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The True Story of the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere

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Map Shows How Humans Migrated Across The Globe

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The miracle of modern genetics has revolutionized the story anthropologists tell about how humans spread out across the Earth.

Elaine Thompson / AP

Europeans arriving in the New World met people all the way from the frozen north to the frozen south. All had rich and mature cultures and established languages. The Skraeling were probably a people we now call Thule, who were the ancestors of the Inuit in Greenland and Canada and the Iñupiat in Alaska. The Taíno were a people spread across multiple chiefdoms around the Caribbean and Florida. Based on cultural and language similarities, we think that they had probably separated from earlier populations from South American lands, now Guyana and Trinidad. The Spanish brought no women with them in 1492, and raped the Taíno women, resulting in the first generation of "mestizo"-mixed ancestry people.

Immediately upon arrival, European alleles began to flow, admixed into the indigenous population, and that process has continued ever since: European DNA is found today throughout the Americas, no matter how remote or isolated a tribe might appear to be. But before Columbus, these continents were already populated. The indigenous people hadn't always been there, nor had they originated there, as some of their traditions state, but they had occupied these American lands for at least 20,000 years.

This article is adapted from Rutherford's new book.

It's only because of the presence of Europeans from the 15th century onward that we even have terms such as Indians or Native Americans. How these people came to be is a subject that is complex and fraught, but it begins in the north. Alaska is separated from Russian land by the Bering Strait. There are islands that punctuate those icy waters, and on a clear day U.S. citizens of Little Diomede can see Russians on Big Diomede, just a little over two miles and one International Date Line away. Between December and June, the water between them freezes solid.

From 30,000 years ago until around 11,000 BCE, the earth was subjected to a cold snap that sucked up the sea into glaciers and ice sheets extending from the poles. This period is known as the Last Glacial Maximum, when the reach of the most recent Ice Age was at its fullest. By drilling mud cores out of the seabed, we can reconstruct a history of the land and the seas, notably by measuring concentrations of oxygen, and looking for pollen, which would have been deposited on dry ground from the flora growing there. We think therefore that sea level was somewhere between 60 and 120 meters lower than today. So it was terra firma all the way from Alaska to Russia, and all the way down south to the Aleutians-a crescent chain of volcanic islands that speckle the north Pacific.

The prevailing theory about how the people of the Americas came to those lands is via that bridge. We refer to it as a land bridge, though given its duration and size, it was simply continuous land, thousands of miles from north to south; it's only a bridge if we view it in comparison to today's straits. The area is called Beringia, and the first people across it the Beringians. These were harsh lands, sparse with shrubs and herbs; to the south, there were boreal woodlands, and where the land met the sea, kelp forests and seals.

Though these were still tough terrains, according to archaeological finds Western Beringians were living near the Yana River in Siberia by 30,000 BCE. There's been plenty of debate over the years as to when exactly people reached the eastern side, and therefore at what point after the seas rose they became isolated as the founding peoples of the Americas. The questions that remain-and there are many-concern whether they came all at once or in dribs and drabs. Sites in the Yukon that straddle the U.S.-Alaskan border with Canada give us clues, such as the Bluefish Caves, 33 miles southwest of the village of Old Crow.

The latest radio-dating analysis of the remnants of lives in the Bluefish Caves indicates that people were there 24,000 years ago. These founding peoples spread over 12,000 years to every corner of the continents and formed the pool from which all Americans would be drawn until 1492. I will focus on North America here, and what we know so far, what we can know through genetics, and why we don't know more.

Until Columbus, the Americas were populated by pockets of tribal groups distributed up and down both north and south continents. There are dozens of individual cultures that have been identified by age, location, and specific technologies-and via newer ways of knowing the past, including genetics and linguistics. Scholars have hypothesized various patterns of migration from Beringia into the Americas. Over time, it has been suggested that there were multiple waves, or that a certain people with particular technologies spread from north all the way south.

Both ideas have now fallen from grace. The multiple-waves theory has failed as a model because the linguistic similarities used to show patterns of migration are just not that convincing. And the second theory fails because of timing. Cultures are often named and known by the technology that they left behind. In New Mexico there is a small town called Clovis, population 37,000. In the 1930s, projectile points resembling spearheads and other hunting paraphernalia were found in an archaeological site nearby, dating from around 13,000 years ago. These were knapped on both sides-bifaced with fluted tips. It had been thought that it was the inventors of these tools who had been the first people to spread up and down the continents. But there's evidence of humans living in southern Chile 12,500 years ago without Clovis technology. These people are too far away to show a direct link between them and the Clovis in such a way that indicates the Clovis being the aboriginals of South America.

Today, the emerging theory is that the people up in the Bluefish Caves some 24,000 years ago were the founders, and that they represent a culture that was isolated for thousands of years up in the cold north, incubating a population that would eventually seed everywhere else. This idea has become known as Beringian Standstill. Those founders had split from known populations in Siberian Asia some 40,000 years ago, come across Beringia, and stayed put until around 16,000 years ago.

Analysis of the genomes of indigenous people show 15 founding mitochondrial types not found in Asia. This suggests a time when genetic diversification occurred, an incubation lasting maybe 10,000 years. New gene variants spread across the American lands, but not back into Asia, as the waters had cut them off. Nowadays, we see lower levels of genetic diversity in modern Native Americans-derived from just those original 15-than in the rest of the world. Again, this supports the idea of a single, small population seeding the continents, and-unlike in Europe or Asia-these people being cut off, with little admixture from new populations for thousands of years, at least until Columbus.

In Montana, 20 miles or so off Highway 90, lies the minuscule conurbation of Wilsall, population 178 as of 2010. Though stacks of material culture in the Clovis tradition have been recovered throughout North America, only one person from this time and culture has risen from his grave. He's acquired the name Anzick-1, and was laid to rest in a rock shelter in what would become-around 12,600 years later-Wilsall. He was a toddler, probably less than two years old, judging from the unfused sutures in his skull. He was laid to rest surrounded by at least 100 stone tools, and 15 ivory ones. Some of these were covered in red ochre, and together they suggest Anzick was a very special child who had been ceremonially buried in splendor. Now he's special because we have his complete genome.

And there's the woeful saga of Kennewick Man. While attending a hydroplane race in 1996, two locals of Kennewick, Washington, discovered a broad-faced skull inching its way out of the bank of the Columbia River. Over the weeks and years, more than 350 fragments of bone and teeth were eked out of this 8,500-year-old grave, all belonging to a middle-aged man, maybe in his forties, deliberately buried, with some signs of injuries that had healed over his life-a cracked rib, an incision from a spear, a minor depression fracture on his forehead. There were academic squabbles about his facial morphology, with some saying it was most similar to Japanese skulls, some arguing for a link with Polynesians, and some asserting he must have been European.

With all the toing and froing about his morphology, DNA should be a rich source of conclusive data for this man. But the political controversies about his body have severely hampered his value to science for 20 years. For Native Americans, he became known as the Ancient One, and five clans, notably the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, wanted to have him ceremonially reburied under guidelines determined by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which affords custodial rights to Native American artifacts and bodies found on their lands. Scientists sued the government to prevent his reburial, some claiming that his bones suggested he was European, and therefore not connected with Native Americans.

To add an absurd cherry on top of this already distasteful cake, a Californian pagan group called the Asatru Folk Assembly put in a bid for the body, claiming Kennewick Man might have a Norse tribal identity, and if science could establish that the body was European, then he should be given a ceremony in honor of Odin, ruler of the mythical Asgard, though what that ritual entails is not clear.

His reburial was successfully blocked in 2002, when a judge ruled that his facial bones suggested he was European, and therefore NAGPRA guidelines could not be invoked. The issue was batted back and forth for years, in a manner in which no one came out looking good. Nineteen years after this important body was found, the genome analysis was finally published.

Had he been European (or Japanese or Polynesian), it would've been the most revolutionary find in the history of U.S. anthropology, and all textbooks on human migration would have been rewritten. But of course he wasn't. A fragment of material was used to sequence his DNA, and it showed that lo and behold, Kennewick Man-the Ancient One-was closely related to the Anzick baby. And as for the living, he was more closely related to Native Americans than to anyone else on Earth, and within that group, most closely related to the Colville tribes.

Anzick is firm and final proof that North and South America were populated by the same people. Anzick's mitochondrial genome is most similar to people of central and south America today. The genes of the Ancient One most closely resemble those of tribes in the Seattle area today. These similarities do not indicate that either were members of those tribes or people, nor that their genes have not spread throughout the Americas, as we would expect over timescales of thousands of years. What they show is that the population dynamics-how ancient indigenous people relate to contemporary Native Americans-is complex and varies from region to region. No people are completely static, and genes less so.

In December 2016, in one of his last acts in office, President Barack Obama signed legislation that allowed Kennewick Man to be reburied as a Native American. Anzick was found on private land, so not subject to NAGPRA rules, but was reburied anyway in 2014 in a ceremony involving a few different tribes. We sometimes forget that though the data should be pure and straightforward, science is done by people, who are never either.

Anzick and Kennewick Man represent narrow samples-a tantalizing glimpse of the big picture. And politics and history are hampering progress. The legacy of 500 years of occupation have fostered profound difficulty in understanding how the Americas were first peopled. Two of the doyennes of this field-Connie Mulligan and Emőke Szathmáry-suggest that there is a long cultural tradition that percolates through our attempts to deconstruct the past.

Europeans are taught a history of migration from birth, of Greeks and Romans spreading over Europe, conquering lands, and interloping afar. Judeo-Christian lore puts people in and out of Africa and Asia, and the silk routes connect Europeans with the East and back again. Many European countries have been seafaring nations, exploring and sometimes belligerently building empires, for commerce or to impose a perceived superiority over other people. Even though we have national identities, and pride and traditions that come with that sense of belonging, European culture is imbued with migration.

For Native Americans, this is not their culture. Not all believe they have always been in their lands, nor that they are a static people. But for the most part, the narrative of migration does not threaten European identity in the same way that it might for the people we called the Indians. The scientifically valid notion of the migration of people from Asia into the Americas may challenge Native creation stories. It may also have the effect of conflating early modern migrants from the 15th century onward with those from 24,000 years earlier, with the effect of undermining indigenous claims to land and sovereignty.

* * *

Deep among the lakes of the Grand Canyon are the Havasupai. Their name means "people of the blue-green waters," and they've been there for at least 800 years. They're a small tribe, around 650 members today, and they use ladders, horses, and sometimes helicopters to travel in and out of-or rather, up and down-the canyon. The tribe is rife with type 2 diabetes, and in 1990, the Havasupai people agreed to provide Arizona State University scientists with DNA from 151 individuals with the understanding that they would seek genetic answers to the puzzle of why diabetes was so common. Written consent was obtained, and blood samples were taken.

An obvious genetic link to diabetes was not found, but the researchers continued to use their DNA to test for schizophrenia and patterns of inbreeding. The data was also passed on to other scientists who were interested in migration and the history of Native Americans. The Havasupai only found this out years later, and eventually sued the university. In 2010, they were awarded $700,000 in compensation.

Therese Markow was one of the scientists involved, and insists that consent was on the papers they signed, and that the forms were necessarily simple, as many Havasupai do not have English as a first language, and many did not graduate from high school. But many in the tribe thought that they were only being asked about their endemic diabetes. A blood sample contains an individual's entire genome, and with it, reams of data about that individual, their family, and evolution.

This isn't the first time this has happened. In the 1980s, before the days of easy and cheap genomics, blood samples were taken with consent to analyze the unusually high levels of rheumatic disease in the Nuu-chah-nulth people of the Pacific Northwest of Canada. The project, led by the late Ryk Ward, then at the University of British Columbia, found no genetic link in their samples, and the project petered out. By the '90s, though, Ward had moved to the University of Utah, and then Oxford in the UK, and the blood samples had been used in anthropological and HIV/AIDS studies around the world, which turned into grants, academic papers, and a PBS-BBC jointly produced documentary.

The use of the samples for historical migration indicated that the origins of the Havasupai were from ancient ancestors in Siberia, which is in accordance with our understanding of human history by all scientific and archaeological methods. But it is in opposition to the Havasupai religious belief that they were created in situ in the Grand Canyon. Though nonscientific, it is perfectly within their rights to preclude investigations that contradict their stories, and those rights appear to have been violated. Havasupai vice chairman Edmond Tilousi told The New York Times in 2010 that "coming from the canyon ... is the basis of our sovereign rights."

Sovereignty and membership of a tribe is a complex and hard-won thing. It includes a concept called "blood quantum," which is effectively the proportion of one's ancestors who are already members of a tribe. It's an invention of European Americans in the 19th century, and though most tribes had their own criteria for tribal membership, most eventually adopted Blood Quantum as part of the qualification for tribal status.

DNA is not part of that mix. With our current knowledge of the genomics of Native Americans, there is no possibility of DNA being anywhere near a useful tool in ascribing tribal status to people. Furthermore, given our understanding of ancestry and family trees, I have profound doubts that DNA could ever be used to determine tribal membership. While mtDNA (which is passed down from mothers to children) and the Y chromosome (passed from fathers to sons) have both proved profoundly useful in determining the deep ancestral trajectory of the first peoples of the Americas into the present, these two chromosomes represent a tiny proportion of the total amount of DNA that an individual bears. The rest, the autosomes, comes from all of one's ancestors.

Some genetic genealogy companies will sell you kits that claim to grant you membership to historical peoples, albeit ill-defined, highly romanticized versions of ancient Europeans. This type of genetic astrology, though unscientific and distasteful to my palate, is really just a bit of meaningless fantasy; its real damage is that it undermines scientific literacy in the general public.

Over centuries, people are too mobile to have remained genetically isolated for any significant length of time. Tribes are known to have mixed before and after colonialism, which should be enough to indicate that some notion of tribal purity is at best imagined. Of the genetic markers that have been shown to exist in individual tribes so far, none is exclusive. Some tribes have begun to use DNA as a test to verify immediate family, such as in paternity cases, and this can be useful as part of qualification for tribal status. But on its own, a DNA test cannot place someone in a specific tribe.

That hasn't stopped the emergence of some companies in the United States that sell kits that claim to use DNA to ascribe tribal membership. Accu-Metrics is one such company. On their web page, they state that there are "562 recognized tribes in the United States, plus at least 50 others in Canada, divided into First Nation, Inuit, and Metis." For $125 they claim that they " can determine if you belong to one of these groups."

The idea that tribal status is encoded in DNA is both simplistic and wrong. Many tribespeople have non-native parents and still retain a sense of being bound to the tribe and the land they hold sacred. In Massachusetts, members of the Seaconke Wampanoag tribe identified European and African heritage in their DNA, due to hundreds of years of interbreeding with New World settlers. Attempting to conflate tribal status with DNA denies the cultural affinity that people have with their tribes. It suggests a kind of purity that genetics cannot support, a type of essentialism that resembles scientific racism.

The specious belief that DNA can bestow tribal identity, as sold by companies such as Accu-Metrics, can only foment further animosity-and suspicion-toward scientists. If a tribal identity could be shown by DNA (which it can't), then perhaps reparation rights afforded to tribes in recent years might be invalid in the territories to which they were moved during the 19th century. Many tribes are effective sovereign nations and therefore not necessarily bound by the laws of the state in which they live.

When coupled with cases such as that of the Havasupai, and centuries of racism, the relationship between Native Americans and geneticists is not healthy. After the legal battles over the remains of Kennewick Man were settled, and it was accepted that he was not of European descent, the tribes were invited to join in the subsequent studies. Out of five, only the Colville Tribes did. Their representative, James Boyd, told The New York Times in 2015, "We were hesitant. Science hasn't been good to us."

Data is supreme in genetics, and data is what we crave. But we are the data, and people are not there for the benefit of others, regardless of how noble one's scientific aims are. To deepen our understanding of how we came to be and who we are, scientists must do better, and invite people whose genes provide answers to not only volunteer their data, but to participate, to own their individual stories, and to be part of that journey of discovery.

This is beginning to change. A new model of engagement with the first people of the Americas is emerging, albeit at a glacial pace. The American Society of Human Genetics meeting is the annual who's who in genetics, and has been for many years, where all of the newest and biggest ideas in the study of human biology are discussed. In October 2016 they met in Vancouver, and it was hosted by the Squamish Nation, a First Nations people based in British Colombia. They greeted the delegates with song, and passed the talking stick to the president for the proceedings to begin.

The relationship between science and indigenous people has been one characterized by a range of behaviors from outright exploitation to casual insensitivity to tokenism and lip service. Perhaps this time is coming to an end and we might foster a relationship based on trust, genuine engagement, and mutual respect, so that we might work together and build the capacity for tribes to lead their own research into the histories of these nations.

* * *

Though the terms Native American and Indian are relative, the United States is a nation of immigrants and descendants of slaves who have overwhelmed the indigenous population. Less than 2 percent of the current population defines itself as Native American, which means that 98 percent of Americans are unable to trace their roots, genetic or otherwise, beyond 500 years on American soil. That is, however, plenty of time for populations to come and breed and mix and lay down patterns of ancestry that can be enlightened with living DNA as our historical text.

A comprehensive genetic picture of the people of postcolonial North America was revealed at the beginning of 2017, drawn from data submitted by paying customers to the genealogy company AncestryDNA. The genomes of more than 770,000 people born in the United States were filtered for markers of ancestry, and revealed a picture of mishmash, as you might expect from a country of immigrants.

Nevertheless, genetic clusters of specific European countries are seen. Paying customers supply spit harboring their genomes, alongside whatever genealogical data they have. By aligning these as carefully as possible, a map of post-Columbus America can be summoned with clusters of common ancestry, such as Finnish and Swedish in the Midwest, and Acadians-French-speaking Canadians from the Atlantic seaboard-clustering way down in Louisiana, close to New Orleans, where the word Acadian has mutated into Cajun. Here, genetics recapitulates history, as we know the Acadians were forcibly expelled by the British in the 18th century, and many eventually settled in Louisiana, then under Spanish control.

In trying to do something similar with African Americans, we immediately stumble. Most black people in the United States cannot trace their genealogy with much precision because of the legacy of slavery. Their ancestors were seized from West Africa, leaving little or no record of where they were born. In 2014, the genetic genealogy company 23andMe published their version of the population structure of the United States. In their portrait we see a similar pattern of European admixture, and some insights into the history of the postcolonial United States.

The Emancipation Proclamation-a federal mandate to change the legal status of slaves to free-was issued by President Lincoln in 1863, though the effects were not necessarily immediate. In the genomic data, there's admixture between European DNA and African that begins in earnest around six generations ago, roughly in the mid-19th century. Within these samples we see more male European DNA and female African, measured by Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA, suggesting male Europeans had sex with female slaves. Genetics makes no comment on the nature of these relations.
This post is adapted from Rutherford's upcoming book, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Adam Rutherford is a writer based in the United Kingdom. He is the author of A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes.

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A New History of the First Peoples in the Americas

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The miracle of modern genetics has revolutionized the story anthropologists tell about how humans spread out across the Earth. Europeans arriving in the New World met people all the way from the frozen north to the frozen south. All had rich and mature cultures and established languages.

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What does "Renaissance" mean?

When did the Renaissance happen?

What is Renaissance art?

What does "Renaissance man" mean?

Renaissance, (French: "Rebirth") period in European civilization immediately following the Middle Ages and conventionally held to have been characterized by a surge of interest in Classical scholarship and values. The Renaissance also witnessed the discovery and exploration of new continents, the substitution of the Copernican for the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, the decline of the feudal system and the growth of commerce, and the invention or application of such potentially powerful innovations as paper, printing, the mariner's compass, and gunpowder. To the scholars and thinkers of the day, however, it was primarily a time of the revival of Classical learning and wisdom after a long period of cultural decline and stagnation.

A brief treatment of the Renaissance follows. For full treatment, see history of Europe: The Renaissance.

Origins and rise of humanism

The term Middle Ages was coined by scholars in the 15th century to designate the interval between the downfall of the Classical world of Greece and Rome and its rediscovery at the beginning of their own century, a revival in which they felt they were participating. Indeed, the notion of a long period of cultural darkness had been expressed by Petrarch even earlier. Events at the end of the Middle Ages, particularly beginning in the 12th century, set in motion a series of social, political, and intellectual transformations that culminated in the Renaissance. These included the increasing failure of the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire to provide a stable and unifying framework for the organization of spiritual and material life, the rise in importance of city-states and national monarchies, the development of national languages, and the breakup of the old feudal structures.

While the spirit of the Renaissance ultimately took many forms, it was expressed earliest by the intellectual movement called humanism. Humanism was initiated by secular men of letters rather than by the scholar-clerics who had dominated medieval intellectual life and had developed the Scholastic philosophy. Humanism began and achieved fruition first in Italy. Its predecessors were men like Dante and Petrarch, and its chief protagonists included Giannozzo Manetti, Leonardo Bruni, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Lorenzo Valla, and Coluccio Salutati. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 provided humanism with a major boost, for many eastern scholars fled to Italy, bringing with them important books and manuscripts and a tradition of Greek scholarship.

Humanism had several significant features. First, it took human nature in all of its various manifestations and achievements as its subject. Second, it stressed the unity and compatibility of the truth found in all philosophical and theological schools and systems, a doctrine known as syncretism. Third, it emphasized the dignity of man. In place of the medieval ideal of a life of penance as the highest and noblest form of human activity, the humanists looked to the struggle of creation and the attempt to exert mastery over nature. Finally, humanism looked forward to a rebirth of a lost human spirit and wisdom. In the course of striving to recover it, however, the humanists assisted in the consolidation of a new spiritual and intellectual outlook and in the development of a new body of knowledge. The effect of humanism was to help men break free from the mental strictures imposed by religious orthodoxy, to inspire free inquiry and criticism, and to inspire a new confidence in the possibilities of human thought and creations.

From Italy the new humanist spirit and the Renaissance it engendered spread north to all parts of Europe, aided by the invention of printing, which allowed literacy and the availability of Classical texts to grow explosively. Foremost among northern humanists was Desiderius Erasmus, whose Praise of Folly (1509) epitomized the moral essence of humanism in its insistence on heartfelt goodness as opposed to formalistic piety. The intellectual stimulation provided by humanists helped spark the Reformation, from which, however, many humanists, including Erasmus, recoiled. By the end of the 16th century the battle of Reformation and Counter-Reformation had commanded much of Europe's energy and attention, while the intellectual life was poised on the brink of the Enlightenment.

Artistic developments and the emergence of Florence

It was in art that the spirit of the Renaissance achieved its sharpest formulation. Art came to be seen as a branch of knowledge, valuable in its own right and capable of providing man with images of God and his creations as well as with insights into man's position in the universe. In the hands of men such as Leonardo da Vinci it was even a science, a means for exploring nature and a record of discoveries. Art was to be based on the observation of the visible world and practiced according to mathematical principles of balance, harmony, and perspective, which were developed at this time. In the works of painters such as Masaccio, the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Fra Angelico, Sandro Botticelli, Perugino, Piero della Francesca, Raphael, and Titian; sculptors such as Giovanni Pisano, Donatello, Andrea del Verrocchio, Lorenzo Ghiberti, and Michelangelo; and architects such as Leon Battista Alberti, Filippo Brunelleschi, Andrea Palladio, Michelozzo, and Filarete, the dignity of man found expression in the arts.

In Italy the Renaissance proper was preceded by an important "proto-renaissance" in the late 13th and early 14th centuries, which drew inspiration from Franciscan radicalism. St. Francis of Assisi had rejected the formal Scholasticism of the prevailing Christian theology and gone out among the poor praising the beauties and spiritual value of nature. His example inspired Italian artists and poets to take pleasure in the world around them. The work of the most famous artist of the proto-renaissance period, Giotto (1266/67 or 1276-1337), reveals a new pictorial style that depends on clear, simple structure and great psychological penetration rather than on the flat, linear decorativeness and hierarchical compositions of his predecessors and contemporaries, such as the Florentine painter Cimabue and the Siennese painters Duccio and Simone Martini. The great poet Dante lived at about the same time as Giotto, and his poetry shows a similar concern with inward experience and the subtle shades and variations of human nature. Although his Divine Comedy belongs to the Middle Ages in its plan and ideas, its subjective spirit and power of expression look forward to the Renaissance. Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio also belong to this proto-renaissance period, both through their extensive studies of Latin literature and through their writings in the vernacular. Unfortunately, the terrible plague of 1348 and subsequent civil wars submerged both the revival of humanistic studies and the growing interest in individualism and naturalism revealed in the works of Giotto and Dante. The spirit of the Renaissance did not surface again until the 15th century.

In 1401 a competition was held at Florence to award the commission for bronze doors to be placed on the baptistery of San Giovanni. Defeated by the goldsmith and painter Lorenzo Ghiberti, Filippo Brunelleschi and Donatello left for Rome, where they immersed themselves in the study of ancient architecture and sculpture. When they returned to Florence and began to put their knowledge into practice, the rationalized art of the ancient world was reborn. The founder of Renaissance painting was Masaccio (1401-28). The intellectuality of his conceptions, the monumentality of his compositions, and the high degree of naturalism in his works mark Masaccio as a pivotal figure in Renaissance painting. The succeeding generation of artists- Piero della Francesca, the Pollaiuolo brothers, and Andrea del Verrocchio-pressed forward with researches into linear and aerial perspective and anatomy, developing a style of scientific naturalism.

The situation in Florence was uniquely favourable to the arts. The civic pride of Florentines found expression in statues of the patron saints commissioned from Ghiberti and Donatello for niches in the grain-market guildhall known as Or San Michele, and in the largest dome built since antiquity, placed by Brunelleschi on the Florence cathedral. The cost of construction and decoration of palaces, churches, and monasteries was underwritten by wealthy merchant families, chief among whom were the Medici family.

The Medici traded in all of the major cities in Europe, and one of the most famous masterpieces of Northern Renaissance art, The Portinari Altarpiece, by Hugo van der Goes ( c. 1476; Uffizi, Florence), was commissioned by their agent, Tommaso Portinari. Instead of being painted with the customary tempera of the period, the work is painted with translucent oil glazes that produce brilliant jewel-like colour and a glossy surface. Early Northern Renaissance painters were more concerned with the detailed reproduction of objects and their symbolic meaning than with the study of scientific perspective and anatomy even after these achievements became widely known. On the other hand, central Italian painters began to adopt the oil medium soon after The Portinari Altarpiece was brought to Florence in 1476.

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Renaissance | Definition, Meaning, History, Artists, Art, & Facts

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The Renaissance was a period in European civilization that immediately followed the Middle Ages and reached its height in the 15th century. It is conventionally held to have been characterized by a surge of interest in Classical scholarship and values. The Renaissance also witnessed the discovery and exploration of new continents and numerous important inventions.

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The ships for the first voyage-the , , and Santa María-were fitted out at Palos, on the Tinto River in Spain. Consortia put together by a royal treasury official and composed mainly of Genoese and Florentine bankers in Sevilla (Seville) provided at least 1,140,000 maravedis to outfit the expedition, and Columbus supplied more than a third of the sum contributed by the king and queen. Queen Isabella did not, then, have to pawn her jewels (a myth first put about by Bartolomé de Las Casas in the 16th century).

The little fleet left on August 3, 1492. The admiral's navigational genius showed itself immediately, for they sailed southward to the Canary Islands, off the northwest African mainland, rather than sailing due west to the islands of the Azores. The westerlies prevailing in the Azores had defeated previous attempts to sail to the west, but in the Canaries the three ships could pick up the northeast trade winds; supposedly, they could trust to the westerlies for their return. After nearly a month in the Canaries the ships set out from San Sebastián de la Gomera on September 6.

On several occasions in September and early October, sailors spotted floating vegetation and various types of birds-all taken as signs that land was nearby. But by October 10 the crew had begun to lose patience, complaining that with their failure to make landfall, contrary winds and a shortage of provisions would keep them from returning home. Columbus allayed their fears, at least temporarily, and on October 12 land was sighted from the Pinta (though Columbus, on the Niña, later claimed the privilege for himself). The place of the first Caribbean landfall, called Guanahani, is hotly disputed, but San Salvador (Watlings) Island in the Bahamas is generally preferred to other Bahamian islands ( Samana Cay, Rum Cay, or the Plana Cays) or to the Turks and Caicos Islands. Beyond planting the royal banner, however, Columbus spent little time there, being anxious to press on to Cipango, or Cipangu ( Japan). He thought that he had found it in Cuba, where he landed on October 28, but he convinced himself by November 1 that Cuba was the Cathay mainland itself, though he had yet to see evidence of great cities. Thus, on December 5, he turned back southeastward to search for the fabled city of Zaiton ( Quanzhou, China), missing through this decision his sole chance of setting foot on Florida soil.

Adverse winds carried the fleet to an island called Ayti ( Haiti) by its Taino inhabitants; on December 6 Columbus renamed it La Isla Española, or Hispaniola. He seems to have thought that Hispaniola might be Cipango or, if not Cipango, then perhaps one of the legendarily rich isles from which King Solomon's triennial fleet brought back gold, gems, and spices to Jerusalem (1 Kings 10:11, 22); alternatively, he reasoned that the island could be related to the biblical kingdom of Sheba ( Sabaʾ). There Columbus found at least enough gold and prosperity to save him from ridicule on his return to Spain. With the help of a Taino cacique, or Indian chief, named Guacanagarí, he set up a stockade on the northern coast of the island, named it La Navidad, and posted 39 men to guard it until his return. The accidental running aground of the Santa María on December 25, 1492, provided additional planks and provisions for the garrison.

