them, they exercised their First Amendment right to “petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Throughout the nation, free blacks and slaves petitioned state legislatures for a variety of purposes: personal freedom; a general emancipation; protection against the reenslavement of manumitted blacks; compensation for work done in slavery; the right to vote; an end to the poll tax; wages for military service and compensation for injuries sustained in the Continental Army; land in the West; funds for transport to Africa; and a host of other goals. Again, Massachusetts blacks were especially strident. In 1780 Paul and John Cuffe petitioned the state legislature for exemption from the poll tax because they were not permitted to vote, labeling the practice “taxation without representation.” Three years later, Belinda, a former slave, asked for and received compensation from her former master’s estate. Prince Hall regularly petitioned the Massachusetts legislature on topics ranging from black access to public schools to protection against kidnapping into slavery. Some went further. Philadelphia blacks twice petitioned the U.S. Congress for protection against reenslavement for four manumitted North Carolinians in 1797 and three years later when they called for a ban on the slave trade and legislation for the gradual abolition of slavery. African Americans in the new nation also found a host of ways to fight for their rights and freedom through the printed word. Like petitions, these methods represented a shift toward literary forms of protest on the part of African Americans in the new nation. A few published public letters to prominent whites. A letter of the black mathematician and scientist Benjamin Banneker (1731–1806) to Thomas Jefferson in 1791 openly challenged the racism of the founding father in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785). Dozens of speeches, sermons, and other orations by African Americans, often commemorating antislavery events such as the abolition of American involvement in the Atlantic slave trade in 1808, found their way into print. These were circulated to a broader audience as African Americans relied increasingly on pamphlet literature. Letters from a Man of Colour (1813), written by the black Philadelphia businessman James Forten (1766–1842) to protest a bill to prevent further black settlement in Pennsylvania, proved to be a particularly influential pamphlet. A few blacks published book-length narratives of their experiences in slavery, often with the aid of white amanuenses. The earliest of these, by Briton Hammon, appeared in 1760. But several more, those of Venture Smith, George White, John Jea, Solomon OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION African Americans also pressed for emancipation and equality through the political structure of the new 28 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 58: AFRICAN AMERICANS Bayley, and William Grimes were published in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, helping to inform and move white Americans on the subject of slavery. Several blacks were able to publish antislavery essays in local newspapers or in friendly periodicals such as Matthew Carey’s magazine, American Museum (1787–1792). Following in the footsteps of Wheatley, a few published poems on racial themes. Richard Allen even offered a few antislavery hymns that he had authored in his hymnbooks for the young AME denomination. A particular concern of African Americans after the War of 1812 (1812–1815) was the increasing prominence of the issue of their repatriation to the African continent. As early as 1787, Hall had petitioned the Massachusetts legislature for funds to establish a colony for black Bostonians in Africa. Paul Cuffe raised similar concerns in the early nineteenth century. But the issue took on a greater immediacy after the formation of the American Colonization Society in 1816 and its colony in Liberia a few years later. Only a minority of blacks supported the repatriation effort. Blacks in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and elsewhere organized against the colonization movement, reminding white Americans that the new nation was their home. Even so, a few hundred blacks had emigrated to Liberia by 1830; a few hundred more accepted the invitation of the Haitian government to resettle in the island nation. Most African Americans, however, chose to stay and fight for emancipation and equality. African American responses to American slavery and racial inequality took on a new militancy in the late 1820s. In many ways, these years served as a prelude to the more strident black abolitionism of the antebellum decades. The first black antislavery society, the Massachusetts General Colored Association, was organized in 1826 in Boston. Freedom’s Journal (1827–1829), the first African American newspaper, was published in New York by Samuel E. Cornish and John B. Russwurm. The year 1829 witnessed the publication of three particularly strident works— George Horton’s The Hope of Liberty, Robert Alexander Young’s The Ethiopian Manifesto, and David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Horton’s collection of verse included poems such as “The Slave’s Complaint” and “On Liberty and Slavery,” which characterized liberty as the “golden prize” sought by all blacks. Young’s pamphlet sought to “call together the black people as a nation in themselves” and predicted the rise of a leader to vindicate black rights. Walker’s controversial and widely circulated pamphlet challenged America’s ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW mistreatment of its black citizens and prophesied a violent response. It reminded white Americans of the promise of equality and natural rights in the nation’s founding document—the Declaration of Independence—and demonstrated how far the country fell short of that promise in its treatment of African Americans. In many ways Horton, Young, and Walker represented hundreds of other African Americans who exposed the new nation’s failures to live up to its creed. See also Abolition of Slavery in the North; Abolition Societies; Newspapers; Press, The; Slavery: Slave Insurrections; Slavery: Slavery and the Founding Generation. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bruce, Dickson D., Jr. The Origins of African American Literature, 1680–1865. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001. Dain, Bruce. A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. Hinks, Peter P., ed. David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. Kaplan, Sidney, and Emma Nogrady Kaplan. The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution. Rev. ed. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989. Newman, Richard S. The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Porter, Dorothy, ed. Early Negro Writing, 1760–1837. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971. Rael, Patrick. Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Sweet, John Wood. Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Roy E. Finkenbine Free Blacks in the North Traveling across the United States in the early 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville searched for the distinctive or “exceptional” quality of American democracy. What set Americans apart, Tocqueville contended, was the basic equality of social condition that Americans enjoyed. The society he observed was in the throes of a fundamental transformation in the very concept of representative, democratic government. Voluntary associations proliferated and, by the early 1830s, state after state had dropped property qualifications for voting for white men. And yet Tocqueville was NATION AMERICAN 29
Slide 59: AFRICAN AMERICANS alarmed at the foundations upon which American democracy seemed to rest: racial prejudice and a white supremacy that pervaded every institution of society. After about 175 years of slavery, the unique nature of the black experience in the United States— politically, socially, economically, culturally—had come into such sharp focus that Tocqueville believed whites and blacks incapable of complete integration or, for that matter, complete separation. “These two races are fastened to each other without intermingling; and they are unable to separate entirely or to combine,” Tocqueville asserted in his classic book, Democracy in America (2 vols., 1835, 1840). “The most formidable of all ills that threaten the future of the Union arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory; and in contemplating the causes of present embarrassments, or of future dangers in the United States, the observer is invariably led to this as a primary fact.” For Tocqueville the real secret to what modern scholars call American exceptionalism lay at the doorstep of the color line. In the new American nation, racial prejudice sometimes seemed more intense in the northern states than in the South. Northern whites who feared blacks or harbored deep racial prejudice were probably more hostile to their black neighbors than were slave owners. This made sense. In the South blacks were controlled by masters, overseers, and slave codes. The entire legal apparatus of the South was available to suppress blacks and keep them in perpetual servitude and perpetual servility. But in the North, especially in the eastern states that formed the Union, free blacks were not under the control of anyone and after the Revolution were free to move about; interact in society; and, in a number of states, participate in politics. (1799), and New Jersey (1804); and the free blacks and fugitive slaves who left the South for the greater freedom and opportunity of the North. The Northeast was not the only destination for free blacks. Despite laws that discriminated against them, southern blacks flocked to Ohio, where the free black population rose from a paltry 198 in 1800 to over 9,500 by 1830. Similarly, Indiana’s free black population grew from 87 in 1800 to over 3,600 by 1830. Illinois, with about 400 free blacks at statehood in 1818, had over 1,600 by 1830. The rights of free blacks in the North varied tremendously in the half century after independence. In Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and later Maine they had virtually full rights as citizens The only formal discrimination they faced in those states was laws banning interracial marriage. After the Revolution blacks could vote not only in those states, but in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey as well. But the new states of the Midwest—Ohio (1803), Indiana (1816), and Illinois (1818)— prohibited blacks from voting and passed laws requiring them to register and prove their freedom. These laws were rarely enforced and did little to slow the growth of the free black population in those states, but the laws did brand them as second-class citizens. More pernicious were laws prohibiting them from testifying against whites, receiving public assistance if they became impoverished, and banning them from public schools. By the end of the early national period, the political status of blacks had declined. In 1821 New York allowed all whites to vote but retained a property requirement for black voters. New Jersey had taken the vote away from blacks by this time. Ohio had begun to build public schools, but only for whites. ABOLITION AND DISCRIMINATION ECONOMIC CONDITIONS In the years following the Revolution the northern states abolished slavery and the free black population grew rapidly. In 1790 there were about 27,000 free blacks and over 40,000 slaves in the northern states. By 1810 these states had over 75,000 free blacks and about 27,000 slaves. By 1830—the end of the early national period—there were over 122,000 free blacks in these states and about 2,700 slaves, almost all of them in New Jersey, which was the last northern state to begin to end slavery. There were three sources for the growing numbers of free blacks: the emancipation and manumission of slaves; the children of slaves who were born free under the gradual emancipation statutes of Pennsylvania (1780), Connecticut (1784), Rhode Island (1784), New York Just up from slavery, blacks were faced with the difficult task of carving out independent lives for themselves and providing the means of economic sustenance. Slavery operated much differently in the North than in the South. Rather than toiling on large, sprawling plantations, slaves were mostly concentrated in northern urban centers and worked as domestics in their owners’ homes. As free blacks moved out of white households and into their own (segregated) communities, they sought work anywhere they could find it. Naturally, they competed on the lowest rung of the economic ladder with poor whites, many of whom were recent immigrants in places like Philadelphia, Boston, Providence, and New York City. Economic competition caused racial tenOF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 30 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 60: AFRICAN AMERICANS Dreadful Riot on Negro Hill! Although Massachusetts was one of the few states where the rights of black northerners expanded, many free blacks continued to suffer the brutal realities of discrimination. This broadside from 1827, purportedly a “letter from Phillis to her sister in the country,” featured a satirical poem describing an attack by white Bostonians on a black family. © CORBIS. ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 31
Slide 61: AFRICAN AMERICANS 32 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION
Slide 62: AFRICAN AMERICANS sions in those areas where urbanization, immigration, and industrialization were the most pronounced. The larger the growing free black population, the more visible blacks were and hence the more resentment they faced. Also, the earlier immigration, urbanization, and industrialization took place, the greater the likelihood that racial animosities would flare up. In general, the social and economic milieu of the early nineteenth century across the North tested what Joanne Pope Melish has described in Disowning Slavery (1998) as “the stability of social identity and the meaning of citizenship for whites as well as for people of color.” In the northern and the mid-Atlantic states, a small portion of free blacks worked in their own fields on land that was either purchased by them or bequeathed to them. In the cities, they carved out their own economic existence as barbers, carpenters, cabinetmakers, painters, and shoemakers. Yet many struggled to become completely independent from white benefactors, many of whom had been their former masters. In New York City from 1790 to 1810, for example, roughly a third of all free blacks lived in white households. Most of these blacks lived and worked as domestic laborers in the homes of merchants, artisans, professionals, and retail salesmen—in other words, in the homes of prominent white citizens of New York City. But in the same period, the number of households headed by free blacks went up from 157 to 1,228, or about an eightfold increase. the northeast of Pennsylvania in Rhode Island, any black child born to a slave after 4 March 1784 was freed upon reaching the age of majority—eighteen for females, twenty-one for males. The children were bound to their masters until that time, and the slave owner was responsible for the child’s education until the age of majority was reached. By 1820 the slave population in Rhode Island had dwindled down to a mere several dozen; in Newport, the foothold of plantation slavery in the state, the number of slaves had declined to seventeen, and the census of the same year recorded only four slaves in Providence. As Rhode Island entered an era of industrial expansion between 1800 and 1830, manumitted blacks were moving from south to north within the state, converging mainly on Providence, where a burgeoning black community began to thrive. Furthermore, the newly freed class eventually possessed and maintained some modicum of economic independence from the white majority. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, nearly two-thirds of all blacks lived in black-headed households. Most of those living outside black homes were children who remained in white households as apprenticed house servants, placed there by the black parents; in return for their services, black children received educational instruction from whites. These ties between the white elite and blacks were formed in the days of slavery and took the shape, specifically in Rhode Island, of whites allowing blacks into their churches and, to a lesser extent, their schools. However, the removal of blacks from white households coincided with an attempt at racial separation through the creation of wholly black institutions. While black groups such as the Free African Union Society and the African Benevolent Society had been in existence in Newport since the 1790s, by 1820 there was a concerted effort on the part of both white and black leaders to establish separate schools and churches for blacks. Some blacks attended college. John Russwurm for example, graduated from Maine’s Bowdoin College in 1826 and then moved to New York, where he was co-founder with Samuel Cornish, a Presbyterian minister, of the nation’s first black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, in 1827. Cornish was one of a number of free black ministers in the North who helped create viable black communities in the early national period. By 1830 black churches could be found throughout the North, run by black ministers and supported by black communities. These communities resisted segregation and discrimination in public places even as they turned inward to create schools, fraternal orNATION FORGING BLACK COMMUNITIES In Pennsylvania, the gradual abolition law passed by the Pennsylvania assembly in 1780 stipulated that any child born to a mother held in slavery would be freed upon reaching the age of twenty-eight. Thus, by 1810 manumission was taking place all across the state. Gradual abolition no doubt played a large role in both the increase in the number of free blacks in the state and the black migration to Philadelphia. By 1810, there were only 795 slaves and 22,493 free blacks in Pennsylvania. In 1800, 56 percent of all Philadelphia blacks lived in white households; by 1810 that number had dropped to 39 percent. Ten years later only 27 percent of blacks resided in white households. Blacks were forging their own communities in Philadelphia, but were doing so in the face of increasing political and economic discrimination on the one hand and residential segregation on the other. Black communities in other northern states also struggled to piece together a tolerable existence. To ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN 33
Slide 63: AFRICAN AMERICANS ganizations, clubs, churches, and intellectual institutions, like Russwurm’s newspaper. Across the North blacks found freedom, discrimination, racism, white philanthropy, economic opportunity, and discrimination in employment. Whether in Massachusetts or Ohio or New York, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, or anywhere else across the North, free blacks suffered the brutal realities of discrimination, the joyous taste of freedom that came with abolition and a new life, and the bitter disappointments attendant with second-class citizenship as it stalked them wherever they went. All dreamed of what James Oliver Horton and Lois Horton called “The Hope of Liberty”; all lived somewhere between freedom and bondage. How did they endure? In his Platform for Change: The Foundations of the Northern Free Black Community, 1775– 1865 (1994), Harry Reed argues that free black communities all across the antebellum North looked to five specific things in forming a community identity and “consciousness” to ease the harshness of their increasingly isolated status: the church, self-help organizations, black newspapers, the black convention movement, and the ideology of emigration that began in the 1810s. How did they endure? Faced with the racial prejudice Tocqueville witnessed firsthand across the North, the answer is simply by relying on one another and the bonds discrimination wrought as a source of strength. See also Abolition of Slavery in the North; Colonization Movement; Emancipation and Manumission; Newspapers; Voting. White, Shane. Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. Paul Finkelman Christopher Malone Free Blacks in the South Prior to the American Revolution, few free blacks resided in the American South, and most of them were in the Chesapeake region. Maryland in 1755 counted 1,817, and Virginia had even fewer as late as 1780. Products of a charter generation of Creoles who came free or who had negotiated freedom out of the yet fluid racial landscape of the seventeenth-century Atlantic world, the earliest free blacks in America were largely of mixed ancestry. They never comprised more than a small fraction of the coastal populations of colonial America, especially after the rapid rise of slavery in the eighteenth century. Eighteenthcentury arrivals of purer African ancestry would also negotiate freedom, but less easily so as AngloAmerican racial attitudes hardened alongside proliferation of slavery in the British colonies. THE REVOLUTION AND MANUMISSION BIBLIOGRAPHY Carrol, Peter N., and David Noble. The Free and the Unfree: A New History of the United States. 2nd ed. New York: Penguin Books, 1988. Chambers, William Nisbet, and Philip C. Davis. “Party, Competition, and Mass Participation: The Case of the Democratizing Party System, 1824–1852.” In The History of American Electoral Behavior. Edited by Joel Silbey, Allan G. Bogue, and William H. Flanigan. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978. Horton, James Oliver, and Lois E. Horton. In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Melish, Joanne Pope. Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998. Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the White Working Class. New York: Verso Press, 1991. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Edited by J. P. Mayer. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969. The Revolution was a watershed in the history of African Americans. A powerful combination of republican principles, religious persuasion, economic pressure, and antislavery activity during and immediately after the war fashioned a dual path for blacks in the South. Indeed, the egalitarian ideals that sustained both white and black Americans through their War of Independence now made slavery seem for many to be in contradiction to those ideals; some slaveholders, as a consequence, freed their slaves in the war’s aftermath. Yet in the Lower South, ironically, the war entrenched slavery even more deeply than before. The British efforts to use slavery to drive a wedge between Loyalists and Patriots caused thousands of bondpeople to seek freedom. This led many planters to eschew their support for England just as it deepened their commitment to slavery. The spread of cotton in the years after the war set slavery on an irreversible course toward an unparalleled expansion in the Lower South states. From 1790 to 1830, the slave population in the Lower South grew from 136,358 to 845,805, a sixfold increase; in the latter year, free blacks numbered 30,193, or just 3.5 percent of its overall black population. Those few slaves freed in the Lower South were generally lightskinned personal servants, often the products of illicit unions between masters or their sons and their OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 34 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 64: AFRICAN AMERICANS bondwomen, who were often educated, skilled, and frequently given property with their freedom. Indeed, some three-fourths of Lower South freedpeople were of mixed parentage, forming a buffer group whose members styled themselves as “free people of color.” As more than one historian has written, free mulattoes occupied a middle ground, enjoying a higher status than the mass of dark-skinned slaves yet denied the rights of full citizenship by whites and being largely despised by both. Conversely, in the Upper South, the Revolution sparked some waning of slavery. For many white slaveholders, the war unleashed storms that buffeted their ideological stance on slavery as they confronted the contradiction of fighting a war for liberty while maintaining the enslavement of African Americans. That, along with an economic transition from tobacco to grain crops, resulted in a wave of manumissions—by will, deed, and term—that dramatically changed the demographics of the Upper South’s black population. By 1790 Virginia boasted 12,766 free blacks while Maryland had some 8,043, constituting some 2.5 percent of the latter state’s total population; by 1830 that figure would climb to nearly 12 percent. More telling, the proportion of free blacks to slaves in the Upper South grew appreciably in the early national period, so that by 1820 some 10.6 percent of its black population was free. In Maryland, the figure went up markedly to 27 percent by 1820; a decade later, a full third of Maryland’s black population was free. In marked contrast to the Lower South, as the Upper South’s free black population grew, so did it become of a darker hue. Where Lower South masters freed only a select few of their bondpeople, mostly mulattoes, Upper South slave owners liberated their bondpeople more indiscriminately, generally freeing not just one or two but most or all of the master’s chattel property. Manumission documents, both deeds and wills, commonly record such wholesale emancipations, involving tens of bondpeople, with men and women appearing in roughly equal proportions. Thousands more owners either simply liberated their slaves or allowed them to purchase their freedom. Such practices soon made the freedpeople of the Upper South most distinguishable from those of the Lower South in their skin color; nearly two-thirds of the Upper South’s free blacks were dark-skinned. Term manumission and term slavery. Unique to the Upper South was the process of term manumission. In an economic environment where slavery was increasingly less profitable, masters could recoup their investment in their slaves, whom they often pos- sessed from an early age and thus provided for them in years when they offered little labor, by promising freedom at a particular age or year in consideration of faithful service. The widespread practice of term slavery created a legal and social contretemps by which term slaves were neither slave nor free, but both at once. Slaves recognized this anomaly and often shrewdly manipulated the existing circumstances to their best advantage. Recognizing their own agency in the slave-master relationship, slaves badgered their owners, threatened their own flight, and even inflicted physical intimidation and violence, to force owners to register documents providing for term manumission for unneeded slaves rather than to sell them to traders who would transport them to the cotton regions.This development, viewed unfavorably by masters largely because it often worked against their interests, played a role in the gradual decline of slavery in the Upper South. Term manumission, in combination with the propensity of owners to free their slaves gradually (by will and deed, the latter promised but not registered until a later date), left the free black class, for the most part, older than the mass of slaves, enough to prompt several states to pass legislation restricting owners’ liberty to emancipate their slaves after certain ages. FREE BLACKS IN THE CITIES As the free black class grew, it quickly shifted its base somewhat from the countryside to the South’s cities, especially in the Lower South. As the historian Ira Berlin has written, “free Negroes were the most urban caste in the South,” a characterization that complement’s Frederick Douglass’s observation that “slavery dislikes a dense population.” The wide variety of occupations available in the growing cities drew many freedpeople from rural regions, where opportunities were limited largely to agriculture. But nearly as important, the relative anonymity of the city offered free blacks the opportunity to live lives more like their free white urban counterparts than plantation slaves. Where in 1790 Baltimore’s free blacks constituted less than 12 percent of its black population, a decade later they made up nearly half; by 1830, its 14,790 free blacks would represent nearly 80 percent of its black population. In some of the port cities of the Lower South, mulattoes made up 90 percent of their free black populations. Employment, property, and housing. The cities soon offered their free black workers employment opportunities that varied considerably between the Upper and Lower Souths. In Lower South ports such as New Orleans and Charleston, the overwhelming pro- ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 35
Slide 65: AFRICAN AMERICANS portion of free black workers labored in skilled trades. With slaves in those cities outnumbering free blacks by more than four to one and thus dominating the unskilled labor market, fewer than one in five free men of color employed in Charleston worked as a common laborer, while just 5 percent held nonmanual occupations such as shopkeeper. The remainder worked as artisans and shopkeepers. Similarly, six of ten free black women in Charleston worked as semiskilled dressmakers, mantua makers, and seamstresses; fewer than one-fourth worked as laundresses and even fewer as domestic workers. Conversely, in Upper South ports such as Baltimore and Norfolk, a large skilled white population drove black workers largely into the ranks of unskilled labor. More than 60 percent of Baltimore’s free black men worked as laborers in 1827; black women fared even worse, with more than nine in ten working as laundresses. Those free blacks in both the Upper and Lower Souths who found higher-paying, skilled, semiskilled, and trading occupations soon found themselves forming an elite class within the black communities of their respective cities. Free blacks in Lower South cities were from three to four times more likely to own property than those in the Upper South cities, and the former possessed property of far greater value. Ironically, such differences in wealth did not find their way so prominently into residential patterns for free blacks. Whether in the countryside or in the cities, free blacks, poor whites, and slaves lived in much the same type of housing, often in close proximity to one another. Most rural free blacks lived in houses indistinguishable from those of bondpeople, and white slave employers generally housed free black hands with slaves. In Deep South cities, high walls enclosed compounds at the rear of owners’ residences in which their slaves lived, thus spreading black residents throughout the urban setting and discouraging racial segregation. Economics often relegated most free blacks to poorer neighborhoods, where they lived on alleys and side streets and in garrets and cellars alongside working-class whites. No uniform black ghetto emerged in southern cities; the absence of urban transportation and the need for black workers to live near their place of work scattered free blacks and slaves. Only the most affluent free blacks could live apart from these poor neighborhoods, and some lived on the most fashionable streets of their cities. In comparative terms, in the Upper South (and especially in its cities) fewer free blacks held noticeably less real property than free blacks in the Lower South. Overall, some two-thirds of the South’s free blacks lived in rural areas; in Virginia, for example, only 1.5 percent owned land in 1830. Of Maryland’s two hundred black property owners in the twentyfive years after the Revolution, one-fourth lived in Baltimore and the average value of their holdings was $150, as opposed to the average holdings of Maryland’s black property owners, which was $104. In direct contrast, Charleston’s free persons of color, with access to skilled trades, had begun to acquire property well before the war and by the 1790s the city boasted a number of black craftsmen who possessed impressive amounts of property. Because most propertied blacks in the Upper South engaged in service occupations with generally modest remuneration rather than the more lucrative skilled trades as in the Lower South, the number of black persons acquiring real property, and the value of property held, was unavoidably low. In 1815, property ownership among Charleston’s black residents stood at nearly 20 percent; in Baltimore the percentage was a modest 5.3 percent. Because the margin was so thin and the level of ownership so low, black property holding was particularly sensitive to economic downturns. The ability to acquire and hold on to property became ever more important in the growing division within southern free black communities. Racial stratification. In the cities, occupational diversification soon contributed to a growing racial stratification within black communities. Free African Americans created their own, if often subtle, brand of elitism, employing their own blend of ingredients for defining and measuring others. Freeborn status, education, organizational participation, church leadership, and above all skin color, became defining characteristics of social standing, ones that often worked in complement with occupation and wealth. Mulattoes dominated the most lucrative, artisanal occupations in both the Lower and Upper Souths. In Charleston, free mulattoes held mean wealth more than double that of black-skinned free blacks. By the 1830s, the free black elites had developed a system of stratification that distinguished them from the mass of free African Americans. The prejudice accompanying these stratifications found its way into free black marriage patterns, with free mulattoes throughout the South marrying largely those with similarly light skin, a practice that had prevailed in the Lower South from the earliest days of the free black population. Many with the fairest skins passed as white, legally and illegally, to avoid all racial stigma. Nowhere was the intraracial divide in black communities more evident than in the growth of slave OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 36 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 66: AFRICAN AMERICANS ownership by free blacks. Though never a large portion of the free population (they numbered only 3,600 in 1850), free black slave owners most often owned their own family members, using their states’ legal property protections to guard their wives and children from whites. Others owned their own relatives because in many southern states, freedpeople had to leave the state after their manumissions. Many free blacks worked their entire lives to purchase their family members’ legal freedom. Yet a handful of free black slaveholders operated slave plantations or industries, behaving much like whites in the way they treated their slave workers. That meant whipping them and also buying and selling slaves to obtain more labor or in response to bad behavior. The Metoyer family of Louisiana owned several hundred slaves in 1830; similarly, William Ellison of South Carolina owned dozens of slaves, whom he employed in his cotton gin manufactory. Both the Metoyers and Ellison were mulattoes; most of their slaves were black. GROWING RESTRICTIONS ON FREE BLACKS state colonization initiatives, including the American Colonization Society, founded in 1816, which sought to remove freed slaves and free blacks from America, transplanting them variously to Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and the American West. Many left voluntarily, going to those places or to the North or Canada rather than face the growing web of racial restrictions. Increasing violence drove others out; a race riot in Cincinnati in 1829 reduced the city’s black population by half. By 1830, free blacks had become the South’s most reviled class of people. Churches, schools, and communities. Despite, and in part because of whites’ perceptions and efforts to restrict free blacks, the South’s African Americans (especially those in the growing cities) began to evolve from a formless aggregate of transients from the countryside to societies that coalesced around their communities and their various bulwarks. The creation of independent black churches began the process, creating spiritual and psychological bedrocks upon which to construct their communities’ social foundations. By 1812, three African Baptist churches existed in Savannah; the first African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church organized in the slave states began meeting in Baltimore in 1816. Branches soon sprang up in other southern cities as far south as Charleston. During the early national period, white southerners increasingly viewed their states’ free black populations with suspicion. Where once the South’s free blacks enjoyed relative freedoms consistent with citizenship, especially in the Upper South where in Maryland, North Carolina, and Tennessee they held voting rights for a time (largely as a result of their voting clout having been severely limited because so few were eligible to vote because of small numbers and property qualifications), by the latter years of the period white southerners began to consider them a visible contradiction to the prevailing notion that freedom was a white-only domain and that slavery was the natural condition for people of African descent. Consequently, southern politicians began enacting laws circumscribing the liberties of free blacks while curbing the growth of the free black population. States like Virginia tightened their manumission laws by requiring that freed slaves leave the state within a year or face reenslavement; others barred free blacks from moving into their state. In Mississippi, individual manumissions required a special act of the state legislature. All states required free blacks to carry papers proving their legal freedom and enacted legislations defining racial caste; other states banned free blacks from certain occupations, restricted their movements, denied them voting privileges and the right to testify in court against whites, and barred them from owning guns and even dogs. Some of the states segregated their public facilities. White southerners gave impetus to national and ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW Independent black churches, predominantly Baptist in the Lower South and Methodist in the Upper South, soon became the social centers of urban and rural communities. As corporate bodies, churches provided innumerable services to the community, as educational centers, libraries, meeting halls, community recreational centers, and social centers. Each conducted Sabbath schools, sponsored benevolent societies, held fairs, exhibits, Christmas pageants, and concerts for the financial benefit of their church, the moral and cultural improvement of their parishioners, and for the future of their children. Moreover, by providing burial sites for black parishioners— which few white churches and private burying grounds would permit in the nineteenth century— the African churches provided respectability even in the afterlife. Moreover, black churches played an essential role in the founding of, and worked in tandem with black private schools; many of the teachers were themselves ministers or prominent members of those churches. Because the African church had available rooms in which to conduct classes, and because of its nearly immediate function as the focal point for black life in the city and country, black churches affiliated naturally with the nascent movement for NATION AMERICAN 37
Slide 67: AFRICAN SURVIVALS black education. Thus the black church became the primary vehicle of education for most of those black community members who received formal schooling. Finally, black organizations emerged in southern cities, bringing together those residents with the same moral and behavioral practices into socially cohesive, self-conscious groups. Beginning in the 1820s, many free blacks aspiring to respectability exerted their commitment to self-help by organizing, joining, and in various ways sustaining a wide array of black fraternal societies, benevolent associations, mutual aid and relief societies, and literary and debating societies in various southern cities. Like black schools, African American social organizations were often tied inextricably with the churches and fulfilled a multitude of purposes. As early as 1821, one such benevolent society was in existence in Baltimore, the Baltimore Bethel Benevolent Society of the Young Men of Color; in Charleston the Brown Fellowship Society had existed since the 1790s. See also Baltimore; Charleston; Emancipation and Manumission; Norfolk; Richmond. BIBLIOGRAPHY It shaped language, their views of how the world worked (which usually involved a religion), how people interacted, ideas of time and space, how they expressed themselves aesthetically, family relations, historical traditions, social customs, and work habits. During the colonial era the most persistent patterns of African influence could be seen in the Chesapeake region of Maryland and Virginia and the coastal low country of Georgia and South Carolina. Not surprisingly, these regions received the overwhelming majority of nearly 300,000 Africans transported to colonial America. The first Africans sold on the North American mainland landed in Virginia in 1619. More would follow, but for decades most slaves were either trans-shipped from the West Indies in small lots or brought as bondspeople by European and West Indies immigrants when they migrated to America. Not until the late seventeenth century did demand for enslaved labor reach a level that would support regular direct shipments from Africa. By the time strife with Great Britain ended the colonial slave trade in 1775, an estimated 100,000 Africans, mainly from Senegambia, the Gold Coast, the Bight of Biafra, and Angola in West-Central Africa, had been transported to the Chesapeake. Farther south in Georgia and South Carolina, English slavers delivered another 130,000 people from Senegambia, Sierra Leone, the Windward and Gold Coasts, and Angola. Despite their variant ethnic backgrounds, when substantial numbers of Africans were able to make extensive social contacts with other blacks in an American community, live in families, and raise children, the creation of a new African American culture from a blending of African, Native American, and European elements began. For the black population of the Chesapeake, the transformation was well under way by the middle of the eighteenth century. American-born blacks, who made up 80 percent of the black population, had mastered English and adjusted to their new environment and work. As they became increasingly acculturated, African languages and names faded, but African ways were still present. These could be seen in the extended kinship networks slaves and free blacks formed, the pottery and pipes they made, and the colorful clothing and headgear they wore. African ways were also reflected in songs, which were often antiphonal in style, and dance, which was usually accompanied by Africanstyled instruments such as the banjo and drums. And despite strenuous efforts by Christians, African Americans were able to preserve some elements of OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION Berlin, Ira. Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South. New York: Pantheon, 1974. Curry, Leonard P. The Free Black in Urban America, 1800– 1850: The Shadow of the Dream. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Johnson, Michael P., and James L. Roark. Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South. New York: Norton, 1984. Phillips, Christopher. Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790–1860. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Whitman, T. Stephen. The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore and Early National Maryland. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997. Christopher Phillips AFRICAN SURVIVALS African American culture on the North American mainland was shaped by many forces. In addition to economic, geographic, and demographic factors, these forces included the extent of social contacts with other blacks, proximity to whites and Native Americans, and African cultures. Although different African American subcultures formed at various times in the separate regions of North America, American blacks still had much in common, especially their African cultural heritage. 38 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 68: AGRICULTURE African religious practices in their lives, evidenced by the prominent role of conjuring and folk medicine in everyday life, distinctive funeral practices, and expressive behavior in worship services. In the Georgia and South Carolina low country, two different African American cultures developed. In Charleston, South Carolina, slaves and free blacks lived and worked closely with whites; by 1750 the urban African American subculture was tied closely to the European American culture of whites. On lowcountry rice and indigo plantations, where bondspeople had little contact with whites and Africans made up more than 40 percent of the black population for most of the eighteenth century, slaves created their own world. They lived in slave quarters that had the look and feel of a West African village. They established stable families, and elders assumed positions of authority. They continued African naming practices, and on the coastal islands they developed a distinctive Creole language, Gullah, spoken with a West African grammatical structure. The task system, in which slaves had to complete an assigned amount of work before their time was their own, allowed them to perpetuate African attitudes toward work. Slaves made baskets that incorporated African influences and continued to observe Old World religious beliefs. In almost every way, African American culture in the low country was linked much more closely to Africa than Europe or America. The Revolutionary War disrupted the Chesapeake and low-country subcultures. In the Chesapeake thousands of slaves escaped, and even more were manumitted. Many settled in northern Virginia and Maryland and started new lives. Within a generation these free blacks were working steady jobs, had established households, and had founded their own churches, schools, and cemeteries, most of which bore the name “African.” However, in the southern Chesapeake the commitment to slavery deepened, and slavery became more entrenched. As the slave population expanded, slave owners began selling “excess” slaves to slave traders, who took them to the West and Southwest. When the cotton boom hit at the turn of the century, the pace of the migration increased. In Georgia and South Carolina, slaves were also on the move. The war had wrecked slavery in the low country. Some 30,000 slaves, 30 percent of the prewar slave population of Georgia and South Carolina, either died, escaped, or were evacuated by the British. When the war ended in 1783, planters looked to the transatlantic slave trade for replacements, and Africans poured into Charleston and Savannah, Georgia. The influx of Africans, mainly ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW from Senegambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and West-Central Africa, reinforced the unique African American culture that had developed in the low country before the war. Many of the 170,000 Africans who landed in America between 1783 and 1810 were sent to the interior of the Lower South and Lower Mississippi Valley. Although they were dispersed over a wide geographic area, and lived and worked closely with their white owners and American-born blacks, they left their mark. Old World names were common throughout the antebellum years. Hoping to win their freedom, many Africans participated in conspiracies and revolts. Although their intrigues failed, like many other Africans who came to America during the colonial and early national eras they contributed much to the formation of American culture. See also African Americans: African American Life and Culture; African American Religion; African American Responses to Slavery and Race; Chesapeake Region; Gabriel’s Rebellion; Georgia; Music: African American; Plantation, The; Slavery: Slave Insurrections; Slavery: Slave Life; Slavery: Slave Trade, African; Slavery: Slave Trade, Domestic; South Carolina; Vesey Rebellion. BIBLIOGRAPHY Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998. Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or, Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. Edited by Shelley Eversley. New York: Modern Library, 2004. Morgan, Philip D. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Wood, Peter H. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. New York: Knopf, 1974; New York: Norton, 1975. James A. McMillin AGRICULTURE This entry consists of three separate articles: Overview, Agricultural Improvement, and Agricultural Technology. NATION AMERICAN 39
Slide 69: AGRICULTURE Cattle on a Massachusetts Farm. This illustration from the 1790s accompanied a story titled “Maria: A Sentimental Fragment,” set on a Massachusetts farm. © CORBIS. Overview Agriculture in the British colonies of North America consisted of a fusion between the plants and animals of Eurasia and Africa—cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, horses, wheat, oats, rye, barley, rice, okra, and sugar—and those first domesticated by American Indians, including, corn (maize), squash, beans, and tobacco. Farming differed by climate and region throughout the colonies and varied according to local politics, economy, and access to markets. Between the 1750s and the 1830s, eastern farmers and southern planters increasingly produced for markets, while those in the interior continued to depend on hunting and subsistence cultivation. would be allowed to dung the ground where they grazed. The New England farmstead included apple orchards for cider, a garden for vegetables, and outlying fields that were cultivated less intensively than those closer to the barn. Farmers in eighteenthcentury Concord, Massachusetts, cultivated no more than twelve acres, depending on their needs and labor, with half or more of all the land they owned in either wild meadow or pasture sown with highquality grasses. The town of Concord maintained broad common meadows that residents spent generations reclaiming from the Concord River. Most remote of all were the woodlands. Plantations raised a principle commodity for sale in international markets and appeared throughout the southern states with products characteristic of their subregions: tobacco in Virginia and North Carolina; rice on the South Carolina and Georgia coasts; and by the 1790s cotton, which had begun to proliferate through the upcountry of South Carolina and Georgia. Plantations consisted of hundreds of acres of mostly forested land, with some having more than a thousand acres. Cultivated spaces varied by time, place, and available labor; they could be as large as three hundred acres. Planters needed such large holdings because they did little or nothing to restore OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION THREE TYPES OF AGRICULTURE Three major forms of colonial agriculture existed by 1750: the diversified farm, the plantation, and the backwoods settlement. Northern farmers tended to practice a diversified agriculture in which they combined corn and rye with dairy stock. The cattle not only gave them milk for high-value products like butter but also manure, which they spread over their fields to replenish soil nutrients. Either the manure would be carted to fields in the spring or the animals 40 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 70: AGRICULTURE the fertility of their soils. They shifted their cultivated acres though the forest in a process of burning and clearing (known later as swidden) that consumed vast areas. Where land could be purchased for little money by any white adult male, few people sold their labor. Planters imported African slaves to perform every task: clearing woodland for new planting, harvesting cotton and ginning it, and managing rice production. Planters shipped their cotton to market cities—New Orleans, Richmond, or New York— where merchants sold it to British and later American mills for fabrication into textiles. A third form of settlement, mixing Finnish logcabin construction with the hunting and swidden techniques of Delaware Indians, came together in the Lower Delaware River valley in the 1720s. It spread rapidly south and west. Backwoods settlers possessed few domesticated animals and favored squatting over land ownership. As farmers, they raised corn and hogs, thus combining two products that offered them great flexibility in changing conditions. Corn could be consumed directly or as hog flesh, in which form it could walk to market. It could also be converted into whiskey, a dense and valuable commodity able to withstand long-distance trade. In such a durable form, corn became visible to the state and taxable. In 1794 the poor farmers of Minco Creek in western Pennsylvania rebelled against an excise tax imposed by Congress on their stills. Agriculture always played a secondary role to hunting in the economy of the backwoods, but the two together created an astonishingly powerful complex of tools and strategies for wilderness living. Backwoods Americans settled more land more quickly than any other people in human history, pouring out of their hearths and into western Kentucky and Tennessee by the 1790s, Illinois by the 1820s, and Texas by the 1830s. A decade later they colonized the Willamette Valley in Oregon. and within twenty years farmers near the growing cities had begun to sell surplus for export and consumption by others. Population density per square mile in the North increased from 14.7 in 1790 to 36.4 in 1830. Most agricultural exports tended to follow the trajectory of pork, ham, bacon, and lard. Considered as a single commodity, 15 million pounds of pork products shipped though American ports in 1811; the quantity spiked after the War of 1812 (1812–1815) and the resumption of trade with Great Britain; crashed after the Panic of 1819; and then began a sharp rise, reaching a level of 60 million pounds exported by 1845. Hoping to boost the exports flowing through their warehouses, New York merchants convinced the legislature in 1817 to build the Erie Canal, connecting Buffalo on Lake Erie, the Genesee Valley, and the Finger Lakes to the port of New York. When it opened in 1825, the canal changed the patterns and products of agriculture. Farmers who once had lived too far from New York to think of a market connection could produce wheat for bakeries, fresh grapes and apples for street carts, or milk for neighborhood stores. The market revolution also set off a frenzy for new products, like merino sheep—a Spanish breed known for wool as fine as human hair. Farmers in Vermont and Massachusetts spent great sums on the sheep and dedicated vast acreage to them, looking forward to years of profitable sales as the number of textile factories increased. In the South, cotton production spread following the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney of New Haven, Connecticut, in 1793. Long-staple cotton had fibers that came away easily from the seed, but it could be grown only along the Carolina and Georgia coast—thus, it was termed “sea-island” cotton. Short staple could be grown on the uplands, but its fuzzy fibers clung to the seed, requiring timeconsuming labor to separate them. The labor required to make short staple marketable prevented the diffusion of cotton throughout the interior until Whitney’s gin changed the labor calculus. Production climbed from just over 3,000 bales of raw cotton in 1790, to 177,638 bales in 1810, to 731,452 in 1830. By the time the United States entered the Mexican War in 1846, it was producing 1.8 million bales of raw cotton a year. MARKET REVOLUTION In 1800 the combined population of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, along with the larger towns like Lancaster, Pennsylvania, amounted to no more than 200,000 people. The home market for agricultural commodities was so small that, beginning in the seventeenth century, northern farmers with access to the coast sent their surplus flour, pork, and butter to the English, French, and Dutch sugar islands in the Caribbean. Colonial farmers provisioned themselves, producing their own clothing, furnishings, and farm implements. Yet this world of self-sufficiency began to change after the Revolution, ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW SOILS AND SCIENCE Constant cropping without soil restoration brought the agricultural lands of the eastern states nearly to ruin in some places by the 1790s. A generation of agricultural reformers worried that decline in the fertilNATION AMERICAN 41
