Key terms
- Proclamation of 1763 (Proclamation Line)
- October 7, 1763
King George III's order barring colonial settlement and private land purchases west of the Appalachians and reserving that land for Native nations.
Colonists who had fought for the West resented the line, which became one of their first grievances against Britain.
- Coverture
- English common law (Blackstone, 1765), kept after 1776
The English common-law rule, which Blackstone described in 1765, that a husband's legal identity covered his wife's. He controlled her property and wages, and she generally could not sue or sign contracts.
Independence left coverture in place, so the women who voted in New Jersey before 1807 were mostly widows and single women.
- Loyalists
- 1775–1783
Colonists who stayed loyal to George III, by most estimates 15 to 20 percent of white colonists, strongest in New York, New Jersey, Georgia, and the port cities.
Their numbers made the war a civil war too, and the new states punished them by seizing their land.
- Property qualifications
- State constitutions, 1776–1800
Rules in most state constitutions that let a man vote only if he owned property or paid taxes, and set a higher bar to hold office.
Voting widened for white men of modest means, yet most states kept a property or tax test through 1800.
- Declaration of Independence
- Adopted July 4, 1776
Congress's statement of July 4, 1776, which based government on natural rights and the consent of the governed, charged George III with a long list of abuses, and declared independence.
Congress declared all men equal while slavery stayed legal in all 13 states, a contradiction Black petitioners raised within a year.
- Gradual emancipation (gradual abolition)
- Pennsylvania March 1, 1780, New Jersey 1804
Northern state laws that freed children born to enslaved mothers after a set date, but only after years of service. Pennsylvania's 1780 act, the first, made them serve until age 28.
Revolutionary ideals moved every Northern state to begin ending slavery by 1804, while no Southern state did.
- Western Confederacy
- 1780s–1795, address to Congress December 18, 1786
An alliance of the Shawnee, Miami, Delaware, and other nations that fought U.S. settlement north of the Ohio River. With British guns, it beat U.S. armies in 1790 and 1791.
Native nations united across tribal lines to defend the Ohio Country against American expansion.
- Northwest Ordinance
- July 13, 1787
The law that set up the Northwest Territory, with an elected assembly at 5,000 free adult men and statehood on equal terms at 60,000 free inhabitants. It banned slavery and encouraged schools.
Future states would join as equals of the original 13, but its promise to take Native land only with consent ended in war.
- Republican motherhood
- 1780s–early 1800s, Rush's address July 28, 1787
The ideal that women served the republic by raising their children to be virtuous citizens. It justified more schooling for girls but gave women no vote and left coverture in place.
Women gained a civic role as mothers, while politics itself stayed in men's hands.
- Three-Fifths Compromise (Three-Fifths Clause)
- Constitution signed September 17, 1787
The rule in Article I that added three-fifths of a state's enslaved people, whom the text called "all other Persons," to its count for House seats and direct taxes.
Just as Northern states began ending slavery, the Constitution gave slaveholders extra power in the national government.
- Bill of Rights
- Ratified December 15, 1791
The first 10 amendments to the Constitution, which Madison steered through the First Congress. They protected freedom of religion, speech, and the press, the right to a jury trial, and other rights.
Anti-Federalists feared a strong central government would trample individual rights, so Federalists promised these amendments to win ratification.
- Federalist Party (Federalists)
- 1790s–1810s
The party of Hamilton and Adams, which wanted a strong national government, Hamilton's bank and tariffs, and close ties with Britain. Merchants, creditors, and New Englanders formed its base.
Federalists trusted the wealthy and educated to govern, and Democratic-Republicans called that a step back toward monarchy.
- Democratic-Republican Party (Republicans)
- 1790s–1820s
Jefferson and Madison's party, which stood for strict construction, states' rights, farmers' interests, and friendship with France. Its strength lay in the South and West.
Its leaders charged that Hamilton's program served merchants and creditors at farmers' expense, and they rallied voters against Federalist rule.
- Whiskey Rebellion
- Whiskey tax March 3, 1791, revolt crushed fall 1794
An uprising of western Pennsylvania farmers against Hamilton's 1791 whiskey tax, which they had to pay in scarce cash. Rebels burned the house of the federal tax inspector, John Neville.
Farmers now resisted a tax from their own elected Congress, and the new federal government proved it could enforce its laws.
- Treaty of Greenville
- Signed August 3, 1795
The treaty in which 12 Native nations gave up most of present-day Ohio for $20,000 in goods and yearly payments. They also agreed to sell other land only to the United States.
As under British rule, Native land passed to settlers through war and then treaty, despite the Northwest Ordinance's promise of consent.