On January 16, 1493, Columbus left with his remaining two ships for Spain. The journey back was a nightmare. The westerlies did indeed direct them homeward, but in mid-February a terrible storm engulfed the fleet. The Niña was driven to seek harbour at Santa Maria in the Azores, where Columbus led a pilgrimage of thanksgiving to the shrine of the Virgin; however, hostile Portuguese authorities temporarily imprisoned the group. After securing their freedom Columbus sailed on, stormbound, and the damaged ship limped to port in Lisbon. There he was obliged to interview with King John II. These events left Columbus under the suspicion of collaborating with Spain's enemies and cast a shadow on his return to Palos on March 15.

On this first voyage many tensions built up that were to remain through all of Columbus's succeeding efforts. First and perhaps most damaging of all, the admiral's apparently high religious and even mystical aspirations were incompatible with the realities of trading, competition, and colonization. Columbus never openly acknowledged this gulf and so was quite incapable of bridging it. The admiral also adopted a mode of sanctification and autocratic leadership that made him many enemies. Moreover, Columbus was determined to take back both material and human cargo to his sovereigns and for himself, and this could be accomplished only if his sailors carried on looting, kidnapping, and other violent acts, especially on Hispaniola. Although he did control some of his men's excesses, these developments blunted his ability to retain the high moral ground and the claim in particular that his "discoveries" were divinely ordained. Further, the Spanish court revived its latent doubts about the foreigner Columbus's loyalty to Spain, and some of Columbus's companions set themselves against him. Captain Martín Pinzón had disputed the route as the fleet reached the Bahamas; he had later sailed the Pinta away from Cuba, and Columbus, on November 21, failing to rejoin him until January 6. The Pinta made port at Bayona on its homeward journey, separately from Columbus and the Niña. Had Pinzón not died so soon after his return, Columbus's command of the second voyage might have been less than assured. As it was, the Pinzón family became his rivals for reward.

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Christopher Columbus - Explorer, Voyages, New World

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Christopher Columbus - Explorer, Voyages, New World: The ships for the first voyage-the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María-were fitted out at Palos, on the Tinto River in Spain. Consortia put together by a royal treasury official and composed mainly of Genoese and Florentine bankers in Sevilla (Seville) provided at least 1,140,000 maravedis to outfit the expedition, and Columbus supplied more than a third of the sum contributed by the king and queen.

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North-America's identity as a predominantly Protestant, English-speaking continent is obvious, yet what is not so well known is the foundational role that the English Reformation had in bringing this about. It was Protestantism that served as one of the leading factors in turning the British Isles into a maritime empire and drove them to seize North America from their Catholic competitors.

In the wake of Columbus' shocking discovery of the Americas, Spain rushed to acquire a papal bull called Inter caetera, granting them exclusive rights to the lands and wealth of the New World. A year later in 1494, with the Treaty of Tordesillas, Portugal also won from the pope rights to their own zone of influence in Asia and the eastern tip of Brazil.

Meanwhile Tudor England languished in the field of exploration. Except for a brief period during the reign of Henry V, medieval England possessed no naval fleet at all and had no oceanic aspirations. Their national interests had been fixated for the last several hundred years on possessions in France and the British Isles, and even if they had wanted to expand across the Atlantic, their relationship with Spain and the papacy meant that after Inter caetera the New World was off limits to them.

In 1527, however, Henry VIII led England on a path away from the continent by divorcing his Spanish wife, Catherine of Aragon, and severing all ties with the Church of Rome. Ironically, while the Reformation grew slowly under Protestant kings Henry VIII and Edward VI, it was Catherine's Catholic daughter, Queen Mary, who truly broke the conservative English away from their old ties. Although the largely Catholic population initially welcomed Mary to the throne, they strongly disapproved of her persecution of Protestants, and her loss of the last English holdings in France meant that upon her death bed she was despised by nearly all of her former political and religious allies.

Mary's persecutions and her attachment to foreign Spain were followed by her sister Elizabeth's tolerant policy. Nominally Protestant, Elizabeth insisted on absolute loyalty to the Church of England, but left church worship largely in the hands of the local parish. The Reformation flourished under this freedom. By the end of Elizabeth's reign the Catholics had become a small minority mostly contained within the English aristocracy.

In 1570 the pope excommunicated Queen Elizabeth for her religious settlement. The excommunication of their Queen combined with the ever menacing threat of a Spanish invasion cemented in the English people's imagination their identity as a Protestant country. And equally integral to their Protestant identity was their fierce opposition to the Bourbon Catholic monarchies of Spain and France.

As the Reformation matured, English Protestants saw dominion of the sea and colonization of the New World as the strongest weapon against papal claims to Catholic universalism. For the next two hundred years following the reign of Elizabeth, staunch Protestants led the call for England to challenge Spain for dominance of the Atlantic and the New World. The role of Protestants in this westward expansion cannot be underestimated. Sir Francis Drake and other Protestant mariners mocked the Pope's Treaty of Tordesillas. They ravaged treasure ships all along the Spanish Main, while championing themselves as Protestant evangelists to the natives. Englishmen who had been oppressed under Bloody Mary saw a kinship of suffering, not only with other persecuted Protestants, but also with natives of the New World who were enslaved under Spanish rule. Protestant ministers called for the liberation of the Americas, and preached the need to colonize those northern lands not yet dominated by Spain. And English colonists in North America saw it as their "manifest destiny" that one day they would wrest the colonies of Canada and Florida away from the idolatrous French and Spanish. While the previous wars with France had merely been over royal possessions, this new conflict with Spain was seen as a bitter struggle between the people of God and the forces of the Anti-Christ.

Protestantism sent England to America, and England brought Protestantism with it. As Europe passed into the eighteenth century, England had transitioned from an island kingdom into the global empire of Great Britain. They emerged from their Atlantic wars as Europe's most progressive maritime and industrial nation, while the Catholic empires of Spain, France, and Austria were slowly slipping away into political and economic stagnation. The role that Protestantism had in accomplishing this transformation of England is unmistakable. English Protestantism championed itself as the antithesis to global, Catholic imperialism. From that drive to counterbalance the papal forces, England metamorphosed into Britain, the most powerful empire of them all, which in turn was overshadowed by the United States, its colonial prodigy and Protestant heir.

George Harrell is a graduate with a master's degree in Theology and Letters from New Saint Andrews College in far off Idaho. He has taught an American history course for adults, and has published in the South African magazine "Die Boodskapper." He currently teaches American History and Economics through Roman Roads Classroom, and continues to live in the foothills of Idaho with his wife and his son Patrick, where he pursues the study of hidden things. He blogs at Shot Glass of History, explaining the movements behind the events we take for granted, and helping to raise the veil from our popular narrative.

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The Race for Empire: The Role of the Reformation in English Colonization

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North-America's identity as a predominantly Protestant, English-speaking continent is obvious, yet what is not so well known is the foundational role that the English Reformation had in bringing this about. It was Protestantism that served as one of the leading factors in turning the British Isles into a maritime empire and drove them to seize North America from their Catholic competitors.

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Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Identify the first English settlements in America

Describe the differences between the Chesapeake Bay colonies and the New England colonies

Compare and contrast the wars between native inhabitants and English colonists in both the Chesapeake Bay and New England colonies

Explain the role of Bacon's Rebellion in the rise of chattel slavery in Virginia

Promoters of English colonization in North America, many of whom never ventured across the Atlantic, wrote about the bounty the English would find there. These boosters of colonization hoped to turn a profit-whether by importing raw resources or providing new markets for English goods-and spread Protestantism. The English migrants who actually made the journey, however, had different goals. In Chesapeake Bay, English migrants established Virginia and Maryland with a decidedly commercial orientation. Though the early Virginians at Jamestown hoped to find gold, they and the settlers in Maryland quickly discovered that growing tobacco was the only sure means of making money. Thousands of unmarried, unemployed, and impatient young Englishmen, along with a few Englishwomen, pinned their hopes for a better life on the tobacco fields of these two colonies.

A very different group of English men and women flocked to the cold climate and rocky soil of New England, spurred by religious motives. Many of the Puritans crossing the Atlantic were people who brought families and children. Often they were following their ministers in a migration "beyond the seas," envisioning a new English Israel where reformed Protestantism would grow and thrive, providing a model for the rest of the Christian world and a counter to what they saw as the Catholic menace. While the English in Virginia and Maryland worked on expanding their profitable tobacco fields, the English in New England built towns focused on the church, where each congregation decided what was best for itself. The Congregational Church is the result of the Puritan enterprise in America. Many historians believe the fault lines separating what later became the North and South in the United States originated in the profound differences between the Chesapeake and New England colonies.

The source of those differences lay in England's domestic problems. Increasingly in the early 1600s, the English state church-the Church of England, established in the 1530s-demanded conformity, or compliance with its practices, but Puritans pushed for greater reforms. By the 1620s, the Church of England began to see leading Puritan ministers and their followers as outlaws, a national security threat because of their opposition to its power. As the noose of conformity tightened around them, many Puritans decided to remove to New England. By 1640, New England had a population of twenty-five thousand. Meanwhile, many loyal members of the Church of England, who ridiculed and mocked Puritans both at home and in New England, flocked to Virginia for economic opportunity.

The troubles in England escalated in the 1640s when civil war broke out, pitting Royalist supporters of King Charles I and the Church of England against Parliamentarians, the Puritan reformers and their supporters in Parliament. In 1649, the Parliamentarians gained the upper hand and, in an unprecedented move, executed Charles I. In the 1650s, therefore, England became a republic, a state without a king. English colonists in America closely followed these events. Indeed, many Puritans left New England and returned home to take part in the struggle against the king and the national church. Other English men and women in the Chesapeake colonies and elsewhere in the English Atlantic World looked on in horror at the mayhem the Parliamentarians, led by the Puritan insurgents, appeared to unleash in England. The turmoil in England made the administration and imperial oversight of the Chesapeake and New England colonies difficult, and the two regions developed divergent cultures.

The Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland served a vital purpose in the developing seventeenth-century English empire by providing tobacco, a cash crop. However, the early history of Jamestown did not suggest the English outpost would survive. From the outset, its settlers struggled both with each other and with the native inhabitants, the powerful Powhatan, who controlled the area. Jealousies and infighting among the English destabilized the colony. One member, John Smith, whose famous map begins this chapter, took control and exercised near-dictatorial powers, which furthered aggravated the squabbling. The settlers' inability to grow their own food compounded this unstable situation. They were essentially employees of the Virginia Company of London, an English joint-stock company, in which investors provided the capital and assumed the risk in order to reap the profit, and they had to make a profit for their shareholders as well as for themselves. Most initially devoted themselves to finding gold and silver instead of finding ways to grow their own food.

Early Struggles and the Development of the Tobacco Economy

Poor health, lack of food, and fighting with native peoples took the lives of many of the original Jamestown settlers. The winter of 1609-1610, which became known as "the starving time," came close to annihilating the colony. By June 1610, the few remaining settlers had decided to abandon the area; only the last-minute arrival of a supply ship from England prevented another failed colonization effort. The supply ship brought new settlers, but only twelve hundred of the seventy-five hundred who came to Virginia between 1607 and 1624 survived.

George Percy on "The Starving Time"

George Percy, the youngest son of an English nobleman, was in the first group of settlers at the Jamestown Colony. He kept a journal describing their experiences; in the excerpt below, he reports on the privations of the colonists' third winter.

Now all of us at James Town, beginning to feel that sharp prick of hunger which no man truly describe but he which has tasted the bitterness thereof, a world of miseries ensued as the sequel will express unto you, in so much that some to satisfy their hunger have robbed the store for the which I caused them to be executed. Then having fed upon horses and other beasts as long as they lasted, we were glad to make shift with vermin as dogs, cats, rats, and mice. All was fish that came to net to satisfy cruel hunger as to eat boots, shoes, or any other leather some could come by, and, those being spent and devoured, some were enforced to search the woods and to feed upon serpents and snakes and to dig the earth for wild and unknown roots, where many of our men were cut off of and slain by the savages. And now famine beginning to look ghastly and pale in every face that nothing was spared to maintain life and to do those things which seem incredible as to dig up dead corpses out of graves and to eat them, and some have licked up the blood which has fallen from their weak fellows.

-George Percy, "A True Relation of the Proceedings and Occurances of Moment which have happened in Virginia from the Time Sir Thomas Gates shipwrecked upon the Bermudes anno 1609 until my departure out of the Country which was in anno Domini 1612," London 1624

What is your reaction to George Percy's story? How do you think Jamestown managed to survive after such an experience? What do you think the Jamestown colonists learned?

By the 1620s, Virginia had weathered the worst and gained a degree of permanence. Political stability came slowly, but by 1619, the fledgling colony was operating under the leadership of a governor, a council, and a House of Burgesses. Economic stability came from the lucrative cultivation of tobacco. Smoking tobacco was a long-standing practice among native peoples, and English and other European consumers soon adopted it. In 1614, the Virginia colony began exporting tobacco back to England, which earned it a sizable profit and saved the colony from ruin. A second tobacco colony, Maryland, was formed in 1634, when King Charles I granted its charter to the Calvert family for their loyal service to England. Cecilius Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, conceived of Maryland as a refuge for English Catholics.

Growing tobacco proved very labor-intensive, and the Chesapeake colonists needed a steady workforce to do the hard work of clearing the land and caring for the tender young plants. The mature leaf of the plant then had to be cured (dried), which necessitated the construction of drying barns. Once cured, the tobacco had to be packaged in hogsheads (large wooden barrels) and loaded aboard ship, which also required considerable labor.

To meet these labor demands, early Virginians relied on indentured servants. An indenture is a labor contract that young, impoverished, and often illiterate Englishmen and occasionally Englishwomen signed in England, pledging to work for a number of years (usually between five and seven) growing tobacco in the Chesapeake colonies. In return, indentured servants received paid passage to America and food, clothing, and lodging. At the end of their indenture servants received "freedom dues," usually food and other provisions, including, in some cases, land provided by the colony. The promise of a new life in America was a strong attraction for members of England's underclass, who had few if any options at home. In the 1600s, some 100,000 indentured servants traveled to the Chesapeake Bay. Most were poor young men in their early twenties.

Life in the colonies proved harsh, however. Indentured servants could not marry, and they were subject to the will of the tobacco planters who bought their labor contracts. If they committed a crime or disobeyed their masters, they found their terms of service lengthened, often by several years. Female indentured servants faced special dangers in what was essentially a bachelor colony. Many were exploited by unscrupulous tobacco planters who seduced them with promises of marriage. These planters would then sell their pregnant servants to other tobacco planters to avoid the costs of raising a child.

Nonetheless, those indentured servants who completed their term of service often began new lives as tobacco planters. To entice even more migrants to the New World, the Virginia Company also implemented the headright system, in which those who paid their own passage to Virginia received fifty acres plus an additional fifty for each servant or family member they brought with them. The headright system and the promise of a new life for servants acted as powerful incentives for English migrants to hazard the journey to the New World.

Visit Virtual Jamestown to access a database of contracts of indentured servants. Search it by name to find an ancestor or browse by occupation, destination, or county of origin.

The Anglo-Powhatan Wars

By choosing to settle along the rivers on the banks of the Chesapeake, the English unknowingly placed themselves at the center of the Powhatan Empire, a powerful Algonquian confederacy of thirty native groups with perhaps as many as twenty-two thousand people. The territory of the equally impressive Susquehannock people also bordered English settlements at the north end of the Chesapeake Bay.

Tensions ran high between the English and the Powhatan, and near-constant war prevailed. The First Anglo-Powhatan War (1609-1614) resulted not only from the English colonists' intrusion onto Powhatan land, but also from their refusal to follow native protocol by giving gifts. English actions infuriated and insulted the Powhatan. In 1613, the settlers captured Pocahontas (also called Matoaka), the daughter of a Powhatan headman named Wahunsonacook, and gave her in marriage to Englishman John Rolfe. Their union, and her choice to remain with the English, helped quell the war in 1614. Pocahontas converted to Christianity, changing her name to Rebecca, and sailed with her husband and several other Powhatan to England where she was introduced to King James I. Promoters of colonization publicized Pocahontas as an example of the good work of converting the Powhatan to Christianity.

Explore the interactive exhibit Changing Images of Pocahontas on PBS's website to see the many ways artists have portrayed Pocahontas over the centuries.

Peace in Virginia did not last long. The Second Anglo-Powhatan War (1620s) broke out because of the expansion of the English settlement nearly one hundred miles into the interior, and because of the continued insults and friction caused by English activities. The Powhatan attacked in 1622 and succeeded in killing almost 350 English, about a third of the settlers. The English responded by annihilating every Powhatan village around Jamestown and from then on became even more intolerant. The Third Anglo-Powhatan War (1644-1646) began with a surprise attack in which the Powhatan killed around five hundred English colonists. However, their ultimate defeat in this conflict forced the Powhatan to acknowledge King Charles I as their sovereign. The Anglo-Powhatan Wars, spanning nearly forty years, illustrate the degree of native resistance that resulted from English intrusion into the Powhatan confederacy.

The Rise of Slavery in the Chesapeake Bay Colonies

The transition from indentured servitude to slavery as the main labor source for some English colonies happened first in the West Indies. On the small island of Barbados, colonized in the 1620s, English planters first grew tobacco as their main export crop, but in the 1640s, they converted to sugarcane and began increasingly to rely on African slaves. In 1655, England wrestled control of Jamaica from the Spanish and quickly turned it into a lucrative sugar island, run on slave labor, for its expanding empire. While slavery was slower to take hold in the Chesapeake colonies, by the end of the seventeenth century, both Virginia and Maryland had also adopted chattel slavery-which legally defined Africans as property and not people-as the dominant form of labor to grow tobacco. Chesapeake colonists also enslaved native people.

When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, slavery-which did not exist in England-had not yet become an institution in colonial America. Many Africans worked as servants and, like their white counterparts, could acquire land of their own. Some Africans who converted to Christianity became free landowners with white servants. The change in the status of Africans in the Chesapeake to that of slaves occurred in the last decades of the seventeenth century.

Bacon's Rebellion, an uprising of both whites and blacks who believed that the Virginia government was impeding their access to land and wealth and seemed to do little to clear the land of Indians, hastened the transition to African slavery in the Chesapeake colonies. The rebellion takes its name from Nathaniel Bacon, a wealthy young Englishman who arrived in Virginia in 1674. Despite an early friendship with Virginia's royal governor, William Berkeley, Bacon found himself excluded from the governor's circle of influential friends and councilors. He wanted land on the Virginia frontier, but the governor, fearing war with neighboring Indian tribes, forbade further expansion. Bacon marshaled others, especially former indentured servants who believed the governor was limiting their economic opportunities and denying them the right to own tobacco farms. Bacon's followers believed Berkeley's frontier policy didn't protect English settlers enough. Worse still in their eyes, Governor Berkeley tried to keep peace in Virginia by signing treaties with various local native peoples. Bacon and his followers, who saw all Indians as an obstacle to their access to land, pursued a policy of extermination.

Tensions between the English and the native peoples in the Chesapeake colonies led to open conflict. In 1675, war broke out when Susquehannock warriors attacked settlements on Virginia's frontier, killing English planters and destroying English plantations, including one owned by Bacon. In 1676, Bacon and other Virginians attacked the Susquehannock without the governor's approval. When Berkeley ordered Bacon's arrest, Bacon led his followers to Jamestown, forced the governor to flee to the safety of Virginia's eastern shore, and then burned the city. The civil war known as Bacon's Rebellion, a vicious struggle between supporters of the governor and those who supported Bacon, ensued. Reports of the rebellion traveled back to England, leading Charles II to dispatch both royal troops and English commissioners to restore order in the tobacco colonies. By the end of 1676, Virginians loyal to the governor gained the upper hand, executing several leaders of the rebellion. Bacon escaped the hangman's noose, instead dying of dysentery. The rebellion fizzled in 1676, but Virginians remained divided as supporters of Bacon continued to harbor grievances over access to Indian land.

Bacon's Rebellion helped to catalyze the creation of a system of racial slavery in the Chesapeake colonies. At the time of the rebellion, indentured servants made up the majority of laborers in the region. Wealthy whites worried over the presence of this large class of laborers and the relative freedom they enjoyed, as well as the alliance that black and white servants had forged in the course of the rebellion. Replacing indentured servitude with black slavery diminished these risks, alleviating the reliance on white indentured servants, who were often dissatisfied and troublesome, and creating a caste of racially defined laborers whose movements were strictly controlled. It also lessened the possibility of further alliances between black and white workers. Racial slavery even served to heal some of the divisions between wealthy and poor whites, who could now unite as members of a "superior" racial group.

While colonial laws in the tobacco colonies had made slavery a legal institution before Bacon's Rebellion, new laws passed in the wake of the rebellion severely curtailed black freedom and laid the foundation for racial slavery. Virginia passed a law in 1680 prohibiting free blacks and slaves from bearing arms, banning blacks from congregating in large numbers, and establishing harsh punishments for slaves who assaulted Christians or attempted escape. Two years later, another Virginia law stipulated that all Africans brought to the colony would be slaves for life. Thus, the increasing reliance on slaves in the tobacco colonies-and the draconian laws instituted to control them-not only helped planters meet labor demands, but also served to assuage English fears of further uprisings and alleviate class tensions between rich and poor whites.

Robert Beverley on Servants and Slaves

Robert Beverley was a wealthy Jamestown planter and slaveholder. This excerpt from his History and Present State of Virginia, published in 1705, clearly illustrates the contrast between white servants and black slaves.

Their Servants, they distinguish by the Names of Slaves for Life, and Servants for a time. Slaves are the Negroes, and their Posterity, following the condition of the Mother, according to the Maxim, partus sequitur ventrem [status follows the womb]. They are call'd Slaves, in respect of the time of their Servitude, because it is for Life.

Servants, are those which serve only for a few years, according to the time of their Indenture, or the Custom of the Country. The Custom of the Country takes place upon such as have no Indentures. The Law in this case is, that if such Servants be under Nineteen years of Age, they must be brought into Court, to have their Age adjudged; and from the Age they are judg'd to be of, they must serve until they reach four and twenty: But if they be adjudged upwards of Nineteen, they are then only to be Servants for the term of five Years.

The Male-Servants, and Slaves of both Sexes, are employed together in Tilling and Manuring the Ground, in Sowing and Planting Tobacco, Corn, &c. Some Distinction indeed is made between them in their Cloaths, and Food; but the Work of both, is no other than what the Overseers, the Freemen, and the Planters themselves do.

Sufficient Distinction is also made between the Female-Servants, and Slaves; for a White Woman is rarely or never put to work in the Ground, if she be good for any thing else: And to Discourage all Planters from using any Women so, their Law imposes the heaviest Taxes upon Female Servants working in the Ground, while it suffers all other white Women to be absolutely exempted: Whereas on the other hand, it is a common thing to work a Woman Slave out of Doors; nor does the Law make any Distinction in her Taxes, whether her Work be Abroad, or at Home.

According to Robert Beverley, what are the differences between servants and slaves? What protections did servants have that slaves did not?

The second major area to be colonized by the English in the first half of the seventeenth century, New England, differed markedly in its founding principles from the commercially oriented Chesapeake tobacco colonies. Settled largely by waves of Puritan families in the 1630s, New England had a religious orientation from the start. In England, reform-minded men and women had been calling for greater changes to the English national church since the 1580s. These reformers, who followed the teachings of John Calvin and other Protestant reformers, were called Puritans because of their insistence on "purifying" the Church of England of what they believed to be un-scriptural, especially Catholic elements that lingered in its institutions and practices.

Many who provided leadership in early New England were learned ministers who had studied at Cambridge or Oxford but who, because they had questioned the practices of the Church of England, had been deprived of careers by the king and his officials in an effort to silence all dissenting voices. Other Puritan leaders, such as the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, came from the privileged class of English gentry. These well-to-do Puritans and many thousands more left their English homes not to establish a land of religious freedom, but to practice their own religion without persecution. Puritan New England offered them the opportunity to live as they believed the Bible demanded. In their "New" England, they set out to create a model of reformed Protestantism, a new English Israel.

The conflict generated by Puritanism had divided English society, because the Puritans demanded reforms that undermined the traditional festive culture. For example, they denounced popular pastimes like bear-baiting-letting dogs attack a chained bear-which were often conducted on Sundays when people had a few leisure hours. In the culture where William Shakespeare had produced his masterpieces, Puritans called for an end to the theater, censuring playhouses as places of decadence. Indeed, the Bible itself became part of the struggle between Puritans and James I, who headed the Church of England. Soon after ascending the throne, James commissioned a new version of the Bible in an effort to stifle Puritan reliance on the Geneva Bible, which followed the teachings of John Calvin and placed God's authority above the monarch's. The King James Version, published in 1611, instead emphasized the majesty of kings.

During the 1620s and 1630s, the conflict escalated to the point where the state church prohibited Puritan ministers from preaching. In the Church's view, Puritans represented a national security threat, because their demands for cultural, social, and religious reforms undermined the king's authority. Unwilling to conform to the Church of England, many Puritans found refuge in the New World. Yet those who emigrated to the Americas were not united. Some called for a complete break with the Church of England, while others remained committed to reforming the national church.

Plymouth: The First Puritan Colony

The first group of Puritans to make their way across the Atlantic was a small contingent known as the Pilgrims. Unlike other Puritans, they insisted on a complete separation from the Church of England and had first migrated to the Dutch Republic seeking religious freedom. Although they found they could worship without hindrance there, they grew concerned that they were losing their Englishness as they saw their children begin to learn the Dutch language and adopt Dutch ways. In addition, the English Pilgrims (and others in Europe) feared another attack on the Dutch Republic by Catholic Spain. Therefore, in 1620, they moved on to found the Plymouth Colony in present-day Massachusetts. The governor of Plymouth, William Bradford, was a Separatist, a proponent of complete separation from the English state church. Bradford and the other Pilgrim Separatists represented a major challenge to the prevailing vision of a unified English national church and empire. On board the Mayflower, which was bound for Virginia but landed on the tip of Cape Cod, Bradford and forty other adult men signed the Mayflower Compact, which presented a religious (rather than an economic) rationale for colonization. The compact expressed a community ideal of working together. When a larger exodus of Puritans established the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s, the Pilgrims at Plymouth welcomed them and the two colonies cooperated with each other.

The Mayflower Compact and Its Religious Rationale

The Mayflower Compact, which forty-one Pilgrim men signed on board the Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor, has been called the first American governing document, predating the U.S. Constitution by over 150 years. But was the Mayflower Compact a constitution? How much authority did it convey, and to whom?

In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, defender of the Faith, etc.

Having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and advancements of the Christian faith and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic; for our better ordering, and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, 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.

In witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape Cod the 11th of November, in the year of the reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth, 1620

Different labor systems also distinguished early Puritan New England from the Chesapeake colonies. Puritans expected young people to work diligently at their calling, and all members of their large families, including children, did the bulk of the work necessary to run homes, farms, and businesses. Very few migrants came to New England as laborers; in fact, New England towns protected their disciplined homegrown workforce by refusing to allow outsiders in, assuring their sons and daughters of steady employment. New England's labor system produced remarkable results, notably a powerful maritime-based economy with scores of oceangoing ships and the crews necessary to sail them. New England mariners sailing New England-made ships transported Virginian tobacco and West Indian sugar throughout the Atlantic World.

"A City upon a Hill"

A much larger group of English Puritans left England in the 1630s, establishing the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the New Haven Colony, the Connecticut Colony, and Rhode Island. Unlike the exodus of young males to the Chesapeake colonies, these migrants were families with young children and their university-trained ministers. Their aim, according to John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay, was to create a model of reformed Protestantism-a "city upon a hill," a new English Israel. The idea of a "city upon a hill" made clear the religious orientation of the New England settlement, and the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony stated as a goal that the colony's people "may be soe religiously, peaceablie, and civilly governed, as their good Life and orderlie Conversacon, maie wynn and incite the Natives of Country, to the Knowledg and Obedience of the onlie true God and Saulor of Mankinde, and the Christian Fayth." To illustrate this, the seal of the Massachusetts Bay Company shows a half-naked Indian who entreats more of the English to "come over and help us."

Puritan New England differed in many ways from both England and the rest of Europe. Protestants emphasized literacy so that everyone could read the Bible. This attitude was in stark contrast to that of Catholics, who refused to tolerate private ownership of Bibles in the vernacular. The Puritans, for their part, placed a special emphasis on reading scripture, and their commitment to literacy led to the establishment of the first printing press in English America in 1636. Four years later, in 1640, they published the first book in North America, the Bay Psalm Book. As Calvinists, Puritans adhered to the doctrine of predestination, whereby a few "elect" would be saved and all others damned. No one could be sure whether they were predestined for salvation, but through introspection, guided by scripture, Puritans hoped to find a glimmer of redemptive grace. Church membership was restricted to those Puritans who were willing to provide a conversion narrative telling how they came to understand their spiritual estate by hearing sermons and studying the Bible.

