Slavery in American History

Early 16th century first African slaves brought to America by the Spaniards and
Portuguese; 1619-1620 African slaves brought to Jamestown by
Dutch vessel; at first, most black slaves treated as servants;

1662 first Virginia Slave Laws; e.g. all children shall be held bond or free only
according to the condition of the mother;

1688 first official protest against slavery by a few Quakers from Germantown,
Pa. on religious and moral grounds;

o Slave rebellions date back to the early 18th c

o 1791-1804 the Haitian Revolution independence from France + abolition
o 1808 Congress ends transatlantic African slave trade in the U.S
o Slavery abolished in the British Empire (1833) after Zong slave ship case

Missouri Compromise (1820)

-Missouri admited as a slave state
-maine created as a free state
-slavery prehobited on the territories of the Louisiana Purchase

Before 1850 Compromise:

-California applies to become free state
-South wanted South California as slave territory
-New Mexico applies to be free state
California is admitted undivided as a free state, denying Southern expansion to
the Pacific
New Mexico and Deseret are denied statehood and become New Mexico Territory
and Utah Territory with slavery left to popular sovereignty
the slave trade was abolished in Washington, D.C. (but not slavery itself)
the Fugitive Slave Act was strengthened

Civil War Amendments

Amendment XIII (1865) Section 1 [abolish slavery / servitude] Neither
slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, shall exist
within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Amendment XIV (1868) Section 1 [full citizen rights] All persons born in the
United States, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they
reside. No state shall 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.
Amendment XV (1870) Section 1 [voting rights]The right of citizens of the
United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by
any state on account of race or color
1828 song Jump Jim Crow performed by white artist Daddy Rice inspired by
the song and dance of an African slave, Jim Cuff or Jim Crow from St. Louis,
Cincinatti or Pittsburgh
Crow pejorative for Afr-Am since 1730s

Cases: Loving v. Virginia (1967) Chief Justice Warren deemed Virginias

discriminatory statute which banned the interracial marriage of white Richard and
black Mildred Loving. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry,
a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by
the State

American Transcendentalism

Started in the early 1830s in Concord, near Boston

Kantian transcendentalism reaches American intellectual circles through
translations and adaptations

Sources of American Transcendentalism :

Antinomianism: doctrine according to which the Gospel frees Christians from
obedience to any law;
Pantheism: every existing entity is only one Being; God is everything and
everything is God;
Unitarianism: emphasis on the unity of God.

Sources of American Transcendentalism:

-Skepticism of religion: influenced by David Hume
-Romantic piety towards nature
-German philosophy seen in contrast with the British sensationalist school of
philosophy

American Transcendentalists:
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mr. America, the central consciousness and theoretician of
transcendentalism; Nature, the manifest of transcendentalism (1836); The
American Scholar (1837); Essays First Series (1841); Essays Second Series
(1844); Representative Men (1850);

Other important transcendentalists:

Henry David Thoreau the best practitioner of transcendentalism (author of
Walden);
George Bancroft (historian and politician);
Bronson Alcott (experimental, dialogic pedagogy);
Theodore Parker (philosophy and logic);
Margaret Fuller (literary critic, conversationalist, editor of The Dial);
Jones Very (poet, essayist, and mystic),
George Ripley (theologian, social reformer),
Orestes Brownson (publicist, activist)
Features:
o The Over Soul, the Universal Being
o Knowledge is a priori
o Vanguard of cultural, religious and political progressivism

Ralph Waldo Emersons Main Ideas

o Support innovative thoughts
o Society as enemy of progress for replacing human unity
o Double consciousness of each individual

Post-Reconstruction Era

Reconstruction of the South (1865-1877) had a strong economic

dimension.
Financial crisis in the 1870s caused by irresponsible inter-bank.
Foreign policy neutrality; only extend commercial relations
The Gilded Age characterized by big business, aggregated wealth,
monopolistic practices, tycoons, rise of pools, trusts, mergers and holding
companies

Social and Political Responses: Workers Position:

Initial success of employers: Emergence of small, powerless labor
unions from 1860s onwards

Knights of Labor (f. 1878, peak year: 1886, on the wane by 1887, its end around
1895) transformation of national labor organization:

-Structure: welcome all workers, not just skilled artisans with craft-oriented
activities

-Composition: all races, sexes, skills, brought together by solidarity irrespective

of skill

Goals: radical change of industrial system, educational and agitational institution

(8-hour work day, many strikes Great Upheaval of 1886, same wages for men
and women, no work for less than 14-year olds)

Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) consumer oriented; declaring illegal any trusts
violating free market competition laws
Peoples Party Platform (1896): nationalization of railroad and communication
corporations; gradual income tax; 8-hour workday; direct election of the
president, vice-president, and senators;
The Progressive Era