Slide 71: AGRICULTURE ity of eastern soils would result in a redistribution of population to the western states and territories, amounting to a western shift in political power. Specifically, they disdained the common practice of planting crops year after year without soil restoration, by which they meant manure transferred from barns (where animals could be penned and their dung collected) to fields. Not all farmers and planters of the 1820s possessed the capital and the labor to undertake a full-scale restoration of their lands, and many suffered from the decline in commodity prices and demand following the Panic of 1819. They responded in two ways: by emigrating to unsettled lands in the West as a means of maintaining production by exploiting fresh soil, or by intensifying production as a way of yielding greater value from worn-out land. The motive for emigration could be read in the land-and-labor-relations of the plantation: slaves paid greater returns when they worked fertile rather than infertile land. Since slaves represented most of a planter’s invested capital, they needed to be well employed all the time. That is why planters looked to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and eventually Texas. The decline in southern soils after the Revolution and the consequent threat to population and thus to the political influence of the southern states brought forth some of the first and most politically motivated agrarian reformers of the nineteenth century. The Virginian John Taylor (1753–1824), author of a series of essays published as Arator (1813), warned that planters placed more than their profits in jeopardy when they failed to integrate grasses and cattle into their plantations, a system for creating manure; they threatened their economic and political independence. Another Virginian, Edmund Ruffin (1794– 1865), dedicated most of his life to promoting marl— calcium carbonate in the form of decaying seashells found in extensive deposits throughout the Atlantic states of the South. When properly mixed into topsoil, marl reduced the acidity so common in damp and rainy climates, resulting in larger yields. Planters, however, no matter how often they decried their declining profits and the flow of households to the West, rarely dedicated labor or land to any form of restoration. The system at the heart of “improved” husbandry consisted of an intensified form of English husbandry that emphasized rotation, special crops for feeding cattle (like turnips), high quality grasses (like timothy) planted in “leys” that became part of the general rotation, and winter penning in order to collect animal manure. Improved cultivation served the purpose of capitalist farmers because it allowed for constant production without fallow. Reformers spread their methods and the ethic of community and constancy through the rural press. Examples included The Cultivator (Albany, New York, edited by Jesse Buel), The Farmer’s Register (Shellbanks, Virginia, edited by Edmund Ruffin), and The American Farmer (Baltimore, edited by John Stuart Skinner), as well as Soil of the South, The New England Farmer, The Farmer’s Cabinet, and The Plough Boy (Albany, New York). Hundreds of farmer and planter associations formed in 1819 and throughout the following two decades, because the Panic of 1819 set off a depression that severely reduced the value of eastern farmland, inspiring planters and farmers to recover that value through improved methods of cultivation. Their published minutes functioned as scientific journals, reporting on the results of experiments. Research into agricultural production centered on the two most important factors of production: land and labor. Americans read Humphry Davy’s (1778–1829) Course of Lectures on Chemistry, published in 1802 and his Treatise on Soils and Manures (1818). The experiments of Sir John Lawes (1814– 1900), also found a limited audience. No other theorist, however, received as much attention as Justus von Liebig (1803–1873), a German chemist whose “mineral theory” proposed that soils contained specific fertile elements—nitrogen, calcium, and phosphors—that could be added into chemical, or artificial, manures. In Organic Chemistry in Its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology (1840), Liebig offered a kind of knowledge that was obscure to most farmers, creating a field of agricultural chemistry that initiated the creation of a class of agricultural experts located in colleges and universities. Liebig’s research also spurred the search for fertile elements and created a new industry—the farm input industry. Among the first products that linked soils chemistry and capitalist agriculture was guano, the dung of seabirds discovered on Pacific islands early in the nineteenth century. Guano came to American farmers in much the same way that synthetic fertilizers soon would, as a commercial product that replaced the manure they had long produced themselves from the resources of their own farms. EXPANSION INTO THE 1830S Cyrus McCormick (1809–1884) invented the first successful reaping machine in northern Virginia in 1831. It was the most notable of a generation of farm implements including binders, corn drills, rakes, and threshers intended to lower the cost of labor and OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 42 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 72: AGRICULTURE allow farmers to cultivate larger units of land in the context of a rising capitalist market in all farm commodities. The reaper (though it did not become affordable or widely available until the 1850s) appealed to farmers because they paid high wages for labor in places where population density remained low. The reaper radically increased the number of acres a single person could harvest in one day, thus offering a powerful tool for transforming the prairies into farmland. During Andrew Jackson’s two terms in office (1829–1837), cotton planters moved into new regions, dispossessing Indians and expanding American influence in North America. Jackson initiated the forced removal of the southern tribes by decree in order to make that land available to slaveholders. Americans moved into the Mexican province of Tejas in the 1820s. Stephen F. Austin (1793–1836) received a grant from the Mexican government in the region of the Brazos River in January 1823. The colonists fought the Battle of Velasco against Mexico in June 1832, organized a constitutional convention in the following year, 1833, and won independence from Mexico in 1836—a classic example of how agrarian societies take over territories by force of population and reproduce their practices and landscapes, creating a new home ground. See also Chemistry; Cotton; Cotton Gin; Erie Canal; Farm Making; Foreign Investment and Trade; Frontier. BIBLIOGRAPHY Kulikoff, Allan. The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992. Racine, Philip N., ed. Piedmont Farmer: The Journals of David Golightly Harris, 1855–1870. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990. Sheriff, Carol. The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817–1862. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996. Stoll, Steven. Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2002. Stuart, Mart A. “What Nature Suffers to Groe”: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680–1920. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Wright, Gavin. The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Norton, 1978. Steven Stoll Agricultural Improvement Colonial farmers mostly replicated the ways of Old World farms. They particularly embraced open-field husbandry, which divided lands into separate plots, rotating usage between pasture, arable fields, and fallow ones in which the soil was rested. This system hardly maintained soil fertility and required much acreage. Because of limited market opportunities, inadequate transportation infrastructure, and underdeveloped credit systems, colonial semisubsistence agriculture aimed at achieving a competency— security and independence for the family and succeeding generations. Printed agricultural information circulated only in almanacs, often with unhealthy doses of superstition. Most sons were content to learn their farming from their fathers. In older seaboard communities, deteriorating soil fertility and dwindling farm sizes due to population pressure posed a threat to generational prospects. Some colonists concluded that open-field husbandry was unsustainable. In 1761 the Reverend Jared Eliot of Killingworth, Connecticut, published Essays upon Field-Husbandry in New-England, in which he discussed the system of horse-powered cultivation of the English agriculturist Jethro Tull. After Eliot’s death in 1763, some colonists took an interest in European improvements like convertible husbandry. This practice emphasized planting grasses and legumes that restored nitrogen to the soil and provided excellent forage and fodder for livestock, whose manure was collected and applied to croplands to return nutrients to the soil. Other innovations included the use of horse-drawn implements like harrows and seed drills; draining and ditching lowlands; and the NATION Barron, Hal S. Those Who Stayed Behind: Rural Society in Nineteenth-Century New England. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Bidwell, Percy Wells, and John I. Falconer. History of Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1620–1860. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1925. Clark, Christopher. Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990. Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983. Donahue, Brian. The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004. Faragher, John Mack. Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986. Gray, Lewis Cecil. History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860. 2 vols. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1933. Jordan, Terry G., and Matti Kaups. The American Backwoods Frontier: An Ethnic and Ecological Interpretation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN 43
Slide 73: AGRICULTURE better care, feeding, and selective breeding of animals. American farmers preferred to emigrate to fresher western soils instead of adopting new, laborintensive practices. Those attempting intensive agriculture were wealthy gentlemen who could invest in the large initial outlay and absorb the higher labor costs involved. Plantation lords like George Washington and northern landholders like Robert R. Livingston and Timothy Ruggles imported British agricultural publications, seeds, and improved breeds of livestock and corresponded with the progressive gentlemen transforming the British countryside. These early American improvers promoted the new farming as individuals before the Revolutionary War, relying on personal prestige and private networks. Economic recovery, the establishment of the federal government, and growing national patriotism fueled a postwar agricultural improvement movement. The promise of more affordable and accessible material comforts induced farm families to increase production of surpluses for sale and whetted their appetite for agricultural information and market intelligence. The mid-1780s saw the creation of the New Jersey Society for Promoting Agriculture, Commerce, and Arts and similar societies in South Carolina and Philadelphia; statewide agricultural societies in New York and Massachusetts soon followed, as overseas trade spurred the rise of commercial agriculture and thriving market towns. The movement’s leaders, including John Beale Bordley of Maryland, who published an influential review of the successful English Norfolk system of tillage in 1784, Richard Peters, John Lowell, and Livingston applied principles of cooperative action and public opinion making learned from Revolutionary War experiences. Their societies successfully lobbied for government support of their chief programs based on Enlightenment empiricism and experimentation: offering and awarding premiums targeted at particular ends and publishing in annual journals the observations and conclusions of the resulting experiments. Before the War of 1812 a second wave of agricultural organizations arose. Claiming that the mass of farmers ignored the elite associations’ volumes of transactions such as the Massachusetts Agricultural Repository and Journal and their state-funded premiums offered for agricultural experiments, Elkanah Watson and the founders of the Berkshire County (Massachusetts) Agricultural Society in 1811 instituted a new system of agricultural education and promotion based on competition and éclat. American agriculture would be better improved by the cumu- lative effect of self-interested families competing for local prizes offered for excellent specimens of specific plants, animals, and domestic manufactures. Visitors would be attracted to the annual exhibitions of the premium-winning productions by elaborate prize ceremonies, opportunities to socialize with neighbors and merchandize farm products, and cultural festivities, including parades and processions, dining and drinking, singing and dancing, and oratory and religious exercises. The resulting institution of the agricultural fair, the backbone of modern agricultural societies, spread quickly through the Northeast and Old Northwest, as state legislatures in the 1810s and 1820s provided newly organized county societies with grants for their premiums. A popular agricultural press simultaneously arose, as farmers gained appreciation for agricultural newspapers that first appeared in the late 1810s. Circulation figures of such periodicals as The Plough Boy, The Cultivator, and The New England Farmer soon reached the tens of thousands by reporting on agricultural improvements, providing practical advice for rural families, reviewing market conditions, and ennobling farming as a profession. Newspapers regularly included information on fairs. Agricultural improvement became a successful popular movement during the depression following the Panic of 1819. Falling prices, especially on cotton, and tighter credit prevented planters and farmers from making mortgage payments and lowered land values. Only increased production promised to offset the declining value of capital investments in real estate and slaves. Marginal croplands and careless practices were no longer profitable. Agricultural societies patronized inventors, and annual fairs showcased new plows and labor-saving mechanized implements in the 1820s. In addition to animal manures, soil additives such as gypsum (or plaster of Paris), lime, marl, and other calcareous manures, were increasingly used to restore fertility and improve crop yields, although a basic understanding of soil chemistry would wait until the work of the German chemist Justus von Liebig reached America in the 1840s. See also Expansion; Fairs; Farm Making; Food; Livestock Production; Panic of 1819; Science; Social Life: Rural Life; Work: Agricultural Labor. BIBLIOGRAPHY Chaplin, Joyce E. An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815. Chapel Hill, and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. 44 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION
Slide 74: AGRICULTURE McClelland, Peter D. Sowing Modernity: America’s First Agricultural Revolution. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997. Stoll, Steven. Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2002. Mark A. Mastromarino Agricultural Technology From the colonial period and its wooden and iron hand and animal implements to the start of the nineteenth century and the development of cast-iron and polished-steel plows, cotton gins, reapers, and threshing machines, agricultural technology advanced at a quick rate and brought about large-scale agriculture by the end of the nineteenth century. Tasks that had taken days or hours to complete could now be finished in hours or minutes. With the new implements, the use of hired labor declined as farmers utilized family members for labor and machinery operation. The mid-Atlantic and Midwest became technologically advanced early in their agricultural history, while the South lagged behind as slave, then sharecropper, labor made use of hand tools. During the colonial era, hand tools were common on most farms. A wooden hoe with an iron blade was used to prepare the field for planting and cultivating. Other tools included the flail, sickle, and scythe. Used in grain and hay production, the sickle cut the stalk, while the scythe gathered the cut crop that was carried from the field. Flails threshed the grain. Labor intensive during the colonial period, agriculture required several hands to plant, cultivate, and harvest crops. Some plows were present in colonial America. Constructed by local blacksmiths or imported from England, colonial plows bore regional differences. In most cases, they were wooden with a metal plowshare. Wooden plows remained the plow of choice for most farmers until the 1820s. In the 1790s Charles Newbold patented the first cast-iron plow. This implement proved impractical, as it had to be cast in one piece. In 1807 David Peacock patented a plow whose moldboard, landslide, and share were cast separately. Further refinements were made by Jethro Wood in the 1810s. Wood’s plow was popular in the East; many farmers abandoned their wooden and older cast-iron plows for his model. During the period from the 1820s to the 1840s, several innovations occurred in plow production. As people moved onto the prairie frontier, farmers needed plows to work the soil there. The Breaking Plow, ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW or Prairie Breaker, was a heavy wooden plow plated with iron strips to reduce friction. Prairie plows were heavy, weighing at least 125 pounds and requiring from three to seven yoke of oxen. Cutting only three inches into the soil, farmers could break eight acres a year. Professional prairie breakers could break more land as they traveled from farm to farm. In 1833 John Lane of Illinois designed the first plow for general farm use on the prairie. Lane used steel instead of cast iron. In 1836 John Deere began to produce steel plows in Illinois. Deere’s plows contained a polished wrought iron moldboard and steel share. This design quickly became the plow of the prairie frontier as the polished steel blade cut through the prairie soil. The cotton gin that was developed in the 1790s drastically changed southern agriculture. Dependent on hand labor but without a strong cotton market, southern planters recognized the need for a device to process and clean upland cotton. The cotton gin patented by Eli Whitney in 1794 allowed for the cleaning and ginning of upland cotton. This invention changed southern agriculture by spreading upland cotton across the South and West, developing a dependence on one-crop agriculture, and perpetuating southern slavery. After plowing, other implements were used. The harrow was necessary to smooth the soil in areas where the soil remained rough. Initially as simple as a tree branch, the harrow became more sophisticated after the Revolution. By the 1790s, two distinct types of harrows were in use: the square and the triangle, or “A” frame. The square harrow was used on old fields that were free of large obstructions, while the triangular frame was used on freshly plowed fields. These models had wooden frames with wood or iron teeth. Cultivators weeded crops once they were planted. By 1820 Americans were using an implement called a horse-hoe. Based on a design by the Englishman Jethro Tull in the early eighteenth century, this horse-drawn machine loosened the soil and killed weeds. In the mid-1820s an expandable cultivator appeared: a triangular-shaped frame that expanded from twelve to twenty-eight inches to till between rows. The mechanical reaper appeared in the 1830s, making mechanized grain harvests possible. The reaper of Cyrus McCormick, patented in 1834, cut through grain stalks as the machine moved forward. Stalks fell onto a platform and were raked off by someone walking alongside the reaper. The McCormick reaper was used for small grains such as rye NATION AMERICAN 45
Slide 75: ALABAMA and wheat. Obed Hussey also developed a reaper in the 1830s. This machine was heavy and proved better suited to mowing hay. Threshing machines were necessary to process cut grain. Replacing the flail, the first American machine was patented in 1791 by Samuel Mulliken. In the 1820s several simple, inexpensive, and locally made hand- and horse-powered threshing machines appeared on the American market. These early machines did not separate the straw from the grain; they merely threshed. Many farmers found that it was more difficult to turn the crank of these simple machines then it was to wield a flail, and in general farmers were not inclined to use these early threshers until a horse-powered machine was developed. See also Cotton Gin; Technology; Work: Agricultural Labor. BIBLIOGRAPHY signed by Creek representatives and federal officials—along with the new U.S. government’s claims to Alabama lands as part of the national domain— invalidated Georgia’s claims and facilitated inclusion of the northern and central sections of Alabama into the Mississippi Territory in 1798. Treaties signed in 1805–1806 between the U.S. government and the Chickasaw and Cherokee nations took native lands, which were sold to settlers under the Land Law of 1800. The construction of a Federal Road through southern Alabama began in 1805. In addition, the United States seized Mobile from Spain in 1812. These developments and internal factionalism among Alabama’s native communities helped precipitate the Creek War (1813–1814). After Red Stick Creek traditionalists destroyed the outpost of Fort Mims, a compound built by white settlers, the ensuing outcry led the U.S. administration to pledge to put an end to the Red Stick uprising. U.S. forces declared war (forces were primarily state militia from the Tennessee, Georgia, and Mississippi territory—-no official declaration of war was made by Congress) on 30 August 1813 after the outpost of Fort Mims was destroyed. During the next year, armies led by Andrew Jackson steadily destroyed Red Stick resistance and ultimately defeated the natives along the banks of the Horseshoe Bend in the Tallapoosa River on 27 March 1814. In the treaty signed at Fort Jackson (Montgomery) in August, Jackson forced the Creeks (traditionalists and accommodators alike) to give up two-thirds of their Alabama lands. Settlers from the east, hoping to profit from cotton production, quickly inhabited the surrendered tracts. This “Alabama fever” saw the population of the region grow from about 15,000 at the end of the colonial era to 127,901 in 1820. During the next decade, settlers established plantations throughout the rich agricultural lands in the southern part of the state known as the “black belt,” while the future capital of Montgomery was founded and Mobile emerged as a major port of the southeasteastern U.S. By 1830 at least 309,527 people lived in Alabama, including 117,484 African American slaves, most of whom were brought to Alabama by recent immigrants from the east. Seeing that Alabama possessed a smaller population than Louisiana and the western portions of the Mississippi Territory due to past boundary disputes, residents requested that the national government create a separate territory out of the larger Mississippi polity. They found support from Southern politicians seeking additional sectional votes. As a result, Congress established the Alabama Territory on 3 March 1817. A little more than two years later, on 14 December 1819, Alabama beOF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION Hurt, R. Douglas. American Agriculture: A Brief History. Ames: Iowa State University, 1994. ———. American Farm Tools from Hand-Power to SteamPower. Manhattan, Kans.: Sunflower University Press, 1982. McClelland, Peter D. Sowing Modernity: America’s First Agricultural Revolution. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997. Stephanie A. Carpenter ALABAMA Alabama (meaning “clearers of the thicket” in Choctaw) was at the crossroads of French, Spanish, and English interests in pre-Revolutionary times. As a result, lands within its modern boundaries were sites of international contention until the conclusion of the French and Indian War (also known as the Seven Years’ War) in 1763, when the Treaty of Paris terminated French and Spanish claims to Alabama and acknowledged England’s hegemony. This agreement ignored Alabama’s indigenous peoples, who by the late eighteenth century consisted of four main groups: the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Creeks. During the American Revolution, these natives fought on both sides, as well as with the Spanish, who invaded the region from New Orleans and successfully ousted English troops from the region. At the conclusion of the war, political control of Alabama remained divided, with Spain claiming the gulf coast and the newly independent (from England) state of Georgia claiming the remaining portions. The subsequent Treaty of New York (1790), 46 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 76: ALBANY came the twenty-second member of the United States, and over the next decade it emerged as the heart of the South in terms of its dependence on cotton, use of slaves, and advocacy of states’ rights. See also American Indians: American Indian Relations; American Indians: American Indian Resistance to White Expansion; American Indians: Southeast; Creek War; Land Policies. BIBLIOGRAPHY trade. RAC employed Russians, Creoles, and Native Americans, the latter including Aleuts, Kurils, Koniags, Kenais, Chugach, Tlingits, Athabaskans, Yupiks, and Inuit Eskimos. The company mistreated most of its subjects, moving them about at will, providing substandard housing, and forcing native women to provide sexual services. RAC’s hold on North America was always precarious. Russia was never determined to create a new society and provided no incentives for its citizens to remain in the New World. Additionally, supplies could take as much as two years to travel from Russia to Alaska and often arrived spoiled. Its lack of selfsufficiency defeated Russian America. Russia, which had established formal diplomatic relations with the United States in 1809, sold Alaska to the new nation in 1867. BIBLIOGRAPHY Griffith, Lucille. Alabama: A Documentary History to 1900. Rev. and enl. ed. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1972. Rogers, William R., Robert D. Ward, Leah R. Atkins, and Wayne Flint, eds. Alabama: The History of a Deep South State. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994. Daniel S. Murphree Haycox, Stephen. Alaska: An American Colony. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002. ALASKA Alaska was claimed by Russia but was only sparsely populated by Russians. It served chiefly to provide sea otter furs for the Asian market between 1743 and 1867. By the end of Peter the Great’s reign in 1725, the Russians had begun to explore the North Pacific Ocean in an effort to discover if Asia and North America were connected. In 1741 explorer Vitus Bering sighted the Alaskan mainland for the Russian government. Companies of promyshlenniki (fur trappers) then began traveling to Alaska in 1743 to exploit its natural resources. The Russian government sent a few military personnel but the primary energy for Alaskan expansion and development was private. The promyshlenniki, interested only in profit, did not treat Alaskan natives well. The promyshlenniki system of taking pelts involved demands for tribute. To get this tribute, the Russians held native women and children villagers as hostages until the male hunters returned with a sufficient number of pelts. The promyshlenniki then left. While as many as forty different fur trading companies operated in Alaska between 1743 and 1799, the first permanent Russian settlement was established only in 1784 on Kodiak Island. The largest number of Russians ever in Russian America is estimated to have been 823, with the average population set at about 600. Great distances and cost eventually forced the consolidation of Russian activities. In 1799 the Russian government chartered the Russian American Company (RAC), giving it a monopoly on all Alaskan ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW Starr, S. Frederick, ed. Russia’s American Colony. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987. Caryn E. Neumann ALBANY Located 135 miles north of New York City and 165 miles west of Boston, Albany was founded by the Dutch in 1624 as a fur trading post and was chartered as a city by the British in 1686. The settlement first came to international attention in 1754 as the site of the Albany Congress, a gathering of colonial representatives and Native American Iroquois leaders. The colonials, delegations of which came from seven of the thirteen British colonies, needed this Indian alliance as a defense against the armed power of New France in the looming imperial conflict that would be known as the French and Indian War (1754–1760). Despite difficulties, the Iroquois’ assistance was secured and the colonial delegates turned their attention to a plan of union to enable greater cooperation and coordination between their colonial governments. The plan that was adopted, conceived by Benjamin Franklin, advocated a single American government with far-reaching powers, uniting the thirteen colonies under one president general appointed by the crown. While it was rejected by both the British government and the colonial legislatures as encroaching on their authority, the Albany Plan paved the way for subsequent national assemblies such as NATION AMERICAN 47
Slide 77: ALBANY PLAN OF UNION the Stamp Act Congress of 1765 and the Continental Congress of 1774. During the French and Indian War, Albany was a major base for English regulars and colonial soldiers. Twenty years later, Albany was a Patriot stronghold in the American Revolution, and in 1775 it was again the site of important negotiation as General Philip Schuyler tried to persuade the Six Nations to remain neutral in the escalating conflict. Throughout the war, Albany’s three thousand residents doggedly resisted British attempts to invade the city. Albany’s riverfront location held strategic value for both sides, and the city thus served as a major supply depot for the Continental Army. Albany developed rapidly after the war, becoming the capital of New York State in 1797, chosen because its inland location promised safety from naval attack and also gave access to new farmlands to the west. The transportation revolution of the early nineteenth century made the city the center of a new web of commercial links. The introduction of steamboats put New York City within twenty hours’ reach, while the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 connected the city to the Great Lakes. While the colonial settlement had once been an entrepôt between frontier colonists and Indian traders, now Albany grew wealthy on the trade between the coastal cities and the resource-rich interior. As Albany expanded, the grid system was adopted and the city acquired banks, hotels, newspapers, a hospital, and a jail. While many of the city’s residents were still of Dutch origin, the population, which reached twenty-four thousand in 1830, was now swelled by Irish construction workers as well as large numbers of northern European Presbyterians and Episcopalians. The city would enjoy continued antebellum prosperity with the arrival of the country’s first commercial railroad, the Mohawk and Hudson, in 1831. Further industrial growth was spurred by the city’s iron foundries and leather industries, creating a period of general growth that would last for much of the century. See also Albany Plan of Union; Erie Canal; Fur and Pelt Trade; Transportation: Canals and Waterways. BIBLIOGRAPHY ALBANY PLAN OF UNION In June 1754 delegates from seven colonies—Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland—met in Albany, New York, to hold a treaty conference with the six Iroquois nations. A year earlier, a party of Mohawk Indians in New York City had declared the alliance between the Iroquois and the northern British colonies broken because of land frauds and trading abuses perpetrated by the colonists. With the Anglo-French contest for control of North America heating up along the Ohio frontier, the British crown could not afford to lose its Indian allies, and so it ordered the colonies to mend the rift by making “one general treaty” with the Iroquois. Similar intercolonial treaty conferences had met in Albany before, but none had included delegations from so many colonies nor been convened with such a sense of urgency. As news of the crown’s order for the treaty conference circulated, a handful of royal officials and colonists in America thought the moment should be seized to coordinate intercolonial Indian relations and military affairs. The royal governor of Massachusetts, William Shirley, made certain that his colony’s delegation to Albany was empowered to enter into a plan of union with the other delegations present; Connecticut’s delegation carried authority to consult on such a plan. The other colonial delegations carried instructions that either did not address the subject of colonial union or specifically proscribed the delegates’ powers to discuss it. Nevertheless, shortly after opening their proceedings, the delegates formed a committee to draft a plan of colonial union. In addition to the New England delegates, the chief force behind this push for colonial union at the Albany Congress was Pennsylvania delegate Benjamin Franklin. In 1751 Franklin had published a plan for creating an intercolonial legislature presided over by a royally appointed governor general. On the eve of the Albany Congress, he published in the Pennsylvania Gazette the famous “Join, or Die” cartoon of a snake cut into several pieces to encourage a united colonial resistance to French expansion in the Ohio country. While en route to the Congress, Franklin drafted “Short Hints towards a Scheme for Uniting the Northern Colonies,” which he circulated among some acquaintances. This document provided the starting point for the committee on colonial union that Franklin joined in Albany. After taking care of their negotiations with the Iroquois, the delegates turned their attention to the OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION Munsell, Joel. The Annals of Albany. 2nd ed. Albany, N.Y.: Munsell, 1869. Shannon, Timothy J. Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000. Richard J. Bell 48 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 78: ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION committee’s work. After some debate, they accepted a final version of the committee’s plan on 10 July 1754 and ordered copies for each colonial assembly and the crown. The Albany Plan of Union offered a novel approach to strengthening both intercolonial and Anglo-American union. The center of the plan was the creation of a Grand Council consisting of representatives from each colony, in proportion to the amount of money it contributed to a common treasury. The crown would appoint a presidentgeneral, who would work with the Grand Council in directing Indian affairs, coordinating colonial military operations, and forming new colonies in western territories. The Albany Plan called for implementation of this new general government for America by an act of Parliament, but it also specifically recognized each colony’s right to retain its “present constitution,” except where altered by the Albany Plan. The Albany Plan of Union failed to attract much support in either Britain or the colonies. The king’s ministers expressed some confusion over the plan, which they had not called for in their original instructions for the treaty conference, and failed to forward it to Parliament. The colonial assemblies ignored it, rejected it as antithetical to colonial liberties, or drafted alternative plans designed to do less damage to the autonomy of colonial governments. Even in New England, where the sentiment for colonial union was strongest, the Albany Plan was regarded as a dangerous intrusion on the sanctity of colonial charters, and it slipped into oblivion as the outbreak of war in the Ohio country diverted political energies elsewhere. The plan’s most significant impact was felt in Indian affairs. While the crown was not sympathetic to creating an intercolonial legislature, it did like the idea of centralizing Indian affairs under royal management. In 1756 the ministry created two Indian superintendencies for North America, one for the northern colonies and one for the southern colonies. While some historians have considered the Albany Congress as a precedent for the intercolonial congresses of the Revolutionary era, its influence on the American union forged between 1765 and 1776 is questionable. Franklin’s role in drafting the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution has likewise encouraged some historians to see in the Albany Plan of Union a harbinger of American federalism, but there is little evidence that the founders cited the Albany Plan as a precedent when they drafted those later documents. More recently, Native Americans and sympathetic scholars have argued that the Albany Plan of Union, Articles of Confederation, and Constitution bear resemblance to the Grand League ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW of the Iroquois, but there is no historical evidence from the Albany Congress, Second Continental Congress, or Constitutional Convention that confirms a purposeful effort by Franklin or others to model their ideas for American union after Native American principles. See also Franklin, Benjamin; Iroquois Confederacy. BIBLIOGRAPHY Alden, John R. “The Albany Congress and the Creation of the Indian Superintendencies.” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 27 (1940): 193–210. Levy, Philip A. “Exemplars of Taking Liberties: The Iroquois Influence Thesis and the Problem of Evidence.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 53, no. 3 (1996): 588–604. Olson, Alison Gilbert. “The British Government and Colonial Union, 1754.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 17, no. 1 (1960): 22–34. Shannon, Timothy J. Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000. Timothy J. Shannon ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION During colonial times Americans became hearty drinkers, consuming considerable rum and hard apple cider. They also drank a lesser amount of low alcohol beer that housewives brewed. Colonists brought a cultural predisposition to drink from Europe. Europeans had been using beer and wine for thousands of years and hard liquor since they borrowed distillation of alcohol from the Arabs at the end of the Middle Ages. In contrast, American Indians prior to white contact used alcohol sparingly, usually in the form of mildly alcoholic beer for ritual purposes. However, native inhabitants proved eager to trade furs and other valuable items for the white man’s “firewater.” Slaves in America took little alcohol; they came from African societies that had only beer. By the 1750s Americans were drinking heavily. Much of the rum was imported, and the rest was distilled in the seaports from molasses brought from the West Indies. Although available data is rough, by 1750 the colonists may have consumed more than 6 gallons of alcohol per adult per year, nearly triple the 2.2 gallons drunk in 1998. During the American Revolution, consumption temporarily dropped as the British cut off rum and molasses imports. As a substitute, Scots-Irish immigrants imported distilling technology to turn corn into whiskey. NATION AMERICAN 49
Slide 79: ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION In those days much drinking took place in taverns, which served as community meeting places for entertainment and politics. In 1776 the Declaration of Independence was drafted in a Philadelphia tavern and Revolutionary War soldiers and sailors were recruited in drinking houses. A hangover might bring awareness that one had enlisted while drunk. Soldiers in the Continental Army, like their British opponents, received two ounces of distilled spirits twice daily. Alcohol was considered to be a preserver of good health, a cure for colds or fevers, a pain reliever, and a way to endure hot and cold weather. The main limit on consumption was availability. wine together accounted for less than 5 percent of the alcohol consumed. Beer neither shipped nor stored well, and it was hard to handle in a largely rural country. With low population density, beer dealers often sold so little that a tapped keg went bad before it was empty. Wine was imported and expensive, and attempts to plant vineyards failed. Adult white men drank the most, consuming perhaps as much as five-sixths of the liquor at an average rate of a half pint a day, but women also drank, often at home and sometimes for real or imagined health problems. Many patent medicines contained alcohol; laudanum, opium dissolved in alcohol, was popular to induce sleep or quiet children. It was effective and addictive. Slaves were barred by law from drinking, and most had much less access to alcohol than did whites, but masters often provided slaves with whiskey for a drunken binge after Christmas. Small children tended to sip tiny amounts, such as finishing off a parent’s glass. To pretend to be adults, twelve-year-old boys swaggered into taverns and ordered drinks. Masters or journeymen sent teenage craft apprentices to the store to get liquor in a pail and bring it back to workshops. When an apprentice finished his term of service at age twentyone, he was expected to treat the shop. Whiskey, usually mixed with water, was taken on rising in the morning, with breakfast, at the “elevens” (the predecessor of the coffee break), with midday dinner, in mid-afternoon, with supper, and upon retiring. The American diet ran heavily to salt pork and corn flour johnnycakes fried in pork lard. The same food appeared at all three meals. Whiskey helped wash down this greasy, salty fare. In the early Republic, Americans did not often get drunk in binges; rather, they stayed mildly high all day long. All social classes drank, from teamsters who allowed the horses to find their own way home to judges who passed a jug or bottle around the courtroom. To keep workers from quitting, farm owners had to provide diluted liquor in the fields. Americans drank on many occasions. Businessmen sealed deals with drinks, political candidates treated voters, and militia musters ended with drunken militiamen covering the ground. TEMPERANCE THE EARLY REPUBLIC From the 1790s through the 1820s, whiskey use soared. Heralded as the national beverage, whiskey made getting drunk a patriotic gesture and an act of American pride. In 1790, when Congress, at the request of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, imposed duties on imported molasses and rum, rum distillers complained that they could not compete with untaxed whiskey. The next year the federal government began to tax all distilled spirits. Many frontier whiskey distillers lacked the means to pay or refused to do so, and in 1794 the federal government crushed the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania. Illegal distilling, however, continued, especially in frontier areas such as Kentucky, and in 1802 Thomas Jefferson repealed the tax on domestic distilled liquor. Alcohol remained untaxed until the Civil War. Around 1800 settlement of the Middle West began, and that region’s hot summers and excellent soil produced bumper corn crops. The result was a corn glut, which increased when Europe stopped buying American grain after the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815. Desperate western farmers turned their corn into whiskey in order to afford the shipping costs of sending it to the East for sale. Whiskey became both cheaper and more plentiful. By the 1820s whiskey was five cents a fifth, cheaper than rum, wine, beer, milk, tea, or coffee. It was often safer to drink than water, too. At the consumption peak, around 1830, Americans drank about seven gallons of alcohol per adult per year. This rate of use is among the highest ever recorded in any society and is close to the human body’s physiological maximum capacity for intake of alcohol. While cider continued to be taken in rural applegrowing areas, three-fifths of the alcohol that Americans drank was in the form of whiskey. Beer and Alcohol did have critics. In the colonial period, Quakers and Methodists opposed drinking, and especially public drunkenness, as socially disruptive, personally irresponsible, and sinful. After the Revolutionary War, Dr. Benjamin Rush, who had been physician to the Continental Army, published An Inquiry into the OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 50 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 80: ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES AND PRODUCTION Effects of Spirituous Liquors (1784). This key pamphlet blamed the overuse of distilled spirits for disease, urged restraint in the intake of alcohol, and recommended beer or wine instead of spirits. Although consumption did not fall immediately, Rush influenced doctors and Protestant clergy, who blamed alcohol for wife beating, family abandonment, high illegitimacy, job instability, poverty, crime, and violence. The early Republic was a time of social turmoil, and taverns, especially in seaports, were associated with rising public drunkenness, prostitution, and gambling. As early as 1810 New England ministers campaigned in The Panoplist, a religious magazine, for moderate use of alcohol, which they called “temperance.” Stressing health and social problems, this early campaign had little appeal, even after the founding of the first temperance society, the Massachusetts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance, in 1812. The public appeared to prefer alcohol to protecting health or changing society. During the 1820s northeastern evangelical ministers, often Congregationalists or Presbyterians, turned alcohol into a moral issue. At first they urged moderation, but after 1830 these preachers increasingly opposed any drinking. They called liquor the Demon Rum and suggested it came from the devil. The renunciation of alcohol gradually became one way in which Evangelicals, including many Methodists and Baptists, demonstrated the sincerity of conversion experiences during the Second Great Awakening, which lasted from the late 1790s through the 1830s. Ministers found that abstainers who were reborn in the spiritual revival were more likely to join a church than were drinkers, who found nonreligious fellowship in taverns. Although churches began to require members to abstain, Catholics, Episcopalians, and many Lutherans never accepted this practice. At communion, Evangelicals served grape juice, which they declared was the pure wine of the Bible. Temperance leaders found it hard to defend limited use because no one agreed how much alcohol was safe. They also found that attacking whiskey while exempting wine did not work, because the poor would not give up cheap whiskey while the wealthy continued to drink expensive wine. Some temperance leaders, notably Sylvester Graham of cracker fame, also embraced vegetarianism on the grounds that meat eaters became animalistic. Temperance gradually spread to the Midwest and the South, but southerners were slow to embrace the ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW idea, in part because those who opposed alcohol often also opposed slavery. By 1834 the American Temperance Society (1826), which claimed 1.25 million members in 7,000 local organizations, urged “teetotalism,” or abstinence from all alcohol. This idea was popular in rural areas and small towns. Some farmers even cut down cider-producing apple trees. Many city residents never accepted teetotalism. At the same time, heavy-drinking Irish and German immigrants arrived in large numbers. By the 1850s, alcohol consumption had dropped by two-thirds or more as Evangelicals stopped drinking altogether. To be northern and middle class in 1850 was, by definition, to abstain. The country, however, was divided about drinking by region, by class, by rural or urban residence, by type of religion, and by ethnicity. See also Reform, Social; Revivals and Revivalism; Temperance and Temperance Movement; Women: Female Reform Societies and Reformers. BIBLIOGRAPHY Blocker, Jack S., Jr. American Temperance Movements: Cycles of Reform. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Conroy, David W. In Public Houses: Drink and the Revolution of Authority in Colonial Massachusetts. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Rorabaugh, W. J. The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Salinger, Sharon V. Taverns and Drinking in Early America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Tyrrell, Ian R. Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum America, 1800–1860. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979. W. J. Rorabaugh ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES AND PRODUCTION Before the Revolutionary War (1775–1783), American colonists made large quantities of alcoholic beverages. The overwhelming bulk of this production consisted of commercially distilled rum. In 1770 the colonists imported four million gallons of rum and distilled another five million gallons from imported molasses. Although some rum was traded overseas, Americans drank eight million gallons per year, about seven gallons per adult. Most distillers operated in the seaboard port cities because the molasses from which rum was made came from sugarNATION AMERICAN 51
