U.S. History: Colonies to Reconstruction

The big picture

Eight miles east of St. Louis, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, there is a flat-topped grassy hill about 100 feet high and 955 feet long. It is not a natural hill. People built it out of earth carried in woven baskets, one load at a time, starting around 900 CE. It is Monks Mound, and its base covers nearly 15 acres, about the ground the Great Pyramid of Giza covers.

A mound that size is evidence of a crowd. Somebody organised the digging and fed the diggers. Before this course reaches a single English ship, you need to know who was already here.

Key idea: North America in 1491 held cities, confederacies and farming towns, not an empty wilderness.

Cahokia, a city where three rivers meet

Monks Mound stands at the centre of Cahokia, a city that grew fast after about 1050 CE near where the Missouri and Illinois rivers join the Mississippi. At its height it covered roughly six square miles and held about 120 mounds. Archaeologists, the scientists who study the past through what people left behind, put its population somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000. The range is wide because a city with no census has to be counted by its house floors, with a guess at how many people slept on each one.

Cahokia was the largest settlement of the Mississippian culture, a way of life built on corn farming that spread across the middle and south-east of the present United States. Around 1175 CE its people built a palisade, a wall of upright logs, around the central district. That wall tells you something the mounds do not: somebody was worried.

West of the mound stood a ring of tall cedar posts called Woodhenge. From a post at the centre, the sunrise lines up with particular posts on the first day of spring and autumn. That is a calendar made of trees.

Cahokia traded far. Its soil has given up copper from the Great Lakes, shark teeth from the Gulf coast, and whelk shells from salt water hundreds of miles away. Then, over the 1200s and 1300s, people left. Drought, worn-out soil, too much wood cut for palisades, or conflict may all have played a part. By about 1350 the city stood empty.

Why this matters: a city of that size, with a calendar and long-distance trade, stood on the Mississippi three hundred years before Columbus sailed.

Five nations that agreed to stop fighting

In what is now upstate New York, five nations spoke related languages and raided one another: the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca. At some point before European contact they stopped, and joined a league its members call the Haudenosaunee, meaning people of the longhouse. A sixth nation, the Tuscarora, joined in the 1700s.

Their agreement is the Great Law of Peace, credited by tradition to the Great Peacemaker working with a speaker named Hiawatha. It set up a Grand Council of fifty chiefs, each nation holding a fixed number of seats.

Two features of that council matter. First, the chiefs did not vote and let 26 beat 24. Business passed between the Older Brothers, the Younger Brothers and the Fire Keepers until all agreed. That is consensus, a decision everyone can accept rather than one most people want. Second, the chiefs were chosen by clan mothers, the senior women of each family line, who could also remove a chief who failed. The Onondaga Nation describes this on its own website today, in the present tense.

The point: the Haudenosaunee ran a working federal system, with member nations keeping their own affairs and sending delegates to a common council, long before anyone wrote the United States Constitution.

Stone towns in a dry country

In the canyon country of north-western New Mexico, the Ancestral Puebloans built in stone. The National Park Service dates Chaco Canyon as a regional centre from 850 to 1250 CE. Its largest building, Pueblo Bonito, went up in stages between about 850 and 1150, holds roughly 800 rooms, and rose four or five storeys in places. Roads up to thirty feet wide run out from the canyon in straight lines for miles.

Set into these buildings are dozens of kivas: round rooms, usually sunk into the ground, used for ceremonies and meetings. The roof beams came from forests dozens of miles away, carried without wheels or draught animals.

Later, in the 1200s, people in the Mesa Verde country of Colorado moved their homes into alcoves in the cliff faces. The largest, Cliff Palace, has 150 rooms and 23 kivas and housed about 100 people. Within a century those villages were left too, and the people moved south and east. Their descendants live in the Pueblo communities of New Mexico and Arizona now, including Acoma and the Hopi villages.

Worth holding on to: Chaco and Mesa Verde were not abandoned by people who died out. They were left by people who moved, and whose descendants can tell you their names.

How we know, when nobody wrote it down

None of these peoples kept writing of the kind you are reading. So how does anyone date a mound? Four methods do most of the work, and each has a limit.

That last method produced one of the best surprises in American archaeology. In 2009, chemists testing pottery from Pueblo Bonito found traces of cacao, the plant chocolate is made from. Cacao grows in Mexico and Central America, not within 1,200 miles of Chaco. No sign was ever dug up saying the Chacoans traded that far south. A chemistry test on a broken pot said it.

A fifth source is not dug up at all. The nations are still here, and they carry oral tradition, knowledge passed down by speaking rather than writing.

In short: layers give order, radiocarbon a range, tree rings a year, chemistry contents, and living nations meaning.

Common misconceptions

• "North America was mostly empty before Europeans came." Estimates for the population north of Mexico in 1491 range from a few million to more than ten million. None of them is empty.
• "Native peoples all lived the same way." A Cahokian farmer, a Haudenosaunee clan mother and a Hopi weaver lived in different climates, spoke unrelated languages and governed themselves differently.
• "They disappeared." The sites were abandoned. The peoples were not. More than 570 tribal nations are federally recognised in the United States today.

In their own words

The opening of the Great Law, as the Seneca archaeologist Arthur C. Parker published it in 1916:

I am Dekanawidah and with the Five Nations' Confederate Lords I plant the Tree of the Great Peace. ... Roots have spread out from the Tree of the Great Peace ... and the name of these roots is the Great White Roots of Peace. If any man or any nation outside the Five Nations shall obey the laws of the Great Peace ... they may trace the Roots to the Tree.

Reading it: Dekanawidah is the Peacemaker. "Lords" is Parker's 1916 English for the council chiefs. The tree stands for the league, and roots spreading outward mean other nations are invited to join rather than be conquered. One caution matters for the rest of this course. Parker printed this in 1916 from versions kept by speakers, centuries after the league began, so it is a recorded version of an oral law, not a page written at the founding. Knowing when a source was set down is part of reading it.

What to carry forward

• Cahokia held perhaps 10,000 to 20,000 people around 1100 CE and traded from the Great Lakes to the Gulf.
• The Haudenosaunee Confederacy governed five, later six, nations by consensus, with chiefs chosen by clan mothers.
• Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde were left by people who moved, not by people who vanished.
• Layers, radiocarbon, tree rings and chemistry each answer a different question.

Sources

1. Parker, A. C. (1916). The constitution of the Five Nations, or the Iroquois book of the Great Law (New York State Museum Bulletin 184). University of the State of New York. archive.org
2. Onondaga Nation. (n.d.). Government. Onondaga Nation. onondaganation.org
3. National Park Service. (n.d.). Cliff Palace. Mesa Verde National Park. nps.gov
4. National Park Service. (n.d.). Chaco Culture National Historical Park. National Park Service. nps.gov
5. Pauketat, T. R. (2009). Cahokia: Ancient America's great city on the Mississippi. Viking.

The big picture

In 1960 a Norwegian couple, Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad, dug into low grassy ridges at L'Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland. Under the turf were the outlines of eight buildings, iron nails and a bronze cloak pin. Norse sailors from Greenland built them around 1000 CE, roughly five hundred years before Columbus.

So here is the problem this lesson solves. If Europeans reached North America in about 1000, and millions of people were already living here, why does 1492 get all the attention? The answer is not that Columbus was first. It is that after 1492 the connection never stopped.

The point: 1492 matters because it began a permanent link between two halves of the world, not because anybody discovered an empty place.

What Columbus was trying to do

Christopher Columbus was a Genoese sailor with an idea about arithmetic. Europeans wanted spices, silk and gold from Asia, and the overland routes were long and controlled by others. Columbus proposed sailing west instead.

He was not arguing the earth was round. Educated Europeans had known that for centuries. In the 200s BCE the Greek scholar Eratosthenes had measured the earth's circumference using shadows, and got close to the true figure. Columbus's argument was that the earth was much smaller than that, and that Asia stretched much further east, so the ocean gap was short enough to cross. He was wrong on both counts. His estimate of the distance to Asia was short by thousands of miles.

Portuguese experts turned him down, correctly. Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain finally said yes in 1492. On 3 August he sailed with three ships and about ninety men. On 12 October a lookout sighted land, an island the people living there called Guanahani. Columbus renamed it San Salvador and claimed it for Spain. He made four voyages in all. He died in 1506 still insisting he had reached the edge of Asia.

Remember: Columbus's plan rested on a mistake about the size of the earth, and he never accepted what he had actually run into.

What he wrote down in the first week

Columbus kept a journal. The original is lost, but a close copy made by the priest Bartolome de las Casas survives, and it is one of the most important documents in American history, because it records the first week of contact from the European side.

Two entries are worth your attention. On 12 October, describing the Taino people who came to meet his ships, he wrote that they should be good servants, that they could easily be made Christians, and that he would take six of them back to Spain so they could learn to speak. Two days later he wrote that with fifty men the whole population could be subjugated and made to do whatever was required.

He is not boasting to strangers here. He is writing a report for the monarchs who paid for the voyage, on day three and day five. Within ten years, Spanish settlers on Hispaniola were running the encomienda, a system that handed a Spaniard the right to demand labour from a group of Indigenous people in return for teaching them Christianity. In practice it meant forced work in gold mines and fields.

How many Taino lived on Hispaniola in 1492? Historians disagree sharply, and you should know that. Estimates run from tens of thousands to a million. What is not in dispute is the direction. Within about fifty years, from disease, forced labour and war, the Taino had almost ceased to exist as a distinct island population.

Columbus himself was removed as governor. In 1500 the Spanish crown sent an investigator, Francisco de Bobadilla, to look into complaints about how the Columbus brothers ran Hispaniola. Bobadilla arrested all three and shipped them back to Spain in chains. Spanish officials, not later historians, made that judgement.

So what?: the honest way to teach Columbus is neither hero nor monster, but record. He was a skilled navigator, he was wrong about geography, and he wrote down what he intended to do to the people he met.

The exchange that reshaped both halves of the world

What happened after 1492 is called the Columbian exchange: a two-way movement of plants, animals, people and diseases between the hemispheres. It changed what everyone on earth eats.

Look at the food row and imagine Italy without tomatoes or Ireland without potatoes. Potatoes and maize grow well on land where wheat struggles, and both spread into Europe, Africa and China, where they helped populations grow. Horses ran the other way. Within two centuries, Plains nations such as the Lakota and Comanche had built entire ways of life around animals that had not existed on the continent in 1492.

The disease row is the one that changed history most. Peoples in the Americas had lived apart from the herd animals of Europe and Asia for thousands of years, so their immune systems had never met smallpox, measles or influenza. Outbreaks often ran ahead of the Europeans themselves, along trade routes, so some communities were struck before they ever saw a European face. Whole villages emptied. Later English settlers who found cleared, unused fields along the New England coast were often looking at land whose farmers had died in an epidemic a few years earlier.

One more thing crossed, and it was people. Sugar cane needed brutal labour, and as Indigenous populations collapsed, Europeans turned to the Atlantic slave trade. Over about four centuries, roughly twelve million Africans were carried across the ocean against their will. That trade is part of the Columbian exchange, not separate from it.

Bottom line: the exchange fed more people than ever before and killed more people than any war in history, and both of those happened because of the same ships.

Common misconceptions

• "Columbus discovered America." Millions of people already lived here and knew exactly where they were, and Norse sailors had reached Newfoundland around 1000 CE. Columbus opened a permanent connection. That is a different claim, and it is true.
• "People in 1492 thought the world was flat." Educated Europeans had known the earth was a sphere since ancient Greece. The real argument was about how big it was, and Columbus lost that argument on the facts.
• "Europeans deliberately spread smallpox from the start." In 1492 nobody understood germs. The catastrophe was mostly unintentional. Deliberate infection is documented later, notably at Fort Pitt in 1763, and that is a separate, provable event.
• "Columbus landed in what is now the United States." His four voyages touched the Bahamas, the Caribbean islands and the coasts of Central and South America. He never set foot on the North American mainland.

In his own words

From the journal, the entry for 12 October 1492, in Clements Markham's 1893 translation:

They should be good servants and intelligent, for I observed that they quickly took in what was said to them, and I believe that they would easily be made Christians, as it appeared to me that they had no religion. I, our Lord being pleased, will take hence, at the time of my departure, six natives for your Highnesses, that they may learn to speak.

Reading it: this is day one. The word "servants" is doing the important work, and "I will take" is not a request. Notice also what Columbus does with evidence. He decides the Taino have no religion because he cannot see one he recognises, after a few hours and with no shared language. A historian reading this asks what the Taino thought was happening that morning, and then has to admit that nobody wrote it down.

The short version

• Norse sailors reached Newfoundland around 1000 CE; 1492 matters because the contact after it never stopped.
• Columbus underestimated the size of the earth and died believing he had reached Asia.
• His own journal records, in the first week, a plan to take captives and subjugate the Taino.
• The Columbian exchange moved crops, animals, silver, people and diseases both ways, and the diseases killed on a scale nothing else matches.

Sources

1. Columbus, C. (1893). The journal of Christopher Columbus (during his first voyage, 1492-93) (C. R. Markham, Trans.). Hakluyt Society. archive.org
2. Nunn, N., and Qian, N. (2010). The Columbian exchange: A history of disease, food, and ideas. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 24(2), 163-188. aeaweb.org
3. Parks Canada. (n.d.). L'Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site. Parks Canada. parks.canada.ca
4. Crosby, A. W. (1972). The Columbian exchange: Biological and cultural consequences of 1492. Greenwood Press.

The big picture

Two pieces of paper start this lesson. On 10 April 1606, King James I signed the First Charter of Virginia, giving a group of London investors permission to plant a colony and dig for gold. Fourteen years later, on 11 November 1620, forty-one men crowded into a cabin off Cape Cod signed a single paragraph agreeing to obey laws they had not yet written.

