ANG 221 - Support de Cours

ANG 221 : La Civilisation Américaine.
LES ENSEIGNANTS DE LA MATIERE :

Pr AFAGLA
Dr AHONDO, MA
Dr KOUMA, MA
Dr AKAKPO DOME, A
Dr AGOUZE, A
Dr MIHAM, A
Établissement : FACULTE DES LETTRES, LANGUES ET ARTS (FLLA)

Domaines d'étude : LETTRES, LANGUES ET ARTS
MOTS-CLES : ETATS-UNIS, HISTOIRE, DEMOCRATIE
Public cible :
Cette UE s'adresse aux étudiants désireux de se former à la recherche en histoire américaine.
Durée apprenant Modalité spatiale Modalité Modalité Type d'activité

3 CREDITS (36h) Mixte temporelle collaborative Apprendre
Mixte Mixte Échanger
Lire
S'informer
S'exercer
Produire
1 Prérequis
Pour suivre cet enseignement, l'étudiant(e) doit s'inscrire en deuxième année de Licence.
2 Objectif(s)
Objectif général : Aider l’étudiant à comprendre la démocratie américaine et les contradictions
inhérentes à sa pratique aux Etats-Unis. A terme, l’étudiant sera capable d’identifier les
soubassements de cette démocratie et les pratiques contraires à ses principes inscrits aussi bien
dans la Déclaration de l’Indépendance que dans la Constitution des Etats-Unis et qui constituent ses
pierres d’achoppement – la politique discriminatoire, par exemple.
- Objectifs spécifiques : A la fin de l’UE, les étudiants seront capables de :

. Identifier les éléments qui constituent la pierre angulaire de la démocratie américaine et
expliquer la pertinence de ces éléments dans toutes nations dites démocratiques ;
. Identifier et relever les différents éléments qui sont contraires aux principes démocratiques
des USA et expliquer comment ces éléments violent le principe d’égalité constituant par là des
menaces pour la démocratie américaine.
. Analyser et relever les éléments contradictoires à la démocratie américaine par le biais des
textes exposant la politique discriminatoire.
1/13
Semaine 1 : Première prise de contact avec les étudiant(e)s
3H temporelle collaborative Communiquer
Asynchrone En groupe Échanger
S'informer
Objectif(s)
Présenter le programme, le manuel de travail, les types d'évaluation et les modes d'évaluation du
cours.
Que faire pour bien suivre ce cours ?
Voici les quatre choses que vous devez faire pour bien suivre et comprendre le cours:
1. AVOIR LE LIVRE DU COURS. Son titre est: Highlights of American History: Landmark Dates and
Texts, 2ème édition, 2019 - ISBN 979-10-699-5351-2 (par Ruben Kodjo Afagla). Vous le trouverez
au point de vente non loin de Lomegan, avant le grand portail de Université de Lomé, situé du coté de
Lomegan. Contact point de vente : 99 06 78 07 – 90 35 33 61 – 92 10 46 99 – 91 11 94 22.
2. LIRE LES TEXTES proposés pour chaque semaine ;
3. ECOUTER LES AUDIOS ET VISUALISER LES VIDEOS proposés pour chaque semaine ; et
4. FAIRE LES EXERCICES/ACTIVITES proposés pour chaque semaine.
Merci.
Prof Afagla
2/13
Semaine 2 : LES TEXTES FONDATEURS DE LA DEMOCRATIE AMERICAINE
3H A distance temporelle collaborative Apprendre
Asynchrone Individuelle Lire
S'exercer
S'auto-former
S'informer
Objectif(s)
Relever et identifier les éléments essentiels de ces textes qui sont à l’origine de la démocratie
américaine
Activité apprenant Activité formateur
Consigne(s) Consigne(s)
Lire les textes suivants dans Highlights of American Lire les texes assignées dans Highlights of American
History, 2ème édition: History
The Mayflower Compact, 1620 (pp. 61-65) Écouter les audios/vidéos

The Declaration of Independence (pp. 117-121)
George Washington: the Democrat (pp. 130-133) Préparer les questions sur les audios/vidéos
George Washington Resigns (pp. 137-138)
Matériel pédagogique
Afagla, Highlights of American History, 2ème édition,
2019.
Écouter les audios/vidéos dont les liens sont indiqués
et répondre aux questions posées
• Afagla, Highlights of American History, 2ème édition,

2019 (A lire obligatoirement).
3/13
Semaine 3 : LES TEXTES FONDATEURS DE LA DEMOCRATIE AMERICAINE
S'exercer
Se former
Objectif(s)
Identifier les éléments qui constituent la force et la faiblesse de ces articles ; et ainsi montrer la
nécessité d’une nouvelle constitution
Lire The Articles of Confederation dans Highlights
- Lire The Articles of Confederation (pp. 121-127) of American History
dans Highlights of American History.
Poster le cours sur Articles of Confederation
Écouter les videos des liens indiqués et répondre
aux questions posées.
Matériel pédagogique Préparer les questions sur les faiblesses des
•Afagla, Highlights of American History, 2ème Articles of Confederation
édition, 2019 (A lire obligatoirement).
Afagla, Highlights of American History, 2ème
édition, 2019.
4/13
Semaine 4 : The Constitution of the United States: The Articles
S'exercer
Se former
Objectif(s)
Identifier les éléments des 7 articles de la Constitution des USA et expliquer comment ces derniers
constituent des bases pour leur démocratie.
Lire The Constitution of the United States: Articles Lire la Constitution américaine dans Highlights of
(pp. 143-154) American History
Visualiser/écouter les vidéos/audios relatifs à la Poster la leçon sur les Articles de la Constitution
Constitution américaine américaine
Matériel pédagogique Préparer les questions sur la Constitution