Slide 81: ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES AND PRODUCTION cane grown in the West Indies. Rum was cheaper to produce in large batches, and a few large-scale distillers dominated the industry. In urban places, commercial brewers made limited quantities of English-style beer. At the time more than 95 percent of Americans lived on farms, where access to commercial beer was poor due to bad transportation and a lack of cash to purchase this relatively expensive beverage. In addition, brewing beer in the English fashion required considerable technical ability, and many American brewers lacked a thorough knowledge of the skills taught through the apprenticeship system in England. English-style beer used light yeast that floated on the top of the vat, and the yeast could easily pick up wild yeasts that gave the beer a bad taste. Wild yeasts in England posed less of a problem than those found in the colonies. On farms as well as in cities, many housewives brewed at home. Often doing so only once a week, they fermented mash naturally from barley, corn, or other grain. This so-called small beer contained little alcohol, about half the strength of beer in the late 1990s. Because of low alcohol content as well as lack of refrigeration, it went sour after a few days. The colonists tended no wine grape vineyards, but farmers in apple-growing areas pressed fruit into alcoholic hard cider for their own use. Around this time, small-scale whiskey distillers innovated better small stills, including one model called the perpetual still, which was claimed to be so efficient that it generated its own energy supply. This was nonsense, but whiskey stills were nevertheless inexpensive to construct and easy to operate. They were portable, required little firewood, and could be moved to wherever a corn glut occurred. However, these new stills were not suitable for molasses, which—unlike corn or rye—became scorched in a small still. Whereas rum distillation had been concentrated in the seaports, whiskey distillation was more common in western frontier areas populated by ScotsIrish and where surplus grain lacked a local market. Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress in the 1780s tried to impose national duties on imported molasses and rum, but such taxes required unanimous consent, and Rhode Island, dominated by the rum-distilling Brown family, refused approval because the taxes would have made rum more expensive than untaxed whiskey. After the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, the new federal government in 1790 raised revenue by taxing imported molasses and rum. Rum distillers complained, and in 1791 the federal government imposed a tax on whiskey and other domestic distilled liquors both to raise more revenue and to level the playing field between rum and whiskey. In 1790 the United States produced about five gallons of hard liquor per adult. Two-thirds was rum; most of the remainder was whiskey. Many whiskey distillers, especially in remote areas, did not pay any tax. Some farmer-distillers lacked cash, and whiskey often circulated as an item of barter on the frontier, where it was traded at general stores. A barrel of whiskey was a convenient way to keep assets in easily saleable liquid form. In 1794 the federal government sent a tax collector into western Pennsylvania, an area heavily settled by Scots-Irish and well known for its extensive whiskey production. Local farmer-distillers physically forced the agent to leave the region. This resistance to authority alarmed federal officials, especially Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, who persuaded President George Washington to call out fifteen thousand militiamen to put down the Whiskey Rebellion. The insurrection was crushed, its leaders were arrested, and stills were seized, but significant defiance persisted. Even after the rebellion, western Pennsylvania yielded little whiskey tax revenue, and OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION WHISKEY CHALLENGES RUM During the Revolutionary War, the British blockaded the seacoast and cut off imports of both molasses and rum. Meanwhile, Irish and Scots-Irish immigrants, who had moved to the colonies in large numbers after 1750, had brought distilling technology from Ireland to turn corn and rye into what the Irish called usquebaugh, which soon was known as whiskey. While these immigrants had distilled small amounts of whiskey for personal use before the Revolution, the disappearance of rum during the war led large numbers of Americans increasingly to substitute whiskey for rum. After 1783 the British continued to block trade between the British West Indies and the new United States. Molasses and rum from other sources was sporadic and unreliable, and by 1789 Americans drank only seven million gallons of rum, about three and a half gallons per adult. In addition, many states taxed imports, including molasses, and rum distillers found themselves at a disadvantage in competition with manufacturers who distilled untaxed whiskey from untaxed grain. 52 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 82: ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES AND PRODUCTION none was obtained from Kentucky, where no tax collector was ever appointed. WHISKEY PREVAILS In 1802 Congress repealed the hated whiskey tax, and the federal government did not again tax alcohol production until the Civil War. Imported molasses and rum, however, still paid duties, and rum sales continued to decline. Molasses imports were a steady one gallon per person after 1802, while rum imports declined from more than a gallon per person during the 1790s to less than half that amount from 1808 to 1827 and less than one-fifth of a gallon from 1828 to 1850. Meanwhile, production of cheap whiskey gradually rose. In 1810 the government calculated that the production of distilled spirits, nearly 90 percent of which was whiskey, amounted to about 8.7 gallons per adult. This prodigious amount made hard liquor the third most important industry in the United States when measured by the value of production. However, this official statistic is too low and the true amount of beverage distillation is impossible to determine. While official production excluded unreported stills, it also included an unknown but considerable amount of liquor that was used for mechanical purposes or as medicine, in the latter case applied both internally and externally. The settlement of the Midwest corn belt in the early 1800s led to higher whiskey production; as a result, the price steadily declined, until by 1825 it was the cheapest beverage at 25 cents a gallon. The United States had fourteen thousand distilleries in 1810, twenty thousand in 1820, but only ten thousand in 1830, when production reached 9.5 gallons per adult. Whiskey distilling continued to be a smallscale business until the 1830s, when cheap grain concentrated in certain areas combined with more efficient large stills and low railroad shipping charges enabled large-scale distillers to gain a major portion of the market. Whiskey varied in quality in these years, and the customer had to take a chance, because it was sold from an unmarked barrel without any brand or labeling until shortly before the Civil War. Most whiskey was 100 proof or 50 percent alcohol. (The technical process for proofing alcohol made it easier to make 100 proof liquor.) Clear in color, whiskey usually had a kick because then it was not aged in charcoal barrels, as it later would be to remove impurities. Whiskey was usually sold within thirty days of production. The modern equivalent is bootleg white lightning. ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW Although there are no reliable statistics, impressionistic evidence suggests that after 1800 production of both commercial and home-brewed beer declined, perhaps because whiskey was so cheap that it discouraged anyone, including housewives, from brewing. Only with the arrival of German immigrants after 1840 did beer production increase. Farmers in apple-growing areas made much hard cider throughout the period. This beverage was never popular in towns or cities, and since it lacked much of a market beyond the farm, it is impossible to know accurately the annual production, which mostly went unreported. Wine could be made from native Concord or Catawba grapes, but such wine was limited to small amounts produced for home consumption. Around 1800 a number of gentlemen farmers, including Nicholas Longworth (1783–1863), experimented with European wine grapes, but the roots tended to rot in the American climate, and the vines yielded more leaves than grapes. Longworth, however, took pleasure in serving surprised Europeans wine from his Cincinnati farm. Although he produced a few bottles of excellent wine, his winery was never a commercial success. Thomas Jefferson tried and failed to make wine at his Virginia plantation, Monticello, and his sponsorship of a colony of experienced wine-growing Swiss immigrants, who settled in Switzerland County, Indiana, in 1805 also came to nothing. These early experiments did not succeed because European vintners misunderstood the soil and climate in the United States. Americans also lacked expertise both in vine growing and in wine making. Only with the acquisition of California in 1848 would the nation gain an area where wine grapes thrived with little effort. See also Alcoholic Consumption; Temperance and Temperance Movement; Whiskey Rebellion. BIBLIOGRAPHY Baron, Stanley W. Brewed in America: A History of Beer and Ale in the United States. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962. Carson, Gerald. The Social History of Bourbon: An Unhurried Account of Our Star Spangled Drink. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1963. Crowgey, Henry G. Kentucky Bourbon: The Early Years of Whiskeymaking. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1971. Downard, William L. Dictionary of the History of the American Brewing and Distilling Industries. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1980. AMERICAN NATION 53
Slide 83: ALIEN AND SEDITION ACTS Pinney, Thomas. A History of Wine in America from the Beginnings to Prohibition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Slaughter, Thomas P. The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. W. J. Rorabaugh ferson, and James Madison, who led the opposition in Congress, called itself “Friends of the People,” placed a stronger emphasis on the sovereignty of the people, and feared a distant and powerful government. The Jeffersonian Republicans also repudiated the British model of development, whether political, economic, or social. Alexander Hamilton’s plan of economic development (1790–1791) triggered the first battle in the struggle to define America’s political principles. Hamilton’s plan was based on a broad reading of the Constitution and was designed to create a powerful national government. Although President Washington was won over by Hamilton’s vision and arguments, the men who coalesced into the Jeffersonian opposition demanded a “strict construction” of the powers granted by the Constitution in order to prevent the creation of an elected despotism. International developments heightened the tensions between these divergent political philosophies. Many Americans who had initially seen the French Revolution as a copy of their own noble struggle against tyranny were disquieted by the escalation of violence and radical ideas in the 1790s—especially the execution of Louis XVI and France’s declaration of war against Great Britain in 1793, the writings of Thomas Paine, and the French subversion of republican governments that had been established throughout Europe. In 1794 the Federalists, fearing the spread of French radicalism, negotiated Jay’s Treaty, which secured peace with England, but only by surrendering America’s claim to the right of neutral trade and by, in French eyes, abrogating America’s 1778 Treaty with France. Publication of Jay’s Treaty precipitated demonstrations by Americans who saw it as selling out to Great Britain; the prosecution of Benjamin Bache, editor of the Philadelphia Aurora, for publishing the terms of the treaty; and attacks on American shipping by France, which viewed the treaty as an alliance between the United States and England. The Quasi-War (1798–1800) with France that ensued increased popular support for the Federalists, especially after peace talks between France and the United States were scuttled by bribes demanded by three French officials, identified only as X, Y, and Z. Blaming the continued hostilities on French venality and the seditious activities of foreign agents and the Republican opposition, Federalist leaders took advantage of their new popularity to arm themselves with the weapons necessary to silence their critics and to perpetuate their political power and principles. OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION ALIEN AND SEDITION ACTS In 1798 America’s Federalists drafted the Alien and Sedition Acts to preserve the national government they had crafted and their own political power. These four laws violated rights guaranteed by the Constitution, inflated presidential power, and disenfranchised America’s immigrants. Although the Federalist majority was able to enact and implement its legislative program, it could not silence the public outcry against these repressive measures or force the acceptance of its political beliefs. The Constitution of 1787 is a sparse document. This is in part because it was conceived as a blueprint for republican government, unencumbered with procedural minutiae, and in part because the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, lacking the time to hammer out the precise powers and roles of each branch of government, left the completion of their work to Congress. The Constitution of 1787 directed Congress to create a national judicial system, to establish a “uniform rule of naturalization,” and to “make all laws which shall be necessary and proper” to execute its enumerated powers. By restricting the Constitution to broad principles, delegates ensured its continued relevance. But the document’s brevity also conferred great power on those who controlled the new national government in the 1790s—the men responsible for implementing the Constitution and filling in its gaps. POLITICAL DIFFERENCES Congressional debates in the 1790s soon revealed differing political beliefs among Americans who had united to throw off British rule. As the decade progressed, two dominant groupings emerged. The Federalist Party, headed by the nation’s first president, George Washington, and first secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, styled itself the party of order or “Friends of Government.” The Federalists advocated rule by “the better sort” and, using England as a model, strove to create a prosperous and powerful American nation. The Republican Party, headed by the nation’s first secretary of state, Thomas Jef- 54 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 84: ALIEN AND SEDITION ACTS TABLE 1 Naturalizations # Naturalized, 1796–1818 June 1798 (Under Act of 1795) 288 444 66 195 993 # Naturalized, 1800–1814 April 1802 (Under Act of 1798) 0 0 0 4 4 Court Location 3 courts, N.Y. County 3 courts, Baltimore Co., Md. 1 court, Frederick Co., Md. 3 courts, Charleston Co., S.C. Totals THE ACTS Although part of the Federalist program to protect the United States from foreign saboteurs and domestic dissidents, the Alien Enemies Act, passed on 6 July 1798, was supported by most members of Congress, who recognized the need to control unnaturalized immigrants whose governments were at war with the United States. The only provision challenged by the Jeffersonian opposition was the “very extraordinary power” given to the president to decide when the threat of “predatory incursion” was sufficient to invoke the act and to specify the treatment of enemy aliens. From a Federalist standpoint, this act was a complete failure. Because war was never declared between France and the United States, the Alien Enemies Act could not be used to apprehend or restrain French radicals. Instead, much to the chagrin of Federalist Anglophiles, the provisions of the Alien Enemies Act would be used against unnaturalized British immigrants during the War of 1812. The remainder of the Federalist program sparked far more controversy. The Naturalization Act, passed on 18 June 1798, was designed to disenfranchise immigrants, by increasing residency requirements from five to fourteen years, and to identify potential troublemakers, by requiring the registration of all unnaturalized aliens residing in the United States in 1798 and of all future arrivals. Penalties for immigrants who refused to report themselves and for all who failed to register aliens in their charge ranged from a monthly fine of two dollars for each infraction, to incarceration until the reports were made. The Naturalization Act of 1798 was, by Federalist standards, a great success. The new requirements virtually ended naturalization activity throughout the United States until the act’s repeal on 14 April 1802. (See table 1.) The Alien Act, passed on 25 June 1798 (also known as the Alien Friends Act), and the Sedition Act, ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW passed on 14 July 1798, were temporary measures designed to silence the political opposition. This Alien Act gave President John Adams the power to deport any unnaturalized foreigner he considered “dangerous to the peace and public safety of the United States.” Aliens who defied a deportation order would be imprisoned for up to three years and permanently excluded from U.S. citizenship; any deportee who returned could be imprisoned for “so long as, in the opinion of the President, the public safety may require.” The furor generated by the Alien Act focused on the “inquisitorial power” conferred on the American president, the Federalists’ extraordinarily broad interpretation of the power granted to Congress by the Constitution, and the violation of rights guaranteed to all “persons”—including unnaturalized immigrants. Members of the Republican opposition warned their colleagues of the dangerous precedent that the Alien Act would set and predicted that, if passed, it would be followed by a similar attack on the rights of American citizens. And indeed, the Sedition Act was enacted less than three weeks after the Alien Act. The Sedition Act was a flagrantly partisan measure designed to ensure the reelection of a Federalist majority in 1800. The act’s provisions, to remain in force until 31 March 1801, made it a crime for anyone, foreign- or native-born, to “write, print, utter or publish,” or to “knowingly . . . assist or aid in writing, printing, uttering or publishing any false, scandalous and malicious writings” concerning the members of Congress or the President; those who did so could be fined two thousand dollars and imprisoned up to two years. Conspicuously excluded from the act’s protection was Vice President Thomas Jefferson—the leader of the Republican opposition. During the election of 1800, no one could, or would, be charged under the Sedition Act for “uttering or publishing” any criticism of Jefferson, no matter how false or scurrilous. Ironically, despite its repressive implementation, the Sedition Act can be considered a progressive development in the law of libel because it allowed truth as a defense and because juries, rather than judges, were allowed to decide whether the publication or statement violated the law. Although some defendants were acquitted under the law, most were convicted by partisan judges and juries who ignored the Act’s more progressive provisions. THE FEDERALIST “REIGN OF TERROR” The Federalist campaign to silence, vilify, and weaken the political opposition made full use of the powNATION AMERICAN 55
Slide 85: ALIEN AND SEDITION ACTS ers conveyed by the Alien, Sedition, and Naturalization Acts of 1798. The fourteen-year residence requirement prevented foreigners from casting (legal) votes for members of the Jeffersonian opposition. Immediately after the passage of the Alien Act, Federalist officials drew up lists of “dangerous” immigrants and prepared deportation orders for President Adams’s signature. But official measures proved unnecessary, as hundreds of immigrants, most of them French refugees from Saint Domingue (the earlier name of Haiti), set sail from America’s inhospitable shores in the summer of 1798; other immigrants went into hiding. News of the treatment awaiting them also reduced the number of English and Irish radicals emigrating to America. In the end, no foreigners were deported under the provisions of the Alien Act. The Sedition Act resulted in the arrests of twenty-five Americans. The most prominent of these was Matthew Lyon, a Republican Congressman from Vermont. Since his election in 1797, Federalists had portrayed the Irish-born Lyon as a savage and seditious “beast,” a promoter of anarchy, and a tool of the French government. In October 1798 a jury, acting on the blatantly partisan charge of Supreme Court Justice William Paterson, found Lyon guilty of making remarks that heaped contempt and odium on the government and president of the United States. Sentenced to a four-month jail term and fined one thousand dollars for deriding President John Adams’s “unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation” and his “continual grasp for power,” Lyon conducted his successful reelection campaign from jail. In New Jersey an inebriated Republican and two drinking companions were found guilty of seditious libel for hoping that one of the artillery shots that accompanied John Adams’s procession through town might lodge itself in the president’s posterior. The Sedition Act’s harshest penalties were meted out by the Massachusetts Circuit Court on Daniel Brown, a semiliterate “wandering apostle of sedition” who, after advocating the “downfall of the Tyrants of America, peace and retirement to the President,” and long life to “the Vice-President and the Minority,” hoped that “moral virtue” would become “the basis of civil government.” Most of the others indicted under the Sedition Act were editors of Republican newspapers. Of those arrested, ten were found guilty; untimely deaths and disappearances allowed others to evade Federalist “justice.” After his election President Jefferson pardoned the men who remained incarcerated for violations of the newly expired Sedition Act. Ultimately the Alien and Sedition Acts destroyed the Federalist Party. By the end of 1798, the Kentucky and Virginia legislatures had passed resolutions denouncing the acts as unconstitutional and refusing to aid in their enforcement. The Kentucky Resolution, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, went even further, claiming that each state had the right to nullify any federal law it found unconstitutional. At the beginning of 1799, petitions signed by thousands of citizens across the country were presented in Congress, “praying” for the repeal of the “impolitic, tyrannical, and unconstitutional” Alien and Sedition Acts. The election of Thomas Jefferson and a Republican congressional majority in 1800 was the ultimate rejection of Federalist policies and principles. THE LEGACY The political battles triggered by the Alien and Sedition Acts had many far-reaching and often unintended consequences. The legislative excesses of the Federalist Party discredited the concept of the “better sort” as society’s natural rulers. After the victory of the Jeffersonian “Friends of the People” in 1800, most successful politicians stressed their (often fabricated) humble beginnings. The Federalist attack on the opposition press resulted in the proliferation of partisan newspapers and increased political participation by the public at large. In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, states lowered or abolished property requirements for voters and ever larger percentages of the electorate cast ballots on election day. Prosecutions under the Sedition Act of 1798 illustrated both the importance and frailty of the American Constitution, which defined treason as an overt act, and the Bill of Rights, which decreed that “Congress shall make no law. . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” In the nineteenth century, Republicans expanded their reading of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment; during the War of 1812, no Federalist was prosecuted for his opposition to the war with Great Britain. Thus, at one level, the experience of the acts led to a stronger ideology of freedom of expression. The Alien and Sedition Acts also had pernicious consequences. They confirmed America’s fear of the abuse of power by a distant, national government, demonstrated the inefficacy of “parchment barriers,” and sowed the seeds of disunion. Because it had taken state action to topple the Federalist Party, state and local governments came to be seen as the true guardians of American liberty—qualified to challenge, perhaps even to nullify, federal laws that seemed to violate the Constitution or individual rights. From there OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 56 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 86: ALMANACS it would be a small step to claim the right of a state to secede from a national government that refused to repeal “unconstitutional” edicts. The Alien and Sedition Acts also became a precedent for dealing with national crises. America has repeatedly responded to international threats by circumventing constitutional rights, impugning the motives of political opponents, equating criticism of government leaders and policies with treason, and exacerbating xenophobia. See also Adams, John; Democratic Republicans; Election of 1800; Federalism; Federalist Party; Federalists; Hamilton, Alexander; Immigration and Immigrants: Immigrant Policy and Law; Jay’s Treaty; Jefferson, Thomas; Judiciary Act of 1789; Judiciary Acts of 1801 and 1802; Presidency, The; Press, The; Quasi-War with France; War of 1812; Washington, George; XYZ Affair. BIBLIOGRAPHY Baseler, Marilyn C. “Asylum for Mankind”: America, 1607– 1800. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998. Buel, Richard, Jr. “Freedom of the Press in Revolutionary America: The Evolution of Libertarianism, 1760–1820.” In The Press and the American Revolution. Edited by Bernard Bailyn and John B. Hench. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981. Cole, David. Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism. New York: Norton, 2003. Levy, Leonard W. Emergence of a Free Press. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985; Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004. Pasley, Jeffrey L. “1800 as a Revolution in Political Culture: Newspapers, Celebrations, Voting, and Democratization in the Early Republic.” In The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic. Edited by James Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis, and Peter S. Onuf. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002. Powe, Lucas A., Jr. The Fourth Estate and the Constitution: Freedom of the Press in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Simon, James F. What Kind of Nation: Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and the Epic Struggle to Create a United States. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002. Smith, James Morton. Freedom’s Fetters: The Alien and Sedition Laws and American Civil Liberties. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1956. Taylor, Alan. “From Fathers to Friends of the People: Political Personae in the Early Republic.” In Federalists Reconsidered. Edited by Doron Ben-Atar and Barbara B. Oberg. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998. ALMANACS No other publication attracted as loyal a following, nor had as widespread a reach, as the almanac. Every fall local newspapers throughout colonial America contained advertisements heralding the latest editions of the many different local almanacs. The annual announcements served as a siren call, beckoning local merchants, artisans, and farmers alike to the printer’s office to purchase their traditional almanac, while salesmen arrived, acquiring almanacs in bulk before heading out to the frontier to peddle their best-selling item. Full of must-have information, like the days local courts convened, the rising and setting of the sun, and the dates of holidays, along with entertaining stories, medicinal cures, astrological prognostications, and favorite recipes, no other single genre of book was purchased as frequently as the almanac, nor was the market for any single item as fully developed or competitive as the almanac market. Yet these almanacs, pervasive in their local markets, could not be sold in other markets because of their highly localized information. A farmer in Pennsylvania could not profit from lunar and solar calculations for Boston, nor could a Bostonian benefit from knowing when a local court met in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The Revolution left most of the almanac’s content unchanged. For all the upheaval it wrought, apparently that conflict did not alter America’s litigious society or the movement of the sun, moon, or stars. Yet the changes that did occur and, more important, where and when these changes happened, provide insight into the creation of the new nation. The most notable, yet subtle, shift appeared in the calendar, which formed the core of every almanac. The British calendar had peacefully resided in every almanac before the imperial crisis, but over the course of the Revolution, it shifted from a celebratory focus on English events, mostly monarchical, to a new, American perspective. Unlike government decrees mandating celebratory days, the almanac makers were free to determine what dates to include in their almanacs. Furthermore, because days, events, and astrology shifted from year to year, printers could not use standing type in their calendars. Therefore, every year they conscientiously constructed the calendar for the upcoming year. Inertia never controlled the almanac and because of the almanac’s profitability and popularity, it can be inferred that popular sentiments implicitly shaped the calendar’s outlook. Every fall during the imperial crisis, almanac makers and publishers needed to survey their contentious audience and determine how to make NATION Marilyn C. Baseler ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN 57
Slide 87: AMERICA AND THE WORLD their almanacs as popular, or as inoffensive to as many, as possible. Although the nationalization of the almanacs occurred regionally during the War for Independence, by the 1780s virtually every almanac celebrated the declaration of independence in addition to many of the battles from the Revolutionary War. The shared celebration of the war and of independence in these localized publications helped foster a shared sense of national community. Philadelphia and Boston served as printing centers for almanacs, accounting for over 70 percent of all the almanacs printed. Philadelphia is remembered as the home of the Continental Congress and birthplace of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of 1787. It also is synonymous with early American almanacs, thanks in large part to Philadelphia printer cum politician Benjamin Franklin, who produced Poor Richard’s Almanack (1732– 1757). But at the time of the imperial crisis, Franklin had given up printing, and the almanac market was far more robust than it ever had been during his years as a printer. In Franklin’s time, there were perhaps five or six competing almanacs, but by the imperial crisis Philadelphia printers produced, on average, twelve different almanacs annually, accounting for over 40 percent of all almanacs in the colonies. The New England market produced no less than a dozen different almanac makers and accounted for 30 percent of all almanacs produced. Here, almanac maker Nathaniel Ames of Massachusetts created a massive following, which his son, Nathaniel Ames Jr., inherited in 1765. At the time, it is likely that Ames’s almanac outsold any other almanac produced in the colonies. Throughout the imperial crisis, Ames Jr. turned his almanac into a political pamphlet. This trend was soon duplicated by other popular compilers like Benjamin West and Nathaniel Low, both also of Massachusetts. During the Revolution, the New England almanac was transformed from an innocuous serial to a political pamphlet to a source of news dissemination and progenitor of national identity. Often the almanac published accounts of battles, and images of George Washington, Horatio Gates, and John Hancock adorned the frontispiece. Thus, almanacs established a nationalizing trend later replicated in the other areas of the country during the early Republic. The vitality of the almanac market did not wane after the Revolution. With the retirement of Ames and his peers, the early Republic witnessed the rise of a new generation of popular almanac makers. Benjamin Banneker, a self-taught free black living in Maryland and Washington, D.C., proved to be one of the most popular compilers in the 1790s. The market explosion that characterized the early Republic also affected almanacs. Between 1765 and 1785, printers produced just over seven hundred almanacs. In the fifteen years immediately following the departure of the last British troops from New York City, production increased by over 140 percent, resulting in almost one thousand almanacs. In the early nineteenth century, American printers produced on average almost one hundred different almanacs a year, often in areas that had not even had printers prior to the Revolution. Such a large circulation of often overtly nationalistic almanacs helped create a national community bound by a shared calendar focused on independence. See also Printers. BIBLIOGRAPHY Franklin, Benjamin V., ed. Boston Printers, Publishers, and Booksellers: 1640–1800. Boston: Hall, 1980. Raymond, Allan R. “To Reach Men’s Minds: Almanacs and the American Revolution, 1760–1777.” New England Quarterly 51 (1978): 370–371. Stowell, Marion Barber. Early American Almanacs: The Colonial Weekday Bible. New York: Franklin, 1977. Patrick Spero AMERICA AND THE WORLD “Since the revolution which assured the sovereignty of the United States,” noted one European journal in 1786, “European observers have painted of conditions there pictures which are sometimes enthusiastic and sometimes lamentable.” That much is undeniable. As Americans expanded their borders through conquest and commerce, they touched off a global debate over the virtue and practicality of their defining attribute: freedom from monarchy. Some considered the United States the last best hope for humankind and thus drew “enthusiastic” pictures of America. For others, life in the American Republic was “lamentable,” confirming the need for and wisdom of monarchical government. These conflicting views—products of the tumultuous Age of Revolution—helped to shape American foreign policy and national identity through much of the nineteenth century. EXPANSION OF THE UNITED STATES During the 1770s, American Revolutionaries portrayed Britain as “corrupt” and “luxurious,” a decaOF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 58 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 88: AMERICA AND THE WORLD Tea-Tax Tempest, or the Anglo-American Revolution (1778). In this German satirical engraving, attributed to Carl Guttenberg after Robert Edge Pine, Father Time projects a magic lantern show for viewers representing figures from around the world. The image on the wall—a teapot exploding among British troops—expresses support for the Americans. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. dent relic of a glorious past. They urged their countrymen and women to forgo British consumer goods and to reject the comfortable bonds of empire in favor of republican “virtue.” Although Americans rushed to buy British manufactures as soon as the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, the image of Britain as the declining parent and America as the vigorous youth endured. “Unshackle your minds and act like independent beings,” Noah Webster challenged his countrymen in 1790. “You have been children long enough.” Bitter memories of wartime atrocities fed a popular hatred for British power, and stories of marauding British troops filled young Americans with a powerful sense of distance—both geographical and cultural—from the Old World in general. The continuing influence of British culture in American life complicated this widespread AngloENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW phobia—or, perhaps, intensified it. British books, magazines, and sermons left their mark at every level of American society and culture. Wealthy merchants in seaports read gentlemen’s magazines published in London; well-educated women read novels by English authors like Jane Austen. British culture permeated American life in more popular and pedestrian ways, too. Newspapers sometimes favored European over local or national events. Children read allegories and morals written by British authors and intended for British youth. And British Evangelicals and moral reformers helped to lead or inspire antislavery and missionary efforts in the United States. In 1800 as in 1750, one measured cosmopolitanism in the English-speaking world by counting the miles from London, not from New York, Boston, or Philadelphia. NATION AMERICAN 59
Slide 89: AMERICA AND THE WORLD But if America remained something of a cultural colony, it quickly emerged as an economic power in its own right. From 1793, when the wars of the French Revolution began, to 1801, when they momentarily halted, the value of American exports surged fivefold. American farmers produced grain surpluses for sale across the Atlantic, where war had disrupted harvests. American merchants kept tobacco, sugar, barrel staves, and hemp circulating throughout the Atlantic basin. In the South, meanwhile, a new staple crop emerged that would make planters immensely powerful in Europe as well as America: cotton. Harvested by enslaved Africans, raw cotton was processed by the newly invented cotton gin and then funneled through American ports to British textile cities. American ships sailed south and west as well, weaving a thin but thickening web of global business. Whalers from New England regularly pursued their quarry into Pacific waters after 1800, making contact with Polynesian peoples and establishing trading posts from the Galápagos Islands to Hawaii. Pious missionaries followed the hard-drinking whalers, leaving native peoples with a most confusing picture of the American character. The most spectacular advances out of the original thirteen states, however, were made in wagons rather than ships. At the time of the Revolution, only about twelve thousand of the roughly three million Americans lived west of the Appalachians. But the westward trickle became a flood after the 1780s, as young families who were pressed by a shortage of land along the seaboard sought their own piece of earth, their own “independence,” within the new territories. Americans also headed west in the wake of military victories over Indian peoples; in 1795, one year after federal troops defeated the Miami Confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, settlers surged into the Ohio region. And the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803 encouraged tens of thousands of Americans to head west. Others came against their will—in slave coffles. From 1810 to 1820 alone, some 137,000 slaves were marched from the old tobacco lands in North Carolina and the Chesapeake to Alabama and Mississippi. The “Empire of Liberty” that President Thomas Jefferson envisioned was also a dominion of slavery, a place for white masters to wring labor and profits out of black bodies. But no matter if they arrived as slaves or free citizens, in Ohio or Alabama, western settlers transformed the Republic and its place in the world. A massive internal economy developed, reorienting American commerce from trade with Europe to trade with other states. By 1830, a middle-class family in Connecticut might eat pork taken from an upstate New York farm, or even from an Ohio family whose surplus goods sailed east over the new Erie Canal, which was finished in 1825. Along with the conversion of millions of acres of grassland and forest into farms and townships came rapid population growth: by 1810, the United States had more than seven million inhabitants, nearly as many as Britain. “Old America,” noted one migrant in 1817, “seems to be breaking up and moving westward.” EUROPEAN VIEWS OF AMERICA Generally speaking, European judgments of America had been few and unkind before the Revolution. Although Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and a handful of other philosophes celebrated America as a place of natural simplicity, the prevailing view was of America as a place of moral and natural degeneration. In the 1760s the French scientist Comte de Buffon and the Swedish naturalist Pehr Kalm synthesized these notions into a scientific theory. Because North America had emerged from the sea more recently than Europe, they reasoned, the indigenous flora and fauna of America had not developed as long or as well as Old World species. European settlers in the colonies had regressed within this primitive environment, which explained why they lagged behind Europeans in wealth, learning, and artistic accomplishment. The lowly status of European immigrants to the colonies reinforced these unflattering portraits of American life. During the first threequarters of the eighteenth century, three out of four immigrants to British North America were unfree: slaves, bound laborers, or convicts. North America seemed like little more than a dumping ground for the unwanted or exploited. America’s image abroad improved dramatically in the period of the Revolution. The political philosophy of republicanism, which pictured a society based on popular rule and citizens’ autonomy, had resonated with western intellectuals and radicals since the Renaissance. During the eighteenth century, it merged with Enlightenment values of human reason and progress to become a powerful logic for social and political change. Rather than a dependent child—a subject of God or king—republicans insisted that the human being was, or should be, an independent adult. When American radicals defied their parent country, therefore, European liberals cheered. Some joined the fray. Thomas Paine, an English-born radical, helped start the Revolutionary War with his pamphlet Common Sense (1776); the Marquis de LaOF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 60 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 90: AMERICA AND THE WORLD fayette, a French nobleman, and Thaddeus Kosciusko, a Polish general, helped to win it for the Americans. Also, over eight thousand Frenchmen served in the war, and they carried the dangerous vision of an independent citizenry back to Louis XVI’s France. As revolution swept over France in 1789, America briefly seemed like the vanguard of a brave new world—a remarkable turnaround in national repute since the late colonial period. The Legislative Assembly of the new French republic conveyed honorary citizenship on George Washington, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton—“foreign philosophers who have with courage upheld the cause of liberty and have deserved well of humanity.” Its leadership aside, the American Republic appeared to offer a new kind of liberty and autonomy to ordinary people. The continent itself, once thought to have degenerative effects, now seemed like the foundation of Americans’ liberty and virtue. On his own piece of ground, an American farmer was beholden to no manor lord or religious dogma and could think and reason and create. The everyday reality for America’s struggling farmers, tenants, and tradesmen was far less rosy, of course. But from the European perspective, American soil became liberty’s garden, the cradle of enlightenment and progress. In his 1782 work, Letters from an American Farmer, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur celebrated the new world: “This continent will become one day the theater on which the liberated forces of the human mind will acquire all the energy of which they are susceptible—the theater on which human nature, so long confined . . . will achieve perhaps, its final and greatest honors.” For this Frenchman, the American Republic was destined to lead the world out of the darkness that priests and kings had so long cast over the globe. Yet, European conservatives decried the very qualities that Crèvecoeur celebrated. To them, American “democracy” (the word became more and more common in the 1780s) was little better than mob rule or demagoguery. Caring only for personal gain, an American politician flattered common people but cared nothing for them; far better, aristocrats declared, to preserve a deferential society in which “disinterested” gentlefolk (like them) looked after a grateful public. Moreover, the character of the American populace itself unsettled and often revolted Europeans. Visiting gentlemen found common people in America to be impertinent and crude. Americans ate too quickly, drank too much, and spit too often. They refused to show deference to their social betters, yet they themselves drove their servants and slaves mercilessly. They seemed too immersed in wealthENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW getting to live like civilized people. One émigré from France lamented that the pursuit of profit weakened every social bond and genteel sentiment in America: “Grab everything, hang on to everything, everything for yourself and nothing for the other fellow, that is the great principle of this nation.” These voices grew louder and more convincing as the French Revolution devolved into anarchy, and then terror, and then tyranny. In 1790 the English philosopher Edmund Burke published Reflections on the Revolution in France, which not only defended the English system of constitutional monarchy but also attacked the basic premises of revolutionary republicanism. The accumulated wisdom of the past, Burke argued, offered a better guide to politics than any slogans about liberty, equality, and the rights of man. Republican ideas upset the “principles of natural subordination” on which society rested. Such conservative principles found a ready audience among Britain’s commercial and landed gentry as well as its Anglican elite. Across Europe, the ruling classes began to rally against the threat of worldwide rebellion against monarchy. The massacre of French priests and nobles in September 1792 and the execution of Louis XVI four months later convinced the European powers to close ranks against radical republicanism. After Thomas Paine published The Rights of Man (1791–1792), for example, the British government tried him in absentia for seditious libel. (Paine initially escaped to France, where he had been elected to sit in the new National Convention.) In 1795 Parliament passed the infamous Two Acts: one outlawed large public gatherings, while the other made prosecution for treason easier to prove. No longer able to control their restive populations through outright censorship or personal patronage, monarchies increasingly turned to professional bureaucracies and police powers to keep order. War with revolutionary France catalyzed this effort. In 1793 Britain joined Prussia, Austria, Sardinia, Holland, and Spain to make war on the French republic. Thus began the series of European conflicts that benefited American commerce but also recast the United States as a global oddity—a republic in a world of monarchies. FOREIGN POLICY AND NATIONAL IDENTITY In his Farewell Address in 1796, President George Washington warned Americans to steer clear of European entanglements. The United States, he counseled, should cultivate commercial and economic ties to Europe but avoid political alliances or military conflicts. Shortly after Washington’s successor, NATION AMERICAN 61
Slide 91: AMERICA AND THE WORLD John Adams, took office, however, the new leaders of the French republic allowed their navy to prey on American shipping. When Adams sent three emissaries to Paris, French officials demanded bribes before any negotiations began. This XYZ affair— Adams called his three agents X, Y, and Z to protect their identities—sparked war fever among many Americans in 1798. Adams’s own Federalist Party called for war to uphold the honor and defend the commerce of the Republic; meanwhile, American naval vessels fought an undeclared Quasi-War (1798–1800) with French privateers in Caribbean waters. Wisely, Adams broke with his party and dispatched more peace emissaries to France, heading off war. Two years later, Adams and the Federalists were defeated by Jefferson and the Democratic Republicans, who sought to preserve peace with Europe while American commerce and internal trade burgeoned. When Napoleon Bonaparte, who had seized power in France after a coup in 1799, set out to conquer the European world, the United States tried to stay neutral. In a bold attempt to counter British hostility on the high seas, President Jefferson pushed through Congress the Embargo Act of 1807. By prohibiting American vessels from sailing to ports abroad and foreign ships from taking cargo in the United States, this measure was designed to force the British into changing their policies without resort to war. It also echoed some of the Revolutionary idealism of the 1770s, when American Revolutionaries had agreed to cease importation of certain British goods. The republican dream endured: complete independence, not only from the British Crown, but also from European warfare and corruption. But the embargo brought more hardship to the United States than to Britain, and it collapsed in 1809. Three years later Jefferson’s successor, James Madison, led the nation to war against Britain. In many respects, the War of 1812 (1812–1815) was catastrophic for the United States. American campaigns against British Canada failed; redcoats burned much of Washington, D.C., in 1814; New England Federalists considered secession and spoke bitterly of “Mr. Madison’s War.” Only Andrew Jackson’s triumph at New Orleans in January 1815 allowed the Americans to claim a measure of victory. This battle had no bearing on the diplomatic settlement of the war—a treaty ending the conflict had been signed two weeks before—but it vaulted Jackson into heroic status. In 1818 he capitalized on his fame by invading Spanish Florida and rampaging through native lands in the Southeast. With his hos- tility towards both European powers and Indian tribes, Jackson personified a new, more aggressive, and more isolationist form of American nationalism. The final defeat of Napoleon in Europe followed soon after the end of this second Anglo-American war, and with peace came a new world order and a new role for the United States. The victorious monarchies of Europe could not push the genie of republicanism back into the ancien régime bottle. But they tried. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the European powers redrew national borders to their preNapoleonic status and placed Louis XVIII on the restored throne of France. These allies also considered ways to strengthen the Spanish Crown and its hold over Central and South America. (Napoleon’s conquest of Spain had sparked independence movements in much of Latin America starting in 1808.) The British government wanted no part of this effort, but in Britain, as well, revolutionary ideas fell on hard times. Republicans and working-class activists in London and the new industrial cities won piecemeal reforms, nothing more. In this conservative age, the United States became a political anomaly, a relic from the bygone and defeated Age of Revolution. In any case, it was a second-rate power with a small army and navy. Although tied to the United States through trade, especially in cotton, the European powers after 1815 did not place the Republic high on their priority lists. In 1823 President James Monroe formalized this general tendency in world affairs by issuing the famous doctrine that bears his name. In response to fears of European intervention in Latin America, Monroe proclaimed the Western Hemisphere off limits for European colonization. (European governments denounced or disdained the Monroe Doctrine; former President Jefferson applauded it.) By and large, Americans seemed to agree with the president: the United States did not need to meddle with Europe, and so Europe should not meddle with the United States. Increasingly, Americans told themselves that they lived in “a world within ourselves,” a vast Republic that looked west rather than east. Isolation from European affairs and European culture became a key source of American nationalism, a way for the citizens of a pluralistic society to relate to one another. Yet the soaring image of America as a land of liberty and enlightenment did not die in Europe. It simply became more sober, more practical, more in keeping with the emerging culture of the Republic itself. The Revolutionary period had halted European immigration to North America, and after the 1780s OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 62 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 92: AMERICAN CHARACTER AND IDENTITY the immigrant pool took on an entirely new character. Unfree and unwanted people from Europe no longer boarded ships for America; they went instead to European cities or to the new penal colony of Australia. In 1808, moreover, the U.S. Congress halted the direct importation of African slaves to American shores. In their place came artisans and farm laborers from England, Scotland, Ireland, and German states, all looking for land and freedom, which meshed together in people’s minds. This early version of the American Dream was not so much a dream for fabulous wealth as it was for modest improvements in one’s life situation and family resources. And, in many respects, the United States did offer a better chance at economic survival than did the more tightly stratified societies of Europe. Even as it became an imperial power abroad and an industrial, class-based society at home during the nineteenth century, America upheld this image and attracted millions of people to its shores. See also China Trade; Embargo; European Responses to America; European Influences; Foreign Investment and Trade; French; Missionary and Bible Tract Societies; Monroe Doctrine; Presidency, The: Overview; Quasi-War with France; Spain; War of 1812; XYZ Affair. BIBLIOGRAPHY invited. Splendid scholars, especially in the early years of the twenty-first century, have traced the emergence of such an identity. Their ingenuity has enriched America’s understanding of its nascent national character. And yet, in the end, their endeavor has been doomed. It has asked how national attachments came to supersede parochial ones when in fact they did not. It has presumed that American identity was focused when in fact it was fractured, and it has predicated the primacy of politics among a people preoccupied with social and economic issues. American allegiances in the new nation, as ever since, were multiple and kaleidoscopic. But the most meaningful senses of selfhood and the most absorbing identity adventures, for most citizens of the early Republic, were simply not political. National identity and local identities alike were paltry parts of the personality. Other self-conceptions mattered much more. Concerns for career and for the attainment of affluence or advancement preoccupied the citizenry of the infant nation. And such concerns were never narrowly utilitarian. Self-made men and women ventured creatively into the void, inventing themselves as they made social space for their unprecedented enterprises. Masking and its attendant risks were then, as they have been since, the business of American businessmen. Confidence men and painted women were more than mere calculating creatures. They always had to contemplate at least a little the meaning of their masks for the meaning of their existence. Social identities similarly transcended the utilitarian, as surely as national political identities did and far more powerfully. To be a Methodist in 1790 was, in many places, to risk rejection in the family and ostracism in the community. To be a Methodist circuit-rider in 1800 was, everywhere, to court early death. And yet Methodism grew far faster, in the early Republic, than nationalism ever did, though the movement proclaimed openly its indifference to politics and its insistence that the blessings of “scriptureholiness” were “infinitely more valuable than any which the revolution of states can possibly afford” (Andrews, p. 81). To cross the mountains in Conestoga wagons, to expect the end of the world, to ply steamboats on the western rivers, to oppose slavery, or to envision canals connecting the interior to the coastal ports was often more visionary, more ethically or spiritually charged, than to effect a continental identity or promulgate a nationalistic ideology in that era. Even to migrate to Spanish Mexico, to support the Hartford Convention, to urge nullification, or to “conspire” to NATION Cremin, Lawrence A. American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876. New York: Harper and Row, 1980. Durant, Will, and Ariel Durant. The Age of Napoleon: A History of European Civilization from 1789 to 1815. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975. Echeverria, Duran. Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957. Foner, Eric. Tom Paine and Revolutionary America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Fugleman, Aaron S. “From Slaves, Convicts, and Servants to Free Passengers: The Transformation of Immigration in the Era of the American Revolution.” Journal of American History, 85 (1998): 43–76. Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1991. J. M. Opal AMERICAN CHARACTER AND IDENTITY From the day that the United States won its independence, thoughtful Americans have attempted to define the new national identity that the Peace of Paris ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN 63