One document is a business licence handed down by a king. The other is a promise made sideways, between ordinary people. The two settlements that followed were as different as their paperwork.

Key idea: Jamestown was founded to make money for investors. Plymouth was founded so a congregation could worship as it wished. Almost everything else follows from that.

Jamestown: a company town in a swamp

In May 1607 about a hundred English men and boys, with no women among them, came ashore on a marshy peninsula in the James River and began building a fort. Jamestown belonged to the Virginia Company, and the settlers were employees. Many were gentlemen who considered manual work beneath them, which is a serious problem when the nearest shop is three thousand miles away.

The site had one advantage, deep water close to shore for ships, and several disadvantages: brackish water, mosquitoes, and no good farmland. The land was also not empty. It sat inside Tsenacommacah, a group of around thirty Algonquian-speaking communities under a paramount chief the English called Powhatan.

Captain John Smith took charge in 1608, imposed a rule that anyone who would not work would not eat, and traded hard for Powhatan corn. Then he was injured by a gunpowder explosion and sailed home in October 1609. What followed is called the starving time.

Here are the numbers, from the archaeologists who dig the site. About 300 colonists were at James Fort in August 1609. A seven-year drought had cut everyone's harvest, Powhatan ordered his warriors to attack anyone who left the fort, and the winter closed in. When a relief ship arrived in May 1610, 60 people were alive. The colonists ate horses, then dogs, cats and mice. In 2012 archaeologists found forensic evidence on human bone that some of the dead were eaten.

In June 1610 the survivors boarded ships to abandon Virginia and sailed down the river. They met the new governor coming up it, and were turned around. Jamestown survived by two days.

What made it pay was a plant. John Rolfe planted a mild West Indian tobacco around 1612, and London bought all of it. Tobacco wears out soil and needs a great deal of labour, so Virginia began giving land to anyone who paid a person's passage, a scheme called headright. Land plus labour is the engine of everything that happens in Virginia next. In 1619 the colony also elected the House of Burgesses, the first representative assembly in English America.

What matters here: Jamestown did not survive because it was well planned. It survived because a cash crop appeared before the investors gave up.

Plymouth: a congregation that would not conform

The Pilgrims were Separatists, English Protestants who wanted to break away from the Church of England entirely rather than reform it from inside. That was illegal. They moved to the Netherlands, worried their children were becoming Dutch, and took a contract with English merchants to settle in northern Virginia.

The Mayflower left England in September 1620 with 102 passengers. Only about half were Separatists; the rest were craftsmen, servants and hired men the merchants sent along. Storms pushed the ship far north of its patent, to Cape Cod. That mattered legally, because their permission to govern did not cover where they had landed, and some of the non-Separatists pointed this out.

So on 11 November they wrote the Mayflower Compact, one paragraph in which the signers combine themselves into a civil body politic and promise obedience to the laws they will make. Forty-one adult men signed. No women signed, and no servants were asked.

Then came their starving time. Nearly half of the 102 died before spring, mostly of disease worsened by cold and poor food. William Bradford, who became governor, wrote that the greatest half died, most within two or three months.

They survived partly by luck of a terrible kind. The cleared fields they planted had belonged to the Patuxet village. The French explorer Samuel de Champlain had mapped it in 1605 as a thriving place. Between 1616 and 1619 an epidemic swept the coast and killed a large share of the people living there, the Patuxet among them. Tisquantum, whom the English called Squanto, survived only because he had been kidnapped and taken to Europe before it struck. He returned to find his village gone, and became the Pilgrims' interpreter. In 1621 the Pilgrims and Massasoit of the Wampanoag agreed a treaty of mutual defence that held for about fifty years.

The upshot: the Pilgrims did not find an empty coast. They found an emptied one, and the treaty that kept them alive was made with a leader who needed allies after that catastrophe.

The two side by side

Common misconceptions

• "The Mayflower Compact was the first American democracy." It was a short agreement to obey laws the signers would make, written by men who had just discovered their patent did not cover Cape Cod. Only adult men signed. It is an important step, not a constitution.
• "The Pilgrims landed on empty wilderness." They built on the site of Patuxet, a village recorded as thriving in 1605 and destroyed by an epidemic between 1616 and 1619.
• "Jamestown was the first European settlement in North America." St. Augustine in Florida was founded by Spain in 1565, forty-two years earlier, and is still a city. Jamestown was the first permanent English one.
• "Squanto helpfully turned up to teach farming." Tisquantum spoke English because he had been kidnapped and sold in Europe. He came back to find everyone he knew dead. That is the beginning of the story, not a happy accident.

In the words of the time

The core of the Mayflower Compact, from the text held by Yale's Avalon Project:

Do by these Presents, solemnly and mutually, in the Presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation ... and by Virtue hereof do enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Officers, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general Good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due Submission and Obedience.

Reading it: a covenant is a solemn promise, the word these Separatists used for their church agreements. A civil body politick means a community with the power to govern itself. Notice the direction of the promise. Nobody is promising obedience to a king here, though the paragraph above it is careful to call James their dread sovereign lord. They are promising obedience to one another's laws. Notice also who is missing from the signature list: women, children and servants, who made up most of the people on board.

Putting it together

• Jamestown, 1607, was a company venture staffed by employees and rescued by tobacco.
• Plymouth, 1620, was a congregation with families, governed by an agreement they wrote themselves.
• Both lost a large share of their people in the first year or two.
• Neither settled empty land: one sat inside Tsenacommacah, the other on the site of an epidemic.

Sources

1. Avalon Project. (n.d.). Mayflower Compact: 1620. Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School. avalon.law.yale.edu
2. Avalon Project. (n.d.). The First Charter of Virginia; April 10, 1606. Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School. avalon.law.yale.edu
3. Jamestown Rediscovery. (n.d.). The starving time. Historic Jamestowne. historicjamestowne.org
4. National Park Service. (n.d.). History and culture. Historic Jamestowne. nps.gov
5. Bradford, W. (1952). Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647 (S. E. Morison, Ed.). Alfred A. Knopf.

The big picture

On 9 July 1640 the Virginia Governor's Council, sitting as the colony's highest court, sentenced three runaway servants who had fled to Maryland together. All three got thirty lashes. Victor, a Dutchman, and James Gregory, a Scot, each had years added to their service. The third man, recorded as "a negro named John Punch," was ordered to serve his master "for the time of his natural life."

Same escape, same day, same court, three different sentences. No English law required that difference. Somebody decided it. This lesson works out why Virginia was where such a decision got made, and how it hardened into a legal system.

Key idea: the thirteen colonies were not thirteen versions of one place. What each was for shaped its land, its laws and its labour.

Why the colonies were not alike

Start with a chain. Climate decides what grows; what grows decides how much labour is needed; labour shapes everything else. Here it is in three columns.

Why this matters: nobody designed three different societies. They fell out of one practical question: what can we grow here, and who will do the work?

New England: the town, the church and the school

Puritans were not Pilgrims. Pilgrims wanted to separate from the Church of England; Puritans wanted to purify it from inside. Between about 1630 and 1640 roughly twenty thousand of them crossed to Massachusetts, and they came as families, not as young men on contracts.

Families change everything. The population grew from births rather than arrivals, people lived long, and villages stayed put. Government happened at the town meeting, where male church members debated and voted on local business directly.

Because Puritans held that every person should read the Bible for themselves, literacy was a religious duty. In 1647 the Massachusetts General Court passed the law nicknamed the Old Deluder Satan Act, after the Satan of its first sentence who keeps people from reading Scripture. Every township of fifty households had to appoint someone to teach children reading and writing; every township of a hundred had to set up a grammar school. That is the ancestor of American public schooling, and its motive was religious.

New England was not free of slavery. Massachusetts legalised it in 1641, enslaved people worked in Boston and Newport households, and New England merchants grew rich shipping to the sugar islands and carrying captives across the Atlantic. The difference from Virginia was scale, not innocence.

The Middle Colonies: wheat and the widest doors

New York began as Dutch New Netherland and became English by conquest in 1664, which is why the Hudson valley kept Dutch place names. Pennsylvania began in 1681 as a grant to William Penn, a Quaker whose faith held that every person carries an inner light, which made forced worship pointless in his view.

Penn's Charter of Privileges of 1701 put that in law. Nobody who acknowledged one almighty God was to be molested for their beliefs or forced to attend or pay for any worship. Read the next clause carefully, though: holding office still required professing belief in Jesus Christ. Even the most open colony in British America drew a line.

Wide doors brought crowded ships. Germans, Scots-Irish, Dutch, Swedes, Welsh, Africans and English all settled the region, and by the 1750s Philadelphia was the largest city in British America. The soil grew wheat, so the region exported flour and bread. Hence the breadbasket.

The core of it: the middle colonies were diverse because their founders admitted people other colonies turned away.

The South: one crop, and the labour to grow it

Virginia and Maryland grew tobacco, which exhausts soil in three or four years and demands constant hand work: seeding, transplanting, topping, worming, cutting, curing. Carolina, founded in 1670 and settled heavily from the English sugar island of Barbados, grew rice in coastal swamps. Rice work was brutal and often deadly, and many West African farmers already knew how to grow it, which planters knew and exploited.

Plantations spread along rivers, each with its own wharf, so the South built few towns. And because the work never ended, it wanted labour families could not supply. That is the pressure meeting our opening document.

1619, and the sixty-five years that followed

In a letter of 1619, John Rolfe reported that a warship reached Point Comfort and "brought not any thing but 20. and odd" Africans, whom the governor and cape merchant bought for food supplies. The National Park Service notes the ship was really the English privateer White Lion, and the captives had been seized from a Portuguese slave ship bound for Mexico. Calling it Dutch moved the blame for piracy onto somebody else.

Here is the part most people do not know. In 1619 Virginia had no law of slavery, and for twenty years the status of Africans there was unsettled. Some served terms and were freed. Anthony Johnson, who arrived about 1621, gained his freedom, farmed on the Eastern Shore, owned livestock and servants, and sued in court like any other landholder.

Then came a sequence of decisions.

1. 1640. John Punch is sentenced to serve for life while two European runaways get extra years. Lifetime servitude enters the record, applied by race.
2. 1662. The assembly rules that a child's status follows the mother, not the father. English law said the opposite. Slavery becomes inheritable, and the children of enslaved women become profitable to owners.
3. 1667. Baptism no longer brings freedom, closing the last common route out.
4. 1705. Virginia gathers the rules into a full slave code, defining enslaved people as property and setting punishments.

Look at the dates. Sixty-five years passed between the first recorded Africans at Point Comfort and a finished legal system of racial slavery. It did not arrive on a ship. Assemblies and courts built it, one vote at a time, and they were told at the time that they could vote otherwise.

Remember: slavery in Virginia was made by law, gradually, in living memory of the people who made it.

Common misconceptions

• "Slavery arrived fully formed in 1619." The 1619 captives entered a colony with no slave law. The system was built afterwards by statutes you can read and date.
• "Everyone back then thought it was normal." Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania signed a protest against slavery in 1688, and enslaved people resisted from the first day. Opposition existed from the beginning; it lost.
• "Only the South had slavery." Every one of the thirteen colonies permitted it at some point. Northern colonies held fewer enslaved people and profited from the trade and from supplying slave-worked sugar islands.
• "Indentured servants were basically slaves." Indenture had an end date, and servants sued in court and went free. Slavery after 1662 was for life and passed to children.

In the words of the record

The Governor's Council, 9 July 1640:

And that the third being a negro named John Punch shall serve his said master or his assigns for the time of his natural life here or elsewhere.

The Virginia assembly, December 1662, Act XII, as printed in Hening's collection of the colony's laws:

Whereas some doubts have arrisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or ffree, Be it therefore enacted and declared ... that all children borne in this country shalbe held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother.

Reading them: "his assigns" means whoever the master sells or wills him to, so the sentence follows Punch wherever he goes. In the second, "some doubts have arrisen" is the giveaway. Doubts arise only where a rule is unsettled, so in 1662 it still was. The assembly settled it in the direction that turned enslaved women's children into property, reversing the ordinary English rule that a child took the father's status. Both documents are decisions, not descriptions.

Where this leaves us

• Climate and crop shaped colonial labour, and labour shaped colonial society.
• New England built towns and school laws, the middle colonies the most open society, the South plantations.
• The 1619 arrivals entered a colony with no slave law.
• Statutes in 1640, 1662, 1667 and 1705 built hereditary racial slavery step by step.

Sources

1. National Park Service. (n.d.). African Americans at Jamestown. Historic Jamestowne. nps.gov
2. Hening, W. W. (Ed.). (1823). The statutes at large; being a collection of all the laws of Virginia (Vol. 2, Act XII of December 1662, p. 170). archive.org
3. Avalon Project. (n.d.). Charter of Privileges granted by William Penn, October 28, 1701. Yale Law School. avalon.law.yale.edu
4. McIlwaine, H. R. (Ed.). (1924). Minutes of the Council and General Court of Colonial Virginia. Virginia State Library. (Verdict of 9 July 1640 on Hugh Gwyn's runaway servants.)
5. Berlin, I. (1998). Many thousands gone. Harvard University Press.

The big picture

On 7 October 1763, George III issued a proclamation drawing a line down the crest of the Appalachian Mountains and forbidding his colonial subjects to settle west of it. Britain had just won the largest war it had ever fought in North America. Thirteen years later, the colonies that had cheered that victory declared independence.

This lesson follows that thirteen-year slide, and the argument at the centre of it was not really about money. It was about who had the right to decide.

Key idea: the Revolution grew out of Britain's victory, not its defeat. Winning created bills, borders and an army, and paying for all three broke the relationship.

The war that removed France

The French and Indian War began in 1754 in the Ohio valley, where a 22-year-old Virginian militia officer named George Washington was sent to warn off the French and lost the fight that followed. It grew into a world war. When it ended in 1763, France gave up nearly all its territory on the North American mainland.