- Alien and Sedition Acts
- June–July 1798, Sedition Act expired March 3, 1801
Four Federalist laws that raised the wait for citizenship to 14 years, let the president deport noncitizens, and punished “false, scandalous and malicious” writing against the government, Congress, or the president.
During the Quasi-War with France, Federalists used the Sedition Act to jail Democratic-Republican editors and Congressman Matthew Lyon.
- Election of 1800 (Revolution of 1800)
- December 1800, House chose Jefferson February 17, 1801
The election in which Jefferson and his fellow Republican Aaron Burr tied with 73 electoral votes each, ahead of Adams's 65. The House of Representatives chose Jefferson on the 36th ballot.
For the first time, power passed peacefully from one party to another, which Jefferson later called a revolution.
Big questions
Evaluate the extent to which politics in the United States became more democratic from 1776 to 1800.
Politics grew more democratic for white men, while most women and all enslaved people still could not vote. Lower property qualifications and respect for talent over birth put more farmers and artisans in state legislatures, and the Democratic-Republican Party organized voters to win the election of 1800. Yet Federalists jailed their critics under the Alien and Sedition Acts.
Explain one change and one continuity in slavery in the United States from 1776 to 1800.
The change came in the North, where Black petitioners used the language of the Declaration of Independence and every state had begun ending slavery by 1804, most through gradual emancipation laws. Slavery continued and grew in the South, and the Constitution's three-fifths compromise gave slaveholding states extra seats in Congress.
How far did the American Revolution change the status of American women?
The Revolution raised women's civic standing but left their legal status almost untouched. Republican motherhood gave mothers the task of raising virtuous citizens and widened schooling for girls. Yet coverture still put a wife's property under her husband's control, and outside New Jersey, where some propertied women voted until 1807, no woman could vote.
Evaluate the extent to which settler expansion influenced North America from 1754 to 1800.
Settlers' demand for land kept the frontier at war under British and American rule. They crossed the Proclamation of 1763 line, and after independence they pushed north of the Ohio despite the Northwest Ordinance's promise of consent. The Western Confederacy fought back, but after Fallen Timbers its leaders gave up most of Ohio in the Treaty of Greenville.
Common mistakes
MistakeThe Northwest Ordinance banned settlement west of the Appalachians.
In factBritain's Proclamation of 1763 tried that, while the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 set out how territories north of the Ohio would become states.
MistakeBy the 1790s, white Southerners widely defended slavery as a positive good.
In factMany Revolutionary-era slaveholders, Jefferson among them, called slavery an evil, and the positive-good defense spread only in the 1830s.
MistakeThe new state constitutions gave governors more power than legislatures.
In factAfter their fights with royal governors, most states made the elected legislature the strongest branch and kept governors weak.
Transcript
One
2–3 January 1800
In January 1800, Congress met in Philadelphia, which was then the nation's capital. Its members still wore mourning for George Washington, who had died in mid-December.
On January 2, the House heard a petition from free Black Philadelphians, and John Rutledge Jr. of South Carolina rose to attack it.
John Rutledge Jr. They now tell the House … these people are in slavery. I thank God they are!
Absalom Jones Men sufficiently callous … are employed in kidnapping those of our Brethren that are free.
Absalom Jones and seventy other free Black Philadelphians had asked Congress to stop such kidnappings and to prepare the way for ending slavery. Petitioning Congress was a right that the First Amendment had protected since 1791.
John Rutledge Jr. this new-fangled French philosophy of liberty and equality.
In 1800, many Americans linked 'French philosophy' with France's bloody revolution and the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue, today's Haiti. Yet Congress had declared those same ideals of liberty and equality in 1776, in the State House next door.
The next day, the House voted eighty-five to one to rebuke the petition's call for emancipation.
Historians still argue over how much the Revolution turned American society upside down.
Kept
1762–1776
Absalom Jones was born enslaved in Sussex County, Delaware, in 1746, and he later described the year his family was broken up.
Absalom Jones In the year 1762, my mother, five brothers and a sister were sold, and I was brought to the city of Philadelphia with my master.
In 1763, Pontiac's War broke out on the frontier, and the king's Proclamation of 1763 banned settlement west of the Appalachians. That December, vigilantes called the Paxton Boys murdered twenty Conestoga, a peaceful Native community in Pennsylvania, and Benjamin Franklin wrote:
Benjamin Franklin The only Crime of these poor Wretches seems to have been, that they had a reddish brown Skin, and black Hair.
In 1770, Jones married Mary, who was also enslaved, and he chose to buy her freedom before his own.
Under the law, a child was born free or enslaved depending on its mother. So because Mary was freed first, any children they had would be born free.