Although many people assume Puritans escaped England to establish religious freedom, they proved to be just as intolerant as the English state church. When dissenters, including Puritan minister Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, challenged Governor Winthrop in Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s, they were banished. Roger Williams questioned the Puritans' taking of Indian land. Williams also argued for a complete separation from the Church of England, a position other Puritans in Massachusetts rejected, as well as the idea that the state could not punish individuals for their beliefs. Although he did accept that nonbelievers were destined for eternal damnation, Williams did not think the state could compel true orthodoxy. Puritan authorities found him guilty of spreading dangerous ideas, but he went on to found Rhode Island as a colony that sheltered dissenting Puritans from their brethren in Massachusetts. In Rhode Island, Williams wrote favorably about native peoples, contrasting their virtues with Puritan New England's intolerance.

Anne Hutchinson also ran afoul of Puritan authorities for her criticism of the evolving religious practices in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In particular, she held that Puritan ministers in New England taught a shallow version of Protestantism emphasizing hierarchy and actions-a "covenant of works" rather than a "covenant of grace." Literate Puritan women like Hutchinson presented a challenge to the male ministers' authority. Indeed, her major offense was her claim of direct religious revelation, a type of spiritual experience that negated the role of ministers. Because of Hutchinson's beliefs and her defiance of authority in the colony, especially that of Governor Winthrop, Puritan authorities tried and convicted her of holding false beliefs. In 1638, she was excommunicated and banished from the colony. She went to Rhode Island and later, in 1642, sought safety among the Dutch in New Netherland. The following year, Algonquian warriors killed Hutchinson and her family. In Massachusetts, Governor Winthrop noted her death as the righteous judgment of God against a heretic.

Like many other Europeans, the Puritans believed in the supernatural. Every event appeared to be a sign of God's mercy or judgment, and people believed that witches allied themselves with the Devil to carry out evil deeds and deliberate harm such as the sickness or death of children, the loss of cattle, and other catastrophes. Hundreds were accused of witchcraft in Puritan New England, including townspeople whose habits or appearance bothered their neighbors or who appeared threatening for any reason. Women, seen as more susceptible to the Devil because of their supposedly weaker constitutions, made up the vast majority of suspects and those who were executed. The most notorious cases occurred in Salem Village in 1692. Many of the accusers who prosecuted the suspected witches had been traumatized by the Indian wars on the frontier and by unprecedented political and cultural changes in New England. Relying on their belief in witchcraft to help make sense of their changing world, Puritan authorities executed nineteen people and caused the deaths of several others.

Explore the Salem Witchcraft Trials to learn more about the prosecution of witchcraft in seventeenth-century New England.

Puritan Relationships with Native Peoples

Like their Spanish and French Catholic rivals, English Puritans in America took steps to convert native peoples to their version of Christianity. John Eliot, the leading Puritan missionary in New England, urged natives in Massachusetts to live in "praying towns" established by English authorities for converted Indians, and to adopt the Puritan emphasis on the centrality of the Bible. In keeping with the Protestant emphasis on reading scripture, he translated the Bible into the local Algonquian language and published his work in 1663. Eliot hoped that as a result of his efforts, some of New England's native inhabitants would become preachers.

Tensions had existed from the beginning between the Puritans and the native people who controlled southern New England. Relationships deteriorated as the Puritans continued to expand their settlements aggressively and as European ways increasingly disrupted native life. These strains led to King Philip's War (1675-1676), a massive regional conflict that was nearly successful in pushing the English out of New England.

When the Puritans began to arrive in the 1620s and 1630s, local Algonquian peoples had viewed them as potential allies in the conflicts already simmering between rival native groups. In 1621, the Wampanoag, led by Massasoit, concluded a peace treaty with the Pilgrims at Plymouth. In the 1630s, the Puritans in Massachusetts and Plymouth allied themselves with the Narragansett and Mohegan people against the Pequot, who had recently expanded their claims into southern New England. In May 1637, the Puritans attacked a large group of several hundred Pequot along the Mystic River in Connecticut. To the horror of their native allies, the Puritans massacred all but a handful of the men, women, and children they found.

By the mid-seventeenth century, the Puritans had pushed their way further into the interior of New England, establishing outposts along the Connecticut River Valley. There seemed no end to their expansion. Wampanoag leader Metacom or Metacomet, also known as King Philip among the English, was determined to stop the encroachment. The Wampanoag, along with the Nipmuck, Pocumtuck, and Narragansett, took up the hatchet to drive the English from the land. In the ensuing conflict, called King Philip's War, native forces succeeded in destroying half of the frontier Puritan towns; however, in the end, the English (aided by Mohegans and Christian Indians) prevailed and sold many captives into slavery in the West Indies. (The severed head of King Philip was publicly displayed in Plymouth.) The war also forever changed the English perception of native peoples; from then on, Puritan writers took great pains to vilify the natives as bloodthirsty savages. A new type of racial hatred became a defining feature of Indian-English relationships in the Northeast.

Mary Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative

Mary Rowlandson was a Puritan woman whom Indian tribes captured and imprisoned for several weeks during King Philip's War. After her release, she wrote The Narrative of the Captivity and the Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, which was published in 1682. The book was an immediate sensation that was reissued in multiple editions for over a century.

But now, the next morning, I must turn my back upon the town, and travel with them into the vast and desolate wilderness, I knew not whither. It is not my tongue, or pen, can express the sorrows of my heart, and bitterness of my spirit that I had at this departure: but God was with me in a wonderful manner, carrying me along, and bearing up my spirit, that it did not quite fail. One of the Indians carried my poor wounded babe upon a horse; it went moaning all along, "I shall die, I shall die." I went on foot after it, with sorrow that cannot be expressed. At length I took it off the horse, and carried it in my arms till my strength failed, and I fell down with it. Then they set me upon a horse with my wounded child in my lap, and there being no furniture upon the horse's back, as we were going down a steep hill we both fell over the horse's head, at which they, like inhumane creatures, laughed, and rejoiced to see it, though I thought we should there have ended our days, as overcome with so many difficulties. But the Lord renewed my strength still, and carried me along, that I might see more of His power; yea, so much that I could never have thought of, had I not experienced it.

What sustains Rowlandson her during her ordeal? How does she characterize her captors? What do you think made her narrative so compelling to readers?

The English came late to colonization of the Americas, establishing stable settlements in the 1600s after several unsuccessful attempts in the 1500s. After Roanoke Colony failed in 1587, the English found more success with the founding of Jamestown in 1607 and Plymouth in 1620. The two colonies were very different in origin. The Virginia Company of London founded Jamestown with the express purpose of making money for its investors, while Puritans founded Plymouth to practice their own brand of Protestantism without interference.

Both colonies battled difficult circumstances, including poor relationships with neighboring Indian tribes. Conflicts flared repeatedly in the Chesapeake Bay tobacco colonies and in New England, where a massive uprising against the English in 1675 to 1676-King Philip's War-nearly succeeded in driving the intruders back to the sea.

Review Question

How did the Chesapeake colonists solve their labor problems?

Answer to Review Question

They encouraged colonization by offering headrights to anyone who could pay his own way to Virginia: fifty acres for each passage. They also used the system of indenture, in which people (usually men) who didn't have enough money to pay their own passage could work for a set number of years and then gain their own land. Increasingly, they also turned to African slaves as a cheap labor source.

Glossary

headright system a system in which parcels of land were granted to settlers who could pay their own way to Virginia

a labor contract that promised young men, and sometimes women, money and land after they worked for a set period of years

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By the end of this section, you will be able to: Identify the first English settlements in America Describe the differences between the Chesapeake Bay colonies and the New England colonies Compare and contrast the wars between native inhabitants and English colonists in both the Chesapeake Bay and New England colonies Explain the role of Bacon's Rebellion in the rise of chattel slavery in Virginia Promoters of English colonization in North America, many of whom never ventured across the Atlantic, wrote about the bounty the English would find there.

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Colonist Affected By the Great Awakening or Enlightenment

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Colonist Affected By the Great Awakening or Enlightenment

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The Enlighment and the Great Awakening Influence on the... | Bartleby

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Free Essay: Both the Enlightenment and the Great awakening caused the colonists to alter their views about government, the role of government, as well as...

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Taxes & Smuggling - Prelude to Revolution: Crash Course US History #6

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The Battle of Saratoga, comprising two significant battles during September and October of 1777, was a crucial victory for the Patriots during the American Revolution and is considered the turning point of the Revolutionary War. The Battle was the impetus for France to enter the war against Britain, re-invigorating Washington's Continental Army and providing much needed supplies and support.

Recognized as one of the fifteen most decisive battles in world history, the Saratoga National Historic Park commemorates the site where a new Nation emerged.

A Brief Overview of the Crucial Battles of Saratoga
N. Currier, and John Trumbull. Surrender of General Burgoyne at Saratoga N.Y. Oct. 17th. New York: Published by N. Currier. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2002695771/>.
The turning point in the Revolutionary War began as a plan by the British to strategically control Upstate New York and isolate New England from the Southern colonies in an effort to decisively put an end to the Revolution. It ended as an opportunity the Patriots were waiting for.

British troops led by General John Burgoyne planned to drive south from Montreal to Albany, NY along the historic water route of Lake Champlain, Lake George and the Hudson River. Once in Albany, they would join forces with two other British commands, one coming north from New York City and the other coming east along the Mohawk River valley.

Moving South

Burgoyne's advance south faltered in the forests near the Lake George area. Colonist troops were felling trees and blocking Burgoyne's path, slowing the British considerably. By the time Burgoyne reached Fort Edward, they were running low on supplies. A detachment was sent to procure cattle and supplies from nearby Vermont, and were subsequently overrun by Colonist forces, further dwindling Burgoyne's numbers.

Separately, the British that were traveling North from New York City under the command of General Howe, decided to veer from the plan and 'take' Philadelphia, which they did, however, Washington's Continental Army retreated to York and prevented Howe from leaving and joining forces with Burgoyne. In addition, Washington realized that a major battle was shaping up, and sent troops north. He also put the word out that any Militia that could join the troops should. The end result was a large contingent of regular troops and militia gathered in the Saratoga area.
Photo Credit: SaratogaPhotographer.com
Battle #1

Burgoyne again began his advance south, but was stopped about 10 miles below Saratoga. The first battle of Saratoga, the Battle of Freeman's Farm, took place on September 19, 1777. A militia of sharpshooters from Virginia harassed the British, while other colonist forces aggressively charged into battle with them. Burgoyne lost two men for every one on the American side.

Battle #2

The second battle, the Battle of Bemis Heights, occurred on October 7, when Burgoyne determined to break free from the encircling colonial forces and drive them from the field. The British troops and their German allies were devastated, and nearly lost their entrenched positions. Fighting on horseback, Benedict Arnold, received a wound in his leg during this battle; his contribution to the battle is commemorated by a statue of his boot, with no other reference to the hero turned traitor.

Victory!

This defeat at Bemis Heights forced Burgoyne to withdraw north to camps in and around the present Village of Schuylerville. Burgoyne surrendered on October 17, 1777, in what would later be named Victory NY, where the Saratoga Monument memorializes that important day.

Disgraced, Burgoyne returned to England, and was never given another command. These crucial colonist victories at the Battle of Saratoga persuaded the French to support the Americans with military aid, and is considered the major turning point in the American Revolution.

See Where It Happened!
Photo Credit: SaratogaPhotographer.com
Here in Saratoga you can walk the battlefield that marked the turning point of the American Revolution, observe period artillery and discover more about the crucial Battle of Saratoga. Visit our page on Saratoga National Historic Park: Site of the Battle of Saratoga to learn more.
Sources of Information: MyRevolutionaryWar.com, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Saratoga National Historic Park MORE: Full excerpt on the Battle of Saratoga from Creasy's 15 most Decisive Battles

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The Battle of Saratoga - A Major Turning Point of the Revolutionary War

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The Battle of Saratoga proved to be a crucial victory for the Patriots and is considered a turning point of the Revolutionary War.

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Exploros, The Revolutionary Era, American Victory, Yorktown and the Treaty of Paris

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The Articles of Confederation served as the written document that established the functions of the national government of the United States after it declared independence from Great Britain. It established a weak central government that mostly, but not entirely, prevented the individual states from conducting their own foreign diplomacy.

The Articles of Confederation

The Albany Plan an earlier, pre-independence attempt at joining the colonies into a larger union, had failed in part because the individual colonies were concerned about losing power to another central insitution. As the American Revolution gained momentum, however, many political leaders saw the advantages of a centralized government that could coordinate the Revolutionary War. In June of 1775, the New York provincial Congress sent a plan of union to the Continental Congress, which, like the Albany Plan, continued to recognize the authority of the British Crown.

Some Continental Congress delegates had also informally discussed plans for a more permanent union than the Continental Congress, whose status was temporary. Benjamin Franklin had drawn up a plan for "Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union." While some delegates, such as Thomas Jefferson, supported Franklin's proposal, many others were strongly opposed. Franklin introduced his plan before Congress on July 21, but stated that it should be viewed as a draft for when Congress was interested in reaching a more formal proposal. Congress tabled the plan.

Following the Declaration of Independence, the members of the Continental Congress realized it would be necessary to set up a national government. Congress began to discuss the form this government would take on July 22, disagreeing on a number of issues, including whether representation and voting would be proportional or state-by-state. The disagreements delayed final discussions of confederation until October of 1777. By then, the British capture of Philadelphia had made the issue more urgent. Delegates finally formulated the Articles of Confederation, in which they agreed to state-by-state voting and proportional state tax burdens based on land values, though they left the issue of state claims to western lands unresolved. Congress sent the Articles to the states for ratification at the end of November. Most delegates realized that the Articles were a flawed compromise, but believed that it was better than an absence of formal national government.

On December 16, 1777, Virginia was the first state to ratify. Other states ratified during the early months of 1778. When Congress reconvened in June of 1778, the delegates learned that Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey refused to ratify the Articles. The Articles required unanimous approval from the states. These smaller states wanted other states to relinquish their western land claims before they would ratify the Articles. New Jersey and Delaware eventually agreed to the conditions of the Articles, with New Jersey ratifying on Nov 20, 1778, and Delaware on Feb 1, 1779. This left Maryland as the last remaining holdout.

Irked by Maryland's recalcitrance, several other state governments passed resolutions endorsing the formation of a national government without the state of Maryland, but other politicians such as Congressman Thomas Burke of North Carolina persuaded their governments to refrain from doing so, arguing that without unanimous approval of the new Confederation, the new country would remain weak, divided, and open to future foreign intervention and manipulation.

Meanwhile, in 1780, British forces began to conduct raids on Maryland communities in the Chesapeake Bay. Alarmed, the state government wrote to the French minister Anne-César De la Luzerne asking for French naval assistance. Luzerne wrote back, urging the government of Maryland to ratify the Articles of Confederation. Marylanders were given further incentive to ratify when Virginia agreed to relinquish its western land claims, and so the Maryland legislature ratified the Articles of Confederation on March 1, 1781.

The Continental Congress voted on Jan 10, 1781, to establish a Department of Foreign Affairs; on Aug 10 of that year, it elected Robert R. Livingston as Secretary of Foreign Affairs. The Secretary's duties involved corresponding with U.S. representatives abroad and with ministers of foreign powers. The Secretary was also charged with transmitting Congress' instructions to U.S. agents abroad and was authorized to attend sessions of Congress. A further Act of Feb 22, 1782, allowed the Secretary to ask and respond to questions during sessions of the Continental Congress.

The Articles created a sovereign, national government, and, as such, limited the rights of the states to conduct their own diplomacy and foreign policy. However, this proved difficult to enforce, as the national government could not prevent the state of Georgia from pursuing its own independent policy regarding Spanish Florida, attempting to occupy disputed territories and threatening war if Spanish officials did not work to curb Indian attacks or refrain from harboring escaped slaves. Nor could the Confederation government prevent the landing of convicts that the British Government continued to export to its former colonies. In addition, the Articles did not allow Congress sufficient authority to enforce provisions of the 1783 Treaty of Paris that allowed British creditors to sue debtors for pre-Revolutionary debts, an unpopular clause that many state governments chose to ignore. Consequently, British forces continued to occupy forts in the Great Lakes region. These problems, combined with the Confederation government's ineffectual response to Shays' Rebellion in Massachusetts, convinced national leaders that a more powerful central government was necessary. This led to the Constitutional Convention that formulated the current Constitution of the United States.

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Milestones: 1776-1783 - Office of the Historian

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The Articles of Confederation served as the written document that established the functions of the national government of the United States after it declared independence from Great Britain. It established a weak central government that mostly, but not entirely, prevented the individual states from conducting their own foreign diplomacy.

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The Great Compromise helped determine how each of the US states was to be represented in the Congress.

What Was The Great Compromise?

The Great Compromise, also known as the Connecticut Compromise, the Great Compromise of 1787, or the Sherman Compromise, was an agreement made between large and small states which partly defined the representation each state would have under the United States Constitution, as well as in legislature. It occurred in 1787. The Connecticut Compromise resulted from a debate among delegates on how each state could have representation in the Congress. The Great Compromise led to the creation of a two-chambered Congress. Also created was the House of Representative which is determined by a state's population. The agreement retained the bicameral legislature, but the upper house had to change to accommodate two senators to represent each state. The deal reshaped the American government structure striking a balance between the highly populated states and their demands while at the same time taking into consideration the less-populous state and their interests.

Overview And Background

The United States underwent painful years in the 1780s. The 1781 ratification of the Articles of Confederation provided an inadequate governmental structure. It failed to regulate trade, levy taxes, and draft soldiers. Also, it failed to solve the slavery issue which polarized the Northwest Territory. The country's economy which had severely plummeted following the Anglo-American Revolution struggled to rebound. Debt, especially the accumulated war debts became an enormous issue in the US. Many citizens found it increasingly difficult to generate enough income to pay for their daily expenses as well as taxes. As much as the people looked up to the state for help, no social welfare relief developed. Furthermore, the contentious politics also divided the citizens. This instability called for a delegation in 1785, proposed by Alexander Hamilton which would address a national reform. James Madison responded with support and asked other states to send their delegates to Annapolis, Maryland for a conference. However, only five states representatives attended, but even so, they approved a plan in whichever state would send delegates to the 1787 Philadelphian convection. In May 1787, 55 delegates representing 12 states, Rhodes Island was absent, met in Philadelphia to discuss the limitations of the Articles of Federation. The Constitutional Convention started later on when Madison proposed the Virginia Plan which Patterson countered with the New Jersey Plan.

What The Great Compromise Involved?

Before the 1787 Constitutional Convention, larger states like Virginia favored congressional representation based on a state's population. On the other hand, smaller states wanted equal representation. Edmund Randolph and James Madison proposed the Virginia Plan on May 29, 1787. This plan outlined that the government should comprise of three branches the legislature, executive, and judiciary. The three branches would serve a two-housed legislature. The population was to elect the members of the lower house and they, in turn, would elect representatives in the Upper House. In other words, both houses included a population proportional representation. Madison also proposed that Congress get a veto for all state laws. The New Jersey Plan, put forward on June 15, 1787, by William Patterson, called for equal representation of each state like it was in the Articles of Confederation system but sought to increase Congress power. It called for a one-house legislature, equal representation of each state, and popular elections. Patterson also proposed a lifetime Supreme Court appointed by executive officers. He focused on the probability that the national government would violate the sovereignty of the states. At this point, the less populous states representatives feared that the agreement would result in larger states drowning the voices and interests rendering them useless in the national scale. Madison, on the other hand, argued that the most important states were very different from each other. Hamilton pointed out that each state was an artificial entity made up of individuals. He thus accused smaller states of being power hungry.

As such, the two sides rejected each other's plans. The disagreements called for reflection leading to a negotiation on how to determine the future of the US government. Roger Sherman, a Connecticut delegate suggested a plan that eventually turned out as the Great Compromise. His plan included a two-legislative form of government in the US, the Senate and the House of Representatives. For every 300,000 citizens, a state received one member to serve in the House of representative and two senators. On July 16, 1787, despite Benjamin Franklin efforts to block equal voting rights of the smaller states, the proposal did pass even though by only one vote. Thus the name compromise was conjured, and it paved the way for the constitutional final passage and became an important stepping stone in the creation and development of the United States.

Upon deciding on the representation issue, the debate focused on the slaves existing in a state's population and which led to the formation of the Three-Fifths Compromise. Under this agreement, each state had to count three-fifths of its slaves into its total population. Before this agreement, slave-holding states called for an increase in their representation in Congress by counting all slaves as part of the community. On the other hand, opponents argued that since slaves were not citizens they thus had no rights. Counting them in the context of the population was not necessary.

The Results Of The Great Compromise

The most significant effect of the Great Compromise was the change in the American Government structure. The agreement focused on working out the interests of large states like Virginia and New York, and the smaller states such as New Hampshire and Rhodes Island, striking a balance between proportional and general representation. The most visible term achieved under the compromise was that each state would split congressional delegates between; representatives who would then be elected by district so as to serve in the lower house and senators to represent individual states in the Upper House. The practical effect was in the creation of a two-tiered system that could address the needs of the people in the lower house, and the upper house could handle the interests of states. The Electoral College and Presidential elections formation splinted from this split between direct and indirect representation.

The Great Compromise of 1787 gave larger states representation in the lower house according to population, and the smaller states attained equal representation in the upper house. Many delegates called for proportional representation in both houses while the smaller state delegates decided not having a constitution was better than having Madison's proposed system. As such the compromise balanced the needs of both the smaller states which wanted a unicameral legislature and the larger states that were rooting for a bicameral legislature, paving the way for constitutional development. Ultimately, the Connecticut Compromise kept the Convention together and led to the system of bicameral Congress in which the lower House is based on proportional representation, and each state has equal representation in the Upper House.

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The Great Compromise, also known as the Connecticut Compromise, the Great Compromise of 1787, or the Sherman Compromise, was an agreement made between large and small states which partly defined the representation each state would have under the United States Constitution, as well as in legislature. It occurred in 1787.

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The United States Constitution is the fundamental law of the United States of America. It was proposed on September 17, 1787, by the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was then ratified by conventions in each state. It went into effect in June 1788 when ratified by nine states. Since its passage, there have been 27 amendments; the first 10 are known as the Bill of Rights. The original document is on display at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C. The Constitution contains 4,543 words, including the signatures of 39 of the 55 delegates representing the states.

The preamble to the United States Constitution states:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Article I details the form and function of the United States Congress. It details that the United States Congress is to be a bicameral body composed of a Senate and a House of Representatives, whose members are to be elected by the people of each state. It also designates all legislative powers to be held by Congress. It is the longest article of the Constitution and has been amended the most.

Article II establishes the executive branch of government and sets the President of the United States at its head. It also describes the duties of the president and vice-president and names the president as Commander in Chief of the armed forces.

Article III details the judicial branch of government and designates the Supreme Court as the highest court in the land. It also describes the requirements to be convicted of treason and the potential punishment for it.

Article IV describes the states of the union and their interactions with the federal government and with one another.

Article V establishes amendment as a means of altering the Constitution. The amendment process requires 2/3 vote of both houses to call a convention for amendment proposal and further requires ratification by 3/4 of states for a proposed amendment to become law.

Article VI describes debts, contracts, and oaths. It declares the Constitution to be the supreme law of the land and requires that all legislative, executive, and judicial officers take an oath to support the Constitution. It also declares that no religious test shall ever be required to hold public office.

Article VII deals with the ratification of the Constitution. It contains the signatures of the representatives of each state at the convention.

Amendments

The bill of rights consists of the first ten amendments to the constitution. These amendments detail the rights of the individual.

Amendment I: Freedom of Speech

Amendment II: Right to Bear Arms

Amendment III: Quartering of Soliders

Amendment IV: Search and Seizure

Amendment V: Trial and Punishment

Amendment VI: Right to a Speedy Trial and Confrontation of Witnesses

Amendment VII: Trial by Jury in Civil Cases

Amendment VIII: Cruel and Unusual Punishment

Amendment IX: Construction of the Constitution

Amendment X: Powers of the States and People

Subsequent amendments

Amendment XI: The 11th Amendment establishes limits on the power of the Judiciary.

Amendment XII: The 12th Amendment describes the process for choosing the President and Vice-President.

Amendment XIII: The 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the United States.

Amendment XIV: The 14th Amendment details the rights of the citizen.

Amendment XV: The 15th Amendment forbids using race as a means to deny a citizen to vote.

Amendment XVI: The 16th Amendment gives Congress the right to establish an income tax.

Amendment XVII: The 17th Amendment declares that senators shall be elected by a popular vote.

Amendment XVIII: The 18th Amendment prohibited the manufacture, sale, or transport of liquor.

Amendment XIX: The 19th Amendment extended the right of voting to women.

Amendment XX: The 20th Amendment describes presidential and congressional terms.

Amendment XXI: The 21st Amendment repealed the 18th amendment, effectively ending prohibition.

Amendment XXII: The 22nd Amendment enacted a two-term limit on the President.

Amendment XXIII: The 23rd Amendment describes the presidential vote for the District of Columbia.

Amendment XXIV: The 24th Amendment bars the use of a poll tax.

Amendment XXV: The 25th Amendment sets up the presidential line of succession.

Amendment XXVI: The 26th Amendment sets the voting age to be 18 years.

Amendment XXVII: The 27th Amendment delays the effect of changes to congressional pay.

External links

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United States Constitution - Ballotpedia

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The United States Constitution is the fundamental law of the United States of America. It was proposed on September 17, 1787, by the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was then ratified by conventions in each state. It went into effect in June 1788 when ratified by nine states.

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A 3-minute guide to the Bill of Rights - Belinda Stutzman

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Political Parties: Crash Course Government and Politics #40

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The Lewis and Clark expedition (1804-1806) was the first United States overland expedition to the Pacific coast and back.

The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 sparked interest in expansion to the west coast. A few weeks after the purchase, United States President Thomas Jefferson, an advocate of western expansion, had U.S. Congress appropriate $2,500 to send a small U.S. Army unit to explore the west all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Along their way, they were instructed to study and make detailed reports on the Indian tribes, geography, climate, plants and animals, as well as evaluate the potential interference of British and French-Canadian hunters and trappers who were already well established in the area. In addition, one of Jefferson's main objectives was for the unit to find a waterway that would connect the east to the west.

Jefferson selected 28-year-old Army captain, Meriwether Lewis to lead the expedition, afterwards known as the Corps of Discovery. Lewis, in turn, selected a former Army comrade, 32-year-old William Clark, to be co-leader of the Expedition. Due to bureaucratic delays in the US Army, Clark officially only held the rank of Second Lieutenant at the time, but Lewis concealed this from the men and shared the leadership of the expedition, always referring to Clark as "Captain."

Lewis and Clark reached their staging point at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers near St. Louis, Missouri in December 1803. There they camped for the winter at the mouth of Wood River, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River. Over the winter, the two captains recruited young woodsmen, boatmen, and enlisted soldiers who volunteered from nearby army outposts.

By spring, the group, comprised of approximately 40 men, began their historic journey on May 14, 1804. Through the long, hot summer, they laboriously worked their way westward on the Missouri River, soon passing Le Rochette, the last white settlement on the Missouri River. From there they continued through what is now Kansas City, Missouri, then along the present-day borders of Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa. Along the way, the group experienced problems within its ranks, including disciplinary floggings, two desertions, and a man dishonorably discharged for mutiny. On August 20, 1804 the Corps of Discovery suffered its first and only death when Sergeant Charles Floyd died from what was thought to be an attack of acute appendicitis.

While in what is now South Dakota, a band of Teton Sioux tried to detain their boats, but when the explorers showed their superior weapons, they were allowed to sail on.

They spent their first winter near present-day Washburn, North Dakota among the Mandan Indians. On the north bank of the Missouri River, they constructed a log fort which they called Fort Mandan, in honor of the local Indians. By this time the expedition had traveled approximately 1,500 miles. The explorers spent the winter hunting, gaining information about the route ahead, and making tools that they would later trade for supplies. While there, they met a French-Canadian trader named Touissant Charbonneau and his young pregnant Shoshone wife, Sacagawea.

Sacagawea's tribal homeland lay in the Rocky Mountain country far to the west and she spoke both the Shoshone and Minitari dialects. Lewis and Clark decided to hire Charbonneau and Sacagawea to accompany them, acting as guides and interpreters. Sacagawea's son was born at Fort Mandan in February and when the expedition set out again in April, the young family joined the expedition.

Along the way, Sacagawea proved even more helpful than they had originally thought, as she also acted as a peacemaker and negotiated for horses and supplies along the way.

The expedition continued up the Missouri River and into Montana Territory, but as they neared the Rocky Mountains the flow of the Missouri River began to lessen. As the expedition approached the river's headwaters deep in the mountains they were forced to start traveling by land. Although, they had believed that the Missouri would connect to another great river leading to the Pacific, the expedition found that such an easy connection did not exist.

