02: Revolutionary America

In place of Paine’s sweeping calls for a new age of mankind, colonists offered detailed, particular, pragmatic reasons for severing their bonds with Britain. The “declaration” was a familiar form, a genre, with roots in British politics, and colonists emulated past declarations, especially the English Declaration of Rights of 1689, which had justified the deposition of King James II. Following this form, colonists enumerated the specific wrongs committed by King George, citing mainly the offenses of the last two years—especially the Prohibitory Act of 1775, which blockaded American ports—and not the longer train of incidents dating to the 1760s. Also common to most of these documents was the claim that the call for separation was a last resort—a step taken only because the king had rejected their previous entreaties and no alternatives remained.

Pauline Maier’s history of the Declaration elevates the role of “the people” in revolutionary history. She belonged to a generation of historians who tried to expand the study of the past beyond “great men” to focus on regular citizens

What are we to think of history? when in less than 40 years, such diversities appear in the memories of living persons, who were witnesses?”<a href="#_edn2" name="_ednref2">[2]</a>

May 9, 1754, Franklin published a political cartoon depicting a rattlesnake with the admonishing title, “JOIN, or DIE.”

To Loyalists, the serpent represented Satan, deception, and the spiritual fall of man, proving the treachery of revolutionary thought. To Patriots however, the snake depicted wisdom, vigor, and cohesiveness, especially when the colonies united for a common purpose

. Franklin’s cartoon was resurrected as a potent call for colonial unity against Great Britain, ultimately giving momentum to the religious controversy that would soon follow when Loyalists and Patriots began writing their opinions on what the snake symbolized.

As every teacher knows, one of the central challenges with any survey is negotiating the gap between how professional historians understand historical events and how those events are perceived in the media and popular press

In an age of fake news and alternative facts, the history that we convey to our students will, in more cases than we may care to admit, be the sum total of the history that they know.

More than anything else, though, I ask students to accept that despite the vast differences between then and now, early Americans, regardless of their race, gender or creed, were in one very important respect just like Americans today: They were complicated, multifaceted human beings, who routinely thought and behaved in inconsistent, often contradictory ways.

It sometimes is cloudy, it rains, it hails; again ’tis clear and pleasant, and the Sun shines on us. Take one thing with another, and the World is a pretty good sort of a World; and ’tis our Duty to make the best of it and be thankful. One’s true Happiness depends more upon one’s own Judgement of one’s self, on a Consciousness of Rectitude in Action and Intention, and in the Approbation of those few who judge impartially, than upon the Applause of the unthinking undiscerning Multitude, who are apt to cry Hosanna today, and tomorrow, Crucify him.

These are the Operations of Nature. It sometimes is cloudy, it rains, it hails; again ’tis clear and pleasant, and the Sun shines on us. Take one thing with another, and the World is a pretty good sort of a World; and ’tis our Duty to make the best of it and be thankful.

Our fore fathers came over here for liberty of conscience, and we have been nothing better than servants to 'em all along this 100 years, and got just enough to keep soul and body together, and buy their goods to keep us from freezing to death, and we won't be their negroes. Providence never designed us for negroes, I know, for if it had it wou'd have given us black hides, and thick lips, and flat noses, and short woolly hair, which it han't done, and therefore never intended us for slaves. This I know is good a sillogissim as any at colledge, I say we are as handsome as old England folks, and so should be as free

Our fore fathers came over here for liberty of conscience, and we have been nothing better than servants to 'em all along this 100 years, and got just enough to keep soul and body together, and buy their goods to keep us from freezing to death, and we won't be their negroes. Providence never designed us for negroes, I know, for if it had it wou'd have given us black hides, and thick lips, and flat noses, and short woolly hair, which it han't done, and therefore never intended us for slaves. This I know is good a sillogissim as any at colledge, I say we are as handsome as old England folks, and so should be as free.

When Washington’s father Augustine died in 1743, George Washington became a slave owner at the early age of eleven. In his will, Augustine left his son the 280 acre family farm near Fredericksburg, Virginia. In addition, Washington was willed ten slaves

<p>As many as 5,000 blacks sailed with the British from Charleston in late 1782. In New York, the commander of the British army took the position that any black who was with the British army before November 30, 1782, would be considered free. American slaveholders tried to reclaim their slave property but had little success. Boston King, a black Baptist preacher, recalled, “This dreadful rumour [re-enslavement] filled us with inexpressible anguish and terror, especially when we saw our old masters, coming from Virginia, North-Carolina, and other parts, and seizing upon their slaves in the streets of New-York, or even dragging them out of their beds.”</p> <p>In the end more than 3,000 blacks left from New York with the British, most bound for Nova Scotia in Canada. At least 8,300 blacks were taken to East Florida from Savannah and Charleston. Of course many remained in a state of slavery to loyalists who had fled. But many had earned their freedom during the war.</p>

A critical part of Adams’s strategy was to convince the jury that his clients had only killed a black man and his cronies and that they didn’t deserve to hang for it.

In “plain English,” this was “most probably a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and molattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tars. — And why we should scruple to call such a set of people a mob, I can’t conceive, unless the name is too respectable for them.” And then Adams likely drew a laugh by observing, “The sun is not about to stand still or go out, nor the rivers to dry up because there was a mob in Boston on the 5th of March that attacked a party of soldiers.” Here is one under-celebrated aspect of Adams’s genius on display: he transformed the crowd into outside agitators, and then he tried to make the jurors laugh. He created the intimacy of the inside joke, the coziness of a dinner table conversation among the like-minded. In doing so, he gave the jury permission to despise the victims.

Pause here, and note the echo across the ages to Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, when Michael Brown’s killer described how he had to shoot the unarmed teen because he was terrified when Brown came charging toward him with “looks like a demon.”

the victims were just a “a rabble of Negroes, &amp;c.”

As a moral fable about the rule of law, the Boston Massacre trial is a story in need of revision.

to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent,