Slavery and the Founders

Slavery and the Founders PDF Author: Paul Finkelman
Publisher: M.E. Sharpe
ISBN: 076564147X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
The new edition of this classic work addresses how the first generation of leaders of the United States dealt with the profoundly important question of human bondage. This third edition incorporates a new chapter on the regulation of the African slave trade and the latest research on Thomas Jefferson.

Slavery and the Founders

Slavery and the Founders PDF Author: Paul Finkelman
Publisher: M.E. Sharpe
ISBN: 076564147X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
The new edition of this classic work addresses how the first generation of leaders of the United States dealt with the profoundly important question of human bondage. This third edition incorporates a new chapter on the regulation of the African slave trade and the latest research on Thomas Jefferson.

No Property in Man

No Property in Man PDF Author: Sean Wilentz
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674241428
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
“Wilentz brings a lifetime of learning and a mastery of political history to this brilliant book.” —David W. Blight, author of Frederick Douglass A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year Americans revere the Constitution even as they argue fiercely over its original toleration of slavery. In this essential reconsideration of the creation and legacy of our nation’s founding document, Sean Wilentz reveals the tortured compromises that led the Founders to abide slavery without legitimizing it, a deliberate ambiguity that fractured the nation seventy years later. Contesting the Southern proslavery version of the Constitution, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass pointed to the framers’ refusal to validate what they called “property in man.” No Property in Man has opened a fresh debate about the political and legal struggles over slavery that began during the Revolution and concluded with the Civil War. It drives straight to the heart of the single most contentious issue in all of American history. “Revealing and passionately argued...[Wilentz] insists that because the framers did not sanction slavery as a matter of principle, the antislavery legacy of the Constitution has been...‘misconstrued’ for over 200 years.” —Khalil Gibran Muhammad, New York Times “Wilentz’s careful and insightful analysis helps us understand how Americans who hated slavery, such as Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, could come to see the Constitution as an ally in their struggle.” —Eric Foner

Forced Founders

Forced Founders PDF Author: Woody Holton
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807899860
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
In this provocative reinterpretation of one of the best-known events in American history, Woody Holton shows that when Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and other elite Virginians joined their peers from other colonies in declaring independence from Britain, they acted partly in response to grassroots rebellions against their own rule. The Virginia gentry's efforts to shape London's imperial policy were thwarted by British merchants and by a coalition of Indian nations. In 1774, elite Virginians suspended trade with Britain in order to pressure Parliament and, at the same time, to save restive Virginia debtors from a terrible recession. The boycott and the growing imperial conflict led to rebellions by enslaved Virginians, Indians, and tobacco farmers. By the spring of 1776 the gentry believed the only way to regain control of the common people was to take Virginia out of the British Empire. Forced Founders uses the new social history to shed light on a classic political question: why did the owners of vast plantations, viewed by many of their contemporaries as aristocrats, start a revolution? As Holton's fast-paced narrative unfolds, the old story of patriot versus loyalist becomes decidedly more complex.

Ties That Bound

Ties That Bound PDF Author: Marie Jenkins Schwartz
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022614755X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
Washington. The widow Washington ; Martha Dandridge ; Married lady ; Mistress of Mount Vernon ; Revolutionary war ; First lady ; Slaves in the president's house ; Home again -- Jefferson. Martha Wayles ; Mistress of Monticello I ; War in Virginia ; Birth and death at Monticello ; Patsy Jefferson and Sally Hemings ; First lady ; Mistress of Monticello II ; The Hemingses ; Death of Thomas Jefferson -- Madison. Dolley Payne ; Mrs. Madison ; First lady ; Mistress of Montpelier ; Decline of Montpelier ; The widow Madison ; Sale of Montpelier ; In Washington ; Death of Dolley Madison -- Epilogue inside and outside

African Founders

African Founders PDF Author: David Hackett Fischer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982145099
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 960

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Book Description
"A ... synthesis of African and African-American history that shows how slavery differed in different regions of the country, and how the Africans and their descendants influenced the culture, commerce, and laws of the early United States"--

Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South

Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South PDF Author: Paul Finkelman
Publisher: Macmillan Higher Education
ISBN: 1319169295
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
This new edition of Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South introduces the vast number of ways in which educated Southern thinkers and theorists defended the institution of slavery. This book collects and explores the elaborately detailed pro-slavery arguments rooted in religion, law, politics, science, and economics. In his introduction, now updated to include the relationship between early Christianity and slavery, Paul Finkelman discusses how early world societies legitimized slavery, the distinction between Northern and Southern ideas about slavery, and how the ideology of the American Revolution prompted the need for a defense of slavery. The rich collection of documents allows for a thorough examination of these ideas through poems, images, speeches, correspondences, and essays. This edition features two new documents that highlight women’s voices and the role of women in the movement to defend slavery plus a visual document that demonstrates how the notion of black inferiority and separateness was defended through the science of the time. Document headnotes and a chronology, plus updated questions for consideration and selected bibliography help students engage with the documents to understand the minds of those who defended slavery. Available in print and e-book formats.