•Afagla, Highlights of American History, 2ème américaine ainsi que sur les audios/vidéos relatifs
édition, 2019 (A lire obligatoirement). à cette Constitution.
• Les vidéos/audios relatifs aux Articles de la Matériel pédagogique

Constitution américaine. •Afagla, Highlights of American History, 2ème
édition, 2019
5/13
Semaine 5: The Constitution of the United States: The Amendments
S'exercer
Se former
Objectif(s)
Analyser et identifier les éléments clés des amendements de la Constitution et expliquer comment
ces derniers constituent des bases pour leur démocratie.
Lire The Constitution of the United States/ Lire les amendements de la Constitution
Amendments (pp. 155-161) américaine dans Highlights of American History
Visualiser/écouter les vidéos/audios relatifs aux Visualiser/écouter les vidéos/audios relatifs aux
amendements de la Constitution américaine amendements de la Constitution américaine
Matériel pédagogique Préparer des exercices pour tester la

• Afagla, Highlights of American History, 2ème compréhension du matériel.
Afagla, Highlights of American History, 2ème
édition, 2019.
6/13
Semaine 6 : LES CONTRADICTIONS DE LA DEMOCRATIE AMERICAINE: Democracy
Expanded, Democracy Tested

S'exercer
Se former
Objectif(s)
Analyser les textes et relever les différents éléments qui sont contraires aux principes démocratiques
des USA et expliquer comment ces éléments handicapent la démocratie américaine.
Lire les textes suivants dans Highlights of American Poster des exercices relatifs aux textes
History, 2ème édition:
The Monroe Doctrine (p. 184) Afagla, Highlights of American History, 2ème
The Extension of Voting Rights (pp. 184-185) édition, 2019
Manifest Destiny: Two Views (pp. 186-187)
The Indian Removal Act (pp. 188)
Indian Removal: An Indian View (pp. 188-189)
The Trail Of Tears: One State's Apology (pp. 189-190)
Westward Migration: Settlement on the Frontier (pp.
190-191)
Faire des exercices relatifs aux textes
• Afagla, Highlights of American History, 2ème
7/13
Semaine 7 : LES CONTRADICTIONS DE LA DEMOCRATIE AMERICAINE: Democracy
Expanded, Democracy Tested (ctd)
S'exercer
Se former
Objectif(s)
Analyser les textes et relever les différents éléments qui sont contraires aux principes démocratiques
des USA et expliquer comment ces éléments constituent des menaces pour la démocratie
américaine.
Lire les textes suivants dans Highlights of American
History, 2ème édition: Poster des exercices relatifs aux textes
East From China: The Origins of Chinese America (pp. Matériel pédagogique
196-7) Afagla, Highlights of American History, 2ème édition,
Portland's Chinatown (pp. 197-199) 2019
Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience" (pp. 200-
201)
The Lowell Girls (pp. 203-204)
Factory Regulations in Lowell (pp. 204-205)
The Grimke Sisters on The Rights of Women (p. 207)
The Seneca Falls Convention (pp.207-208)
Faire des exercices relatifs aux textes
8/13
Semaine 8 : American Slavery
S'exercer
Se former
Objectif(s)
Relever et expliquer les différents faits ségrégationnels subis par les Noirs et les Indiens aux USA et
expliquer comment ces faits constituent des menaces pour la démocratie américaine.
Lire les textes suivants dans Highlights of American Lire les textes assignées dans Highlights of American
History, 2ème édition: History
African American History Timeline (pp. 46-52)

Slavery in the South, 1860 (p. 210) Préparer des questions sur les textes et les vidéos.
Two Views of Slavery (p. 211)
A Northerner's Attitude toward Slavery (pp. 212-13) Matériel pédagogique
Slavery and Social Control (pp. 213-14) Afagla, Highlights of American History
Slavery's Impact on Race and Gender Roles (pp. 214-
15) Mettre les liens vidéos et audios
Slave and Free Blacks in Indian Territory (pp. 216-17)
Runaway Slaves in Mexico (pp. 217-20)
Répondre aux questions relatives aux textes/ vidéos et

audios
9/13
Semaine 9 : American Slavery (ctd)
Rechercher
S'exercer
S'informer
Se former
Objectif(s)
Relever et expliquer les différents faits ségrégationnels subis par les Noirs et les Indiens aux USA et
expliquer comment ces faits constituent des menaces pour la démocratie américaine.
Lire les textes suivants dans Highlights of American Lire les textes à l’ordre du jour dans Highlights of
History, 2ème édition: American History, 2nd édition 2019.
The Compromise of 1850: Two Views (pp. 223-4) Préparer des exercices de compréhension relatif
Abolitionists – Garrison and Douglass (pp. 224-5) au concept de l’esclavage.
A Fugitive Slave Responds to His Owner (pp. 225-6)
Oregon Territory Bans African Americans (pp.226-7)
The Dred Scott Decision (pp. 231-2) Matériel pédagogique
John Brown's Last Speech, November 2, 1859 (pp. Afagla, Highlights of American History, 2ème
232-3) édition, 2019
Écouter les audio sur l’esclavage Chercher des audios sur l’esclavage.
Faire des exercices de compréhension du concept de

l’esclavage.
Afagla, Highlights of American History, 2ème édition,
10/13
Semaine 10: The Civil War and Reconstruction