For colonists, the French threat was gone. For Britain, three problems arrived at once.

1. The frontier. Native nations of the Ohio country had lost their French allies and trading partners. In 1763 a broad uprising named for the Ottawa leader Pontiac took British forts across the region. Britain, exhausted, wanted it stopped.
2. The debt. The war roughly doubled Britain's national debt. Parliament decided colonists should pay a share of their own defence, which in London seemed obvious.
3. The army. Thousands of soldiers stayed in America, and the Quartering Act of 1765 made colonial assemblies house and supply them.

The Proclamation of 1763 answered the first problem by closing the west to settlement. Colonists who had just fought a war partly over that land read it as a betrayal.

Tax, and the word that mattered

The Sugar Act of 1764 tightened customs duties. Then came the Stamp Act of 1765, which required an official stamp, bought with cash, on newspapers, legal documents, licences, playing cards and dice. It touched printers, lawyers, merchants and tavern-goers, a remarkable list to annoy at once.

The colonial objection was not that the sum was large. Per person, colonists paid far less tax than people in Britain did. The objection was constitutional. An Englishman could only be taxed by a body he had helped elect, and no colonist elected anyone to Parliament. Hence the slogan: no taxation without representation.

Parliament had an answer, called virtual representation. Members of Parliament, the argument ran, represent the whole empire, not just the towns that elect them. Plenty of English cities elected nobody either and were still represented. Colonists replied that a member from Manchester at least shared a country and a tax bill with those he did not represent. A member from Bristol shared neither with a Virginia planter.

Nine colonies sent delegates to a Stamp Act Congress in New York in 1765, merchants stopped importing British goods, and crowds made it impossible for stamp distributors to work. Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in 1766, and on the very same day passed the Declaratory Act, asserting its power to bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever. The tax went; the claim stayed.

The point: both sides thought they were defending an existing constitution. That is why neither could simply back down.

King Street, 5 March 1770, and a picture of it

Britain sent troops to Boston in 1768, and off-duty soldiers competed for work with local labourers. On the evening of 5 March 1770 a crowd of a few hundred surrounded a sentry outside the Custom House on King Street, shouting and throwing snowballs, ice and sticks. Captain Thomas Preston brought eight soldiers to relieve him. Somebody was knocked down. Shots were fired without a clear order. Five colonists died, among them Crispus Attucks, a mixed-race sailor and former enslaved man who had been at the front of the crowd.

Three weeks later Paul Revere published a hand-coloured engraving titled The Bloody Massacre perpetrated in King Street. You have almost certainly seen it. Look at what it shows, and then at what it leaves out.

The engraving is still evidence. It is excellent evidence of what Boston patriots wanted people to believe in March 1770, and it worked: copies spread through the colonies within weeks. It is poor evidence of what happened on the street.

Here is the detail that surprises most readers. The soldiers were tried, and their defence lawyer was John Adams, a Boston patriot who later helped write the Declaration of Independence. He took the case because he believed anyone accused deserved a defence. Six soldiers were acquitted; two were convicted of manslaughter rather than murder and branded on the thumb.

Worth holding on to: a source can be false about the event and true about the moment. Ask what it was made to do.

Tea, punishment, and a pamphlet

The Tea Act of 1773 was clever and, for Parliament, disastrous. It let the East India Company ship tea straight to America without the usual middlemen, making legal tea cheaper than smuggled Dutch tea while keeping a small tax on it. Boston radicals saw a trap: buy the cheap tea and you have accepted Parliament's right to tax you.

On the night of 16 December 1773 men thinly disguised as Mohawks boarded three ships and threw 342 chests of tea into Boston harbour. Parliament answered in 1774 with laws the colonists called the Intolerable Acts. The Boston Port Act closed the harbour until the tea was paid for; another act gutted Massachusetts self-government.

The punishment united the colonies instead of isolating Boston. Twelve sent delegates to a Continental Congress in September 1774. On 19 April 1775 British troops marching to seize militia supplies met armed colonists at Lexington and Concord.

Even then, most colonists wanted their rights inside the empire, not out of it. What changed that was forty-seven pages. In January 1776 Thomas Paine published Common Sense in plain language anyone could follow, attacking not just King George but hereditary monarchy itself. It circulated on a scale no American publication had matched, and was read aloud in taverns to people who could not read.

Common misconceptions

• "Colonists were crushed by British taxes." They paid much less per person than Britons did. The fight was about who had the authority to tax, not about the size of the bill.
• "The Boston Tea Party protested a tax increase." The Tea Act made legal tea cheaper. The protest was against the principle, and against the loss of business for local merchants.
• "Everyone wanted independence." Historians estimate roughly one in five white colonists stayed loyal, and many more tried to stay out of it. Neighbours fought neighbours.
• "Revere's engraving shows what happened." It was made three weeks later to persuade. Set it beside the trial testimony and the differences are the whole point.

In the words of the time

Thomas Paine, Common Sense, January 1776:

Small islands not capable of protecting themselves, are the proper objects for kingdoms to take under their care; but there is something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island. In no instance hath nature made the satellite larger than its primary planet.

Reading it: a satellite is a moon, and a primary planet is the world it circles. Paine is saying that America is bigger than Britain, so Britain ruling America reverses the natural order. Notice the method. He does not cite a law or a charter. He appeals to what any reader can see for themselves, which is why the pamphlet worked on people who had never read a political argument in their lives. Notice too what it is not: an argument about taxes. By 1776 the case had moved on to the thing itself.

Summing up

• Victory in 1763 left Britain with debt, a frontier to police and an army to house, and the colonies were asked to pay.
• The colonial objection was constitutional, and Parliament answered it with virtual representation.
• The Boston Massacre killed five people and produced an engraving that shaped opinion more than the trial did.
• The Intolerable Acts united the colonies, and Common Sense made independence thinkable.

Sources

1. Avalon Project. (n.d.). The Royal Proclamation, October 7, 1763. Yale Law School. avalon.law.yale.edu
2. Avalon Project. (n.d.). Great Britain: Parliament, the Stamp Act, March 22, 1765. Yale Law School. avalon.law.yale.edu
3. Paine, T. (1776). Common Sense. R. Bell. gutenberg.org
4. Revere, P. (1770). The Bloody Massacre perpetrated in King Street Boston on March 5th 1770 [Engraving]. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.
5. Wroth, L. K., and Zobel, H. B. (Eds.). (1965). Legal papers of John Adams (Vol. 3). Harvard University Press.

The big picture

In June 1776, in a rented upstairs room on Market Street in Philadelphia, Thomas Jefferson wrote a draft. Congress then cut about a quarter of it, including one entire paragraph blaming the king for the slave trade. The document that came out of that editing is the most quoted piece of writing in American history, and most people can recite only one sentence of it.

This lesson reads the whole thing in order, part by part, then asks the hardest question about it.

Key idea: the Declaration is a legal argument, not a poem. It sets out a rule, shows the rule was broken, and states the consequence.

Four parts, four jobs

Notice the shape. Rule, evidence, verdict. It is built like a case in court, which is unsurprising: many of the men involved were lawyers.

The second paragraph, phrase by phrase

Here is the sentence everyone quotes, broken into its working parts.

• "We hold these truths to be self-evident." Self-evident means true on its face, needing no proof. Jefferson is refusing to argue for what comes next. He is asserting it.
• "That all men are created equal." Equal in rights at birth, not equal in strength, wealth or talent. It denies that some people are born to rule others, which is a direct shot at hereditary monarchy.
• "Endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." Unalienable means cannot be given away or taken. If rights come from birth rather than from a king, no king can withdraw them.
• "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The usual phrase in this tradition was life, liberty and property. The change is deliberate and much argued over.
• "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." Here is the engine. A government's authority comes from the people, so it is a tool, not a master.
• "Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it." And here is the consequence. If the tool breaks its purpose, the people may replace it. That is a justification for revolution, written down and signed.

The point: the second paragraph is a logical chain. Rights come first, government exists to protect them, and a government that attacks them forfeits its claim to obedience.

Twenty-seven charges, all against one man

The longest part of the Declaration is a list of grievances, and every one of them begins with "He." Read them and you would think Parliament did not exist. The Stamp Act, the Tea Act and the Coercive Acts were all acts of Parliament, yet Parliament is never named.

That was a choice. By 1776 the colonists' position was that Parliament had no authority over them at all, so naming it would have conceded the argument. Their only remaining connection to Britain was the king, and so the king takes every charge. Among them: he has kept standing armies among us in times of peace, he has cut off our trade with all parts of the world, and he has imposed taxes on us without our consent.

The list also contains a sentence worth facing. The Declaration accuses the king of stirring up "the merciless Indian Savages" against the colonists. The same document that says all men are created equal describes Native nations that way, in the same breath, and asks the world to sympathise.

What that famous sentence did and did not mean in 1776

Start with who was living in the thirteen colonies when it was written. Roughly one person in five was enslaved, about half a million people. Women could not vote anywhere. In most colonies neither could men without property.

So the sentence did not describe the society that produced it, and the men who signed it knew that. Jefferson enslaved people his whole adult life. His draft had included a paragraph attacking the king for the slave trade, calling it a cruel war against human nature. Congress cut it, to keep South Carolina and Georgia on board. Jefferson later wrote that northern delegates agreed to the cut too, since their merchants had been, in his words, considerable carriers of enslaved people to others.

Women noticed the gap at once. On 31 March 1776 Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John, then in Congress, asking him to remember the ladies in the new code of laws, and warning that women would not hold themselves bound by laws in which they had no voice or representation. That is the Revolution's own argument, aimed back at the men making it. John wrote back on 14 April that he could not but laugh.

Now the other half of the answer, which matters just as much. Jefferson wrote "all men," not "all Englishmen" and not "all free men." A universal claim, once printed, belongs to anybody who can read it.

• Lemuel Haynes, a Black veteran of the war, wrote an essay in 1776 titled Liberty Further Extended, quoting the Declaration and applying it to slavery.
• Vermont's constitution of 1777 banned adult slavery outright, the first in America to do so.
• In Massachusetts, an enslaved man named Quock Walker sued for his freedom and won in 1781, with courts pointing to the state constitution's words that all men are born free and equal. By 1790 the census recorded no enslaved people in the state.
• In 1848 the women at Seneca Falls rewrote the sentence to read that all men and women are created equal.
• In 1863 Abraham Lincoln opened the Gettysburg Address by dating the nation to 1776 and that proposition.

Worth holding on to: in 1776 the sentence was a description of nothing and a promise about everything. The rest of this course is largely the fight over who gets included.

Common misconceptions

• "Everyone signed it on 4 July 1776." Congress approved the text that day. Most delegates signed the engrossed parchment on 2 August, and a few later still.
• "The Declaration made America independent." It announced independence. Seven more years of fighting and the Treaty of Paris in 1783 secured it.
• "All men are created equal meant everyone at the time." It did not, and the deleted slavery paragraph plus Abigail Adams's letter show that contemporaries saw the gap.
• "The Declaration is American law." It is a founding statement, not a legal code. The Constitution, written eleven years later, is the law.

In the words of the draft

From Jefferson's rough draft, the paragraph Congress removed:

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere ... determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold.

Reading it: the "he" is George III, and the charge is that the king forced the slave trade on unwilling colonies. That charge is not honest. Colonial assemblies bought and sold people enthusiastically, and Jefferson was one of the buyers. But look at what survives even so. The words "MEN should be bought and sold" are capitalised in the manuscript, and they say plainly that the people in the trade are men, with the same sacred rights the rest of the document claims. Congress cut the paragraph. The thought did not go away.

What to remember

• The Declaration has four parts: introduction, principles, grievances, and the declaration itself.
• Its second paragraph argues that rights come first, government exists to protect them, and a government that attacks them may be replaced.
• All twenty-seven grievances blame the king, because the colonists denied Parliament any authority over them.
• The famous sentence excluded most people living in America in 1776, and its universal wording was used against that exclusion almost immediately.

Sources

1. National Archives. (n.d.). Declaration of Independence: A transcription. America's Founding Documents. archives.gov
2. Adams, A. (1776, March 31). Letter to John Adams. Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. masshist.org
3. Adams, J. (1776, April 14). Letter to Abigail Adams. Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. masshist.org
4. Boyd, J. P. (Ed.). (1950). The papers of Thomas Jefferson (Vol. 1, pp. 423-428: the original Rough draught). Princeton University Press.
5. Maier, P. (1997). American scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence. Alfred A. Knopf.

The big picture

On 17 October 1777, near Saratoga in upstate New York, a British army of about six thousand men laid down its weapons and surrendered. Britain had the largest navy on earth, a professional army, and more money than its opponent could imagine. Six years later it signed a treaty recognising the United States as free, sovereign and independent states.

That is the puzzle. How did the weaker side win? The answer is not that Americans were braver. It is that the two sides needed completely different things in order to win, and one of those things was much harder.

Key idea: Britain had to conquer and hold a country the size of western Europe. America only had to avoid losing its army long enough to make the war not worth Britain's while.

Count the advantages

That last row is the whole war. An order from London took two months to arrive, by which time the situation had changed. Every barrel of salt pork for the British army crossed an ocean.

Washington's one rule

George Washington lost more battles than he won. New York in 1776 was a disaster; he was driven out of Long Island, Manhattan and New Jersey in a few months. But he understood something his opponents took years to grasp: the Continental Army did not need to win. It needed to exist.

While an American army stayed in the field, no British general could say the rebellion was over. So Washington avoided battles he could lose badly and struck when the odds were short. On the night of 25 December 1776 he crossed the ice-filled Delaware and captured a Hessian garrison at Trenton, then beat a British force at Princeton a week later. Militarily these were small actions. Politically they kept the war alive through a winter when enlistments were expiring.

The upshot: a rebellion loses when its army is destroyed, so preserving the army is a form of winning.

