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Materials > Lecture Study Guide |
Europe in the Age of Expansion (summary)
Why was Europe the first to reach the New World and systematically marshall, or if you prefer, exploit its vast resources? The consequences remember were quite far-reaching, tipping forever the balance of power in favor of one world culture--the European--over other, equal viable and in many ways more sophisticated cultures of China on the Asian mainland and Islam stretching from the Arabian peninsula to North Africa.
In the mid-1400s, China was arguably the most advanced civilization in the world. It had ventured farther from its coast than any other nation. It had the technology, the administration, and the experience to manage an overseas empire. On Columbus's famous 1492 voyage, he guided his boats to the New World with a Chinese invention (the compass); he subdued the New World natives with a Chinese invention (gunpowder); and, most important, he wasn't looking for the New World at all. He was looking for China and the golden troves of the Great Khan--about which he had been informed by the widely-circulated Description of the World by Marco Polo, written on a Chinese invention (paper) with a Chinese invention (printing).
Indeed, the Chinese had as many or more of the prerequisites for founding and maintaining an overseas empire than the European powers. First, the Chinese had seafaring boats called junks, with water-tight holds in the head and stern and efficient, easily-collapsible, fan-like sails, usually stained with pig's blood. In the fifteenth century, junks were over 150 long, with five masts, four decks, hundreds of crewmen, and rudders measuring up to 37 feet. Second, the Chinese had a thorough knowledge of navigation. Chinese astrologers kept records so accurate they can still be used today. They constructed elaborate armillary spheres, models of the heavens that could be used to predict the movements of heavenly bodies, and they invented the compass, using magnetized needles to determine direction. Third, the Chinese had the administrative organization to manage an empire. The Chinese invented the craft of papermaking and printing and had a centralized government bureaucracy staffed by hard-working, efficient employees. Fourth, the Chinese had considerable experience on the seas, and had captured that experience in elaborate maps and charts. Between 1405 and 1433 Cheng Ho embarked on a series of voyabes that took him well north of Japan and south of the horn of Africa.
If China was so advanced, why didn't it make it to the New World before Europe? In many ways it was China's very superiority that hampered its drive to explore. First, the vastness and richness of its domain meant that it had little to look for outside its borders. Second, its culture was extremely ethnocentric, with an unswerving belief in Chinese superiority. The outside world seemed to the Chinese to have little to offer. Third, and related, China was extremely anti-foreign, believing that contact with other cultures was more likely to contaminate than to enrich their own society. Fourth, traders were generally disdained by the upper class of mandarins. Fifth, the very governmental centralization that might have allowed China to mastermind an overseas empire could also effectively discourage the entire country from venturing and exploring. Throughout the fifteenth century the Chinese emporers adopted policies that discouraged and even forbade overseas voyages, and the centralization of the Chinese empire ensured that the laws were vigorously enforced.
If China labored under certain disadvantages, why didn't the Arab empire reach the "New World" first? The Arabs, after all, had many of the same prerequisites as the Chinese. They were experienced mariners, with large seaworthy vessels, sophisticated star charts, advanced navigational technology, and a vast overseas trade network. Moreover, where the Chinese disdained merchant traders, the Arabs embraced and revered the calling, and where the Chinese saw no reason to mix with foreigners, Arabs had a religion (Islam) which encouraged them to convert or conquer other peoples.
Precisely because the Arabs stood at the hub of a vast trading empire, however, they had no especial reason to venture into wildly unknown territories. When Columbus set sail, after all, he had no idea of "discovering" North America--indeed, he had no idea that North America existed and would have been discouraged to learn of its existence. Rather, he was trying to circumvent the Arab trade network to establish a direct route to Asia. The Arabs, by contrast, had already established such a route, and had little cause to invent another one.
In many ways, Europe in the late middle ages presented a rather sorry picture, one which gave little hint of itself as a power that would rise to global prominence. In the century before Columbus's voyage, Europe was mired in poverty, factionalism, fanaticism, pestilence, and famine. All available tax records indicate that between 1300 and 1450, western Europe endured a demographic catastrophe that reduced its population by at least one half and possibly two-thirds. The exact reasons for the sharp dropoffs are unclear, but most scholars agree that the largest factors were malnutrition and disease.
The omnipresence of death ate into European culture and cast a wide shadow over the period's artistic mood. Paintings took death as a subject, as if to maintain some artistic control over a catastrophe that was quickly beyond the limits of human understanding. Long columns of pentitents marched through the streets of European cities, whipping themselves, and praying God for forgiveness and deliverance from the plague.
Some historians have suggested that the Renaissance reaffirmed the value of human life in the immediate aftermath of the plague, and spurred the initiative of explorers to go forth and discover the world. This is true but in many ways the Renaissance was as much pessimistic as optimistic, as gloomy as it was hopeful.
The fixation with classical antiquity, the defining characteristic of the Renaissance, can be seen not as a glorification of the artist's present but as a desperate search for an earlier, better time.
Both Petrarch and Machiavelli, for example, were preoccupied with the Ancient world not merely because it was inspiring but because their own contemporary situations were so depressing. I make this point because it is important to realize that the European tradition which Columbus carried to the New World betrays a people not only interested in God and glory but pursued by deeper demons. China and the lands of Islam had the means, the expertise, and the bureaucracies to sail across the world in search of new lands and new opportunities. They did not do so, I think, because they were content with their place in the world. This is the one ingredient that Europe possessed in a high degree. No other people of the period were so discontent with themselves and with their place in the world.
New Worlds for All (summary)
Archaeologists are for the most part in agreement that the first humans moved across the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska around 35,000 B.C. These were primarily tribes of game-hunting nomads, Asiatic in origin, driven by the search for more reliable sources of food. Over the next thousands of years they gradually migrated South and East, ultimately reaching the Southern tip of South America and the East coast of North America, and becoming by 9000 B.C. widely dispersed over the two continents. The vast differences in climates and ecosystems in the Americas and the natives success in adapting to those ecosystems, generated a great variety in Native American cultures.
In about 5,000 B.C., Native Americans began to domesticate plants. Just as it did in Europe, Asia, and in Africa at about the same time, this first "agricultural revolution" led to dramatic changes in the texture of everyday life. First, across the world settled societies replaced nomadic tribes. Second, populations boomed with the increased availability of food. Third, time and energy which had formerly been spent on forraging was diverted into social, political, and religious development. Fourth, it led in most areas to a deepening of the sexual division of labor, in which men hunted and cleared land and women planted and harvested crops.