S'exercer
Produire
Se former
Objectif(s)
Analyser les textes et relever ses différents éléments relatifs à la guerre de Sécession et à la
Reconstruction ; et expliquer comment ces éléments remettent en cause la démocratie américaine.
Lire les textes suivants dans Highlights of American Lire les textes de la semaine dans Highlights of
History, 2ème édition: American History, 2nd édition 2019
America's Bloodiest War (pp. 237-8)
Secession – One Planter's View (pp. 238-9) Rendre accessible les audios sur la Guerre Civile et
The Post War South – A Defeated Planter Looks Back la Reconstruction aux Etats-Unis.
(pp. 239-40)
The Secession Crisis, 1860-1861 (pp. 241) Poser des questions de compréhension sur la
A Southern Woman Defends Secession (pp. 241-2) Guerre Civile et la Reconstruction.
The Emancipation Proclamation (pp. 243)
Reluctant Liberators: Northern Troops in the South Matériel pédagogique
(pp. 245-7) Afagla, Highlights of American History, 2ème
Hard Times in the Confederacy (pp. 247-8) édition, 2019
The Fall of Richmond: A Black Soldier's Perspective
(pp. 250-52)
Écouter les audios relatifs à la Guerre Civile et à la

Reconstruction aux Etats-Unis et s’exercer.
11/13
Semaine 11 : The Civil War and Reconstruction
Rechercher
S'exercer
Rechercher
Objectif(s)
Analyser les textes et relever ses différents éléments relatifs à la guerre de Sécession et à la
Reconstruction ; et expliquer comment ces éléments remettent en cause la démocratie américaine.
Lire les textes suivants dans Highlights of American Lire les textes de la semaine dans Highlights of
History, 2ème édition: American History, 2nd édition 2019
Juneteenth: Birth of an African American Holiday (pp. Rendre accessible les audios sur la Guerre Civile et
253-4) la Reconstruction aux Etats-Unis.
"Impudent" Freedwomen (p. 255-6)
President Johnson Meets Black Leaders (pp. 256-7)
Reconstruction Amendments, 1866-1870 (pp. 257-8) Poser des questions de compréhension sur la
Reconstruction Amendments: Oregon's Response Guerre Civile et la Reconstruction.
(pp. 258-60)
Black Voting Rights: Other Views from the Far West Matériel pédagogique
(pp. 260-62) Afagla, Highlights of American History, 2ème
The Black Codes (pp. 263-4) édition, 2019
Thaddeus Stevens demands Black Suffrage (p. 264)
South Carolina under Black Government (pp. 265-6)
Écouter les audios relatifs à la Guerre Civile et à la

Reconstruction aux Etats-Unis et repondre aux
questions.
12/13
Semaine 12 : Présentielle
3H En présentiel temporelle collaborative Communiquer
Asynchrone En groupe Coopérer
Échanger
Se former
S'évaluer
Objectif(s)
General Review/Course evaluation.
Venir avec des questions/suggestions pour Prendre les suggestions pour améliorer
améliorer le cours le semestre prochain. l'enseignement dans le futur
13/13
A - STUDY OF FOUNDATIONAL TEXTS OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
CLASS MEETING No 2:
Objective: To help the students identify the basic elements in a series of proposed texts
inaugurating US democracy.
Texts to be studied and locate the genuine coming into being of American democracy:
- The Mayflower Compact (pp. 61-65)
- The Declaration of Independence (pp. 117-121)
- George Washington: the Democrat (pp. 130-133)
- George Washington Resigns (pp. 137-138)
II – Classic lecture note on the texts: Inaugurating Democracy in America:

-
- II.1. The Mayflower Compact
Mayflower Compact was a document signed on the English ship Mayflower on
November 21, 1620, prior to its landing at Plymouth, Massachusetts. It was the first
framework of government written and enacted in the territory that is now the United States of
America.
Rough seas and storms prevented the Mayflower from reaching its intended destination
in the area of the Hudson River, and the ship was steered instead toward Cape Cod. Because
of the change of course, the passengers were no longer within the jurisdiction of the charter
granted to them in England by the Virginia Company. Within this legally uncertain situation,
friction arose between the English Separatists (the Pilgrims) and the rest of the travelers, with
some of the latter threatening to leave the group and settle on their own.
To quell the conflict and preserve unity, Pilgrim leaders (among them William Bradford
and William Brewster) drafted the Mayflower Compact before going ashore. The brief
document (about 200 words) bound its signers into a body politic for the purpose of forming a
government and pledged them to abide by any laws and regulations that would later be
established “for the general good of the colony.” The compact was signed by nearly all of the
Mayflower’s adult male passengers (41 of a total of 102 passengers) while the ship was
anchored at Provincetown harbor. Its authority was immediately exercised when John Carver,
who had helped organize the expedition, was chosen as governor of the new colony.
The Mayflower Compact was not a constitution but rather an adaptation of a Puritan
church covenant to a civil situation. Furthermore, as a provisional instrument adopted solely
by the colonists, the document did not solve the matter of their questionable legal rights to the
land they settled. Nevertheless, the Mayflower Compact became the foundation of Plymouth’s
government and remained in force until the colony was absorbed into the Massachusetts Bay
Colony in 1691. Although in practice much of the power in Plymouth was guarded by the
Pilgrim founders, the Compact, with its fundamental principles of self-government and
common consent, has been interpreted as an important step in the evolution of democratic
government in America.
Self-Government Takes Root under the Mayflower Compact