Saratoga buys an ally

In 1777 Britain tried to cut New England off from the rest of the colonies by marching an army south from Canada down the Hudson valley. The plan needed three forces to meet. Two never arrived. John Burgoyne's column pushed on alone into country where American militia gathered around it, supplies ran short, and riflemen picked off his officers. After two battles at Saratoga he surrendered.

The news reached Paris in December. France had been quietly sending money and gunpowder since 1776, wanting revenge for 1763 but unwilling to back a loser. Saratoga proved the Americans could destroy a British army. In February 1778 France signed a treaty of alliance, and Spain and the Dutch Republic entered against Britain soon after.

That changed everything. Britain was now fighting a world war, defending the West Indies, Gibraltar and India as well as America, and for the first time since the war began it did not control the sea without challenge.

Valley Forge: what actually happened there

That same winter, about twelve thousand Continental soldiers camped at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, twenty miles from a comfortable British army in Philadelphia. The killer was not cold; it was hunger, exposure and disease, mostly typhus, dysentery and influenza. Roughly two thousand men died over the encampment.

The other thing that happened there mattered more. A Prussian officer, Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, arrived and taught the army to drill: how to march in column, form line, and load and fire together under pressure. He wrote a manual, and the army practised it. The force that marched out in June 1778 could manoeuvre with British regulars. That, and not suffering, is what Valley Forge produced.

The war nobody puts on a poster

For enslaved people the war was a calculation about which side offered freedom sooner. In November 1775 Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, proclaimed that any enslaved man belonging to a rebel who would join British forces was free. Tens of thousands eventually escaped to British lines during the war. Several thousand Black men also served in the Continental Army, and Rhode Island raised a regiment that enlisted enslaved men with a promise of freedom.

For Native nations the calculation ran the other way. Britain had drawn the Proclamation line in 1763; American settlers wanted it gone. Most nations that took a side took Britain's. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy could not agree, and for the first time in centuries its council fire was covered: four nations sided with Britain, the Oneida and Tuscarora with the Americans. In 1779 Washington sent General John Sullivan into Haudenosaunee country with orders to destroy their settlements. His troops burned dozens of towns and the cornfields around them, and refugees starved that winter at Fort Niagara.

Remember: for many people in America the question was never independence or empire. It was which side would leave them freer, or alive.

The southern war and Yorktown

From 1778 Britain moved south, expecting loyalists to rise. It took Savannah and then Charleston, the worst American defeat of the war. Then the strategy fell apart. Loyalist and patriot neighbours fought a vicious partisan war; at Kings Mountain in 1780 and Cowpens in 1781 the British lost forces they could not replace. Nathanael Greene refused to risk his army in a decisive battle and instead marched Cornwallis back and forth across the Carolinas until the British force was worn thin.

Cornwallis withdrew to Yorktown, Virginia, on the coast, expecting the Royal Navy to supply or evacuate him. Instead a French fleet under de Grasse took control of the Chesapeake, and Washington marched south with French troops under Rochambeau. Cornwallis was surrounded on land and cut off by sea. On 19 October 1781 he surrendered about eight thousand men.

Yorktown did not end the fighting, but it ended Britain's appetite for it. Parliament voted against continuing the American war, and negotiators signed the Treaty of Paris in 1783.

Common misconceptions

• "Americans hid behind trees while the British marched in silly lines." Both sides used lines and both used skirmishers. Washington worked hard to train his army to fight in formation, because in the open field that is what wins.
• "France sent a bit of help at the end." French money, gunpowder, an army and above all a fleet were decisive. Yorktown was impossible without the French navy.
• "Enslaved people all supported the Revolution." Many judged that the British offer of freedom was the better bet, and tens of thousands went to British lines.
• "The war ended at Yorktown in 1781." Fighting continued elsewhere for two more years, and independence was settled by treaty in 1783.

In the words of the treaty

Article 1 of the Treaty of Paris, signed 3 September 1783:

His Brittanic Majesty acknowledges the said United States ... to be free sovereign and independent states, that he treats with them as such, and for himself, his heirs, and successors, relinquishes all claims to the government, propriety, and territorial rights of the same and every part thereof.

Reading it: "relinquishes" means gives up completely. Notice the plural, "states," listed one by one, because in 1783 that is what was being recognised: thirteen of them, not one country. Notice also who is absent. The Native nations who had fought as Britain's allies were not present at the negotiations and are not mentioned in the treaty, yet Britain handed over land they lived on, east of the Mississippi. They had not been defeated. They had been signed away.

Pulling it together

• Britain had to conquer and hold; the Americans only had to keep an army in existence.
• Saratoga in 1777 brought France into the war, and with it money, troops and a navy.
• Valley Forge turned the Continental Army into a force that could manoeuvre against regulars.
• Enslaved people and Native nations made their own calculations, and many chose Britain.
• Yorktown in 1781 broke Britain's will, and the Treaty of Paris in 1783 ended the war.

Sources

1. Avalon Project. (n.d.). Treaty of Paris, 1783. Yale Law School. avalon.law.yale.edu
2. National Park Service. (n.d.). History and culture. Saratoga National Historical Park. nps.gov
3. National Park Service. (n.d.). Valley Forge National Historical Park. National Park Service. nps.gov
4. Dunmore, J. M. (1775, November 7). A proclamation [Broadside]. Williamsburg, Virginia.
5. Middlekauff, R. (2005). The glorious cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (Rev. ed.). Oxford University Press.

The big picture

In the winter of 1786 and 1787, farmers in western Massachusetts, many of them army veterans being sued for debts they could not pay, shut down county courts by force and marched on the federal arsenal at Springfield. Congress had no money to raise troops and no authority to act. A private subscription from Boston merchants paid for the militia that stopped them.

That is Shays' Rebellion, and it frightened people who had not previously thought the national government needed fixing. Four months later a convention met in Philadelphia.

Key idea: the Constitution was not written by people who agreed. It is a set of bargains between people who did not, and some of those bargains protected slavery.

What the Articles of Confederation could not do

The Articles of Confederation, in force from 1781, created a league of states rather than a nation. Each state had one vote no matter its size. There was no president and no national court.

The fatal gap was money. Congress could ask states for funds; it could not tax. States ignored the requests, printed their own money, and taxed one another's goods. Nine of thirteen states had to agree to pass anything important, and all thirteen to change the Articles at all, which meant one state could block everything.

It is worth saying what the Articles did well, because textbooks often skip it. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 organised the territory north of the Ohio River, set out how a territory could become a state equal to the original thirteen, and banned slavery there. That ban is one reason the Ohio River later became the line between free and slave states.

Philadelphia, summer 1787

Fifty-five delegates met from May to September with the windows shut and guards at the door so nothing leaked. We know what was said because James Madison sat at the front taking notes every day and published them after his death.

They agreed quickly that the new government needed to tax, regulate trade and act directly on citizens rather than through states. Then they hit the question that nearly ended the convention: how should states be represented?

That last column is the Great Compromise, and it is why Wyoming and California have the same number of senators today.

What matters here: nobody at the convention thought the Senate was ideal. It was the price of having a country at all.

The bargains over slavery

Once representation ran by population, a second question followed immediately: who counts? Southern delegates wanted enslaved people counted, which would give their states more seats in the House. Northern delegates pointed out that these were people the South defined as property, and property is not represented.

The answer was the three-fifths clause: three of every five enslaved people would be added to a state's population for representation and for direct taxes. Read that carefully, because it is almost always misdescribed. It is not a statement that an enslaved person is three-fifths of a human being. It is a formula for counting, and the anti-slavery position in the room was to count them as zero, since they could not vote and were not represented. The effect was to hand slave states extra seats in Congress and extra votes for president for as long as slavery lasted.

Two further bargains followed. Congress was forbidden to ban the importation of enslaved people before 1808, which bought the trade twenty more years. And a fugitive clause required that a person held to service who escaped into another state be returned, which made free states legally complicit.

One more thing. The words "slave" and "slavery" appear nowhere in the 1787 text. The framers wrote "other Persons," "such Persons," and "Person held to Service or Labour." Madison recorded that delegates thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution that there could be property in men. They protected the thing and refused to name it.

Bottom line: the Constitution did not create slavery and did not abolish it. It made a working government possible by giving slaveholding states protections in writing, and that decision shaped the next seventy-four years.

How the machine was designed to work

The framers had two fears: a government too weak to function, which they had just lived through, and a government strong enough to become tyrannical, which they had just fought. Their answer was to divide power twice over.

• Separation of powers. Congress makes law, the president enforces it, courts interpret it.
• Checks and balances. The president can veto a bill; Congress can override a veto by two-thirds; the Senate confirms appointments and ratifies treaties; Congress can impeach and remove.
• Federalism. Some powers belong to the national government, some to the states, some to both.

Madison explained the logic in Federalist 51 with a famous phrase: ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The design does not assume officials will be good. It assumes they will want power, and sets them against each other.

Ratification, and the price of it

Nine states had to ratify. Supporters called themselves Federalists; opponents became Anti-Federalists, and their objection was concrete: this document lists the government's powers but not the people's rights. What stops a president or a Congress from shutting a newspaper?

Federalists first argued a bill of rights was unnecessary, then realised they would lose without one and promised to add it. That promise carried Massachusetts, Virginia and New York. The Constitution took effect in 1789, and the first Congress sent twelve amendments to the states; ten were ratified in 1791 as the Bill of Rights: speech, religion, press, assembly and petition; the right to bear arms; limits on searches; due process; jury trial; no cruel and unusual punishment; and a reminder that powers not given to the national government remain with the states or the people.

Common misconceptions

• "The Constitution was agreed unanimously." It nearly collapsed over representation, three delegates present at the end refused to sign, Rhode Island never sent anyone, and ratification passed narrowly in several states.
• "The three-fifths clause meant a person was three-fifths human." It was a counting formula for representation and taxation. Opponents of slavery wanted enslaved people counted as zero, precisely because counting them gave slaveholders more power.
• "The Bill of Rights was part of the original plan." It was added to win ratification, after Federalists had argued it was unnecessary.
• "The Constitution is silent about slavery." It never uses the word, but three separate clauses protect the institution.

In the words of the document

Article I, Section 2, from the National Archives transcription:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States ... according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

Reading it: "bound to Service for a Term of Years" means indentured servants, who are counted fully. "Indians not taxed" means members of Native nations, who are excluded entirely, since they were treated as belonging to separate nations. "All other Persons" means enslaved people, and the clause counts three of every five of them. The sentence names indentured servants and Native peoples openly and reaches for a euphemism only once. That is where the discomfort was.

What you now know

• The Articles could not tax, had no executive or courts, and needed unanimity to change.
• The Great Compromise gave the House representation by population and the Senate two seats per state.
• Three clauses protected slavery: three-fifths counting, no ban on the slave trade before 1808, and the return of people who escaped.
• Separation of powers, checks and balances and federalism divide power on purpose.
• The Bill of Rights was the price of ratification and was added in 1791.

Sources

1. National Archives. (n.d.). The Constitution of the United States: A transcription. America's Founding Documents. archives.gov
2. National Archives. (n.d.). Articles of Confederation (1777). Milestone Documents. archives.gov
3. National Archives. (n.d.). The Bill of Rights: A transcription. America's Founding Documents. archives.gov
4. Madison, J. (1788). The Federalist No. 51. Yale Law School. avalon.law.yale.edu
5. Madison, J. (1840). Notes of debates in the Federal Convention of 1787. Published posthumously by order of Congress.

The big picture

In February 1791 President Washington put the same written question to two members of his cabinet: does the Constitution permit Congress to create a national bank? Alexander Hamilton, the Treasury secretary, wrote a long answer saying yes. Thomas Jefferson, the Secretary of State, wrote a short one saying no, warning that a single step beyond the powers listed in the Constitution opens a boundless field of power.

Neither man knew it, but they had just written the founding documents of America's first two political parties.

Key idea: the Constitution said what the government was. The 1790s decided what it would actually do, and the country split over the answer.

Everything Washington did became a rule

There had never been a president. Congress debated for weeks what to call him; suggestions included His Highness. Washington settled on Mr. President, and the plain title stuck.

Other precedents followed from his habits. He gathered his department heads for advice, which became the cabinet. When France and Britain went to war in 1793 he issued a proclamation of neutrality, establishing that a president could set foreign policy. In 1794, when western Pennsylvania farmers refused to pay a federal tax on whiskey and attacked collectors, he rode out at the head of nearly 13,000 militia. The rebellion melted away without a battle, which was the point: the new government could collect a tax, and under the Articles it could not have.

Then he did the thing that mattered most. After two terms he went home. No law required it. Every president until 1940 followed his example, and after 1951 an amendment made it law.

In his Farewell Address of 1796 he warned against two dangers: permanent alliances with foreign nations, and the spirit of party. Political parties had already formed. He was warning against something that had happened.

Hamilton against Jefferson

Hamilton won most of the practical fights of the 1790s. The federal government assumed state war debts, the bank was chartered, and American credit became good enough to borrow at reasonable rates, which is why the Louisiana Purchase was possible a decade later.

Then Jefferson won the election of 1800. Federalists handed power to a party they had called dangerous, and nobody was arrested and no regiment marched. A government changing hands between enemies without violence was rare enough in 1801 to be worth noticing.

The point: the argument between these two is not settled history. Loose against strict reading of the Constitution is still the shape of American constitutional argument.

Marbury, and how the Court got its power

On his last night in office John Adams signed commissions for a batch of new judges. Some were not delivered before Jefferson took over, and Jefferson's Secretary of State, James Madison, refused to hand them out. William Marbury sued.

Chief Justice John Marshall, in Marbury v. Madison in 1803, did something clever. He ruled that Marbury was entitled to his commission but that the Court could not order its delivery, because the law giving the Court that power went beyond what the Constitution allowed. A law repugnant to the Constitution, Marshall wrote, is void.