This was no less true in the Americas than it was in Europe, and the notion that Native American societies were somehow less advanced than Old World ones is now totally discredited. But the two cultures were very different.
The Iroquois may serve as an example. The Iroquois lived in villages of up to 1000 people; work was performed communally and land was owned in common. The notion of owning one's own land and improving only it, or owning one's own house and filling it with material goods, was totally foreign. Indeed, their whole psychology was what one anthropologist has called capitalism working in reverse. They sought the esteem of their fellows, as any human being does, but esteem was garnered not by accumulating material goods but by distributing them.
Kinship was organized matrilineally, with family membership determined through the female rather than the male line. Sons remained with their kin group until they married when joined their wife's family. Iroquois women also had other rights that would have seemed odd by European standards: unusually free access to divorce and unusually large role in the decision-making of the tribe.
None of this is to so turn things around as to say that Indian society was somehow superior to European. The point isn't to pass judgments on cultures but to understand how a culture evolves into a mature social system that answers the needs of its people and echoes the demands of the environment in which those people find themselves.
In the European view, the natural world was filled with resources for man to use. The land, the waters, the animals of the earth could all be harnessed with little or no discomfort, so long as proper thanks was given to God for having provided so bountifully for man. And because these resources were available to be exploited for man's gain, the Europeans had a notion of private ownership of property which undergirded their entire social structure. Great property owners stood at the top of the social pyramid, passing their property on to their children through inheritance, and the mass of propertyless individuals formed the base of the pyramid with what were deemed suitable restrictions on their opportunities and privileges as a result. This had a way of making the Europeans a striving, acquisitive, competitive, and individualistic people, qualities that were in many ways foreign to the Native Americans they encountered.
To be sure, Native Americans had notions of rivalry and competition. But they did not measure men by their material possessions, instead channeling rivalry and competition into modes that provided for the entire clan. The man who killed the most buffalo would certainly be awarded great praise, but the buffalo remained the collective property of the entire tribe.
These two cultures collided after 1492.
There is now no question that Norse explorers sailed from their colonies in Greenland and established short-lived settlements in Newfoundland and other parts of North America around 1000 A.D. It also seems increasingly likely that British and Portuguese fishermen were catching cod off the coast of North America at least as early as 1480. So why if there had been relatively consistent contact between Europe and North America, would Columbus's voyage be reckoned a "discovery?"
First, it was an official, royal mission of perhaps one of the most powerful monarchies in Europe. This was not a casual fishing trip, but a state-sponsored venture. Second, it was a carefully document voyage both by the captain and by the royal observers sent along for that purpose, and it brought back tangible evidence, including exotic specimens of flora and fauna, which helped stimulate the European imagination. Third, it achieved not only a way to the New World but a way back to the Old, each leg of the journey having been carefully measured. Thus Columbus had achieved what any good scientist of the period longed for, a replicable experiment. Fourth, the news was broadcast throughout an increasingly centralized Europe now operating under the influence of a new invention, the printing press. Fifth, the Columbian voyage was designed from the beginning not merely to locate new fishing grounds or establish an outpost for trade, but as the start of a long, elaborate, and overt process of trade, colonization, and, ultimately, conquest and exploitation. Sixth, it was achieved by a power which wanted, perhaps needed, to expand to foreign shores. When Icelanders came to America in 1100 they left almost as quickly as they came, having found little that interested them more than their own homelands. But Western Europe by the fifteenth century needed the outlet that the New World provided.
Thus Columbus's journey to the New World was followed up quickly, fueling a revival of enterprise and overseas expansion that lasted more than four hundred years, setting in motion a vast ecological exchange that altered both Old and New worlds forever.
Once gold and silver was found in the new world, there was a wholesale rush of enterprising young men from the lesser Spanish nobility who sought to adventure and advancement in the new Spanish holdings. In 1521, Hernan Cortes and 600 soldiers attacked the huge Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan (modern day Mexico city). The Spanish soldiers were astounded at the city's size. It had a population then of about 100,000, with floating gardens, elaborate causeways and aqueducts, and monumental temples. But the Aztec's were equally astounded by the intruders, who had hair on their faces and rode horses, beasts the Aztecs had never seen before. Aided by a splinter group within the Aztec empire, Cortes brought the Aztec ruler to his knees in 75 days. Francisco Pizarro matched the feat in 1532 when he brought down the Incan empire. These crushing Spanish victories, we know now, were facilitated not only, and not evey mostly, by European metalworking and muskets, but by pathogens the Europeans had unwittingly introduced into a world which, unlike Europe, had little experience with them and therefore little immunity.
Though historians squabble a little about the figures, it is now estimated that the Americas had a population of roughly 60 to 70 million, roughly 90-5% of which were killed by European diseases. It is impossible for us to imagine the psychological strain on the native populations of so massive and so sudden a depopulation.
Not all of the ecological exchanges were negative. From the European ecology came wheat, barley, rye, peaches, pears, oranges, lemons, melons, grapes, burros, cattle, goats, horses, pigs, and sheep. It is hard for us to imagine America without these non-native species. From the New World, Europeans borrowed peanuts, pumpkins, pineapples, squash, turkeys, and most important, maize and potatoes. Indeed, the potato became a staple of the European diet and did much to aid the continent with its ongoing bouts of famine.
But there was another huge consequence to Columbus's discovery. After 1492 Europe's orientation shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, where the production of sugar, coffee, rice, and tobacco demanded a massive influx of (eventually slave) labor.
Jamestown (summary)
The English founded their first permanent settlement in the Americas at Jamestown in 1607. It was not a colony in the strict sense of the word. It was a business enterprise, the property of the Virginia Company of London, and was expected to return a profit for its shareholders. The people who invested in the project were hoping to duplicate the remarkable success of the Spanish and Portuguese in Mexico, Peru, and Brazil.
But there were problems: The English promoters drastically miscalculated the resources of the North American coast. Using the Spanish experience as a model, they had dreamed of mineral riches and a readily exploitable pool of native laborers. But Virginia had little mineral riches and the Indian population was not so densely settled or so centralized as they had been under the Aztecs or Incas. Where the Spanish had installed themselves as the rulers of an already vast empire and then directed it to their will, the English found themselves interlopers in a land very foreign to them.
As a result of these fundamental miscalculations, the Jamestown venture suffered dramatic losses. The colonists spent much of their time bickering and searching for gold, and too little on establishing the colony itself. Starvation and disease took their toll. By 1609 the Company had sent 900 settlers and by the end of the winter only 60 had survived.