The expedition continued by land, traveling across much of present-day Northern Idaho until reaching the Clearwater and Snake Rivers, where they again could journey by boat. The expedition moved more quickly by water, finally reaching Columbia River in mid-October. Continuing on, they passed Celilo Falls and through what is now Portland, Oregon.

In November, 1805, some 18 months after leaving St. Louis, Lewis spotted Mt. Hood, a mountain known to be very close to the ocean. However, winter was upon them so they soon set up a permanent winter dwelling south of the Columbia River, near present-day Astoria, Oregon, which they called Fort Clatsop. The expedition spent the self-described long, wet winter preparing for the trip home by boiling salt from the ocean and hunting elk and other wildlife.

The explorers started their journey home on March 23, 1806 and on their return Lewis and Clark split up. Clark led one group up the Yellowstone River, while Lewis led another group into what are now North Central Montana and the Province of Alberta. In August they met on the Missouri River and arrived back in St. Louis on September 23, 1806.

Throughout the journey, Lewis and Clark constantly collected samples of plants, animals, and birds, while also documenting encounters with the many Indians they met along the way. Their detailed observations on their 8,000 mile round trip journey of climate, landscape, plant communities, and human and animal populations were valuable to an expanding nation.

Although the expedition failed to find the Northwest Passage, it greatly increased knowledge of the nation's newly acquired territory and opened the doors to westward settlement.

After the expedition concluded, Lewis was made governor of the Louisiana Territory in 1807. His career started well, but two years later a controversy involving government finances arose and Lewis made plans to travel to Washington D.C. to resolve the dispute. Traveling through Tennessee, Governor Meriwether Lewis on October 11, 1809 died mysteriously from gunshot wounds inflicted while at Grinder's Stand, a public roadhouse. It is not known whether he was murdered or committed suicide. His grave lies where he died, within today's Natchez Trace National Parkway near Hohenwald, Tennessee.

Meanwhile, Clark was made a brigadier general of the territory in March, 1807. In 1813 he was appointed Governor of Missouri Territory, a position he held until Missouri Statehood in 1820. In 1822 he was appointed Superintendent of Indian Affairs by President Monroe. He was reappointed to this post by each succeeding president and served in this capacity for the remainder of his life. General William Clark died of natural causes in St. Louis, September 1, 1838 and is buried in the Clark Family plot at Bellefontaine Cemetery, St. Louis.

Today the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail can still be followed along the Missouri and Columbia Rivers. Though much has changed over the past centuries, many of the trail portions remain intact. At 3700 miles, the Lewis & Clark National Historic Trail is the second longest of the 23 National Scenic and National Historic Trails. It begins at Hartford, Illinois and passes through portions of Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Oregon and Washington.

Many people follow the trail by auto while the more adventurous can still find many sections that encourage boating, biking, or hiking.

© Kathy Weiser/ Legends of America, updated, May, 2017.
Also See: Lewis & Clark Scenic Byway Sacagawea - Leading Lewis & Clark Lewis & Clarks' Fort Mandan William Clark - Co-Leader of the Corps of Discovery Expedition The Louisiana Purchase The Mighty Missouri River The Mysterious Death of Meriwether Lewis Old West Explorers, Trappers, Traders & Mountain Men

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Corps of Discovery - The Lewis & Clark Expedition

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The Lewis and Clark expedition (1804-1806) was the first United States overland expedition to the Pacific coast and back. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 sparked interest in expansion to the west coast. A few weeks after the purchase, United States President Thomas Jefferson, an advocate of western expansion, had U.S.

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In the War of 1812, caused by British restrictions on U.S. trade and America's desire to expand its territory, the United States took on the greatest naval power in the world, Great Britain.

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Why was the Monroe Doctrine important?

What were the basic tenets of the Monroe Doctrine?

What motives were behind the Monroe Doctrine?

Who worked on the Monroe Doctrine?

How did the Monroe Doctrine change over time?

Monroe Doctrine, (December 2, 1823), cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy enunciated by Pres. James Monroe in his annual message to Congress. Declaring that the Old World and New World had different systems and must remain distinct spheres, Monroe made four basic points: (1) the United States would not interfere in the internal affairs of or the wars between European powers; (2) the United States recognized and would not interfere with existing colonies and dependencies in the Western Hemisphere; (3) the Western Hemisphere was closed to future colonization; and (4) any attempt by a European power to oppress or control any nation in the Western Hemisphere would be viewed as a hostile act against the United States:

In the wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy so to do. It is only when our rights are invaded or seriously menaced that we resent injuries or make preparation for our defense....

With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the governments who have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.

The origin and framing of the Monroe Doctrine

The doctrine was an outgrowth of concern in both Britain and the United States that the Continental powers would attempt to restore Spain's former colonies, in Latin America, many of which had become newly independent nations. The United States was also concerned about Russia's territorial ambitions in the northwest coast of North America. As a consequence, George Canning, the British foreign minister, suggested a joint U.S.-British declaration forbidding future colonization in Latin America. Monroe was initially favourable to the idea, and former presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison concurred. But Secretary of State John Quincy Adams argued that the United States should issue a statement of American policy exclusively, and his view ultimately prevailed.

American History and Politics Quiz

The first draft of the message included a reproof of the French for their invasion of Spain, an acknowledgment of Greek independence in the revolt against Turkey, and some further indications of American concern in European affairs. Adams argued for the better part of two days against such expressions, which were finally eliminated from the message.

Adams noted in his diary,

The ground that I wish to take is that of earnest remonstrance against the interference of the European powers by force in South America, but to disclaim all interference on our part with Europe; to make an American cause, and adhere inflexibly to that.

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Monroe Doctrine | History, Summary, & Significance

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Monroe Doctrine, U.S. foreign policy enunciated by President James Monroe in 1823 that the U.S. would not interfere in European affairs and wars or with existing colonies in the Western Hemisphere. European intervention in the hemisphere (closed to future colonization) would be seen as a hostile act against the U.S.

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Jacksonian Democracy - background and introduction

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Modern American political culture began to emerge in the early nineteenth century. In this video, Kim discusses the transition from the United States' earlier aristocratic political culture to a more democratic one as the right to vote was extended to a broader segment of American citizens.

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The Indian Removal Act Explained in 5 Minutes: US History Review

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Quickly following Texan independence, the United States admitted Texas into the republic as a slave state.

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What was Manifest Destiny?

Manifest Destiny, in U.S. history, the supposed inevitability of the continued territorial expansion of the boundaries of the United States westward to the Pacific and beyond. Before the American Civil War (1861-65), the idea of Manifest Destiny was used to validate continental acquisitions in the Oregon Country, Texas, New Mexico, and California. The purchase of Alaska after the Civil War briefly revived the concept of Manifest Destiny, but it most evidently became a renewed force in U.S. foreign policy in the 1890s, when the country went to war with Spain, annexed Hawaii, and laid plans for an isthmian canal across Central America.

Origin of the term

John L. O'Sullivan, the editor of a magazine that served as an organ for the Democratic Party and of a partisan newspaper, first wrote of "manifest destiny" in 1845, but at the time he did not think the words profound. Rather than being "coined," the phrase was buried halfway through the third paragraph of a long essay in the July-August issue of The United States Magazine, and Democratic Review on the necessity of annexing Texas and the inevitability of American expansion. O'Sullivan was protesting European meddling in American affairs, especially by France and England, which he said were acting

for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.

O'Sullivan's observation was a complaint rather than a call for aggression, and he referred to demography rather than pugnacity as the solution to the perceived problem of European interference. Yet when he expanded his idea on December 27, 1845, in a newspaper column in the New York Morning News, the wider audience seized upon his reference to divine superintendence. Discussing the dispute with Great Britain over the Oregon Country, O'Sullivan again cited the claim to

the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.

Some found the opinion intriguing, but others were simply irritated. The Whig Party sought to discredit Manifest Destiny as belligerent as well as pompous, beginning with Massachusetts Rep. Robert Winthrop's using the term to mock Pres. James K. Polk 's policy toward Oregon.

Yet unabashed Democrats took up Manifest Destiny as a slogan. The phrase frequently appeared in debates relating to Oregon, sometimes as soaring rhetoric and other times as sarcastic derision. As an example of the latter, on February 6, 1846, the New-Hampshire Statesman and State Journal, a Whig newspaper, described "some windy orator in the House [of Representatives]" as "pouring for his 'manifest destiny' harangue."

Over the years, O'Sullivan's role in creating the phrase was forgotten, and he died in obscurity some 50 years after having first used the term "manifest destiny." In an essay in The American Historical Review in 1927, historian Julius W. Pratt identified O'Sullivan as the phrase's originator, a conclusion that became universally accepted.

A history of expansion

Despite disagreements about Manifest Destiny's validity at the time, O'Sullivan had stumbled on a broadly held national sentiment. Although it became a rallying cry as well as a rationale for the foreign policy that reached its culmination in 1845-46, the attitude behind Manifest Destiny had long been a part of the American experience. The impatient English who colonized North America in the 1600s and 1700s immediately gazed westward and instantly considered ways to venture into the wilderness and tame it. The cause of that ceaseless wanderlust varied from region to region, but the behaviour became a tradition within one generation. The western horizon would always beckon, and Americans would always follow. After the American Revolution (1775-83), the steady advance of the cotton kingdom in the South matched the lure of the Ohio Country in the North. In 1803, Pres. Thomas Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the country with the stroke of a pen. Expansionists eager to acquire Spanish Florida were part of the drive for the War of 1812, and many historians argue that American desires to annex Canada were also an important part of the equation. Andrew Jackson's invasion of Florida in 1818 and the subsequent Transcontinental Treaty (Adams-Onís Treaty) settled a southern border question that had been vexing the region for a generation and established an American claim to the Pacific Northwest as Spain renounced its claim to the Oregon Country. The most consequential territorial expansion in the country's history occurred during the 1820s. Spreading American settlements often caused additional unrest on the country's western borders. As the United States pacified and stabilized volatile regions, the resulting appropriation of territory usually worsened relations with neighbours, setting off a cycle of instability that encouraged additional annexations.

Caught in the upheaval coincidental to that expansion, Southeast Indians succumbed to the pressure of spreading settlement by ceding their lands to the United States and then relocating west of the Mississippi River under Pres. Andrew Jackson's removal policy of the 1830s. The considerable hardships suffered by the Indians in that episode were exemplified by the devastation of the Cherokees on the infamous Trail of Tears, which excited humanitarian protests from both the political class and the citizenry.

Finally, in the 1840s, diplomacy resolved the dispute over the Oregon Country with Britain, and victory in the Mexican-American War (1846-48) closed out a period of dramatically swift growth for the United States. Less than a century after breaking from the British Empire, the United States had gone far in creating its own empire by extending sovereignty across the continent to the Pacific, to the 49th parallel on the Canadian border, and to the Rio Grande in the south. Having transformed a group of sparsely settled colonies into a continental power of enormous potential, many Americans thought the achievement so stunning as to be obvious. It was for them proof that God had chosen the United States to grow and flourish.

Yet in a story as old as ancient Rome's transformation from republic to empire, not all Americans, like the doubters of Rome, found it encouraging. Those dissenters saw rapid expansion as contrary to the principles of a true republic and predicted that the cost of empire would be high and its consequences perilous.

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Manifest Destiny | Summary, Examples, Westward Expansion, & Significance

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Manifest Destiny, the supposed inevitability of the continued territorial expansion of the boundaries of the United States westward to the Pacific and beyond. Before the American Civil War, Manifest Destiny was used to validate continental acquisitions in the Oregon Country, Texas, New Mexico, and California.

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Spanish:

Guerra de 1847 or Guerra de Estados Unidos a Mexico ("War of the United States Against Mexico")

What was the Mexican-American War?

What did the Mexican-American War have to do with Manifest Destiny?

Was there opposition to the Mexican-American War within the United States?

What did the U.S. gain by winning the Mexican-American War?

How did the Mexican-American War increase sectionalism in the United States?

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Trusted Britannica articles, summarized using artificial intelligence, to provide a quicker and simpler reading experience. This is a beta feature. Please verify important information in our full article.

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Mexican-American War, war between the United States and Mexico (April 1846-February 1848) stemming from the United States' annexation of Texas in 1845 and from a dispute over whether Texas ended at the Nueces River (Mexican claim) or the Rio Grande (U.S. claim). The war-in which U.S. forces were consistently victorious-resulted in the United States' acquisition of more than 500,000 square miles (1,300,000 square km) of Mexican territory extending westward from the Rio Grande to the Pacific Ocean.

"American blood on American soil": Polk and the prelude to war

Mexico severed relations with the United States in March 1845, shortly after the U.S. annexation of Texas. In September U.S. Pres. James K. Polk sent John Slidell on a secret mission to Mexico City to negotiate the disputed Texas border, settle U.S. claims against Mexico, and purchase New Mexico and California for up to $30 million. Mexican Pres. José Joaquín Herrera, aware in advance of Slidell's intention of dismembering the country, refused to receive him. When Polk learned of the snub, he ordered troops under Gen. Zachary Taylor to occupy the disputed area between the Nueces and the Rio Grande (January 1846).

On May 9, 1846, Polk began to prepare a war message to Congress, justifying hostilities on the grounds of Mexican refusal to pay U.S. claims and refusal to negotiate with Slidell. That evening he received word that Mexican troops had crossed the Rio Grande on April 25 and attacked Taylor 's troops, killing or injuring 16 of them. In his quickly revised war message-delivered to Congress on May 11-Polk claimed that Mexico had "invaded our territory and shed American blood on American soil."

Spot Resolutions and Civil Disobedience: American opposition to the war

Congress overwhelmingly approved a declaration of war on May 13, but the United States entered the war divided. Democrats, especially those in the Southwest, strongly favoured the conflict. Most Whigs viewed Polk's motives as conscienceless land grabbing. Indeed, from the outset, Whigs in both the Senate and the House challenged the veracity of Polk's assertion that the initial conflict between U.S. and Mexican forces had taken place in U.S. territory. Further, legislators were at odds over whether Polk had the right to unilaterally declare that a state of war existed. Principally at issue was where the encounter had actually taken place and the willingness of Americans to acknowledge the Mexican contention that the Nueces River formed the border between the two countries. Active Whig opposition not only to the legitimacy of Polk's claim but also to the war itself continued well into the conflict. In December 1846 Polk accused his Whig doubters of treason. In January 1847 the by-then Whig-controlled House voted 85 to 81 to censure Polk for having "unnecessarily and unconstitutionally" initiated war with Mexico.

Among the most-aggressive challenges to the legitimacy of Polk's casus belli was that offered by future president Abraham Lincoln, then a first-term member of the House of Representatives from Illinois. In December 1847 Lincoln introduced eight " Spot Resolutions," which placed the analysis of Polk's claim in a carefully delineated historical context that sought to

obtain a full knowledge of all the facts which go to establish whether the particular spot of soil on which the blood of our citizens was so shed was, or was not, our own soil at that time.

Ultimately, the House did not act on Lincoln's resolutions, and Polk remained steadfast in his claim that the conflict was a just war.

Abolitionists saw the war as an attempt by the slave states to extend slavery and enhance their power with the creation of additional slave states out of the soon-to-be-acquired Mexican lands. One abolitionist who agreed with that interpretation was author Henry David Thoreau, who was incarcerated in July 1846 when he refused to pay six years' worth of back poll taxes because he felt the U.S. government's prosecution of the war with Mexico was immoral. Although he spent only a single night in jail (his aunt, against his wishes, paid the taxes, thus securing his release), Thoreau documented his opposition to the government's actions in his famous book-length essay Civil Disobedience (1849), insisting that if an injustice of government is

of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.

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Mexican-American War | Significance, Battles, Results, Timeline, & Facts

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Mexican-American War, war between the U.S. and Mexico from 1846 to 1848. It was caused by a territorial dispute stemming from the United States' annexation of Texas in 1845 and from contention over whether Texas ended at the Nueces River or the Rio Grande.

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Kids learn about the Industrial Revolution including where it began, how long it lasted, the First and Second Industrial Revolution, cultural changes, transportation, working conditions, and interesting facts. Educational article for students, schools, and teachers.

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Table of Contents

1. Preindustrial Gunmaking

2. Eli Whitney's Impressive Display

3. The Impact of Interchangeable Parts

During the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, machines took over most of the manufacturing work from men, and factories replaced craftsmen's workshops. The event that laid the groundwork for this monumental change was the introduction of interchangeable parts, or pre-manufactured parts that were for all practical purposes identical, into the firearms industry. Interchangeable parts, popularized in America when Eli Whitney used them to assemble muskets in the first years of the 19th century, allowed relatively unskilled workers to produce large numbers of weapons quickly and at lower cost, and made repair and replacement of parts infinitely easier.

Preindustrial Gunmaking

Gunmaking was considered an extremely skilled craft in the 18th century, and firearms, including pistols and muskets, were all constructed by hand. In this way, every gun was a one-of-a-kind possession, and a gun broken could not be easily repaired. At the very least, the process was time consuming and expensive, as the gun had to be brought to a craftsman and repaired to order.

Did you know? Eli Whitney first made his name at the tender age of 27 with his invention of the cotton gin, patented in 1794. This revolutionary device was easily copied, however, and several patent infringement lawsuits gained little to no financial reward for Whitney and his partners.

In the mid-18th century, the French gunsmith Honoré LeBlanc suggested the gun parts be made from standardized patterns, so that all gun parts would follow the same design and could be easily replaced if broken. LeBlanc was not alone in imagining the potential value of this concept; an English naval engineer Samuel Bentham had earlier pioneered the use of uniform parts in the production of wooden pulleys for sailing ships. LeBlanc's idea didn't catch on in the French gun market, however, as competing gunsmiths saw clearly the effect that it would have on their craft. In 1789, Thomas Jefferson, then serving as American minister to France, visited LeBlanc's workshop and was impressed by his methods. Despite LeBlanc's efforts, however, it would be left to another man to fully introduce interchangeable parts into the American-and later the international-weapons industry.

Eli Whitney's Impressive Display

In 1797, when Congress voted to prepare the nation for war with France, including the appropriation of a large amount of funds for new weapons, the young inventor Eli Whitney-already known for his invention of the cotton gin in 1794-seized an opportunity to try to make his fortune. In mid-1798, he obtained a government contract to manufacture 10,000 muskets within an extraordinarily short time frame of less than two years.

By January 1801, Whitney had failed to produce a single one of the promised weapons, and was called to Washington to justify his use of Treasury funds before a group that included outgoing president John Adams and Jefferson, now the president-elect. As the story goes, Whitney put on a display for the group, assembling muskets before their eyes by choosing (seemingly at random) from a supply of parts he brought with him. The performance earned Whitney widespread renown and renewed federal support. It was later proven, however, that Whitney's demonstration was a fake, and that he had marked the parts beforehand and they were not exactly interchangeable. Still, Whitney received credit for what Jefferson claimed was the dawn of the machine age.

The Impact of Interchangeable Parts

Whitney proved to be an effective businessman and manager, dividing labor efficiently among his largely unskilled work force and building precision equipment that enabled the production of large numbers of identical parts quickly and at a relatively low cost. The last of the 10,000 muskets that Whitney had promised in his original contract came in eight years late, but were judged to be of superior quality, and he produced 15,000 more within the next four years.

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Preindustrial Gunmaking Eli Whitney's Impressive Display The Impact of Interchangeable Parts During the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, machines took over most of the manufacturing work from men, and factories replaced craftsmen's workshops. The event that laid the groundwork for this monumental change was the introduction of interchangeable parts, or pre-manufactured parts that were for all practical purposes identical, into the firearms industry.

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Changing Times - Railroads & Canals I THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

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America's Journey Through Slavery: The Life Of An Enslaved Person (#GH4974) Trailer

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Immigration to the United States in the 1800's

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Immigration to the United States in the 1800's

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People of European or Asian decent immigrat

ed to the United States in the mid-1800's. Gjert Hovland, from Norway, was one of these people. He emigrated from Norway and came here, to the U.S. with his family in search of a better life. As he said himself in a letter he wrote to a friend in Norway, there was room and jobs for immigrants in America. Therefore people that could not support their family would come here for economic reasons.

Coming to the United States was a difficult task. Usually only men would come. People would come in steerage because of lack of money. The conditions they faced there were devastating. People were crammed up together in dirty, small decks. Coming to America was a dangerous journey where many got sick, and some even died. But still, people from Britain, Ireland, Gernamy, Sweden, Denmark, and China, came to America.

Push-Pull factors

Push-Pull factors are said to be the cause of Immigrants in the U.S.. Push factors are circumstances that generally push people out of their native country. "Push factors" in Europe are:

"Pull factors" are reasons or actions that that attracted emigrants to the United States. Some pull factors are stated below.

Scandinavians, or people from Sweeden, came to the United States for economic opportunity. Land here was sold for $1.25 an acre which enticed people to come to the U.S.. Sweedish laws prevented scandavians from emigrating and preachers adviced church members to stay in Sweeden. Soon, they realized that people were going to leave anyways. Scandaviand who came to the U.S. tried to find places that felt comfortable to them, so most settled in WIsconsin and Minnisota and became farmers.

Germans who immigrated to the United Sates would settle in Wisconsin or Texas. They chose Wisconsin because the climate would allow them to grow oats. They were looking to settle in places where they were the most comfortable in, and Wisconsin had a German Catholic bishop. They also settled in Texas because it had German culture within it. Many Germans became successful as they opened various types of bussineses. They also had a lot of influence in America. The Christmas tree, hamburgers and hotdogs, gyms, and kindergartens came from Germany.

Most immigrants from Ireland were Catholic and were denyed some rights, so they decided to come to the United States. In 1845, Ireland's main food crop, the potato stoped growing causing a famine. This food shortage to emigrate from Ireland.orced about two milion to emigrate from Ireland. When they came to America, Irish men and w omen had no savings with little education. Men worked building railroads in very dangerous conditions where many died. Women became servants. They often had fight for their jobs because they were competing with free slaves. The Irish lived in cities where ships had docked filling up one quarter of the population in New York, Baltimore, Philidelphia, Boston, and Baltimore.

Overcrowding in the U.S.

Population in many cities kept growing abruptly because of new immigrants. In the early 1800's, New York's population went from 60,489 to 202,589. St.Louis' population doubled every nine years and Cincinnati doubled every seven years. Abrupt population growth brought issues for the residents. Houses were compacted together and toilets overflowed, spreading diseases. Crime was also a huge problem. To help new immigrants, societies were set up to aid them and politicians set up organizations to help.

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Early Immigration in the U.S - The North:1800s to 1850s

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People of European or Asian decent immigrat ed to the United States in the mid-1800's. Gjert Hovland, from Norway, was one of these people. He emigrated from Norway and came here, to the U.S. with his family in search of a better life.

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The Second Great Awakening - origins and major ideas (video) | Khan Academy

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Learn for free about math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, finance, history, and more. Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

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Facts, information and articles about Abolitionist Movement, one of the causes of the civil war

Abolitionist Movement summary: The Abolitionist movement in the United States of America was an effort to end slavery in a nation that valued personal freedom and believed "all men are created equal." Over time, abolitionists grew more strident in their demands, and slave owners entrenched in response, fueling regional divisiveness that ultimately led to the American Civil War.

Slavery Comes To The New World

African slavery began in North America in 1619 at Jamestown, Virginia. The first American-built slave ship, Desire, launched from Massachusetts in 1636, beginning the slave trade between Britain's American colonies and Africa. From the beginning, some white colonists were uncomfortable with the notion of slavery. At the time of the American Revolution against the English Crown, Delaware (1776) and Virginia (1778) prohibited importation of African slaves; Vermont became the first of the 13 colonies to abolish slavery (1777); Rhode Island prohibited taking slaves from the colony (1778); and Pennsylvania began gradual emancipation in 1780.

The Maryland Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Free Negroes and Others Unlawfully Held in Bondage was founded in 1789, the same year the former colonies replaced their Articles of Confederation with the new Constitution, "in order to form a more perfect union."

When the U.S. Constitution was written, it made no specific mention of slavery, but it provided for the return of fugitives (which encompassed criminals, indentured servants and slaves). It allowed each slave within a state to be counted as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of determining population and representation in the House of Representatives (Article I, Section 3, says representation and direct taxation will be determined based on the 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.")

The Constitution prohibited importation of slaves, to begin in 1808, but again managed to do so without using the words "slave" or "slavery." Slave trading became a capital offense in 1819. There existed a general feeling that slavery would gradually pass away. Improvements in technology-the cotton gin and sewing machine-increased the demand for slave labor, however, in order to produce more cotton in Southern states. By the 1830s, many Southerners had shifted from, "Slavery is a necessary evil," to "Slavery is a positive good." The institution existed because it was "God's will," a Christian duty to lift the African out of barbarism while still exerting control over his "animal passions."

Learn More About Slavery In America

The Missouri Compromise And Dred Scott

Missouri's appeal for statehood brought a confrontation between free and slave states in Congress in 1820; each feared the other would gain the upper hand. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 set a policy of admitting states in pairs, one slave, one free. (Maine came in at the same time as Missouri.) The compromise prohibited slavery above parallel 36 degrees, 30 minutes in the lands of the Louisiana Purchase, and it included a national Fugitive Slave Law requiring all Americans to return runaway slaves to their owners. The Fugitive Slave Law was upheld in Prigg v. Pennsylvania, 1842, but the Missouri Compromise's prohibitions on the spread of slavery would be found unconstitutional in the 1857 Dred Scott decision.

Learn more about Dred Scott

The Abolitionism Movement Spreads

Although many New Englanders had grown wealthy in the slave trade before the importation of slaves was outlawed, that area of the country became the hotbed of abolitionist sentiment. Abolitionist newspapers and pamphlets sprang into existence. These were numerous enough by 1820 that South Carolina instituted penalties for anyone bringing written anti-slavery material into the state.

These publications argued against slavery as a social and moral evil and often used examples of African American writings and other achievements to demonstrate that Africans and their descendents were as capable of learning as were Europeans and their descendents in America, given the freedom to do so. To prove their case that one person owning another one was morally wrong, they first had to convince many, in all sections of the country, that Negroes, the term used for the race at the time, were human. Yet, even many people among the abolitionists did not believe the two races were equal.

In 1829, David Walker, a freeman of color originally from the South, published An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World in Boston, Massachusetts. It was a new benchmark, pushing abolitionists toward extreme militancy. He called for slaves to rise up against their masters and to defend themselves: "It is no more harm for you to kill a man who is trying to kill you, than it is for you to take a drink of water when thirsty." As early as 1800, a Virginia slave known as Gabriel Prosser had attempted an uprising there, but it failed when two slaves betrayed the plan to their masters.

Walker's publication was too extreme even for most abolition leaders, including one of the most renowned, William Lloyd Garrison. In 1831, Garrison founded The Liberator, which would become the most famous and influential of abolitionist newspapers. That same year, Virginia debated emancipation, marking the last movement for abolition in the South prior to the Civil War. Instead, that year the Southampton Slave Riot, also called Nat Turner's Rebellion, resulted in Virginia passing new regulations against slaves. Fears of slave revolts like the bloody Haitian Revolution of 1791-1803 were never far from Southerners' minds. Publications like An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World led white Southerners to conclude Northern abolitionists intended to commit genocide against them.

In 1833 in Philadelphia, the first American Anti-Slavery Society Convention convened. In a backlash, anti-abolition riots broke out in many northeastern cities, including New York and Philadelphia, during 1834-35. Several Southern states, beginning with the Carolinas, made formal requests to other states to suppress abolition groups and their literature. In Illinois, the legislature voted to condemn abolition societies and their agitation; Delegate Abraham Lincoln voted with the majority, then immediately co-sponsored a bill to mitigate some of the language of the earlier one. The U.S. House of Representatives adopted a gag rule, automatically tabling abolitionist proposals.

The first national Anti-Slavery Convention was held in New York City in 1837, and the following year the second Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women met in Philadelphia; the latter resulted in pro-slavery riots. The Liberty Party, a political action group, held its first national convention, at Albany, N.Y., in 1839. That same year, Africans mutinied aboard the Spanish slave ship Amistad and asked New York courts to grant them freedom. Their plea was answered affirmatively by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1841.

Frederick Douglass: A Black Abolitionist

Frederick Douglass-a former slave who had been known as Frederick Bailey while in slavery and who was the most famous black man among the abolitionists-broke with William Lloyd Garrison's newspaper, The Liberator, after returning from a visit to Great Britain, and founded a black abolitionist paper, The North Star. The title was a reference to the directions given to runaway slaves trying to reach the Northern states and Canada: Follow the North Star. Garrison had earlier convinced the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society to hire Douglass as an agent, touring with Garrison and telling audiences about his experiences in slavery. In England, however, Douglass had experienced a level of independence he'd never known in America and likely wanted greater independece for his actions here.