On July 8, 1776, a crowd gathered in the State House yard to hear the Declaration of Independence read aloud.
John Nixon We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…
Absalom Jones, then twenty-nine, was still enslaved a few streets away.
Twenty-four years later, in Congress Hall next door, Rutledge answered the petitioners this way:
John Rutledge Jr. They say they are not represented. To be sure, a great number of them are not.
In 1776, colonists had called taxation without representation a reason for revolution.
Nothing But Force
1778–1787
1778 Nothing But Force
In 1778, Absalom Jones, then thirty-one, asked his owner to let him buy his own freedom, and his owner refused.
That June, the British army left Philadelphia, which it had occupied since the fall of 1777. Joseph Galloway, a leading Loyalist who in 1774 had urged the Continental Congress to keep the colonies in the empire, left with it. His wife, Grace, stayed behind to keep the house she had inherited from her father.
Grace Growden Galloway I told them Nothing but force shou'd get me out of My house
In August, state agents seized the house as Loyalist property and put her out.
Turn the painting over to see the year she married, 1753. When she married, the law of coverture put her property, including her future inheritance, under her husband's control. So when Pennsylvania punished her husband's treason, it took her father's house.
By November, Grace was living in borrowed rooms, apart from her husband, and she wrote in her diary:
Grace Growden Galloway ye Liberty of doing as I please
Grace Growden Galloway Makes even poverty more agreeable than any time I ever spent since I married
Her new freedom came from her husband's absence, not from any change in the law of marriage.
After the war, a new ideal called republican motherhood held that women should be educated to raise virtuous citizens. It gave women's work at home a political purpose, but no state except New Jersey let women vote, and only for a time.
Most Native nations sided with Britain, the power that had tried to keep settlers off their lands. In 1778 at Fort Pitt, today's Pittsburgh, the Delaware, or Lenape, allied with the United States instead. The treaty even raised the possibility of a Delaware-led state with a seat in Congress.
Congress never approved that state, and by 1781 most of the Delaware had joined the British side.
Back in Congress Hall in 1800, Harrison Gray Otis, a Massachusetts Federalist, explained what frightened him about the petition.
Harrison Gray Otis It would teach them the art of assembling together, debating, and the like, and would soon, if encouraged, extend from one end of the Union to the other.
In 1774, white colonists doing exactly that in this same city had formed the Continental Congress.
The Same Picture
1781–1804
In October 1781, trapped by American and French troops on land and a French fleet at sea, Cornwallis's British army surrendered at Yorktown. A later legend said the British band played a tune called 'The World Turned Upside Down.'
Christian Lenape, converts of Moravian missionaries, lived on the Tuscarawas River in today's Ohio and tried to stay neutral in the war. British-allied warriors had driven them out in 1781, and early in 1782 some went back to Gnadenhütten to gather the corn they had left.
Pennsylvania militiamen under David Williamson took them prisoner, and according to the missionaries, the captives spent the night singing hymns.
The next morning, the militiamen killed ninety-six people, thirty-four of them children. No one was punished for the Conestoga murders in 1763, and no one was punished for this. Under British rule and then American rule, governments failed to stop settler violence against Native peoples.
In the 1783 Treaty of Paris, Britain recognized American independence and gave the United States the land west to the Mississippi. No Native nation took part in the talks, and in 1786 a Western Confederacy calling itself the United Indian Nations protested to Congress:
Reader of the United Indian Nations address, 1786 we the Indians, were disappointed finding ourselves not included in that peace according to our expectations
In 1787, Congress's Northwest Ordinance set out how western territories would become equal states, and it banned slavery north of the Ohio. It also promised that Native land would never be taken without consent, but by 1790 American armies were marching into the Ohio country.
After losing the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, the confederacy gave up most of present-day Ohio in the 1795 Treaty of Greenville.
Absalom Jones on the first of October, 1784, he generously gave me a manumission.
That was six years after his owner had refused to let him buy his freedom. Four years earlier, in 1780, Pennsylvania had passed the first state law to end slavery gradually. It did not free most people already enslaved; children born to enslaved mothers after 1780 would be free at twenty-eight.
By 1783, Massachusetts courts had ruled slavery incompatible with the state constitution, which declared all men 'born free and equal.' By 1804, every Northern state had begun to end slavery, mostly gradually, while no Southern state did.
The Few and the Many
1775–1799
In 1787, delegates met in secret in Philadelphia's State House to write a new Constitution. That same year, a few streets away, Jones and Richard Allen, a Methodist preacher who had bought his own freedom, founded the Free African Society. Its members paid dues so the society could help the sick, widows and orphans.