After three years of steady failure, the Virginia Company began to make changes to their system. First, they recruited ordinary farmers instead of soldiers of fortune and scofflaws. Second, they offered free land to those who would make the trip and put in seven years labor. Third, they shipped a boatload of unmarried women to the colony to improve morale and encourage the formation of families and the setting down of roots. Fourth, they allowed a degree of local government, providing for the election of a representative assembly.
In response to these concessions, more than 4,500 colonists arrived between 1619 and 1624. But crucial to Virginia's revival was the discovery that tobacco grew exceptionally well in the Chesapeake. Tobacco had first come to Europe in the 1560s as a result of Portuguese explorations. Francis Drake brought a boatload of what was called "the jovial weed" to England in 1586, and Sir Walter Raleigh popularized the use of tobacco among the English upper class, transforming the practice from a medicinal to a social practice.
Tobacco made Virginia a success. The colony shipped its first crop to England in 1617; seven years later it exported 200,000 pounds of leaf, and by 1638 the crop exceeded three million pounds. Tobacco became to the Chesapeake what sugar was to the West Indies and silver was to Mexico and Peru.
Puritan Myths (summary)
Myth has it that the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620 and embarked on the godly enterprise of erecting a "City Upon a Hill," an experiment in God-fearing democracy that the world might envy and emulate. From out of a virgin wilderness the Pilgrims carved their community with the willing assistance of the local natives, a communitarian spirit embodied by the first Thanksgiving. More even than Jamestown--established earlier--Plymouth came to be regarded as the prototype American settlement, a cradle of democracy--with the Mayflower Compact as the forerunner to the Constitution.
This founding myth, like that of Pocahontas and Jamestown, is very revealing of American self-beliefs but not entirely accurate.
In 1616 or 1617 the Indians of coastal Massachusetts suffered their first catastrophic contact with European diseases. Native Americans prior to Columbus were one of the healthiest people on earth. All life has its origins in warmer climes and must adapt to colder weather. Over the course of millennia mankind had adapted to cold, inventing fire, clothing, and shelter. In about 30,000 B.C. men and women first crossed the snowy Bering Strait. Though they made the journey, certain diseases and, just as important, livestock did not make the journey. Thus the Americas prior to 1492 had a larger population than Europe's and they also had a healthier one. They had fewer diseases, and because they had no livestock (chickens, horses, sheep, cows, goats, and pigs) they had fewer vectors for disease. Europe on the other hand, with its larger population centers, poor sanitation and hygiene, infrequent bathing, and constant contact with a wider Mediterranean world, was ensured of regular outbreaks of disease, leaving survivors with a degree of immunity.
Though it is difficult to be sure what started the Indian epidemic in 1617, the most likely sources for the disease were Dutch and English fisherman working the Massachusetts coast. Fisherman would often go ashore to replenish supplies of fresh water and firewood, sometimes to make slave runs on the coastal natives. Regardless of the source, however, by the time the Puritans arrived on Plymouth Rock the natives had been decimated by disease.
Like the Europeans, Native Americans had little knowledge of how disease actually worked; they had no theory of germs, contagion, or quarantine. Indeed, the methods Indians had developed for disease actually ensured higher mortality rates. Typically, they treated illness by putting the sick person in a sweatbox followed by immersion in a cold river. The damp and the heat only ensured that the disease would thrive and be passed on; the immersion in cold water only ensured that pneumonia would be added to a fever victim's list of medical problems. Such a heavy death toll disrupted normal farming and hunting routines, thereby adding starvation and malnutrition to the list as well. Finally, the Indians had a social tradition of always visiting the sick, a practice that allowed the epidemic to spread further.
Almost as devastating as the epidemic's effect on Indian bodies was the effect on the Indian psyche. In the Native American tradition, disease was always considered a manifestation of spiritual forces. The power of medicine men to divine these forces and bring them back into balance was a central part of Indian religion. But the native medicine men were absolutely powerless to do anything about a wave of death that killed probably 19 out of every 20 men and women. Thus the epidemic constituted not only a physical but also a spiritual and a religious crisis; medicine men were hounded out of the tribe, punished, or even killed, and the remaining natives were left with a shattered confidence in themselves, their gods, and their worldview.
Thus it was that when the Pilgrims stepped onto Plymouth Rock the found themselves not so much in a wilderness as a ghost town. The Pawtuxet Indians had cleared the land and then themselves been cleared away by disease, leaving the Pilgrims with a perfect site for a new village. When the colonists went out to plant the following spring, they did not have to deal with the back-breaking labor of clearing forests or trees but merely stripped away the weeds that had taken up residence in the abandoned Indian corn-fields.
But before they could plant in the spring, they needed to survive the winter, which they couldn't have done if the Indians hadn't been there first. Indeed, the colonists began receiving Indian assistance on their first full day in Massachusetts: "We marched to the place we called Cornhill where we had found the corn before. At another place we had seen, we dug and found some more corn, two or three baskets full, and a bag of beans. In all we had about ten bushels, which will be enough for seed. It was with God's help that we found this corn, for how else could we have done it?"
The source continues: "The next morning, we found a place like a grave. We decided to dig it up. We found first a mat and under that a fine bow. We also found bowls, trays, dishes, and things like that. We took several of the prettiest things to carry away with us, and covered the body up again."
Why did the Indians put up with this? Even after the devastations of the plague, the Indian presence in Massachusetts was more formidable than the European presence. The Europeans had little knowledge of how to make proper use of the land their diseases had cleared, and half the Plymouth settlers died the first winter of exposure, malnutrition, and exhaustion; the Indians could have turned Plymouth into another lost colony had they struck in the early going. They had motive--knowledge of past massacres and enslavement of their people at the hands of other Europeans, not to mention the Pilgrims recent theft and grave robbing--and they had, despite the massive depopulation, still the strength to destroy the feeble and infant colony. What held the Indians back?
Probably fear. In the eyes of the natives, white people possessed a greater potency, a greater mana, than any Indian people they had encountered. The colonists, for instance, had guns, which while not necessarily more effective than native weapons made a greater show. This was true too of their ship cannons, which made a sound like a thunderclap and then killed at a great distance by a seemingly invisible cause. Indeed, there is reason to suspect that the Indians believed that disease was just another invisible agent in the arsenal of the Europeans, and there is evidence that some natives believed that plague victims had been shot through by Europeans employing invisible bullets. When the Indians asked the Europeans if they controlled disease, the whites answered according to their own belief, that God controlled disease, which the Indians took to mean that the whites had a powerful benefactor who would infect them if they resisted white encroachment.