Immediately after agreeing to the Mayflower Compact, the signers elected John Carver
(one of the Pilgrim leaders) as governor of their colony. They called it Plymouth Plantation.
When Governor Carver died in less than a year, William Bradford, age 31, replaced him. Each
year thereafter the "Civil Body Politic," consisting of all adult males except indentured
servants, assembled to elect the governor and a small number of assistants. Bradford was re-
elected 30 times between 1621 and 1656.
In the early years Governor Bradford pretty much decided how the colony should be
run. Few objected to his one-man rule. As the colony's population grew due to immigration,
several new towns came into existence. The increasingly scattered population found it
difficult to attend the General Court, as the governing meetings at Plymouth came to be
called. By 1639, deputies were sent to represent each town at the other General Court
sessions. Not only self-rule, but representative government had taken root on American soil.
The English Magna Carta, written more than 400 years before the Mayflower Compact,
established the principle of the rule of law. In England this still mostly meant the king's law.
The Mayflower Compact continued the idea of law made by the people. This idea lies at the
heart of democracy. So, from its crude beginning in Plymouth, self-government evolved into
the town meetings of New England and larger local governments in colonial America. By the
time of the Constitutional Convention, the Mayflower Compact had been nearly forgotten, but
the powerful idea of self-government had not. Born out of necessity on the Mayflower, the
Compact made a significant contribution to the creation of a new democratic nation: the
United States of America.
II. 2. The Declaration of Independence

Written by Thomas Jefferson and adopted by the Second Continental Congress, the
Declaration of Independence states the reasons the British colonies of North America sought
independence in July of 1776. The Declaration opens with a preamble describing the
document's necessity in explaining why the colonies have overthrown their ruler and chosen
to take their place as a separate nation in the world.
The Declaration explains why the colonies should break away from Britain. It says that
people have rights that cannot be taken away, lists the complaints against the king, and argues
that the colonies have to be free to protect the colonists' rights. At the bottom of the
document, the delegates signed their names.
All men are created equal and there are certain unalienable rights that governments
should never violate. These rights include the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
When a government fails to protect those rights, it is not only the right, but also the duty of
the people to overthrow that government. In its place, the people should establish a
government that is designed to protect those rights. Governments are rarely overthrown, and
should not be overthrown for trivial reasons. In this case, a long history of abuses has led the
colonists to overthrow a tyrannical government.
The King of Great Britain, George III, is guilty of 27 specific abuses. The King
interfered with the colonists' right to self-government and for a fair judicial system. Acting
with Parliament, the King also instituted legislation that affected the colonies without their
consent. This legislation levied taxes on the colonists. It also required them to quarter British
soldiers, removed their right to trial by jury, and prevented them from trading freely.
Additionally, the King and Parliament are guilty of outright destruction of American life and
property by their refusal to protect the colonies' borders, their confiscation of American ships
at sea, and their intent to hire foreign mercenaries to fight against the colonists.
The colonial governments tried to reach a peaceful reconciliation of these differences
with Great Britain, but were continually ignored. Colonists who appealed to British citizens
were similarly ignored, despite their shared common heritage and their just cause. After many
peaceful attempts, the colonists have no choice but to declare independence from Great
Britain.
The new nation will be called the United States of America and will have no further
connections with Great Britain. The new government will reserve the right to levy war, make
peace, make alliances with foreign nations, conduct trade, and do anything else that nations do
The Declaration of Independence was designed for multiple audiences: the King, the
colonists, and the world. It was also designed to multitask. Its goals were to rally the troops,
win foreign allies, and to announce the creation of a new country. The introductory sentence
states the Declaration’s main purpose, to explain the colonists’ right to revolution. In other
words, “to declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” Congress had to prove the
legitimacy of its cause. It had just defied the most powerful nation on Earth. It needed to
motivate foreign allies to join the fight.
The Declaration of Independence has three main parts, the Preamble, the List of
Grievances and the Resolution of Independence
- The Preamble
These are the lines contemporary Americans know best: “We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness.”
These stirring words were designed to convince Americans to put their lives on the line for
the cause. Separation from the mother country threatened their sense of security, economic
stability, and identity. The preamble sought to inspire and unite them through the vision of a
better life. The Declaration justified the independence of the United States by listing 27
colonial grievances against King George III and by asserting certain natural and legal rights,
including a right of revolution.
- List of Grievances
The list of 27 complaints against King George III constitutes the proof of the right to
rebellion. Congress cast “the causes which impel them to separation” in universal terms for an
international audience. Join our fight, reads the subtext, and you join humankind’s fight
against tyranny.
- Resolution of Independence
The most important and dramatic statement comes near the end, which is the declaration
of their independence: “That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and
Independent States.” It declares a complete break with Britain and its King and claims the
powers of an independent country.
The Declaration of Independence has served as a role model document: it inspired many
similar documents in other countries, the first being the 1789 Declaration of United Belgian
States issued during the Brabant Revolution in the Austrian Netherlands. It also served as the
primary model for numerous declarations of independence in Europe and Latin America, as
well as Africa (Liberia) and Oceania (New Zealand) during the first half of the 19th century.
II.3. – “George Washington: the Democrat” and “George Washington Resigns”