-Late 19th c. 1920s

-In politics: progressive platforms in general elections from 1896 until 1912;
-Progressive Party founded by former president Theodore Roosevelt
-Reformist spirit coupled with belief in the scientific approach to government,
economy
-Naturalism in literature: William Dean Howells, Steven Crane, Frank Norris, Jack
London, Theodore Dreiser;

Journalistic Responses during the Progressive Era: Muckraking (1902-

1912)

Progressive era = period of reform in government and business, thanks to

investigating writers of exposure or muckrakers

Emergence of socially responsible reporter-reformer, muckraker having 3 main

focuses:
Corruption in government
Irresponsibility of trusts
Exploitation of women and children

Organs of muckrakers: daily newspapers, national magazines fol. growing

literacy, urbanization and farmers move to impersonal, corrupt cities with
publications a substitute of village gossip, rise of slum sketch

William Jamess Pragmatism (1907)

Pragmatic method is meant to settle disputes between material and spiritual

claims
A pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal
solution. . He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards
action and towards power

American Womens Condition

Women restricted to the latter; the separation maintained in the modern

age
By 19th century, access to formal education and an emerging democratic
culture made young American women surprisingly self-reliant
True womanhood a standard, an ideal;
Reactions to the True Womanhood Doctrine

Sarah and Angelina Grimkes Letters on the Equality of Sexes and the
Condition of Women (1838); focus on education, complicity of church and
slavery;
The Declaration paralleled the Decl. of Independence and placed women in
colonists shoes
Margaret Fullers Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1844) considered
proto-feminist; less radical
After the Civil War, womens movement focused on the right to vote

Suffrage Movement Shifts of Emphasis

By end of 19th century rhetoric of womens suffrage mvmt. no longer sustained

the universal white-black minority coalition of 1848 but narrowly used the
dominant superior ideology of WASP American society

1890-1920 Arguments of Suffragists (S) and Anti-Suffragists (A) (see

Goodman)

Religious

A: Eve created from Adams rib, hence mens superiority + husband as ruler over
wife in Bible

S: contradictions of Bible, rib story=surgical episodes, other bible episodes =

gender equality

Biological (physical/mental)

A: men should vote fol. physical strength; women=weak, body inferiority;

frivolous; irrational, emotional, illogical

Sociological

S: taxation-without-representation,

A: womens condition already improved

Womens Struggles after 1920:

The Gibson Girl (early 20th c.) succeeded by the flapper of the roaring
twenties, a fashionable, but exclusive model of womanhood
 Rosie the Riveter: women play greater role in U.S. society and economy
during WWII;
Second wave of feminism: Betty Friedans The Feminine Mystique (1963)
Audience: middle-class housewives; womens need to be provided national
educational programs for veterans to be able and balance household
responsibilities and professional career
Third wave feminism (1980s): reflective, academic following the creation of
womens studies departments

African Americans During Reconstruction Political Reform Acts

Widespread poverty among southern blacks causes mass migration to

urban areas up North;
Jim Crow laws adopted after 1865 to enforce racial segregation and
discourage freedmen from voting;
Lynchings and other crimes were perpetrated against black citizens

Booker T.

Booker T. Washington (son of white father and black mother, b. Virginia, a

slave till 10 y.o.)
not opposed to segregation
promoter of Tuskegee Institute

Most African American leaders actively opposed segregation

W. E. B. Du Bois (b. Massachusetts) criticized B.T. Washington accommodationist

policies in The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

The Harlem Renaissance (Cultural Front):

A black modernist movement of the 1920s and 1930s, in poetry, dance,

music, novel writing, philosophy, anthropology; promoted a new racial
consciousness
The New Negro (1925) an anthology of African American culture
Great African American writers influenced by this movement include
Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison.
Showing importance of Black folklore and rhythms, Black experience for
American art

Post-WWII Civil Rights Developments on Social Front:

Emmett Till b. in 1941, in Chicago
 In 1955, went on holiday to relatives in Money, Mississippi, where lynchings
were still common buying bubblegum from Carolyn Bryant and whistling
to her on leaving
Tortured, killed and thrown into Mississippi delta by Roy Bryant and J.W.
Milam then acquitted at trial
His mother exposed his maimed body to public scrutiny and put forth an
open-casket funeral in Chicago fuelling Civil Rights Mvmt (a mere childs
body as risk not the usual body at peace vulnerability exposed and
whites violence openly criticized = community nexus and fight for end of
discrimination)
Similarities with 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida, fol. Stand your
ground laws

Post-WWII Civil Rights Developments and Challenges:

Thanks to NAACPs relentless efforts, the U.S. Supreme Court finally
declares segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education
(1954)
Rosa Parks incident in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955; bus boycott ends in
victory
Martin Luther King, Jr. rises to prominence
Other approaches to civil rights movement were radical: Nation of Islam
(Malcom X) and the Black Panther Party proposed violent resistance, whites
as clear enemy
Kennedys death said that the chickens have come to roost in America