Also little remarked upon in the mythic story of the Puritan founding is the effect of the Indian epidemics on Puritan psychology. The Puritans, already seeing their lives as part of a divine project, readily interpreted the Indian epidemic as a scourge sent by God to punish the heathens and prepare the land for the Europeans.
In 1621, three months after the Pilgrims had arrived, the Wampanoags, a local Indian tribe, sent sixty men into Plymouth. With sixty men the Indians could have destroyed the colony, but they came instead in peace. The tribe had been so devastated by the epidemic of 1617-1619 that they feared they might be conquered by other neighboring tribes who had had less contact with disease. Hoping the new colonists might help them in their battles, the Wampanoag sachem, Massasoit, agreed to help the infant colony learn to farm. Particularly helpful was a local native named Squanto who could speak English and taught the colonists to plant corn, squash, and pumpkins. Indeed, in many of the mythic stories of the first Thanksgiving, Squanto plays a role not unlike that of Pocahontas, protecting his new white allies from danger and saving them from starvation. Squanto's story is in fact more fascinating--and more complicated--than textbooks usually make out. Squanto knew English because in 1614 a British slave raider had seized him and sold him into slavery in Spain. Somehow he had escaped from slavery and made his way back to England, where in 1619 he talked a British captain into taking him along on his voyage to Cape Cod. When Squanto returned to New England he found his village completely deserted and everyone he knew dead or run off. In one of the great ironies of history, it was his village, in fact, which the Pilgrims claimed as their own when they arrived in 1620, and it was on the ruins of his homeland that he and the Pilgrims celebrated the "First Thanksgiving."
Indentured Servitude and the Origins of American Slavery (summary)
When the Atlantic slave trade began in the 1440s, there was little "culture gap" between European and African societies. The assumption that Africa was a backward continent was largely invented after the slave trade was well underway, when western societies were looking for justifications for permanently enslaving blacks. In 1440, West African cities were comparable in size to those of Europe, with sophisticated systems of religion, politics, and commerce. For this exact reason, Europeans did NOT, as commonly supposed, regularly raid coastal Africa for slaves; the existing African kingdoms were too powerful to permit such depradations. This notion that the slave trade developed when advanced Europeans swept down on helpless Africans is false. It is more correct to say that two relatively sophisticated cultures, European and African, developed a commercial partnership, in which Africans traded gold, ivory, and slaves to Europeans in exchange for guns, horses, and textiles. Thus the early history of the Atlantic slave trade could only have proceeded with the cooperation of the African kingdoms themselves.
It is important to remember though that slavery in this period differed substantially from what it would become in America before the Civil War.
Slavery was not a new social phenomenon for either Europeans or Africans. It flourished in ancient Greece and Rome, in Russia, the Middle East, and throughout the Mediterranean world. During this period, slavery had nothing to do with skin color. Anyone could be the slave of anyone else, if they were unfortunate enough to fall into the wrong hands. John Smith, remember, had been enslaved by Muslims before finally making his escape to England, the New World, and, finally, Pocahontas's "loving arms."
Within Africa itself, slavery had existed for centuries. It was accepted, there as elsewhere, without question as a part of human organization and as just another sign and method of accumulating wealth. One became a slave by being an outsider or an infidel, by being captured in war, by transgressing the laws of one's society, or by selling oneself into bondage to make money for one's family.
For centuries, African societies had been involved in an overland slave trade that transported black slaves from West Africa across the Sahara to the Roman Empire and the Middle East. When the Portuguese made landfall on the west coast of Africa in the 1440s, then, slaves were just another commodity the Africans traded with their new European trading partners.
The Atlantic slave trade was of only minor commercial importance until European expansion to the New World created a vast shortage of labor. The Spanish needed miners to work the gold and silver deposits of South and Central America, then the Spanish, Dutch, and English needed agricultural slaves to work sugar, rice, and tobacco plantations.
This new demand for laborers dramatically changed the tempo and character of the Atlantic slave trade. Where before Africans had sold into slavery criminals or captives taken in war, now they went out actively to capture huge cargoes of what came to be called "black gold." Thus began the largest forced migration in human history as over the next four centuries 12 million Africans were dragged from their homes to work the brutal plantations of the New World.
It is impossible now to imagine what it would have been like to have been captured and sold into this new form of slavery. The first shock usually came when African slave traders attacked a village at night, setting fire to huts, killing any who resisted, and yolking the remainder together in neck braces of wood and leather. The first leg of a slave's journey took them on a forced march from the West African interior to the coast. Having just lost family members and friends, uncertain of what they were being led into, it is not surprising that some Africans attempted to kill themselves by gorging on clay or preferred being shot to being enslaved. Once they reached the coast they suffered the indignities of being inspected, branded, and thrown into jails to await transport to the slaveship.
And from there things got much worse. The horrors of the "middle passage" have been so often described that it is difficult now to get a fresh perspective. The sea voyage was fairly miserable regardless, taking three weeks to three months, depending on the winds. But as the African coast began to recede from view, the Africans on board tended either to give way to despair or rise up in great violence. Some attempted to jump overboard, preferring drowning or consumption by sharks to whatever awaited them. To prevent this, slave ships tended to extend netting from both sides of the ship. Other slaves either refused to eat, preferring starvation, or attempted to consume vast quantities of anything that would kill them. Such attempts were dealt with harshly. Those who didn't eat were severely flogged or had hot coals applied to their lips and their mouths pried open by a device invented for the purpose.
Of greater concern to the slave-traders, of course, was the possibility of insurrection among the slaves. To combat this, slave-traders used sadistic punishments to create an atmosphere of fear that might stifle insurrectionist tendencies. It was not beyond a slaveship captain to torture or mutilate one slave so that the others might understand what might happen if they attempted to resist.
Most horrendous, of all, however, were conditions in the hold where the slaves spent most of their hours. "Under the decks," remembered Olaudah Equiano, "I received such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life: so that with the loathesomeness of the stench and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat [and I] wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me."
Even though they were long familiar with Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese use of African slave labor, English colonists did not turn immediately to Africa to solve the problem of cultivating labor-intensive crops. The first Africans to arrive in the British colonies came from Dutch ships that landed at Jamestown in 1619. Because Virginia had no slave laws at the time, the Africans were held as indentured servants, and set to work beside other white indentures. Conditions for these servants were harsh, but there were three important distinctions between this form of labor and slavery: indentured servitude, unlike slavery, was not perpetual, did not devolve upon one's children, and was not based on color. One black indenture, for instance, arrived at Jamestown in 1621, survived his term of indenture, married and prospered, eventually acquiring land and indentured servants of his own.