Working with Douglass on The North Star was another black man, Martin R. Delaney, who gave up publishing his own paper, The Mystery, to join with Douglass. Born to a free mother in Virginia (in what is now the eastern panhandle of West Virginia), Delaney had never been a slave, but he had traveled extensively in the South. After Uncle Tom's Cabin became a bestseller, he attempted to achieve similar success for himself by penning a semi-fictional account of his travels, Blake: The Huts of America. In 1850, he was one of three black men accepted into Harvard Medical School, but white students successfully petitioned to have them removed. No longer believing that merit and reason could allow members of his race to have an equal opportunity in white society, he became an ardent black nationalist. In 1859, he traveled to Africa and negotiated with eight tribal chiefs in Abbeokuta for land, on which he planned to establish a colony for skilled and educated African Americans. The agreement fell apart, and he returned to America where, near the end of the Civil War, he became the first black officer on a general's staff in the history of the U.S. Army.

The Seneca Falls Convention

In 1848, the first Women's Rights convention was held, in Seneca Falls, N.Y. Outside of the Society of Friends ("Quakers"), women were often denied the opportunity to speak at abolitionist meetings. The women's rights movement produced many outspoken opponents of slavery, including Elizabeth Cody Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. In fact, women's equality and abolition became inextricably linked in the minds of many Southerners. In the 20th century, that lingering animosity nearly defeated the constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote.

Although Delaney's planned African colony failed, in 1849 Great Britain recognized the African colony of Liberia as a sovereign state. It had been founded in 1822 as a colony for free-born blacks, freed slaves and mulattoes (mixed race) from the United States. A number of Americans who opposed slavery (including Abraham Lincoln for a time and the aforementioned Delany) felt that the two races could never live successfully together, and the best hope for Negroes was to return them to freedom in Africa. However, the slave trade between Africa and the Western Hemisphere (the Caribbean and South America) had never ended, and many American ship owners and captains were enjoying something of a golden era of slave-trading while the U.S. and Europe looked the other way. Even if freed slaves had been sent to Africa, many would have wound up back in slavery south of the United States. Only in the late 1850s did Britain step up its anti-slavery enforcement on the high seas, leading America to increase its efforts somewhat.

When the federal government passed a second, even more stringent fugitive slave act in 1850, several states responded by passing personal liberty laws. The following year, Sojourner Truth (Isabella Baumfree) gave a now-famous speech, "Ain't I a Woman," at the Women's Rights convention in Akron, Ohio. Born a slave in New York, she walked away from her owner after she felt she had contributed enough to him. In the late 1840s, she dictated a memoir, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave, published by Garrison in 1850. She began to tour, speaking against slavery and in favor of women's rights.

Learn more about the Seneca Falls Convention

Harriet Tubman and The Underground Railroad

While Sojourner Truth, Douglass, Delaney and others wrote and spoke to end slavery, a former slave named Harriet Tubman, nee Harriet Ross, was actively leading slaves to freedom. After escaping from bondage herself, she made repeated trips into Dixie to help others. Believed to have helped some 300 slaves to escape, she was noted for warning those she was assisting that she would shoot any of them who turned back, because they would endanger herself and others she was assisting.

Tubman was an agent of the Underground Railroad, a system of "safe houses" and way stations that secretly helped runaways. The trip might begin by hiding in the home, barn or other location owned by a Southerner opposed to slavery, and continuing from place to place until reaching safe haven in a free state or Canada. Those who reached Canada did not have to fear being returned under the Fugitive Slave Act. Several communities and individuals claim to have created the term "Underground Railroad." In the southern section of states on the north bank of the Ohio River, a "reverse underground railroad" operated; blacks in those states were kidnapped, whether they had ever been slaves or not, and taken South to sell through a series of clandestine locations.

Learn more about Harriet Tubman
Learn more about the Underground Railroad

Harriet Beecher Stowe: Abolitionist and Author

In 1852, what may have been the seminal event of the abolition movement occurred. Harriet Beecher Stowe, an abolitionist who had come to know a number of escaped slaves while she was living in Cincinnati, authored the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. It presented a scathing view of Southern slavery, filled with melodramatic scenes such as that of the slave Eliza escaping with her baby across the icy Ohio River:

The huge green fragment of ice on which she alighted pitched and creaked as her weight came on it but she stayed there not a moment. With wild cries and desperate energy she leaped to another and still another cake;-stumbling,-leaping,-slipping-springing upwards again! Her shoes are-gone her stockings cut from her feet-while blood marked every step; but she saw nothing, felt nothing, till dimly, as in a dream, she saw the Ohio side and a man helping her up the bank.

Critics pointed out that Stowe had never been to the South, but her novel became a bestseller in the North (banned in the South) and the most effective bit of propaganda to come out of the abolitionist movement. It galvanized many who had been sitting on the sidelines. Reportedly, when President Abraham Lincoln met Stowe during the Civil War he said to her, "So you're the little woman who started this big war."
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Abolitionists Invoke A Higher Law

Abolitionists became increasingly strident in their condemnations of slave owners and "the peculiar institution of slavery." Often, at Fourth of July gatherings of abolition societies, they reportedly used the occasion to denounce the U.S. Constitution as a "covenant with death, and an agreement with hell." Many of them came to believe in "higher law," that a moral commitment to ending slavery took precedent over observing those parts of the Constitution that protected slavery and, in particular, they refused to obey the Fugitive Slave Act. Slave owners or their representatives traveling north to reclaim captured runaways were sometimes set upon on abolitionists mobs; even local lawmen were sometimes attacked. In the South, this fueled the belief that the North expected the South to obey all federal laws but the North could pick and choose, further driving the two regions apart.

Abolitionism, Politics and the Election Of Abraham Lincoln

The abolition movement became an important element of political parties. Although the Native American Party (derisively called the Know-Nothing Party because when member were asked about the secretive group they claimed to "know nothing") opposed immigrants, they also opposed slavery. So did many Whigs and the Free Soil Party. In 1856, these coalesced into the Republican Party. Four years later, its candidate, Abraham Lincoln, captured the presidency of the United States.

John Brown: Abolitionism's Fiery Crusader

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 allowed the citizens of those territories to determine for themselves whether the state would be slave or free. Proponents of both factions poured into the Kansas Territory, with each side trying to gain supremacy, often through violence. After pro-slavery groups attacked the town of Lawrence in 1856, a radical abolitionist named John Brown led his followers in retaliation, killing five pro-slavery settlers. The territory became known as "Bleeding Kansas."

Learn more about John Brown

Dred Scott V. Sanford

The 1857 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Dred Scott v. Sanford denied citizenship to anyone of African blood and held the Missouri Compromise of 1820 to be unconstitutional. While Southern states had been passing laws prohibiting "Negro citizenship" and further restricting the rights even of freemen of color (Virginia in 1857 prohibited slaves from smoking and from standing on sidewalks, among other restrictions), one Northern state after another had been passing laws granting citizenship to their black residents. The Court's findings upended that, and the ruling outraged many Northerners. Abraham Lincoln revived his personal political career, coming out of a self-imposed semi-retirement to speak out against the Dred Scott decision.

The year 1859 saw two events that were milestones in the history of slavery and abolition in America. The ship Clotilde landed in Mobile, Alabama. Though the importation of slaves had been illegal in America since 1808, Clotilde carried 110 to 160 African slaves. The last slave ship ever to land in the United States, it clearly demonstrated how lax the enforcement of the anti-importation laws was.

Learn more about the Dred Scott Decision

John Brown's Raid On Harpers Ferry

Nearly 1,000 miles northeast of Mobile, on the night of October 16, 1859, John Brown-the radical abolitionist who had killed proslavery settlers in Kansas-led 21 men in a raid to capture the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). Though Brown denied it, his plan was to use the arsenal's weapons to arm a slave uprising. He and his followers, 16 white men and five black ones, holed up in the arsenal after they were discovered, and were captured there by a group of U.S. Marines commanded by an Army lieutenant colonel, Robert E. Lee. Convicted of treason against Virginia, Brown was hanged December 2.

Initial reaction in the South was that this was the work of a small group of fanatics, but when Northern newspapers, authors and legislators began praising him as a martyr-a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier eulogizing Brown was published in the New York Herald Tribune less than a month after the execution-their actions were taken as further proof that Northern abolitionists wished to carry out genocide of white Southerners. The flames were fanned higher as information came out that Brown had talked other abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, about his plans and received financial assistance from some of them.
Learn more about John Brown's Raid On Harpers Ferry

Abraham Lincoln: Abolitionist President

Following Abraham Lincoln's election to the presidency in 1860, Southern states began seceding from the Union. Though personally opposed to slavery and convinced the United States was going to have to be all free or all slave states-"a house divided against itself cannot stand"-he repeatedly said he would not interfere with slavery where it existed. But he adamantly opposed its expansion into territories where it did not exist, and slave owners were determined that they had to be free to take their human property with them if they chose to move into those territories.

Less than two years into the civil war that began over Southern secession, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. It freed all slaves residing in areas of the nation currently in rebellion. Often ridiculed, both then and now, because it only freed slaves in areas that did not recognize Lincoln's authority, it meant that Union Army officers no longer had to return runaway slaves to their owners because, as the armies advanced, slaves in the newly captured areas were considered free. It also effectively prohibited European nations that had long since renounced slavery from entering the war on the side of the South.

Learn more about Abraham Lincoln
Learn more about the Emancipation Proclamation

The 13th Amendment: The Abolitionism Movement Triumphs

The 13th Amendment to the Constitution, declared ratified on December 18, 1865, ended slavery in the United States-at least in name. During the Reconstruction Era, Southern states found ways to "hire" black workers under terms that were slavery in all but name, even pursuing any who ran off, just as they had in the days of the Underground Railroad.

Abolition had been achieved, but the lessons learned by those in the abolition movement would be applied to other social concerns in the decades to come, notably the temperance and woman's suffrage movements.

Articles Featuring The Abolitionist Movement From History Net Magazines

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Abolitionist Movement summary: The Abolitionist movement in the United States of America was an effort to end slavery in a nation that valued personal freedom and believed "all men are created equal." Over time, abolitionists grew more strident in their demands, and slave owners entrenched in response, fueling regional divisiveness that ultimately led to the American Civil War.

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The Women’s Rights Movement, 1848–1917 | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

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The fight for women’s suffrage in the United States began with the women’s rights movement in the mid-nineteenth century. This reform effort encompassed a broad spectrum of goals before its leaders decided to focus first on securing the vote for women. Women’s suffrage leaders, however, disagreed ov…

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The History Place - Abraham Lincoln: Kansas-Nebraska Act

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Sound Smart: The Lincoln-Douglass Debates | History

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The attack on Fort Sumter marked the official beginning of the American Civil War-a war that lasted four years, cost the lives of more than 620,000 Americans, and freed 3.9 million enslaved people from bondage.

How it ended

Confederate victory. With supplies nearly exhausted and his troops outnumbered, Union major Robert Anderson surrendered Fort Sumter to Brig. Gen. P.G.T Beauregard's Confederate forces. Major Anderson and his men were allowed to strike their colors, fire a 100-gun salute, and board a ship bound for New York, where they were greeted as heroes. Both the North and South immediately called for volunteers to mobilize for war.

In context

By 1861, the country had already experienced decades of short-lived but ultimately failed compromises concerning the expansion of slavery in the United States and its territories. The election of Abraham Lincoln as president of the United States in 1860-a man who declared "I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free"-threatened the culture and economy of southern slave states and served as a catalyst for secession. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina seceded from the United States, and by February 2, 1861, six more states followed suit. Southern delegates met on February 4, 1861, in Montgomery, AL., and established the Confederate States of America, with Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis elected as its provisional president. Confederate militia forces began seizing United States forts and property throughout the south. With a lame-duck president in office, and a controversial president-elect poised to succeed him, the crisis approached a boiling point and exploded at Fort Sumter.

Before the Battle

In Charleston, the birthplace of secession, tempers are on edge. A delegation from the state goes to Washington, D.C., demanding the surrender of the Federal military installations in the new "independent republic of South Carolina." President James Buchanan refuses to comply. Charleston is the Confederacy's most important port on the Southeast coast. The harbor is defended by three federal forts: Sumter; Castle Pinckney, one mile off the city's Battery; and heavily armed Fort Moultrie, on Sullivan's Island. Major Anderson's command is based at Fort Moultrie, but with its guns pointed out to sea, it cannot defend a land attack. On December 26, Charlestonians awake to discover that Anderson and his tiny garrison of 90 men have slipped away from Fort Moultrie to the more defensible Fort Sumter. For secessionists, Anderson's move is, as one Charlestonian wrote to a friend, "like casting a spark into a magazine,"

Adding to the major's concern is his dangerously dwindling store of supplies. On January 5, 1861, the Star of the West departs from New York with some 200 reinforcements and provisions for the Sumter garrison. As the ship approaches Charleston Harbor on January 9, cadets from the Citadel fire, forcing the crew to abandon its mission. On March 1, Jefferson Davis orders Brig. Gen P.G.T. Beauregard to take command of the growing southern forces in Charleston. On April 4, Lincoln informs southern delegates that he intends to attempt to resupply Fort Sumter, as its garrison is now critically in need. To South Carolinians, any attempt to reinforce Sumter means war. "Now the issue of battle is to be forced upon us," declared the Charleston Mercury. "We will meet the invader, and the God of Battles must decide the issue between the hostile hirelings of Abolition hate and Northern tyranny."

On April 9, Davis and the Confederate cabinet decide to "strike a blow!" Davis orders Beauregard to take Fort Sumter. The next day, three of Beauregard's aides sail to the fort and courteously demand the garrison's surrender. Anderson is equally courteous, but refuses: "I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your communication demanding the evacuation of this fort, and to say, in reply thereto, that it is a demand with which I regret that my sense of honor, and of my obligations to my Government, prevent my compliance." He also informs the delegation that the garrison's supplies will only last until April 15.

During the Battle

April 12. At 4:30 a.m., a flaming mortar shot arcs into the air and explodes over Fort Sumter. On this signal, Confederate guns from fortifications and floating batteries around Charleston Harbor roar to life. Outmanned, outgunned, undersupplied, and nearly surrounded by enemy batteries, Anderson waits until around 7:00 a.m. to respond. Captain Abner Doubleday volunteers to fire the first cannon at the Confederates, a 32-pound shot that bounces off the roof of the Iron Battery on Cummings Point.

For nearly 36 hours the two sides keep up this unequal contest. A shell strikes the flagpole of Fort Sumter, and the American colors fall to the earth, only to be hoisted back up the hastily repaired pole. Confederates fire hotshot from Fort Moultrie into Fort Sumter. Buildings begin to burn within the fort. With no more resources, Anderson surrenders Fort Sumter to Confederate forces.

April 13. At 2:30 p.m., Maj. Anderson and his men strike their colors and prepare to leave the fort. Sadly, the only casualties at Fort Sumter come during the 100-gun salute, when a round explodes prematurely, killing Pvt. Daniel Hough and mortally wounding another soldier. The attack is over, but the war had just begun.

Aftermath

Following the evacuation of Major Robert Anderson and his Federal garrison on the afternoon of April 14, 1861, Fort Sumter is occupied initially by Confederate troops of Company B of the First South Carolina Artillery Battalion and a volunteer company of the Palmetto Guard, a local militia unit. The fort remains in Confederate hands for the next four years until all Confederate forces evacuate Charleston on the evening of February 17, 1865.

Despite having surrendered, Anderson and his men are greeted as heroes when they disembark in New York. Capt. Abner Doubleday notes later that "all the passing steamers saluted us with their steam-whistles and bells, and cheer after cheer went up from the ferry boats and vessels in the harbor." Anderson's valor during the attack and commitment to duty are praised by the Union. Beauregard is also hailed for this first Confederate victory. He is later ordered to direct the troops at Bull Run.

Fort Sumter: Featured Resources

Related Battles

Charleston Harbor, SC | April 12, 1861

Result: Confederate Victory

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Early in the morning of April 12, 1861, Confederate guns around Charleston Harbor opened fire on Fort Sumter. The American Civil War was officially upon both the North and the South. A war that lasted four years and cost the lives of more than 620,000 Americans.

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Clara Barton:  The Beginnings of the American Red Cross

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The Battle of Gettysburg marked the turning point of the Civil War. With more than 50,000 estimated casualties, the three-day engagement was the bloodiest single battle of the conflict.

How it ended

Union victory. Gettysburg ended Confederate general Robert E. Lee 's ambitious second quest to invade the North and bring the Civil War to a swift end. The loss there dashed the hopes of the Confederate States of America to become an independent nation.

In context

After a year of defensive victories in Virginia, Lee's objective was to win a battle north of the Mason-Dixon line in the hopes of forcing a negotiated end to the fighting. His loss at Gettysburg prevented him from realizing that goal. Instead, the defeated general fled south with a wagon train of wounded soldiers straining toward the Potomac. Union general Meade failed to pursue the retreating army, missing a critical opportunity to trap Lee and force a Confederate surrender. The bitterly divisive war raged on for another two years.

Before the Battle

On June 3, soon after his celebrated victory over Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker at the Battle of Chancellorsville, Gen. Robert E. Lee leads his troops north in his second invasion of enemy territory. The 75,000-man Army of Northern Virginia is in high spirits. In addition to seeking fresh supplies, the depleted soldiers look forward to availing themselves of food from the bountiful fields in Pennsylvania farm country, sustenance the war-ravaged landscape of Virginia can no longer provide.

Hooker also heads north, but he is reluctant to engage with Lee directly after the Union's humiliating defeat at Chancellorsville. This evasiveness is of increasing concern to President Abraham Lincoln. Hooker is ultimately relieved of command in late June. His successor, Maj. Gen. George Gordon Meade, continues to move the 90,000-man Army of the Potomac northward, following orders to keep his army between Lee and Washington, D.C. Meade prepares to defend the routes to the nation's capital, if necessary, but he also pursues Lee.

On June 15, three corps of Lee's army cross the Potomac, and by June 28 they reach the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. While Lee loses precious time awaiting intelligence on Union troop positions from his errant cavalry commander, Gen. Jeb Stuart, a spy informs him that Meade is actually very close. Taking advantage of major local roads, which conveniently converge at the county seat, Lee orders his army to Gettysburg.

During the Battle

July 1. Early that morning a Confederate division under Maj. Gen. Henry Heth marches toward Gettysburg to seize supplies. In an unplanned engagement, they confront Union cavalry. Brig. Gen. John Buford slows the Confederate advance until the infantry of the Union I and XI Corps under Maj. Gen. John F. Reynolds arrives. Reynolds is killed in action. Soon Confederate reinforcements under generals A.P. Hill and Richard Ewell reach the scene. By late afternoon, the wool-clad troops are battling ferociously in the sweltering heat. Thirty thousand Confederates overwhelm 20,000 Federals, who fall back through Gettysburg and fortify Cemetery Hill south of town.

July 2. On the second day of battle, the Union defends a fishhook-shaped range of hills and ridges south of Gettysburg. The Confederates wrap around the Union position in a longer line. That afternoon Lee launches a heavy assault commanded by Lieut. Gen. James Longstreet on the Union left flank. Fierce fighting rages at Devil's Den, Little Round Top, the Wheatfield, the Peach Orchard, and Cemetery Ridge as Longstreet's men close in on the Union position. Using their shorter interior lines, Union II Corps commander Maj. Gen. Winfield S. Hancock and others move reinforcements quickly to blunt Confederate advances. On the Federal right, Confederate demonstrations escalate into full-scale assaults on East Cemetery Hill and Culp's Hill. Although the Confederates gain ground on both ends of their line, the Union defenders hold strong positions as darkness falls.

July 3. Believing his enemy to be weakened, Lee seeks to capitalize on the previous day's gains with renewed attacks on the Union line. Heavy fighting resumes on Culp's Hill as Union troops attempt to recapture ground lost the previous day. Cavalry battles flare to the east and south, but the main event is a dramatic infantry assault by 12,500 Confederates commanded by Longstreet against the center of the Union position on Cemetery Ridge. Though undermanned, the Virginia infantry division of Brig. Gen. George E. Pickett constitutes about half of the attacking force. Pickett, ordered by Lee to advance his division toward the enemy through a mile of unprotected farmland, replies, "General, I have no division," but the order stands. During Pickett's Charge, as it is famously known, only one Confederate brigade temporarily reaches the top of the ridge-afterwards referred to as the High Watermark of the Confederacy. This daring strategy ultimately proves a disastrous sacrifice for the Confederates, with casualties approaching 60 percent. Repulsed by close-range Union rifle and artillery fire, the Confederates retreat. Lee withdraws his army from Gettysburg late on the rainy afternoon of July 4 and trudges back to Virginia with severely reduced ranks of wasted and battle-scarred men.

Aftermath

As many as 51,000 soldiers from both armies are killed, wounded, captured or missing in the three-day battle. The carnage is overwhelming, but the Union victory buoys Lincoln's hopes of ending the war. With Lee running South, Lincoln expects that Meade will intercept the Confederate troops and force their surrender. Meade has no such plan. Even as Lee's escape is hampered by flooding on the Potomac, Meade does not pursue them. When Lincoln learns of this missed opportunity on July 12, he laments, "We had only to stretch forth our hands & they were ours." Months later, in November 1863, a portion of the Gettysburg battlefield becomes a final resting place for the Union dead. President Lincoln uses the dedication ceremony at the Gettysburg's Soldiers' National Cemetery to honor the fallen and reassert the purpose of the war in his historic Gettysburg Address:
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. 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.

Gettysburg: Featured Resources

Related Battles

Adams County, PA | July 1, 1863

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In the summer of 1863, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee launched his second invasion of the Northern states. Forces collided at the crossroads town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania from July 1-3, 1863. It resulted in an estimated 51,000 casualties on both sides, the bloodiest single battle of the entire war.

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Account of The Battle Of Vicksburg

Originally published by America's Civil War magazine.

Alarmed residents of Vicksburg, Mississippi, watched in despair on the night of May 17, 1863, as thousands of ragged, downcast Southern soldiers poured into their city from all directions. 'Where are you going?' a townsperson demanded of a fleeing Confederate. 'We are running' the soldier forthrightly replied.

The man the Rebels were running from, Union Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, had ended months of Northern frustration and failure by landing an overwhelming force in western Mississippi on the night of April 30, then moving inland across the state. In 17 days of brilliant campaigning, the misleadingly phlegmatic Grant had inflicted five crushing defeats on separate bands of Confederate warriors who had always felt that enemy soldiers could never threaten them so deep on their own home soil.

All this Grant had accomplished while cut off from his base of operations and supply, and in direct violation of his stated orders to advance south into Louisiana for a combined operation against Port Hudson. By May 16, when he met and decisively defeated Lt. Gen. John Pemberton's troops at Champion's Hill, 25 miles east of Vicksburg, Grant stood poised for a final assault on the crucial Mississippi River town.

Vicksburg had been the object of intense Union attention since the start of the war. Abraham Lincoln knew its importance. 'We can take all the northern ports of the Confederacy, and they can still defy us from Vicksburg' he said. 'It means hogs and hominy without limit, fresh troops from all the states of the far South, and a cotton country where they can raise the staple without interference.' Confederate President Jefferson Davis called it 'the nailhead that held the South's two halves together.' Though Fort Pillow to the north and New Orleans to the south were in Union hands by May 1863, Vicksburg closed the lower Mississippi to unhindered Federal traffic-and was a looming symbol of Confederate defiance.

Following his victories at Champion's Hill and, one day later, at Big Black River Bridge, Grant was confident of quick victory. 'I believed,' he later wrote, '[the enemy] would not make much effort to hold Vicksburg.' Sergeant Osborn Oldroyd of the 20th Ohio shared the feeling. He wrote in his diary, 'We have now come here to compel them to surrender, and we are prepared to do it either by charge or by siege ... they cannot say us nay.'

A Union charge was not long in coming. Grant, confident that one sharp push could overwhelm the demoralized Confederates in their defenses and avoid a long, uncomfortable siege, ordered an assault all along his front to begin at mid-afternoon on May 19. Major General William T. Sherman's XV Corps was to attack points along the northern end of the' Confederate line. Meanwhile, Maj. Gens. James McPherson's and John McClernand's troops were to assault the Confederate center and right, respectively.

But between the defeats at Champion's Hill and Big Black River Bridge and the afternoon of May 19, something had happened to the Confederate Army of Vicksburg. Pemberton had left 10,000 men in the city when he ventured out, and these unbloodied troops stiffened the resolve of those returning from battle. They were also behind strong fortifications. And, as Grant soon would find out, he could not even rely on the normal competence of his corps commanders in the upcoming fight.

The May 19 action was hampered from the start. Though Grant ordered an assault all along the line, McClernand's and McPherson's troops were delayed by the tangled underbrush and treacherous ravines common to the area, and were pinned down by sharp Confederate rifle fire. The bulk of the assault fell, thus, to Sherman's command.

Sherman's advance was tentative, not the first time this was to happen at Vicksburg. Only one brigade, commanded by Colonel Giles Smith, managed to gain much headway. It advanced to the outer trenches of the 'Stockade Redan,' at a critical bend in the defensive lines. Troopers from the 1st Battalion, 13th U.S. Infantry, Sherman's own pre-war unit, carried its flag to the very edge of the Rebel works.

Volunteer regiments from Indiana and Illinois joined them, but they could not enter the works because of intense Confederate fire. Other Union troops did not get as far. As one Southern officer wrote: 'They marched up in one solid column ... when [our men] opened a terrific volley of musketry. The enemy wavered a moment, and then marched forward. They were again met by another volley, when they broke and fled under cover of the hills.'

Many more Federal troops were pinned down between the lines, lying amid the canebrakes that covered the terrain. It was all they could do to remain low and avoid the killing rain of Minie bullets and artillery fire. Not long after, when night had obscured the battlefield, Sherman ordered all his advanced troops withdrawn.

This first attack was repulsed with some 950 Federal casualties, to a Confederate loss of about 250 men. True to form, Grant's thoughts turned immediately to another attempt, this time making full use of all his command.

Historians have debated for years the wisdom of Grant's ordering another assault. In his official report on the campaign, Grant himself gave four reasons for trying again. First, he hoped the advanced positions gained on the nineteenth would make success more certain. Also, he knew that Rebel General Joseph Johnston, to his rear, was increasing the size of his own army, which, if joined together with Pemberton's, would outnumber Grant's force of 45,000.

Third, a successful assault would free Grant's men for action against Johnston and avoid the miasmal toll of a siege during a steamy Mississippi summer. Grant's last and most important reason was his innate perception of his troops' temperament. Even if another assault failed, he believed the men would not work as willingly on the trenches and other necessities of a siege unless they had first tried to take Vicksburg by the front door.

Here Grant was counting on the army's confidence and swagger, built up by three weeks of brilliant success. For the most part, only Sherman's troops had been bloodied on the nineteenth; the army still considered the Rebs demoralized and ripe for one more defeat, strong defenses or no. One observer noted, 'They felt as if they could march straight through Vicksburg, and up to their waists in the Mississippi, without resistance.' Observant Sergeant Oldroyd of Ohio had a clear view of the besieged city: 'We can see the court house...with a Confederate flag floating over it. What fun it will be to take that down and hoist in its stead the old stars and stripes'

Grant planned a coordinated 10 a.m. assault. The night before, he issued full rations to his men, many of whom had spent the previous two days strengthening their positions or building roads. Perhaps he knew what lay ahead; certainly the troops did, as night stretched into morning. 'The boys...were busy divesting themselves of watches, rings, pictures and other keepsakes' one observer noted. 'The instructions left with the keepsakes were varied: 'This watch I want you to send to my father if I never return.' 'If I do not get back, just send these trifles home, will you?"

The attacking infantrymen were to move against the Confederate entrenchments as a solid unit-Sherman's to the north, McPherson's in the center on both sides of the road linking Vicksburg and Jackson, and McClernand's to the south, centered on the Southern Mississippi Railroad track leading east out of Vicksburg.

They prepared to assault perhaps the best-defended Southern city outside Richmond. The rifle pits and trenches surrounding Vicksburg on three sides linked nine steep-walled forts, protected by ditches. Since these forts commanded high ground, they were of great advantage to the deadly marksmen wearing gray. Rebel artillerymen, in turn, had doubleloaded their cannons with grape and canister. A final obstacle faced the attackers: felled timber further choking the already rugged terrain.

During the night of May 22, Admiral David Porter's Union gunboats opened on the city and its defenses. As dawn broke, a thundering artillery barrage from Grant's batteries joined the bombardment, trying to soften the defenses and demoralize the defenders.

Then, shortly before 10 a.m., the firing stopped. Confederate Brig. Gen. Stephen D. Lee remembered, 'Suddenly, there seemed to spring almost from the bowels of the earth dense masses of Federal troops, in numerous columns of attack, and with loud cheers and huzzahs, they rushed forward at a run with bayonets fixed, not firing a shot, heading for every salient along the Confederate lines:'

Major General Frank Blair's division led the assault for Sherman's corps on the Union right. Sherman planned to avoid the abatis-strewn gullies and hollows that had slowed his advance on the nineteenth. Blair's troops would advance along roads in column by regiment, rather than present a broad target by marching across the difficult ground in battle line. The column would be led by a 150-man volunteer'storming party,' carrying the boards and poles needed to bridge the ditch of the earthen fort, Stockade Redan.