Slide 93: AMERICAN CHARACTER AND IDENTITY detach the trans-Appalachian west from the United States was often more daring and less crassly advantageous than to espouse a mild, modest nationalism. The discussion of identity in the new Republic has historically been carried on in two very different ways. In the one that has overwhelmingly engaged them, historians have studied the emergence of explicit sentiments vaunting American nationality. This is the ancient cosmopolitan project that still sets the terms of the national narrative. This is the saga of “the architects of the early American Republic,” with its emphasis on the epic and exemplary confrontations of Federalists and anti-Federalists, of Jefferson and Hamilton, of Marbury and Madison. It is, at bottom, tautological. In the other, historians have not taken for granted the reality of the formation they say they study. They ask more empirically about the actual identities of Americans. They address the energies and obsessions of the people as they find them—their inveterate westering, their volatile conversion to and backsliding from the proliferous denominations of the early Republic, their rabid antipathy to Indians, Catholics, Masons, African Americans—and wonder where the thread of national identity fits amid these more limited yet perhaps more urgent identities. To be sure, historians cannot ignore elite politics and elite political culture in this empirical inquest. There may have been ways in which a nascent national identification might have mattered for a multitude of Americans. Perhaps “an allegiance to the young republic” provided people a modicum of permanence in a world in which many of their other identities changed and churned. No matter how often they moved, abandoning one local and even one regional identity for another; no matter how often they converted, forsaking one church for another, finding faith and backsliding from it; no matter how often they changed employment or occupation, or social standing, or political party—they remained Americans. Perhaps that anchorage afforded them some sustaining reassurance that they did belong, abidingly, in a society increasingly incapable of conferring a secure sense of place. And perhaps an emergent American attachment allowed them a comforting conviction that they could still find moral bearings in a world where solid ground seemed more and more to slip away. A disembodied imagining of a national community could carry ethical aspirations difficult to embody in everyday life. It could offset the priority on imagemanagement of the schemers and scammers who swarmed the cities and the countryside alike in the mobile young Republic. It could elevate the sordid scuffle for wealth that was exacerbated by the expansion of the market. It could redeem the quiet desperation that so many observers saw in the early nineteenth century. But such uses of national allegiance could only provide solace. They could not provide the citizens of the new nation a dominant or decisive sense of themselves. Political independence did, inevitably, thrust a sort of American identity on men and women who had not previously seen themselves as distinctive. It forced them to forge a sense of special peoplehood after the fact. It drove them, all unprepared, to devise a community and character worthy of the sudden, surprising fact of having a name and being a nation. In the first fervency of independence, spokesmen expected American distinctiveness to appear automatically. They affirmed again and again their sublime faith that, once free of British fetters, an authentic republican character would manifest itself. In the ensuing decades, nothing happened. Despite summons upon summons to an indigenous national literature, or art, or music or drama or poetry or architecture—despite plaintive exhortation upon plaintive exhortation to the cultivation of native genius in mathematics, or science, or natural history— virtually no consequential artistry or ideation came forth in the half-century after independence. The implication grew inescapable. Contrary to the fevered rhetoric of the rebels in the last years of their quarrel with the mother country, the edicts that emanated from Whitehall had not inhibited a surging cultural creativity that waited to well up as soon as colonial constraints could be shed. A distinctive delineation of America would not bubble forth of its own accord. If there was to be a definition of a national identity, it would have to be contrived, and its concoction would inevitably serve the purposes of people with the power to promote it. The promulgation of an American exceptionalism would be, as the scholar Michael Lind has argued, the province of AngloSaxon Protestants. But Anglo-Saxon Protestant nationalism was not, as Lind thought, a natural formation, arising from a population itself preponderantly AngloSaxon and evangelical. Only an ever-diminishing minority of Americans in the first generations after independence were English. Only a scant tithe were evangelical Protestants, in a country in which just OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 64 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 94: AMERICAN CHARACTER AND IDENTITY one adult in five affiliated himself (or, more likely, herself) with any church at all. Anglo-Saxon Protestant identity would be an ideological imposition on an American people who were not themselves English evangelicals and who had not themselves shown any notable aptitude for fathoming their own uniqueness or indeed any apparent possession of such uniqueness. Anglo-Saxon Protestant identity would express the ideological interests of a special stratum of society. Exactly as ideology, it would be thin and abstract. It would never engage conscientiously the distinctive elements of American life that did not serve its celebratory agenda or its persuasive purposes. Although Anglo-Saxon Protestant identity would exhibit the very disposition to extremity and excess that had always colored American experience, it would never acknowledge that disposition as a constituent of the national character. It would never face up to the new nation’s racism, hedonism, violence, conformism, materialism, or amoralism. It would never grapple with the polarities, paradoxes, and horrors with which the early Republic struggled. It would never be an irresistible emanation of the masses—a vast, vague expression of their aspirations and anxieties—so much as a conscious construction of a few. Precisely as a project of a small cadre of elite Anglo-Protestant males, the fabrication of American identity served psychic needs felt by few others in the new nation. Most men of the early Republic knew men by the work they did: the physical labor of tilling the soil, or working wood or leather, or crossing the mountains or sailing the seas. Even the planters of the old South, who consigned conventional men’s work to their slaves, still marked their masculinity by riding horses, fighting duels, and scourging subalterns with the lash. But the leisured men of the North who worked with words, following the “feminine” callings of imagining and writing, needed a facade of “masculine” function to muffle their unease. As much as the nascent nationalism afforded a muscular posture to such scribbling men, it provided even more to the richer and more powerful men in whose cultural and material interests they wrote. The “cause of America,” as one publicist called this new nationalism, promoted the prerogatives of the cosmopolitan few against the parochial many. Its celebration of the political economy of Lockean liberalism recast the claims of clan and community, which had long mattered mightily in the New World, as inauthentically American. Its exaltation of entrepreneurial capitalism as the special genius of the ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW new nation discredited tradition and the entitlements that had always attended it. American identity as it was inscribed in the epoch after independence cannot be understood in its own words, for those words did not arise from the citizenry. They represented, rather, an enthusiasm of an elite that grasped clearly that the individualism it exhorted had indeed to be exhorted. Americans had to be taught to love the market and their own selfishness in it. They had to learn to be the Americans whom their mentors so stridently told them they were. They had to be pried loose from their very real attachments to family and to fellows, if America was to become the society that the bankers, merchants, and manufacturers envisioned. Of course, those cosmopolitan entrepreneurial elites were prepared to use the power of the law to teach, and to teach, in truth, more compellingly than the cosmopolitan intellectuals who deployed their prose in the same tutelary campaign. But the mass of Americans remained reluctant students. Unrooted individualism and unabashed enterprise could not constitute American identity until they triumphed over contrary cultural traditions of great power and attractiveness. They did not do so in the era of the early Republic, except among those who talked among themselves. See also America and the World; Citizenship; Economic Development; European Influences: Enlightenment Thought; Founding Fathers; Individualism; Naming of the Nation; National Symbols; Nationalism; Politics: Political Culture; Press, The; Print Culture; Religion: Overview; Work: Work Ethic. BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London and New York: Verso, 1991. Andrews, Dee. The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760–1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Appleby, Joyce. Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2000. Newman, Simon P. Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Nye, Russell. The Cultural Life of the New Nation, 1776–1830. New York: Harper, 1960. Onuf, Peter S. Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. AMERICAN NATION 65
Slide 95: AMERICAN COLONIZATION SOCIETY Waldstreicher, David. In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Michael Zuckerman AMERICAN COLONIZATION SOCIETY See Colonization Movement. AMERICAN INDIANS This entry consists of nineteen separate articles: Overview, Northern New England, Southern New England, Middle Atlantic, Southeast, Old Northwest, Old Southwest, Plains, Far West, American Indian Ethnography, American Indian Policy, 1787–1830, American Indian Relations, 1763–1815, American Indian Relations, 1815–1829, American Indian Religions, American Indian Removal, American Indian Resistance to White Expansion, American Indians as Symbols/Icons, American Indian Slaveholding, and British Policies. A Winnebago Orator. This lithograph is based on an 1828 painting by Charles Bird King, who was commissioned by Thomas Loraine McKenney, Superintendent of Indian Trade, to paint portraits of Native American leaders who came to Washington, D.C., to visit the president. © GIANNI DAGLI ORTI/CORBIS. Overview The period between the onset of the Seven Years’ War in 1754 and the inauguration of President Andrew Jackson in 1829 witnessed profound changes for the indigenous peoples of North America. It proved to be a time of paradoxes—with widespread destruction and creative adaptation, demographic collapse and cultural survival, colonization and nation-building, Christian missionization and spiritual revitalization all occurring simultaneously. Although native peoples met the challenges posed by these trying years, and often played central roles in shaping the outcome of the most pivotal events, their worlds would never be the same. DEMOGRAPHY AND DISEASE lines stretched to the west and east as well. Commercial ties brought with them conflict, intermarriage and adoption, regional alliances, the development of trading languages, and the exchange of foods, tools, ideas, and technologies. Native peoples not only knew of one another, but many had long been in contact with Europeans by the mid-eighteenth century. The presence of the French, English, and Dutch along the Atlantic Coast and down the St. Lawrence and Mississippi Rivers, Spanish incursions in the Caribbean, as well as the present-day southeastern and southwestern United States, and Russian settlements along the Northwest Coast had already brought significant change. These encounters did not need to be face-to-face to carry dramatic consequences. Exemplifying a process the historian Alfred Crosby called “the Columbian exchange,” American Indians throughout the continent, even in places where Europeans were not physically present, had already confronted these OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION Native North America in the mid-eighteenth century represented a dynamic landscape, one that had already seen the rise and fall of ancient civilizations. It was an interconnected space in which trade routes bound together literally hundreds of distinct indigenous cultures embodying diverse sociopolitical and economic systems. Although they maintained their separateness, the peoples of the Great Lakes, the Ohio Valley, and the Lower Mississippi, for instance, had long been tied to one another by commerce, and these 66 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 96: AMERICAN INDIANS outsiders’ material goods, their plants and animals, and—most devastatingly—their diseases. Scholars debate indigenous population figures prior to contact with Europeans, and determining aggregate population figures at any period prior to formal census taking poses great difficulties. But scholars do know that, by the mid-eighteenth century, many indigenous peoples had already experienced demographic collapse as a consequence of disease and war. European travel writings, missionary reports, oral traditions, and winter counts all tell of the devastation wrought by “Old World” diseases, especially smallpox, cholera, and typhoid. Wherever they occurred, these “virgin soil epidemics” fundamentally altered indigenous communities by striking down the old and young first, decreasing fertility, wreaking havoc on traditional systems of governance, and interfering with the transmission of sacred knowledge. The very connectedness of the trans-Mississippi West, with its commercial centers and intersecting trade routes, facilitated the transmission of disease, as with the smallpox epidemic of the late eighteenth century. The demography of Native North America in the mid-eighteenth century, then, must not be thought of merely in terms of northward- or westwardmoving frontiers that clearly separated indigenous and nonindigenous peoples. Rather, refugee communities in the Ohio River Valley brought together members of many different peoples who creatively remade themselves into new peoples. Through a process known as “ethnogenesis,” for instance, the Delawares had become a far more centralized and corporate people after being pushed into eastern Pennsylvania and westward into present-day Ohio. The Hurons, once located north of Lake Ontario, experienced diaspora in the wake of Iroquois expansion and reconstituted themselves as the Wendat or Wyandot people of the southern Great Lakes region. The Iroquois, on the other hand, had adopted so many individuals from other tribes via their “mourning wars,” that many of their communities had a majority population of non-Iroquois people in them. On the Plains, the Lakotas, Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Crows, and Comanches developed equestrian buffalo-hunting cultures, replete with new vocabularies, rituals, songs, and gender roles that reflected the centrality of horses and bison. This, in turn, sparked ecological changes that would remake the landscape. Moreover, it set Plains people on a course of becoming increasingly dependent on a single source—the bison—for their sustenance. While this enabled equestrian peoples’ quick rise to dominance, ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW Inhabitants of Northwest America. Native Americans from the Pacific Northwest, depicted circa 1829 by Karl Joseph Brodtmann. © HISTORICAL PICTURE ARCHIVE/CORBIS. it would also serve as their Achilles heel when nonIndian settlement pushed westward in the late nineteenth century. Along the Upper Missouri, Mandans, Arikaras, and Hidatsas developed a major center for trade that bound the region to a vast network of peoples across the continent. Meanwhile, intermarriage between European traders and Indians contributed to mixed-blood communities, such as the FrenchIndian Metís. In the Southwest, Utes and Apaches followed a pattern not dissimilar to that found on the Plains. They developed an equestrian culture predicated in part on raiding neighboring Indian and Spanish settlements. Meanwhile, the Navajos and Pueblos cultivated more sedentary ways of life organized around a combination of livestock herding, cultivation of corn, and trade. Historian James Brooks has shown that a system of captivity and exchange bound together these peoples, as well as Comanches and Spaniards, into a tightly knit regional economy. Like the Northeast and the Ohio River Valley, then, the Southwest borderlands contained ethnically diverse and constantly changing indigenous and nonindigenous communities. NATION AMERICAN 67
Slide 97: AMERICAN INDIANS The introduction of Christianity carried demographic consequences, as well. “Praying towns” populated by converts to Christianity could be found across the Northeast. Some, like the Wampanoag community on Martha’s Vineyard, dated back to the seventeenth century. Elsewhere, such as in the Ohio River Valley, times of war made it dangerous to live in Christian settlements. These peoples were often looked upon with suspicion; their communities became targets of colonists and Indians alike. Such tensions could lead to disaster, as was the case with the massacre of converts living in Gnaddenhutten, a Moravian town in present-day Ohio, during the American Revolution (1775–1783). In the Southwest and along the coast of California, the Franciscan mission system continued to expand. But as with the Wampanoags at Martha’s Vineyard, the Yokuts, Pomo, Miwok, Wappo and other diverse peoples who joined missions in places like Alta California did so for reasons that were very much their own. And when Spaniards overstepped the boundaries native peoples had set, they resisted as in the case of the 1824 Chumash uprising. By the nineteenth century individual American Indians had also become part of European and American societies—as interpreters, traders, soldiers, scouts, husbands, wives, adopted children, ministers, and laborers. On the island of Nantucket, just off the coast of Cape Cod, Indian people adapted to the market economy by engaging in whaling. In the case of the Potawatomis and Miamis in the southern Great Lakes region, survival increasingly meant “hiding in plain view” by establishing farms, dressing in Western fashion, and intermarrying with non-Indians. Along the coast from Rhode Island to Georgia, peoples such as the Narragansetts, Catawbas, Cherokees, Chickahominies, and Monacans struggled to retain their identities as Indians, even as whites attempted to impose upon them racial classifications such as “Colored” and “Negro.” Even as white Americans consigned native peoples living east of the Mississippi to the past, indigenous communities found ways to survive. Indeed, creative adaptation and change became hallmarks of Indian identity across Native North America. ferent approaches in their relations with indigenous peoples. Although all of these nations engaged in empire building, the day-to-day realities of diplomacy and exchange revealed that power more often rested in native communities through most of the eighteenth century. This is evidenced by the use of treaties to forge alliances, resolve disputes, and convey land. Treaties signified the respect the colonizers had for Indian claims to sovereignty, for even as they sought to conquer a land they portrayed as being inhabited by savages, they cemented nation-to-nation agreements that were consistent with those forged in the international arena. Treaties served multiple functions for indigenous people—they conveyed stories, signified sacred bonds, and established connections that were to be mutually beneficial to all parties involved. Unfortunately, Europeans often viewed treaties primarily as expedients and looked hopefully to a time when domination would replace diplomacy. More than any other colonial power, the French came to understand the need to maintain appropriate relationships as Indian communities defined them— relationships predicated on the principle of reciprocity, the language of kinship, and the practice of ritualized gift giving. Because their claim to empire rested primarily on commerce, it also depended on the good graces of the tribes with whom they traded. But even the British, whose contempt for tribal sovereignty grew through the course of the eighteenth century, understood the import of proper treaty relationships. The Covenant Chain with the Iroquois Confederacy best symbolized this recognition. Also known as the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy represented an alliance that allowed the Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas, Mohawks, and Tuscaroras to dominate trade throughout the Northeast. This, as well as the formidable military power it wielded, impelled the British to renew the Covenant Chain ritually and symbolically, even as they sought to exploit it for their own purposes. During the Seven Years’ War (1754–1763), both the British and French relied on their Indian allies to establish dominance in the Upper Ohio Country, an area bounded by Lake Erie to the north, the Ohio River to the south, the Maumee and Miami Rivers to the west, and the Appalachian Mountains to the east. The inverse was true as well, as diverse Indian peoples attempted to play off European powers so as to preserve their homelands, hunting grounds, and political autonomy. The most intense conflict occurred in the Upper Ohio Country, where refugee communities made up of Delawares, Shawnees, Miamis, OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION INDIAN-WHITE RELATIONS Out of their shared encounters with Europeans— physical, material, economic, political, ideational, religious, and epidemiological—Indians emerged with a vast array of distinct experiences. Since the initial contact period of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Spain, France, and Great Britain had adopted dif- 68 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 98: AMERICAN INDIANS Ojibwas, and other tribes sought to fend off the intrusion of British colonists and the Iroquois Confederacy by aligning themselves more closely with the French. WARS, ALLIANCES, AND CHANGING RELATIONS In the wake of French defeat in 1763, a nativistic spiritual revitalization movement erupted across the Upper Ohio Country. The conflict known as Pontiac’s Rebellion or Pontiac’s War can be traced to many contributing factors, but its particular significance was a clear shift in Indian-white relations. As their military power diminished and economic dependency grew, indigenous peoples were no longer treated in accordance with what they considered to be their proper status. No less than the pan-Indian movement that would follow in the second decade of the nineteenth century, this struggle sought to reestablish Indian control over the rate and nature of change in tribal communities. By invoking sacred power, rejecting many of the outward manifestations of Anglo-American culture, and freeing themselves from economic dependency, Indians endeavored to restore balance to their worlds. This came at a time when the British signaled their desire to replace reciprocity with dominance, kinship with subordination. The Seven Years’ War carried important implications for Indian-white relations in the Southwest as well. Through the 1760s the Spanish staked a claim to and held nominal control over the region they named New Mexico. However, the Comanches held sway in the surrounding area and used their own tenuous alliance with the French to establish peaceful relations on terms of their own making. Known as the “lords of the southern plains,” the Comanches possessed vast numbers of horses and drew their strength from the enormous herds of buffalo in the area and their access to larger trade networks. When France transferred the Louisiana Territory to Spain in 1762, however, the Comanches lost a critical countervailing force. This, combined with the increasing movement of other Indian peoples onto the plains, complicated trade relations, made access to goods and firearms more difficult, and forced Comanches to turn to the British as commercial partners. Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, conditions worsened for tribes living east of the Mississippi River. The American Revolutionary War meant many things to many different peoples—from opportunities to renew the system of playing powers off against each other to the impetus ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW for civil war—but it ultimately brought with it a diminution of tribal autonomy, the loss of land and life, the destruction of crops and villages, and the dislocation of peoples from their homelands. As had happened in the wake of the Seven Years’ War, American Indians were not given a place at the table during the negotiations that brought the Revolutionary War to an end. In war’s aftermath, the United States followed British precedent by establishing boundaries to separate Indian from non-Indian lands and passing legislation to regulate trade. The use of treaties to secure land cessions and establish peace became the cornerstone of the new nation’s policy that contemporaries called “expansion with honor.” Best captured in the text of the Northwest Ordinance (1787), a document that attempted to lay the foundation for future American expansion into the Ohio Country and beyond, expansion with honor meant that the federal government pledged itself to the continuation of treaty making with “the utmost good faith” and supported the “civilization” of Indian people by sending missionaries and federal agents specializing in animal husbandry and agriculture into their communities. Congress further passed the Indian Trade and Intercourse Act in 1790, establishing systems for licensing traders operating in Indian country, purchasing Indian lands, and taking over the Indian trade. Contradictions riddled Indian-white relations. In the Northwest Ordinance, the federal government simultaneously laid claim to the right to wage just wars—as it defined them. Like their British and Spanish forebears, they had no intention of forfeiting what they considered to be their right—by discovery, conquest, or otherwise—to Indian land. If they met resistance they deemed unwarranted, Americans similarly found it easy to rationalize war. On more than one occasion during the 1790s, this was precisely what happened in the Upper Ohio Country. After delivering several decisive defeats and suffering one of their own, representatives from the Miamis, Potawatomis, Ottawas, Kickapoos, Shawnees, and other tribes signed the Treaty of Greenville. This event not only failed to end conflict in the region, it also underscored the extent to which the treatymaking process had altered traditional systems of governance. The advent of treaty or annuity chiefs— individuals who gained their authority primarily by virtue of having control over American largesse— ultimately caused strife in Indian communities. Still other contradictions complicated the notion of expansion with honor. First, neither words nor lines could stanch the flow of westward-moving setNATION AMERICAN 69
Slide 99: AMERICAN INDIANS tlers. By the time of the War of 1812, the onrush of non-Indians into the Ohio Country and throughout the Southeast set the stage for bloody warfare. Second, the factory system established by the federal government served a purpose greater than regulating trade between the United States and Indian nations. President Thomas Jefferson (1801–1809) indicated his hope that trade would cultivate dependency among Indian people and that dependency would lead to United States control over them. Finally, the so-called civilization program championed by federal policymakers during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries failed to destroy tribal cultures or transform Indians into yeoman farmers. Rather than clearing the way for non-Indian settlement, the presence of missionaries and federal agents sowed the seeds of anomie and discontent. The roles of men and women played a critical part in Indian-white relations from the moment of initial contact with Europeans, and the import of gender did not diminish during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Across cultures, Indian women served as intermediaries, particularly in the realm of trade and commerce; they were integral to the process of forging fictive and literal kinship ties between their communities and outsiders. Historian Susan Sleeper-Smith has revealed a fascinating fur trade network that reached across the southern Great Lakes, from Cahokia, Detroit, and Green Bay to Michilmackinac, Ouintnanon, and St. Joseph. An extensive Catholic kin network that bound multiple families together through godparenthood made this possible. If the creative adaptations to kinship ties enabled native trade networks to thrive, the disruption of these kinship ties, and the reciprocal obligations they implied, also figured significantly in conflicts between Indians and outsiders. The United States civilization program, for instance, could do violence to native peoples’ own conceptions of appropriate gender roles for both men and women. Among the Cherokees, for instance, the process of becoming “civilized” actually marginalized women economically, politically, and socially. Patriarchy and patrilineal descent competed with the clan-based matriarchal and matrilineal system of governance. And, as the market economy prevented Cherokee males from attaining prestige through traditional means, they often turned to things such as horse stealing. This, in turn, further complicated the already difficult relationships between Indians and non-Indian settlers. And finally, early-nineteenth-century prophets of nativistic revival such as Neolin (Delaware), Tens- kwatawa (Shawnee), and the Trout (Ottawa) warned that the disruption of traditional gender divisions of labor—in which women cultivated crops and men served as hunters and traders—carried profound spiritual consequences. Indeed, they tied the Christian effort to move women into the home and men into the fields to a loss of sacred power. With that said, neither the fur trade nor the United States government’s civilization program should be thought of as solely deleterious to women or destructive to native societies. Among the Ojibways in the Western Great Lakes, women carved out their own niche in the fur trade predicated on traditional responsibilities for producing maple syrup and cultivating rice well into the nineteenth century. And among the Cherokees, the authority of clans and the power of women continued to be influential. To be sure, the governing elite in Southeastern tribes such as the Cherokees embraced Christianity and EuroAmerican culture. By the 1820s, the Cherokees had forged a constitutional form of government, developed a syllabary that allowed their language to be written, established a national newspaper entitled The Cherokee Phoenix enjoyed a literacy rate higher than that of surrounding non-Indians, and actively engaged in the southern plantation economy. Cherokees used all of these to fashion themselves not only as a “civilized tribe,” but also as a nation with a claim to sovereignty equal to that of the United States. No less important, as historian Theda Perdue has demonstrated, elite members of the Cherokee Nation— like the majority of Cherokee people—continued to recognize the traditional authority of clans and matrilineal descent. At times, this proved to be the case even when that meant that Cherokee National Council and Supreme Court might refuse to enforce its own laws. By the inauguration of Andrew Jackson in 1829, the balance of power had shifted decisively toward the United States—at least east of the Mississippi. A culture of Indian hating, a hunger for land, and a growing sense of both states’ rights and nationalism brought increasing pressure for the removal of the remaining tribes. Historian Daniel Richter did not overstate the situation when he likened the resulting policy to one of ethnic cleansing. The roots of removal extended at least to the late eighteenth century and gained momentum with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and the Lewis and Clark expedition (1804– 1806). American Indians east of the Mississippi would mount spirited defenses of their homelands during the 1830s and 1840s, but for most of them the effort ended in the forced relocation of their peoOF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 70 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 100: AMERICAN INDIANS ple to western lands. Like their relatives who made long journeys to remake their homelands in places they had never seen, those who stayed behind found ways to survive. This survival would come at considerable cost. See also British Empire and the Atlantic World; Expansion; French; French and Indian War, Consequences of; Jackson, Andrew; Jefferson, Thomas; Northwest and Southwest Ordinances; Pontiac’s War; Spain; War of 1812. BIBLIOGRAPHY Sturtevant, William C., ed. Handbook of North American Indians. 12 volumes. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978–2001. Thornton, Russell. American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Williams, Robert A., Jr. Linking Arms Together: American Indian Treaty Visions of Law and Peace, 1600–1800. New York: Routledge, 1999. Brooks, James F. Captives & Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Calloway, Colin G. One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Cayton, Andrew R. L., and Fredrika J. Teute, eds. Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Dowd, Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. ———. War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Fenn, Elizabeth. Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001. Gutiérrez, Ramón A. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991. Jones, David S. Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. Mancall, Peter C., and James H. Merrell, eds. American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal, 1500–1850. New York: Routledge, 2000. Merrell, James H. The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1989. Perdue, Theda. Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Prucha, Francis Paul. The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians. Vol. 1. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. Richter, Daniel K. Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. Sleeper-Smith, Susan. Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. Daniel M. Cobb Northern New England Two distinct Wabanaki (or Abenaki; “people of the dawnland”) groups lived in northern New England. Western Wabanakis, including the Penacooks, Sokokis, and Missisquois, lived along the Upper Merrimac and Connecticut Rivers and Lake Champlain watersheds. Eastern Wabanakis lived near the coast; they consisted of interrelated tribes usually identified by the rivers along which they lived, particularly the Sacos (also Pigwackets), Kennebecs (or Norridgewocks), and Penobscots. Further northeast lived the related Maliseet-Passamaquoddies and Mi’kmaqs. The Wabanakis’ economies were primarily based on seasonal rounds of fishing, hunting, and gathering, and settlements were small and temporary; people lived in small kinship bands. They quickly became involved in the fur trade, which resulted in larger, semi-permanent villages along rivers and near trading posts. Beginning in late 1675, war with English colonists frequently flared, largely because Massachusetts sought to establish settlements and imperial conflict between France and England intensified, with Wabanakis responding by developing closer connections to the French. They abandoned vulnerable villages when threatened and moved to the Bécancour and Odanak-St. Francis mission towns near Montreal and Quebec. While some went back when peace returned, others remained, creating permanent kinship ties spanning the region. By 1760 only a few villages remained along with families and seasonal camps scattered throughout the region. Western Wabanakis remained centered at St. Francis, although they never surrendered their claims to ancestral homelands and village sites, and members often traveled to those areas to visit, fish, hunt, and sell crafts. Most Eastern Wabanakis lived NATION ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN 71
Slide 101: AMERICAN INDIANS in settlements along the St. John’s River, Passamaquoddy Bay, and the Penobscot River. The Penobscots, with about eight hundred people, served as the “representatives” for most of the remaining Wabanakis between Quebec and the coast; all were also part of an emerging Algonquian Confederacy that met at Kahnawake near Montreal. The expansion of English settlements kept tensions high, and the occasional murder of Indians triggered alarms of war. But the Penobscots were able to make a place for themselves and sought a protected reservation. In the summer of 1775 as the Revolution erupted, Penobscot chiefs obtained, from the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, a trading post and protection for their lands against encroachment in exchange for their support for the colonial cause. One year later, two Maliseet chiefs signed a similar agreement, supposedly on behalf of the Mi’kmaqs as well, although these tribes were divided over the war and some signed a nonaggression treaty with the English. By the end of the war, between forty and fifty men from the three tribes and the Passamaquoddies served with U.S. forces. After the war Massachusetts manipulated ambiguities in the agreement and by 1790 had taken everything but two islands along the coast and the islands in the river northward from the main Penobscot village at Old Town. Maliseets at Passamaquoddy Bay also received a reservation, and groups of Mi’kmaqs obtained similar protection from Canada. In the new Republic, Wabanakis continued their subsistence rounds of hunting and fishing, living in wigwams and wood huts and occasionally traveling and camping in family bands. In 1822 Jedidiah Morse found about 300 Mi’kmaqs, 379 Passamaquoddies, and 277 Penobscots; this count missed Wabanakis traveling or living outside the reserves. The three tribes retained deep connections through the Wabanaki confederation, and members attended each other’s celebrations, including the installation of a new sachem. Each tribe also retained considerable political and cultural autonomy: they elected their sachems; combined Catholicism and belief in traditional spirit beings; lived in wigwams; and spurned state schools. The men continued to trap and sell furs; they also worked for farmers and lumbermen, while women and families peddled baskets. This ancillary income became more important as Anglo-Americans settled and “developed” the region, destroying or taking fishing and hunting habitat. The changes in the environment and white racism demoralized natives, which only increased the rising problem of alcohol addiction. After 1830 the Penobscots would face more tribulations as the booming lumber industry destroyed hillsides and rivers, and tribal conflicts intensified as the older sachems sold timber and more land. But they and the other two Wabanaki communities survived, and in the early twenty-first century remain semi-sovereign tribes. See also Diplomatic and Military Relations, American Indian. BIBLIOGRAPHY Day, Gordon M. In Search of New England’s Native Past: Selected Essays. Edited by Michael K. Foster and William Cowan. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. McBride, Bunny. Women of the Dawn. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Prins, Harald. The Mi’kmaq: Resistance, Accommodation, and Cultural Survival. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996. Daniel R. Mandell Southern New England By 1760 the approximately five thousand Indians in southern New England lived in two fairly distinct worlds. Near the New York border, MahicanHousatonics resided in relatively autonomous villages, growing crops, hunting, trading furs, and occasionally working and fighting for the English. The largest was the mission town of Stockbridge in Massachusetts, established in the 1730s; to the south in Connecticut lay Scatacook near Kent and a series of smaller settlements. Those to the east of the Connecticut River had deeper connections with AngloAmerican culture and institutions and lived either as part of a tribe on a reservation, where they retained a distinctive community and culture, or in a town as an isolated household, a servant with a white family, or a sailor or laborer. There were about twenty-five reservations, primarily along the coast, most ranging from 100 to 4,000 acres, with anywhere from a few families to about 350 people. The largest were Mashpee and Gay Head in Massachusetts, Mohegan in Connecticut, and Narragansett in Rhode Island. ACCULTURATION AND AUTONOMY Within these communities, sachems were increasingly rejected as they sold too much land to colonists and became autocratic. Indian ministers were already leaders in Massachusetts before the first Great Awakening of the 1740s, and became very influential in the rest of the region when their people embraced Christianity during the Awakening; particularly prominent were Samson Occom, a Mohegan, and OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 72 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 102: AMERICAN INDIANS Samuel Niles, a Narragansett. One result was the conflict between “traditionals” and followers of the new Indian Christian preachers, which often paralleled older conflicts between sachems and their opponents. In addition, provincial governments appointed Anglo-American guardians who controlled tribal lands, resources, accounts, indentures, and labor contracts. While some groups asked for such assistance against trespassers and abuse, guardians were also challenged, particularly by Mashpees, who battled until they won autonomy in 1834. After the Revolution, elected tribal councils became prominent, particularly at Narragansett. Indians throughout the region gradually adopted Anglo-American farming techniques, cattleraising, and material culture. However, older customs of communal resource management and hunting and gathering persisted, and subsistence rather than profit remained their goal; this was particularly true in the western part of the region. All felt increased pressure from white neighbors, who poached wood and fish or tried to obtain Indian land. A growing number left their ancestral homes to work for Anglo-Americans: most of the men went whaling, while women worked as domestics in white households. Women also found a growing demand for their crafts, and by 1800 Indian basket peddlers became part of New England folklore. Less romantic but also significant was that Indian children and adults continued to be pressed into servitude. A Rhode Island census in 1774 showed at least 35 percent of all Indians in the colony living in white households. Communities also changed as natives abandoned small settlements for larger ones, such as Mashpee and Scatacook, driven by the rising population and number of colonial towns and attracted by churches that drew people from many communities. The most significant movement began in 1773, when Samson Occom and other native leaders in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and eastern Long Island joined to create a secure homeland in Oneida territory. After the war, over two hundred moved there to create Brothertown, nearly emptying some communities. Similarly, after the Revolution the Stockbridge Indians reacted to their growing problems by obtaining land from the Oneidas for a new settlement. Even after both communities were forced further west in the 1810s, finally settling in Wisconsin, the Brothertown residents maintained contact with their Mohegan and Narragansett cousins, and individuals occasionally returned to their ancestral communities or left for Brothertown. ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW Indians continued to have problems with disease; most notably, in 1763 yellow fever nearly wiped out Natives on Nantucket. Men left to fight in the colonial wars or work in the growing whaling industry; by 1765, the women outnumbered men 2 to 1, and a growing number married African Americans and poor whites. This trend was apparent in the smaller inland enclaves by 1750, but was significant throughout the region at the end of the century. By 1830 the number of identifiable Indians had declined to about fifteen hundred. REACHING A NADIR Those left faced many tribulations, and the early Republic may have been the nadir of Indian life in the region. Whaling pulled most men out of the villages, leaving the women and children vulnerable, and many sailors preferred to find better homes elsewhere or died at sea. Women and some men continued to work in Boston and other port towns, and many decided to stay, often marrying blacks and creating kinship networks through and alongside the African American community. Servitude continued, particularly affecting children; those in smaller enclaves whose parents were considered poor or disorderly were often indentured to white families for many years. Alcohol addiction became a major epidemic throughout America, although the resulting poverty, violence, and neglect seemed far worse among Indians; towns frequently reported Indian men or women dying alone, often of cold or injuries. White racism seemed to intensify as the rate of exogamous marriages increased, and observers began to view Indians as a disappearing race. Those who remained on tribal reserves faced growing economic and social problems as neighboring whites poached timber and fish and trespassed on their pasture and fields. Meanwhile, guardians abused their powers and unstable families and lack of financial support battered schools and other institutions. While reform movements after 1820 led to improved social and economic conditions by midcentury, Indians continued to face poverty and prejudice. Ann Wampy, a Pequot basket maker and peddler, complained in the late 1820s that “by me come trouble very much, me very much troubled. Me no like Christians, me hate ’em, hate everybody” (O’Connell, p. 152). At the same time, Indian communities were braced by folk traditions, communal management of land and resources, and kinship and social connections that linked many groups. In 1820 Jedidiah Morse surveyed the larger groups as part of his Report to the Secretary of War of the United States NATION AMERICAN 73
Slide 103: AMERICAN INDIANS on Indian Affairs (1822), commissioned in part to examine the question of removal, and concluded that they would not be willing to leave. And indeed, most of the groups remaining in 1830 still exist at the start of the twenty-first century. See also Diplomatic and Military Relations, American Indian. BIBLIOGRAPHY Calloway, Colin G., ed. After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England. Hanover, N.H..: University Press of New England, 1997. Frazier, Patrick. The Mohicans of Stockbridge. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Mandell, Daniel R. “Shifting Boundaries of Race and Ethnicity: Indian-Black Intermarriage in Southern New England, 1760–1880.” Journal of American History 85 (1998): 466–501. O’Connell, Barry, ed. On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Simmons, William S. Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620–1984. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1986. 1763). Since the French were fewer in number than the British and their colonial effort was predicated upon engaging Indians in trade rather than settling on their land, they were able to win greater native support during the war. The Indians proved crucial allies, without whom the French would have been unable to defend their North American empire. French-allied Indians, including Shawnees, Senecas, and some Delawares, devastated the frontiers of British America and even struck as close to the coast as New Jersey. However, their prowess was not sufficient to overcome British superiority in numbers or power, and Great Britain was eventually able to turn the tide. Mohawks and New Jersey–based Delawares, both keenly aware of the power of the British, were among the native groups who assisted them. The British victory created a serious problem for native peoples in the region, since with the French threat removed, there were few reasons left for the British to court them. The flow of goods into Indian country diminished accordingly. The brutality of the war and the preponderance of Indians on one side also contributed to heightened consciousness of racial difference on the part of both white settlers and Indians. Whites proved increasingly willing to attack Native Americans regardless of whether they were friendly or hostile. The most dramatic example was the killing of fourteen friendly Conestogas under government protection by an angry mob at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in December 1763. Indians’ own heightened sense of racial solidarity permitted them to downplay tribal divisions and act with unprecedented coordination in surprising the British in 1763. Inspired in part by Neolin, a Delaware prophet who repudiated European ways, an alliance composed primarily of Indians from the Ohio Valley and Upper Great Lakes launched a series of attacks on forts and settlements across the frontier, including many in western Pennsylvania. Although the Indians were defeated in this conflict, known as Pontiac’s War (May–November 1763), a partial resumption of British trade and tribute followed. Daniel R. Mandell Middle Atlantic In 1830 residents of the mid-Atlantic region, led by New Jersey senator Theodore Frelinghuysen, protested loudly against President Andrew Jackson’s program to remove Native Americans from the South. There was some irony in this, since the events of the previous seventy-five years had done much to relegate the native population of the mid-Atlantic to small reservations surrounded by white settlers or impel them to emigrate to the West or Canada. In 1754 western and central New York (the Iroquois heartland) and central and western Pennsylvania were still under native control. The Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy held the balance of power between Great Britain and France, and they manipulated it to their own benefit vis-à-vis both European empires and other native groups. The Iroquois had settled Delawares and other groups fleeing conflict or loss of land on their vulnerable southern flank, in Pennsylvania and southern New York. Although these communities retained considerable autonomy, the Iroquois supervised their formal relations with colonial authorities. SEVEN YEARS’ WAR THE PROCLAMATION LINE Native power and territorial control eroded significantly as a result of the Seven Years’ War (1756– After the Seven Years’ War, the British government hoped to limit tensions between Indians and whites and thereby avoid further military expenditures. The centerpiece of its policy was the Proclamation Line (1763) that limited settlement to the area east of the Appalachian crest until the crown negotiated cessions from the Indians. However, because the Proclamation Line was perceived as restraining economic OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 74 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 104: AMERICAN INDIANS opportunities for the rural colonists (not to mention wealthy urban land speculators), it contributed to their alienation from Great Britain. The line was promptly pushed westward in 1768 by Superintendent of Indian Affairs Sir William Johnson and the Six Nations at the Treaty of Fort Stanwix. The Six Nations ceded much of the Mohawk homeland, some Oneida territory, and Seneca hunting territories. In general, however, the cession allowed the Iroquois to preserve the majority of their homeland at the expense of the Delawares, Shawnees, and others in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky. THE REVOLUTION veyed a large parcel to private speculators in 1788. The fact that these cessions involved individual nations of the Iroquois Confederacy reflected the weakening of that entity. Wartime division and powerlessness in the face of settler encroachment led many Iroquois to emigrate to Canada and Ohio. A parallel Iroquois confederacy emerged in Upper Canada. In 1794, the U.S. government and Six Nations signed the Treaty of Canandaigua. This treaty returned some lands ceded in 1784 in exchange for the Seneca relinquishment of their claim to Presqu’Isle in Pennsylvania. The treaty provided the Six Nations with annuities and technical assistance to help them adjust to European-style plough agriculture. Although the Canandaigua treaty also guaranteed that reserved lands would not be alienated except at treaties held under federal authority, it did not put an end to Indian land loss. In the Treaty of Big Tree in 1797, the Senecas traded millions of acres for $100,000 and reservations totalling 200,000 acres. Pressure to shrink even these reservations continued, abating during the War of 1812 (in which most of the region’s Indians remained neutral or supported the United States) and resuming when canals raised land values across the state. If the concessions at Fort Stanwix suggest the difficult position in which Native Americans found themselves, the Revolution (1775–1783) restored their leverage. As with the Seven Years’ War, diplomacy and interest led most Indians to align themselves with the side that was more likely to limit settler expansion. Four of the six Iroquois nations supported the British. U.S. actions such as the campaign of General John Sullivan in 1779, which burned nearly every village in western Iroquoia, and the murder in 1782 of over ninety unarmed Christian Indians (mostly Delawares) at Gnadenhutten, in the future state of Ohio, only made Indian support of the British more lopsided. Iroquois raids were so successful that the frontier of white settlement in upstate New York was rolled back to Schenectady, only sixteen miles from Albany and the Hudson River. The Oneidas were the only native nation from the region to provide the United States substantial support for the duration of the war. Despite the military contributions made by its native allies, Great Britain failed to make any provisions for them in the Treaty of Paris (1783). This permitted the United States to proclaim the Indians to be conquered peoples. At a gathering convened in the autumn of 1784 to settle affairs between the United States and the Six Nations, delegates of the latter were forced to sign away their claims to Pennsylvania and Ohio lands in the second Treaty of Fort Stanwix. DECLINE OF THE IROQUOIS EMIGRATION, RESERVATIONS, AND SURVIVAL Reservation life demanded great adjustments on the part of Native Americans. It was particularly disorienting for men, whose traditional hunting and warring activities were sharply curtailed. This challenge was met spiritually by prophets, of which the most renowned was a Seneca named Handsome Lake (c. 1735–1815). He experienced a series of visions that served as the basis of a new theology. He preached against alcohol, witchcraft, and neglect of ceremony. Although Handsome Lake’s endorsement of male plough agriculture and the nuclear family helped men adapt to their new context, it undercut traditional sources of women’s authority such as the extended family. As white settlement spread to every corner of the region, the adaptations of Indians newly limited to reservations resembled those of native groups living further east who had faced similar pressures earlier. Some attempted to lease tribal lands to whites. Some also took up small-scale farming or became laborers, usually domestics or farm hands (although whaling remained a popular choice for Native American men on Long Island). Some manufactured and peddled brooms and baskets. Others decided not to stay and moved west or to Canada. The Ogden Land Company, which held the NATION Eager to defend its claim to Iroquois lands against a rival assertion by Massachusetts, New York began treating directly with the Iroquois beginning in the 1780s. By 1790, New York signed treaties with the Oneidas (1785 and 1788), Onondagas (1788), and Cayugas (1790) that transferred millions of acres of Iroquois land to New York State. The Senecas conENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN 75