Read what just happened. Marshall gave Jefferson the immediate result he wanted, and in exchange established that the Supreme Court decides whether a law is constitutional. That power, called judicial review, is nowhere in the Constitution. It has shaped American law ever since.

The country doubles

In 1800 Spain secretly returned the vast Louisiana territory to France, and Napoleon planned an American empire based on the sugar colony of Saint-Domingue. Enslaved people there had other plans. Their revolution, and yellow fever, destroyed the French army sent to crush it, and Haiti became independent. Without Saint-Domingue, Louisiana was worthless to Napoleon, and he needed money for a European war.

So in 1803 he offered the whole territory. Jefferson, the strict constructionist, faced an awkward fact: nothing in the Constitution authorises buying land. He bought it anyway, for about fifteen million dollars, roughly doubling the size of the United States. He sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to cross it, guided for much of the way by Sacagawea, a Lemhi Shoshone woman, and by Native nations who fed them.

Notice what was actually bought. France sold its claim, not the land. Dozens of Native nations lived there and had not agreed to anything.

The War of 1812, and who lost it

Britain was at war with Napoleon and treated neutral American shipping roughly, seizing cargoes and forcing sailors off American ships into the Royal Navy, a practice called impressment. Meanwhile in the Ohio country the Shawnee leader Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa were building a confederacy to stop further land sales, and Americans believed Britain was arming them. Congress declared war in 1812.

It went badly. Invasions of Canada failed. In August 1814 British troops burned the Capitol and the President's house in Washington. Then the tide turned at Baltimore, where the garrison at Fort McHenry held through a night of bombardment, and a lawyer watching from a ship wrote a poem that became the national anthem. Andrew Jackson won a lopsided victory at New Orleans in January 1815, two weeks after the peace treaty had been signed in Europe; news travelled slowly.

The Treaty of Ghent settled almost nothing. Borders went back to where they had been, and impressment was not even mentioned, because Napoleon's defeat had ended Britain's need for it.

The war had a clear loser, and it was not Britain or the United States. Tecumseh was killed in 1813, his confederacy collapsed, and Native nations east of the Mississippi lost their last powerful ally. Everything in the next lesson follows from that.

Bottom line: a war often called a draw was decisive for the people who were not at the treaty table.

Common misconceptions

• "America won the War of 1812." The treaty restored the prewar borders and settled none of the stated causes. What changed permanently was Native power east of the Mississippi.
• "The Louisiana Purchase bought empty land." France sold a claim. Dozens of nations, including the Osage, Lakota and Mandan, were living there and were not consulted.
• "The Constitution gives the Supreme Court the power to strike down laws." It does not say so. Marshall established judicial review in 1803, and it stuck because it was accepted.
• "Washington warned against parties before they existed." By 1796 two parties were already fighting hard, and Washington's own cabinet had produced them.

In the words of the time

Washington's Farewell Address, September 1796:

Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally. This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind ... The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge ... is itself a frightful despotism.

Reading it: "baneful" means harmful; "faction" is his word for party; "despotism" means rule by force. Notice that he does not claim parties can be abolished. He says party feeling is inseparable from human nature, and that is exactly why he thinks it is dangerous. His worry is the cycle: each side taking revenge when its turn comes, until someone decides to keep power rather than hand it over. Four years later his own vice president beat his own successor, and power changed hands peacefully anyway.

Looking back

• Washington created the cabinet, presidential neutrality, and the two-term limit by example.
• Hamilton read the Constitution loosely and built credit, a bank and manufacturing; Jefferson read it strictly and trusted farmers.
• Marbury v. Madison established judicial review in 1803.
• The Louisiana Purchase doubled the country's size and sold a claim over land where Native nations lived.
• The War of 1812 ended where it started for Britain and America, and ended Native resistance east of the Mississippi.

Sources

1. Washington, G. (1796). Farewell Address. Yale Law School. avalon.law.yale.edu
2. Jefferson, T. (1791). Opinion on the constitutionality of a national bank. Yale Law School. avalon.law.yale.edu
3. National Archives. (n.d.). Marbury v. Madison (1803). Milestone Documents. archives.gov
4. Avalon Project. (n.d.). Treaty of Ghent, 1814. Yale Law School. avalon.law.yale.edu
5. Wood, G. S. (2009). Empire of liberty: A history of the early Republic, 1789-1815. Oxford University Press.

The big picture

On 29 December 1835, twenty Cherokee men signed a treaty in the town of New Echota, Georgia, handing over every acre of Cherokee land east of the Mississippi. Between three and five hundred Cherokees were present. Not one of the signers held office in the Cherokee Nation. More than fifteen thousand Cherokees signed a protest against it. The United States Senate ratified the Treaty of New Echota anyway, by a single vote.

Three years later the army came to enforce it.

Key idea: American expansion between 1830 and 1848 was not a natural spreading-out. It was a series of laws, treaties and wars, each with a date and a vote count.

The phrase that explained it afterwards

In the summer of 1845 a New York editor named John O'Sullivan wrote that foreign powers were interfering with "the fulfilment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions."

Unpack that sentence. Manifest means obvious. Destiny means something fated. Providence means God. O'Sullivan is claiming that God has already assigned the continent to the United States, so taking it is not conquest but fulfilment.

Two things are worth noticing. First, the phrase arrived in 1845, after decades of expansion had already happened; it explained and justified rather than caused. Second, notice the word "allotted," as though the continent had been empty and waiting. Around 600,000 Native people were living west of the Mississippi at the time, along with about 80,000 Mexican citizens in the northern provinces.

Removal, in law

In 1830 Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which authorised the president to offer eastern nations land west of the Mississippi in exchange for their homelands. On paper the exchange was voluntary. The vote was close: 28 to 19 in the Senate, 101 to 97 in the House. Andrew Jackson signed it on 28 May 1830.

What followed was not voluntary. Between 1830 and 1850 about 100,000 Native people from Michigan to Florida were moved west, some in chains. About 3,500 Creeks died in Alabama and on the journey. Opponents, including missionaries and the Whig Party, argued in Congress and lost.

The case the Cherokee won, and what good it did

The Cherokee Nation did not fight. It went to court, which was in itself a remarkable decision. The Cherokee had a written constitution modelled on the American one, a written language invented by Sequoyah in the 1820s, a printing press and a newspaper.

In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia in 1831 the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, calling the Cherokee a domestic dependent nation rather than a foreign state. In Worcester v. Georgia in 1832, Chief Justice Marshall ruled that Cherokee territory was a distinct community where Georgia's laws had no force.

The Cherokee won. Nothing happened. Georgia ignored the ruling and Jackson did not enforce it. You may have heard that Jackson said, "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it." He probably never said it. The line first appears in a book published in 1864, nineteen years after Jackson died. The true version is duller and worse: no quotable defiance, just a president who declined to act, and a ruling that changed nothing on the ground.

Why this matters: a court decision only protects people when someone with power enforces it. That is a lesson this course will return to in Reconstruction.

The Trail of Tears

In May 1838 federal troops and state militia began rounding Cherokee families into stockades. People were taken from their homes at gunpoint with minutes to gather belongings, and looters followed the soldiers into empty houses.

The first groups left in summer, but rivers were too low and drought killed three to five people a day in one party. The Cherokee asked to wait for cooler weather and to manage their own removal. Permission was granted on condition they stay in the camps, where crowding and bad water killed more.

By November, twelve groups of about a thousand people each were walking roughly 800 miles west. Autumn rains turned the roads to mud. Two-thirds of them were caught between the frozen Ohio and Mississippi rivers in January. Elizur Butler, a missionary doctor who travelled with them, estimated that more than 4,000 died, close to a fifth of the Cherokee Nation. About a thousand people hid in the mountains of North Carolina and stayed; their descendants are the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians today.

John Ross, the principal chief who had fought removal for a decade, was elected chief of the reconstituted nation in the west in 1839. Its capital, Tahlequah, is still the seat of the Cherokee Nation.

Texas, and a war over a boundary

American settlers had been moving into the Mexican province of Texas since the 1820s, many bringing enslaved people even after Mexico abolished slavery in 1829. Texas rebelled in 1835, won independence in 1836, and asked to join the United States. Congress hesitated for nine years, because admitting Texas meant admitting another slave state.

In 1845 the United States annexed Texas. President James Polk then claimed the border lay at the Rio Grande, while Mexico said it lay at the Nueces River, about 150 miles north. Polk sent troops into the disputed strip. Mexican forces attacked them, and Polk told Congress that American blood had been shed on American soil.

Not everyone believed him. A first-term congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln demanded that Polk identify the exact spot where it happened. Henry David Thoreau refused to pay his tax and spent a night in jail. Ulysses S. Grant, who fought in the war as a young officer, wrote in his memoirs many years later that he had thought it one of the most unjust wars ever waged.

The United States won. Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, Mexico gave up roughly half its territory, including California and most of the present Southwest, for fifteen million dollars. Around 80,000 Mexican citizens became residents of the United States overnight and were promised their property rights, promises that were widely broken in the courts that followed.

And now the question that breaks the country. All that new land had to be organised into territories. Would slavery be allowed in it? In 1846 a congressman named David Wilmot proposed that it should not. His proviso passed the House repeatedly and died in the Senate every time. The argument it started ran straight to Fort Sumter.

Common misconceptions

• "Native nations never used the law to resist." The Cherokee took Georgia to the Supreme Court and won in 1832. The ruling was simply not enforced.
• "Jackson defied the Court with a famous line." The quotation appears first in 1864, nearly two decades after his death, and is almost certainly invented.
• "The West was empty." About 600,000 Native people lived west of the Mississippi, and tens of thousands of Mexican citizens lived in the north of Mexico.
• "Everyone supported the war with Mexico." Lincoln challenged its stated cause in Congress, Thoreau went to jail rather than fund it, and Grant later called it unjust.

In their own words

A Cherokee survivor of the removal, recorded by the National Park Service among the accounts of the Trail:

Long time we travel on way to new land. People feel bad when they leave Old Nation. Womens cry and make sad wails. Children cry and many men cry ... but they say nothing and just put heads down and keep on go towards West. Many days pass and people die very much.

Reading it: this is English spoken by someone whose first language was Cherokee, recorded years later. Do not mistake the plain grammar for simple thinking. Look at what the speaker chose to report: the women and children cry, the men cry too, and then say nothing and keep walking. Another survivor described losing his father, then his mother, then five brothers and sisters, in his words one each day, then all are gone. No official report conveys that. Only the people who walked it could.

The takeaway

• Manifest Destiny, named in 1845, claimed that God had assigned the continent to the United States.
• The Indian Removal Act of 1830 passed by four votes in the House and led to about 100,000 people being moved west.
• The Cherokee won Worcester v. Georgia in 1832, and the ruling was never enforced.
• On the Trail of Tears in 1838 and 1839 more than 4,000 Cherokees died, close to a fifth of the nation.
• The war with Mexico added half of Mexico's territory and immediately raised the question of slavery in it.

Sources

1. National Park Service. (n.d.). What happened on the Trail of Tears? Trail of Tears National Historic Trail. nps.gov
2. O'Sullivan, J. L. (1845). Annexation. The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 17(85), 5-10. wikisource.org
3. National Archives. (n.d.). Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848). Milestone Documents. archives.gov
4. National Archives. (n.d.). President Andrew Jackson's message to Congress on Indian removal (1830). Milestone Documents. archives.gov
5. Perdue, T., and Green, M. D. (2007). The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears. Viking.

The big picture

In October 1836 an eleven-year-old girl stood in a spinning room in Lowell, Massachusetts, waiting to see whether the women around her would walk off the job. Her name was Harriet Hanson. Her work was doffing: pulling full bobbins of thread off the spinning frames and pushing empty ones on, hour after hour, in air kept damp on purpose so the cotton would not snap.

The mill companies had cut wages, and they had also stopped paying the twenty-five cents a week they had been putting toward each worker's board. Together that took about a dollar a week out of pay that ran to a few dollars. Women in the upper rooms walked out first. In Harriet's room nobody moved, so she marched out alone, and the rest came after her. Between twelve and fifteen hundred workers left the mills that month and went through the streets in procession, singing.

The core of it: between about 1815 and 1848 the way Americans worked, travelled, worshipped and argued changed faster than it ever had, and ordinary people responded by organising: in the mills, in revival meetings, in antislavery societies, and at a two-day convention in a chapel in New York.

What the canals and mills actually changed

Start with a mule. A mule can carry about 250 pounds on its back. Hitched to a rope on a towpath beside a canal, the same mule can pull a barge weighing 60,000 pounds. That is the whole idea behind the Erie Canal, which opened on 26 October 1825 and ran 363 miles from Albany to Buffalo, joining the Hudson River to the Great Lakes.

Steamboats did the same work on the Mississippi, and by the 1840s railroads were doing it on land. Western wheat could now reach a New York bakery and still be cheap.

Historians call the whole shift the market revolution. The phrase means this: work that families had done for themselves moved into factories, and families began buying what they had made. A farm household in 1790 spun its own thread, wove its own cloth, cut its own soap. By 1840 many households bought cloth, and to buy it they needed cash, and to get cash somebody in the family went to work for wages.

That is why Lowell existed. In 1821 a group of Boston investors bought farmland at a thirty-foot waterfall on the Merrimack River and built a city of brick mills around it. Water turned the wheels; the wheels turned belts; the belts turned thousands of spindles and looms under one roof. It needed workers, and it hired the group New England had most of and paid least: unmarried farm daughters, mostly aged fifteen to thirty.

Inside the Lowell system

The bargain was written down. In return for monthly wages in cash, a worker agreed to stay at least a year, to live in a company boardinghouse, and to attend church. Boardinghouse keepers enforced curfews and rules of conduct. About a third of a worker's pay went straight back to the company as room and board. The working day ran twelve to fourteen hours, plus half a day on Saturday, with Sunday off.