There were three major factors which led to the gradual decline of indentured servitude. First, in part because of the influx of New World riches, the situation of the English poor began to improve, making them less willing to sell themselves into servitude. Second, as the health and food supply of the colonies themselves began to improve, a greater number of indentured servants survived the term of their indenture and began to take up positions as free laborers and farmers. Colonial governments thought this class of free white laborers a potentially dangerous and unstable social element, particularly after Bacon's 1676 Rebellion in Virginia. Third, the maturation of the British slave societies of the Carribean provided a model for North American plantations and drastically increased the supply of slaves available to British Americans.
Slavery is at its base an economic system--an exploitative one, to be sure--but economic nonetheless. As such, it depends for its character and form on the economic circumstances to which it is adapted. In those places where slaves were employed as artisans and domestics, the system tended not to be as brutal. In those areas where slaves were employed in high numbers on arduous and repetitive agricultural tasks, the system could be very brutal. In the malarial rice swamps of South Carolina, for instance, where blacks outnumbered whites, labor had to be coerced and slaves had to be brutally controlled for fear of insurrection. This gave slavery a different character than it had in the Old World, where slaves were seen more as members of the household and given certain legal protections and privileges.
The French and Indian War (summary)
Between 1675 and 1763 three European powers--France, Spain, and England--struggled for dominance in the vast area between the Mississippi River and the Atlantic coast.
Spain encouraged settlements in the New World to strengthen her claims to territory; to secure gold, silver, and valuable agricultural products, especially sugar and indigo; and to convert the Indians to Catholicism. Spanish settlers were chiefly government officials, soldiers, noblemen, merchants, and missionaries.
The Papal Line of Demarcation assigned the New World, except for Brazil, to Spain. The Spanish first settled the islands of the West Indies: Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola. From these bases they proceeded to colonize Mexico, Central America, and most of South America.
Spain also established colonies in territory that today is part of the United States. In 1565, the Spanish settled in St. Augustine, Florida. In 1605 they founded Santa Fe in New Mexico. Other settlements were made throughout Florida, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California. In 1600, before the Enlish had made their first settlement, Spanish colonists in the New World numbered about 200,000.
Spain gave much of the new world her culture, language, and religion. In part because there were so few women colonists and because Spanish men faced few taboos for doing so, Spanish settlers and Indians intermarried and created a creole culture. The Spanish colonies were under the strict control of the crown.
The Spanish foothold in the New World slipped away gradually. The loss of the Armada in 1588 marked Spain's slow decline as a world power. In the Napoleonic wars she would lose most of her American holdings, and in the Spanish-American war she would lose the rest.
When the King of France heard that the pope had apportioned the New World between Spain and Portugal, he demanded to see "the clause in Adam's will" that excluded his country. The French wanted to acquire an empire in the New World, to fish for cod off Newfoundland, to trade with the Indians for furs, and to convert the Indians to Catholicism.
The French utilized the vast inland waterways to explore and settle North America, founding fur-trading settlements especially along the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi-most notably Montreal, Detroit, St. Louis, and New Orleans.
French settlement was very sparse. In 1750 New France held only 80,000 white settlers. The reasons for this small number were: First, New France had no gold or silver and so could not attract fortune hunters. Second, France restricted emigration to Catholics, thereby excluding French Protestants. Third, Frenchmen were primarily engaged in the fur trade instead of farming. Fourth, New France, like France itself, was under the strict rule of an absolute king who opposed the growth of self-government, and thereby crushed the sort of private colonization initiatives which marked the British colonies.
France lost her possessions in North America as a result of the French and Indian War. French influence in the New World has remained strong, however, in Quebec and in Louisiana.
Many Englishmen migrated to the colonies to escape the political and religious unrest that seized England under the Stuarts. In succession, England experienced civil war (1642-45), the beheading of King Charles I (1649), a Puritan dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell (1649-58), the restoration of the Stuarts (1660), and the final overthrow of Stuart rule by the Glorious Revolution (1688-89). Over much of the same period dissenting Protestants and minority Catholics suffered new bouts of discrimination with each change in administration, and many Englishmen preferred the colonies to the uncertainties of England in the period.
Also in the fifteenth and sixteenth century English lords began to make sheep pastures out of the lands, fencing them in, and tossing out tenant farmers (the so-called enclosure movement). These farmers moved to the cities, where an English depression sent them looking for fresh starts in America.
Unlike New France or Spain, the English came to settle America permanently, bringing their families, investing themselves in the lands they occupied, and maintaining a discrete distance from the natives. Between the influx of settlers and the population boom produced by natural reproduction among settled families, the English became the most numerous, the most densely-populated of the European powers in North America. From a population of 250,000 in 1700, the English colonies grew to 1.2 million by 1750 and 1.6 million by 1760. By comparison the Iroquois Indians, after the decimations of European diseases, had about 10,000 people in all of their allied tribes.
In many textbooks, the Indians are seen as merely pawns in the European wars for empire. It's better to see the Indians as yet another player employing a combination of diplomacy and war to protect their claims to the land. The Indian tribes of the American interior were much more powerful than those that had been swept from the coast, and far from being the passive victims of European encroachment, they set many of the terms of intercultural contact.
Over many generations, however, interaction with European societies transformed Indian culture in important ways.
Almost from the first moment of contact the fur trade drew Native Americans and Euro-Americans together. Both parties had something to gain from the exchange. The Indians valued the utility of European trade goods and gradually adopted the use of such things as iron hatchets, copper kettles, scissors, needles, thimbles, knives, guns, and other metal implements, all of which were items that were easily adapted to traditional Indian agricultural and hunting practices. The Europeans, on the other hand, valued the Indians extensive experience in hunting, trapping, and trading. From the Indian point of view, beaver skins were easy to obtain and the trade goods so useful as to make it seem that they were getting the best of the deal.