Brigadier General Hugh Ewing's brigade, the 30th, 37th and 47th Ohio and the 4th West Virginia, followed the volunteers along a dirt path, appropriately named Graveyard Road. As the storming party emerged from a cut in the road, Mississippians and Missourians in the fort opened up. Some of the advance unit made it to the earthwork itself, but aside from planting Ewing's headquarters flag they could do little more than burrow in and wait.

Nineteen members of the storming party Sherman later called his 'forlorn hope' died in the assault, and 34 were wounded. The Medal of Honor later was awarded to 78 of the 150.

The 30th Ohio, close behind, got the same greeting as the volunteers. The grisly scene of death and misery that greeted the 37th Ohio a few moments later caused many in that regiment to refuse to go any further; the ensuing traffic jam meant the last two regiments had to move overland. They never made it to the fort, ending up about 150 yards east of the redan, which they fired upon with little effect. The assault by the Union right was effectively turned back. The 30th and 37th Ohio, along with the volunteer storming party, were the only units of Sherman's to see heavy action that morning. The rest of his XV Corps, eight brigades in all, waited.

McPherson's XVII Corps was assigned to assault the main fortifications in the center of the Rebel line, the so-called Great Redoubt and a smaller earthwork fort known as the 3rd Louisiana Redan. As with Sherman's troops on Graveyard Road, McPherson's men on the Jackson road eventually came under intense fire and an attack on the 3rd Louisiana Redan was beaten back.

One brigade, under Brig. Gen. John D. Stevenson, traveled overland to mount an assault on the Great Redoubt. The 81st Illinois and 7th Union Missouri regiments of his brigade, the latter largely Irish in background, took terrible losses from the Louisianans' volleys and cannon fire, but managed to place some men in the ditch before the redoubt. The men of the 7th planted their emerald green flag on its exterior slope. However, their scaling ladders were too short and they could go no farther. They were pulled back almost immediately.

In a mere half-hour, Stevenson lost 272 officers and men. Except for one more abortive attack elsewhere on the line, this was the extent of XVII Corps action on the morning of the twenty-second.

Perhaps the hardest fighting of the morning was done along the Union left by the men of politician-soldier John McClernand's XIII Corps. A Democratic congressman before the war who had supported Lincoln's war effort, McClernand was not one of Grant's favorites. He was vain and self-promoting and, though not the worst of the political generals, was at best merely competent. He also had an odd sense of timing. At one point during the fighting in Mississippi that month, he had jumped up on a stump and given his troops a political harangue, while bullets were flying.

The primary target for McClernand's men was an earthen fort alongside the Southern Mississippi track, known to them as the Railroad Redoubt and to their foes as Fort Beauregard. It covered about a half-acre of ground, with walls 15 feet high and a ditch 10 feet wide. As with all the forts, a line of rifle pits connected it with nearby fortifications, allowing the defenders to enfilade all approaches. The 14th Division of Brig. Gen. Eugene Carr would spearhead the attack.

Precisely at 10 a.m., the men moved out. 'Down into the abatis of felled timber and brush we went, our comrades falling thickly on all sides of us,' wrote Lt. Col. Lysander Webb of the 77th Illinois. 'Still up the hill we pressed, through the brambles and brush, over the dead and dying...oh! that was a half hour which may God grant we shall never be called upon to experience again.'

Joining Webb in the Railroad Redoubt action was a brigade of Iowa and Wisconsin men commanded by one of Grant's favorite warriors, Brig. Gen. Michael Lawler. Lawler had impetuously ordered a charge at Big Black River Bridge five days earlier that, in less than five minutes, had broken the back of Rebel resistance. Now he faced an entrenched foe, the 30th and 46th Alabama regiments supported by the Texas Legion, fighting with new spirit and determination.

Starting in a ravine 150 yards from the redoubt, Lawler ordered the men to charge with bayonets fixed. Colonel William Stone led his 22nd Iowa Volunteers, mostly farmers and merchants from around Iowa City, toward the fort, with the 21st Iowa close behind in support. Regiments from Illinois and Wisconsin rushed forward near them, heading for rifle pits south of the redoubt. The Iowans reached the ditch fronting the earthwork and began crawling up its exterior slope.

Union artillery fire had opened a hole in the top of the redoubt, setting the stage for one of the most tragically heroic actions of the campaign. Sergeant Joseph Griffith of the 22nd Iowa led a group of fellow Iowans up the side of the fort and into that opening, where they fought hand-to-hand and forced most of the grayclads to abandon the works. Griffith's men placed the colors of the 22nd on the parapet. The Confederate defenses had at last been breached, but the Union hold was tenuous. The few who had entered and remained unhurt were still subjected to rifle fire from the Confederates to the rear of the line.

The decision was made to rejoin the troops in the ditch, but few were left to obey the order. According to the official regimental history, between 15 and 20 men followed Griffith into the redoubt; only one returned with him alive. Without reinforcements, the desperate gamble gained little of substance. However, the flag of the 22nd still flew from the parapet, and its men waited below to try again.

They did not wait long, as the 77th Illinois arrived soon after to occupy the ditch to the right of the Iowans. Again men clawed their way up the steep exterior slope of Railroad Redoubt. Soon the 77th's flag sat planted next to the 22nd's, though no one from the 77th actually entered the fort. In early afternoon, a sortie from the 30th Alabama tried to retake control of the ditch, but was beaten back. Griffith then re-entered to accept the surrender of 13 Alabamians. Bitter fighting continued to swirl around the redoubt, with no one gaining a clear upper hand.

Meanwhile, just north of the Railroad Redoubt, the other main target of McClernand's men would prove an equally tough nut to crack. Colonel Ashbel Smith and his 2nd Texas Regiment awaited the onslaught on their works, a type of earthwork known as a 'lunette' The 2nd Texas Lunette faced Brig. Gen. William Benton's brigade of regiments from Illinois and Indiana. As 10 a.m. came, the cannon fire died out and the 99th Illinois moved forward in the lead, the men coatless in the late-morning heat. As they came near, some Yanks were heard to shout, 'Vicksburg or hell!'

The fire from the Texans' rifles was murderous, and a 12-pounder gun in the lunette belched canister at the Federal soldiers with deadly accuracy. The 99th and two of the three other regiments in the brigade veered to the left toward rifle pits manned also by the 2nd Texas. Corporal Thomas J. Higgins was captured, but not before carrying the flag of the 99th to the very edge of the Rebel rifle pits, braving the fire that cut down many beside him. (He was later awarded the Medal of Honor, based in part on the testimony of admiring Confederate foes.) The fourth regiment, the 18th Indiana, placed its flag on the edge of the lunette, but could do little more than watch it and wait for help.

That help came from Brig. Gen. Stephen Burbridge's brigade. Within minutes his men rushed forward, shouting wildly, and gained the ditch before the lunette. Many of Burbridge's men began to move up its side along with the men of the 18th Indiana. They reached one of two embrasures and poured rifle fire through it. The 12-pounder pointing out of the other embrasure was useless; Rebel artillerists were being shot down almost as soon as they could man it. Cotton bales between the two embrasures burned, set ablaze by muzzle blasts, which further increased the confusion and ferocity of the fight.

As the fort appeared ready to fall into Union hands, four Texans answered the call of Ashbel Smith to clear the embrasure. They jumped forward and, from five paces, fired their rifle-muskets into the opening. The leaders of the thrust fell dead, and the attack was blunted. The encouraged butternuts were soon rolling lit artillery shells into the ditch below to clear it.

The struggle for the 2nd Texas Lunette was not yet over, though. Burbridge's Chicago Mercantile Battery hauled one of its brass 6-pounders up a gully near the lunette. The Chicago gunners then fired canister into the fort from 30 feet away. The point-blank artillery fire did not break the will of the Texans, and as morning wore into afternoon the fighting stalemated.

The morning fight had been undeniably bloody. Both Sherman and McPherson had committed only one brigade each to heavy action, but each had been badly hit. McClernand's men did most of the fighting and dying. The 22nd Iowa was to lose 164 men killed, wounded or captured, most in the morning struggle. The brigade to which the 22nd belonged, Lawler's, suffered 368 casualties over the course of the day, the most of any brigade in Grant's army. All that had been gained was a shaky hold on one fort that could be loosened at any time.

In fact, by 11 a.m., Grant was ready to call off his troops. He had seen them struggle toward the forts against the galling Rebel fire. Before the smoke of battle obscured his view he saw them huddling in the ditches, with the flags of the 22nd Iowa and a few other regiments waving from several parapets. He rode to see Sherman, his most trusted lieutenant.

As he galloped north, he was overtaken by a note from McClernand, saying a timely blow from McPherson's troops might swing the battle McClernand's way. A second note arrived minutes later claiming possession of two forts and asking for a push all along the line. Grant was skeptical; he had had a better viewpoint of the battlefield than McClernand. He told Sherman, 'I don't believe a word of it.'

Yet on the strength of these notes and one later communication, Grant sent troops to support McClernand. After seeing the dispatches, Sherman decided to push again, but he did it with isolated units in three assaults. The first was at 2:15, when two brigades already in good position moved against the Stockade Redan complex. As had happened that morning, the Missourians and Mississippians within the fort shattered the approaching bluecoat contingent.

At 3 p.m., the Eagle Brigade, along with the 8th Wisconsin's bald eagle mascot, 'Old Abe' advanced down Graveyard Road, used that morning by Sherman's 'forlorn hope' and the two Ohio regiments. Though some troops made it to the fort's ditch, their position was extremely tenuous and Sherman ordered them withdrawn. Finally, an attack at 4 o'clock involved Sherman's remaining division unbloodied in that day's action. This attempt too was blunted.

Meanwhile, McPherson's reinforcements to McClernand were split up, some going to the 2nd Texas Lunette and some to the Railroad Redoubt. A Confederate counterstroke cleared the lunette of Federal troops not long after their arrival there. The remaining troops, sent to the redoubt, were told to attack and hold the trenches between the two forts.

Heartened by the sight of the 77th Illinois and 22nd Iowa flags still flying over the redoubt, Colonel George Boomer's men advanced toward the trenches until they stopped in the bottom of an abatis-choked hollow. Before the lines could be re-formed, Boomer was shot dead and his men withdrawn. Late in the day, McPherson launched a half-hearted attack on the 3rd Louisiana Redan, in the Confederate center, which was quickly beaten back.

The Union attack was coming to a dismal end all along the line, yet one more drama remained to be played out. As long as the Railroad Redoubt was in Union hands, the Confederate line was breached and invited further attack. Stephen Lee, who had watched the Union troops swarming toward him that morning, repeatedly called for volunteers to close the breach. The troops of the 30th Alabama, exhausted and dismayed, did not step forward.

In desperation, Lee turned to men of the 2nd Texas, some of whom had been massed in support of the Alabamians since that morning. 'Can your Texans take the redoubt?' Lee asked. 'Yes!' Colonel James Waul replied. At 5:30, with a shrill Rebel yell, about 40 Texans (with several late Alabama volunteers) moved out along a narrow ridge swept by Yankee snipers. The fire and their exposed position did not halt them, and they pushed into the fort, driving the Federal occupants into the ditch below and sealing the last breach in the Vicksburg line.

The men in the ditch below now faced the rifle fire of the Texans and lit shells being rolled down the side. Lieutenant Colonel Harvey Graham, commanding the 22nd Iowa and the other 58 men there, surrendered after having spent almost eight hours under continuous fire.

The supposedly 'whipped' Rebels had taken on the triumphant Yankee army and inflicted on it a stinging defeat. The Army of the Tennessee had suffered over 3,000 casualties, more than in all other engagements since landing in Mississippi. Confederate casualties probably did not exceed 500.

The story of the lost battle lay in Union generalship. The performance of McPherson and Sherman, normally Grant's two most reliable corps commanders, had been subpar. Sherman advanced little more than a token force in the morning, then attacked piecemeal in the afternoon, allowing the defenders time to regroup between attacks. McPherson also seemed halfhearted in his commitment to battle, throwing only one brigade at a time into the fight (though one division of his had been sent to McClernand in the afternoon).

McClernand did not face similar criticisms; all but one brigade under his command saw action. However, Grant (among others) attacked him for the misleading nature of the messages Grant received urging a renewed push. Grant believed the renewed assaults increased Union casualties by 50 percent, with little increased chance for a breakthrough. McClernand defended his actions, then and later, but the mood of the Army was against him. Grant now had a reason to sack him-McClernand was soon gone from command.

Grant knew the time for recriminations would come later. As night fell on the outskirts of Vicksburg that May 22, he wasted little energy on the past. A direct assault had been tried and failed, and his mind, characteristically, had already turned to the matter at hand. A bystander heard him say, perhaps to himself, 'We'll have to dig our way in.'

This article was written by Jeffry C. Burden and originally appeared in the May 2000 issue of America's Civil War.

For more great articles be sure to pick up your copy of America's Civil War.

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Originally published by America's Civil War magazine. Alarmed residents of Vicksburg, Mississippi, watched in despair on the night of May 17, 1863, as thousands of ragged, downcast Southern soldiers poured into their city from all directions. 'Where are you going?' a townsperson demanded of a fleeing Confederate.

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Southern Surrender at Appomattax Courthouse

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Southern Surrender at Appomattax Courthouse

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American Artifacts Preview: Surrender at Appomattox

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Amendment XIV

Section 1.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 2.

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a state, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such state.

Section 3.

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Section 4.

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Section 5.

The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

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All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.

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United States presidential election of 1876 , disputed American presidential election held on November 7, 1876, in which Republican Rutherford B. Hayes defeated Democrat Samuel J. Tilden . Tilden led Hayes by more than 260,000 popular votes, and preliminary returns showed Tilden with 184 electoral votes (one shy of the majority needed to win the election) to Hayes's 165, with the 19 electoral votes of three states (Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina) and one elector from Oregon (originally awarded to Tilden) still in doubt. The U.S. Congress subsequently created an Electoral Commission , which by early March 1877 had resolved all the disputed electoral votes in favour of Hayes, giving him a 185-184 electoral college victory.

The candidates

After the Civil War ended in 1865, the Republicans held a stranglehold on the presidency , with Gen. Ulysses S. Grant winning easily in both 1868 and 1872 . But Grant's administration and the Republicans generally had been beset by scandals and allegations of corruption, such as the Crédit Mobilier Scandal and the Whiskey Ring . The Democrats entered 1876 on an upswing, having won control of the House of Representatives in 1874, and from the outset the election was expected to be competitive.

The Republicans held their convention in Cincinnati, Ohio , in mid-June, and the front-runner for their nomination was James G. Blaine of Maine , the speaker of the House of Representatives. Republican reformers, however, hoped to thwart his nomination. Blaine led after the first ballot but without enough votes to secure the nomination. Among the challengers to Blaine were Roscoe Conkling , a senator from New York and a prominent Republican leader in the post-Civil War period; Oliver H.P.T. Morton , a senator from Indiana and that state's former governor; Benjamin Helm Bristow , the U.S. secretary of the Treasury (1874-76) and successful prosecutor of the Whiskey Ring; and Rutherford B. Hayes, the governor of Ohio. Eventually, with the withdrawal of Bristow, Conkling, and Morton in favour of Hayes, Hayes secured the nomination on the seventh ballot, and William A. Wheeler , a senator from New York, was selected as his running mate. Hayes's unblemished public record and high moral tone (as well as his deep sympathy toward the South) offered a striking contrast to widely publicized accusations of corruption in the Grant administration.

The Democrats held their convention two weeks later in St. Louis , Missouri-the first time a national convention was held west of the Mississippi. Samuel J. Tilden, the governor of New York, strongly appealed to delegates from Southern states, and on the first ballot he led Thomas A. Hendricks , the governor of Indiana. After a second ballot Tilden secured the nomination, and Hendricks was chosen as his running mate.

The platforms

The 1876 election occurred in the midst of an economic depression in the United States and continuing sectional animosity, particularly in the South, where opposition to federal occupation and Reconstruction had grown. Many Republicans had grown weary of Reconstruction and had come to believe that the time for compromise with Southern whites was at hand. Still, the Republicans continued their strong commitment to the civil rights of emancipated slaves, their party platform stating that "the permanent pacification of the Southern section of the Union and the complete protection of all its citizens in the free enjoyment of all their rights, are duties to which the Republican party is sacredly pledged." It further criticized the Democratic Party for its lack of commitment to civil rights, arguing that the "party counts, as its chief hope of success, upon the electoral vote of a united South, secured through the efforts of those who were recently arrayed against the nation and we invoke the earnest attention of the country to the grave truth, that a success thus achieved would reopen sectional strife and imperil national honor and human rights."

Meanwhile, the Democratic platform called for "immediate reform" of the federal government and, to forestall Republican charges of sectionalism, committed itself to the "permanence of the Federal Union." It also called for civil service reform and restrictions on Chinese immigration to the United States.

The disputed election

On election day Tilden led Hayes by more than 260,000 votes and appeared on the verge of winning an electoral college majority, having swept much of the South; he also won the border states and several states in the northeast, including his home state of New York, Connecticut , Delaware , Maryland, and New Jersey . However, three states were in doubt: Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina , with 19 electoral votes among them. The status of one of Oregon's three electors-which had already been given to Tilden-was also in question. Hayes and most of his associates were ready to concede when a New Hampshire Republican leader, William E. Chandler, observed that if Hayes were awarded every one of the doubtful votes, he would defeat Tilden 185-184. Both parties claimed victory in all three Southern states and sent teams of observers and lawyers into all three in hopes of influencing the official canvass.

The impasse continued into December, when the electors were to meet and cast their votes. When Congress convened on December 7, there were rival electoral reports, and, over the next six weeks, maneuvering and acrimony prevailed in Congress, and there were fears that another civil war might break out. On January 29, 1877, Congress created an Electoral Commission to break the deadlock. The commission was to have five members from the House of Representatives, five from the Senate , and five from the Supreme Court. As originally conceived, the commission was to comprise seven Democrats, seven Republicans, and one independent, the Supreme Court justice David Davis . Davis refused to serve, however, after the Republican-controlled legislature of Illinois engineered to have him elected to the state's vacant Senate seat, and Justice Joseph P. Bradley , a Republican, was named in his place by the other four justices.

While the commission was deliberating, Republican allies of Hayes engaged with moderate Southern Democrats in secret negotiations aimed at securing acquiescence to Hayes's election. Although Bradley leaned toward Tilden's claim in Florida, he was swayed to back Hayes, and thereafter every action by the Electoral Commission followed a strict 8-7 split in favour of the Republican claims. When the last issue was resolved after 4 am on March 2, Hayes was declared the winner, with a narrow 185-184 majority, and he was sworn in privately the following day (because March 4 was a Sunday, the public swearing in took place on March 5). Although the result was greeted with outrage and bitterness by some Northern Democrats, who dubbed Hayes "His Fraudulency," Hayes was sworn in without incident. Southern Democrats, however, found relative contentment with the outcome, when, as president, Hayes promptly made good on the secret pledges made during the electoral dispute to withdraw federal troops from states still under military occupation and thus end the era of Reconstruction. Thereafter the Democrats came to dominate what became known as the " Solid South ."

For the results of the previous election, see United States presidential election of 1872 . For the results of the subsequent election, see United States presidential election of 1880 .

Results of the 1876 election

The results of the 1876 U.S. presidential election are provided in the table.

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united states presidential election of 1876

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United States presidential election of 1876 | United States government

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United States presidential election of 1876 , disputed American presidential election held on November 7, 1876, in which Republican Rutherford B. Hayes defeated Democrat Samuel J. Tilden .

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How did Plessy v. Ferguson affect segregation in the United States?

Plessy v. Ferguson, legal case in which the U.S. Supreme Court on May 18, 1896, by a seven-to-one majority (one justice did not participate), advanced the controversial " separate but equal" doctrine for assessing the constitutionality of racial segregation laws. Plessy v. Ferguson was the first major inquiry into the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment's (1868) equal-protection clause, which prohibits the states from denying "equal protection of the laws" to any person within their jurisdictions. Although the majority opinion did not contain the phrase "separate but equal," it gave constitutional sanction to laws designed to achieve racial segregation by means of separate and supposedly equal public facilities and services for African Americans and whites. It served as a controlling judicial precedent until it was overturned by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954).

Background

The case originated in 1892 as a challenge to Louisiana's Separate Car Act (1890). The law required that all railroads operating in the state provide "equal but separate accommodations" for white and African American passengers and prohibited passengers from entering accommodations other than those to which they had been assigned on the basis of their race. In 1891 a group of Creole professionals in New Orleans formed the Citizens' Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law. They hired Albion Tourgée, a Reconstruction-era judge and social reformer, as their legal counsel. As plaintiff in the test case the committee chose a person of mixed race in order to support its contention that the law could not be consistently applied, because it failed to define the white and "coloured" races. Homer Plessy, who was seven-eighths white and one-eighth African American, purchased a rail ticket for travel within Louisiana and took a seat in a car reserved for white passengers. (The state Supreme Court had ruled earlier that the law could not be applied to interstate travel.) After refusing to move to a car for African Americans, he was arrested and charged with violating the Separate Car Act. At Plessy's trial in U.S. District Court, Judge John H. Ferguson dismissed his contention that the act was unconstitutional. After the state Supreme Court affirmed the district court's ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari, and oral arguments were heard on April 13, 1896. The court rendered its decision one month later, on May 18.

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Plessy v. Ferguson | Summary, Ruling, Background, & Impact

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Plessy v. Ferguson, legal case in which the U.S. Supreme Court on May 18, 1896, by a seven-to-one majority (one justice did not participate), advanced the controversial 'separate but equal' doctrine for assessing the constitutionality of racial segregation laws.

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Expanding the Transcontinental Railroad: History and Impact

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Wounded Knee Massacre | Facts, History, & Legacy

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Wounded Knee Massacre (December 29, 1890), the slaughter of approximately 150–300 Lakota Indians by U.S. Army troops in the area of Wounded Knee Creek in southwestern South Dakota. The massacre was the climax of the U.S. Army’s late 19th-century efforts to repress the Plains Indians.

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dawes general allotment act of 1887 - Google Search

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The homestead act was passed May 20, 1862. This act allowed for US citizens to get 160 acres of land out in the west for free. They had to be adults of course, and they also had to have been loyal to...

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Bessemer process, the first method discovered for mass-producing steel. Though named after Sir Henry Bessemer of England, the process evolved from the contributions of many investigators before it could be used on a broad commercial basis. It was apparently conceived independently and almost concurrently by Bessemer and by William Kelly of the United States. As early as 1847, Kelly, a businessman-scientist of Pittsburgh, began experiments aimed at developing a revolutionary means of removing impurities from pig iron by an air blast. Kelly theorized that not only would the air, injected into the molten iron, supply oxygen to react with the impurities, converting them into oxides separable as slag, but that the heat evolved in these reactions would increase the temperature of the mass, keeping it from solidifying during the operation. After several failures, he succeeded in proving his theory and rapidly producing steel ingots.

In 1856 Bessemer, working independently in Sheffield, developed and patented the same process. Whereas Kelly had been unable to perfect the process owing to a lack of financial resources, Bessemer was able to develop it into a commercial success. Another Englishman, Robert Forester Mushet, found that adding an alloy of carbon, manganese, and iron after the air-blowing was complete restored the carbon content of the steel while neutralizing the effect of remaining impurities, notably sulfur. A Swedish ironmaster, Goran Goransson, redesigned the Bessemer furnace, or converter, making it reliable in performance. The end result was a means of mass-producing steel. The resultant volume of low-cost steel in Britain and the United States soon revolutionized building construction and provided steel to replace iron in railroad rails and many other uses.

The Bessemer converter is a cylindrical steel pot approximately 6 metres (20 feet) high, originally lined with a siliceous refractory. Air is blown in through openings (tuyeres) near the bottom, creating oxides of silicon and manganese, which become part of the slag, and of carbon, which are carried out in the stream of air. Within a few minutes an ingot of steel can be produced, ready for the forge or rolling mill.

The original Bessemer converter was not effective in removing the phosphorus present in sizable amounts in most British and European iron ore. The invention in England, by Sidney Gilchrist Thomas, of what is now called the Thomas-Gilchrist converter, which was lined with a basic material such as burned limestone rather than an (acid) siliceous material, overcame this problem. Another drawback to Bessemer steel, its retention of a small percentage of nitrogen from the air blow, was not corrected until the 1950s. The open-hearth process, which was developed in the 1860s, did not suffer from this difficulty, and it eventually outstripped the Bessemer process to become the dominant steelmaking process until the mid-20th century. The open-hearth process was in turn replaced by the basic oxygen process, which is actually an extension and refinement of the Bessemer process.

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Bessemer process | Dates, Definition, & Facts

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Bessemer process, the first method discovered for mass-producing steel. Though named after Sir Henry Bessemer of England, the process evolved from the contributions of many investigators before it could be used on a broad commercial basis. It was apparently conceived independently and almost concurrently by Bessemer and by William Kelly of the United States.

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An invention is a new process, method, composition or device which achieves unique functions. It can be an entirely new device or an improvement to a machine that makes it work more efficiently. Ever since the beginning of time, human beings have been building tools and processes which helped them tame their environment. Technology has helped shape the world into what it is today, and these prominent discoveries of the 19th century had a substantial impact on the world as we know it.

1. Typewriter - 1867

Typewriters are electromechanical or mechanical machines that produce characters by pressing ink upon paper. Johann Gutenberg invented the idea of a printer which applied the concept of the movable type, a revolutionary modification. Gutenberg helped convert the printing press into simple equipment for personal usage. The description of this type of device dates back to 1714 when Henry Mill patented the typewriter idea. Christopher Sholes created the first reliable typewriter with the help of Samuel Soule and Carlos Glidden in 1867. Sholes licensed the patent to Remington and sons from New York who developed the first commercial typewriter in 1874. Thomas Edison built the first electric typewriter in 1872.

2. Camera - 1888

Cameras have evolved over the years from the camera obscura to the numerous generations of photographic technologies including films, dry plates, calotypes, daguerreotypes and finally the present-day digital camera. George Eastman pioneered photographic film usage in 1885 when he started producing paper films. He patented his first film in 1884 and perfected the first camera using roll film in 1888. That same year, Eastman introduced the Kodak camera into the market. It was a unique box-camera that came with a film roll big enough for one hundred photos. The film roll had to be returned to the company for processing once finished. In 1892, Eastman opened the Eastman Kodak Company which produced transparent flexible films.

3. Electric Battery - 1800

The concept of electricity dates back to ancient Greece when Thales noticed that an electric charge was produced when he rubbed amber. Scientists also discovered a 2,000-year-old jar in Baghdad in 1938, which is believed to be the world's earliest example of a battery. It produced 1.1 volts. The current battery was invented by Alessandro Volta in 1800 when he developed his voltaic pile. The voltaic pile could create a steady and reliable electricity stream. Volta started his work in 1794 when he noticed an electrical interaction between two metals that were submerged in an acidic solution. Using this principle, he designed his battery which had alternating zinc and copper rings immersed in an electrolyte.

4. Telephone - 1876

A telephone is a system that converts a voice into an electric impulse of varying frequency and then back to its original form. Michael Faraday was the first person to contribute to the idea of a telephone when he proved that metal vibrations could be converted into electric impulses. Faraday's concept was not put into practice until Philip Reis invented a device that could convert sound waves into electric impulses and then back to sound waves in 1861. The invention of a practical telephone is credited to Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray who worked on their projects independently. Gray invented the first electromagnetic receiver in 1874 but did not perfect the design of a working diaphragm until Bell managed to create the first working telephone. The invention became a reality on March 10, 1876, when Bell transmitted the first sentence through his simple phone.

5. Aspirin - 1897

The effects of aspirin-like mixtures have been known for centuries now. The earliest reports of the use of salicylates date back to the Sumerians, the earliest known civilization, who used willow tree bark to help reduce fever and illness. The willow tree has the salicin compound which is similar to the compound that we call aspirin: acetylsalicylic acid. However, it was not until the 1800s that researchers discovered and extracted salicylic acid from willow trees. Charles Gerhardt tried mixing salicylic acid with other elements in 1853, but his method of synthesizing the compound lacked efficiency. In 1897 Felix Hoffmann, a German chemist, was searching for medicine to help relieve his father's arthritis when he created proper acetylsalicylic acid, branded and sold as aspirin.

6. Coffee Pot - 1806

Before the invention of a coffee pot, coffee lovers had to chew the coffee since the drink would be full of grounds. In 1806, Benjamin Thompson invented a percolating coffee pot with a metallic sleeve that helped strain all the grounds, converting the beverage into a refreshing drink instead of a liquid meal. Thompson developed the coffee pot after his service with the Bavarian army where he helped improve their diets. Thompson was a British inventor and physicist whose inventions and challenges in establishing physical theory played a crucial role in the creation of thermodynamics during the 19th century.

7. Sewing Machine - 1846

During the early 1800s, much of the population did not have the income to purchase clothes. Therefore, everything was sewn by hand and families had to sew clothes using a thread and needle. Elias Howe changed all this when he invented the sewing machine as we know it, which he patented in 1846.