Say plainly what that bargain was worth. For a farm daughter in 1835 it was the first money that was hers, and the workers ran their own magazine, the Lowell Offering.

It was also loud enough to leave workers deaf, dusty enough to leave them coughing, and controlled down to the hour of the bell. When the companies cut pay in 1834, about 800 walked out calling themselves the daughters of freemen, and lost. In 1836 the turnout was bigger, better organised and lasted months. A Factory Girls' Association collected money so strikers could pay their board, and several companies gave way: the Hamilton Company dropped the board increase for daily-wage workers, and the Boott and Merrimack corporations dropped it entirely.

What matters here: the first large strikes by women in American history came out of the first large factories, and they were about the same thing every strike is about, which is who decides what the work is worth.

Why the revival meetings filled up

The same decades brought the Second Great Awakening, a wave of Protestant revival preaching. A revival is a series of meetings, often nightly for weeks, meant to convert people on the spot.

Its most famous preacher was Charles Grandison Finney, a lawyer turned minister who preached in Rochester, New York, through the winter of 1830 to 1831, in a canal boom town full of strangers with wages. Critics called his methods new measures: he let women pray aloud in mixed meetings and named individuals from the pulpit.

The doctrine underneath mattered more than the theatre. Older Calvinist teaching held that God had already chosen who would be saved. Finney taught that a person could choose. Turn that idea loose and it has a consequence: if you can choose to save yourself, you can choose to fix the world. Out of the revivals came temperance societies against drink, Horace Mann arguing for free public schools, and Dorothea Dix, who spent two years counting how mentally ill people were actually kept in Massachusetts and reported to the legislature in 1843 that she had found them in cages, closets, cellars and pens.

Abolition gets loud, and gets answered

On 1 January 1831 a printer in Boston named William Lloyd Garrison published the first issue of a newspaper called The Liberator. Most opponents of slavery at the time favoured gradual emancipation, or shipping free Black Americans to Africa. Garrison demanded immediate emancipation and wrote: "I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice."

Two years later he helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society. Note who was already there: free Black communities in Boston, Philadelphia and New York had been organising against slavery for years.

The reaction tells you the movement was working. From 1836 the House of Representatives enforced a gag rule that tabled every antislavery petition without reading it; it stood for eight years. In 1837 a mob in Alton, Illinois, killed the editor Elijah Lovejoy and threw his printing press in the river.

In August 1841, at a meeting on Nantucket, a twenty-three-year-old who had escaped from slavery in Maryland three years earlier was asked to speak. Frederick Douglass spoke so well that audiences began to doubt he had ever been enslaved, so in 1845 he published a narrative naming his owners, which forced him to sail for Britain to avoid recapture. He later split with Garrison over a real question: Garrison called the Constitution a proslavery document and burned a copy of it, while Douglass came to argue it could be used against slavery.

Seneca Falls, 19 and 20 July 1848

Eight years earlier Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott had been refused seats at an antislavery convention in London because they were women. In July 1848 they called a two-day meeting at a chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, and about three hundred people came.

What they adopted was not a speech but a document, deliberately shaped like the Declaration of Independence: the same opening, the same list of grievances, with a husband and the law in the place of King George. Roughly a hundred people signed it, sixty-eight women and thirty-two men. Most resolutions passed without argument. The one demanding the vote nearly failed, and Frederick Douglass spoke in its favour on the floor.

Common misconceptions

• "Factory work was simply an improvement on farm work." It paid cash, which mattered, and it ran fourteen hours in deafening rooms under company rules. Both facts are true at once, which is why workers took the jobs and then struck.
• "Abolitionists were a northern majority." They were a small, unpopular minority in the 1830s. Northern mobs broke their presses and killed Lovejoy.
• "Seneca Falls started the women's rights movement from nothing." The women who called it had been organising against slavery for years, and they built the convention out of that experience.

In the words of the convention

The opening of the Declaration of Sentiments, adopted at Seneca Falls on 20 July 1848, with two of its grievances:

We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights ... He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise. He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.

Reading it: hold it beside Jefferson's sentence from 1776. Two words are added, and women, and the borrowed form is the argument. Anyone who called the document outrageous had to explain which part of the Declaration of Independence they were rejecting. The He is not one man; it is husbands, legislatures and courts taken together. Elective franchise means the vote, and seventy-two years passed before the Nineteenth Amendment granted it.

Recap

• Canals and railroads put distant markets in reach, and households began buying what they had made.
• Lowell paid cash wages for twelve to fourteen hour days under company rules; the turnouts of 1834 and 1836 were among the first large strikes by women in the United States.
• The Second Great Awakening taught that a person could choose salvation, and that idea fed temperance, school and asylum reform.
• Garrison demanded immediate emancipation from 1831; the gag rule, the mobs and Lovejoy's killing measured how unwelcome that was.
• At Seneca Falls in 1848 about a hundred people signed a Declaration of Sentiments modelled on the Declaration of Independence, and its demand for the vote nearly failed.

Sources

1. National Park Service. (n.d.). Early strikes in Lowell. Lowell National Historical Park. nps.gov
2. National Park Service. (n.d.). The mill girls of Lowell. Lowell National Historical Park. nps.gov
3. Robinson, H. H. (1898). Loom and Spindle; or, Life Among the Early Mill Girls. T. Y. Crowell. archive.org
4. National Park Service. (n.d.). Declaration of Sentiments. Women's Rights National Historical Park. nps.gov
5. Garrison, W. L. (1831, January 1). To the public. The Liberator, 1(1). Transcription in PBS, Africans in America. pbs.org

The big picture

In 1841 a free man named Solomon Northup, a farmer and fiddle player from Saratoga Springs, New York, took a job with two men who offered him good money to play music on tour. In Washington, D.C., they drugged him. He woke in a slave pen within sight of the Capitol, in chains, and was told he was a runaway from Georgia. He was shipped to New Orleans, sold, and worked for twelve years on Louisiana cotton and sugar plantations before a Canadian carpenter carried a letter north for him. He got home in January 1853 and published his account that same year.

Northup is useful precisely because he had lived both ways. He knew what it was to be a free man in New York, and he could therefore describe what was taken.

Remember: slavery in the United States was not a vague cruelty. It was a legal system with rules, prices, account books and a census, and it is that ordinariness, written into law and ledger, that has to be understood.

Four million people, counted

The Eighth Census, taken in 1860 and printed in 1864, counted 31,443,321 people in the United States. Of those, 3,953,760 were enslaved: just under four million, roughly one American in eight. The same census listed 393,975 slaveholders by name.

Those two numbers together already tell you something. Most white southerners owned nobody. Counting by family rather than by name, about 26 percent of families in the fifteen states where slavery was legal owned at least one person, and about 31 percent in the eleven states that later seceded. So slaveholding was a minority, a large one, and the wealthiest by a distance.

Where those four million people lived had shifted. In 1790 slavery was concentrated in Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas. Then Eli Whitney's cotton gin, built in 1793, made it quick to pull seeds out of short-staple cotton, which grows almost anywhere in the Deep South. Cotton became the country's largest export, and by the 1830s Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana were growing half the national crop.

People were moved to follow the cotton. Between 1790 and 1860 roughly a million enslaved people were carried or marched from the Upper South to the Deep South by traders, in what the historian Ira Berlin, in Generations of Captivity (2003), called the second middle passage. Congress had banned the importation of captives from Africa in 1808. The internal trade was legal, large and profitable, and it worked by selling people away from their families.

What the law said

The slave codes of the southern states were not identical, but they agreed on the essentials. An enslaved person was property that could be sold, mortgaged, willed or seized to pay a debt. A marriage between enslaved people had no legal standing, so no court would stop a sale that ended it. Children inherited the mother's condition, the rule Virginia had written in 1662 that you met in Module 2. Enslaved people could not testify in court against a white person, could not travel without a written pass, and after Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831 could not legally be taught to read in several states.

Read that list again with a question in mind: what is a law for? Every item on it exists because somebody was doing the opposite. States banned teaching reading because enslaved people were learning to read.

The work, measured

On cotton plantations the common arrangement was gang labour: rows of people working at a set pace under a driver, from first light until dark. Cotton was weighed at the end of the day. Northup wrote that an ordinary day's work was two hundred pounds, and that the walk to the gin house at dusk was frightening whichever way the scale went, because too little meant punishment and too much meant a higher quota tomorrow.

In the rice country of South Carolina and Georgia the task system was more usual: a measured job for the day, and time to yourself if you finished it. Compared with gang labour that sounds better, and people in the rice fields used the difference to grow food and sell it. Rice work also meant standing in flooded fields where malaria and yellow fever killed at rates far above the cotton districts.

Rations were written down like any other supply. Douglass recorded the monthly allowance on the Maryland plantation where he grew up: eight pounds of pork, or its equivalent in fish, and one bushel of corn meal, with a yearly issue of clothing he reckoned could not have cost seven dollars.

What no ledger records

Frederick Douglass did not know the year of his own birth. He was separated from his mother as an infant and saw her only at night, when she walked twelve miles after her day's work to lie beside him and was gone before he woke. She died when he was about seven, and he was not allowed to be there.

Harriet Jacobs, born in Edenton, North Carolina, in 1813, was pursued for years by the man who owned her. To get her children away from him she hid in a crawl space above a shed at her grandmother's house, a space too low to stand in, for nearly seven years. She wrote of her daughter's birth: "Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women."

Against all of this, enslaved families held. People married in ceremonies the law refused to recognise, named children after grandparents to keep a line visible, walked miles at night to visit a wife on another place, and built churches that met in the woods when the law shut them out of buildings.

Resistance, in more than one form

In August 1831 Nat Turner, a preacher in Southampton County, Virginia, led a revolt that killed at least fifty-five white people over two days. It was put down within days. Turner was hanged that November. In the reprisals white militias and mobs killed many Black people who had nothing to do with it, and the Virginia legislature responded by debating whether to abolish slavery, deciding not to, and tightening the codes instead.

Escape was the second form. Harriet Tubman escaped from Maryland in 1849 and then went back about thirteen times, bringing out around seventy people, family first. The Underground Railroad was not a formal organisation with a membership list; it was people, mostly free Black northerners and a smaller number of white allies, who hid and moved travellers.

The third form was daily and unspectacular: working slowly, breaking tools, hiding food, feigning sickness, disappearing into the woods for a week to force a bargain. It rarely ended slavery for anyone. It set limits, which is what most resistance under overwhelming power does.

How we know

Four kinds of evidence, each with a catch. Published narratives by Douglass, Jacobs and Northup are first-hand, and were written to persuade a northern public, so they select and arrange. Plantation records list names, prices and rations, recording what owners thought worth recording. Runaway advertisements describe scars and skills in detail, written by the pursuer. And in the 1930s the Federal Writers' Project interviewed more than 2,300 elderly people who had been enslaved: irreplaceable testimony, given by people who had been children at the time, seventy years later, mostly to white interviewers, which shaped what felt safe to say.

The upshot: no single source gives you slavery whole. You read them against each other, and you always ask who made this record and what they wanted from it.

Common misconceptions

• "Most white southerners owned slaves." About a quarter of families in the slave states did. The system shaped the whole society anyway, because it held the wealth and the political power.
• "Enslaved people accepted their condition." Revolt, escape and daily obstruction ran through the whole period, and the codes were written to stop exactly those things.
• "Slave songs show that people were content." Douglass answered this directly in 1845, and his answer is at the end of this lesson.

In his own words

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), on the songs he heard as a boy on the Lloyd plantation:

I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.

Reading it: Douglass is correcting a specific error made by specific people, northern visitors who heard singing and drew a conclusion. Notice his method. He does not simply deny their claim; he supplies the missing piece, which is that he was inside the song and they were outside it. This is the whole problem of reading evidence in one paragraph. A visitor saw a true thing, people singing, and read it wrong because he did not know what he was looking at.

The short version

• The 1860 census counted 3,953,760 enslaved people in a country of 31,443,321, and named 393,975 slaveholders.
• The cotton gin and Deep South land moved slavery west; about a million people were sold south between 1790 and 1860.
• Slave codes made people property, denied legal marriage, barred testimony against white people, and after 1831 banned teaching reading in several states.
• Gang labour on cotton was measured by the scale; the task system on rice traded a measured job for deadly conditions.
• Resistance ran from Turner's revolt and Tubman's thirteen journeys to slow work and broken tools.
• Every source has an author with a purpose, including the testimony gathered in the 1930s.

Sources

1. Douglass, F. (1845). Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Anti-Slavery Office. gutenberg.org
2. Jacobs, H. A. (1861). Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (L. M. Child, Ed.). Published for the author. docsouth.unc.edu
3. Northup, S. (1853). Twelve Years a Slave. Derby and Miller. docsouth.unc.edu
4. U.S. Department of the Interior, Census Office. (1864). Population of the United States in 1860, Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census. Government Printing Office. census.gov
5. Library of Congress. (n.d.). Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Collection of more than 2,300 interviews.

The big picture

Under a law passed in September 1850, a federal commissioner who decided that the person standing in front of him was a runaway from slavery was paid ten dollars. If he decided the person was free, he was paid five. The accused could not testify. There was no jury. Any citizen could be ordered to help catch the person, and refusing was a crime.

That law was part of a bargain meant to save the Union, and it did more than any abolitionist speech to turn northerners against slavery, because it put slavery in their own streets and made them part of it.

What matters here: the eleven years from 1850 to 1861 are not a slow drift into war. They are a sequence of decisions, each one intended to settle the question of slavery in the territories, and each one leaving it more dangerous than before.