Over the long term, however, involvement in the fur trade had important consequences for Native American tribes. First, as subsistence hunting gave way to commercial hunting, the tribes moved from their fixed agricultural lifestyle to a more nomadic, woodlands existence--closer, in fact, to the notion Europeans had of their lives to begin with. Second, the shift from an agricultural to a hunting-based society also affected gender-relations within the tribe. As hunting became more important to a tribe increasingly dependent upon European trade goods, Indian men spent less time in their village, more time trapping and trading, and their enhanced position and importance began to erode the traditional matrilineal organization of the tribe. Third, involvement in the fur trade gradually altered the relationship of the Native Americans to their ecosystem, a change which had spiritual consequences. In the pre-contact Indian cosmology there was a balance between animals and men that had to be respected for fear of angering the spirit of nature. In declaring all out war against fur-bearing animals, the Indians repudiated this staple spiritual dimension of their lives, and it tended to eat at their confidence and identity as time wore on. Fourth, the fur trade intensified intertribal rivalries and tensions. As hunting grounds became depleted, tribes competed and made war on each other to protect or acquire good hunting grounds and thereby maintain their privileged position in the trade with Europeans.
In trading with Europeans, Indian tribes discovered that centralized, male leadership was more effective. Europeans wanted and expected to be able to deal with one head man, and Indians seeking a trading relationship with the Europeans were obliged to make this shift in their political organization. Europeans sped such changes along by giving gifts that might enhance the power of one tribal chief over another. Given that warfare and hunting, traditional male pursuits, were already becoming more esteemed, this shift toward political centralization under one male further eroded the traditional matrilineal arrangement of Indian society, and a warrior code, rather than an agricultural/spiritual code, came to dominate many of the tribes.
Obviously the most controversial aspect of post-contact cultural change among the Indians involved the use of alcohol. Rates of alcoholism among Native Americans is still ridiculously high, and most historians have argued that the Indians took to alcohol because of depression and self-loathing at having lost their ancestral homes and sold-out their traditions and culture. New findings suggest that while this may have been the case in the nineteenth century, it was not the case in the seventeenth and eighteenth. Early on Indians use of alcohol was no where near the levels of the Europeans themselves, and the Indians tended to fold alcohol into their existing understanding of mind-altering substances. At least in the beginning, Indians either used alcohol as we use it, as a way of nursing sociability, or used it as they used peyote or smoking, investing the experience with religious functions and meanings.
The costs of alcohol abuse mounted rapidly after 1700 when the flow of rum and brandy into Indian villages grew dramatically. The increased consumption of alcohol antagonized existing squabbles between and within tribes, increased the incidence of domestic violence, and increased disease and malnutrition as Indians drank away the profits of fur-trading, gave up on agriculture, and weakened their immune systems.
From 1700 to near 1750, the French, Spanish, English, and Indian groups maintained a kind of diplomatic equilibrium in North America. That equilibrium broke down in the French and Indian War, preparing the way for English dominance of the New World--and then American independence from Britain.
Open hostilities began in 1754 when colonial Virginia militiamen clashed with French forces for control of the Ohio Valley. For three years, the war went very badly for the British.
In the summer and autumn of 1755, Indian raiders terrorized the Virginia and Pennsylvania backcountry. In 1756 and 57 one French victory after another threw the English colonies into panic. The English port at Oswego, Ontario fell in 1757. Fort William Henry surrendered later that year. So desperate was the English situation that the governor of Pennsylvania, terrified by Indian attacks that had reached to within thirty miles of Philadelphia, seriously considered promising the Indians free passage through his colony if they would promise to concentrate their attacks on the Virginians.
But in 1757 William Pitt became Prime Minister and Britain began to redouble her war efforts in North America. Additional troops, together with additional colonial militia, turned the tide of battle. In retrospect it is a wonder that 70,000 French and Indians had managed for three years to so successfully thrash a million and a half Englishmen.
The significance of the French and Indian War cannot be overstated. First, the colonies gained self-confidence and valuable military experience--and after three years of being beaten, began to see the need for colonial unity in order to meet common problems. More important, the danger of attack by the French and at least some Indian tribes had been significantly reduced, paving the way for further movement west. By securing their borders, the colonies became less dependent on England for troops and protection. Second, divided and preoccupied by religious strife, succession problems, and wars with France, Britain had become very lax in its governance of the colonies. She had allowed her American colonies to exercise virtual self-government and evade the typical European mercantilist restrictions on colonial economies. In 1763 Britain determined to change her policy. She believed that 1) the colonies had gained much by the war's outcome but contributed very little, some of them even profiting by trading goods including arms with both sides during the conflict; and 2) that the colonies needed to help pay back the staggering war debt that had amassed during the war, and thus the English government began to propose a series of tax reforms that brought significant resentment from a colonial populous accustommed to great freedoms and suffering from a post-war economic downturn. Third, the French were almost completely driven out of the new world. They ceded their territory west of the Mississippi to Spain and all eastern territories (except New Orleans) to Britain. This meant that the Indians of the Ohio Valley, who had so successfully played England and France off of one another, could no longer depend on their careful diplomacy to keep them safe from English encroachment.
The War for Independence (summary)
Beginning in 1763, the British government adopted a new colonial policy; the policy had three objectives: first, to place the colonies under strict British political and economic control; second, to compel the colonists to demonstrate respect for and obedience to English laws; and third, to make the colonies bear their part of the cost of maintaining the British Empire.
The new British policy called for a stricter enforcement of already existing laws. Reflecting mercantilist doctrine the Navigation Acts required the colonists to: first, transport their goods only in British (and colonial) ships (though Dutch freighters might offer lower rates; second, export certain enumerated articles--tobacco, sugar, indigo, and furs, only to Britain (though other European markets might offer higher prices); third, purchase their imports from Britain or, if the purchased from the European continent, they were to stop at a British port and pay duties. Writs of Assistance were general search warrants which authorized British officials to search colonial homes, buildings, and ships for smuggled goods.
The new British policy also saw the enactment of new measures--some of which were repealed and replaced as the British struggled to find a tax policy that seemed reasonable to all parties. Early new measures included: 1) the Sugar Act (1764), which actually reduced the existing duty on colonial sugar and molasses imports from the Spanish and French West Indies, but it called for stricter enforcement; 2) the Stamp Act (1765), the first internal tax levied on the colonies, which required that stamps be put on such printed materials as wills, mortgages, almanacs, pamphlets, and newspapers. This act directly affected influential groups such as lawyers, clergymen, and printers; 3) Townshend Acts (1767), import duties on paper, glass, paint, tea, and other enumerated goods. Part of the proceeds from these duties was to go directly to the royal governors to make them financially independent of the colonial assemblies; 4) Proclamation of 1763, a royal decree prohibiting colonists from settling west of the Appalachians; 5) Quartering Act (1765), requiring colonists to provide food and living quarters for British soldiers. The soldiers were ostensibly there to protect the colonists from Indians, but they were stationed primarily not in frontier settlements but in populous coastal cities.