George Washington is a Genius in democracy. Both texts feature Washington as a
democrat. Why did George Washington emerge as the most significant leader in the founding
of the United States of America, even to the extent of being called the Father of the Country?
This is a question that inevitably arises in the mind of anyone who studies, even on a
casual basis, the founding of the United States of America. Washington lived and worked
with brilliant philosophers, thinkers, writers, orators and organizers, such as Franklin, Mason,
John and Sam Adams, Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Hamilton, Madison, Dickinson, the
Randolphs and the Lees, almost all of whom were far better educated than he. Yet at the three
major junctions in the founding of the nation, the Revolution, the Constitutional Convention
and the selection of the first President, for each position the leader chosen was George
Washington. In his own day he was seen as the indispensable man, the American Moses, The
Father of the Country. Why?
His contemporaries and subsequent commentators have enumerated many factors that
entered into the selection by his peers for these three strategically important positions:
physical size and presence, charisma, energy, multi-faceted experiences, charm, courage,
character, temperament, being a Virginian, wealth, ambition, his reputation as a stalwart
patriot and, especially after the Revolution, the regard, admiration and affection of the
populace at all levels of society. The most commonly cited characteristic given for his
emergence as the supreme leader is his character.
Both texts show Washington’s instrumentality to US democracy not only in his
leadership roles but also because of his character. He is a trusted person who has
demonstrated a noble and incorruptible character to the point of putting his resignation in the
balance. He is represented in both texts as a highly effective leader, illustrating himself as a
leader in his roles of commander in chief of the Continental Army, president of the
Constitutional Convention and first President of the country. His strategy in talking to the
soldiers preserves the fledging US democracy from succumbing to oblivion. Also, his wise
resignation offers another ample evidence of his democratic propensity: Democracies do not
elect presidents-for-life.
Discussion and Writing Questions
1. What two groups comprised the passengers on the Mayflower? How were they different
from each other? How similar?
2. What events forced the passengers on the Mayflower to write and sign the Mayflower
Compact? Discuss.
3. What facts in the text support the argument that the Pilgrims were democratic? What facts
support the view that they were not democratic?
4. What is the most important idea contained in the Mayflower Compact? What are some
other ideas it contains?
5. Why is the Declaration of Independence a key document in American life?
6. Discuss the instrumentality of Washington to the emergence of US democracy.
The Articles of Confederation
Confederation, primarily any league or union of people or bodies of people. The
term in modern political use is generally confined to a permanent union of sovereign
states for certain common purposes— Confederation, primarily any league or union of
people or bodies of people. The term in modern political use is generally confined to a
permanent union of sovereign states for certain common purposes—
Confederations and federations
The distinction between confederation and federation—words synonymous in their

origin—has been developed in the political terminology of the United States. Until 1789
the U.S. was a confederation; then the word federation, or federal republic, was
introduced as implying closer union. This distinction was emphasized during the
American Civil War when the seceding states formed a confederation (Confederate States
of America) in opposition to the Federal Union. Confederation thus came to mean a union
of sovereign states in which the stress is laid on the autonomy of each constituent body,
while federation implies a union of states in which the stress is laid on the supremacy of
the common government. The distinction is, however, by no means universally observed.
The variant confederacy, derived through the Anglo-French confederacie and meaning
generally a league or union, whether of states or individuals, was applied in America in
the sense of confederation to the seceding Southern states. In its political sense
confederacy has generally come to mean rather a temporary league of independent states
for certain purposes.
After the Revolutionary War, the American states were independent from Great
Britain. They needed to create a system of government to run this new nation. The first
system created was known as the Articles of Confederation and was adopted by the
Congress on November 15, 1777. In its final form, the Articles of Confederation were
comprised of a preamble and 13 articles. The Articles of Confederation were finally
ratified by the last of the 13 American states, Maryland, in 1781 and became the ruling
document in the new nation. The Articles created a nation that was “a league of friendship
and perpetual union.” The state governments retained most of the power under the
Articles, with little power given to the central government. Congress, for example, had to
rely upon the states for its funds and for the execution of its decrees. The central
government received little respect and was not able to accomplish much because it had
little authority over states or individuals in America. In the words of George Washington,
the government created by the Articles of the Confederation was “little more than the
shadow without the substance.”As the need for a stronger federal government began to be
realized, leaders from throughout the states got together to decide how to create it. The
Federal Constitutional Convention of 1787 was responsible for drafting the Constitution
of the United States, the document which took the place of the Articles of Confederation
in 1789 and created a stronger central government
Strengths and Accomplishments