Five bills, and one of them poison

The war with Mexico had handed the United States a huge territory and one question: slavery there, or not? Henry Clay proposed a package; Stephen Douglas of Illinois got it through Congress as separate bills in the autumn of 1850. The Compromise of 1850 admitted California as a free state, organised Utah and New Mexico with the question left to their settlers, ended the buying and selling of people in the District of Columbia while leaving slavery there legal, settled the Texas boundary in exchange for federal payment of Texas debts, and passed the new Fugitive Slave Act.

Leaving a question to the settlers of a territory was called popular sovereignty. It sounds democratic. Its practical meaning was that both sides now had a reason to move people into a territory fast.

The Fugitive Slave Act reached north in a way nothing else had. In 1854 Anthony Burns, who had escaped to Boston, was arrested there, and it took federal troops to march one man to a ship past crowds and buildings draped in black. Northern legislatures replied with personal liberty laws obstructing the federal act, which southern states later listed as a grievance.

The book

In 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe, a minister's daughter in Maine who had been reading fugitive narratives and antislavery papers, published Uncle Tom's Cabin. It sold about 300,000 copies in the United States in its first year, at a time when the whole country held 23 million people. It was staged in theatres, argued about in pulpits, and answered by at least two dozen novels defending slavery.

Be careful how you weigh it. A novel is not evidence about slavery; it is evidence about what its readers were prepared to feel. Southern reviewers were furious in a way that tells you they thought it was working.

A line erased

In 1854 Douglas wanted a railroad through Nebraska, and to get southern votes for organising the territory he wrote popular sovereignty into the bill. That meant repealing the Missouri Compromise line of 1820, which had banned slavery north of 36 degrees 30 minutes. The Kansas-Nebraska Act passed in May 1854.

Thirty-four years of settled arrangement disappeared, and both sides raced into Kansas. Missourians crossed the border to vote illegally; New England emigrant aid societies paid to send settlers the other way. Kansas ended up with two rival governments and a long stretch of killing that the newspapers named Bleeding Kansas. On 21 May 1856 a proslavery posse wrecked the presses and hotel at Lawrence. Three days later John Brown and his sons killed five proslavery settlers with swords at Pottawatomie Creek.

Between those two events, on 22 May 1856, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina walked onto the floor of the Senate and beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with a heavy cane until it broke. Sumner, who had made a speech insulting Brooks's relative, took three years to return to his seat. Brooks was sent replacement canes by admirers.

Out of the Kansas fight came a new party. The Republican Party, founded in 1854, proposed not to abolish slavery in the states but to stop it spreading into the territories, which southern leaders read as a plan to surround and eventually end it.

The Court settles it, and unsettles everything

Dred Scott was an enslaved man in Missouri whose owner had taken him to live in Illinois, a free state, and in Wisconsin Territory, where the Missouri Compromise banned slavery. He sued for freedom on the ground that residence on free soil had made him free. On 6 March 1857 the Supreme Court ruled against him, seven to two.

Chief Justice Roger Taney went far beyond the case. He held that a person of African descent could not be a citizen of the United States and so could not sue in federal court at all. In the passage everyone remembers, Taney was describing what he claimed had been the settled opinion of Europeans and Americans in 1787: that Black people were "so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." He then used that claim about the past to decide the present. Second, he held that Congress had no power to ban slavery in a territory, which made the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional and the Republican programme illegal before it started.

So what?: the decision that was supposed to end the argument destroyed the middle ground. If Congress could not ban slavery in the territories, then no compromise since 1820 had been lawful, and the only remaining options were to accept slavery everywhere or to change the Court.

Seven debates and a raid

In 1858 Abraham Lincoln ran for the Senate in Illinois against Stephen Douglas. They held seven debates, three hours each, in front of crowds that stood in the sun to listen. Lincoln opened his campaign with a sentence borrowed from the Gospels: "A house divided against itself cannot stand." He said the country could not stay permanently half slave and half free. He also said, at Charleston, that he did not favour political and social equality between the races, which is part of the record too. Douglas kept his seat. Lincoln became known nationally.

A year later, on 16 October 1859, John Brown led twenty-one men into Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and seized the federal armoury, expecting enslaved people to rise and join him. Almost none could. Marines under Robert E. Lee took the engine house in three minutes. Brown was tried, convicted and hanged on 2 December 1859. In the North church bells tolled for him; in the South his raid was read as proof that northerners intended to arm a slave revolt.

Eleven states leave, and say why

Lincoln won the election of November 1860 with about 40 percent of the popular vote and a clear majority in the Electoral College. In most of the South his name was not even on the ballot.

South Carolina left on 20 December 1860, six weeks after the election and four months before Lincoln did anything at all. Several states published declarations of their causes, and those documents are the best evidence we have about motive, because they were written by the men who made the decision, for their own people, at the moment of deciding.

Common misconceptions

• "The war was about states' rights, not slavery." Read the declarations. Mississippi's second sentence names slavery, and its list of grievances includes northern states using their own laws to obstruct the federal Fugitive Slave Act, that is, a complaint that states had too many rights.
• "Lincoln was elected promising to abolish slavery." He promised to stop its expansion into the territories and said repeatedly that he had no power to touch it in the states where it existed.
• "The South seceded after being attacked." Seven states left before Lincoln took office. The first shots were fired by Confederate guns at Fort Sumter on 12 April 1861.

In the words of the declaration

From Mississippi's Declaration of the Immediate Causes, January 1861:

In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course. Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest of the world. ... We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure this as well as every other species of property.

Reading it: this was written to persuade Mississippians and the world, not to hide anything, so it says plainly what later accounts often blur. Notice the phrase "property worth four billions of money." The property is people. Every argument here is about slavery, and the writers assumed their readers would find that an obvious and sufficient reason.

What to carry forward

• The Compromise of 1850 admitted California free and attached a Fugitive Slave Act that forced northerners to take part in recapture.
• Uncle Tom's Cabin sold about 300,000 copies in a year and moved the argument from policy to people.
• The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 repealed the 1820 line, produced years of violence in Kansas, and created the Republican Party.
• Dred Scott in 1857 denied Black citizenship and barred Congress from banning slavery in the territories.
• After Lincoln's election, seven states seceded before he was inaugurated, and their own declarations give slavery as the cause.

Sources

1. Mississippi. (1861). A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union. Avalon Project, Yale Law School. avalon.law.yale.edu
2. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857). Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. law.cornell.edu
3. National Archives. (n.d.). Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854). Milestone Documents. archives.gov
4. Lincoln, A. (1858, June 16). House Divided speech, Springfield, Illinois. Wikisource. wikisource.org
5. Stowe, H. B. (1852). Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly. John P. Jewett. gutenberg.org

The big picture

On 17 September 1862, along a sunken farm lane and a cornfield near Antietam Creek in Maryland, 22,726 men were killed, wounded or listed missing between dawn and dusk. It remains the deadliest single day in American history. Neither army had achieved much: Robert E. Lee's invasion of the North was stopped, and that was all.

Five days later Abraham Lincoln used the result as the occasion he had been waiting for. He announced that on 1 January 1863 he would declare enslaved people in states still in rebellion to be free.

The point: the war began as a fight to keep the Union whole, and by 1863 it had become a fight to end slavery as well. That change was not a mood. It happened on dates, in documents, and because of what enslaved people themselves did.

What each side had in 1861

Start with the arithmetic, because it explains the shape of the war.

At the peak of strength in 1863, Union soldiers outnumbered Confederate soldiers by about two to one. Notice the awkward line in that table: 3.5 million of the South's people were enslaved, and the Confederacy could use them as labour but dared not arm them until the last weeks of the war, by which time it hardly mattered.

Why it lasted four years anyway

Advantages on paper are not victory. The Confederacy did not have to conquer anything; it only had to survive until the North gave up. The Union had to invade, take and hold a territory bigger than western Europe, with supply lines that got longer at every step and could be cut by a hundred men with axes.

The Union plan, mocked at the time as the Anaconda Plan, was to blockade the coast, take the Mississippi, and squeeze. It was slow, it was correct, and it took three years to work.

What the Proclamation did, and did not do

The Emancipation Proclamation of 1 January 1863 declared free all people held as slaves in areas still in rebellion. Read that carefully. It did not apply to the border states that had stayed in the Union, nor to parts of the South already under Union control. On the day it was signed it freed almost nobody by its own force, because it applied exactly where the United States had no power to enforce it.

So why does it matter? Three reasons. It made every advancing Union army a force of liberation: from that day, wherever the army went, slavery ended in front of it, and hundreds of thousands of people walked to the lines to make that happen. It authorised Black men to enlist. And it made European recognition of the Confederacy politically impossible, because Britain had abolished slavery in 1833 and could not now take the slaveholders' side.

Lincoln issued it as a war measure under his powers as commander in chief, which is why its language is dry and legal rather than ringing. He knew a proclamation could be undone by a court or a later president, and that is why he pushed for the Thirteenth Amendment.

179,000 men

By the end of the war roughly 179,000 Black men had served as soldiers in the United States Army, about a tenth of it, and another 19,000 in the Navy. Nearly 40,000 died, about 30,000 of them from disease. Most served in the United States Colored Troops, and nearly 80 held commissions as officers.

They were not paid equally. A Black soldier received ten dollars a month with three deducted for clothing, leaving seven; a white soldier received thirteen with no deduction. The men of the 54th Massachusetts refused to take any pay at all for eighteen months rather than accept less, and Congress equalised the pay in 1864. On 18 July 1863 that regiment led the assault on Fort Wagner in South Carolina and lost half its men and two thirds of its officers. Captured Black soldiers risked being killed or sold rather than treated as prisoners of war, as at Fort Pillow in April 1864.

Why this matters: emancipation was not a gift handed down. People freed themselves by leaving, and then enlisted in the army that had to be persuaded to take them.

The first week of July 1863

On 1, 2 and 3 July 1863 Lee's army met the Union army at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The three days cost 51,116 casualties on both sides, and on the third Lee sent about 12,500 men across three quarters of a mile of open ground into artillery and rifle fire. Roughly half did not come back. He retreated to Virginia and never invaded the North again.

On 4 July, 900 miles away, the Confederate garrison at Vicksburg surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant after a six-week siege in which townspeople lived in caves dug into the bluffs. The Mississippi River was now Union all the way to the sea, and the Confederacy was cut in two.

The home fronts

Both governments ran out of volunteers and both resorted to conscription, which is compulsory military service. The Confederacy went first, in April 1862, and later exempted one white man on any plantation with twenty or more enslaved people, a rule soldiers summarised bitterly as a rich man's war and a poor man's fight. The Union's draft law of March 1863 let a man escape service by paying 300 dollars, close to a year's wages for a labourer. In July 1863 riots in New York City against the draft turned into four days of attacks on Black residents, and more than a hundred people were killed.

In the South, blockade and inflation emptied the shops. In April 1863 several hundred women marched through Richmond breaking into stores for food, and Jefferson Davis had to come out and speak to them. Women on both sides ran farms, nursed in hospitals and worked in arsenals; thousands served in Union hospitals under Dorothea Dix, the reformer you met in the Lowell lesson.

So why did the North win?

Four reasons, in order of weight. Resources, once the Union found generals willing to use them. The blockade and the Mississippi, which strangled Confederate supply. Emancipation, which added 179,000 soldiers to one side and removed labour from the other. And politics: Sherman took Atlanta on 2 September 1864, which secured Lincoln's re-election that November against a candidate whose party platform called the war a failure. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House on 9 April 1865. Five days later Lincoln was shot.

The cost was long counted at about 620,000 dead. A 2011 study by the demographer J. David Hacker, comparing census records, put the likely figure nearer 750,000. Either way it is more Americans than died in both world wars together.

Common misconceptions

• "The Emancipation Proclamation freed all enslaved people." It applied only to areas in rebellion. Slavery in Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware and Missouri ended with the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865.
• "Black soldiers were kept out of combat." The 54th Massachusetts led the attack on Fort Wagner, and nearly 40,000 Black soldiers died in the war.
• "Lincoln always intended to free the enslaved." In 1861 he said his object was to save the Union. What moved him was three years of war, the labour of people who freed themselves, and the arithmetic of who would fight.

In the words of the speech

On 19 November 1863, at the dedication of a cemetery at Gettysburg, the main speaker talked for two hours. Lincoln then spoke about 270 words in roughly two minutes. The close of the Gettysburg Address, in the text printed in the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln:

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us ... that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Reading it: start with the first four words of the speech, which are not in this extract. Four score and seven years before 1863 is 1776, not 1787. Lincoln is dating the country from the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution, and that choice is an argument: it makes all men are created equal the founding promise, and the Constitution merely the machinery. Then notice new birth. He is not asking the nation to go back to what it was. He says the dead have already done their part, so the work is for the living. And he never mentions slavery, the South, or a single general by name. Two minutes, no names, and the war's purpose quietly redefined.

Where this leaves us

• The Union had about 18.5 million people to the Confederacy's 5.5 million free, and enlisted 2.67 million men.
• The Confederacy needed only to survive, which is why superior resources took four years to decide anything.
• The Emancipation Proclamation of 1 January 1863 applied only to areas in rebellion, turned Union armies into forces of liberation, and opened enlistment to Black men.
• About 179,000 Black soldiers and 19,000 sailors served; nearly 40,000 died; their pay was equalised only in 1864.
• Gettysburg and Vicksburg fell in the same week of July 1863, and Atlanta in September 1864 secured Lincoln's re-election.
• Between about 620,000 and 750,000 soldiers died.

Sources

1. Lincoln, A. (1863, November 19). The Gettysburg Address (text from R. P. Basler, Ed., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln). Lincoln Home National Historic Site, National Park Service. nps.gov
2. National Archives. (n.d.). Emancipation Proclamation (1863). Milestone Documents. archives.gov
3. National Archives. (n.d.). Black soldiers in the U.S. military during the Civil War. Educator Resources. archives.gov
4. National Park Service. (n.d.). Civil War facts. The Civil War. nps.gov
5. Hacker, J. D. (2011). A census-based count of the Civil War dead. Civil War History, 57(4), 307-348.