However, although the patent for the sewing machine was new, the concept wasn't. In 1755, Charles Wiesenthal had invented a double-pointed needle which got rid of the idea of turning the needle after every stitch. Bartholomew Thimonnier created his sewing machine using the double-pointed needle in 1830. In 1834, Walter Hunt invented double-thread shuttle equipment. Nonetheless, Elias Howe is remembered for his invention of an early model of the modern sewing machine.

8. Telegraph - 1836

Pavel Schilling invented the earliest electromagnetic telegraph in 1832, making him the first inventor to use the idea of binary systems in signal transmission. In 1833 Carl Gauss used induction pulses to send seven letters per minute, and this earned him some funding which enabled him to construct a telegraph network along the German railroad in 1835.

Dr. David Alter developed the first electric telegraph in 1836 in Elderton, but he did not manage to establish a practical system. In 1837, Samuel Morse developed a more efficient device. Together with his friend, Alfred Vail, they managed to create Morse code and send the first telegraph message across two miles on January 11, 1938. He later managed to send another message over 44 miles from Washington to Baltimore.

9. Paperclip - 1899

A paperclip might be a simple device, but for centuries people used straight strings and pins as fasteners, which damaged documents. Samuel Fay invented the first paperclip in 1867 and patented it as a ticket fastener on April 23, 1867. Over 50 designs were copyrighted before 1899, none of them resembling the current paper clip design.

William Middlebrook designed the modern paper clip. Middlebrook also developed a paperclip-creating machine as early as April 27, 1899. He sold the patent to Cushman and Denison in 1899 who created "GEM," a trademark for their paperclips. In 1903 George Mc Gill patented a design that resembles today's version of paper clips.

10. Escalator - 1892

Jesse Reno invented an escalator-type machine in 1891. The earliest working escalator (which was patented to Jesse Reno in 1892) was installed at the Old Pier, Corney Island as a novelty ride in 1896.

George Wheeler patented an Escalator on April 18, 1899, and then sold it to Seeberger who registered the trademark "Escalator." Seeberger sold the trade name "Escalator" along with the patent to the Ortis Elevator Company in 1910, and with the help of David Lindquist, they added some improvements to the invention, thus creating present-day escalators.

11. Coca-Cola - 1886

The history of Coca-Cola dates back to 1886 when Dr. John Pemberton modified his tonic headache and stimulant formula, creating Pemberton's French Wine Coca. Dr. Pemberton produced a Coca Cola syrup and took it to Jacob's pharmacy where they sampled it and sold it at five cents per glass. With the help of Frank Robinson, Dr. Pemberton coined the trademark "Coca-Cola" which refers to the two main "medicinal" ingredients in the original recipe: coca leaves, which is what is used to make cocaine, and kola nuts. Dr. Pemberton sold part of his company, and before he died, he sold his last share of the company to Asa G. Candler who managed to gain complete control over the beverage. Mr. Candler, together with his brother John and other associates, opened The Coca-Cola Company. Coca-Cola contained trace amounts of cocaine until 1929.

12. Chewing Gum - 1870

People have had chewed gum-like substances for centuries now-in fact, the earliest gums were thickened latex or resin obtained from various trees while others were from waxes, grains, leaves, and grasses. The American colonists chewed gums from spruce trees, and they were sold as lumps in the eastern parts of the United States by the early 1800s.

Chewing gum was made by Thomas Adam, who was introduced to chewing chicles by General Santa Anna. Adam experimented on it and tried making rain boots, masks and toys from chicle but failed. Tired and discouraged, Adam popped a small piece of his surplus chicle into his mouth and finally came up with the idea of the first chewing gum, opening a factory in 1870. Adam patented the gum-making process on February 14, 1871. He created the first flavored chewing gum called the "Black Jack" in 1880.

13. Elevator - 1852

The origin of elevators dates back to 1852 when Elisha Otis developed the first elevator safety brakes, installing them in an elevator in 1853 and paving the way for safe societal use of elevators. Before brakes were invented, elevator-type contraptions were used to transport goods from one floor to another, but required a firm hand on the rope to prevent the elevator from dropping. Otis started his elevator company in 1853, which manufactured freight holstering elevators. His invention helped architects achieve the goal of designing taller buildings.

Otis installed the first human elevator in a department store in New York in 1857. He received the patent for his improvements on the safety brakes and the holstering device in 1861. After his death, his sons opened the Otis Brothers and Company, and by 1873 they had installed over 2,000 elevators in various buildings. The Otis brothers partnered with 14 other entities to create the Otis Elevator Company in 1898, and they introduced the gearless traction elevator in 1903.

14. Jell-O - 1897

A man named Pearl Wait decided to switch to the food industry after his syrup manufacturing business failed in 1897. Pearl modified gelatin, which had been invented in the 1600s, by adding some fruit syrup to it. By doing this, Wait created a new product named Jello. Pearl tried marketing his new product, but due to lack of enthusiasm, he sold the patent to Francis Woodward. By the 1900s various chefs discovered Jell-O and introduced it to the market. Woodward started advertising his product in 1902 as the "Best American Dessert." Jello remains popular today.

15. Automobile - 1889

The earliest automobile ever invented was the Fardier which was built by Nicholas Cugot. Fardier was a steam-powered machine that Nicholas developed for the French War minister in 1771. The Fardier was much slower than a horse-driven vehicle, and therefore was never reproduced. Wilhelm Maybach and Gottlieb Daimler built the first automobile, powered by a 1.5hp 2-cylinder gasoline engine in 1889. Their car had a 4-speed transmission and attained a maximum speed of 10 mph.

Another German known as Karl Benz developed a gasoline-powered vehicle in 1889, and his is considered to be the first practical automobile. The first mass-produced cars were the Curved Dash Oldsmobile which Ransom E. Olds produced in 1901 in the United States. Henry Ford is credited for the current mass production of vehicles after he built his first car in 1896. Ford began developing the Model-T in 1908 and by the time its production stopped in 1927, over 18 million units had been sold.

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An invention is a new process, method, composition or device which achieves unique functions. It can be an entirely new device or an improvement to a machine that makes it work more efficiently. Ever since the beginning of time, human beings have been building tools and processes which helped them tame their environment.

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Industrial Growth and the Rise of Big Business

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Antitrust in the U.S. is now undergoing disruption. We may be witnessing the rise of the fifth cycle - namely a progressive, anti-monopoly, New Brandeis School. An emerging group of young scholars are inquiring whether we truly benefited from competition with little antitrust enforcement. The mounting evidence suggests no. To be clear, the anti-monopoly New Brandeis School does not suggest or promote unrestricted intervention or the jettisoning of economic analysis in antitrust enforcement. All agree that intervention should be measured to avoid chilling competition, innovation and investment. The question is one of degree. The hope is for an enforcement policy which is carefully designed, but not diluted.

What happened to the antitrust movement? This was the question asked by Richard Hofstadter in the mid-1960s. Antitrust, observed the historian, once was the subject of a progressive movement in the U.S. that stirred public agitation and imagination, despite few antitrust prosecutions. By the 1960s, there were many antitrust prosecutions (by both Democratic and Republican administrations), but without any antitrust movement. Fifty years later, the U.S. has neither an antitrust movement nor much enforcement. That needs to change.

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The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of the U.S. Antitrust Movement

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Antitrust in the U.S. is now undergoing disruption. We may be witnessing the rise of the fifth cycle - namely a progressive, anti-monopoly, New Brandeis School. An emerging group of young scholars are inquiring whether we truly benefited from competition with little antitrust enforcement. The mounting evidence suggests no.

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The First Migration;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJdT6QcSbQ0

The Earliest North American Society;
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/a-brief-history-of-everyone-who-ever-lived/537942/

Native American Culture Areas;
https:/padlet-uploads.storage.googleapis.com/305315940/ddf9c83c00f09a43f88699d28ba8af57/cultareas.gif

The European Renascence;
https://www.britannica.com/event/Renaissance

Chapter 2

The Vikings;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xIy7FoiaQY

1942: The Voyages of Christopher Columbus;
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Christopher-Columbus/The-first-voyage

Spanish Empire in North America;
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwilq9qCwdXeAhXQdN8KHdWsDhoQjRx6BAgBEAU&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.timemaps.com%2Fhistory%2Fnorth-america-1789ad%2F&psig=AOvVaw19LUU-IwxrutBqasT1ORVz&ust=1542340676995424

Race for Empires in North America;
https://romanroadsmedia.com/2015/10/reformation-and-colonization/

Chapter 3

English Settlement in North America;
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/ushistory1os/chapter/english-settlements-in-america/

Colonist Affected by the Great Awakening and Enlightenment;
https://www.bartleby.com/essay/The-Enlighment-and-the-Great-Awakening-Influence-P3CFLRSTJ

Acts Passed Against Colonists;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eytc9ZaNWyc&t=121s

Colonist Response;
https://slideplayer.com/slide/12287091/72/images/9/Boston+Tea+Party%2C+Tea+Act+and+the+intolerable+Acts+Colonists+did+not+like+the+Tea+Act+because+it+forced+the+colonists+to+buy+tea+from+British+companies+%28British+East+India+Company%29+only..jpg

Chapter 4

Paul Reveres Ride/Lexington & Concord;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn1W9dBeQVU

The Deceleration of Independence;
https://cdn.britannica.com/42/97342-050-81F61CC3.jpg

Battle of Saratoga;
https://www.saratoga.com/aboutsaratoga/battle-of-saratoga/

Battle of Yorktown/Treaty of Paris;
https://www.exploros.com/summary/Yorktown-and-the-Treaty-of-Paris

Chapter 5/6

The Articles of Confederation;
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1776-1783/articles

The Great Compromise;
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-was-the-great-compromise.html

Federalism;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie6mvIDU2y4

Separation of Power;
https://docs-of-freedom.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/image/attachment/37/Ch_1_-_separation_of_power.jpg

The Constitution;
https://ballotpedia.org/United_States_Constitution

The Bill of Rights;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYEfLm5dLMQ

Chapter 7-9
The Rise of Political Parties;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEmOUHxessE

The Louisiana Purchase;
https://cdn.britannica.com/s:300x300/92/2192-004-7A826C8B.jpg

The Corps of Discovery;
https://www.legendsofamerica.com/ah-lewisclark/

The War of 1812;
https://www.history.com/topics/war-of-1812

The Monroe Doctrine;
https://www.britannica.com/event/Monroe-Doctrine

Nationalism and Sectionalism;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FeKQXigaFk

Ch 10/11

Jacksonian Democracy;
https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/jacksonian-democracy

Native American Removal;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQfP2Y2t45U

Trail West;
https://www.google.com/search?q=trails+west+oregon+mormon+santa+fe&rlz=1CAXWWL_enUS846&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiP_Yrt1ebhAhUCQq0KHWvkB2QQ_AUIECgD&biw=1366&bih=641&safe=active&ssui=on#imgrc=zfZqSRyQGCKiDM:

Texas Becomes a Nation;
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/the-early-republic/age-of-jackson/a/annexing-texas

Manifest Destiny;
https://www.britannica.com/event/Manifest-Destiny

Mexican American War;
https://www.britannica.com/event/Mexican-American-War

Chapter 12/13

The Industrial Revolution;
https://www.ducksters.com/history/us_1800s/industrial_revolution.php

Interchangeable Party;
https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/interchangeable-parts

The Transportation Revolution;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46foHFxUvC8

Eli Whitney's Cotton Gin;
https://padlet.com/ffitzgerald20/pfwh1w0hamdt

The Life of a Slave;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qcm1mPWk_pM

Chapter 14/15
Immigration to the United States in the 1800's;
https://sites.google.com/site/thenorthsite/early-immigration-in-the-u-s-1

Second Great Awakening;
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/the-early-republic/culture-and-reform/v/the-second-great-awakening-part-1

Abolitionist Movement;
https://www.historynet.com/abolitionist-movement

Women's Rights Movement in the 1800's;
https://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/WIC/Historical-Essays/No-Lady/Womens-Rights/

Compromise of 1850;
http://www.ushistory.org/us/images/00080486.gif

Kansas/Nebraska Act;
http://www.historyplace.com/lincoln/kansas.htm

Lincoln/Douglas Debates;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LljCzkPasuk

Election of 1860;
https://cdn.britannica.com/01/78201-050-A1F45B4D/Election-poster-campaign-lithograph-Abraham-Lincoln-Hannibal-1860.jpg

Chapter 16
The Fall of Ft. Sumter;
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/civil-war/battles/fort-sumter

The Emancipation Proclamation;
http://librarycompany.org/steptowardfreedom/images/section123/1-2-xam1862unistapres-5792-f-30b.jpg

Clara Barton and the American Red Cross;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7k0D01ODDFA

The Battle of Gettysburg;
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/civil-war/battles/gettysburg

The battle of Vicksburg;
https://www.historynet.com/battle-of-vicksburg

Southern Surrender at Appomattox Courthouse;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Bmt54ETNGM

Chapter 17

the 13th amendment;
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/civil-war-era/reconstruction/v/the-reconstruction-amendments-overview-and-13th-amendment

The 14th Amendment;
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv

The 15th Amendment;
http://www.shestokas.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/15th-Amendment.jp

The Election of 1876;
https://www.britannica.com/event/United-States-presidential-election-of-1876

Plessy v. Ferguson;
https://www.britannica.com/event/Plessy-v-Ferguson-1896

Chapter 18

The Transcontinental Railroad;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl0lxIMMb9E

Massacre at Wounded Knee;
https://www.britannica.com/event/Wounded-Knee-Massacre

Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887;
https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Filoveancestry.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F05%2Fdawes2-general-allotment-ac.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Filoveancestry.com%2Fdawes-general-allotment-act-february-8-1887%2F&docid=j3iMMPLRRGa0_M&tbnid=W4zfipw8My8qFM%3A&vet=10ahUKEwiR5KHnrJrmAhWHop4KHfbeCrUQMwhNKAAwAA..i&w=624&h=400&safe=active&bih=641&biw=1366&q=dawes%20general%20allotment%20act%20of%201887&ved=0ahUKEwiR5KHnrJrmAhWHop4KHfbeCrUQMwhNKAAwAA&iact=mrc&uact=8

The Homestead and Morrill Act;
https://into-the-westah1.weebly.com/homestead-act-and-morrill-land.html

Chapter 19;

The Bessemer Process;
https://www.britannica.com/technology/Bessemer-process

Growth of Invention - Late 1800's;
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/great-inventions-of-the-19th-century.html

The Rise of Big Business;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVn_23WpJM8

The Antitrust Movement;
https://hbr.org/2017/12/the-rise-fall-and-rebirth-of-the-u-s-antitrust-movement

The Labor Movement;
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=images&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjWlffAvpzmAhWQJDQIHaTpCxkQjRx6BAgBEAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theonion.com%2Ftimeline-of-the-u-s-labor-movement-1822960915&psig=AOvVaw3GChyl_9UhSU8Pu-pxJXr2&ust=1575565900092353

Chapter 20

The Rise of Immigration - late 1800's
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=images&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwieu5q4wJzmAhXEPn0KHYJXBugQjRx6BAgBEAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fsites.google.com%2Fsite%2Fthenorthsite%2Fearly-immigration-in-the-u-s-1&psig=AOvVaw3cDuCSiKxJY_U-WxMlJdGO&ust=1575566417753873

The Growth of Cities;
https://research.newamericaneconomy.org/report/immigrants-and-the-growth-of-americas-largest-cities/

Tenement Life - Causes and Effects;
https://www.nypl.org/blog/2018/06/07/tenement-homes-new-york-history-cramped-apartments

The Growth of Mass Communication - late 1800's
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqofcim2B4c

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What do Cincinnati, Miami, and Birmingham have in common when it comes to immigration? Their populations grew dramatically because of immigration. In fact, in each of these metro areas, over 87 percent of population growth between 2014 and 2017 was attributable to new immigrant residents.

New American Economy first released Map the Impact , featuring data on every congressional district, all 50 states, and 100 of America's largest metro areas, three years ago. Today, we are releasing our latest city data, showing how immigrants contribute by paying taxes, creating jobs, and supporting key industries. Why put a spotlight on metro areas? Simply put, cities are where immigrants tend to concentrate. In 2017, 85 percent of all immigrants in the United States lived in the top 100 metro areas. Past has already found that immigrants are critical to keeping large metro areas growing and vibrant. Now with several years of data, we can see how much immigrants contribute to helping cities grow.

From 2014 to 2017, immigrants contributed to nearly 33 percent of total population growth in the top 100 metro areas.

In fact, 12 metro areas would have shrunk without immigrants, including Philadelphia, Detroit, and San Jose.

Some metro areas saw a significant increase in the number of immigrant entrepreneurs. For example, in the Baton Rouge metro area, the number of immigrant business owners more than doubled from 1,450 to more than 3,000 just between 2014 and 2017.

As baby boomers retire in large numbers, and U.S. healthcare needs increase, immigrants are filling crucial healthcare roles. In 18 metro areas, healthcare was one of the top five industries for immigrants. In metro El Paso, foreign-born workers made up one in three healthcare workers in 2017 and in 11 metro areas, immigrants made up more than 1 in 10 healthcare workers.

Homeownership among immigrants is on the rise in 88 of the top 100 metro areas. The total number of immigrant homeowners rose from 7.3 million to 8 million, an increase of 9.5 percent between 2014 and 2017. In 22 metro areas, the number of immigrant homeowners increase by more than 10,000 in just those three years.

Table 1: Top 10 Metro Areas by Largest Share of Overall Population Growth, 2014-2017, Attributable to Immigrants

Along with their new and diverse perspectives, new arrivals bring their skills and entrepreneurial spirit to cities, fueling economic growth for all residents. In 2017, the 37.8 million immigrants who lived in the top 100 metro areas made up about 17.4 percent of their overall population. As workers, they serve as engineers designing machines in advanced manufacturing in Cincinnati, small business owners running grocery stores in Birmingham, and construction laborers building new homes in Miami.

Meanwhile, as consumers and taxpayers, immigrants are pumping billions of dollars into the local economies. In 2017 alone, immigrant households earned $1.3 trillion in income and held $973 billion in spending power in the top 100 metro areas combined, supporting local businesses from clothing shops to electronics stores to restaurants. Furthermore, in these metro areas, immigrants paid a total of nearly $361 billion in taxes, including more than $250 billion in federal taxes and $110 billion in state and local taxes, supporting local public services such as hospitals and schools.

Critically for some metro areas, immigration was the determining factor between growth and decline. Among the top 100 metro areas, 12 would have shrunk without growth in their immigrant population between 2014 and 2017.

In Philadelphia, for example, immigrants have become a key driver of its population growth. Without the influx of immigrants, the Philadelphia metro area would have shrunk by more than 13,000 people. Philadelphia's proactive welcoming policies, as well as its lower cost of living compared to other major cities like New York, have made it an attractive pace for immigrants and native-born Americans alike. Its overall population grew by nearly 47,000 people between 2014 and 2017.

These new Americans are arriving in cities at a time when baby boomers are retiring . Between 2014 and 2017, all but two of the top 100 metros had an increase in the share of their U.S.-born population aged 65 and above. Not only has this led to greater workforce needs as boomers retire, but it has also triggered a surging demand for healthcare support services.

Immigrants are uniquely positioned to help these aging communities. In all of the 100 metro areas, they are more likely to be working-age compared to their U.S.-born counterparts. As active workers in the labor force, immigrants contribute to entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security and help fund other social services that support senior citizens.

Meanwhile, immigrant workers also provide the medical care and personal assistance much needed by older populations. In 18 metro areas, healthcare appears as one of the top five industries in which immigrants played an outsize role in 2017. In El Paso, Texas, for example, foreign-born workers made up one in three healthcare workers. In 11 metro areas, immigrants made up more than 1 in 10 healthcare workers.

Immigrants are also breathing new life into local businesses as entrepreneurs. After settling down in places like Seattle or Tampa, many immigrants start their own businesses, creating jobs and making their own contributions to America's strong entrepreneurship culture. Between 2014 and 2017, the number of foreign-born entrepreneurs grew by 7.7 percent in the top 100 metro areas alone, from 2.6 million to 2.8 million.

Across the largest 100 metro areas, homeownership among immigrant residents is also on the rise, contributing to increased housing wealth in the country. The number of immigrant households who owned their homes rose from 7.3 million to 8 million, an increase of 9.5 percent, in the top 100 metro areas between 2014 and 2017. All in all, 22 metro areas saw the number of immigrant homeowners increase by more than 10,000 in just those three years. These new homeowners not only support local housing markets but also make major contributions through property taxes, further expanding local taxes bases that fund local programs and services.

Across the top 100 metro areas in the United States, from the smallest, Spokane, Washington, to the largest, New York City, immigrants are helping cities grow in myriad ways. They serve as healthcare workers filling critical labor gaps and caring for seniors, entrepreneurs creating local jobs, consumers patronizing local businesses, homeowners strengthening local housing markets, and taxpayers funding public services.

This new data shows that making cities more accessible and welcoming to immigrants will benefit not only the immigrants themselves, but also the communities where they live.

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Immigrants and the Growth of America's Largest Cities - New American Economy Research Fund

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What do Cincinnati, Miami, and Birmingham have in common when it comes to immigration? Their populations grew dramatically because of immigration. In fact, in each of these metro areas, over 87 percent of population growth between 2014 and 2017 was attributable to new immigrant residents.

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The Growth of Mass Communication - late 1800's

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The Growth of Mass Communication - late 1800's

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Learn more about history and science with Studies Weekly! StudiesWeekly.com

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By Carmen Nigro, Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building

New York is not the only city with tenement buildings, but these particularly crowded multi-family dwellings have had a significant effect on New York City's character and history.

Tenement homes are part of the city's history, architectural look, and sociology, as well as the lifestyles of its current residents. The imprint and influence of the New York tenement are layered upon the city much like the apartments themselves are layered atop each other.

Tenement Defined and Legislated

The Oxford English Dictionary's primary definition of tenement is "a room or a set of rooms forming a separate residence within a house or block of apartments." It's a fairly all-inclusive definition that speaks to the historic definitions of tenement as well as its modern and colloquial connotations, which the dictionary also addresses with this: "a house divided into and rented out as separate residences, especially one that is run-down and overcrowded."
The term itself is legally neutral, but most people-especially in New York City-apply the connotation of run-down and overcrowded when using it.

In New York City, rapid growth and the imposition of the New York City street grid both played major roles in the look, density, and availability of housing for New Yorkers. In A History of Housing in New York City (also in electronic format), author Richard Plunz states "the relationship between housing and social class quickly became institutionalized with exaggerated differences between the upper and lower ends of the social spectrum."
Plunz explains that New York housing problems date back to the mid-19th century, and that "the horrors of the tenement were perfected in New York, but most reform legislation also originated there, as did most housing philanthropy." The legislation appeared as a series of "Tenement House Acts" in 1867, 1879, 1901, and 1919.

A tenement is legally defined in New York by the Tenement House Act of 1867 as "any house, building, or portion thereof, which is rented, leased, let or hired out to be occupied or is occupied, as the home or residence of more than three families living independently of one another and doing their own cooking upon the premises, or by more than two families upon a floor, so living and cooking and having a common right in the halls, stairways, yards, water-closets, or privies, or some of them." This definition applied to much of the available housing of the time, legally classifying those buildings as tenements.

General Timeline and History

Tenements originated from subdivided structures that originally had other purposes, such as single-family homes, with the usually substandard and small living quarters leased to the poor. In the 19th century, the primary housing available to New York's low-income residents were those subdivided buildings and self-built shanties, clustered together in different areas of the city.
New houses were not often built for the poor, and the affluent mostly built single-family homes for themselves. Tenements built specifically for housing the poor originated at some time between 1820 and 1850, and even the new buildings were considered overcrowded and inadequate.

By the end of the Civil War, "tenement" was a term for housing for the urban poor, with well-established connotations for unsafe and unsanitary conditions. With the city's population nearing one million people at the time, there were more than 15,000 tenement buildings in New York City, not yet including the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, or Staten Island.
The Manhattan grid allowed for lots measuring 25 feet by 100 feet, and tenements tended to occupy about 90 percent of these lots, allowing little to no room for natural light or air shafts. Buildings that did not occupy the entire lots often had "rear tenements" built into the yards behind them, providing even worse conditions than rooms of the buildings that faced the streets. It was all very dense, very crowded, and unregulated-conditions that fostered disease and inhumane living conditions, which soon caught the eye of reformers.

In 1865, the " Report of the Council of hygiene and public health of the Citizens' Association of New York upon the sanitary condition of the city" (available digitally via Sabin Americana) was published. This thorough analysis of the housing conditions of the time contained extraordinary detail and classified more than 65 percent of the city's population as living in substandard housing conditions.
The report was followed by the city's first comprehensive housing law, the aforementioned Tenement House Act of 1867. The law famously required fire escapes on buildings and windows in each room, but was largely ineffective in improving the lives of tenement dwellers. Additional Tenement House Acts brought more reforms in 1879, 1901, and 1919, with the 1901 law considered a pivotal point. Tenement houses built before were called "old law tenements;" any built after were called "new law tenements." In 1903, the Tenement House Department was finally organized and took over inspection of the tenements from the variety of city departments that previously had to enforce different sections of the laws.

Through the latter half of the 19th century, a variety of commissions, exhibits, and published works pushed the conditions of the tenements into the popular conscience and spurred legislators into enacting reform.
Numerous publications appeared, such asThe tenement house problem, in which statistics, diagrams, photographs, and eyewitness reports were used as persuasive arguments for housing reform. In particular, Jacob Riis' use of photography in How the Other Half Lives was effective in presenting the housing conditions to a wider public. Riis' work can be explored more thoroughly in this anthology of his work on biblioboard, and his papers at the NYPL can also be accessed.
Tenement dwellers were educated about changes to the laws that would affect their housing conditions with publications such as " The tenants' manual; a handbook of information for dwellers in tenement and apartment houses and for settlement and other workers" (also available digitally), which advocated for awareness of sanitation methods, legal matters, and even available recreation opportunities. Social workers and newspapers also helped publicize this information.

The tenement laws were challenged in courts and amendments, and a new "Multiple Dwelling Law" took shape in 1929. The laws regarding apartment housing in New York are currently called the "Multiple Dwelling Law" and are currently in force. From the 1930s to the 1960s, the concept of "Slum Clearance," summarized in this article, was the dominant policy surrounding New York's tenement houses. Slum clearance initiatives often had the backing of federal funding, and, initially, little opposition. By the 1950s, the impact of this policy led to many of the tenement buildings being demolished.

Tenements in Manhattan near the Williamburg Bridge, from photographs taken by NYC Tenement House Department inspectors; NYPL Digital Collections, Image ID: 3984322

Researching New York's Tenement Housing History

The New York Public Library holds multitudes of materials on our city's history. The scope ranges from the built environment to social conditions, from natural history to scientific discovery, and the amount of material available to research a cornerstone issue such as tenement housing is vast.
Our collections, primary and secondary sources, archives and monographs, digital and print, text and visual, are embedded in collections across the research libraries. These tremendous holdings are always available for researchers to access.

Tenements and elevated train tracks, Broadway at 13th St., Manhattan, from photographs taken by NYC Tenement House Department inspectors.

NYPL Digital Collections, Image ID: 3984413

Tenement Conditions Documented in Photographs

Photographs are terrific primary sources and, in the context of tenement house history, are particularly potent because of their use in the reform movement and the slum clearance programs. Some of the Library's digitized tenement photos include:

A rear tenement room in NYC, from photographs concerning labor, housing and social conditions in the United States by Lewis Hine.

NYPL Digital Collections, Image ID: 416558

A collection of photographic negatives taken by inspectors of the New York City Tenement House Department from 1902 to 1914 (just a few are featured in this post). It is comprised of roughly 8,000 glass plate negatives and 249 mounted plates, which were used by the Tenement House Department for exhibition purposes.
The collection includes exterior views of buildings, domestic interiors, backyards, and plumbing and sanitary facilities, as well as images of street scenes and local residents.
The New York Tenement House Department was created in 1901 to enforce new building standards and document safety and health violations in New York City's overcrowded multi-family dwellings. Inspectors, including staff photographers, surveyed and documented the living conditions of the occupants, including information pertaining to light and ventilation, fire safety, sanitation, and interior layout.

A collection gifted to NYPL by the New York City Department of Housing and Buildings in 1942. The original nitrate negatives (4,198 images) were microfilmed on four 35mm reels before being destroyed. A representative selection of images (roughly 1,100 in number) was preserved with interpositives and contact prints.
The collection includes exterior and interior shots of buildings, as well as images of street scenes, storefronts, fire report cards, and various employees of the Tenement House Department. It provides a visual documentation of over one thousand photographs of tenement conditions, and includes some striking images.

Hine was an American sociologist and photographer who used his images as a tool for social reform, documenting conditions of inadequate housing and child labor. Among Hine's wide scope of photographs are some particularly of tenement conditions.

These can be found in the larger collection called Photographic views of New York City, 1870's-1970's

Using Pamphlets as Primary Source Documents

The Library holds a substantial collection of pamphlet volumes, smaller booklets of usually fewer than 50 pages, that have been bound together and contain related subject matter.

