The document summarizes the government of the American colonies in the 1700s. Each colony had its own established system of self-government and elections based on English rights. Tensions escalated over British taxation, leading the colonies to form provincial congresses and the Continental Congress to coordinate protests against Britain. By 1775, all royal officials had been expelled as the colonies moved toward declaring independence and establishing independent state governments.
Chapter 12 The Abolition of SlaveryThe United States abolished .docxbartholomeocoombs
Chapter 12: The Abolition of Slavery
The United States abolished slavery through the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865, in the aftermath of a great Civil War. But the effort to abolish slavery did not begin nor end in North America. Emancipation in the United States was part of a worldwide antislavery movement that had begun in the late eighteenth century and continued through the end of the nineteenth.
The end of slavery, like the end of monarchies and aristocracies, was one of the ideals of the Enlightenment, which inspired new concepts of individual freedom and political equality. As Enlightenment ideas spread throughout the western world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, introducing the idea of human rights and individual liberty to the concept of civilization, people on both sides of the Atlantic began to examine slavery anew and to ask whether it was compatible with these new ideas. Some Enlightenment thinkers, including some of the founders of the American Republic, believed that freedom was appropriate for white people, but not for people of color. But others came to believe that all human beings had an equal claim to liberty and their views became the basis for an escalating series of antislavery movements.
Opponents of slavery first targeted the slave trade--the vast commerce in human beings that had grown up in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and had come to involve large parts of Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and North and South America. In the aftermath of the revolutions in America, France, and Haiti in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the attack on the slave trade quickly gained momentum. Its central figure was the English reformer William Wilberforce, who spent years attacking Britain's connection with the slave trade. He argued against it on moral and religious grounds, and eventually, after the Haitian revolution, he argued as well that the continuation of slavery would create more slave revolts. In 1807, he persuaded Parliament to pass a law ending the slave trade within the entire British empire. The British example--when combined with heavy political, economic, and even military pressure from London--persuaded many other nations to make the slave trade illegal as well: the United States in 1808, France in 1814, Holland in 1817, Spain in 1845. Trading in slaves continued within countries and colonies where slavery remained legal (including in the United States), and some illegal slave trading continued throughout the Atlantic world. But the sale of slaves steadily declined after 1807. The last known shipment of slaves across the Atlantic--from Africa to Cuba--occurred in 1867.
Ending the slave trade was a great deal easier than ending slavery itself, in which many people had major investments and on which much agriculture, commerce, and industry depended. But pressure to abolish slavery grew steadily throughout the nineteenth century, with Wilberforce once more helping.
Chapter 2For thousands of seekers and adventurers, America in EstelaJeffery653
Chapter 2
For thousands of seekers and adventurers, America in the seventeenth century was a vast unknown land of new beginnings and new opportunities. The English settlers who poured into coastal America and the Caribbean islands found not a “virgin land” of uninhabited wilderness but a developed region populated by Native Americans. As was true in New Spain and New France, European diseases such as smallpox overwhelmed the Indians and wiped out whole societies. William Bradford of the Plymouth colony in Massachusetts reported that the Indians “fell sick of the smallpox, and died most miserably... like rotten sheep.”
Native Americans dealt with Europeans in different ways. Many resisted, others retreated, and still others developed thriving trade relationships with the newcomers. In some areas, land-hungry colonists quickly displaced or decimated the Indians. In others, Indians found ways to live in cooperation with English settlers—if they were willing to adopt the English way of life.
After creating the Virginia, Maryland, and New England colonies, the English would go on to conquer Dutch-controlled New Netherland, settle Carolina, and eventually establish the rest of the thirteen original American mainland colonies. The diverse English colonies had one thing in common: To one extent or another, they all took part in the enslavement of other peoples, either Native Americans or Africans or both. Slavery, common throughout the world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, enriched a few, corrupted many, and compromised the American dream of equal opportunity for all.
The English Background
Over the centuries, the island nation of England had developed political practices and governing principles similar to those on the continent of Europe—but with key differences. European societies were tightly controlled hierarchies. From birth, people learned their place in the social order. Commoners bowed to priests, priests bowed to bishops, peasants pledged their loyalty to landowners, and nobles knelt before the monarchs, who claimed God had given them absolute power to rule over their domain.
Since the thirteenth century, however, English monarchs had shared power with the nobility and with a lesser aristocracy, the gentry. England’s tradition of parliamentary monarchy began with the Magna Carta (Great Charter) of 1215, a statement of fundamental rights and liberties that nobles forced the king to approve. The Magna Carta established that England would be a nation ruled by laws. Everyone was equal before the law, and no one was above it.