The big picture

On the evening of 12 January 1865, in a house on Savannah's Charles Street, twenty Black ministers sat down with the Secretary of War and General William Sherman. The army had just taken the city. The government wanted to know what the people it was freeing actually wanted.

The ministers chose Garrison Frazier, aged sixty-seven, freed eight years earlier after buying himself and his wife, to answer. Asked what slavery was, he defined it. Asked what freedom meant, he defined that too. Asked how his people could best take care of themselves, he said: land, and the right to work it themselves.

Four days later Sherman issued Special Field Orders No. 15, setting aside a strip of coast from Charleston down to Florida, thirty miles inland, for settlement in plots of no more than forty acres. About 40,000 people moved onto roughly 400,000 acres. Within the year, President Andrew Johnson gave the land back to its former owners and had the families removed.

Worth holding on to: Reconstruction is not a story of what was given to freedpeople. It is a story of what they claimed, what the law briefly guaranteed, and how both were taken back.

Three amendments, and the words inside them

The Constitution was changed three times in five years, and the exact wording matters in each case.

The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified on 6 December 1865, abolished slavery. Read its first sentence closely: neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist, "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." Southern states read that exception and began arresting Black men for vagrancy, then leasing convicts to planters and mines. The practice lasted into the twentieth century.

The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified 9 July 1868, did three things in one sentence and a half. It made everyone born in the United States a citizen, which erased Dred Scott. It forbade any state to deprive a person of life, liberty or property without due process of law. And it forbade any state to deny any person the equal protection of the laws. Those last five words are the most litigated phrase in American law.

The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified 3 February 1870, barred denying the vote on account of race, colour, or previous condition of servitude. Notice what it does not say. It says nothing about sex, which split the women's movement bitterly, and it bans only certain reasons for refusing the vote, not other tests a state might invent. Thirty years later, states invented them.

What freedom looked like first

Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands on 3 March 1865, known as the Freedmen's Bureau. It issued rations, ran hospitals, supervised labour contracts, legalised marriages slavery had refused to recognise, and helped set up schools. It was understaffed and often outmatched by local authorities, and its records are now the largest single body of evidence about Black families in this period.

What freedpeople did for themselves is the bigger story. They walked hundreds of miles to find children and spouses sold away, and placed advertisements in Black newspapers for decades afterwards looking for them. They founded their own churches by the thousand. They built schools and paid teachers out of wages that barely covered food, and older people learned to read beside their grandchildren.

And they voted. Under the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 the southern states wrote new constitutions with Black men voting and sitting in the conventions. Between 1867 and 1877 about 2,000 Black men held public office in the South, from constable to Congress. Hiram Revels of Mississippi entered the Senate in 1870, in a seat Jefferson Davis had held before secession. Blanche K. Bruce served a full six-year Senate term. Robert Smalls, who in 1862 had stolen a Confederate steamer out of Charleston harbour with his family aboard and handed it to the Union navy, served five terms in the House. The new state governments also founded the South's first public school systems, for both races.

The counter-attack

It began immediately. In late 1865 Mississippi and South Carolina passed Black Codes: laws requiring Black workers to sign yearly labour contracts, punishing those who quit, making unemployment the crime of vagrancy, and binding Black children to white employers as apprentices, with the former owner given first claim. Congress answered with the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and then the Fourteenth Amendment.

Then came violence. The Ku Klux Klan, founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866, whipped, burned and murdered, and it aimed at exactly the people who made Reconstruction work: voters, officeholders, teachers and landowners. On Easter Sunday 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana, a white militia killed scores of Black men, most of them after they had surrendered. Congress passed Enforcement Acts in 1870 and 1871, sent federal marshals, and in South Carolina broke the Klan with hundreds of prosecutions. It worked where it was tried. Then Washington stopped trying.

Sharecropping: the arrangement nobody wanted

Freedpeople wanted land. Planters wanted gang labour back. Neither got it. What emerged was sharecropping: a family farmed a plot and gave the landowner a share of the crop, commonly a third to a half.

It gave families something real, which was daily control of their own work. It also trapped them. Seed, tools and food had to be bought on credit at a store, often the landlord's, against the coming crop, at interest that could exceed 50 percent. A bad year meant a debt carried forward, and a law in most southern states made it a crime to leave while owing money. By 1880 most Black farmers in the cotton South were sharecroppers, and most were in debt.

1877, and the century after

The presidential election of 1876 was disputed. Samuel Tilden led the popular vote and was one vote short in the Electoral College, with twenty votes contested in three southern states. A commission of fifteen men awarded all twenty to Rutherford Hayes, by eight votes to seven. In the arrangement that followed, known as the Compromise of 1877, Hayes took office and federal troops were withdrawn from the statehouses of South Carolina and Louisiana, ending the last Republican governments in the South.

What followed was not immediate. Black men kept voting in numbers into the 1880s, and it took new state constitutions, poll taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses, beginning with Mississippi in 1890, to remove them from the rolls almost entirely. In 1896 the Supreme Court approved separate railway cars in Plessy v. Ferguson, and separate but equal became the rule for another fifty-eight years.

Bottom line: the amendments stayed in the Constitution the whole time. That is why the civil rights movement of the twentieth century did not have to invent a new legal argument. It went to court with the Fourteenth Amendment and demanded that the words be enforced.

Common misconceptions

• "Reconstruction failed because freedpeople were unready for politics." This was taught in American schools for decades and is false. Black officeholders built the South's first public schools and its first state-funded hospitals. Reconstruction ended when armed force and federal withdrawal removed them.
• "The amendments were undone." They were never repealed. They were unenforced, which is a different and more useful thing to understand.
• "Segregation was the old southern way of life." Legal segregation was built after Reconstruction, mostly in the 1890s, by new laws that had to be written because the old ones did not exist.

In the words of the meeting

Garrison Frazier, speaking for twenty Black ministers to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and General Sherman, Savannah, 12 January 1865:

Slavery is, receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent. ... The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor.

Reading it: Frazier had been asked a question by two of the most powerful men in the country, in a city their army had just captured, and he gave a definition rather than a plea. Look at the word irresistible. He is not describing cruelty; he is describing power, which is the accurate thing to describe. And his answer about land is a policy proposal, not a wish: land, worked by the family, so that the labour and its fruit belong to the same people. Four days later he got it, in an army order. Within the year the government took it back.

Putting it together

• The Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery in 1865 but left an exception for punishment after conviction, which southern states exploited.
• The Fourteenth made everyone born here a citizen and required equal protection of the laws; the Fifteenth barred race as a reason to deny the vote.
• The Freedmen's Bureau ran schools, hospitals and labour contracts from 1865; freedpeople built churches, schools and families of their own.
• About 2,000 Black men held office between 1867 and 1877, including two United States senators.
• Black Codes, the Klan and the Colfax massacre attacked that work; the Enforcement Acts stopped it where they were used.
• The Compromise of 1877 ended federal protection, and disfranchisement and segregation followed in the 1890s.

Sources

1. Freedmen and Southern Society Project. (n.d.). Savannah colloquy: Minutes of a meeting between Black religious leaders and Union military authorities, 12 January 1865 (originally printed in the New-York Daily Tribune, 13 February 1865). University of Maryland. freedmen.umd.edu
2. National Archives. (n.d.). 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of slavery (1865). Milestone Documents. archives.gov
3. National Archives. (n.d.). 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Civil rights (1868). Milestone Documents. archives.gov
4. National Archives. (n.d.). Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. African American Records. archives.gov
5. Foner, E. (2014). Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (Updated ed.). Harper Perennial.

The big picture

Harriet Hanson Robinson was eleven years old in October 1836, when she walked out of a Lowell mill and the other women followed her. She wrote that story down in a book published in 1898. She was seventy-three. In the years between she had become a campaigner for women's suffrage, and the sentence in which she describes looking back at the line of women ends by comparing that pride to how she will feel when her state finally gives women the vote.

So here is the problem this lesson exists to solve. Is that account evidence? It is sixty-two years late, written by a participant, by an author with a cause, in a book meant to be read. And it is also the only description we have from inside the room.

The point: the question is never whether a source is biased. Every source is made by somebody for a reason. The question is what this particular source, made by this person for that reason, is good evidence of.

Four questions

Before you believe a word of a document, ask these, in this order.

1. Who made it? A participant, a witness, an official, a stranger repeating a rumour? What did they gain or lose by what they wrote?
2. When? At the moment, the next day, or decades later? A diary and a memoir are different kinds of thing.
3. For whom? A private letter, a court record, a newspaper, a petition to Congress, a speech to a crowd. The audience shapes the content more than almost anything else.
4. What is missing? Who does not appear, what is not said, what would you expect to find here that is not here?

Historians add a fifth move, corroboration: check the claim against a source with a different author, audience and purpose. Agreement between two documents that share none of those is worth far more than agreement between two that share all three.

Working the example

Apply the four questions to Robinson's account of the 1836 turnout.

Who. A participant, and a child at the time, later a suffrage campaigner. That gives her access nobody else had and a reason to shape the story as the beginning of a life of activism.

When. 1898, sixty-two years later. Memory at that distance keeps the shape of an event and loses detail; specific numbers in a memoir should be treated as approximate unless something else supports them.

For whom. A general reading public, in a book partly meant to defend the early mill workers against the claim that factory women were degraded. That purpose predicts what she emphasises: dignity, self-respect, respectability.

What is missing. She tells you almost nothing about what the strike cost the women who had no family to return to, and nothing about the Irish immigrant workers who were replacing the Yankee farm daughters by the 1840s.

Now corroborate. The National Park Service summary of the Lowell strikes, built from corporation records and contemporary newspapers, says between 1,500 and 2,000 workers took part in 1836, that a Factory Girls' Association supported strikers with boarding money, and that several companies gave way. Robinson's own book says twelve to fifteen hundred and describes the causes the same way, but says the strike did no good.

What do we conclude? The event, the scale and the causes are corroborated. The outcome is disputed, and here the record of company decisions beats the memory of a child, so the better answer is that several companies retreated while Robinson, whose own mother was thrown out of her boardinghouse in reprisal, remembered it as a defeat. Both parts of that sentence are true, and only one of them is in either source alone.

What each kind of source is good for

You have used every row of that table in this course. Virginia's 1662 statute told you what the colony decided, not how it was enforced. The 1860 census counted four million people without recording one word any of them said. Paul Revere's engraving of King Street showed you an intention, and the trial record showed you something else.

The silences

The hardest skill is noticing what is not there. Plantation ledgers list first names and prices and rarely a surname, because surnames imply families and families complicate sales. Colonial tax lists count households by the man's name, so a widow running a farm appears only as a number. Frederick Douglass did not know his own birthday because nobody who could write one down thought it worth writing.

Silences are not empty. A missing record is itself evidence about who was doing the recording and what they thought mattered. When you cannot find a group in the archive, ask who kept the archive.

Reliable, and useful

Keep two ideas apart. Reliable means the account is accurate about the thing it describes. Useful means it tells you something true, which may not be the thing it claims.

The Treaty of New Echota is an unreliable guide to Cherokee opinion, since the signers held no office. It is excellent evidence about how the United States Senate was prepared to make law. A Confederate secession declaration is not a neutral account of the 1850s. It is first-rate evidence of what the men who voted for secession thought they were doing and expected their neighbours to accept. Even an invented quotation is evidence, of the moment somebody found it convenient to invent: Jackson's famous line about John Marshall first appears in 1864, which tells you what a writer in 1864 wanted his readers to believe about 1832.

In short: ask what a document proves rather than whether it is true, and you will get more out of a weak source and less wrong from a strong one.

Common misconceptions

• "Primary sources are more reliable than secondary ones." A primary source is closer, not truer. A careful historian with fifty documents may be righter than one eyewitness with a view of a corner.
• "A biased source is useless." Every source has a purpose. Knowing the purpose is what makes the source readable.
• "If two accounts disagree, one is lying." They often describe different parts of the same event, or measure differently. Robinson and the company records disagree about the outcome of a strike that both describe accurately.
• "Old documents say what they mean in plain English." Words move. Domestic dependent nation, servant, franchise and even freedom all meant something specific in their own decade, and you have to check.

In the words of one small document

Robinson printed one more scrap in her book: the certificate she was given when she left the mill to be married.

Harriet J. Hanson has been employed in the Boott Cotton Mills, in a dressing-room, twenty-five months, and is honorably discharged. (Signed) J. F. Trott. Lowell, July 25, 1848.

Reading it: twenty-eight words, four facts, one signature. Ask the four questions. Who made it: a company officer, not the worker. For whom: the next employer, since without an honourable discharge a worker could be refused work elsewhere in the city. What it proves: that the corporations kept records of who left and how, and that a worker's ability to move depended on a paper another person signed. What it leaves out: everything Robinson herself put in the book around it, which is the strike, the mother thrown out of the boardinghouse, the fourteen-hour days and the pride. One sentence of company paperwork, and a whole life beside it that the paperwork was never designed to hold. That gap, between what was recorded and what happened, is where the work of history is done.

What you now know

• Ask of every document: who made it, when, for whom, and what is missing.
• Corroborate across sources that do not share an author, an audience or a purpose.
• Each kind of source proves a specific kind of thing; laws prove decisions, not obedience.
• Silences in the record are evidence about the people who kept the record.
• Unreliable sources remain useful once you ask what they are evidence of.

Sources

1. Robinson, H. H. (1898). Loom and Spindle; or, Life Among the Early Mill Girls. T. Y. Crowell. archive.org
2. National Park Service. (n.d.). Early strikes in Lowell. Lowell National Historical Park. nps.gov
3. National Archives. (n.d.). Document analysis worksheets. Educator Resources. archives.gov
4. Wineburg, S. (2001). Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past. Temple University Press.