Slide 105: AMERICAN INDIANS preemption rights to most of the Indian reservations of upstate New York, provided financial and political support for Indian emigration. About 150 Oneidas had already emigrated to the vicinity of Green Bay, Wisconsin, before 1830, and more would follow. Nevertheless, about 4,000 Iroquois remained in New York State at the end of the 1820s. Also remaining were scattered tribes such as the Montauks on Long Island whose population numbered in the dozens or fewer. In addition, Native Americans continued to live in the region as families or individuals, and many intermingled with African Americans and others. Of these, some maintained an Indian identity, at least privately, while others did not. By 1829, Indians of the mid-Atlantic had lost the vast majority of their lands. While well over half the native population departed, others adapted to life in the midst of white settlement. Although further erosion of their land base would ensue, the adaptations made during this early period formed the basis for Native American persistence in the region into the twenty-first century. See also French and Indian War, Battles and Diplomacy; French and Indian War, Consequences of; Iroquois Confederacy; Pontiac’s War; Proclamation of 1763. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Karim M. Tiro Southeast American Indian societies in the southeastern quadrant of North America experienced dramatic change in the period from 1754 to 1829, as they had in the years before. At the beginning of the era, they were still attempting to adjust to the consequences wrought by the European exploration and settlement of the region. The most significant factor in the transformation of the Native American Southeast had been the decimation of the population by diseases brought to the New World by Europeans. Demographers generally agree that the Native American population declined by at least 90 percent after 1500. This depopulation wreaked havoc on the social and political structure of the Southeast. Dozens of tribes and polities, including the great Mississippian chiefdoms dominating the Southeast before 1500, had fallen into ruin and disappeared. In most cases, only remnants survived to integrate into sustainable societies. By the middle of the eighteenth century, only a few prominent tribes—the Cherokees, the Choctaws, the Chickasaws, the Creeks, and the Catawbas—and a few smaller groups had emerged from the process of decimation and amalgamation. Even the largest, the Cherokees, probably numbered no more than twenty thousand individuals at the middle of the eighteenth century. TRADITIONAL CULTURE BIBLIOGRAPHY Benn, Carl. The Iroquois in the War of 1812. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Dowd, Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance: The Struggle for Native American Unity, 1745–1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. ———. War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Graymont, Barbara. The Iroquois in the American Revolution. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1972. Hauptman, Laurence M. Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New York State. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1999. Tanner, Helen Hornbeck. Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Trigger, Bruce G., ed. Handbook of North American Indians, volume 15: Northeast. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978. Wallace, Anthony F. C. The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca. New York: Knopf, 1970. Weslager, C. A. The Delaware Indians, A History. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1972. ———. The Delaware Westward Migration. Wallingford, Pa.: Middle Atlantic Press, 1978. Although the spiritual beliefs and customary practices of these societies varied in detail, they all shared some fundamental characteristics. They located their villages along waterways, practiced riverine agriculture, and supplemented their diet by hunting, fishing, and gathering. They divided their communities into clans and moieties, determined kinship relations through the matrilineal system, and organized their towns in a matrilocal fashion. Gender roles were divided to provide the sense of balance required by the southeastern cosmology and social ethic. Women were responsible for the vegetable diet and performed most of the agricultural work; men provided meat and therefore spent much of their energy in hunting. Women also fulfilled domestic responsibilities, while men engaged in war and games. Southeastern communities were autonomous: each town or village was responsible for its own poOF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 76 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 106: AMERICAN INDIANS litical affairs and held its own social and spiritual events. Town councils were divided into civil (white) and military (red) spheres. Civil decisions were reached by consensus after a period of discussion in which all adults had a right to speak. Older members of the community held influence, as did men and women who had distinguished themselves with their military exploits, administrative ability, or wisdom. A red council, which was composed of the warriors of the community, took control of the town when the civil council of the whole determined to go to war. The chiefs, military and civil, did not possess coercive authority over their people; they essentially led their people where the latter wanted to go. Over time, loose confederations of peoples and towns had developed for purposes of security and trade; these ties continued to solidify into national institutions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. population and deranged the ritual relationship that traditionally existed between hunter and prey. THE IMPERIAL WARS CULTURAL CHANGE New economic relations with settlers of European ancestry had already transformed southeastern Indian subsistence and social patterns. Although the native peoples were already quite experienced in dealing with the multicultural world of disparate tribes, the English, Scots-Irish, French, and Spanish colonists who intruded into their territories brought with them new languages, cultural practices, and material goods. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Indians of the Southeast had adopted many of the items offered by colonial merchants, including firearms and gunpowder, metal tools and implements, cotton, wool, and glass. Southeastern men hunted deer, bear, and other mammals and offered up the skins to pay off the debts they had accrued from the purchase of trade goods. The trade goods made much of day-to-day life easier and more productive. At the same time, however, by the middle of the eighteenth century all of the southeastern societies had fallen into a state of dependency upon the European suppliers. Native Americans came to rely on the new technology over the old ways of doing things, and at times the colonies were able to force the tribes to accede to their wishes by threatening to withhold trade goods. Colonial settlers continued to intrude westward into tribal territories; and when Indian consumers accumulated large debts to merchants, colonial authorities sometimes forced their councils to surrender land to retire the balances. Overhunting, which resulted from the need to pay trade debts and purchase more goods (including alcohol, which became a social problem in many communities), depleted the deer ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW Despite these challenges, the southeastern tribes demonstrated an extraordinary ability to survive, adjust, and adapt as Britain, France, Spain, and later the United States vied for control of North America. The geopolitical rivalries enabled the southeastern Indians to play the imperial powers, and the colonies, off against one another for their own political and economic interests. The Choctaws and Creeks, for example, played the French, Spanish, and English against one another to obtain gifts and better trade goods at cheaper prices. In the 1780s the Creeks, under Alexander McGillivray’s leadership, forced the United States and Spain to compete for their trade, friendship, and military support. At the same time, southeastern communities were often divided by sympathies to different European powers. During the French and Indian War (1754–1760), both British and French authorities tried to recruit southeastern warriors to their side, which exacerbated existing factional strife. Some contingents of Creeks, Choctaws, and Cherokees fought with the French; other warriors among them allied with or offered aid to the British. In 1758 hostilities broke out between the Cherokees and English settlers in western Virginia. On three occasions in 1760–1761 British armies, supported by colonial militia and Chickasaw and Catawba warriors, invaded the Cherokee Nation and burned its towns and crops. Perhaps as many as 50 percent of the Cherokees perished from war, disease, and starvation during the conflict; in its terms of peace, the British required the Cherokees to surrender a large portion of its eastern territory. The Treaty of Paris (1763) that ended the war required France to surrender its territory east of the Mississippi River. Although King George III attempted to pin the colonies east of the Appalachians with the Proclamation of 1763, it was impossible to keep white squatters and speculators out of Indian country. Settler intrusions continued to exasperate the southeastern tribes until they were forced to relocate beyond the Mississippi in the 1830s; neither the British nor the U.S. governments could stem the tide of westward settlement. When the American Revolution broke out in 1775, representatives from Britain and the rebelling colonies tried to form alliances with the tribes of the Southeast. The Cherokees and groups of Chickasaws, Creeks, and Choctaws fought on the side of the British during the war; the Catawbas, surrounded by colonists in the Carolinas, fought NATION AMERICAN 77
Slide 107: AMERICAN INDIANS with the Americans. The Cherokees suffered another devastating defeat in 1776 when militia from the southern colonies invaded their territory. The southeastern tribes paid for their British sympathies. The southern states seized tracts of land from the Cherokees and Creeks during the war as the penalty for supporting the British. After the war the United States moved to make peace with the southeastern tribes. During the period of 1785 to1786, American negotiators signed separate treaties with the Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws at Hopewell, South Carolina. Each agreement established specific borders between the tribe and the United States and provided the Indian council with jurisdiction over Americans venturing into its territory. These recognitions of tribal rights of title and sovereignty were balanced, or perhaps contradicted, by provisions which stated that the tribe was under the protection of the United States and was prohibited from conducting independent trade or diplomatic relations. Creeks under Alexander McGillivray, and the Chickamaugas, a dissident group of Cherokees led by the warriors Dragging Canoe and Bloody Fellow, refused to accept the Hopewell peace settlements and joined in raids to force American settlers out of the Tennessee and Cumberland Valleys. Along with forming an alliance with Spain, McGillivray also attempted to construct a confederation of southeastern tribes that would challenge the United States’s designs on the region. McGillivray’s rapprochement with the United States in 1790 (and his death in 1793), the refusal of the Chickasaws to support the movement, and the Spanish withdrawal from the area under the Treaty of San Lorenzo (1795) thwarted the dreams of a southeastern Indian alliance. The Chickamaugas and settlers continued to fight bitterly until 1794, when the Indians submitted to a treaty with the United States. wheels, appointed federal agents to instruct each tribe, and established model farms to demonstrate how to live as American yeomen. The tribes were also encouraged toward acculturation by a small class of political leaders and economic entrepreneurs who were the descendants of Indian women and English, Scots-Irish, or French traders. These men held clan and tribal membership through their mothers, spoke English and their Indian language, and moved adroitly in the white and Native American worlds. Some of them established farms and plantations growing cotton and other staple crops, acquired African American slaves, and integrated themselves into the American market economy. The more successful of this acculturated class—such as John Ross (1790–1868), a Cherokee; Levi Colbert (1759–1834), a Chickasaw; and Greenwood LeFlore (d. 1865), a Choctaw—diversified into tavern and ferry operations, built fine homes with expensive furnishings, sent their children to school in New England, and secured high office in tribal government. Many southeastern Indians did not want to make the transformation required by the civilization program. Women did not want to abandon their place in the fields; men did not want to perform the agricultural work that traditionally had defined femininity. The civilization program created factions in communities between those who did and did not want to change, and the pressure to acculturate provoked nativist revolts among some of the tribes. In 1811 a number of Red Stick warriors from the Upper Creek towns responded to the call of Tecumseh and his brother, the prophet Tenskawatawa, for a panIndian rebellion against the United States. Civil war broke out between the Red Sticks, who wanted to eliminate the influence of Anglo-American culture, and other Creeks who sought a peaceful accommodation with the United States. In 1813 the rebellion drew in the United States when the Red Sticks massacred hundreds of Americans at Fort Mims, northeast of Mobile (in what became southwest Alabama). Andrew Jackson organized an army comprising militia forces and Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and accomodationist Creek warriors and marched into Creek territory. On 27 March 1814 Jackson’s army annihilated the Red Sticks at Horseshoe Bend (in what was later eastern Alabama). After the battle, Jackson forced the Creeks to cede twenty-two million acres of their territory to the United States under the Treaty of Fort Jackson (August 1814). Many of the surviving Red Sticks fled into Florida and assimilated with the Seminoles, who were an amalgamation of the remnants of the Florida tribes that had been decimated by war and disease during the colonial era. In OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION CIVILIZATION During the presidential administration of George Washington, the United States began adopting legislation and using treaties, such as the Treaty of New York (1790) with the Creeks, to implement a “civilization” program for the Native American population. The federal government wanted Indians to adopt Anglo-American cultural habits, become farmers on their own individual plots, and assimilate into American society. This would free up Indian hunting grounds, according to the plan, and enable the United States to acquire and then transfer them to Americans. The federal government provided the Indians with farm implements, looms, and spinning 78 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 108: AMERICAN INDIANS 1817 Jackson led another army into Spanish Florida to punish the Seminoles, who had been attacking American settlements on the Georgia border and providing refuge to runaway slaves. In 1819 the United States acquired Florida from Spain, and in 1823 it forced the defeated Seminoles to surrender their territory in northern Florida and move farther south into the interior of the peninsula. REMOVAL The civilization program did not produce the land cessions and political assimilation that its proponents had anticipated. After the War of 1812 Jackson and many southern political leaders began urging the federal government to relocate the tribes across the Mississippi River and open up all of the Southeast to American settlement. As the pressure for removal increased, the southeastern tribes became more determined to preserve their sovereign powers and land base. In an effort to present a unified front to the United States, the tribes gradually moved legal and political authority from the clans and local councils to new tribal or national institutions. The Cherokees, for instance, created a national police force to protect private property rights, formally abolished the practice of clan blood revenge, and adopted and codified laws to deal with various economic and social issues. The Choctaws in 1826 and the Cherokees in 1827 adopted written constitutions. The Cherokee constitution emulated the American model to some extent in that it created a republican government comprised of three branches: a two-house legislature; a national judiciary; and an executive (the principal chief) elected by the people. The Cherokees also created national social and cultural institutions. In 1821 a Cherokee named Sequoyah created a syllabary that allowed his people to communicate in writing in their own language. The syllabary, which Cherokees could learn quickly, enabled the Cherokee Nation to print books and religious materials for its people. In 1828 the nation began publishing a newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, that included text in both Cherokee and English; its editor, Elias Boudinot, became an important voice in informing the Cherokees on the removal developments affecting their nation. By 1835 a majority of Cherokee households had at least one individual who could read the Cherokee language. In 1819 Georgia, which in 1802 had signed away its western territory in exchange for a promise from the United States that it would extinguish the Indian title in the state, began urging the federal government to fulfill its promise and remove the Creeks and Cherokees from its boundaries. Tennessee, AlaENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW bama, and Mississippi quickly joined Georgia’s removal campaign to clear the Southeast of Native Americans. The Creeks, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Cherokees all surrendered territory to placate the southern states. They also took measures to inhibit private sale of their lands: the Creek and Cherokee national councils adopted laws forbidding the sale of tribal territory upon penalty of death. In 1825 the Creek national council executed William McIntosh, a prominent headman, for signing the Treaty of Indian Springs (1825), which called for the removal of the Creeks and the cession of most of their homeland. After the Cherokees announced the ratification of their constitution and declared themselves a sovereign nation in July 1827, the Georgia legislature extended the jurisdiction of the state over their territory. Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi soon extended state jurisdiction over the Native Americans within their borders. After Andrew Jackson was elected president in 1828, he told the tribes to submit to state jurisdiction or remove. In 1830 Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which gave Jackson authority to negotiate the removal of the eastern tribes across the Mississippi. Despite determined resistance from the Cherokees (who attempted to forestall removal in the federal judicial system) and the Seminoles (who fought a long and bloody engagement with the United States Army), between 1832 and 1843 the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Creeks, and Seminoles were relocated to the Indian Territory that the federal government established west of Arkansas. See also French and Indian War, Battles and Diplomacy; Horseshoe Bend, Battle of. BIBLIOGRAPHY Braund, Kathryn E. Holland. Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685–1815. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. Carson, James Taylor. Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Champagne, Duane. Social Order and Political Change: Constitutional Governments among the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, and the Creek. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992. Garrison, Tim Alan. The Legal Ideology of Removal: The Southern Judiciary and the Sovereignty of Native American Nations. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002. Gibson, Arrel M. The Chickasaws. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971. Green, Michael D. The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. AMERICAN NATION 79
Slide 109: AMERICAN INDIANS Hudson, Charles. The Southeastern Indians. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976. Perdue, Theda. Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Wright, J. Leitch, Jr. The Only Land They Knew: The Tragic Story of the American Indians in the Old South. New York: Free Press, 1981. Tim Alan Garrison Old Northwest In the early decades of the eighteenth century, much of the Old Northwest (the area north and west of the Ohio River, encompassing the present-day states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and a portion of Minnesota) underwent an extensive indigenous repopulation. Driven to the far western reaches of the region (or, in the case of the Shawnees of southern Ohio, to the southeast) by the Iroquois during the Beaver Wars of the previous century, the surviving elements of the northwestern tribes returned to their traditional area homes in response to Iroquois peace initiatives in the early eighteenth century. These groups were joined in the region by eastern tribes fleeing white encroachment, disease, and ongoing Iroquois raids from the north and east. Among the larger tribal groups inhabiting the Old Northwest by mid-century were the Ojibways, settled primarily around Lake Superior; the Ottawas, located in the straits region of present-day Michigan; the Potawatomis of southern Michigan; the remnants of the Huron nation (also known as Wyandots), settled around Detroit and northern Lake Erie; the Delawares (migrants from Pennsylvania) of south central and central Ohio; the Shawnees (also migrants from the east) of southern Ohio and Indiana; the Miamis, settled in northwestern Ohio and northern Indiana; the Illinois; and the Winnebagos of present-day Wisconsin. Most of the region’s estimated 60,000 to 80,000 natives were of Algonquian stock (the main exceptions being the Iroquoianspeaking Hurons (or Wyandots) and the Siouan Winnebagos) and practiced, with varied emphasis, a mixed pattern of relatively settled horticulture combined with seasonal hunting and gathering. FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR American continent, hostilities broke out in 1754 when Virginia militia, under the command of George Washington, failed in their attempt to dislodge the French from the headwaters of the Ohio River near present-day Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Eager to strike back at those who had driven them from their eastern homes, many of the Ohio natives, along with the stridently pro-French tribes of the Great Lakes, joined the fray against the British and their American colonists, playing a critical role in the defeat of British forces under the command of General Edward Braddock in 1765, and staging ongoing raids throughout the Pennsylvania and Virginia backcountry. Although the war began well for the French and their northwestern native allies, defeats at Quebec (1759) and Montreal (1760) paved the way for British victory and the loss of France’s mainland American colonial empire. The natives’ long-standing accommodationist strategy of pitting one European power against the other was no longer viable. As a result the British commander in chief in America, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, who was also motivated by personal disdain for the natives, drastically altered British Indian policy. He confined the fur trade to army posts; banned the sale of weapons, ammunition (necessary tools in the fur trade), and alcohol to the Indians; and ended the tradition of diplomatic gift giving (originally adopted in adherence to the native concept of reciprocity). Stunned by the unexpected French abandonment, the northwestern tribes bristled under Amherst’s insulting and culturally demeaning policies. Additionally, a steady stream of westward-moving white settlers and the British occupation of abandoned French posts in the west fueled native fear and animosity. Inspired by the teachings of a Delaware prophet named Neolin, who preached renunciation of white culture and a return to traditional lifestyles, many northwestern Indians, such as the Ottawa chief Pontiac, embraced a more radical, oppositional philosophy and turned their backs on accommodation with whites. The resulting conflict, referred to as Pontiac’s Rebellion or Pontiac’s War (1763), failed in its primary objective of ridding the region of any British and American presence. Nonetheless, it did prompt an alteration of British policy culminating in the ouster of Amherst and his replacement by General Thomas Gage, the appointment of two regional (northern and southern) superintendents of Indian relations, and the creation of a demarcation line separating Indians and colonists designed to stop settler encroachment into the region. Moreover, the conflict, coming as it did on the heels of French withdrawal from the region and the collapse of the complex web of layered OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION The northwestern territory where these tribes settled rapidly became a highly contested borderland between rival European powers. As France and Great Britain maneuvered for control over the rich fur resources of the Ohio Country and the interior of the 80 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 110: AMERICAN INDIANS Indian and European alliances, also delineated a clear racial fault line in the northwest between Indian and white. The Northwestern Indians’ hopes that the boundary line might hold and that native autonomy might become a reality, however, were rapidly dashed. In 1768, the Six Nation Iroquois, intent on preserving their New York homeland, ceded their tenuous claim to western lands south and east of the Ohio River in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix. Conspicuously absent from the negotiations were the tribes— the Cherokees and Shawnees—actually inhabiting the region. Equally problematic for the local tribes were the competing claims of Pennsylvania and Virginia to the disputed region. The intense intercolonial rivalry led to numerous attacks on local Indians and in 1774 to open warfare between Virginia, aggressively seeking to preempt Pennsylvania claims to western lands, and the Shawnees in Lord Dunmore’s War. The ensuing Treaty of Camp Charlotte (1774) forced Shawnee recognition of Virginia’s claim to Kentucky. WAR FOR OHIO As British and American diplomats conducted talks to end the war, the northwestern tribes found themselves in a familiar position—without representation. Indeed, the ensuing Treaty of Paris (1783) completely disregarded Indian interests and resulted in the unauthorized cession of their homelands by their wartime allies to a now independent United States. American officials quickly made it clear to the Northwestern tribes that they considered them conquered peoples and that they were to submit to American authority or perish. In light of the altered circumstances, elements of the western tribes met with American officials at Fort Stanwix (1784) in New York, Fort McIntosh (1785) in Pennsylvania, and Fort Finney (1786) in Ohio. Under great pressure, they recognized American sovereignty and ceded large tracts of land, including lands in the Ohio country, to cement the peace. The Confederation Congress followed up on the cessions with laws providing for the structured survey and sale of the newly acquired lands and, with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, by organizing the area as the Northwest Territory. White Americans swarmed into the region. Large segments of the western native population, however, refused to recognize the cessions as legitimate and held fast to the idea of an Ohio River boundary between white and Indian. Encouraged by the Mohawk leader Joseph Brant, the northwestern tribes forged a confederation that refused to accept treaties signed by individual tribes and pledged itself to resisting American settlement in Ohio. Violence was not long in coming. In 1790 and 1791 American armies (the first commanded by Josiah Harmar and the second by Arthur St. Clair) invaded Indian country intent on subduing the confederation. Both armies were decimated by confederation warriors led by the Miami Chief Little Turtle and the Shawnee Blue Jacket. In spite of their success, however, the confederation began to unravel as Brant recommended reaching a settlement with American authorities. While the western tribes debated the merits of continued resistance or compromise, the Americans raised a new army, placing it under the command of General “Mad” Anthony Wayne. Indian factionalism played into Wayne’s hands; in 1794 his Legion marched into the heart of the northwest. Confronting a reduced Indian force on the Maumee River near present-day Toledo, Ohio, Wayne’s army drove the natives from the field (the Indians were then denied refuge at a nearby British fort) and then proceeded to destroy native villages and crops in the Battle of Fallen Timbers. The following year, Wayne extracted a promise of peace and vast cessions of land NATION THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR AND THE NORTHWEST As Lord Dunmore’s War drew to its close, the imperial struggle between Great Britain and its American colonists reached a heightened level, spilling into open warfare in April 1775. Among the grievances cited by the Americans in making their case for independence was the ministry’s concerted effort to deny white migration onto western lands and its alleged encouragement of Indian raiding along the frontier. The Northwestern tribes initially approached the revolutionary crisis with a great deal of caution, with most attempting to remain neutral in the conflict. Sustained diplomatic and economic pressure, along with the recognition that the war was also a conflict for native land, however, persuaded many western tribes to side with the British and to wage their own war for freedom. Among the areas hardest hit by the conflict was Ohio. There American and British agents worked tirelessly to persuade the Delawares and Shawnees to take up arms. Despite assuming a neutral stance, the Delawares and Shawnees faced continued American depredations—the murder of the pro-American Delaware Chief White Eyes (1778), the massacre of pacifist Moravian Delawares at Gnadenhutten (1782), and the killing of the Shawnee Chief Cornstalk while under a flag of truce (1777). As a result, by war’s end members of both tribes were actively engaged in the struggle against the Americans. ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN 81
Slide 111: AMERICAN INDIANS from the natives in the Treaty of Greenville, thus opening the door to unimpeded access to most of Ohio. BIBLIOGRAPHY TECUMSEH AND TENSKWATAWA With peace at hand, American officials stepped up their effort to “civilize” the western tribes by converting them to Christianity, recasting traditional gender roles, and reorganizing native life around intensive agriculture. The rigorous pressure on the western tribes and the assault on traditional life helped to spawn one final effort, led by the Shawnee brothers Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh, to build a united native front in the northwest. Inspired by a visionary trance in 1805, Tenskwatawa (also known as the Shawnee Prophet) renounced his previous life of drunkenness and debauchery and began to preach a messianic message urging native peoples to abandon alcohol and to reject Christianity and all things white. Tenskwatawa’s religious vision was spread by his brother Tecumseh, who added a plea for Indian unity in resisting white expansion. The combination was a potent one, and its success frightened American officials. In response, in 1811 the American army under General William Henry Harrison launched a preemptive attack on the prophet’s settlement on Tippecanoe Creek, Indiana. The Americans’ victory in the Battle of Tippecanoe dealt the prophet and Tecumseh’s confederation efforts a blow. Tecumseh’s subsequent death at the Battle of the Thames (1813) during the War of 1812 destroyed what was left of the movement. With the resistance movement broken, American authorities redoubled their efforts to “civilize” the tribes, concentrating them onto small “reservations” of land and exploring the possibility of relocating the tribes to new lands west of the Mississippi River (lands acquired through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803). It was argued that the natives would be insulated there from the vices and pressures of white society and free to advance at their own pace. This policy, known as removal, became the key component of President Andrew Jackson’s Indian policy in the early 1830s and eventually resulted in the forced relocation of most of the native peoples of the lower northwest (Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois) to Indian Territory (Oklahoma). See also French and Indian War; Fur and Pelt Trade; Northwest; Northwest and Southwest Ordinances; Pontiac’s War; Proclamation of 1763; Thames, Battle of the; Tippecanoe, Battle of; Treaty of Paris. Dowd, Gregory Evans. War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Hinderaker, Eric, and Peter C. Mancall. At the Edge of Empire: The Backcountry in British North America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. McConnell, Michael N. A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724–1774. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. O’Donnell, James H., III. Ohio’s First Peoples. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. Richter, Daniel K. Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Martin J. Hershock Old Southwest The native peoples of the Old Southwest resided in an area that included western Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and parts of Florida and Louisiana. Between 1754 and 1829 they underwent profound changes. In 1754 most Indians in the region lived by small-scale farming, hunting game, and fishing. They lived in villages with headmen who used powers of persuasion rather than coercion to get people to follow them. Private property was unknown, and criminal matters were avenged by the victim, or in the case of murder, the victim’s kin. By 1829 the major tribes of the Old Southwest possessed formal governments with written constitutions; court systems; large-scale agriculture, including plantations and African American slaves; and powerful chiefs who governed by force of law backed by organized police forces. In many cases the wealthiest Native Americans possessed more goods and lived in better style than many of their European American neighbors. Despite their adoption of European technology and political practices, the United States failed to protect these people from local settlers and state officials who coveted the Indians’ land and envied their successes. At the close of the era, the federal government under the Jackson administration (1829–1837) forcibly removed most of the Native Americans east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska. Despite those challenges, these victimized Indian peoples had created social institutions at the dawn of the nineteenth century that have allowed them to thrive into the twenty-first century. OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 82 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 112: AMERICAN INDIANS Dog Dance. This picture of a “dog dance” performed by Indians in what is now Kansas is an 1823 engraving by Cephus G. Childs based on a sketch by the artist Samuel Seymour, who accompanied Major Stephen H. Long on an expedition to the American West in 1819. © CORBIS. TRIBES OF THE REGION The most prominent nations in the region were the Choctaws, the Chickasaws, the Creeks, the Seminoles, and the Cherokees. In the first two decades of the 1800s, these Indians became known as the Five Civilized Nations because they took up commercial farming and other European ways. A number of smaller nations lived among the five: the Yamasees, Houmas, Chitimachas, Tunicas, Catawbas, and Yuchis. Some of these groups united with one of the Five Tribes for protection. The Shawnees also traveled through the region during the late eighteenth century, some of them settling among the Creeks. Though all of these peoples played a role in the history of the Old Southwest, the Five Civilized Tribes dominated it. All of the five except the Cherokees spoke Muskogean languages. The Choctaw and Chickasaw cultures were so similar that both people told stories that they had descended from two brothers. The two, it was said, lost each other during a hunting trip; when they met up again, they had been apart so long that they no longer understood each other’s speech. They decided to settle at some distance from the other ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW and from them came the Chickasaw and Choctaw people. The Creeks and many of the Seminoles spoke a similar language. Some Seminoles spoke Mikasuka, a distant relative of Creek. The Cherokees, on the other hand, spoke an Iroquoian language that developed during two thousand years of separation from their northern kinsmen. The Choctaws lived along the upper reaches of the Tombigbee River in eastern Mississippi and western Alabama. To the north, in western Tennessee, lived the Chickasaws. The Creeks inhabited eastern Alabama and western Georgia. Florida was home for the Seminoles, many of whom had relatives among the Creeks. The Cherokees resided in the mountainous regions where the states of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee meet. Farmers, hunters, and traders from France, Spain, England, Scotland, and Germany also lived and worked in small settlements scattered throughout the region. During the early part of the 1700s, most of the native people of the Old Southwest grew accustomed to the labor-saving tools and efficient firearms delivered by French and English traders who gradually tied Native Americans to the markets of the Atlantic NATION AMERICAN 83
Slide 113: AMERICAN INDIANS world. They paid for these weapons with deerskins. Tens of thousands of hides traveled along the roads and rivers for eventual shipment from New Orleans, Mobile, or Charles Town (later known as Charleston). By the middle of the eighteenth century, life in Indian country depended on a steady supply of European tools, cloth, and ammunition. 1790s. The Chickasaws lacked the strength to resist the shifting policies of Great Britain. The Choctaws and Creeks, however, managed to convince the British to amend their ways. In January 1762 the British appointed John Stuart as the royal superintendent for Indian affairs in the southern colonies. Rather than dealing with competing provincial governments, Native Americans would be able to parley with a single responsible individual. However, Stuart’s desire to regulate trade and mediate conflicts between the colonists and the Indians did not work. South Carolinians, Virginians, and others resented British protection of their recent enemies. This resentment played a role in the decision of Americans to revolt against Britain in the mid1770s. White juries would not convict European Americans for crimes committed against Indians. Unlicensed traders brought liquor and shoddy merchandise into the backcountry and often cheated their customers. BRITISH DOMINANCE The French and Indian War (1754–1763) had little initial impact on the region. The Choctaws, traditional allies of France, formed a barrier between the pro-British Cherokees and Creeks. The Chickasaws, badly weakened by a quarter century of warfare with Louisianans and Choctaws, could do little for their English-speaking patrons. As the war progressed, British traders and agents strengthened their ties with the Creeks. The English also made inroads with the Choctaws, starved of powder and textiles by the Royal Navy’s blockade of the French. By the war’s end, most of the Native American nations in the region considered themselves allies of King George. Cessation of hostilities in Europe did not mean peace for the peoples of the inland regions of the Old Southwest. Trouble came from several sources. The British government stopped giving gifts to groups like the Cherokees. Officials from London declared that Native Americans were subjects of the king, not allies, and therefore ineligible for such donations. Another problem carried over from the early 1700s: tensions between the European Americans and Indians over land flared as settlers moved west. Moreover, the Indians had fewer European powers to play against each other. With the French gone, the Choctaws and Creeks could still turn to the Spanish for supplies and support when British demands became too burdensome. However, Spain no longer had the resources nor the inclination to offer a consistent alternative to the English. The Cherokees and Chickasaws, who lived inland far from Florida and Mexico, had even fewer options. The Cherokees took arms in protest against these changes that began in the late 1750s and continued through the 1760s. As a consequence, they suffered terribly at the hands of the combined might of the British army and colonial militias. When the two sides made peace, the Cherokees lost much of their land east of the Appalachians. Some Cherokees, led by Dragging Canoe, bitterly resisted Euro-American expansion. He established a stronghold along the banks of the Chickamauga River and continued to fight the colonists, and later the Americans, into the LAND CESSIONS AND DEPENDENCY The United States’s victory in the War of Independence (1775–1783) had momentous consequences for Native Americans. The Treaty of Paris (1783) awarded control over all the land between the Mississippi and the Atlantic Ocean to the new nation. Indian nations experienced different outcomes from the Revolution. The Cherokees once again suffered terribly during this conflict. Virginia militiamen devastated Cherokee settlements in 1776 in retaliation for alleged Cherokee raids in the state’s western mountains. Dragging Canoe and his Cherokee faction kept the United States at bay until the late 1780s. On the other hand, many other Cherokee leaders saw a fearsome enemy in the Americans and eventually ceded territory to the new Republic in the Treaty of Hopewell (1785) and in the Treaty of Holston (1791). The Creeks faced similar pressure after the war, as did the Choctaws. Fortunately for the latter two nations, they were far enough away from the Americans to avoid heavy involvement in the Revolution. Also, they had the option of trading with the Spanish in Pensacola and Mobile, where English merchants maintained well-stocked warehouses. The Old Southwest took its final shape during the years around the ratification of the Constitution. The defining policy came in the form of the Indian Trade and Intercourse Act (1790). This legislation limited commercial contact with Native Americans to licensed traders who operated in official “factories,” or stores. Many in the federal government hoped that by providing a flood of consumer goods OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 84 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 114: AMERICAN INDIANS and tools, they would ensnare Native American leaders in debt. They then would have to sell their land to pay their creditors. Another provision of the law sent farm tools and teachers to Native American tribes in order that they assimilate into European American society. It also placed Indian agents in each of the major nations as representatives of the federal government. Though many of the agents engaged in graft, several of them worked hard to protect their charges from the settlers and state governments. One the most successful of these men was Benjamin Hawkins, agent for the Creek Nation from the 1780s to the 1810s, who helped the Creeks adapt to the pressures exerted by the expanding Republic. During the years following the American Revolution, one Creek began the process of transformation without waiting for cues from the United States. Alexander McGillivray, the wealthy son of a Scottish merchant and a Creek woman, negotiated an alliance with Spain in 1784 for protection against the infant United States. After fighting several battles against the Americans throughout the 1780s, he traveled to New York, where in 1790 he signed a treaty with the United States. He then received an appointment as a brigadier general with a yearly salary of twelve hundred dollars a year. After returning home, he repudiated that treaty and in 1792 reinstated the old alliance with Spain, this time for a Spanish salary of two thousand dollars yearly. McGillivray’s career exemplified the changing nature of Native American leadership styles in the Old Southwest. The old model of a chief who relied upon his powers of persuasion gave way to men who controlled access to European manufactured goods and markets. This caused a major shift in the way Native Americans organized themselves. Private property became the norm in the region. Many men turned to farming, traditionally women’s work, and animal husbandry to make a living. Others still harvested deerskins in the forests, but they often did so with tools and weapons purchased on credit from wealthy Indian headmen rather than European American merchants. As Indians acquired private property, they created institutions to protect it. They also recognized the need to organize themselves to meet the threats posed by their American neighbors. The skills introduced by Indian agents like Hawkins helped them develop an economic base upon which they built a political structure. ACCOMMODATION, RESISTANCE, AND REMOVAL the Cherokee Light Horse and in 1827 adopted a constitution modeled on the U.S. Constitution. Sequoyah facilitated the last innovation by creating the Cherokee syllabary (alphabet), completed by him in 1821 and still in use 185 years later. The Cherokees also saw the wisdom of cooperating with the United States. Chief John Ross (1790–1866) led Cherokee warriors against the Red Sticks, a Creek faction, during the Creek War (1813–1814), fighting alongside the forces of Andrew Jackson at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend (1814). Not all Native Americans in the Old Southwest wanted these changes. The Red Sticks, from the Upper Towns, located in northern Alabama and northwestern Georgia, rejected the adoption of Western culture and technology taking hold of the Lower Towns. The latter communities were on the coastal plain in southeastern Alabama and western Georgia. The Creek War started as a civil war between the two factions. The Red Sticks wished to return to the old spiritual practices and abandon the corrupting influences of alcohol and dependence on manufactured goods. They sought protection from traditional talismans and rituals. These hopes were soon dashed when the United States entered into the conflict to prevent Great Britain from gaining inroads into the region during the War of 1812. The defeat of the Red Sticks spelled the end of armed resistance against the United States. The Treaty of Fort Jackson (1814) forced the Creeks to cede a large portion of their tribal lands. Ironically, much of the territory belonged to the Lower Towns, which supported Jackson in his fight against the Red Sticks. Some survivors of the Creek War made their way into Spanish Florida to join with the Seminoles, a multiethnic group of Native American refugees of earlier conflicts, Creeks, and escaped African American slaves, where they held out for decades. Throughout the 1820s, some of the Indians of the Old Southwest, particularly families with leadership roles, prospered as they continued to use more Euro-American technology. Many of the wealthier Native Americans acquired African American slaves whom they treated as a form of property. The headmen of the major tribes built plantations and began to raise cotton, others became successful merchants. Nonetheless, a good number of the Indian peoples remained poor, eking out a living on small backcountry farms. This situation changed during the War of 1812. The conflict between the United States and Great Britain placed the Native Americans of the Old Southwest between two fires. Some of them supNATION In the first decades of the 1800s, the Cherokees created a court system and a mounted police force called ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN 85