Government signed a treaty of alliance with France in 1778.
Government successfully waged a war for independence against the British.
Government negotiated an end to the American Revolution in the Treaty of Paris,
signed in 1783.
Government granted the free inhabitants of each state “all the privileges and
immunities of free citizens in theseveral states.”
Government provided for the eventual admission of Canada into the
Confederation.
Government passed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which allowed the
Northwest Territories to organize their own governments. It allowed the eventual
admission to the Union of no more than five states, and no fewer than three, “on an equal
footing with the original states.” The Ordinance also banned slavery from the region.
Government established the Departments of Foreign Affairs, War, Marine, and
Treasury.
Weaknesses
Congress had no power to coin money, therefore each state developed its own
currency.
Congress was unable to regulate interstate and foreign commerce; some states
refused to pay for goods they purchased from abroad.
Congress was unable to impose taxes; it could only borrow money on credit.
No national court system was established to protect the rights of U.S. citizens.
No executive branch was established to enforce laws.
Amendments could be added only with the approval of all 13 states.
Approval of 9 of 13 states was required to pass alaw in Congress.
One vote was allotted for each state, despite the size of its population. It was just a
“firm league of friendship.”
As Noah Webster (ca. 1780) put it, “ So long as any individual state has power to
defeat the measures of the other twelve, the pretended union is but a name, and the
confederation a cobweb.”
America’s First Failure at Government
The Articles of Confederation
by Ted Brackemyre
A New Government
After the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, the thirteen American colonies
needed a government to replace the British system they were attempting to overthrow.
The Founding Fathers’ first attempt at such governance was formed around the Articles of
Confederation. The Articles of Confederation were first proposed at the Second
Continental Congress in 1777 in Philadelphia. They were fully ratified and put into effect
in 1781. The reign of the Articles of Confederation was brief. Why did the articles of
confederation fail? What were the flaws of the Articles of Confederation and how did it
distribute power? Read more to discover why by 1789 the former colonies were under the
law of a new governing document—the Constitution of the United States of America.
Power in the States’ Hands
The inherent weakness of the Articles of Confederation stemmed from the fact that
it called for a confederacy—which placed sovereign power in the hands of the states. This
is most explicitly stated in Article II, which reads: “Each state retains its sovereignty,
freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this
Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.”
Wary of Strong National Government
This distribution of power was chosen by the Founding Fathers because American
colonists were wary of strong national governments. Having dealt with the British Crown
for so many years, the American colonies did not want to create yet another out-of-touch,
national government. Moreover, Americans identified most strongly with their individual
colony, so it seemed natural to construct an American government based on powerful state
governments.
That said, during its short lifespan, the Articles of Confederation became
increasingly ineffective at governing the continually growing American states. The main
cause of this ineffectiveness stemmed from a lack of a strong, central government. From
the absence of a powerful, national government emerged a series of limitations that
rendered the Articles of Confederation futile.
Specifically, the lack of a strong national government in the Articles of
Confederation led to three broad limitations.
1. Economic disorganization
2. Lack of central leadership
3. Legislative inefficiencies
Economic Disorganization
The first flaw of the Articles of Confederation was its economic disorganization
which led to financial hardship for the emerging nation. By the late 1780s, America was
struggling to compete economically and pay off the debts it accumulated in its fight for
independence. These problems were made worse by a series of economic limitations
present in the Articles of Confederation.
1. Congress could not regulate trade
In 1786, James Madison wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson detailing the economic
problems caused by disorganization and competition between the states:
“The States are every day giving proofs that separate regulations are more likely
to set them by the ears than to attain the common object. When Massachusetts set on foot
a retaliation of the policy of Great Britain, Connecticut declared her ports free. New
Jersey served New York in the same way. And Delaware I am told has lately followed the
example in opposition to the commercial plans of Pennsylvania. A miscarriage of this
attempt to unite the states in some effectual plan will have another effect of a serious
nature….I almost despair of success.”
America in the mid-1780’s was plagued by economic chaos that originated from
the national government’s inability to manage trade. Under the Articles of Confederation,
Congress had limited power to regulate trade. Congress was only able to regulate trade
and commerce with Native American tribes and, even then, only if it did not impair an
individual state’s ability to monitor its own trade. Congress had no ability to negotiate
trade agreements with foreign countries. The central government could enact foreign
treaties, but such treaties were specifically barred from policing imports and exports.
States, on the other hand, could make and enforce any trade restriction they saw
fit. The only power they lacked was the ability to make foreign treaties. Since the central
government had so little trade power, there was very little economic coordination amongst
the states. Each state had its own agenda and import and export policies differed greatly
from state to state
2. No uniform system of currency
Article IX of the Articles of Confederation stated, “The United States in Congress
assembled shall also have the sole and exclusive right and power of regulating the alloy
and value of coin struck by their own authority, or by that of the respective State.”
While Congress had the right to regulate all forms of American currency, the
Articles failed to call for a singular form of currency. This meant that the national
government could print money, but each state could as well. Consequently, America had
no uniform system of currency which made trade between the states, and with foreign
entities, much more difficult and less efficient.
3. No power of taxation
Only the states, not Congress, had the authority to impose taxes and raise revenue.
Accordingly, Congress had to request for funds from the states. Per Article VIII, these
funds “shall be supplied by the several States in proportion to the value of all land within
each State.”
How that money was raised, within each state, was up to the state legislatures.
Unfortunately, this money was oftentimes not raised by the states or given to the national
government long after it was due.
As a result, Congress faced substantial revenue shortfalls. Without payment from
the states, Congress struggled to pay off America’s foreign debts and was incapable of
fulfilling its other tasks, such as managing foreign affairs. Moreover, the unpredictability
of the central government’s revenue stream made establishing a national budget nearly
impossible. Not knowing how much and when states were going to pay their share
severely handicapped an already-limited national government.
In short, it was a lack of economic unity that brought about many of America’s
economic woes during the years under the Articles of Confederation. Congress had few
effective means to enforce its laws, raise revenue, or regulate the economy. The result was
a disorganized economy that lacked the ability to pay for itself.
Lack of Central Leadership
The second series of limitations that the Articles of Confederation had to contend
with deal with was the lack of central leadership it provided. As detailed earlier, the
Articles placed sovereign power in the hands of the state. Most critically, this led to