Colonial opposition to these measures: 1) continued smuggling; 2) the firing of the Gaspee; 3) the continued settlement of lands beyond the Appalachians; 4) the Stamp Act Congress (1765) and its arrangement for a boycott of British goods; 5) the Committees of Correspondence, inaugurated in 1772 in Massachusetts by Samuel Adams (brewer/patriot) and dedicated to organizing opposition to British policies; 6) the Sons of Liberty, an organization of colonial patriots which helped enforce the boycotts; 7) demonstrations against soldiers, one of which turned violent (the Boston Massacre, 1770) giving colonists a cause to rally around; 8) the Tea Parties.
Determined to make an example of Massachusetts, parliament passed the Coercive Acts (1774), which 1) closed Boston harbor until the colonists paid for the tea; 2) authorized the quartering of troops in any colonial town; 3) permitted British officials accused of crimes in Massachusetts to stand trial in England; and 4) curtailed Massachusetts self-government.
In mid-April 1775, Thomas Gage, now installed as governor of Massachusetts, received orders to enforce the Intolerable Acts, by military action if necessary, and to stop Patriot preparations for armed defense.
Gage immediately dispatched 700 men to Concord to destroy a known cache of American arms. When the redcoats arrived at Lexington at dawn on April 19, 1775 they found seventy minutemen waiting for them. After repeated British commands to disperse, the outnumbered Americans complied. At this point someone fired the first shot of the Revolutionary war.
Few Americans in the spring of 1775 were yet willing to break ties with England. Whatever their squabblings about import duties, ties of memory, habit, interest, and affection, not to mention fears of the unknown, all acted as deterrents to a complete break with England.
This hope reflected in the Olive Branch Petition adopted by the Second Continental Congress in July 1775, declaring that the colonists remained loyal to King George and asking him to intervene to protect his American subjects against Parliamentary tyranny.
Gradually Americans changed their minds, because 1) The King rejected the Olive Branch Petition out-of-hand; 2) he determined to send the hated Hessian mercenaries to help quell the colonial uprising; 3) he began to arm the slaves, which alienated the Chesapeake as much the Intolerable Acts had alienated New England; 4) Thomas Paine, a recent immigrant from England, published 120,000 copies of Common Sense, which attacked King George directly, convincing many Americans that he was not a benevolent father but a dictator who had unleashed the redcoats, the Hessians, and their own slaves upon them. Congress followed up Paine's treatise with the Declaration of Independence, a detailed indictment of the King's crimes, cruelties, and illegal acts against the colonies.
Declaring Independence was one thing. Establishing it another. At the beginning of the Revolution, it seemed like madness for the Americans to make a move for independence: First, Britain was probably the strongest nation on earth, with an enormous advantage in numbers, experience, and the political centralization to orchestrate a war. Second, several hundred thousand Americans remained staunchly loyal to the crown, creating a vast network of spies and informants, along with a local supply of troops. Third, America had for a centralized government only the Continental Congress, which had no power to levy taxes, and thus could provide little but hot air to support the commanders in the field. Fourth, it wasn't clear to anyone that there even was an America to be independent. State animosities and allegiances remained paramount in the minds of most soldiers.
But Britain also faced enormous problems. First and most obviously, Britain was 3,000 miles away from the military scene, and troops and supplies would take two or three months to arrive. Second, when troops did arrive they would have to fight on unfamiliar terrain, often surrounded by a hostile populace. The Americans, by contrast, were on their home ground, close to supplies and manpower, able to apply whatever strength they had to the battle at hand. Third, British military and naval power had declined since the end of the French and Indian War. Meanwhile, France, smarting from the loss of its colonies, had rebuilt its military forces and was in a position to challenge Britain again. More serious, Britain's victories in the recent war had left it isolated. France, Spain, Holland, and Russia all feared British power and had grievances that they hoped to redress. These nations, and especially France, were potential American allies in 1775, and their hostility to Britain would prove indispensable. Fourth, the British misunderstood from the very beginning the nature of the rebellion itself, and in fact, they seemed never exactly to understand. Assuming that they were dealing with a handful of rabblerousers who could be brought to the bargaining table relatively easily, British tactics lagged behind the reality of the independence movement. First the British assumed that if they won a staggering victory, the Americans would crumple. The British won more than a few decisive victories, but the Americans never (quite) crumpled. Next the British assumed that if they occupied major American cities resistance would break down. So they took New York, then New Jersey, and then Philadelphia, the national capital. But the resistance they were seeking to break had no one point on which pressure could be applied. It was rather general to the population. European powers had always built that power on mercenary armies that they'd recruited and paid. To actually harness popular enthusiasm and make it militarily effective was new to the American Revolution.
George Washington and the Birth of the Republic (summary)
George Washington is a sort of civic god. Doubtless this is due in part to his accomplishments. As Revolutionary general and First President, Washington did much to establish and then set the tone for the government of the United States. But Washington was also godlike in his aspect and bearing. He has always seemed--even to many of his biographers--remote, stern, and inscrutable.
Washington's aloofness was undoubtedly an essential part of his personality. Most people who knew him admitted that he could seem cold and distant. But in many ways Washington's haughteur was a deliberate role, a characteristic that he cultivated very carefully, a suit that he wore, and was expected to wear. Though never as clever a financier as Hamilton, or as well-rounded an intellectual as Thomas Jefferson, Washington had an intuitive feel for the outward show of character and power, a feel that was unique among the founders and critical for the young nation's success.
Throughout the war, Washington was hampered by the vacillations and weakness of the Continental Congress. They could not ensure him the manpower or materials necessary to win the war, and he believed (quite rightly) that their incompetence dragged out the war. But despite this understanding, Washington never took over the Congress, as a Cromwell or Napoleon might have; indeed, he did not even appeal over the heads of the Congress to the people directly. Instead Washington seemed always to return to the idea that the military must remain subservient to civil authority, even when that authority was incompetent or so weak that it was costing his army lives. And when his men grew exasperated with the failure of the government to feed, arm, protect, or pay them, he stood between them and Congress and thwarted every threat against the supremacy of civil power.
Washington was, despite his haughteur, fundamentally republican. He had been fully persuaded that the king of England and the minions surrounding him were conspiring to destroy the liberties of Americans. He welcomed Thomas Paine's devastating attack not only on George III but on monarchy itself.
