Give Me Liberty!

1
Chapter 6
Norton Media Library
Give Me Liberty! An American History Second
EditionVolume 1
by Eric Foner
2
I. Democratizing freedom

• Challenges to hereditary privilege
• Rejection of hereditary aristocracy
• Radicalism of all men are created equal
• Expansion of political democracy
• Popular engagement in public debate
• Unintended disruption of social order
• Rise of artisans, small farmers, laborers, etc.
• Rolling back of property qualifications
  (especially in PA)
• Less democratization in the South
• New state constitutions (all republican)
• PA 1-house legislature
• MA balanced bicameral legislature
• Radical conservative patriots

3
II. Toward religious toleration

• Broadening of religious toleration
• Weakening of anti-Catholicism
• The founders and religion
• Religion public morality
• Skeptical of religious doctrine
• Separating church and state
• Deists and evangelists unite to separate church
  and state
• Only NY offered complete religious toleration
• Jefferson and religious liberty
• Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom
• Rejected creationism
• Jeffersons Bible Jesus was not divine
• James Madison U.S. was a religious / political
  asylum
• Revolution and the churches
• Challenges to church authority
• Leaders encouraged virtue sacrifice
  self-interest for public good

4
III. Defining economic freedom

• Sharpening of the line between free and slave
  labor
• Decline of intermediate forms of un-free labor
• Indentured servitude apprenticeship (vanished
  by 1800)
• Causes of decline
• Rise of wage workers
• Points of consensus
• Excessive dependency and inequality subversive to
  republic
• America well-poised to foster liberty equality
• Points of debate
• Equality of condition vs. equality of opportunity
• Jefferson abolishes entail and primogeniture
• Regulation of prices vs. free trade
• Adam Smiths Wealth of Nations invisible hand
  of free market

5
IV. The limits of liberty

• Colonial loyalists
• Social profiles
• Comprised _at_ 1/3 of population
• Similar to patriots (or rebels)
• 20,000 fought with the British
• Motivations
• Numerous in NY, PA, SC, and GA
• Economic
• Experiences
• Suppression and assaults
• Seizure of property
• Oaths of allegiance
• Banishment or voluntary departure _at_ 100,000
• Gradual fading of stigma

6
IV. The limits of liberty

• Indians
• Accelerated dispossession
• Wartime dilemmas and disruptions
• Futile efforts at neutrality
• Divided allegiances
• Losses and hardships
• Access to Indian land was one of the fruits of
  victory
• Treaty of Paris marked culmination of power shift

7
V. Slavery and the Revolution

• Use of slavery in rhetoric of revolution
• In 1776, slaves comprised 1/5 of American
  population
• As a metaphor for political status of colonists
• Arbitrary governmental power
• Disfranchised
• As direct critique of slavery
• James Otis
• MP Edmund Burke
• Alleged hypocrisy of slaveholders crying
  slavery
• Dr. Samuel Johnson
• Obstacles to abolition
• Importance of slave system in the colonies
• Perception of slavery as basis for white freedom
• Conception of property rights as essential to
  liberty

8
V. Slavery and the Revolution (contd)

• Impetus for abolition
• Growing debate over slavery in America
• Benjamin Rush and general liberty
• Thomas Jefferson
• Black initiatives against slavery
• Invocations of freedom as universal right
• Lemuel Haynes Phillis Wheatley
• British emancipators
• Invitations to slaves to escape to British lines
• Lord Dunmores proclamation
• Henry Clintons proclamation
• Magnitude of slave response
• 100,000 escaped to British lines
• Long-term outcomes for slaves who escaped to
  British
• 15,000 accompanied the British out of America

9
V. Slavery and the Revolution (contd)

• The first emancipation
• Curbs on slave importation
• Nearly every state prohibited or discouraged
  importation
• Upper South manumissions
• Robert Carter III (VA)
• Richard Randolph (VA)
• John and Henry Laurens (SC)
• Abolition in northern states
• Between 1777 and 1804, all states north of
  Maryland
• Slow process
• Emergence of free black communities
• Formed a standing challenge to the logic of
  slavery

10
VI. Women and the Revolution

• Participation in revolutionary cause
• Deborah Sampson, Ladies Association, and home
• Limits on access to American freedom
• Maintenance of legal subordination of women
• Male supremacy as element of revolutionary
  thought
• View of women as wives and mothers, unfit for
  citizenship
• Improvements in status of women
• Ideology of republican motherhood
• Perception of women as trainers of citizens,
  meriting education
• Notion of companionate marriage

11
VII. Repercussions of American independence
struggle throughout Atlanticworld

1. Worldwide demand by locals for greater autonomy
2. French Revolution
3. Latin America

12
Map 18
13
MAPS

• http//www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/