Pamphlets were not always collected by libraries, so they can be difficult for researchers to find, and their ephemeral nature means that some are in quite poor condition. But contemporary publications pertaining to tenement reform were frequently distributed as pamphlets, so access to them is valuable to those seeking primary sources. Highlights from the Library's holdings include:

Maps

Those researching housing conditions can use maps to track building by building growth in an area. Maps were also produced by city agencies and reformers to illustrate conditions in ways that text could not convey.

Fire insurance maps give detailed building-specific data for a city. By comparing fire insurance maps of a specific area of the city over time, one can see the changes in development of an area: height of the buildings, how much lot they occupy, from which materials they are constructed, how many are on a block, etc.

Sanitary and social chart of the Fourth Ward of the City of New York, to accompany a report of the 4th Sanitary Inspection District, made to the Council of Hygiene of the Citizens' Association; NYPL Digital Collections, Image ID: 5056960

In the News

The word "tenement" appears in some of our earliest digitized newspapers, in advertisements for rentals and sales.
The ProQuest New York Times (1851-2013) database has more than 106,000 results for the word "tenement," which included reporting on the Health Officer's account to the Common Council about increases of deaths in the city, and how some of those increases could be attributed to overcrowded dwellings and the rental of cellars as housing.

Additional digitized historical newspapers can be found on the Library's database menu.

New York Times article dated Jan 21, 1852

In the Archives

How the Other Half Lives, page 1, from the Jacob Riis papers.

NYPL Digital Collections, Image ID: 1654566

In addition to the Jacob Riis papers, other collections in the Library's Manuscripts and Archives Division provide powerful primary source documentation of tenement building and the housing reform movement in New York.

Among the useful materials:

Tenement House Building Company minutes

Letters written for the New York Tenement House Commission that are part of the Richard Watson Gilder papers

People's Institute records, featuring the work of Charles Sprague Smith, to teach the theory and practice of government and social philosophy to workers and recent immigrants in New York City. It sponsored lectures, classes, concerts, and other community activities principally on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Lillian D. Wald papers; Wald was a public health nurse and social worker on New York City's Lower East Side, a pioneer in American social work and public health

The American Institute of Social Service Exhibition, Photographs exhibition of American social conditions in 1900s, which show the character of tenements and other buildings

Committee for Slum Clearance, 1954-1959, part of the Robert Moses papers.

Modern influence

In many ways, New York City remains defined by its density, a characteristic brought about by compact living. Slum clearance policies did not eliminate tenements from New York-the buildings still populate our blocks in various states of repair and are still homes for thousands of New Yorkers.

The Tenement Museum is a powerful public history example of the influence and impact of New York's tenement housing. It has been a significant catalyst for researchers, who have produced a number of scholarly works and other publications including the museum's own newspaper, The Tenement Times.

Tenement Museum Reading List:

Eighth Avenue and 46th Street, 1997, from the Bill Barvin Location Photograph Archive; NYPL Digital Collections, Image ID: 5210097

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Tenement Homes: The Outsized Legacy of New York's Notoriously Cramped Apartments | The New York Public Library

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The influence of the New York City tenement is layered upon the city much like the apartments themselves are layered atop each other.

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political machine, in U.S. politics, a party organization, headed by a single boss or small autocratic group, that commands enough votes to maintain political and administrative control of a city, county, or state.

The rapid growth of American cities in the 19th century, a result of both immigration and migration from rural areas, created huge problems for city governments, which were often poorly structured and unable to provide services. In those conditions, political machines-such as Tammany Hall, run by boss William Magear Tweed (1823-73) in New York City -were able to build a loyal voter following, especially among immigrant groups, by performing such favours as providing jobs or housing.

Political machines are characterized by a disciplined and hierarchical organization, reaching down to neighbourhood and block organizers, that enables the machine to respond to the problems of individual neighbourhoods, or even families, in exchange for loyalty at the polls. The term refers to their ability to elect candidates or enact measures with mechanical efficiency and predictability.

Although the primary goal of a political machine is keeping itself in power rather than providing good government, machines have been responsible for restructuring city governments to centralize authority, improving facilities and services, helping to assimilate immigrant groups, and encouraging the growth of business and industry. Supporters of political machines say that they "work" and that consolidating power in the hands of a boss, like Mayor Richard J. Daley (1902-76) of Chicago, guarantees city governments the power and authority that they need to cope with urban problems effectively. However, because political machines in such cities as Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Kansas City have also been responsible for many abuses of power, the term carries a pejorative sense.

Organizers who "deliver" the votes are often rewarded with patronage jobs. However, patronage can result in poorer service to the citizens because appointees may be neither qualified for their jobs nor interested in performing them. Control of both elective and appointed posts also gives a machine control of government salaries and revenues, which can be used to enrich the party at the public's expense. For example, the machine may accept donations or kickbacks from businesses in return for such favours as tax or zoning concessions or the award of lucrative public-works contracts. In some cities, machine business dealings have included accepting money from organized-crime syndicates in exchange for protection from legal interference.

In cities whose neighbourhoods are divided along ethnic or racial lines, machine patronage may aggravate hostilities by awarding most jobs and services to those people of the same background as the city's power elite. In practice, this made machine politics the last defense of white neighbourhoods against growing black populations, while black politicians who anticipated power viewed their constituents as merely the latest in a series of ethnic or racial groups that had benefited from the machine.

Since the 19th-century heyday of machine politics, civil service reforms limiting the number of patronage jobs, the institution of direct primaries rather than party nomination of candidates, the municipal operation of public utilities, and judicial review by state and federal courts have all reduced the power of political machines. The steady exodus of city residents to the suburbs since World War II and a more mobile population with fewer ties to particular neighbourhoods have also weakened the social base that once made political machines synonymous with city government.

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Political machine | Definition, History, & Facts

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political machine, in U.S. politics, a party organization, headed by a single boss or small autocratic group, that commands enough votes to maintain political and administrative control of a city, county, or state.

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Important Examples of Progressive Reforms
(Progressive Era: approx. 1890s-1920)
Settlement House Movement - White, upper-middle class, college-educated women who wanted to make a difference in society created and worked at settlement houses, which were like community centers in inner-city, immigrant neighborhoods.They wanted to improve the lives of slum-dwellers by providing education and child care, teaching English and other basic skills, helping the immigrants get better jobs and housing, and uplifting them culturally (art & music appreciation.) Part of the mission of the settlement house workers was Americanization of immigrants - to teach the immigrants WASP middle-class values. The most famous settlement house was Hull House in , led by Jane Addams.Black middle-class women ran separate settlement houses for fellow African-Americans - illustrating the racial segregation of the Progressive movement.

Housing and Sanitation Reforms - Progressive reformers urged cities to pass legislation which set standards for housing (to try to eliminate the worst tenements) and such sanitation matters as garbage pick-up and sewage systems.The legislation would require the hiring of inspectors to see that these standards were met.Many of the inspectors first hired by city governments under these reforms were women, such as Jane Addams.

Beautification Campaigns - Some reformers wanted to improve the urban environment by making it more pleasant and attractive. This, like the housing reforms, was based on their idea that an improved environment meant improved people. (This idea was a rejection of Social Darwinism.)Some of their reforms included parks, civic centers, and better transportation systems.Some historians argue that these were superficial reforms enacted to please the middle-class inhabitants or tourists of cities, but did not really address the dire problems of the masses who lived in the slums.

Anti-Prostitution Campaign - Progressives were responsible for the Mann Act (1910), whichprohibited interstate transportation of women for "immoral purposes."By 1915, nearly every state had outlawed prostitution.

Woman suffrage - This was the movement to secure for women the right to vote. Many different kinds of women (race, class, and ethnicity) joined the campaign to win the federal amendment, but the movement was mainly led by WASP middle and upper-class women.

Factory Safety Regulations, Limits on Working Hours (mainly for women), Workers' Compensation for injuries, Restrictions on Women and Child Labor - While labor unions sought these measures by organizing workers to bargain with their employers, a tense alliance between some middle-class and working-class reformers also sought these reforms by passing laws (government intervention instead of collective bargaining.)These reformers were successful in convincing most states to pass factory inspection laws, workers comp, and minimum age of employment laws.Some states passed laws limiting the number of hours women (but not men) could work.These regulations were usually difficult to enforce; many employers found ways to evade them.

Another problem was that some working-class families wanted their women and children to work in order to make as much money for the family as possible (in order to survive) and did not appreciate reforms that restricted women and child labor.Many middle-class reformers did not understand this reaction.Many middle-class reformers believed that the working class should adopt WASP middle-class values, which included the value that women and children should not work for wages.

Moreover, even though they wanted to improve conditions for workers, many middle-class reformers were suspicious of (or hostile to) labor unions because they felt threatened by the idea of working-class autonomy, or working-class solidarity.They were much more comfortable with the idea of the middle class generously bestowing labor reforms upon the downtrodden workers, which is a paternalistic attitude.Working-class reformers, including socialists, recognized this condescending attitude and were uneasy about working with middle-class reformers to ahiceve labor legislation, though they often swallowed hard and did anyway. There were, however, some examples of fairly harmonious organizations that brought working-class and middle-class reformers together to help workers.

Temperance, then Prohibition - Progressive reformers focused their fight against the consumption of alcohol on the saloons.Saloons were a major center of immigrant culture, for they were not only bars but important social gathering places and where most political machines operated out of.The Progressives' war on saloons was motivated by a sincere concern for the real dangers of alcohol consumption and its effect on families, particularly on innocent women and children, and also by a less compassionate anti-immigrant sentiment. Overall, Prohibition aimed at decreasing, if not stopping, drinking by the working class, especially working-class immigrants. Prohibition also had an economic motivation: employers wanted sober, efficient workers.

- Progressives viewed the immigrants' political machines as corrupt and inefficient.Also, middle-class WASP reformers felt threatened by the power these machines afforded working-class immigrants.Progressives wanted to take the "politics" (the wheeling & dealing, the personal favors) out of government to make it more scientific and efficient and remove power from the hands of immigrants.They advocated replacing elected officials with appointed Kill the Political Machine experts, such as trained city managers.

(17 Initiative, Referendum, Recall, and Popular Election of Senators th Amendment) (look these up in your textbook if you don't know what they are)These reforms aimed to bring about broader political participation - to return power to "the people" and eliminated corrupt and concentrated power.Some historians argue that middle-class WASP reformers pushed these reforms because they saw themselves, not working-class immigrants or African Americans, as the "people" who would gain power.Some middle-class reformers assumed that the working class would not have the time, intelligence, or other resources to participate actively in the political process.

- Before the passage of these acts, there was no government agency to make sure that food, drugs, or any other kind of product was safe. The credo "let the buyer beware" had dominated.But when Upton Sinclair published Meat Inspection Act, and the Pure Food & Drug Act The Jungle in 1906, which publicized the disgusting methods of meat-packing plants, the public became outraged.Reformers argued that in a complex, technological age dominated by big business, consumers needed impartial government experts to regulate manufacturers, tell consumers what was safe, and eliminate corrupt business practices.

Anti-Trust Regulation - Progressives sought more fairness in the capitalist economy and thought that if businesses became too big and powerful (trusts or monopolies), then they could exploit consumers and workers and drive out small businesses. Progressives believed that the government needed to intervene to regulate the size and power of corporations. Examples of anti-trust laws and government agencies to regulate "trusts" are the Interstate Commerce Commission (and the Hepburn Act), the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, and The Federal Trade Commission.

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Important Examples of Progressive Reforms

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Important Examples of Progressive Reforms (Progressive Era: approx. 1890s-1920) Settlement House Movement - White, upper-middle class, college-educated women who wanted to make a difference in society created and worked at settlement houses, which were like community centers in inner-city, immigrant neighborhoods.They wanted to improve the lives of slum-dwellers by providing education and child care, teaching English and other basic skills, helping the immigrants get better jobs and housing, and uplifting them culturally (art & music appreciation.)

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The Labor Movement in the United States | History

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Imperialists believe that the American government should protect what it considers to be the national interest, even if that means getting involved in conflicts around the globe. They also maintain that it is the government's duty to spread our political and economic systems to other countries, by force if necessary. In other words, they believe in U.S. leadership of the world. The Federalists were the original American imperialists. Being Anglophiles, they looked to Great Britain as the role model for American foreign policy. Federalists desired strong financial and commercial ties to Europe and an economy based on overseas trade. Power needed to be concentrated in a strong federal government in order to speak with one voice to the governments of other nations. A strong military was needed to protect the interests of American bankers and businessmen. An admirer of Caesar and Napoleon, Alexander Hamilton desired an imperialistic foreign policy for the new nation. In 1799, Major General Hamilton "was a man who dreamed dreams, and in his imagination he was already leading his army into Louisiana, the Floridas and points south. 'We ought,' he said, 'to squint at South America.'" The ideological division in early American public policy is clear: "Hamilton longs for empire, opulence, and glory for the nation, whereas Jefferson seeks virtue, freedom, and happiness for the social individual." Hamilton was "very opportunistic about international diplomacy" and distrusted "moralizing in foreign policy." 1

Isolationists believe that the American government should be predominantly concerned about the needs and desires of its own citizens. They do not believe our government should be potentially involved in every conflict around the globe. They do not believe our government should attempt to control the governments of other nations. In other words, they believe in national self-determination. The Anti-Federalists and Democratic-Republicans were the original American isolationists. They believed in decentralized politics, agrarian-based economics, no standing army, staying out of Europe's continual bloodshed, and friendship with the people of other nations but non-alliance with those people's governments. Isolationists are often characterized as provincial bumpkins. This characterization hardly fits the nation's premier isolationist. Jefferson was a diplomat and a student of language, science, and philosophy. Cosmopolitan in outlook, he nonetheless opposed national involvement in overseas political and military conflicts. Referring to a controversy about the West Indies, in a 1791 letter to an American diplomat, he stated, "If there be one principle more deeply rooted than any other in the mind of every American, it is, that we should have nothing to do with conquest." In 1799, Jefferson wrote, "I am for free commerce with all nations; political connection with none; and little or no diplomatic establishment. And I am not for linking ourselves by new treaties with the quarrels of Europe; entering that field of slaughter to preserve their balance..." In his first inaugural address (1801), President Jefferson urged "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none." He held this view throughout his life. 2

Using the word isolationism to describe Jefferson's foreign policy is an oversimplification. Setting aside the negative images with which it is saddled due to 70 years of imperial propaganda, the term is still problematic because it does not express the full range of Jefferson's thought. In addition to the obvious forswearing of entangling alliances, Jeffersonian isolationism involved support for a republic rather than an empire, for national sovereignty, for ethical conduct, for human rights, and for popular control of foreign policy. These five beliefs could be thought of as causes, components, or concomitants of isolationism. Jefferson "vigorously rejected the view that only individuals are bound by a moral code, and that nations are free to act in accordance with self-interest without any restraints." Writing to James Madison in 1789, he remarked, "I know but one code of morality for men, whether acting singly or collectively. He who says I will be a rogue when I act in company with a hundred others, but an honest man when I act alone, will be believed in the former assertion but not in the latter." Despite his belief in the importance of moral conduct in foreign relations, Jefferson was not nave in his view of the world. He had, for example, a realistic assessment of foreign governments. In 1812, Jefferson condemned both the French and British governments for trying to "draw to themselves the power, the wealth and the resources of other nations." Three years later, he called Napoleon "the wretch...who has been the author of more misery and suffering to the world, than any being who ever lived before him. After destroying the liberties of his country, he has exhausted all its resources, physical and moral, to indulge his own maniac ambition, his own tyrannical and overbearing spirit." He did not, however, have a favorable view of the British government and other opponents of Napoleon. Jefferson condemned the imperialism of all the leading countries of Europe: "The will of the allies? There is no more moderation, forbearance, or even honesty in theirs, than in that of Bonaparte. They have proved that their object, like his, is plunder." 3

Isolationism is a problematic word. It is an epithet, it is anachronistic when applied to Jefferson, and it fails to indicate the full range of thought involved. Admittedly, it is a flawed term, but it may be the best term available. Non-interventionism is a non-definition that merely calls attention to another undefined term, the word continentalism never caught on after being proposed by scholar Charles Beard, and neutrality is too vague. To some, isolationism may imply ostrich-like, willful ignorance of the rest of the world, but this was never the case with its most famous practitioners. The isolation is not one of intellect, trade, or travel, but one of entangling alliances, military conflict, and imperial domination. For isolationists, national self-determination for colonies and national sovereignty for America are closely-related principles emanating from a common source: a commitment to democracy, freedom, and decentralization. Isolationism is the foreign policy of traditional liberals. As Robert Morss Lovett noted in 1924 in his Progressive Party statement for the elite journal Foreign Affairs,

It is historically characteristic of governments devoted to conservative measures and the maintenance of the status quo in domestic affairs to develop an aggressive policy in foreign affairs, and similarly for governments whose chief outlook is toward the progressive improvement of existing conditions to seek to disembarrass themselves from the complications of foreign policy.

This progressive tradition was first manifested in power through the presidency of Thomas Jefferson.

Isolationism may be an unfortunate term in some ways, but it describes a real, deep, and honorable tradition in American politics. Prior to the 1930s, the ideological underpinning of our approach to the world lacked a distinct label because it was simply accepted as traditional U.S. foreign policy. In his 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, Thomas Paine wrote, "As Europe is our market for trade, we ought to form no partial connection with any part of it. It is the true interest of America to steer clear of European contentions..." In 1796, George Washington's Farewell Address noted, "The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible....It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world..." The Independence Day speech of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in 1821 indicated that isolationism was still taken for granted 25 years later. Referring to America, he reminded the House of Representatives, "She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings...She goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own." The Monroe Doctrine acted as an isolationist bulwark for many years, until it was corrupted by the Theodore Roosevelt Corollary (1904) and virtually set aside by Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. The Doctrine asserted,

In the wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy to do so....It is impossible that the allied powers [of Europe] should extend their political system to any portion of either [American] continent without endangering our peace and happiness; nor can anyone believe that our southern brethren, if left to themselves, would adopt it of their own accord....It is still the true policy of the United States to leave the [Latin American] parties to themselves, in hope that other powers will pursue the same course.

In opposing the annexation of Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) in 1870, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Charles Sumner (R-MA) argued that Caribbean islands "should not be absorbed by the United States, but should remain as independent powers, and should try for themselves to make the experiment of self-government....To the African belongs the equatorial belt and he should enjoy it undisturbed." Things began to change dramatically in 1898. With the annexation of Hawaii and the Spanish-American War, we were well on our way to becoming an empire with extensive political and military ties to the rest of the world. As a result, traditional foreign policy fell into disfavor among U.S. elites and was eventually disparaged by the dismissive term isolationism. Meanwhile, when the word imperialism fell out of favor, it was exchanged for the more euphemistic internationalism.

The Best of Jeff Taylor

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Imperialism and Isolationism: Contrasting Approaches to Foreign Policy - LewRockwell LewRockwell.com

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DIGG THIS Imperialists believe that the American government should protect what it considers to be the national interest, even if that means getting involved in conflicts around the globe. They also maintain that it is the government's duty to spread our political and economic systems to other countries, by force if necessary.

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V Rise of Political Machines;
https://www.britannica.com/topic/political-machine

The Progressive Reform;
http://www-personal.umd.umich.edu/~ppennock/Progressive%20Reforms.htm

Rise of Labor Organizations;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewu-v36szlE

Women Temperance Movement;
https://worldhistory.us/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/temperance-movement-produces-womens-suffrage-leaders.jpg

Election of 1912;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWKzNvgRKoQ

Isolationism vs. Imperialism;

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2006/11/jeff-taylor/imperialism-and-isolationism-contrasting-approaches-to-foreign-policy/

chapter 23

Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEGVcSpfM9k

New Technology of World War 1
https://www.loc.gov/collections/world-war-i-rotogravures/articles-and-essays/military-technology-in-world-war-i/

President Wilson's 14 points
https://m.warhistoryonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/president-wilson-14-points-b.jpg

Treaty of Versaillles
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/treaty-of-versailles

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Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand

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Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand

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The Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand Cartoon

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World War I was less than one year old when British writer H. G. Wells lamented the fate of humanity at the hands of "man's increasing power of destruction" (H. G. Wells, "Civilization at the Breaking Point," New York Times, May 27, 1915, 2). Although considered a father of science fiction, Wells was observing something all too real-technology had changed the face of combat in World War I and ultimately accounted for an unprecedented loss of human life.

[Detail] "Huge siege guns of the Central Powers used in the smashing of forts." War of the Nations, 110.

Infantry warfare had depended upon hand-to-hand combat. World War I popularized the use of the machine gun-capable of bringing down row after row of soldiers from a distance on the battlefield. This weapon, along with barbed wire and mines, made movement across open land both difficult and dangerous. Thus trench warfare was born. The British introduced tanks in 1916; they were used with airplanes and artillery to advance the front. The advent of chemical warfare added to the soldier's perils.

"French, British, and German Types of Battle Tanks." War of the Nations, 167.

Sea and airborne weapons made killing from a distance more effective as well. Guns mounted on ships were able to strike targets up to twenty miles inland. The stealth and speed of German submarines gave Germany a considerable advantage in its dominance of the North Sea. Although airplanes were technologically crude, they offered a psychological advantage. Fighter pilot aces such as Manfred von Richthofen, Germany's "Red Baron," became celebrities and heroes, capturing the world's imagination with their daring and thrilling mid-air maneuvers.

[Detail] "The Insidious and Deadly Gas That Creeps Noiselessly Down Toward the Foe." War of the Nations, 210.

Newspapers charted the public's reaction-horror and vengeance-to these technological advancements. A few weeks after the Germans first used poison gas in Ypres, Belgium, on April 22, 1915, a London newswire to the New York Times described the brutal details of the attack and the immediate effects on the soldiers, concluding: "It is without doubt the most awful form of scientific torture." Yet a Daily Chronicle [London] editorial urged Britain to retaliate with poison gas use of its own (quoted in New York Times, May 7, 1915, 2). In fact, Germany claimed that the Allies were already using mines charged with poison gas. So horrified were people by chemical warfare that the use of poison gases was banned for future wars, although not until 1925.

When Germany's plan for a swift military victory went unrealized, the pace of war bogged down. Both sides tried to break this stalemate through the use of force. In previous wars, victory was achieved through territorial supremacy; in World War I it was accomplished by simply outlasting the opponent-a "war of attrition." When fighting first broke out in August 1914, many hoped the war would be short-lived; few predicted a conflict that would last for more than four years and scar an entire generation with its unprecedented brutality.

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Military Technology in World War I | Articles & Essays | Newspaper Pictorials: World War I Rotogravures, 1914-1919 | Digital Collections | Library of Congress

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World War I was less than one year old when British writer H. G. Wells lamented the fate of humanity at the hands of "man's increasing power of destruction" (H. G. Wells, "Civilization at the Breaking Point," New York Times, May 27, 1915, 2).

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Background: The Impact of World War I

World War I was one of the most destructive wars in modern history. The opposing sides in World War I were the Entente Powers and the Central Powers.

Nearly ten million soldiers died. The enormous losses on all sides resulted in part from the introduction of new weapons like the machine gun and gas warfare. Military leaders failed to adjust their tactics to the increasingly mechanized nature of warfare. A policy of attrition, particularly on the Western Front, cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

No official agencies kept careful track of civilian losses during the war years. Scholars suggest that as many as thirteen million non-combatants died as a direct or indirect result of the war. The conflict uprooted or displaced millions of persons from their homes in Europe and Asia Minor.

Property and industry losses were catastrophic, especially in France, Belgium, Poland, and Serbia, where fighting had been heaviest.

Background: The "Fourteen Points"

In January 1918, some ten months before the end of World War I, US President Woodrow Wilson had written a list of proposed war aims which he called the " Fourteen Points ."

Eight of these points dealt specifically with territorial and political settlements to accompany a victory of the Entente Powers (Great Britain, France, and Russia). One important point was the idea of national self-determination for ethnic populations in Europe. Other points focused on preventing war in the future. The last principle proposed a League of Nations to arbitrate international disputes. Wilson hoped his proposal would bring about a just and lasting peace: a "peace without victory."

German leaders signed the armistice (an agreement to stop fighting) in the Compiègne Forest on November 11, 1918. Many of them believed then that the Fourteen Points would form the basis of the future peace treaty. But when the heads of the governments of the United States, Great Britain, France, and Italy met in Paris to discuss treaty terms, the European countries of the "Big Four" rejected this approach.

After the devastation of World War I, the victorious Western powers (Great Britain, the United States, France, and Italy, known as the "Big Four") imposed a series of treaties upon the defeated Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey).

Viewing Germany as the chief instigator of the conflict, the European Allied powers decided instead to impose harsh treaty terms upon defeated Germany. The treaty was presented to the German delegation for signature on May 7, 1919, at the Palace of Versailles near Paris. The Treaty of Versailles held Germany responsible for starting the war and liable for massive material damages.

Provisions of the Versailles Treaty

Germany lost 13 percent of its territory, including 10 percent of its population. The Treaty of Versailles forced Germany to:

concede Eupen-Malmédy to Belgium

concede the Hultschin district to Czechoslovakia

concede Poznan, West Prussia, and Upper Silesia to Poland

return Alsace and Lorraine, annexed in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War, to France.

The treaty called for:

demilitarization and occupation of the Rhineland

special status for the Saarland under French control

referendums to determine the future of areas in northern Schleswig on the Danish-German frontier and parts of Upper Silesia on the border with Poland.

Further, all German overseas colonies were taken away from Germany and became League of Nation Mandates. The city of Danzig (today Gdansk), with its large ethnically German population, became a Free City.

Perhaps the most humiliating portion of the treaty for defeated Germany was Article 231, commonly known as the "War Guilt Clause." This clause forced the German nation to accept complete responsibility for starting World War I. As such, Germany was to be held liable for all material damages.

France's premier, Georges Clemenceau, in particular, insisted on imposing enormous reparation payments. While aware that Germany would probably not be able to pay such a towering debt, Clemenceau and the French still greatly feared rapid German recovery and a new war against France.

The French sought to limit Germany's potential to regain its economic superiority and also to rearm. The German army was to be limited to 100,000 men. Conscription was forbidden. The treaty restricted the Navy to vessels under 10,000 tons, with a ban on the acquisition or maintenance of a submarine fleet. Germany was forbidden to maintain an air force.

Finally, Germany was required to conduct war crimes proceedings against the Kaiser and other leaders for waging aggressive war. The subsequent Leipzig Trials, without the Kaiser or other significant national leaders in the dock, resulted largely in acquittals. They were widely perceived as a sham, even in Germany.

Impact of the Treaty

The harsh terms of the peace treaty did not ultimately help to settle the international disputes which had initiated World War I. On the contrary, the treaty got in the way of inter-European cooperation and intensified the underlying issues which had caused the war in the first place.

For the populations of the defeated powers-Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria-the peace treaties came across as unfair punishment. Their governments quickly resorted to violating the military and financial terms of the treaties. This was the case whether the governments were democratic as in Germany or Austria, or authoritarian in the case of Hungary and Bulgaria. Efforts to revise and defy provisions of the peace became a key element in their foreign policies and became a destabilizing factor in international politics.

A "dictated peace?"

The newly formed German democratic government saw the Versailles Treaty as a "dictated peace" ( Diktat ). The war guilt clause, huge reparation payments, and limitations on the German military seemed particularly oppressive to most Germans. To many Germans, the treaty seemed to contradict the the very first of Wilson's Fourteen Points, which called for transparency in peace negotiations and diplomacy. Revision of the Versailles Treaty was one of the platforms that gave radical right-wing parties in Germany such credibility to mainstream voters in the 1920s and early 1930s. Among these parties was Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party.

Promises to rearm, reclaim German territory, remilitarize the Rhineland, and regain European and world prominence after the humiliating defeat and peace appealed to ultranationalist sentiment. These promises helped some average voters to overlook the more radical tenets of Nazi ideology.

The reparations and a general inflationary period in Europe in the 1920s caused spiraling hyperinflation of the German Reichsmark by 1923. This hyperinflationary period combined with the effects of the Great Depression (beginning in 1929) to undermine the stability of the German economy. These conditions wiped out the personal savings of the middle class and led to massive unemployment. Such economic chaos contributed to social unrest and the instability of the fragile Weimar Republic .

Stab-in-the-Back Legend

Finally, the efforts of the Western European powers to marginalize Germany through the Versailles Treaty undermined and isolated German democratic leaders.

Some in the general population believed that Germany had been "stabbed in the back" by the "November criminals"-those who had helped to form the new Weimar government and negotiate the peace. Many Germans "forgot" that they had applauded the fall of Germany's emperor, initially welcomed parliamentary democratic reform, and celebrated the armistice. They recalled only that the German Left-commonly seen as Socialists, Communists, and Jews-had surrendered German honor to a shameful peace.

This Dolchstosslegende (stab-in-the-back legend) helped to discredit the German socialist and liberal circles who were most committed to Germany's fragile democratic experiment. The difficulties caused by social and economic unrest in the aftermath of World War I and its peace undermined democratic solutions in Weimar Germany.

German voters ultimately found this kind of leadership in Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party.

Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

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Learn about the provisions and impact of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, including the "War Guilt Clause" which held Germany responsible for starting World War I.