The ineffectiveness of Congress that had hampered Washington's prosecution of the war continued to threaten the viability of the new republic in peacetime. Having submitted to the military loss of her mainland colonies, England set about to regain them by economic warfare, or so it seemed. As England closed its ports to American produce, the Congress became bankrupt, and without the power to tax, it had no recourse for funds. Looking to the states for funds, it found only so many seemingly separate countries, squabbling among themselves, erecting barriers to interstate trade, grinding out their own depreciated currencies, and wreaking havoc upon the nation's financial system at home and respect abroad.
But finally, it was the looming specter of anarchy that demanded action. In Western Massachusetts in 1786 hundreds of angry farmers, threatened with mortgage foreclosures, took up their muskets in demand for cheaper money and relief from taxation. Though put down by the Massachusetts militia, Shays' Rebellion unnerved American men of property in every state, and the impotence of the central government during the crisis did little to assuage their anxieties.
So Washington came out of his self-imposed retirement after the Revolution to lend his name to the cause of redrafting the weak Articles of Confederation. He had reflected carefully before deciding to attend the Philadelphia convention. He was fifty-five and rheumatic. He was far from certain that the Philadelphia convention would find a solution to the nation's political problems and had little wish to risk his reputation in an effort that might be doomed to failure. More important, when he had resigned his military commission in December 1783 he had clearly stated his intention of spending the rest of his days in private life. But what most troubled Washington was the realization that his failure to go to Philadelphia might be interpreted as a rejection of the convention. Moreover, without a redrafting of the outmoded Articles, the republican experiment he had worked so hard to secure might fail altogether.
Washington entered Philadelphia at the head of a parade of cheering well-wishers and was quickly chosen presiding officer of the Convention. Most of the members were concerned with the general drift of the country toward anarchy and dissolution.
Despite such anxieties, most delegates agreed that no matter how unstable, the people were the only sound foundation for good government. This paradox of advocating popular government while at the same time distrusting the people on which such a government would be based, was not lost on the founders; and yet, the whole quarrel with England had, at least ostensibly, centered around the question of actual representation. Thus the legacy of the Revolution complicated matters for the Founding Fathers. If they were to construct a government based on actual representation, as the individual states had done, they would be faced with the same anarchy that had plagued the nation under the Articles of Confederation. And yet, if they balked at actual representation, they would be repudiating the very revolution they were attempting to rescue at the Convention.
The political system created by the Constitution called for three "separate and distinct" branches of government, each able to check the others' power, none able to assert itself alone. And only one half of one of the three branches would be composed of actual (direct) representatives of the people. The executive branch was to be headed by a president elected for a four-year term not by the people directly but by an electoral college. The judicial branch was to be composed of judges appointed by the president (with Senate approval) for life. Only the lower house of the legislative branch was to be composed ot directly-elected representatives; the upper house was to consist of men chosen by their legislatures. Thus while the preamble of the Constitution seemed to invoke the power of the American people, the actual government established by the Constitution did not grant to the people, as such, much of the power they had been invoked to create. That is the Founding Fathers rather successfully created an ostensibly democratic nation that wasn't particularly democratic.
But the government was not meant simply to restrain the mob and ensure that natural aristocrats were appointed to the positions of government, although that certainly was part of the Fathers intention. The government was constructed in such a way that all men, aristocratic or plebian, were restrained from bending it to selfish ends.
The Founders believed there were two common ways for a republican government to lose control. The aristocratic element of a society could learn to relish the power to which it naturally rose, becoming an abusive elite ruling without regard for the common and human good. Or the plebian element of a society might rise up as a tyrannical majority, disrespectful of the rights of property and the need for order. The Constitution was intended to create a system of government immune to these two types of abuse. It was, in this sense, neither anti-democratic nor anti-aristocratic but rather simply anti-abuse of power. More important, it was intended as the best possible expression of popular government, as a restraining influence on the citizenry so they might have the freedom to make the best possible expression of themselves. The paradox was spelled out by Jeremy Belknap: "Let it stand as a principle that government originates from the people; but let the people be taught…that they are not able to govern themselves."
The Constitution which emerged from Philadelphia was a "bundle of compromises." First, it offered a compromise on the sticky question of representation. The more populous states supported the Virginia Plan that representation in the legislature be based on population. The less populous supported the New Jersey Plan, calling for each state have equal representation. This issue, the most serious one dividing the delegates, was settled by the adoption of the Connecticut Compromise which spelled out a legislature built of two houses: 1) a House of Representatives, where representation was to be based on population, and 2) a Senate, where each state was to have equal representation. Second, the Constitution offered a comfortable compromise on the issue of slavery. The Southern states proposed that 1) slaves be counted as part of the population for purposes of representation, this increasing Southern influence in the House, and 2) slaves not be counted as part of the population for purposes of taxation, thus decreasing the Southern tax burden. The Northern states, in which slavery existed but was fast dying out, supported the opposite positions. The issue was settled by the three-fifths compromise: Five slaves were to be counted as three free persons for purposes of both representation and direct taxation. By another compromise on slavery, Congress was forbidden for 20 years (until 1808) to interfere with the importation of slaves into the country. Third, the Constitution offered a compromise on tariffs. The South, being highly agricultural, feared that a central government might pass a tariff on their exports of indigo, rice, and tobacco. The North, being highly commercial, wanted a central government to establish uniform regulations on commerce with foreign nations. The issue was settled by granting Congress the power to control foreign commerce and levy tariffs on imports but not on exports.
Even with these compromises, many felt that the Convention had overstepped its bounds and that the resulting document threatened the power of both the states and the people.
The Antifederalists, opponents of the Constitution, consisted of farmers and city workers who argued that the Constitution was a tool of propertied interest, which left the people unprotected against federal encroachment upon their civil liberties.
The Federalists, who supported the Constitution, consisted of men with business and property interests. They argued that the new government would provide stability, maintain law and order, further economic prosperity, and command respect abroad.
The Federalists ultimately prevailed. First, the Federalists were better organized and financed. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, writing under pseudonym, produced The Federalist, which helped to drive home the arguments in favor of a stronger central government. Second, the Antifederalists were in a position of having to support the Articles of Confederation, which were totally inadequate to meet the needs of the expanding country. Third, state property qualifications for voting in the ratifying conventions meant that business interests (allied with the Federalists) would be more likely to qualify to vote than the urban workers and poorer farmers (allied with Antifederalists). Fourth, the Federalists enjoyed the support of two highly respected men: Benjamin Franklin and George Washington.
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