economic troubles, but it also led to a leadership deficit. Lack of national leadership took
various forms.
1. No independent judiciary
The Articles of Confederation offered no system of courts in the jurisdiction of the
national government. This meant that the entire judiciary branch was dependent on the
states. According to Article IV, “Full faith and credit shall be given in each of these States
to the records, acts, and judicial proceedings of the courts and magistrates of every other
State.”
Consequently, states could overturn national actions that they found objectionable.
Since Congress had no means to enforce its laws, the states could simply ignore national
laws without fear of retribution. Also, since there was no national court system, individual
persons or states could not file complaints against the national government. The states
could always ignore anything they disagreed with, but if a citizen had a grievance with the
national government there was no system in place to hear the lawsuit.
2. No foreign affairs head
One of the glaring differences between the Articles of Confederation and its
successor—the Constitution of the United States—was its lack of a chief executive. Most
notably, the lack of a presidential figure or body left America without a representative to
conduct foreign affairs. Britain actually complained of such difficulties, protesting that
they did not know who to contact in order to initiate diplomacy. Without a single
executive to act as the head of foreign affairs, America was at a serious diplomatic
disadvantage.
3. Inability to deal with internal and external threats
It seems counterintuitive that a body of government would be tasked with declaring
war, but not be allowed to commission an armed force. According to the Articles of
Confederation, Congress had the sole power to make peace and war, but did not have the
authority to raise an army of its own: “The United States in Congress assembled, shall
have the sole and exclusive right and power of determining on peace and war.”
Instead, the national government had to rely on state militia. Since it was
dependent on state troops, Congress was severely limited in its capabilities to quickly and
effectively responding to internal and external threats. Abroad, Congress failed to defend
American from the continuing threat of Britain following the Revolutionary War. Shortly
after the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, Britain began to break the agreement.
By 1784, the British were infringing upon American fishing rights and the British
Royal Navy was impressing American sailors into forced conscription. Without the aid of
a unified military, though, Congress was incapable of fighting back and protecting
America’s sovereignty. At home, the inability of Congress to decisively put down the
internal threat of Shay’s Rebellion was a direct result of the lack of a capable national
army. The rebellion began in 1786 due to the post-war economic depression and the
American government’s harsh policies in response to the economic downturn. Rebels
initially protested peacefully, resisting the collection of taxes and debts from struggling
Americans.
However, following the arrest of several of their leaders, rebels became much
more militant. The national government failed to come up with the funds to raise an army
capable of putting down the rebellion. It took a group of rich merchants from
Massachusetts pooling their resources to pay for a militia. The rebellion was eventually
put down, but the inability of the national government to act effectively made the
weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation ever more apparent. Shay’s Rebellion served
as one impetus for the creation of a stronger, central government in the upcoming
Constitution.
Legislative Inefficiencies
Lastly, the Articles of Confederation proved ineffective because of a set of rules
that made legislating under this framework inefficient.
1. Each state had one vote
Per Article V, “each State shall have one vote.”
As a result, small states and large states had the same voting weight in Congress
and there was no proportionality in voting matters. Considering the large discrepancy in
state populations, states with larger populations were quite unhappy with this set-up. For
example, in 1780, Virginia had over ten times the number of citizens as Delaware. In fact,
Virginia had twice as many people as every state except for Pennsylvania, yet each state
received only one vote in Congress.
2. Difficulty passing laws
In a pre-calculator era, one might think that ”one state, one vote” would make it
easier to pass laws. Regrettably, the opposite rang true since it took the consent of nine of
the thirteen states to approve legislation. This meant that blocking a bill took only five of
the thirteen states. In 1780, the five least populated states—Delaware, Rhode Island, New
Hampshire, Georgia, and New Jersey—had a total population of less than 400,000.
Virginia, on the other hand, had a population of over 500,000.
Thus, a unified population smaller than the single state of Virginia could block any
piece of legislation presented in Congress. A very small percentage of the American
populace could preclude bills from passing that could benefit the majority of Americans.
3. Impractical amendment process
The most ironic of the Articles’ legislative inefficiencies was the difficult
amendment process it detailed. Article XIII prohibited “any alteration at any time
hereafter be made in any of them; unless such alteration be agreed to in a Congress of the
United States, and be afterwards confirmed by the legislatures of every State.”
This meant that any amendment had to have the consent of the national Congress
and all of the states. Requiring a unanimous vote made it extremely difficult to pass
changes. Ironically, the fact that the Articles of Confederation was so poorly structured
that it did not have mechanisms in place to fix itself. Ultimately, the Articles were
scrapped altogether in favor of an entirely new governing document.
Articles v. Constitution
The main difference between the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution is
that the Articles called for a confederate style of government, whereas the Constitution
outlined a federal form of governance. The divergence between confederate and federal
models occurs when a sovereign power is granted.
In a confederate government, that ultimate power resides in regional and local
governments. The central government only has as much power as regional governments
are willing to give to it. The only noteworthy examples are the Articles of Confederation
and the Confederacy during the Civil War. Neither of these regimes lasted more than a
decade.
In a federal government, sovereign power is given to both regional and central
governments. A strong and clear constitution is needed in order that power is clearly
divided. This notion of a separated government was popularized by the Constitution of the
United States and can be found in modern politics in countries such as Canada, Germany,
and Spain.
The third form of government, that neither the Articles nor the Constitution
proposed, is a unitary government. Unitary governments place all power in the central
government. Acting like the opposite of a confederacy, regional governments only have
the power that is given to them by the national government. Modern unitarian
governments include Britain, France, and Italy.
This article helps answer “why did the articles of confederation fail?” Themes:
failures of the articles of confederation, articles of confederation lack of unity, flaws of the
articles of confederation, articles of confederation ineffective, problems with the articles
of confederation, reasons why the articles of confederation failed, flaws of articles of
confederation, failure of articles of confederation, limitations of articles of confederation,
powers or institutions the national government did not have under the articles of
confederation, articles of confederation and taxes, articles of confederation and currency.
CLASS MEETING No 4:
Objective: Review the various articles of the Federal Constitution and explain how they solidly
ground American democracy.
Text to be studied and underscore the basis of American democracy:
- The Constitution of the United States: the Seven Articles (pp. 143-154)
IV – Classic lecture note on the Constitution