Slide 115: AMERICAN INDIANS ported the United States while others resisted. American troops from the East overran Creek country. Their commander, General Andrew Jackson, imposed harsh terms in the Treaty of Fort Jackson (1814) that deprived Creeks of more than half of their land. Jackson later invaded Florida and closed the British supply stations in Spanish Pensacola. Thus, the Indians of the region lost the ability to play the Americans against their Spanish and English rivals. This lack of foreign support eroded Native Americans’ power to negotiate with Washington and the state governments. Soon after the war, the Mississippi and Alabama Territories gained admission to the Union as states in 1817 and 1819, respectively. The new governments resented having Indian nations claiming sovereignty in their midst. Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi passed legislation outlawing Native American courts and political entities within their borders. Andrew Jackson’s election in 1828 paved the way for the annihilation of Indian rights in the Old Southwest. The president pushed successfully for passage of the Indian Removal Act (1830), which called for the seizure of Native American lands in the East and the exile of the Indians west of the Mississippi. See also Creek War; French and Indian War, Consequences of; Horseshoe Bend, Battle of. BIBLIOGRAPHY Green, Michael D. The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. Hatley, Tom. The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Era of Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Ishii, Izumi. “Alcohol and Politics in the Cherokee Nation before Removal.” Ethnohistory 50 (2003): 671–695. Kidwell, Clara Sue. Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 1818–1918. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. O’Brien, Greg. Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Piker, Joshua. “‘White and Clean’ and Contested: Creek Towns and Trading Paths in the Aftermath of the Seven Years’ War.” Ethnohistory 50 (2003): 315–347. Remini, Robert V. Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars. New York: Viking, 2001. Saunt, Claudio. A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Snapp, J. Russell. John Stuart and the Struggle for Empire on the Southern Frontier. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. Swanton, John Reed. Indian Tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley and Adjacent Coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1911. ———. Religious Beliefs and Medicinal Practices of the Creek Indians. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1928. ———. Social and Religious Beliefs and Usages of the Chickasaw Indians. Washington: N.p., 1928. Usner, Daniel H., Jr. American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. White, Richard. The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Woods, Patricia Dillon. French-Indian Relations on the Southern Frontier, 1699–1762. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research, 1980. Braund, Kathryn E. Holland. Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685–1815. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. Brescia, William Jr. “Choctaw Oral Tradition Relating to Tribal Origin.” In The Choctaw Before Removal. Edited by Carolyn Keller Reeves. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1985. Carson, James Taylor. Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Cox, Bruce Alden. “Natives and the Development of Mercantile Capitalism.” In The Political Economy of North American Indians. Edited by John H. Moore. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993. Cushman, Horatio Bardwell. History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez Indians. Greenville, Tex.: Headlight Printing House, 1899. Galloway, Patricia K. “‘So Many Little Republics’: British Negotiations with the Choctaw Confederacy, 1765.” Ethnohistory 41 (1994): 513–538. ———. Choctaw Genesis, 1500–1700. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Garrison, Tim Alan. The Legal Ideology of Removal: The Southern Judiciary and the Sovereignty of Native American Nations. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002. George Edward Milne Plains Since about A.D. 1000, the Indians of the Great Plains had been divided into two grand divisions: the nomadic, tipi-dwelling nomads who generally lived on the western short-grass Plains, and the villagedwelling horticulturists who occupied the eastern reaches of the region. Each group was well adapted to conditions in the semiarid plains environment, and the entire region was heavily populated, despite earlier claims that the area was inhospitable and OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 86 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 116: AMERICAN INDIANS Young Omahaw, War Eagle, Little Missouri, and Pawnees. A portrait of several Pawnee leaders, painted by Charles Bird King in 1821. SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM, WASHINGTON, DC/ART RESOURCE, NY. sparsely inhabited before horses were introduced by the Spanish in the seventeenth century. The nomadic life had ancient roots, reaching deep into the prehistoric past, for Indians had been living on the plains and hunting bison for no less than twelve thousand years. The village way of life was more recent, having been introduced from eastern North America about A.D. 900. The village farmers lived principally along the Missouri and its major tributaries and on the eastern reaches of tributaries of the Mississippi. They included, from south to north, the Caddoan-speaking tribes of Texas and Oklahoma, and the Osages, Otoes and Missouris, Wichitas, Pawnees, Iowas, Omahas, Poncas, Arikaras, and the Mandans and Hidatsas. In the north, most of these villagers lived in substantial earth-covered lodges in communities often surrounded by fortifying ditches and post palisades; in the south, more moderate weather permitted their ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW homes to be less substantial (the Wichitas even lived in grass houses). They remained for most of the year near their villages, where the women grew their crops in the fertile river bottoms. Conversely, the nomads lived in skin tipis and, while they had home territories, ranged widely in search of the bison that was the mainstay of their diet. The most important of them were the many bands of Dakotas, or Sioux; the Cheyennes and Arapahos, Crows, and Assiniboines. There was a brisk trade from prehistoric to historic times between the villagers and the nomads, the villagers trading corn and garden produce to the nomads in exchange for the products produced by these hunting peoples. Their trade routes often became those followed by early European fur traders. This trade did not prevent groups from raiding one another at other times, for young men could attain social and political prominence only if they had war honors NATION AMERICAN 87
Slide 117: AMERICAN INDIANS and were successful in raiding other groups for horses. Even before 1750 diseases introduced by Europeans, principally smallpox, began drastically to reduce Indian populations, sometimes killing up to 95 percent of the affected population. Smallpox probably attacked tribes along the Missouri River in about 1750, but a major outbreak in 1781 was responsible for massive depopulation, as was a later one in 1837, which almost eliminated the Mandans and, according to Joshua Pilcher, left the entire northern Plains “one great grave yard.” This depopulation made later American settlement a far simpler matter. European penetration of the plains came from three directions: from the southwest by early Spanish explorers; from the north and east from the Canadian plains and Great Lakes by the French and English; and from the southeast, principally by Americans ascending the Missouri River. These alien traders brought a startling new technology, including edged iron tools and firearms, and a shift in Indian lifeways from one that stressed subsistence to another that focused on producing, at first, furs and, later, buffalo robes. These new elements, together with the introduction of horses, led to massive changes in their lifeways, ones that, for a time, brought them riches and an affluent way of life that led to today’s stereotypic view of the American Indian: a tipi and a horse-mounted warrior wearing an eagle-feather headdress and carrying a spear or firearm. Pierre Gaultier de la Vérendrye was the first visitor from the north to reach the Missouri River in 1738, but about the same time, traders from St. Louis or Prairie du Chien, on the Mississippi, began infiltrating the northern plains, and other French traders were reaching tribes deep in the southern plains. By the early nineteenth century American explorers began to follow the tracks left by the first traders, and initiated the process that led to American settlement and the often illegal confiscation of tribal lands. Lewis and Clark in 1804–1806, Zebulon Pike in 1805–1807, and Stephen H. Long in 1819–1820 brought the West to the attention of easterners. The trails that brought cattle from Texas north into Kansas and further followed, between 1840 and 1897. But it was the initiation of the Oregon and California Trails in 1834 and 1841, and the Santa Fe Trail in 1821, that brought trespassing immigrants and trade. Indian responses to them were largely the reason for the introduction of military posts along their routes. See also Expansion; Exploration and Explorers; Fur and Pelt Trade; Health and Disease; Livestock Production; West. BIBLIOGRAPHY DeMallie, Raymond J., ed. Handbook of North American Indians. Volume 13: Plains. William C. Sturtevant, general editor. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2001. Holder, Preston. The Hoe and the Horse on the Plains: A Study of Cultural Development among North American Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970, 1991. Joshua Pilcher to William Clark, February 27, 1838. Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs: Upper Missouri Agency, 1824-1881. Record Group 75, Microcopy No. 234, Roll No. 884. National Archives, Washington, D.C. Wood, W. Raymond, ed. Archaeology on the Great Plains. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998. W. Raymond Wood Far West As Indians east of the Mississippi embroiled themselves in international wars, engaged in religious revitalization movements, and faced Indian removal, Indians west of the Mississippi were also experiencing profound changes in their way of life. Between 1750 and 1815, new opportunities brought substantial economic, social, and cultural changes to the Indians of California, the Great Plains, the Southwest, and the Pacific Northwest coast. At some time in the past, the Cheyennes’ Creator, Maheo, warned the Cheyenne people that adopting horses would result in great changes in their way of life. Indeed, all across the Plains during the eighteenth century, American Indians dealt with changes in material culture, social organization, and intertribal relations as a result of the adoption of the horse culture. Horses had arrived in North America with Hernán Cortés in 1519. Spanish soldiers and settlers then took horses to northern Mexico, where they eventually spread into the Southwest. Indian groups in northern Mexico, for instance, raided Spanish settlements and subsequently traded the horses they captured to Indians in New Mexico and Texas. A second mass migration of horses occurred in 1680, when Spanish soldiers and settlers fled New Mexico in the aftermath of the Pueblo Revolt. From New Mexico, various Indians traded horses to Indians living on the northern Great Plains. Horses made hunting bison more efficient and quicker and brought new material culture items such as saddles and bridles. For some, like the CheyOF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 88 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 118: AMERICAN INDIANS A Traditional Dance. This image from circa 1806 by Wilhelm von Tilenau depicts a group of costumed Indians engaging in a traditional dance near the San José de Guadalupe Mission in California. © CORBIS. ennes, Comanches, and Lakotas, the horse culture brought wealth and power—but not without costs. First, the drive to acquire horses put tribes in direct conflict with one another and increased the incidence of warfare on the Great Plains. The Lakotas embarked on an impressive expansion during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, moving from Minnesota to occupying parts of the Dakotas, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Colorado. In the process they dislodged the Mandans, Hidatsas, Arikaras, Omahas, and Pawnees. Second, the acquisition of horses precipitated social fissures. Horses became the prime indicator of wealth within Indian groups; the man with the most horses usually controlled an unequal portion of wealth. Plains Indians became stratified into, as the Kiowas called them, the fine (those with more than a hundred horses), the middling (those with around twenty horses), and the poor (those with few or no horses). These social changes also affected women’s roles. When women harvested wild ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW food sources or practiced agriculture, they were the primary economic providers of their group. With the advent of the horse and buffalo economy, men became the primary providers (they hunted the buffalo), and women tended to become the processors of trade items (bison hides). Third, horses required vast acreage for grazing and thus threatened the ecology of the northern and southern Plains. Plains Indians tended to winter in river valleys, which were rich in timber and grasses. As a result of the long period of habitation as well as environmental changes on the Plains, these riverine valleys became denuded of trees and grasses. When Americans began to migrate across the Plains in the mid-nineteenth century, it only exacerbated an already worsening situation. The horse and bison economy also put Plains Indians in contact with southwestern tribes. For instance, between 1740 and 1830 the Comanches held annual trade fairs in the panhandle of Oklahoma. These trade fairs became a rich and vibrant marketNATION AMERICAN 89
Slide 119: AMERICAN INDIANS place for bison hides, Pueblo pottery, European guns and horses, and human captives. The fairs were part of a larger regional economy in the Southwest that depended on the reciprocal raiding by Navajos and the Spanish for livestock and humans. Navajos frequently launched attacks on neighboring Spanish settlements, absconding with sheep and human captives; Spanish and Mexican militias would then attempt to recapture them, taking Navajo captives in the process. Thus Indians and the Spanish were part of a tightly woven, though sometimes hidden, web of kin and economic relations. Farther west, Spanish officials established missions, military bases, and civilian communities in California to combat what they saw as a threat from Russian and English traders in the Pacific Northwest. Led by Father Junípero Serra in 1769, Franciscan friars established a string of twenty-one missions, intended to convert California Indians to Christianity, that stretched from San Diego to San Francisco. These institutions of religious conversion were completely dependent on Indian labor to harvest crops, tend cattle, and make artisanal objects. The missions had high mortality rates for Indians. In response to beatings by friars, Indians often ran away or participated in open revolt. Russians, British, and Americans in the Pacific Northwest also affected Indian life. They established a trade in sea otter pelts from the Aleutian Islands to northern California; although Pacific Northwest Indians welcomed the new trade items and the potential allies, the trade came at great cost. Europeans and Americans brought epidemic diseases that affected indigenous populations, and unscrupulous traders exchanged alcohol for the pelts, leading to other social problems. Native Americans of the far West confronted small bands of Europeans and Euro-Americans in search of both furs and souls. By the time Americans began to move west across the Mississippi, the region had already undergone a century of enormous change. See also Expansion; Exploration and Explorers; Fur and Pelt Trade; Livestock Production; Spanish Empire; West. Hämäläinen, Pekka. “The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures.” Journal of American History 90 (December 2003): 833–862. William J. Bauer, Jr. American Indian Ethnography Between 1750 and 1829 Americans attempted to explain the Indian cultures they encountered as well as to identify Indian origins. Eyewitness and secondary accounts of Indian life or the lives of whites among the Indians became popular reading, and collections of Indian artifacts fascinated the American public. Observers of Indian societies—ministers, missionaries, government officials, Indian captives, explorers, traders, travelers—wittingly or unwittingly practiced ethnography, or the study and systematic recording of a culture. These records of Indian manners and customs reflect the authors’ judgments against the backdrop of government policy regarding the Indians. The 1803 Louisiana Purchase ushered in an era of expansion, and land and its use increasingly became the focus of debate on American-Indian relations. Land was precious to both groups, but the Americans had the advantage of the printed word on their side. Their writings applied descriptive and pejorative terms to Indians such as “wild,” “savage,” “primitive,” and “heathen,” rendering more persuasive the land claims of “civilized” Americans. Even sympathetic collectors and writers employed these stereotypes. The idea that the Indians were expendable took root. IDEAS ABOUT INDIAN ORIGINS Throughout the period of Indian displacement and Indian wars, Americans pondered Indian origins. The Indian trader James Adair was likely the first to claim, based on his observation of taboos and eating habits, that the Indians were the Lost Tribe of Israel; others were to follow, such as Elias Boudinot, whose Star of the West (1816) portrayed Indians as strayed members of the Chosen People. The Scottish historian William Robertson thought Indians had migrated from Wales, calling them “exuberant Highlanders.” Benjamin Smith Barton, in New Views of the Origins of the Tribes and Nations of America (1797), asserted that the Indians had originated in Persia and other parts of Asia. ETHNOGRAPHIC CHRONICLES: POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE IMAGES BIBLIOGRAPHY Calloway, Colin G. One Vast Winter Count: The Indian West Before Lewis and Clark. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Prior to and during the French and Indian War (1756–1763), many positive images of Indians OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 90 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 120: AMERICAN INDIANS Algonquin Child’s Coat. This coat was part of a collection of American Indian drawings on hide that was gathered by M. Fayolle in 1786 and taken to France. Most of the collection consisted of garments worn by chiefs of the Arkansas, Dakota, and Northeastern regions. © BETTMANN/CORBIS. emerged in the writings of observers and in records of transactions between Americans and Indians. In his memoirs (1753) Samuel Hopkins, a Congregational pastor in Springfield, Massachusetts, attached great significance to the introduction of Christianity to the Indians, whom he felt were ready to accept “civilization.” In 1763 the interpreter Conrad Weiser detailed the Onondaga language and customs and the successful negotiations to establish a trading post in their nation. As Benjamin Franklin’s printing of Indian treaties between 1736 and 1762 revealed, American officials learned that Indian councils followed strict protocol and rituals, such as using the wampum belt to seal agreements and the passing of the calumet to signify friendship, when engaging in land negotiations. Though a land speculator himself, Franklin decried aggression against innocent and friendly Indians. In 1764 he denounced the twentytwo massacres in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, incited by revenge for Pontiac’s War of 1763. In his writings, the Quaker reformer John Woolman praised Indians as containing the “inner light” or ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW knowledge of God. William Smith’s An Historical Account of the Expedition Against the Ohio Indians, in the Year 1764 portrayed Indians as patriotic, independent, and lovers of liberty. Captivity narratives depicting Indian societies fueled negative images of Indians. Mary Rowlandson’s A Narrative of the Captivity, Sufferings, and Removes of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, first published in 1682 and reprinted many times, attests to the widely accepted notion of Indian cruelty. Other narratives also portrayed Indian brutality, such as Peter Williamson’s French and Indian Cruelty (1757); William Walton’s A Narrative of the Captivity and Sufferings of Benjamin Gilbert and His Family (1780); and Mary Kinnan’s A True Narrative of the Sufferings of Mary Kinnan (1795). A somewhat milder version of Indian life was depicted in A Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Johnson (1796), by Suzanne Willard (Johnson) Hastings, who lived for four years among the Abenakis. In the early nineteenth century, narratives and narrative novels began to portray Indian culture and NATION AMERICAN 91
Slide 121: AMERICAN INDIANS people as having a sense of purpose. James E. Seaver recounted the praise of Indian people by Mary Jemison, who lived with the Delawares for seventy years, in his Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison (1824). John Dunn Hunter’s Memoir among the Indians of North America (1824) commended his captors, the Osages and Kansas Indians, for their intelligence, religiosity, and communalism. Travelers and traders recorded scrupulously detailed accounts. Bernard Romans, in A Concise History of East and West Florida (1775), described Indians as unnatural and grotesque, whereas others took great care to observe and record indigenous cultures accurately. John Bartram, in Observations on the Inhabitants, Climate, Soil, Rivers, Productions, Animals (1751), and his son, William Bartram, who wrote of his encounters with Indians of the Southeast in 1791, portrayed the Indians favorably. The trader James Adair, who lived with Cherokees and Chickasaws for forty years, wrote glowingly about Indian law, marriage, and religion in his History of the American Indians (1775). The Virginian Henry Timberlake, in his memoirs of 1765, characterized Cherokee culture as an improvement over British culture. The physician and reformer Benjamin Rush praised Indians for their wisdom in a 1789 essay on Indian medicine. The expedition from 1804 to 1806 by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, commissioned by President Jefferson, and the publication in 1814 of Nicholas Biddle’s history of the expedition, provided a wealth of information about Indians from the upper reaches of the Missouri to the Pacific Ocean. The expedition brought back Indian animal-skin maps, dress, and a host of other artifacts that Jefferson displayed in his Indian cabinet at Monticello. Encountering over fifty tribes, the explorers described Indians as simple savages, culturally inferior to whites and prone to stealing and sexual promiscuity. settlers as to Indians, but other works, such as Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Indian Atrocities (1782), described the Indians as racially inferior to whites and of a wild and brutish nature. John Filson’s The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke (1784) juxtaposed the heroism of Daniel Boone against the undisciplined, indecorous Indians. Many works attested to the social harms of alcohol abuse among the Indians, citing it as the Indians’ path to disappearance. Among them are Franklin’s Autobiography (1784), Benjamin Smith Barton’s Observation on Some Part of Natural History (1787), and Daniel Gookin’s Historical Collection of the Indians of New England (1792), in which the Puritan missionary portrayed Indians as barbarians, decimated by disease. “WORTHINESS” OF THE INDIAN: PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE The founding of the American Philosophical Society in 1743, with Franklin as the first president and Jefferson as a leading member, fostered the pursuit of knowledge in the areas of ethnology and philology. The Moravian missionary John Heckewelder, who became a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1797, chronicled his experiences among the Leni-Lenape Delawares in History, Manners, and Customs of Indian Nations (1819). His commendation of Indian life, except for their refusal to abandon their “heathenism,” became the focus of debates over Indian worthiness. The writers Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper considered the attributes of Indians in their fiction and nonfiction works. In his 1813 essay, “Traits of Indian Character,” Irving criticized the rapacious frontiersmen for breaking treaties and undermining Indian character; he also praised Indians for what he saw as their natural “wildness” stemming from long contact with nature. Cooper’s novel The Last of the Mohicans (1826) extolled the Indian for having conquered the wilderness and passing it on to the white man. In 1829 John Augustus Stone’s popular play Metamora, or The Last of the Wampanoags, based on the life of Metacomet (called King Philip by the colonists), reinforced American fascination with the vanishing “noble savage.” INDIAN EXPENDABILITY AND REMOVAL THE “VANISHING” INDIAN One result of the Indians’ encounter with Americans was the depletion of their populations. War, alcohol abuse, and disease took their toll. Travelers, government officials, Enlightenment philosophers, and missionaries put forth a theory of the vanishing Indian alongside notions of the noble and ignoble savage. Thomas Jefferson, in Notes on Virginia (1781–1782), called Mingo Chief Logan a doomed but, in the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s phrase, “noble savage.” In his Letters from an American Farmer (1782), Michel Guillaume St. Jean de Crevecoeur attributed the violence of the frontier as much to white In 1820 President James Monroe commissioned Jedidiah Morse to tour among the Indians and ascertain the “actual state” of Indian affairs. In Morse’s 1822 Report to the Secretary of War of the United States on Indian Affairs, he pressed for immediate programs OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 92 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 122: AMERICAN INDIANS of “civilization.” Policymakers agreed that the Indians were expendable, but they had serious doubts as to whether the Indians would accept acculturation programs. By 1829 the notion that Indians should be made peripheral to American society had become dominant. Favoring a policy of Indian removal, Lewis Cass, the governor of Michigan Territory and later secretary of war to Andrew Jackson, dismissed Heckewelder’s Indian history and Hunter’s captivity memoir as presenting Indians in too favorable a light; he found The Last of the Mohicans superficial and romantic. Responding to the removalists, William Apess, a Pequot, admonished whites for driving Indians from their ancestral domains in his autobiography A Son of the Forest (1829). Jeremiah Evarts published essays against Indian removal in 1830 under the pseudonym William Penn, invoking the teachings of Penn as they correlated to Evarts’s own beliefs about America’s obligations, both legal and moral, to indigenous peoples. Intellectualizing Indian existence failed to stop the push for Indian removal. The audience for printed materials and collected artifacts of Indian life lived along the East Coast, far removed from the Indians of the interior and the frontiersmen who came in contact with them. By 1829 the frontier voice was a deciding factor in the formation of a policy of Indian removal. Displacement and dispossession followed, and much of the literature by then accepted Indian expendability as a reality. See also American Philosophical Society; Autobiography and Memoir; Fiction; Louisiana Purchase; Racial Theory. BIBLIOGRAPHY Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism. Edited by Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972. Rowlandson, Mary. Narrative of the Captivity, Sufferings, and Removes of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. Boston: Nathaniel Coverly; reprint, 1770. Rush, Benjamin. “Inquiry into the Natural History of the Medicine among the Indians of North America, and a Comparative View of Their Diseases and Remedies with Those of Civilized Nations.” In Medical Inquiries and Observations. 1789. New York: Arno Press, 1972. Rowena McClinton American Indian Policy, 1787–1830 The new American nation developed an Indian policy based on the premise that peace must be maintained. National leaders considered war too expensive, and they feared that harsh treatment of the Indians would blacken the nation’s honor and reputation. By conciliation of the Indians through negotiation, liberal gifts and presents to the chiefs, guarantees of protection against white encroachment, and welldeveloped trade to provide for Indian wants, federal officials envisioned peace and prosperity for both the new Republic and the Indian tribes on the frontiers. Peace, however, was an elusive goal, for white citizens on the frontier were avaricious for land; they had little respect for Indians and their culture, and it was difficult for the government to restrain them. Time and again, serious wars interrupted the peace, which nevertheless remained a constant goal. To meet the challenge of preserving peace while at the same time satisfying the demands of white citizens, the government, in the ethnocentric climate of the times, hoped that the Indians would ultimately accept the cultural patterns of the whites and thus be assimilated into mainstream American society. The Indian problem would disappear if the Indians disappeared, not by extermination but by amalgamation. THE PLAN OF CIVILIZATION Adair, James. The History of the American Indians. 1775. Edited by Kathryn E. Holland Braund. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004. Berkhofer, Robert F., Jr. The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Knopf, 1978. Franklin, Benjamin. Indian Treaties. 1736–1762. Edited by Carl Van Doren and Julian Boyd. Philadelphia: Historical Society of Philadelphia, 1938. ———. A Narrative of the Late Massacres, in Lancaster County, of a Number of Indians, Friends of this Province, by Persons Unknown. Philadelphia: Anthony Armbruster, 1764. Lepore, Jill. The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity. New York: Knopf, 1998. Liebersohn, Harry. Aristocratic Encounters: European Travelers and North American Indians. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Nash, Gary B. “The Image of the Indian in the Southern Colonial Mind.” In The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western The theoretical basis for this hope for assimilation was supplied by George Washington, Secretary of War Henry Knox, and Thomas Jefferson. These officials were men of the Enlightenment, and their views were widely shared. They saw the Indians as brothers moving inexorably from barbarism to civilization, and they were determined to encourage and support the journey. The main embodiment of the principle was a plan of civilization, begun in Washington’s administration and carried on by Jefferson and his successors. Its outline was simple: give the NATION ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN 93
Slide 123: AMERICAN INDIANS INDIAN PEACE MEDALS An important element in federal Indian policy was the distribution of silver medals to Indian chiefs and warriors as a sign of friendship and allegiance. The United States inherited the practice from the British, French, and Spanish; and Indian chiefs expected to get such medals from their new Great Father. During Washington’s administration, officials presented large oval medals, individually engraved. Some small medals with scenes of civilized life were struck in England at Washington’s direction to reward Indians for their acceptance of white ways. Then the government settled on a new form for the medals. Beginning with the Jefferson presidency, the U.S. Mint struck large round medals bearing on the obverse the bust of the president and on the reverse, amid clasped hands and crossed peacepipe and hatchet, a message proclaiming PEACE AND FRIENDSHIP. until 1890. All those before 1850 used the peace and friendship reverse; later medals had reverses designed to promote culture change among the Indians. As Thomas L. McKenney, head of the Indian Office, wrote to Secretary of War John H. Eaton on 21 December 1829: “Without medals, any plan of operations among the Indians, be it what it may, is essentially enfeebled. This comes of the high value which the Indians set upon these tokens of Friendship. They are, besides this indication of the Government Friendship, badges of power to them, and trophies of renown. They will not consent to part from this ancient right, as they esteem it; and according to the value they set upon medals is the importance to the Government in having them to bestow.” The medals are now of interest chiefly to museums and private collectors, who pay high prices for them. In the early Republic they were essential for successful dealings with the Indians. Lewis and Clark presented such medals to Indian chiefs, and the medals were used widely by Indian agents and other American officials. They came at first in three sizes, in order to differentiate chiefs of varying importance. The medals were produced for succeeding administrations (except that of William Henry Harrison) Francis Paul Prucha BIBLIOGRAPHY: Prucha, Francis Paul. Indian Peace Medals in American History. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000. Indians cattle and sheep as private property; supply plows and other agricultural tools (with blacksmiths to keep them in shape); and provide cards, spinning wheels, and looms. Thus would the men be able to support their families by agriculture while the women practiced the arts of domestic manufacture. Once the Indians had adopted these methods of sustenance, they would make their hunting grounds available for white settlers because extensive territories would no longer be necessary for food and clothing. The government sent agents to work among the tribes with instructions to carry out this plan as their primary duty. Indian policy, of course, did not develop in a vacuum, but was influenced by the circumstances of the day. The federal policy grew little by little to meet the exigencies of the times. One problem was land. The United States acknowledged the Indians’ ownership of their lands, but it limited that right to occupation and use, without admitting a fee simple title, which would have allowed the Indians to dispose of their land at will. The federal government paid for lands that the Indians ceded rather than claiming them by right of conquest. And it insisted that the Indians could cede or sell land only to the government, which carefully guarded this right of preemption. Another problem was trade, a primary contact point of the two races in much of the early national period. Goods had long been exchanged between the Indians and the whites, the former supplying furs and peltries, the latter supplying knives, kettles, guns, and other manufactured goods that had become necessities in Indian lives. Unless fraud and corruption could be eliminated from the trade, peace with the tribes was unlikely, and the plan of civilization could not be carried out. TREATIES The concerns that developed over the decades were met in the first instance by formal treaties between the federal government and the Indian nations. By 1789, when the new government under the Constitution began, nine treaties had already been signed OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 94 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 124: AMERICAN INDIANS tribes; Congress appropriated money for gifts and annuities given in exchange for lands; and the signed treaties were sent to the president to be forwarded to the Senate for its approval or ratification, as the Constitution directed. Between 1787 and 1830, 142 treaties of peace and land cession were ratified. By 1830, except for the still-reserved lands of the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole) and some lands in Michigan and Wisconsin, nearly all the territory east of the Mississippi had been freed of Indian title. The treaties, of course, provided much more than peace and land cessions. They regulated trade, promoted civilization, made rules for the detention of hostages and for exchange of prisoners, established procedures for dealing with crimes in the Indian country so that Indians could be deterred from private retaliation, specified the boundaries between white settlements and the Indians, provided annuities and other payment for ceded lands, required passports for entering the Indian country, promised protection by the United States (which the Indians agreed to accept), obtained rights of way for passage through the Indian country, supported education among the tribes, and limited state jurisdiction over Indians. All this supported peace, defined political relations between the United States and the tribes, and promoted the plan of civilization. TRADE AND INTERCOURSE ACTS Jefferson Peace Medal. This silver medal, designed by John Reich, was struck by the U.S. Mint in 1801 in several different sizes. Lewis and Clark carried a supply of Jefferson peace medals on their expedition west from 1804 to 1806. The medals were presented to Indian leaders they met along the way. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. The treaties alone did not maintain the peace between the Indians and the white settlers, who invaded the Indian country and boldly squatted on lands that were protected by treaties. So, beginning on 22 July 1790, Congress, at Washington’s bidding, passed a series of laws “to regulate trade and intercourse with the Indian tribes, and to preserve peace on the frontiers.” These Trade and Intercourse Acts were the key legislation for governing the relations between the whites and the Indians—mainly by establishing norms and sanctions to control the white citizens. The first law was simple: it regulated traders by means of a licensing system, prohibited the purchase of Indian lands by any means other than federal treaties, and provided punishment for crimes against the Indians. Then, as conditions got worse, the legislation was expanded in 1793, 1796, and 1799, and a more comprehensive and permanent law was enacted on 30 March 1802. That law renewed trade regulations, described the boundary line marking the Indian country, specifically forbade invasion of the Indian lands by whites to settle or drive cattle, required passports for entry into the Indian country, NATION with the New York Indians and the southern nations. The Constitution authorized the federal government to regulate commerce with Indian tribes as well as among states and with foreign nations, but it did not specifically mention treaties with Indians. President Washington, however, decided that the forms used in treating with Indians be the same as those used with foreign nations. The use of treaties persisted, despite a somewhat shaky constitutional base. Commissioners were appointed to deal with the ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN 95
Slide 125: AMERICAN INDIANS prescribed punishment for crimes, attempted to eliminate horse stealing, authorized action “to promote civilization among the friendly Indian tribes,” and appointed agents for that purpose. Because failures of enforcement continued, the laws authorized the use of military force to restrain the white violators, and they strengthened the sanctions against the introduction of whiskey into the Indian country. An amendment of 29 April 1816, aimed at British traders from Canada, prohibited foreigners from engaging in the Indian trade, and a law of 25 May 1824 required private traders to carry on trade with the Indians only at specified sites. Congress finally collected this piecemeal legislation and codified it in the Trade and Intercourse Act of 10 June 1834, which endured for the rest of the century. THE FACTORY SYSTEM interests, led by John Jacob Astor of the American Fur Company. Influenced by these men, Congress on 6 May 1822 closed all the factories and turned the trade back to the private traders, although new legislation of the same date tightened the regulations. The government trading houses had fallen victim to the spirit of free enterprise. THE INDIAN DEPARTMENT To ease if not eliminate problems in the Indian trade caused by profit-seeking white traders, many of whom were persons of low character, Congress, pushed by Washington, passed a second series of laws. This legislation, beginning on 18 April 1796, established government trading houses (called factories), which sought to eliminate unscrupulous traders by setting up trading posts owned and operated by the federal government. The intention was to treat the Indians fairly, restrain the use of liquor in the trade, and drive private traders out of the business by underselling them. On 21 April 1806 Congress established an Office of Indian Trade with a superintendent of Indian trade to run the business. It was a noble experiment; the system grew from two factories among the Creeks and the Cherokees at the end of the eighteenth century to a nationwide system that eventually numbered twenty-two houses. The factories were also a civilizing force. Thomas L. McKenney, superintendent of Indian trade from 1816 to 1822, was especially eager to encourage the Indians to accept white ways, and he turned his office into a center for promoting schools and missions among the tribes. Largely at his urging, Congress on 3 March 1819 established an Indian Civilization Fund by appropriating $10,000 annually to “instruct [the Indians] in the mode of agriculture suited to their situation; and for teaching their children in reading, writing, and arithmetic.” McKenney distributed the money to missionary societies, who added their own funds for Indian education. Although the War of 1812 interrupted the work of the factories, the system survived and expanded. Then it was crushed by powerful private fur-trading The complexity of Indian policy after 1800 necessitated a growing bureaucracy to implement it, a corps of men collectively known as the Indian Department. At the top was the secretary of war, whose office was charged with the management of Indian affairs. To assist him in the field were superintendents of Indian affairs monitoring large areas in the West, whose office was often joined to that of territorial governor. Reporting to the superintendents were Indian agents and subagents, who were assigned to specific tribes or groups of tribes and who lived with the Indians. These men enforced the intercourse laws, negotiated treaties, and were ambassadors of the federal government to the Indians. They protected peaceful Indians as well as identified hostile ones. They knew the Indians, understood their needs, and were in general respected by the tribesmen. The system of agents in the early years, however, was haphazard. Not until 1818 did Congress provide funds specifically for agents, and only on 30 June 1834 did a new law finally establish a wellorganized Indian department. Some semblance of an Indian office within the War Department was provided by McKenney while he was superintendent of Indian affairs. Then, on 11 March 1824, soon after the factory system collapsed, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, without specific congressional authorization, established in his department a Bureau of Indian Affairs. McKenney headed the bureau from 1824 to 1830. Correspondence with superintendents and agents passed through his office. He handled the payment of annuities and the distribution of the civilization fund, examined claims arising under the trade and intercourse acts, and took care of financial matters pertaining to Indian affairs. Not until 9 July 1832 did Congress create a commissioner of Indian affairs. The agents in the field cooperated with the trading houses, which were often located near the agencies. They were in close contact also with the commanders of the army troops stationed at crucial spots along the frontiers. Although the military men were directed not to interfere with Indian policy decisions of the agents, and the agents did not command OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 96 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 126: AMERICAN INDIANS the troops, in many cases the lines of responsibility were not clearly drawn. Frequent controversies arose between the two sets of officers, even though both reported to the secretary of war. INDIAN REMOVAL The plan of civilization did not work as rapidly as its promoters had envisioned—and certainly not as quickly as the expanding white population demanded. Even those Indians who had accepted white ways were not likely to be accepted enthusiastically in white society. Many observers feared that Indians along the southern, northern, and western borders of the new nation might aid foreign nations in schemes against the United States. A new and radically different policy for preserving and civilizing the Indians gained acceptance little by little. It called for the exchange of lands in the East for lands in the West and the removal of eastern tribes to areas west of the Mississippi, a policy made feasible by the Louisiana Purchase of 30 April 1803. A small exchange of lands was accomplished with the Cherokees in 1817. Then President James Monroe took up the idea aggressively. In a special message to Congress on 27 January 1825, he advanced his arguments in favor of removal, including the establishment of a government in the West for the Indians. Meanwhile Georgia continued to pursue its intention to free the state completely of Indians. It did not acknowledge the Cherokees’ claims to sovereignty and began to extend state authority over the Indian lands within its boundaries. The issue of the removal of the Cherokees (and of other tribes as well) took on new force when Andrew Jackson became president in 1829. He denied that the Indians were sovereign and independent nations and that they could claim “tracts of country on which they have neither dwelt nor made improvements, merely because they have seen them from the mountain or passed them in the chase.” Either they must become subject to the state or move to the West, where no state or territorial claims existed. There, under the guidance and protection of the federal government and freed from contact with the worst sort of frontiersmen, the Indians could continue their advance toward civilization. Following Jackson’s first message to Congress (8 December 1829), in which he outlined his policy, removal bills were introduced. Bitter debate occurred in Congress and in the public press between those who accepted Jackson’s proposal and religious-minded persons who feared that God would punish the naENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW tion if it did not live up to its treaty obligations. The Jackson party won when Congress enacted a Removal Act on 28 May 1830, which authorized the president to exchange lands west of the Mississippi for Indian lands east of the river and provided funds for the removal. Under that stimulus, despite Supreme Court decisions (Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, [1831] and Worcester v. Georgia [1832]) that supported the Indians’ claims, the Cherokees and other southern tribes were forced to sign removal treaties. In the North removal continued piece by piece in numerous treaties that did not furnish the high drama of southern removal. Federal officials in these early years had mixed motives. They heard the cries of the whites for Indian lands and acquired those lands through treaty after treaty. But at the same time they wanted to act humanely toward the Indians and to ease as much as possible the trauma of displacement. How well they succeeded has been a contested question among historians. Some see the government responding honestly to nearly insoluble problems; others charge Jefferson and similar leaders with hypocrisy and deceit in offering help to the Indians in their public pronouncements but robbing them of their lands and culture by their actual deeds. See also Land Policies. BIBLIOGRAPHY Horsman, Reginald. Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1782–1812. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Prucha, Francis Paul. American Indian Policy in the Formative Years: The Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts, 1790–1834. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962. ———. American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Prucha, Francis Paul, ed. Documents of United States Indian Policy. 3rd ed., documents 1–50. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Viola, Herman J. Thomas L. McKenney: Architect of America’s Early Indian Policy, 1816–1830. Chicago: Sage Books, 1974. Wallace, Anthony F. C. Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. Francis Paul Prucha American Indian Relations, 1763–1815 Indian affairs between the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars in NATION AMERICAN 97
Slide 127: AMERICAN INDIANS 1815 were marked by a stark contradiction. On the one hand, policymakers in London and Philadelphia wrote stirring defenses of Indian rights, especially the right of American Indians to keep possession of their lands in North America. Basic ideas about sovereignty and Indian rights were worked out during this period. On the other hand, the half century between the two grand wars was also the time when the loss of native lands far outstripped the total area of all the lands lost in the 150 years prior to 1763. From a relatively narrow coastal strip of thirteen colonies in 1754 hemmed in on three sides—by the French to the north, the Appalachians to the west, and the Spanish to the south—the English-speaking settlements burst out of their confinement and within four decades claimed sovereignty over North America to the Rocky Mountains. After 1763, American Indian tribes resorted to armed defense of their landholdings in a series of wars during and after the American War of Independence (1775–1783). They suffered serious defeats in the 1780s and 1790s, followed by crushing defeats to Indian nations in the Lower Mississippi Valley, the Ohio Valley, and the central Great Lakes region during the War of 1812 (1812–1815). After every defeat of Indian arms by the United States, and sometimes in between, the United States sought and gained major land cessions from the American Indian nations. THE PROCLAMATION LINE OF 1763 Having defeated the French in the French and Indian War (1754–1760)—the North American phase of the Seven Years’ War—the British in 1760 arrogantly assumed that they had a monopoly of power and trade over the Indians of North America and therefore could command without negotiating. Pontiac’s uprising in 1763, however, disabused the English of that notion. Instead, the British had to reinvent their king, George III, as the Great Father of all the peoples in his North American dominions. But just thirteen years after Pontiac’s War, his own English subjects in the colonies revolted rather than continue to submit to his rule. In this regard, a student of history could consider Pontiac’s uprising against George III as the first American Revolution and the uprising of 1776 as the second. King George’s royal proclamation of a settlement line in North America in October 1763—known as the Proclamation of 1763—is an important, if neglected, document in American history. The king of Great Britain said that his subjects all had their own homelands. His British subjects in North America had their homes in the thirteen colonies on lands east “Horrible and Unparalleled Massacre!” Proponents of removal exploited the fears and racist inclinations of many frontier southerners and westerners who indicated that they would never afford Indians equal status. This illustration from around 1800 accompanied an editorial describing “merciless Savages . . . fatally engaged in the work of death on the frontiers.” © CORBIS. of the Appalachian Mountains; his French-speaking subjects had their homeland in the St. Lawrence Valley downstream from the Great Lakes; and his Indian subjects had their homelands in the lands west of the Appalachian Mountains. In other words, King George divided up his North American sovereign claims into three ethnically based enclaves. In effect, the Proclamation of 1763 introduced the idea of a geographical place called “Indian Country,” an imOF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 98 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 128: AMERICAN INDIANS portant term in law not to be confused with the depiction in Hollywood western movies of Indian Country as outlaw or bandit lands. Indian Country was the king’s designation of lands within Britain’s sovereign North American claims where Indian occupancy of the land was not to be “molested or disturbed” by non-Indians. The king explicitly “reserved” Indian hunting lands for the use of Indians. The king demanded that his Indian children regard him as their Great Father, but he also promised them that they would be protected in their lands against trespassers, invaders, settlers, rum dealers, and other interlopers. Since 1763, the term “Indian Country” has continued to mean the lands that Indian tribes occupy and hold without disturbance or trespassing from outsiders. The king’s settlement line proclamation anticipated that the British could acquire lands from Indian Country but only by an agreement directly between a tribe and the king or his representative, most likely a royal governor. King George III said that this type of agreement shall be held at a “Meeting or Assembly,” that is, at a treaty negotiation. The king’s representative would approach a tribe. A meeting would be held. A mutual agreement would be reached. The Indians would sell their land directly to the king for whatever they could negotiate. After the king took title to his new lands, he could presumably sell those lands to his English “loving subjects,” give them away, or keep them as a royal game park. But the Proclamation of 1763 made it illegal for individual Englishmen to buy lands directly from Indian Country. Land cessions and resistance. Mountains. More significantly for the future, the Fort Stanwix land cession assumed the shape of a sword thrust deep into the center of Indian Country in the Ohio Valley that had the effect of separating the American Indian populations into northwest and southwest nations. To the northwest of the land cession, the Indian tribes held a line on the Ohio River containing the lands north and west of that river to the Great Lakes and to Upper Spanish Louisiana. To the southwest of the land cession, the Indian tribes held a line on the Cumberland River containing the lands south and west of that river to Spanish Florida and Lower Spanish Louisiana. The Shawnee Indians did not accept the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, insisting that the Iroquois Indians who signed the treaty had no authority to cede to the crown the lands of the Shawnees in what would become Kentucky. In the years after 1768, Kentucky was the scene of bloody warfare between the Shawnees and English-speaking settlers. The Shawnees were eventually driven north out of Kentucky and across the Ohio River, but they fought into the 1790s to keep access to their old lands. Further south, in the Tennessee and Cumberland Valleys, the Cherokee Indians resisted English-speaking settlers crossing the mountains into Indian Country. Open warfare broke out between the Cherokees and the militias of Virginia and North Carolina in 1774. Many of the tribes that had fought the British crown in the Seven Years’ War now sided with King George III in his war to suppress the rebellion in the thirteen colonies. Some Indian nations, such as the Mohicans and the Oneidas in the North and the Catawbas in the South, supported the American side in the Revolutionary War, but many more supported the crown. Unfortunately for the American Indians living in an area that became part of Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Virginia, many of the king’s British subjects had moved west of the settlement line. Rather than try to expel the trespassers from Indian Country, the king’s main representative for Indian affairs in North America, Sir William Johnson, worked for four years to obtain a treaty cession from the Indian tribes that would redraw the line between Indian Country and the king’s thirteen English-speaking colonies. In the Treaty of Fort Stanwix of 1768, the Iroquois Confederacy negotiated a major land cession. They sold land that ran from the Upper Delaware Valley southwest through the Susquehanna, Ohio, and Wabash Valleys and then looped back up the Cumberland River Valley to the Cumberland Pass of the Appalachian Mountains. This cession confirmed the existing fact on the ground of a widespread European American population movement to the west of the Appalachian OF THE NEW THE REVOLUTION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES The American Revolution did not erase the concept of an Indian Country with limited sovereignty within a larger sovereign power. Instead, the American Congress simply replaced the crown as that overall sovereign. The Proclamation of 1763 continued to be the basic model for American federal Indian policy. The United States forbade trespassers in Indian Country. It also enacted legislation to regulate trade there. And only the United States, through a treaty, could purchase land from a tribe. The first plan of government for the new United States was the Articles of Confederation, written in 1777 but not ratified until 1781. The Articles perpetuated the basic idea of the Proclamation of 1763, stating that “the United States in Congress assembled shall also have the sole and exclusive right and power of . . . regulating the trade NATION ENCYCLOPEDIA AMERICAN 99