Jones and Allen worshipped at St. George's Methodist Church, where one Sunday the Black members were sent up to the gallery. As they knelt to pray, a trustee grabbed Jones and tried to pull him to his feet.
A trustee of St. George's You must get up—you must not kneel here.
Absalom Jones Wait until prayer is over, and I will get up and trouble you no more.
When the prayer was over, the Black members walked out of the church together.
William Manning, a farmer in Billerica, Massachusetts, marched with his town's militia against the British in April 1775.
In 1798, Manning wrote an essay on why free governments fail, and he blamed the wealthy few:
William Manning The Reasons why a free government has always failed is from the unreasonable demands & desires of the few.
By then, a lot had changed: new state constitutions limited governors' power, and several states lowered property requirements for voting. Two national parties had also formed, Hamilton's Federalists and Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans, and their newspapers attacked each other. But most women, enslaved people and, in many states, men without property still could not vote.
In 1798, during the Quasi-War, an undeclared naval war with France, the Federalist Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Sedition Act made it a crime to publish 'false, scandalous and malicious' writing against the government, and some critics went to jail. Jefferson and Madison answered with the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, which declared the acts unconstitutional.
To pay for the Quasi-War, Congress also taxed houses, land and enslaved people in 1798. In March 1799, John Fries, an auctioneer from Bucks County, led armed farmers into Bethlehem and forced a federal marshal to release jailed tax resisters. Adams sent federal troops, and Fries was convicted of treason and sentenced to hang.
Five years earlier, Washington had called out nearly 13,000 militiamen to crush the Whiskey Rebellion against a federal tax on whiskey. Both times, farmers were resisting taxes passed by their own elected government, not by a distant Parliament.
Their Own Church
1794–1799
After independence, states began ending support for official churches, as Virginia did in 1786, and the First Amendment barred a national church. In July 1794, members of the Free African Society opened their own church, St. Thomas, led by Absalom Jones. That same month, Richard Allen opened Bethel, the mother church of the African Methodist Episcopal, or AME, Church. In these churches, no trustee could pull Black worshippers off their knees.
By 1799, kidnappers along the waters of Maryland and the state of Delaware were seizing free Black people and selling them south. They used the cover of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which let a slaveholder claim a person before a judge, with no jury. In their petition, Jones and the others used the Declaration's own words, asking that
Absalom Jones we may be admitted to partake of the Liberties and unalienable Rights therein held forth
But they were careful not to ask for too much at once:
Absalom Jones We do not ask for the immediate emancipation of all…
Absalom Jones yet humbly desire you may exert every means in your power to undo the heavy burdens, and prepare the way for the oppressed to go free.
The One
2–3 January 1800
Only one member of the House had voted no: George Thatcher, a Federalist from the District of Maine, then part of Massachusetts. During the debate on January 2, Thatcher rose to answer Rutledge's attack on the petitioners.
Choose the argument you would have made in Thatcher's place.
On January 3, the House resolved that, on emancipation, the federal government was
Jonathan W. Condy precluded by the Constitution
The House had a point: the Constitution gave Congress no power to end slavery in the states, and it protected slavery in three ways.
The Constitution counted three-fifths of enslaved people when dividing House seats, which gave slaveholding states more power. It barred Congress from banning the Atlantic slave trade before 1808, and it required the return of people who escaped slavery. Open each clause to see what it protected and whom it left exposed.
So the Constitution, one of the Revolution's biggest changes, also protected slavery, one of the period's biggest continuities.
Jonathan W. Condy Mr. Thatcher.
George Thatcher · reconstructed vote No.
Clerk · reconstructed tally reading Yeas, eighty-five. Nays, one.
Members of both parties voted for the rebuke, but the House sent the parts on the slave trade and kidnapping to a committee.
Upside Down?
1800–1801
On May 21, 1800, President Adams pardoned John Fries. A white man who had led an armed revolt against a federal tax went free. Yet when seventy-one free Black Philadelphians peacefully petitioned Congress, the House rebuked their call for emancipation, eighty-five to one.
Later that year, Adams lost the election of 1800 to Thomas Jefferson, the leader of the Democratic-Republicans. In 1801, power passed peacefully from one party to another for the first time in the nation's history.
Choose the strongest thesis on how much the Revolution changed American society.
Independence changed a great deal: it ended royal rule, created written constitutions, widened voting for white men, and began Northern emancipation. Free Black Americans also built their own churches and societies, pushing freedom further than the Revolution's leaders had. But much continued: the Constitution protected slavery, coverture bound married women, and settlers kept taking Native land, as under British rule.
Absalom Jones and the other petitioners had ended their appeal with a hope:
Absalom Jones that every yoke may be broken.