Heirs of the Founders

Heirs of the Founders PDF Author: H. W. Brands
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385542542
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
From New York Times bestselling historian H. W. Brands comes the riveting story of how, in nineteenth-century America, a new set of political giants battled to complete the unfinished work of the Founding Fathers and decide the future of our democracy In the early 1800s, three young men strode onto the national stage, elected to Congress at a moment when the Founding Fathers were beginning to retire to their farms. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, a champion orator known for his eloquence, spoke for the North and its business class. Henry Clay of Kentucky, as dashing as he was ambitious, embodied the hopes of the rising West. South Carolina's John Calhoun, with piercing eyes and an even more piercing intellect, defended the South and slavery. Together these heirs of Washington, Jefferson and Adams took the country to war, battled one another for the presidency and set themselves the task of finishing the work the Founders had left undone. Their rise was marked by dramatic duels, fierce debates, scandal and political betrayal. Yet each in his own way sought to remedy the two glaring flaws in the Constitution: its refusal to specify where authority ultimately rested, with the states or the nation, and its unwillingness to address the essential incompatibility of republicanism and slavery. They wrestled with these issues for four decades, arguing bitterly and hammering out political compromises that held the Union together, but only just. Then, in 1850, when California moved to join the Union as a free state, "the immortal trio" had one last chance to save the country from the real risk of civil war. But, by that point, they had never been further apart. Thrillingly and authoritatively, H. W. Brands narrates an epic American rivalry and the little-known drama of the dangerous early years of our democracy.

Invisible Founders

Invisible Founders PDF Author: Lynn Rainville
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789202329
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Literal and metaphorical excavations at Sweet Briar College reveal how African American labor enabled the transformation of Sweet Briar Plantation into a private women’s college in 1906. This volume tells the story of the invisible founders of a college founded by and for white women. Despite being built and maintained by African American families, the college did not integrate its student body for sixty years after it opened. In the process, Invisible Founders challenges our ideas of what a college “founder” is, restoring African American narratives to their deserved and central place in the story of a single institution — one that serves as a microcosm of the American South.

Liberty’s Chain

Liberty’s Chain PDF Author: David N. Gellman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501715860
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 542

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Book Description
In Liberty's Chain, David N. Gellman shows how the Jay family, abolitionists and slaveholders alike, embodied the contradictions of the revolutionary age. The Jays of New York were a preeminent founding family. John Jay, diplomat, Supreme Court justice, and coauthor of the Federalist Papers, and his children and grandchildren helped chart the course of the Early American Republic. Liberty's Chain forges a new path for thinking about slavery and the nation's founding. John Jay served as the inaugural president of a pioneering antislavery society. His descendants, especially his son William Jay and his grandson John Jay II, embraced radical abolitionism in the nineteenth century, the cause most likely to rend the nation. The scorn of their elite peers—and racist mobs—did not deter their commitment to end southern slavery and to combat northern injustice. John Jay's personal dealings with African Americans ranged from callousness to caring. Across the generations, even as prominent Jays decried human servitude, enslaved people and formerly enslaved people served in Jay households. Abbe, Clarinda, Caesar Valentine, Zilpah Montgomery, and others lived difficult, often isolated, lives that tested their courage and the Jay family's principles. The personal and the political intersect in this saga, as Gellman charts American values transmitted and transformed from the colonial and revolutionary eras to the Civil War, Reconstruction, and beyond. The Jays, as well as those who served them, demonstrated the elusiveness and the vitality of liberty's legacy. This remarkable family story forces us to grapple with what we mean by patriotism, conservatism, and radicalism. Their story speaks directly to our own divided times.

In the Shadow of Liberty

In the Shadow of Liberty PDF Author: Kenneth C. Davis
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1627793127
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Did you know that many of America’s Founding Fathers—who fought for liberty and justice for all—were slave owners? Through the powerful stories of five enslaved people who were “owned” by four of our greatest presidents, this book helps set the record straight about the role slavery played in the founding of America. From Billy Lee, valet to George Washington, to Alfred Jackson, faithful servant of Andrew Jackson, these dramatic narratives explore our country’s great tragedy—that a nation “conceived in liberty” was also born in shackles. These stories help us know the real people who were essential to the birth of this nation but traditionally have been left out of the history books. Their stories are true—and they should be heard. This thoroughly-researched and documented book can be worked into multiple aspects of the common core curriculum.