Slide 129: AMERICAN INDIANS and managing all affairs with the Indians, not members of any of the States.” In other words, only Congress, as the sovereign power of the United States upon independence from the crown, had the authority to deal with Indians who were in Indian Country, but not Indians residing in the states. The shift here was subtle but important. Congress would deal with Native Americans in the areas northwest and southwest of the line of the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, and the separate states would have free rein to deal with Indians within their boundaries. Revolution and Confederation. At the same time that the United States fought Great Britain for its independence, the new nation entered into active diplomacy with Indian nations. Most notably, the United States in 1778 signed a treaty with the Delaware Indians residing in the lands northwest of the Fort Stanwix line giving U.S. forces passage through Delaware lands to attack British posts in Indian Country. The United States promised material aid to the Delaware Indians, recognition of the Delawares’ right to their Ohio Valley lands, and most intriguing, the possibility that at some future date, the Delaware Nation could lead an intertribal confederacy and join the United States as a state. Subsequent warfare between U.S. and Delaware forces made that promise a dead letter, but it was significant that the Congress was willing to contemplate a future federation with an intertribal group. The triumph in 1781 of U.S. forces fighting the British in the South caused the latter to seek a negotiated end to the War of American Independence. Negotiations lasted into 1783, with the U.S. diplomats rejecting any acknowledgment of special rights for the crown’s former Indian subjects in the lands that the king acknowledged as the United States. Confederation, and the Northwest Ordinance. Instead, the Constitution had only one direct and one oblique reference to the conduct of Indian affairs. The direct reference stated that Congress shall have the power to regulate trade with the Indian tribes. The indirect reference acknowledged that “Indians not taxed” were outside the American polity and presumably kept their own limited sovereignty within U.S. borders. The Constitution contemplated a continued relationship with American Indian tribes via negotiated and ratified treaties, like the half dozen concluded by the Articles of Confederation government in the 1780s to end wartime hostilities and gain land cessions from northwestern and southwestern tribes. Indeed, after the ratification of the Constitution and continuing until 1871, the United States negotiated and ratified more than three hundred treaties with Indian tribes. By the terms of the Constitution, these treaties were the “supreme law of the land” and continue in the twenty-first century as fundamental elements of American law. DEFEAT OF INDIAN NATIONS After independence the Congress, operating under the Articles of Confederation, further spelled out its Indian policy in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Besides creating a system of government for the trans-Ohio region, the document set out a new Indian policy: “The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and, in their property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress.” The Constitution. Beginning in the early 1790s, the United States engaged in a series of wars against the Indian nations of the Old Northwest and the Old Southwest. The goals of most of the military campaigns were to establish U.S. power and secure Indian recognition of a superior U.S. sovereignty over the lands in the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys, but each campaign in which the United States emerged victorious was accompanied by a treaty demand upon the Indian tribes to cede and relinquish more lands. In the cases where Indian arms prevailed over the U.S. military forces, the Americans regrouped and came back with greater force to prevail and impose their will. The three most significant examples of the ongoing warfare between the United States and the Indian tribes within U.S. borders as recognized under the Treaty of Paris (1783) were the Ohio campaigns of the 1790s, the Indiana campaigns of 1811–1813, and the Alabama campaigns of 1813–1814. Battles of the 1790s. The same year as Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, a different gathering of delegates met in Philadelphia to devise a new constitution. The document approved at the Constitutional Convention contained none of the lofty sentiments found in the Proclamation of 1763, the Articles of U.S. policy toward the lands northwest of the Ohio River in the mid-1780s ran ahead of U.S.-Indian diplomacy. On the one hand, the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 contemplated American settlement of the trans-Ohio region, and soon enough, settlers established communities at Marietta, Gallipolis, and Cincinnati. On the other, the United States had not yet made treaties with the Shawnees and Delawares ceding the lands on the north bank of the Ohio River and upstream on the big tributaries of the Ohio, such OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 100 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 130: AMERICAN INDIANS as the Muskingum, the Scioto, and the Miami. To solidify its claim, the U.S. Army built forts at key points in the interior of Ohio and the American soldiers there prepared for war. The Americans pursued a strategy of destroying Indian villages in 1790 and 1791 on the Upper Maumee River in what became northwestern Ohio and on the Upper Wabash River in latter-day Indiana. U.S. forces overreached, however, in the fall of 1791, and more than one thousand soldiers were cornered in western Ohio, where they were decimated by an intertribal Indian force of Miami, Shawnee, and Delaware Indians during the battles of Harmar’s Defeat (1790) and St. Clair’s Defeat (1791). The complete destruction of General Arthur St. Clair’s army seemed to presage a rollback of American power south all the way to the Ohio River, the line established in 1768 by the Treaty of Fort Stanwix that the Indians insisted was the true border between U.S. lands and Indian Country. In 1794 the U.S. government in Philadelphia decided to send another military expedition to reverse the St. Clair defeat. This force, led by General Anthony Wayne, engaged in a campaign to destroy the intertribal villages in the Maumee and Upper Wabash Valleys. At the Battle of Fallen Timbers (1794), fought upstream from where Toledo would later stand, the U.S. forces defeated the Indian soldiers. General Wayne then compelled the Indian leaders to sign the Treaty of Greenville in the summer of 1795. It established a new boundary line between the U.S. settlements in the southern half of Ohio and the nowreduced Indian Country to the north. Many of the Indian people who had lived in Ohio moved west to the Lower Wabash Valley of Indiana, north among the Ottawa and Potawatomi people in the lower peninsula of Michigan, or northeast into British North America among the intertribal groups on the north shores of Lakes Erie and Ontario. Indian revitalization. In the years after the Indian defeat at Fallen Timbers, some remarkable intertribal movements for religious and political reform began. Some tribes embraced Protestant Christianity, notably the Mohicans, or Stockbridge Indians, whose leaders attempted to form new intertribal arrangements. Other religious leaders among the Indian nations rejected Christian missionaries and their teachings. Starting among the Seneca Indians of New York, Indian religious leaders preached a variety of messages emphasizing the importance of returning to old beliefs in order to reverse the imbalance of power with the Americans. The most inspiring of the new leaders were Tenskwatawa, a Shawnee prophet, and his brother Tecumseh a Shawnee warrior, who built an intertribal community at Prophetstown on the Lower Wabash River in what became Indiana. The Shawnee leaders preached a message of intertribal resistance to the Americans and their ways, and in the years between 1805 and 1811, their views reached thousands of Indians from the Gulf of Mexico to Lake Winnipeg. In the year 1811, territorial militia under Major General William Henry Harrison attacked the intertribal settlement and ignited a general war with the Indians of the Northwest that soon became part of an international war with Great Britain. War of 1812. While mainly remembered for the British burning of the American capital at Washington and for the victory of the Kentucky and Tennessee militiamen against British regulars at New Orleans, the War of 1812 in the Old Northwest and Old Southwest was fought mainly between American regulars and militia on one side and Indian nations with some British militia on the other. Two leaders on the American side emerged as effective generals against Indian forces: Major General Harrison in the Northwest and Major General Andrew Jackson in the Southwest. Under Harrison, American forces defeated Indian soldiers on the Lower Wabash. After an initial loss of the garrison at Detroit, American forces regrouped and took the war into the Indian villages of British North America between Detroit and Niagara. This campaign culminated in the decisive Battle of the Thames in 1813, in which the Americans routed a combined Indian and British force and killed Tecumseh. The power of the intertribal forces under Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa to resist American power in Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan was broken forever. The religious message of cultural revitalization and reform had perhaps its deepest resonance in the Southwest among the Muskogee (Creek) Indians of Alabama and Georgia. The villages of the Muskogee Nation divided in the year 1812 into two camps, one group supportive of revitalization and of opposition to the American settlers in the Old Southwest, and the other willing to coexist with the Americans. The insurgent group of Red Stick Muskogees began a civil war within the Muskogee Nation and soon enough militiamen from Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama joined to make the intratribal fight a battle between nations. Led by General Jackson, the forces of the Tennessee militia in 1814 finally cornered and slaughtered the Muskogee soldiers at the Muskogee settlement of Tohopeka in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. After the fighting ended, Jackson imposed a draconian peace on the entire Muskogee Nation that included the cession of fourteen million acres of land NATION ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN 101
Slide 131: AMERICAN INDIANS in Alabama, including fertile parts of the future Cotton Belt. In the next few years, Jackson imposed similar terms on the other Indian nations of the Old Southwest, thereby opening the way for the dramatic expansion of slave-based plantation agriculture in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. The allied, if fragmented, opposition of the intertribal groups inspired by the Shawnee prophet had one final chance to halt the spread of American settlement and power in the years from 1811 and 1814, and soon after their defeat, the United States turned to a policy of Indian removal from the Old Northwest and the Old Southwest into the lands of the new Louisiana Purchase (1803). See also Creek War; Fallen Timbers, Battle of; French and Indian War, Battles and Diplomacy; French and Indian War, Consequences of; Horseshoe Bend, Battle of; Northwest and Southwest Ordinances; Pontiac’s War; Proclamation of 1763; Revolution: Military History; Thames, Battle of the; War of 1812. Sheehan, Bernard W. Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973. Tanner, Helen Hornbeck et al., eds. Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. James W. Oberly American Indian Relations, 1815–1829 The history of United States–Native American relations between 1815 and 1829 was marked by an ascension of United States military superiority over the Native American nations. It was also marked by the continuation of the federal government’s programs to acculturate Native Americans and bring order to the Native American trade, as well as by the emergence of an American plan to relocate the eastern tribes west of the Mississippi River. GENERAL POLICIES IN 1815 BIBLIOGRAPHY Calloway, Colin G. The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Cayton, Andrew R. L., and Frederika J. Teute, eds. Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Deloria, Vine, Jr., and David E. Wilkins. Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999. Edmunds, R. David. Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership. Boston: Little Brown, 1984. Frazier, Patrick. The Mohicans of Stockbridge. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Martin, Joel W. Sacred Revolt: The Muskokgees’ Struggle for a New World. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991. McLoughlin, William G. Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986. Merrell, James. The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Oberly, James W. A Nation of Statesmen: The Political Culture of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohicans, 1815–1972. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005. Payne, Samuel B., Jr. “The Iroquois League, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 53 (1996): 605–620. Remini, Robert V. Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars. New York: Viking, 2001. Before 1815 the United States adopted policies intended to stabilize its frontiers and provide for the peaceful expansion of the nation. The government recognized the Native American tribes as sovereign nations possessing legitimate title to their land, paid for cessions acquired in diplomatic treaties, and prohibited white settlement on Native American lands without tribal permission. Congress also instituted a “civilization program” to prepare Native Americans for assimilation into the American population. The government included articles to encourage acculturation in its treaties with the tribes, appropriated money to supply Native Americans with farming tools and implements, and posted agents among the tribes to instruct individual Native Americans in their use. The federal government continued the civilization program with uneven success in the period from 1815 to 1829. Of particular note in this era was an act in 1819 in which Congress began appropriating funds for the education of Native American children. Rather than establishing secular schools, however, the government simply channeled the money to Protestant churches and missionary societies. By 1830 over fifty schools had been established in or around the Native American nations. WAR OF 1812 The civilization program was not as successful in achieving assimilation as its exponents had hoped. OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 102 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 132: AMERICAN INDIANS Most white Americans, particularly those on the frontier, refused to accept acculturated Native Americans into their midst on equal terms, and many Native Americans simply did not want to make the transformation required by the program. In some nations, nativist prophets like White Path (Cherokee) and Tenskwatawa (Shawnee) urged their followers to repudiate Anglo-American culture and goods (particularly alcohol) and drive American settlers out of Native American territory. Many Native American communities divided into factions that either accepted or rejected the civilization model. During the War of 1812 the United States eliminated two major Native American uprisings spawned by nativist prophets. In the Old Northwest, American forces under William Henry Harrison destroyed a pan–Native American confederation of tribes led by Tenskwatawa and his brother, the warrior chief Tecumseh. In 1814 troops under Andrew Jackson annihilated a group of nativist “Red Stick” Creek warriors at Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa River. Jackson forced the Creeks to cede some twenty-three million acres to the United States in a treaty at Fort Jackson. American victories over the northwestern confederation and the Red Sticks established U.S. military hegemony over the Native American nations in the East. In the Treaty of Ghent (1814) that ended the War of 1812, the United States promised Great Britain that it would make peace with Britain’s Native American allies and restore their former “possessions, rights, and privileges.” Within months the United States had concluded numerous treaties with the tribes from the Old Northwest at Portage des Sioux (near St. Louis) and Spring Wells (near Detroit). Rather than returning Native American territory, however, the United States immediately set out to acquire more. Jackson became a pivotal figure in the American acquisition of tribal territory. As a U.S. treaty commissioner (1814–1820) he used harsh, if not unscrupulous, means to acquire major cessions from the southeastern tribes. He also played a controversial role in the United States’s acquisition of western Florida. In 1818 Jackson, suspecting that the Spanish were encouraging Seminole attacks on white settlements in southern Georgia, led an army into Florida, attacked the Seminoles, and captured and executed two British traders. Spain surrendered control of Florida to the United States in the Adams-Onís, or Transcontinental, Treaty of 1819 that resolved the conflict; the Seminoles subsequently ceded much of their territory in the Treaty of Gadsden (1823). ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW REGULATING THE NATIVE AMERICAN TRADE Until 1849 (when the Interior Department assumed responsibility), Native American relations, including the regulation of the Native American trade, fell under the jurisdiction of the War Department. The trade had always been a source of income, and trouble, for the United States and its colonial predecessors. The government continued trying to reduce the unrest provoked by unprincipled merchants in the years from 1815 to 1829. Congress required traders to obtain licenses and post bonds and provided punishments for those found guilty of corrupt dealing. These measures supplemented the public factory system (which provided trade goods to Native Americans at cost) that the government had established in 1795 to compete with private traders. As superintendent of Native American trade (1816–1822), Thomas L. McKenney urged the government to continue the factory system and use it to promote civilization, Christianity, and fair dealings with Native Americans. The factory system expanded throughout most of the Native American country until 1822, when John Jacob Astor, owner of the American Fur Company, and other prominent private merchants persuaded Congress to abandon the government’s competing posts. McKenney lost his job as superintendent of trade in the process, but in 1824 Secretary of War John C. Calhoun created the Bureau of Indian Affairs to manage nonmilitary Native American matters and appointed McKenney its first commissioner. In 1832 Congress codified Calhoun’s restructuring of Native American affairs. To intimidate the tribes and prevent them from reestablishing trade and military ties with Great Britain and Spain, the United States built several forts at key river locations on the northwestern and southwestern frontiers after the War of 1812. In 1816 Congress began refusing trading licenses to noncitizens and authorized the president to arrest foreign traders and seize their goods. The federal government also tried, with little success, to eliminate crime and disorder among frontier and Native American communities. The fact that a particular crime could involve Native Americans and whites under state, federal, or Native American territory jurisdiction complicated prosecution. Much of the crime was caused by the widespread availability of alcohol in Native American and American towns. In the Trade and Intercourse Act of 1822, Congress authorized government agents to seize a trader’s inventory if it included alcohol. In 1832 Congress prohibited the sale of “ardent spirits” in Native American country. This proscription was no more successful than the national prohibition declared nearly a century later, NATION AMERICAN 103
Slide 133: AMERICAN INDIANS for the government agents lacked the resources to rein in the private suppliers. leaders began calling for Native American residents to leave their states. Removal proponents also exploited the fears and racist inclinations of many frontier southerners and westerners who indicated that they would never afford Native Americans equal status, regardless of how civilized they became. The situation of the Cherokees offered a clear example of this irony. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the Cherokees developed a market economy, adopted a republican government, and built schools and churches throughout their nation. They devised their own written language, known as Sequoyah’s syllabary, and used it in the publication of their own newspaper. Despite this movement toward the AngloAmerican standard of civilization by the Cherokees, and by the other southeastern tribes as well, most white southerners refused even to entertain the idea that they might assimilate Native Americans in the future. Toward implementation. Between 1817 and 1826 the Cherokees (1817 and 1819), Choctaws (1820), and Creeks (1826) signed cession treaties that included removal articles. The agreements offered Native Americans living on ceded territory the choice of removing to land offered in the West or remaining in the East, taking individual allotments of land, and living as subjects of the state. The treaties promised that the United States would protect the removed Native Americans from attacks and white settlement in their new lands, allow them to maintain their political autonomy, and continue to provide them with material and personnel to prepare them for their eventual assimilation. Similar provisions were included in the general removal treaties signed by the Native American nations in the 1830s. Some of these agreements, including the Cherokee treaty of 1817 (which was negotiated by Jackson), were signed by dissident factions in the face of opposition by the formal tribal government. In order to prevent future illegal cessions, the Cherokee national council enacted legislation formally establishing the land of the nation as property of the people in common and prohibited, upon penalty of death, the sale of tribal territory without its approval. NATIVE AMERICAN REMOVAL After the War of 1812 Jackson and Calhoun urged President James Monroe to abandon the federal government’s policy of recognizing the land title and political sovereignty of the tribes. The United States, they argued, should treat Native Americans as subjects of the state in which they lived. Jackson and state political leaders in Georgia began calling for the federal government to remove the Native American tribes from the southern states. In 1803 Thomas Jefferson had proposed the idea of relocating eastern Native Americans to the Louisiana Territory where, he asserted, they would have time to acculturate free from the trespasses of white settlers. Although a few thousand Cherokees responded to Jefferson’s entreaties and moved west in the years from 1808 to 1810, the vast majority of Native Americans preferred to remain in their ancestral homelands. Georgia’s removal argument was buttressed by an agreement concluded during Jefferson’s administration. In the Compact of 1802, the state had surrendered its territory between the Chattahoochee and Mississippi Rivers to the United States. In exchange, the federal government had promised to extinguish the Native American title in Georgia as soon as it could be “peaceably obtained, and on reasonable terms.” Georgia used this agreement to force the federal government to consider extinguishing the territorial rights of the Creeks and Cherokees who lived within the state’s borders. President Monroe responded that the federal government was not bound by the Compact of 1802, and that while he favored the idea of removing the tribes to the West, he would not force any nation to relocate involuntarily. The motivations of removal proponents were primarily economic and racial. The emerging profitability of cotton agriculture created a tremendous demand for land in the southern “Black Belt,” a fertile crescent that stretched from western Georgia across central Alabama and Mississippi. The cotton boom enticed thousands of white settlers into and around Native American lands in the Southeast. In 1810, for example, 40,000 Americans lived in the Mississippi Territory; by 1830 the population of Mississippi and Alabama, the states formed out of that territory, had increased to almost 450,000. The Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws were very quickly surrounded by white Americans who wanted their land, and as soon as Mississippi (1817) and Alabama (1819) were admitted into the Union, their political John Quincy Adams, who succeeded Monroe, held to the position that the Native Americans would have to consent to any removal proposal. The resistance of the Cherokees, and Adams’s refusal to force them to remove, infuriated the Georgia government. In 1827 George Troup, governor of the state, had become so frustrated by the federal government’s inaction that he threatened to use the state militia to reOF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 104 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 134: AMERICAN INDIANS move the Cherokees and Creeks and promised a war if the federal government interfered. The Creeks tired of Georgia’s unrelenting pressure and signed away their remaining territory in Georgia. The state then turned its attention to the Cherokees, who adamantly refused to concede. On 26 July 1827, the Cherokees adopted a constitutional government and declared their nation an independent, sovereign republic. In subsequent months they called over and over again for the federal government to intervene in the dispute and restrain Georgia’s belligerence. In 1828 the U.S. voters elected Andrew Jackson as president, and the administration of the national government passed into the hands of a man who had been promoting removal for almost a decade. In his first annual message, Jackson warned that the Native American tribes could either remove or fall under the jurisdiction of the state in which they lived. He also called on Congress to enact legislation to remove the eastern tribes. Georgia was emboldened by Jackson’s election and, within weeks of his victory, its legislature had annexed the Cherokees’ lands in the state. In 1829 Georgia extended its jurisdiction over the Cherokees and purported to abolish their national council, court system, and laws. Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee soon followed Georgia’s lead and claimed jurisdiction over the Native Americans in their states. The discovery of gold in the Cherokee Nation in 1829 only exacerbated the desire of whites to move onto Native American land; the Georgia legislature unilaterally seized the strike locations, prohibited Cherokees from approaching them, and established a paramilitary force to harass the Native Americans. Soon thereafter Georgia sent surveyors into the Cherokee Nation, divided its territory into parcels, and distributed them to white state residents by lottery. In 1830 Jackson’s allies in Congress responded to his request and introduced a removal bill. Despite the determined efforts of Jeremiah Evarts, the secretary of the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions, who led public opposition to the bill in New England, and Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, who fought the bill in the Senate, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 passed by slim majorities in both houses. The bill, which Jackson signed into law on 28 May 1830, authorized the president to mark off territory in the West for Native American resettlement and negotiate removal treaties with the Native American nations. The law also authorized the president to reimburse Native Americans for improvements surrendered upon removal and to pay the costs of relocation and resettlement. ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW Native American response. With the passage of the removal bill, the Native American nations had four choices: submit to state jurisdiction, remove, litigate, or fight. In the 1830s different nations chose different courses. The Creeks, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and many tribes in the North reluctantly agreed to remove. The Cherokees, led by their principal chief, John Ross, challenged Georgia’s extension laws in federal court. In Worcester v. Georgia (1832) the U.S. Supreme Court declared the Cherokees a sovereign nation and Georgia’s extension laws unconstitutional. Jackson, however, did not enforce the decision against the state. The Cherokee national council continued to refuse to sign a removal treaty, but in 1835 a dissident group signed the infamous treaty of New Echota, which called for the surrender of all Cherokee lands in the East and the removal of the nation to a territory in the West. In 1838 federal troops entered the Cherokee Nation, rounded up some sixteen thousand Cherokees, and forced them to march to the Indian Territory that Congress had established west of the Mississippi River (in what became Oklahoma). Military resistance failed as well. The Seminoles, Sacs, and Foxes fought bitter wars against the U.S. Army before they surrendered and were forced to remove. Thousands died in the removal migrations, mostly from starvation, malnutrition, exposure, and heartbreak. The Cherokees, for example, who came to refer to the removal as the Trail of Tears, lost over a quarter of their population in the exile; deaths ascribable to the removal crisis may have approached ten thousand among the Creeks. Although most of the removal controversy centered around the Cherokees and the other southern nations, the Indian Removal Act also resulted in the relocation of most of the tribes in the North, including the Cayugas, Delawares, Kaskaskias, Kickapoos, Menominees, Miamis, Ojibwas, Oneidas, Ottawas, Peorias, Piankashaws, Potawatomis, Senecas, Shawnees, Tuscaroras, and Winnebagos. In 1843 the War Department estimated that it had removed almost ninety thousand Native Americans from their homes. See also Adams, John Quincy; Jackson, Andrew; Transcontinental Treaty; War of 1812. BIBLIOGRAPHY Garrison, Tim Alan. The Legal Ideology of Removal: The Southern Judiciary and the Sovereignty of Native American Nations. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002. Green, Michael D. The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. AMERICAN NATION 105
Slide 135: AMERICAN INDIANS Kappler, Charles J., ed. and comp. Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties. 5 vols. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1904–1941. Prucha, Francis Paul. The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. Remini, Robert V. Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars. New York: Viking Press, 2001. Viola, Herman J. Thomas L. McKenney: Architect of America’s Early Indian Policy, 1816-1830. Chicago: Sage Books, 1974. Wallace, Anthony F. C. The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993. Washburn, Wilcomb E., comp. The American Indian and the United States: A Documentary History. 4 vols. New York: Random House, 1973. ful crops, and cooperation among villages. In a controversial stance, the scholar Calvin Martin argues that hunters in southern Canada blamed the spread of European epidemic diseases such as smallpox on the beaver and other animals and subsequently waged war on the animals. All across North and South America, the arrival of Europeans disrupted the native world. New diseases, slaving expeditions, and the introduction of new items (such as alcohol, trade goods, and weapons) forced Indians to adjust their religious lives. RELIGIOUS REVITALIZATION IN INDIAN COUNTRY Tim Alan Garrison American Indian Religions The eras of the American Revolution and early Republic were turbulent times in Indian country. Waves of English and American settlers encroached on Indian lands, epidemic diseases winnowed indigenous populations, and the pangs of dependency— including the increase of the rum trade—gnawed at communities. Religion provided succor for many American Indians during these tumultuous times. Many found new hope and strength in religious revitalization movements that swept the Ohio Valley and Southeast. Others entered, voluntarily or involuntarily, Christian communities and encountered Christian missionaries who promised new hope. The American Revolution profoundly affected the religious experiences of American Indians. American Indian religions were holistic. Ceremonies and worship connected people, nature, and animals. The ceremonies also emphasized harmony and efficacy. Religious practices ensured that hunters found game, that corn, beans, and squash grew plentifully, and that the universe remained in balance. When game disappeared, crops failed, or the universe was out of kilter, it suggested that the ceremonies had failed, been improperly practiced, or ignored, or a combination of all three factors. When such calamities befell the entire community, American Indians refashioned older ceremonies or adopted new ones. Thus American Indian religions were malleable and could incorporate other elements without losing strength. Contact with Europeans affected American Indian religious practice in diverse ways. For instance, some scholars trace the rise of the kachina ceremonies to the dispersal of the Anasazis because of drought and warfare. Kachinas bring rain, plenti- The succession of religious revivals that began in the 1730s in the colonies coincided with a period of intense religious revitalization among American Indians in the Northeast and Southeast. Native prophets such as Neolin, Handsome Lake, and Tenskwatawa preached a message of Indian unity, renewal, and rejection of Euro-Americans. Their messages combined Old and New World religious beliefs and spoke to the issues—disease, excessive alcohol consumption, and war—that affected Indian communities. These religious movements resulted from the changes in Indian country during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Disease and Iroquoian warfare had reduced many native populations, and, in response, surviving Algonquians, Hurons, and Winnebagos formed multitribal villages in the Ohio Valley and along the Great Lakes. These multiethnic villages served as centers of diplomacy, trade, and religious activity throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Witnessing the deleterious effects of disease and trade dependency, shamans called for a rejection of Europeans and their trade goods. In 1737 a prophet told his followers that God told the animals to leave the Susquehanna Valley because Indians had traded furs for alcohol. In 1751 a Delaware woman informed followers that God had made three separate peoples—blacks, whites, and Indians—and that all should have different religions. These prophets, and others like them, outlined the forms of religious expression during this period. First, they preached Indian guilt. That is, Indians were to blame for their current problems (trade dependency, overhunting, and alcohol), but Indian actions (forgoing alcohol, ending trade with Europeans, and giving up European trade items) could correct these issues. Second, they preached a pan-Indian message. All Indians, regardless of tribe, faced similar problems because of English encroachment, such as the pressure on their hunting lands and trade dependency. These OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 106 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 136: AMERICAN INDIANS messages of unity and anti-Europeanism became more salient after the 1750s. The aftermath of the Seven Years’ War (1756– 1763) fueled the shamans’ fire. After the British forced France to withdraw from its North American colonies, British settlers on Indian land in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes prompted conflict between Indian and white settlers on the frontier. France’s absence also left most Indians with only one trading partner—the British. Prices soared, the quality of goods declined, and British traders used rum liberally in their exchanges with Indians. These events laid the groundwork for a wave of religious expression. Sometime after France abandoned its colonies in North America, Neolin, a member of the Delaware tribe who lived at Tuscarawas Town, in present-day Ohio, received a visitor. This visitor told Neolin that before the Europeans arrived the Indians’ path to heaven had been unimpeded. Now, whites blocked the Indians’ path and irrevocably led them to hell. Neolin then began teaching the message of the Master of Life to the Delaware and others. He warned his followers of the dangers of alcohol and advocated that his followers surrender European goods. Neolin also suggested that American Indians were inherently different from Europeans, and thus all Indians should unite to combat English expansion. Neolin’s message was accompanied by the use of the “Black Drink.” Indians brewed this concoction, drank it, and then vomited so as to expel English influences from their bodies. Neolin also preached a message of warfare, predicting that Indians and Europeans would soon engage in battle. Neolin’s message was extremely popular in the Ohio Valley and by the end of 1761 had reached all the Delaware villages in the region. By 1763 Neolin had followers among the Potawatomis in Michigan and Indiana. Among Neolin’s most influential followers was Pontiac, a member of the Ottawas. Pontiac told his followers that the Master of Life disliked the English but liked the French. Thus Indians should attack the English, force them to leave North America, and wait for the return of the French father. The ensuing conflict, Pontiac’s War (1763–1766), fused religious and military messages to unite Indians in the Great Lakes. Indians across the region heeded Neolin’s and Pontiac’s call and lay siege to English forts. Some of these assaults were successful, but Pontiac himself failed to take Fort Detroit, a defeat with symbolic importance. Moreover, the demands of the hunt prevented Pontiac and others from keeping an army in the field year round. The brutal warfare on both sides (including General Jeffrey Amherst’s use of blankets that had ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW covered smallpox patients) ended the rebellion but not the importance of pan-Indian religious movements. Thirty years later, similar social and economic conditions spawned another revival. After the American Revolution, Iroquois prestige and power declined. Between 1763 and 1776, the Iroquois acted as middlemen between the British government and the Indian nations in the Ohio Valley. However, the American ascension after the American Revolution stripped the Iroquois of influence and wealth. The Iroquois ceded large chunks of land to the United States (some of which actually belonged to Ohio Valley Indians) and lost their ability to act as political intermediaries and support their own economies. Subsequently, alcohol consumption in Iroquois country soared. In 1799 Handsome Lake, of the Senecas, lying on what seemed to be his deathbed, received a series of visions in which the Creator instructed him on how to revitalize Iroquoian communities. Handsome Lake’s religious message fused American policy and religion with Iroquoian beliefs. First, he admonished the Iroquois to live at peace with the United States and each other. However, Handsome Lake protested any future Iroquoian land cessions to the United States. Second, he supported the United States’ efforts to teach the Iroquois Euro-American modes of farming and education. Third, he denounced alcohol and sale of Iroquois land. Finally, Handsome Lake preached the return to older thanksgiving festivals. Handsome Lake spread this message throughout the Iroquois nation for the next fifteen years before passing away in an Onondaga town. This religion continues to have adherents among contemporary Iroquois. Similar economic conditions plagued Ohio Valley Indians. After the American Revolution, Shawnees, Miamis, and other Indians reacted against American settlers on their homelands. Little Turtle (Miami) and Blue Jacket (Shawnee) resisted the United States, but Anthony Wayne’s victory at Fallen Timbers (21 August 1794) and the subsequent Treaty of Greenville (1795) forced them to surrender most of modern-day Ohio and Indiana. By 1800 Ohio Valley Indians found themselves deprived of lands on which to hunt and dependent on American traders for much of their livelihoods. In the early nineteenth century, two members of the Shawnee tribe, the half-brothers Tecumseh (1768–1813) and Lelawithika (1768–1834), played a significant role in Indian relations with Americans. Chief Tecumseh attempted to rally Ohio Valley and Southeastern Indians to create a unified army to preNATION AMERICAN 107
Slide 137: AMERICAN INDIANS vent United States expansion. Joining the British side in the War of 1812, he helped them capture Detroit. Behind this military effort to block U.S. encroachment was the religious influence of Lelawithika. In 1805 Lelawithika had a vision in which he visited with the Master of Life, who told Lelawithika to return to earth and preach his message. Lelawithika changed his name to Tenskwatawa, meaning “open door,” and told his followers to throw off European trade items (especially alcohol) and return to older ceremonial practices. Tenskwatawa helped Tecumseh advocate for Indian confederacy, and his message spread to the Shawnees, Ottawas, and Wyandots. In 1808 Tenskwatawa, known among his followers as the Prophet, established Prophetstown, a settlement in modern-day Indiana, to accommodate them. In 1811 William Henry Harrison, governor of the Northwest Territories, marched on Prophetstown. Before Tecumseh left for the Southeast, he warned his brother not to engage Harrison’s troops, but Tenskwatawa ignored his brother’s advice. In Tecumseh’s absence, Harrison’s force defeated Tenskwatawa’s at Tippecanoe in 1811, and Tenskwatawa abandoned Prophetstown. He was discredited in the eyes of his followers and never regained prestige. Tecumseh’s efforts for a pan-Indian alliance also failed. The Southeastern Indians (Choctaws and Creeks) rejected Tecumseh’s call for unity, and he returned to burned-down Prophetstown. Tenskwatawa fled with other Shawnees to the west, and Tecumseh was killed by Harrison’s forces in 1813. During this time, a movement influenced by Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh emerged among the Muscogees in the Southeast. Muscogee shamans called for a rejection of Euro-American trappings, including livestock and alcohol, and a renewal of older ceremonies, such as the Black Drink Ritual and the Green Corn Ceremony. In 1810 some shamans went north and visited Tenskwatawa. However, the efforts of the Muscogee shamans fractured Muscogee society. Some chose to follow American policy and adopted farming and Christianity. Others, known as the Red Sticks for the ceremonial red sticks they carried with them into battle, remained hostile to this way of life. The Red Sticks resisted until 1813–1814, when Andrew Jackson delivered a crushing defeat at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend (27 March 1814). The surviving Red Sticks retreated to the Everglades of Florida and teamed with Seminoles to provide resistance to Jackson and Indian Removal in the 1830s. INDIANS IN CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES During the period of pan-Indian revitalization movements, other Indians lived in Christian communities throughout North America. Some Indians came to the communities voluntarily; others were forced. In the Northeast, Christian missionaries established communities for American Indians. For instance, Moravian missionaries created small communities for their Indian converts. Yet this placed many American Indians in harm’s way. In 1763 in Pennsylvania, residents of Paxton descended on Conestoga, the home of Christian Susquehannocks who had moved to the town and lived under the protection of the colonial government. With passions and fears inflamed by Pontiac’s Rebellion, the so-called Paxton boys attacked and killed six Susquehannocks. The Christian Indians then fled to nearby Lancaster, but the mob followed them there, broke into the warehouse where the Susquehannocks were hiding, and butchered them. Indians who adopted Christianity were not immune to the violence of Indian-hating colonists. A different story emerged in the Spanish territory of California. Spanish officials, fearing British and Russian incursions from the Pacific Northwest, began establishing a series of Franciscan missions in California. Father Junípero Serra established the first mission in modern-day San Diego in 1769, and by 1834 the string of missions reached Solano, just north of San Francisco. The missions were the focal point of Spain’s efforts to defend its northern frontier, which also included presidios (military bases) and pueblos (civilian communities). At the missions, Franciscans sought to transform native ways of life. Soon, Indians replaced wild foods gleaned from hunting, fishing, and gathering with domesticated plants and animals, especially corn and beef. Indians began living in Spanish-style houses and dressing in Spanish-style clothing. Franciscan priests also sought to transform Indian social relations. They required unmarried men and women to live in separate dormitories (often in filthy conditions). They also squelched behaviors that conflicted with Christian morality. At one mission, priests and soldiers discovered a berdache—a man who dressed like a woman—and made him sweep and work in the plaza in the nude. After this punishment, the berdache fled into the interior of California. Religious instruction was an important part of the mission environment, as was religious conversion. Spanish officials gathered Indians in the immediate area of the mission and sometimes sent military expeditions inland to gather potential converts. FranOF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 108 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 138: AMERICAN INDIANS ciscans oriented all aspects of daily life in the mission toward conversion, such as signaling work and prayer times by ringing bells and performing baptisms. Some Franciscans wanted Indians to learn the tenets of Catholicism before baptism, whereas others placed little emphasis on religious knowledge as a prerequisite for baptism. Yet because of California’s isolation, economic factors often overwhelmed the efforts at conversion. Until 1834 most land routes from northern Mexico and New Mexico to California were considered too dangerous to traverse; civilian and military outposts had only sporadic connections with Mexico City and, by extension, Spain. Therefore missions, with their large Indian workforces, strove to be as selfsufficient as possible. Under the direction of the friars, Indians harvested grain, tended cattle herds, and developed artisanal skills, such as leather working and soap making. The missions also traded with presidios and, to a lesser extent, pueblos. These activities left little time for the friars’ efforts to convert the Indians. Because conversions were limited, the Indian religions remained strong and vibrant in the missions. The influx of Indians from the interior of California also helped to maintain traditional Indian religious ways. Shamans continued to administer to followers and heal the sick, and Indian dances persisted. California Indian religions also blended Christian and native traditions. Among the Luiseño, Cupeño, Kumeyaay, and Chumash tribes, a new religion called Chingichngish gained in popularity. This religious expression was named after a cultural hero, manifested as a new creator or a condor, who emerged among the groups. Chingichngish was probably a response to epidemic diseases as well as to mission Indians who fled the Franciscan communities and brought tenets of Christianity inland. Indian participants, however, were extremely secretive about their practices and hid their religion from the Franciscans. For many California Indians, living in missions meant death. On average, Indians survived only twelve years of mission life. Between 1769 and 1834, California’s Indian population declined by almost one-third. Yet, unlike Spanish mission efforts in New Mexico and Texas, a large population in the interior of California provided ready sources of new converts and workers. Spanish soldiers made frequent forays into the San Joaquin Valley to capture gentiles (unbaptized Indians) and bring them back to the mission. ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW Poor living conditions and an influx of gentiles fostered discontent among the Indian population. Priests and soldiers attempted a number of methods of social control. When Indians committed criminal offenses, priests flogged Indian converts or put them in stocks. When priests considered crimes too egregious, Spanish officials executed Indians. In response, California Indians participated in a variety of resistance strategies. Many Indians ran away from the missions, sometimes for a few days, sometimes permanently. Other California Indians participated in open rebellion. In 1824, members of the Chumash tribe near Santa Barbara rose up, attacked, and occupied Mission Santa Barbara and Mission La Purisima. CHRISTIANS COME TO INDIANS After the American Revolution, the architects of federal Indian policy debated what to do with the Indians living in the Ohio Valley and the Southeast. Anglo-Americans agreed on expanding onto Indian land; they disagreed on how to treat Indians living there. President George Washington, Secretary of War Henry Knox, and others decided the best way to ensure peaceful relations with Indians and open land for settlement was through the process of teaching Indians the rudiments of Euro-American farming, education, and religion. Toward this end, missionaries from a number of denominations, including Moravians and Presbyterians, descended on Indian communities in the Ohio Valley and Southeast. Some tribes, including the Cherokee, invited the missionaries. The Cherokees had endured a tumultuous history since the Seven Years’ War. Between 1760 and 1790, Cherokees had fought in all major conflicts and subsequently suffered from economic and political dislocation. In an effort to heal internal wounds and adapt to new circumstances, some Cherokees asked for Moravian and Presbyterian missionaries, primarily to teach school. Between 1811 and 1813, the influx of Christian missionaries and EuroAmerican ideas precipitated a Cherokee revival. Prophets attempted to direct and control social change. Some advocated expelling all Americans and American influences; others thought that the Cherokees should expel Americans but let their trade goods remain; and still others thought that the Cherokees should allow a few more Americans to enter their communities, but no more than were necessary. As with other contemporaneous religious movements— such as those of Tenskwatawa and the Red Sticks— the Cherokee religious revival blended EuroAmerican and Cherokee religious traditions. Some NATION AMERICAN 109