The people’s representatives formed the national legislature known as Parliament, which comprised the hereditary and appointed members of the House of Lords and the elected members of the House of Commons. The most important power allocated to Parliament was the authority to impose taxes. By controlling tax revenue, the legislature exercised leverage over the monarchy.
Religious Conflict and War
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2. CHAPTER: 13 REVOLUTIONS In England, King James alarmed the Protestant majority by ruling arbitrarily and by favoring his fellow Catholics. Several Anglican bishops and aristocrats secretly write to William, the Dutch Prince of Orange, urging that he come to England with an army to intervene on behalf of the Protestant cause. In 1688 the Dutch face a renewed war with powerful France, under the aggressive rule of Louis XIV. In a bold and desperate gamble, William invaded England as a preemptive strike to capture that realm for a Dutch alliance. William's English supporters, known as the Whigs, called the transfer of power a 'Glorious Revolution', which they creatively depicted as a spontaneous uprising by a united English people. In fact, the revolution was fundamentally a coup spearheaded by a foreign army and navy.
3. CHAPTER: 14 THE ATLANTIC During the 18th century, a swelling volume of British shipping carried information, goods and people more regularly across the Atlantic. The annual transatlantic crossings tripled from about 500 during the 1670s to 1500 by the late 1730s. The increasing shipping (and diminished piracy) reduced insurance costs and freight charges, which encouraged the shipment of greater cargos. The ocean became less of a barrier and more of a bridge between the two shores of the empire. Clustered close to the Atlantic, most colonists felt oriented eastward toward the ocean and across to Europe, rather than westward into the interior. The continental interior of dense forests, Indian peoples and immense but uncertain dimensions was far more mysterious and daunting than an ocean passage. Far from dividing the colonists from the mother country, the ocean and the passage of time both worked to draw them closer together during the first two-thirds of the 18th century. The colonists became significantly better informed about events and ideas in Britain and especially London. William Penn explained that it had become 'the interest of England to improve and thicken her colonys with people not her own'. By recruiting for colonists in Europe, imperial officials hoped to strengthen the colonies without weakening the mother country. In 1740, Parliament passed the Plantation Act, which enabled foreign-born colonists to win British citizenship: a necessary prerequisite for legal ownership of land as welll as for political rights.
4. CHAPTER: 14 THE ATLANTIC (Cont.) The new recruitment invented America as an asylum from religious persecution and political oppression in Europe, with the important proviso that the immigrants had to be Protestants. Colonial laws and prejudices continued to discourage the emigration of Catholic and Jews to British America, from a fear they would subvert Protestantism and betray the empire to French or Spanish attack. As a land of freedom and opportunity, British America had powerful limits. More than any other 18th century empire, the British relied on foreign emigrants for human capital. The new emigration included far fewer English but many more Scots and Germans. As the colonial population became less English, it assumed a new ethnic and racial complexity, which increased the gap between freedom and slavery, privilege and prejudice, wealth and poverty, white and black. At the same time that high culture and consumer culture became more tied to English models, the colonial population and vernacular cultures became less homogenous. Relatively large farms and fertile soil enabled colonists to raise or to purchase cheaply the grains, vegetables, milk and meat of a plentiful diet. The muster rolls for colonial military regiments recorded heights, revealing that the average colonial man stood two or three inches taller than his English counterpart.
5. GOVERNMENT IN 1700’s The colonies were independent of each other before 1774 as efforts led by Benjamin Franklin to form a colonial union had not made progress. The thirteen all had well established systems of self government and elections based on the Rights of Englishmen, which they were determined to protect from “imperial interference”. Beginning with the intense protests over the Stamp Act of 1765, the Americans insisted on the principle of "no taxation without representation". They argued that, as the colonies had no representation in the British Parliament, it was a violation of their rights as Englishmen for taxes to be imposed upon them. Parliament rejected the colonial protests and asserted its authority by passing new taxes. Trouble escalated over the tea tax, as Americans in each colony boycotted the tea and in Boston, dumped the tea in the harbor during the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Tensions escalated in 1774 as Parliament passed the laws known as the Intolerable Acts, which, among other things, greatly restricted self-government in the colony of Massachusetts. In response the colonies formed extralegal bodies of elected representatives, generally known as Provincial Congresses, and later that year twelve colonies sent representatives to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. During the Second Continental Congress that year, a thirteenth colony, Georgia, sent delegates, and by spring 1775 all royal officials had been expelled from all thirteen colonies. The Continental Congress served as a national government through the war that raised an army to fight the British and named George Washington its commander, made treaties, declared independence, and instructed the colonies to write constitutions and become independent states.