Slide 139: AMERICAN INDIANS messages spoke of God and Heaven while at the same time proposing to minimize the influence of American culture. Although the Cherokee religious revival paralleled Tenskwatawa’s, they were not affiliated. Still, many Americans, including the missionaries living in Cherokee territory, feared this movement and wanted the Cherokees to demonstrate their loyalty. During the Red Stick War (1813–1814), five hundred Cherokees enlisted with Andrew Jackson’s force and helped defeat the Red Stick Creeks at Horseshoe Bend. Between 1750 and 1815, warfare, epidemic diseases, and trade dependency forced American Indians to make difficult adjustments. In new religious expressions, American Indians sought to mediate these changes. Some, such as Neolin, Handsome Lake, and Tenskwatawa, fused Christian and native religions to support a pan-Indian effort to block American westward expansion. Others, such as the Susquehannocks, California Indians, and Cherokees, experienced Christian missionary efforts. Franciscans, Moravians, and Presbyterians descended on their communities and attempted to change the Indians from the inside. Yet throughout this period Indian religious expressions remained strong and vibrant. Handsome Lake’s religion, Chingichngish, and others blended Christianity and native beliefs to make sense of a new world. These types of religious expressions would continue into the twentieth century, with the Ghost Dance and the Native American Church. See also Horseshoe Bend, Battle of; Moravians; Pontiac’s War; Presbyterians; Revivals and Revivalism; Tippecanoe, Battle of. BIBLIOGRAPHY Salisbury, Neal. “The Indians’ Old World: Native Americans and the Coming of Europeans.” William and Mary Quarterly 53 (1996): 435–458. Wallace, Anthony F. C. The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca. New York: Vintage, 1972. Weber, David. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. William J. Bauer, Jr. American Indian Removal The process of pushing indigenous tribes westward long predated Andrew Jackson and his oft-maligned Indian Removal Act. Every time since 1607 that native peoples had their land seized or purchased by the European invaders of North America, they had to find new habitations and hunting grounds. By 1776 they had been pushed well away from the Atlantic coast, and the new United States authorities soon determined to reduce the tribes’ remaining landholdings through a process of negotiation and purchase conducted, after 1789, by the federal government. By 1820 this process had successfully extinguished the Indian title throughout most of the North, compelling most indigenous peoples to migrate farther west or north into Canada or restricting those that remained to reservations of very limited size. In the South, native tribes signed over thirty land-cession treaties between 1789 and 1820, but the situation there proved more complex and contentious. Since 1789 the federal government had always been willing to envisage native people remaining as residents in the eastern states if they would accept “civilized” standards. Those standards required behaving as individuals rather than as members of tribes and becoming farmers rather than hunters— which would mean that Indians needed less land. This policy, backed by congressional appropriations after 1802, had its greatest successes among the most agricultural, settled, politically sophisticated, and numerous tribes—the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole—but, ironically, the “civilization” program made them ever more determined to retain their ancestral lands. In 1820 these “civilized” tribes still held the title to fifty million acres in the South, including large tracts of Georgia and Alabama and more than half of Mississippi, and their rights were recognized by existing treaties with the United States. OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION Deloria, Vine. God Is Red: A Native View of Religion. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1973; reprint, New York: Fulcrum Publishing, 2003. Dowd, Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Edmunds, R. David. The Shawnee Prophet. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985. Jackson, Robert, and Edward Castillo. Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. Martin, Calvin. The Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Martin, Joel. Sacred Revolt: The Muskogees’ Struggle for a New World. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991. McLoughlin, William. Cherokees and Missionaries, 1789– 1839. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984. 110 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 140: AMERICAN INDIANS 0 0 200 Ottawa Menominee Potawatomi Winnebago Sauk, Fox Omaha Pawnee Kansa Kaskaskia Shawnee Miami Ojibwa 200 400 km 400 mi. ME NH MA Iroquois NY RI Wyandot Delaware PA NJ DE MD CT VA N Indian Territory Osage Cherokee Chickasaw Choctaw Creek Catawba NC SC ATLANTIC OCEAN Seminole citizenship rights to those Indians who wished to remain as individual landowners. By 1824 the parties had come to an impasse: the speed of white encroachment on Indian lands made conflict likely, while the survival of tribal authority could not be fitted within the federal system without undermining state rights. On 24 January 1825 Monroe announced the first comprehensive removal plan, designed to move all the tribes—except those Indians who chose to remain as individuals—beyond the damaging influence of white men to lands across the Mississippi that would never be encroached on. The Senate approved the plan, but it failed in the House, many of whose members objected to a plan that seemed designed to encourage the internal expansion of the slave economy. Gulf of Mexico Spanish Terr. POLITICS OF REMOVAL, 1824–1830 American Indian Removal Land ceded before 1784 Land ceded 1784–1819 Routes of removal Indian Territory boundary THE REMOVAL POLICY, 1817–1825 The policy of persuading Indians to exchange their lands in the East for specific permanent grants of federal land across the Mississippi was first proposed by President Thomas Jefferson in 1803 but was not officially adopted until the presidency of James Monroe. His administration continued the “civilization” policy, but insisted that any tribe that refused to surrender tribal independence and adopt individual landownership must be encouraged to emigrate westward. The lands they would receive were not barren wilderness but desirable farming areas on the fringes of the prairies. In 1817 the first treaty was signed by which a tribe was explicitly offered federal land west of the Mississippi if it would agree to emigrate, and in 1818 some six thousand Cherokees moved west at the War Department’s expense, as did some Choctaws in 1820. However, the policy of buying up the Indians’ lands piecemeal broke down in 1822 when the Cherokees and Creeks declared their determination not to remove, made land sales punishable by death, and even began to question the authority of the state they lived in. Any temptation to give up tribal authority and assimilate as individuals was in any case eliminated when the southern states refused to grant ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW By now the issue had begun to affect presidential politics. In the 1824 election most southwestern states overwhelmingly backed Andrew Jackson because of his leadership in crushing hostile Creeks in 1813– 1814 and 1818 and securing huge land cessions. The successful candidate, John Quincy Adams, accepted the removal policy, but insisted that emigration must be voluntary and treaty rights respected. Georgia pointed out that in 1802 it had surrendered its claims in Alabama in return for a federal promise to extinguish the title of Indian tribes in Georgia as soon as practicable; in 1826, finally losing patience, Georgia began to survey lands not yet legally ceded by the Creeks. In January 1827 Adams’s Secretary of War, James Barbour, threatened to use the army to uphold existing treaties, and Governor George M. Troup retorted that Georgia would repel all armed invaders. The Cherokees compounded this contest of constitutional authorities when they adopted their own constitution in July 1827, in effect creating a state within a state. Even the Adams administration recognized that removal would dissolve this impasse and prevent the possible destruction of the Georgia Indians. In the late 1820s Congress debated an Indian removal bill, but its proponents divided as to whether the new Indian lands should be established as a formal territory, with a locally elected legislature. The impasse helped make Jackson overwhelmingly popular in Georgia and the southwestern states, where local whites coveted the Indians’ lands and feared their possible support for rebellious slaves. When Jackson came to power, he threw all his influence behind securing a removal act. As passed on 28 May 1830, the act authorized the assigning of federal lands across the Mississippi to the tribes “forever” in return for their lands in the East, and providNATION AMERICAN 111
Slide 141: AMERICAN INDIANS ed a half-million dollars to pay for the improvements Indians had made to their lands as well as the costs of transport and subsistence for the first year in the West. Treaties for removal were still supposed to be negotiated freely and removal to be entirely voluntary, but in practice Jackson refused to protect the Indians against the governments of the states they lived in, and various southern states passed laws extending their laws over the tribes. Decisions of the Supreme Court striking down such measures could not be enforced, and most tribes quickly accepted the inevitable. By 1836 almost all the tribes east of the Mississippi, including most northern tribes, had agreed to remove to lands assigned to them west of the ninety-fifth meridian. Of the more reluctant, the Florida Seminoles fought on, retreating ever deeper into the Everglades, while about four thousand Cherokees died when forcibly moved west in 1838-1839 on what became known as the Trail of Tears. This tragedy was compounded by the fact that the lands across the Mississippi promised “forever” would in time be themselves lost, as white settlers moved west seeking land. See also Expansion; Florida; Georgia; Jackson, Andrew; Land Policies; Monroe, James. BIBLIOGRAPHY A WAR FOR INDIAN INDEPENDENCE Many Indians fought in the Revolution, most of them on the side of the British. In joining they acted less out of loyalty to the king than from an awareness that American settlers threatened their land and freedom. Some Cherokees, for example, saw the Revolution as an opportunity to punish squatters and regain territory lost to Virginia and the Carolinas over the previous decade. Against the advice of older leaders, Cherokee warriors began raiding backcountry settlements soon after the start of the conflict. In the Ohio Valley, Delaware and Shawnee leaders at first tried to keep their people neutral. Americans, however, treated both tribes as enemies, and soon Delaware and Shawnee warriors accepted British offers of alliance. For the Iroquois Six Nations, the Revolution became a civil war. The Mohawks, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas joined the British, whereas the Oneidas and Tuscaroras sided with the Americans. The Revolution brought terrible destruction to Indian country. In the South, Americans responded to Cherokee raiding with punitive expeditions that burned crops and villages and drove whole communities into flight. In the North, Britain’s Iroquois allies suffered similar forays, including John Sullivan’s infamous 1779 raid, in which Americans burned some forty Iroquois towns. Yet for all of the damage, the fighting was inconclusive. When invading armies left, native people often returned, and in 1783 Indians still controlled most of the interior. The Treaty of Paris, signed that year, ended the Revolutionary War and granted the United States all territory east of the Mississippi, but from an Indian perspective this was a fraud. The British had no right to give away these tribal homelands. Americans claimed the interior, but Indians possessed it. In those circumstances, conflict was bound to be renewed. INDIAN UNITY AGAINST THE NEW REPUBLIC Cotterill, R. S. The Southern Indians: The Story of the Civilized Tribes before Removal. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954. Horsman, Reginald. Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783–1812. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Sheehan, Bernard W. Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian. Chapel Hill: University Press of North Carolina, 1973. Wallace, Anthony F. C. The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993. Donald J. Ratcliffe American Indian Resistance to White Expansion North American Indians had been accustomed to dealing with Europeans long before the United States came into existence. For two centuries Indians traded, intermarried, allied with, and fought against the various groups of newcomers. The people of the United States, however, represented something new in their seemingly limitless appetite for Indian land. For many native people, a long struggle to contain this aggressively expansionist nation consumed the eras of the Revolution and new Republic. Soon after the Revolution ended, the United States began pressuring tribes for land cessions. Believing they were dealing with conquered peoples, American treaty commissioners tried to dictate new territorial borders. They worked to gain possession of Indian country piece by piece, signing agreements with single tribes and, if that failed, with particular factions or individuals. American citizens, meanwhile, pushed westward, with settlers and land speculators ignoring any and all boundaries. In response, northern Indian leaders attempted to unite their peoples in common defense. The Mohawk Joseph Brant, the Shawnee leader Blue Jacket, and others built a multitribal alliance, rejecting the earlier treaties and inOF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 112 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 142: AMERICAN INDIANS sisting that future land cessions be made only with the tribes’ unanimous consent. In 1786 they informed Congress that they wanted the Ohio River to be a firm boundary between the new Republic and the Indian nations. That arrangement, they suggested, would be fair to everyone and would promote peaceful coexistence. If the Americans continued to demand land beyond the Ohio, however, the united tribes would fight for their homes. Confederation was not a new strategy. Before the Revolution, Indians had attempted similar alliances, the most famous being the movement named for the Ottawa leader Pontiac. In 1763 this coalition of Great Lakes and Ohio Valley tribes attempted to rid the Northwest of the British. Indians seized seven military posts and killed some 2,500 soldiers and settlers before disease and the British army broke the “rebellion.” The confederacy of the 1780s reflected what was, by then, a well-established political tradition. The Indians’ effort to contain American expansion led to war, and for a time the confederacy had the better of the fighting. On two occasions multitribal forces led by Blue Jacket and the Miamis’ Little Turtle defeated invading American armies—in 1790 near modern-day Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the next year in northwestern Ohio. In the wake of those victories, however, the confederacy began to splinter, as some leaders (among them Joseph Brant) advocated negotiation over continued war. In 1794 General Anthony Wayne led a third invasion, besting an outnumbered Indian force at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in northwest Ohio. That defeat broke what was left of the Indian alliance, and in 1795, in the Treaty of Greenville, tribal representatives assented to large new land cessions in return for American promises that their remaining territory would be secure. Few Indians accepted the logic of the civilization campaign. They adopted specific elements of EuroAmerican cultures that they found attractive, but they seldom sought the kind of wholesale transformation desired by agents and missionaries. Some Indians, meanwhile, responded to cultural pressure by actively rejecting white ways. This resistance often took religious form. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, prophets appeared in many tribes, holy men who taught that the acceptance of Euro-American culture had weakened the Indians and angered the Creator. Indians needed to purify themselves, casting away at least some foreign practices and ideas, if they were to restore order to their lives and communities. Together, the prophets represented an ongoing Indian effort to regain spiritual power and autonomy in a world unbalanced by colonization. Although some prophets opposed warfare, others played crucial roles in maintaining the armed defense of Indian land. Pontiac’s movement, for example, drew inspiration from the Delaware prophet Neolin. Something similar occurred in the early nineteenth century with the last, and most famous, effort to create an Indian confederacy. Like other holy men before him, the Shawnee Prophet, Tenskwatawa, taught that Indians must reject EuroAmerican religion, goods, and economic practices if they were to regain the favor of the Creator. This message, which he began preaching in 1805, won him followers from a variety of northwestern tribes. Tenskwatawa’s brother, Tecumseh, shaped that religious revival into a new movement for Indian unity. Like the previous generation of leaders, he urged an end to land cessions and criticized chiefs who continued to sign American treaties. He traveled throughout the interior, inviting tribes to join together to restrain the United States. As in the 1790s, the effort to create an Indian confederacy ended in war. In 1811 an army led by William Henry Harrison marched against Prophetstown, Tenskwatawa’s village, while Tecumseh was away. In the Battle of Tippecanoe, the prophet’s followers ambushed the Americans as they camped near the village; but Harrison’s troops drove the attackers back, forcing the Indians to abandon Prophetstown. The following year, the Indians’ conflict with the United States merged with the War of 1812. Tecumseh allied with the British, hoping to use the war to end American expansion. The Indians enjoyed some military success, but when the fighting closed the United States retained possession of the Northwest. Tecumseh himself was killed in 1813 at NATION PROPHECY AND RESISTANCE While white farmers sought to take Indians’ land, other Americans pursued their minds and souls. Missionaries, teachers, and government agents worked to “civilize” native peoples, urging them to change their economies and abandon their religions and languages. The men and women involved in this effort assumed that when confronted by a “superior” society, Indians would be destroyed if they did not join the new order. They also anticipated that as Native Americans discarded their old ways they would become willing to part with much of their land. The eradication of Indian cultures, they believed, would promote the growth of the Republic while rescuing native people from annihilation. ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN 113
Slide 143: AMERICAN INDIANS the Battle of the Thames in southeast Ontario. With his death, and in the absence of a British victory, the last movement to create an eastern Indian alliance unraveled. DIFFERENT STRATEGIES In the South several tribes adopted a different path. As Tecumseh worked to form a confederacy, Cherokees began building a centralized political system for their tribe. This was partly a response to American land hunger. Tribal leaders hoped that a strong national government would prevent individuals and faction leaders from negotiating their own treaties. It also reflected the Cherokees’ accommodation to Euro-American culture. By the 1810s and 1820s, many Cherokees had adopted at least some of their white neighbors’ ways, in particular economic activities such as raising livestock and spinning cloth. A segment of the tribe, meanwhile, undertook a more thorough change, entering the market economy as owners of businesses and plantations and seeking Euro-American education for their children. This latter group led the move toward political centralization, although often with the agreement of more traditional Cherokees. The culmination of the trend came with the framing of the 1827 Cherokee Constitution, which created a government modeled on that of the United States and declared that government to be the only authority capable of selling Cherokee land. Creeks likewise began centralization, particularly after the Creek War of 1813–1814. The national council took control of tribal law, drafting and enforcing national statutes. Politics, however, remained far more decentralized than among the Cherokees, and the Creeks did not adopt a national constitution until the 1860s. By the 1820s the Cherokees had become one of the most important targets of the removal policy, the United States’ campaign to persuade the major eastern tribes to trade their lands for new homes west of the Mississippi. The state of Georgia demanded, with increasing fervor, that the federal government end Indian possession of land within its borders, citing an 1802 agreement in which the federal government had promised to do just that. Federal officials urged the Cherokees to cooperate, offering them new lands and pledges of future security, and some did choose to migrate. By the 1820s, however, those who remained were determined to preserve their homes, and the United States faced the choice of either reneging on its promise to Georgia or violating its treaties with the Cherokees in order to force the tribe out. The balance in this standoff tipped in Georgia’s favor with the presidential election of 1828. Andrew Jackson was a longtime advocate of the removal policy, and Georgia’s leaders took his victory as an invitation to force their claim to Cherokee land. Soon after the election, the state legislature passed an act to absorb tribal territory into existing Georgia counties. It then extended state law over the Cherokees and established a process to parcel out the tribal lands to Georgia citizens. The Cherokees responded by asking the federal government to protect the tribe, as promised in the treaties. The new president, however, refused to act. Some in the South expected violence, but the Cherokees chose different methods of resistance. Led by Principal Chief John Ross, they lobbied Congress, seeking allies among Jackson’s political opponents. They conducted what modern Americans would call public relations campaigns, appealing in particular to opinion in the North. They received aid in these efforts from reformers and philanthropists, including missionaries with ties to the tribe. Using the Cherokees’ reputation as “civilized Indians,” Ross and his allies argued that the Cherokees had done everything Americans ever asked and wanted only to be left unmolested to continue their progress. When the Jackson administration ignored their appeals, they sought to compel federal action through the Supreme Court, a strategy that resulted in two of the most important cases in Native American legal history: Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832). In the second of these cases, Chief Justice John Marshall affirmed the Cherokees’ right to self-government and acknowledged that, under the treaties, the federal government had a duty to protect the tribe from Georgia and its citizens. The Cherokees won the day in court, and they gained a great many sympathetic allies. They did not, however, defeat Georgia and Jackson. The president ignored the Supreme Court’s decision, and his lieutenants continued to press the Cherokees for a removal treaty. In this increasingly desperate situation, some Cherokees broke with the tribal government and began to advocate emigration. In 1835, arguing that the battle had been lost, this “Treaty Party” negotiated and signed a removal agreement. The Cherokee government continued to resist, leaders insisting (correctly) that the Treaty Party did not represent the tribal majority. In 1838, however, federal troops began to implement the agreement, gathering Cherokees together for the long journey west. By the time the last group arrived in Indian Territory (today, eastern Oklahoma) in early 1839, at least OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 114 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 144: AMERICAN INDIANS four thousand Cherokees had died either in camps prior to departure or while traveling the “Trail of Tears.” In the end, the Cherokees, like Tecumseh’s confederacy, failed to keep Americans at bay. In the twentieth century, however, it would be the Cherokees’ methods that would help Native Americans regain some of their property and autonomy. Political organizing, public relations, and the law would be the weapons of the new warriors. See also Expansion; Fallen Timbers, Battle of; Jackson, Andrew; Marshall, John; Missionary and Bible Tract Societies; Pontiac’s War; Proclamation of 1763; Prophecy; Thames, Battle of the; Tippecanoe, Battle of; Treaty of Paris. of this dramatic act of defiance, which became a touchstone for the Revolution and a powerful symbol of burgeoning American nationalism, cannot be understood fully without considering the richly layered history of the Indian as icon in American history. When the Sons of Liberty chose to disguise themselves as Mohawks for the Boston Tea Party, they called into play a wide range of meanings associated with the figure of the Indian. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, European iconography commonly represented America as an Indian Queen. Such imagery suggested the wealth and availability of the New World along with hints of savagery (usually represented by club or bow and arrows) that indicated both the Indians’ need for civilization and their formidable strength to resist. American colonists adapted existing iconography to a variety of new purposes. The seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, for example, features an Indian woman who pleads, “Come Over and Help Us.” The Diplomatic Medal designed for President George Washington in 1790 represents the new nation with the figure of an Indian woman seated on bales and barrels signifying American natural resources transformed into items of commerce. The cornucopia she offers to Mercury (god of commerce) reinforces the effort to link the national destiny to the rich potential of the land, and to associate both with the figure of the Indian. During the years of the Revolution, the Indian Princess was often used by English and American political cartoonists to represent the American cause. Political artists emphasized the Princess’s relationship to Mother Britannia, the vulnerability of the daughter, and the Indian’s commitment to liberty. Paul Revere’s 1774 engraving (copied from a British cartoon) shows America victimized by parliament as Britannia looks away in shame. Other cartoons foreground the Indian’s savage strength and love of liberty as representative of American resistance. For example, “Liberty Triumphant” (1774) features an Indian Princess with arrow drawn, leading the attack against England as she cries, “Aid me, my sons, and prevent my being Fetter’d.” A follower reaffirms, “Lead on to Liberty or Death.” After the Revolution the symbolic uses of the Indian became more complex. The continuing popularity of Indian captivity narratives reinforced a vision of the Indian as ferocious savage. During the Whiskey Rebellion, backwoods settlers of Pennsylvania dressed as Indians staged violent protests against the 1791 excise tax on whiskey while more peaceful NATION BIBLIOGRAPHY Calloway, Colin G. The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Champagne, Duane. Social Order and Political Change: Constitutional Governments among the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, and the Creek. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992. Dowd, Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. ———. War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Edmunds, R. David. The Shawnee Prophet. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. McLoughlin, William G. Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986. Perdue, Theda. Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Perdue, Theda, and Michael D. Green, eds. The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford Books, 1995. Sugden, John. Tecumseh: A Life. New York: Holt, 1998. Andrew Denson American Indians as Symbols/Icons On the evening of 16 December 1773, 150 American patriots dressed as Mohawk Indians ran through the streets of Boston and down to the wharves, where they spent the next three hours dumping tea into Boston Harbor to protest the Tea Act. The meaning ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN 115
Slide 145: AMERICAN INDIANS The Widow of an Indian Chief (1789). The noble and vanishing Indian, as seen in this engraving by John Raphael Smith after Joseph Wright, became a dominant trope in representations of Native Americans. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. groups published their demands in an “Indian Treaty” printed in the Pittsburgh Gazette in 1794. During the same period, fraternal organizations such as Tammany societies or the Order of Red Men provided citizens of the new nation a means to forge communal bonds and to assume new roles as they experimented with the values and meanings that would distinguish a new, distinctively American identity. The Indian continued to be associated with the potential of the new nation, as is evident in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785). To refute the theory of the eighteenth-century French scientist Count de Buffon, who argued that the American environment produced degeneration in all organisms including man, Jefferson offered a picture of the Indian as noble savage representing an earlier but not inferior manifestation of human development. As an illustration of the Indian’s superior ora- torical skills, Jefferson printed Chief Logan’s famous speech, which concludes, “Who is there to mourn for Logan?—Not one.” The conjunction of noble and vanishing Indian embodied by Logan was to become a dominant theme in representations of the Indian during the nineteenth century. From Washington Irving’s “Traits of Indian Character” (1814) to James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) to the legal and political rhetoric shaping American Indian policy, the disappearance of the noble Indian was lamented even as it was embraced as an inevitable and natural process. In countless novels, plays, and speeches mourning “the last of the tribe,” Americans imagined themselves as heirs to the noble American qualities embodied by the doomed and vanishing Indian. OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 116 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 146: AMERICAN INDIANS The figure of Pocahontas provided a particularly appealing version of the noble Indian, whose nobility is best evidenced by her willingness to sacrifice herself to the cause of “civilization.” In the original story introduced by Captain John Smith in A General History of Virginia (1624), Pocahontas risks her own life to save Smith, then serves as protectress of the colony by warning of impending attack and providing food in times of scarcity. During the years following the Revolution, this image of Pocahontas as patron saint of the fledgling nation became the basis for a powerful nationalistic myth of origins. John Davis was one of the first to popularize the myth in The First Settlers of Virginia, an Historical Novel (1805). Numerous poets, playwrights, and artists followed his lead, thereby contributing to the elevation of Pocahontas to national hero. The artwork installed in the Capitol during the early nineteenth century illustrates the role of the Indian as national symbol. Above each of the four doors of the Capitol rotunda is a relief sculpture depicting the role of Indians in American history. Two of the four scenes picture peaceful interactions— William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians (Nicholas Gevelot, 1827) and the Landing of the Pilgrims (Enrico Causici, 1825)—while The Preservation of Captain John Smith by Pocahontas (Antonio Capellano, 1825) focuses on the moment when violence is interrupted by the Indian’s intercession for peace. The fourth sculpture offers a very different vision of the Indian’s role in national history. In the Conflict of Daniel Boone and the Indians (Enrico Causici, 1826–1827), Indian and white man are locked in battle, each resting a foot on a dead (or dying) Indian. Together the sculptures make clear that the confrontation with the Indian—whether imagined as noble or savage, compliant or resistant—constitutes the symbolic ground upon which the identity of the new American nation was forged. See also Art and American Nationhood; Nature, Attitudes Toward; Whiskey Rebellion. BIBLIOGRAPHY Scheckel, Susan. The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Susan Scheckel American Indian Slaveholding American Indians forced other humans to labor in at least three distinct forms in the colonial and antebellum eras. First, Eastern Woodlands societies and other Native American cultures customarily practiced “mourning war”—combat initiated to avenge or replace lost kin. When a war party took captives, the prisoners could be tortured to death to alleviate the sadness of those who had lost relatives in battle, adopted to replace a dead family member, or held by a family in an ambiguous position between death and adoption as a form of servant. Eastern Woodlands peoples did not hold these individuals as capital investments. Instead, the captives assisted their “owners” with subsistence and domestic chores and were treated as a distinct class of people beyond the protection of a clan. In the Pacific Northwest, the Tlingkits, Modocs, Chinooks, and other peoples of the region captured and purchased slaves from rival tribes. Native Americans in the region were motivated by the desire to enhance their position in the community and occasionally gave their slaves to others to demonstrate their wealth. Some peoples in the Pacific Northwest practiced the ritual murder of slaves; when a chief died, his slaves were executed and buried with the corpse. American Indians participated in a second form of forced labor when Europeans arrived in North America. Spanish conquistadors and French and English colonists captured Native Americans and forced them to carry burdens and work in their mines, missions, and fields. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, merchants working out of the English colonies of Virginia and Carolina developed a vigorous slave trade in Indian war captives. They supplied Indian allies such as the Westos and Chickasaws with manufactured trade goods, including guns and ammunition, in exchange for native prisoners who were sold into slavery on plantations in the Southeast, New England, and the Caribbean. In 1708 a Carolina census reported that 1,400 of the 4,300 slaves in the colony were American Indians. The Tuscarora (1711–1713) and Yamasee uprisings (1715) were partly motivated by English traders who kidnapped their kin and sold them into slavery. In the third form of forced labor, Native Americans purchased or captured African American slaves NATION Berkhofer, Robert F., Jr. The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian, from Columbus to the Present. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Deloria, Philip J. Playing Indian. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998. Fleming, E. McClung. “The American Image as Indian Princess, 1765–1783.” Winterthur Portfolio 2 (1965): 65–81. Lubbers, Klaus. Born for the Shade: Stereotypes of the Native American in United States Literature and the Visual Arts, 1776–1984. Amsterdam and Atlanta, Ga.: Ropodi Press, 1994. ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN 117
Slide 147: AMERICAN INDIANS and put them to work in their homes, fields, and businesses. In the eighteenth century slaves captured in Africa gradually replaced Indians and English indentured servants as the primary source of agricultural labor in the southern colonies. American laws stigmatized African slaves as inheritable and alienable (transferable) property, a status that had not applied to the customary form of Indian servitude. In the late 1780s the United States established a “civilization program” to teach Native Americans to live and work like Anglo-Americans. Federal Indian agents offered slaveholding white planters as the model of civilization to the Indian nations in the Southeast; and in the nineteenth century a number of Creeks, Cherokees, Chickasaws, and Choctaws developed farms and procured African American slaves to perform the agricultural work that had customarily been performed by women. Indian slave owners also used their bonded servants to work on their ferries and in their taverns and manufacturing enterprises. Although most Native Americans could not afford, or did not want to acquire slaves (most scholars agree that less than 10 percent of Southeastern Indians owned slaves), a small class of bicultural Indians enthusiastically embraced the form of slave agriculture promoted by the federal agents. Men such as Greenwood LeFlore (Choctaw), Levi Colbert (Chickasaw), Alexander McGillivray and William McIntosh (Creek), and the Vann, Ross, and Ridge families (Cherokee), bought and sold African American slaves, developed large plantations, and built palatial homes that rivaled those of the wealthiest white planters. By the 1820s the planter class had acquired tremendous influence in their nations; slavery thus became a divisive political and social issue among Southeastern Indian societies. Although the planter class, as a general rule, believed that their nations needed to embrace Anglo-American cultural mores, they opposed political integration into the United States and wanted their tribes to remain sovereign nations with the right to determine the future of slavery. In the 1820s the Southeastern Indian governments began to adopt laws circumscribing the rights of African Americans held in bondage. The Cherokee national government, for instance, prohibited blacks from marrying Indians or whites, forbade them from participating in political activities, and made it illegal for them to deal in liquor or own property. Most historians agree that the Indian slave codes were not as draconian as those of the southern states; and at least one scholar, Theda Perdue, has argued that slaves of Indians lived more comfortably and were treated less harshly than those serving under white owners. Whereas white masters and the southern state governments refused to allow slaves to learn to read and write, she points out, many African American slaves living in the Indian nations received educational instruction. African Americans did not always live in bondage with Southeastern Indians. In Florida the Seminole Indians welcomed runaway slaves from nearby Alabama and Georgia into their communities. In the First Seminole War (1817–1818), the United States invaded the Spanish territory to recapture slaves who had fled to the Seminoles and to punish the Indians for attacks on American settlements. Black and Indian Seminoles fought side by side to defend their liberty and territory from American forces. In 1830 Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which provided the president with the authority to negotiate treaties that resulted in the relocation of the eastern tribes. By 1843 the federal government had removed all of the major Southeastern tribes to an “Indian Territory” it established west of Arkansas. When they immigrated, Indian slaveholders took their bondspeople with them and put them to work establishing farms and plantations in the Indian Territory. Southeastern Indians in the territory continued to possess slaves until the end of the American Civil War, when the United States required their nations to abolish slavery and accept the freedpeople as tribal citizens. See also Slavery. BIBLIOGRAPHY Littlefield, Daniel F., Jr. Africans and Creeks: From the Colonial Period to the Civil War. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979. Perdue, Theda. Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540-1866. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979. Wright, J. Leitch, Jr. Creeks and Seminoles: The Destruction and Regeneration of the Muscogulge People. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. Tim Alan Garrison British Policies Between 1754 and 1829, British policies toward native North Americans sought three key objectives: recruitment and supply of native military allies; regulation of trade and diplomacy; and protection of native peoples’ territorial integrity through negotiatOF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 118 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 148: AMERICAN INDIANS ed settlement boundary lines. Although these policies played a crucial role in the British victory over France in the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), they rapidly fell into disfavor among the settler population of British North America after 1763. By 1776, colonists’ discontent with imperial oversight of Indian affairs constituted a significant grievance against Great Britain. In the aftermath of the Revolutionary War (1775–1783), the ongoing influence of the British Indian Department in Canada with native peoples in the United States was viewed by many Americans as a threat to the survival of the Republic itself. Only after the Treaty of Ghent (1814) ended the War of 1812 (1812–1815) did the British cease to pursue alliances with Native Americans as a means of checking American expansionism. dian policy, encouraged native peoples to withdraw military support from France. The lack of Indian allies to pursue offensive frontier raiding forced the French into a defensive posture, which contributed to the British conquest of Canada in 1760. The expansion of British territorial jurisdiction in North America after the Seven Years’ War created conflicting needs to forge diplomatic and economic ties to many native peoples previously connected to France and Spain on the one hand, and to economize Indian Department expenditures on the other. Provision for a settlement boundary line in the British Crown’s Proclamation of 1763 was intended to protect native peoples’ territorial integrity from settler encroachment, but it also antagonized many squatters and colonial land speculators with claims to lands beyond the boundary. The British military presence in the trans-Appalachian West proved incapable of stemming the postwar movement of settlers into Indian territory, forcing Johnson and John Stuart (who replaced Atkin in 1762) to continually revise the northern and southern boundary lines through treaty negotiations with influential tribal groups between 1763 and 1773. In 1764 Johnson proposed a comprehensive “Plan for the Future Management of Indian Affairs,” which advocated confining all Indian trade to licensed merchants at military posts operating from a fixed price schedule and official renewal of the diplomatic custom of regular distributions of military supplies and material goods (or “presents”) to allied native nations. However, the British Parliament’s repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766 eliminated the colonial revenues needed to fund Johnson’s plan. Parliament took further steps toward the deregulation of Indian affairs in 1768, restoring control over the Indian trade to individual colonies and relocating the bulk of the military establishment from the scattered interior posts to cities on the colonial seaboard to deter civilian unrest. Mounting colonial protests against crown efforts after 1768 to raise revenues to fund the costs of frontier defense compounded problems of Indian policy. In the vacuum of imperial authority in the West, settlers and speculators continued to encroach on Native American lands; employed questionable techniques to clear native title in lieu of treaties; and murdered Indians, who often responded in kind. Even in moments of crisis, settlers, not Indians, enjoyed the support of crown officials. For example, in 1774 Lord Dunmore, the governor of Virginia, opposed the efforts of the Shawnees to retain hunting grounds east of the Ohio River. At the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1775, British officials sought NATION LATE COLONIAL YEARS The Albany Congress of 1754 witnessed the first call by imperial reformers for centralizing control of Indian affairs in British North America. General Edward Braddock commissioned William Johnson as his agent to the Six Nations (Iroquois) in 1755, and in 1756 the crown established northern and southern superintendencies for the colonies. South Carolina merchant Edmond Atkin became the first superintendent of the Southern Department; William Johnson headed the Northern Department. Leaving Indian affairs primarily in the hands of locally constituted bodies in individual colonies marked a dramatic change from past practice. After 1755, the crown sought to rationalize and extend its control over Indian policymaking, employing the superintendents to integrate Native Americans into a multinational North American empire in which all constituent peoples were at once protected by and subordinated to the crown. During the Seven Years’ War, the administrative reforms in British Indian policy had minimal impact on military affairs. Neither Johnson nor Atkin proved successful in imposing their authority over the Iroquois or the Cherokees (the two largest British-allied Indian nations). As in prior colonial conflicts, native warriors dictated the extent of their participation in British military campaigns notwithstanding threats, cajoling, and lavish outlays of cash, arms, and supplies from the superintendents. The critical turn for British Indian policy came at the Treaty of Easton in October 1758, when Pennsylvania officials conceded a settlement boundary line (at the Allegheny Mountains) to hostile western Algonquian nations then allied to France. This promise, which became fundamental to subsequent British InENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW AMERICAN 119
Slide 149: AMERICAN INDIANS to enlist Native American assistance in suppressing the colonists’ rebellion. This led an outraged Thomas Jefferson to decry King George III’s intended use of “merciless Indian savages” in the Declaration of Independence in 1776. FROM 1776 THROUGH 1815 During the Revolutionary War, the British enjoyed far more success recruiting Native American allies than did the Continental Congress. An experienced diplomatic corps, a steady flow of arms and ammunition, and continued promises to protect native lands earned the British the allegiance of an estimated thirteen thousand native warriors over the course of the conflict. Yet despite these impressive numbers, British generals hesitated to make full use of allied native warriors in the early years of the conflict, fearing that any overt appearance of support for “atrocities” inflicted by Indians might hinder efforts to reintegrate the rebellious colonists into the empire. For their part, Indians allied to Great Britain during the Revolutionary War placed their own objectives first, fighting a proxy war against settler expansion with British supplies. The significance of the eventual American victory in the Revolutionary War extended beyond the failure of the British to secure territorial protections for their native allies in the Treaty of Paris (1783). Americans used the fact that Indians had chosen the wrong side and lost as justification for punitive treatment of them in the aftermath of the conflict. After 1783 the British provided material support for allied Native Americans (including arms and ammunition) in the trans-Appalachian region in order to preserve their territory as a buffer zone against the expansion-oriented United States. Operating from Great Lakes posts such as Detroit and Michilimackinac, retained by the crown in violation of the Treaty of Paris (on the grounds of illegal American confiscations of Loyalist property), British Indian agents sustained highly effective Native American resistance to settler encroachment for a decade after 1783 along a frontier stretching from modern Ohio to Florida. However, the refusal of the British garrison at Fort Miami (near modern Toledo, Ohio) to provide refuge to allied Indians retreating from American general Anthony Wayne’s army sealed their defeat at the Battle of Fallen Timbers on 20 August 1794. The ratification of Jay’s Treaty with Great Britain by the United States in 1795 prompted the British evacuation of the Great Lakes posts, creating further distance between erstwhile native allies and the material support of the British Crown. British fear of an American invasion of Upper Canada (modern Ontario) in the aftermath of the Chesapeake affair of June 1807 motivated imperial officials to renew ties to the native peoples bordering on the province. The reappearance of the British as a potentially viable military partner, however, offered substantial encouragement to native leaders such as Tecumseh, who employed promises of British assistance in his efforts to recruit a pan-Indian army to oppose American settler expansion. Native Americans played crucial roles as British allies during the War of 1812, but the American naval victory on Lake Erie in September 1813 prompted the British to withdraw from Fort Malden (modern Amherstburg, Ontario) and other advanced Great Lakes posts. Allied Native Americans, who remembered 1783 and 1794, expressed bitter opposition to this decision, since they recognized it as another British abandonment of their territorial interests. The Treaty of Ghent of 1814 ended the war by restoring the 1811 status quo ante bellum. Although the United States did not implement this provision, never again would the British pursue offensive alliances with Native Americans against the United States. AFTER 1815 Although the newly elected President Andrew Jackson worried in 1829 about the British “stirring up” of soon-to-be-removed southeastern Indian nations in the United States, official British Indian policy had long since shed its aggressive component. During the post-1815 rapprochement between Britain and the United States, British Indian Department officials made clear in a series of public Indian councils that they would no longer assist or turn a blind eye to native hostilities against the United States. For six decades after 1754, Native Americans allied with Great Britain in hopes of securing their interests against an aggressively expansionist settler population. After 1783, however, power dynamics in North America east of the Mississippi River led the British to treat native peoples as expendable inferiors in international diplomacy with the United States. Increasingly after 1783, Britain looked to North America for markets and raw materials, not for Indian allies or the furs they traded. Although the image of perfidious British Indian agents inciting “savages” to terrorize innocent frontier inhabitants persisted in the American mind-set, British Indian policy after 1815 closely resembled that of the United States insofar as it attempted to change those belonging to independent Native American nations into Christian citizenfarmers occupying bounded spaces. OF THE NEW AMERICAN NATION 120 ENCYCLOPEDIA
Slide 150: AMERICANIZATION See also Fallen Timbers, Battle of; French and Indian War, Battles and Diplomacy; French and Indian War, Consequences of; Ghent, Treaty of; Jay’s Treaty; Treaty of Paris; War of 1812. BIBLIOGRAPHY Allen, Robert S. His Majesty’s Indian Allies: British Indian Policy in the Defence of Canada, 1774–1815. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1992. Calloway, Colin G. Crown and Calumet: British-Indian Relations, 1783–1815. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Hall, Anthony J. The American Empire and the Fourth World. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003. Snapp, J. Russell. John Stuart and the Struggle for Empire on the Southern Frontier. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. Sosin, Jack M. Whitehall and the Wilderness: The Middle West in British Colonial Policy, 1760–1775. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961. University of the State of New York. Division of Archives and History. The Papers of Sir William Johnson. 14 vols. Albany: University of the State of New York, 1921–1965. Within the colonies, the English established the cultural baseline by being the first group to settle in large numbers during the seventeenth century. In Albion’s Seed (1989) David Hackett Fischer describes four waves of English immigrants who brought radically different cultural assumptions with them from different parts of their home country: the Puritans arrived between 1629 and 1640; the elitist Cavaliers and their indentured servants between 1642 and 1675; the Quakers between 1675 and 1725; and the Scots-Irish from 1718 to 1775. A huge surge of immigrants from London and Scotland started in the 1750s, a migration that could only be stopped by the American Revolution. Throughout the colonies, the new subcultures were diverse, but primarily English, ranging from the Yankee, the Yorker, the Quaker, and the Cavalier to the Scots Irish. In The Shaping of America (1986, 1993), D. W. Meinig concluded that the colonies were more culturally English than either Ireland or Scotland on the eve of the American Revolution. AN EMERGING AMERICAN IDENTITY Jon Parmenter AMERICANIZATION For the different groups engaged in the struggle to gain political and economic control of the misnomered “New World,” “Americanization” meant radically different things. In exchange for western manufactured goods, whiskey, and horses, Native Americans were decimated by disease, warfare, and cultural subordination. African slaves faced an equally harsh transformation, from their passage across the Atlantic to being under the total legal control of another human being. Nevertheless, the slaves quickly reestablished elements of their prior culture (most enduringly through music) despite their degraded status, while the Native Americans maintained a remarkable degree of cultural difference. The numerous European regional, ethnic, religious, and national groups also brought their own beliefs and customs; there were 150 different ethnoreligious groups by 1750. All these peoples immediately commingled. While some slaves worked on isolated rural plantations, many thousands worked with whites and Native Americans at the numerous ironworks or in the small but growing towns that eventually became bustling urban centers. Thus, from the moment of initial contact, Americanization was a perpetually changing, interactive process with global ramifications. ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW Yet as Frederick Jackson Turner pointed out in his famous series of essays on the effects of the frontier on American culture, the combination of wide-open spaces and continual warfare with the indigenous population gradually changed Englishmen into optimistic, aggressive Americans whose rugged individualism assumed a middle-class conception of equality (at least for all white males). As the colonists progressed westward to their small towns and tiny plots of land, they became increasingly “American.” Although an elite bound by family relations and wealth ran each colony, hereditary aristocracy could not thrive within a political system that guaranteed the franchise to many more of its citizens than did England. Because England never had a grand, hierarchical design for its colonies, the colonists flourished with little political guidance while paying few taxes. Having come from many different backgrounds, the colonists never merged themselves into a religious majority and thus gradually became more tolerant of different religious beliefs (even though widespread wariness of Catholicism lingered for many more decades). Two surges of evangelical Christianity—the Great Awakening in the middle of the eighteenth century and the Second Awakening at the turn of the century—transformed the American religious experience into what two scholars called a “free market religious economy.” Just as the average American could choose where to live and what to buy, he or she did not have to conform to the more NATION AMERICAN 121