The Constitution of the United States
The US Constitution is the supreme law of the United States of America. The Constitution,
originally comprising seven articles, delineates the national frame of government. Its first three
articles embody the doctrine of the separation of powers, whereby the federal government is
divided into three branches: the legislative, consisting of the bicameral Congress (Article One);
the executive, consisting of the president (Article Two); and the judicial, consisting of the
Supreme Court and other federal courts (Article Three). Articles Four, Five and Six embody
concepts of federalism, describing the rights and responsibilities of state governments, the
states in relationship to the federal government, and the shared process of constitutional
amendment. Article Seven establishes the procedure subsequently used by the thirteen States
to ratify it. It is regarded as the oldest written and codified national constitution in force.
The Constitution's first three words—We the People—affirm that the government of the
United States exists to serve its citizens. For over two centuries the Constitution has remained
in force because its framers wisely separated and balanced governmental powers to safeguard
the interests of majority rule and minority rights, of liberty and equality, and of the federal and
state governments. The first permanent constitution of its kind, adopted by the people's
representatives for an expansive nation, it is interpreted, supplemented, and implemented by a
large body of constitutional law, and has influenced the constitutions of other nations.
Background
First government
From September 5, 1774, to March 1, 1781, the Continental Congress functioned as the
provisional government of the United States. Delegates to the First (1774) and then the Second
(1775–1781) Continental Congress were chosen largely through the action of committees of
correspondence in various colonies rather than through the colonial or later state legislatures. In
no formal sense was it a gathering representative of existing colonial governments; it
represented the dissatisfied elements of the people, such persons as were sufficiently interested
to act, despite the strenuous opposition of the loyalists and the obstruction or disfavor of colonial
governors. The process of selecting the delegates for the First and Second Continental
Congresses underscores the revolutionary role of the people of the colonies in establishing a
central governing body. Endowed by the people collectively, the Continental Congress alone
possessed those attributes of external sovereignty which entitled it to be called a state in the
international sense, while the separate states, exercising a limited or internal sovereignty, may
rightly be considered a creation of the Continental Congress, which preceded them and brought
them into being.
Preamble
The preamble to the Constitution serves as an introductory statement of the document's
fundamental purposes and guiding principles. It neither assigns powers to the federal
government, nor does it place specific limitations on government action. Rather, it sets out the
origin, scope and purpose of the Constitution. Its origin and authority is in "We, the people of the
United States". This echoes the Declaration of Independence. "One people" dissolved their
connection with another, and assumed among the powers of the earth, a sovereign nation-state.
The scope of the Constitution is twofold. First, "to form a more perfect Union" than had
previously existed in the "perpetual Union" of the Articles of Confederation. Second, to "secure
the blessings of liberty", which were to be enjoyed by not only the first generation, but for all
who came after, "our posterity".]
The Articles
Article One
Article One describes the Congress, the legislative branch of the federal government.
Section 1, reads, "All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the
United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives." The article
establishes the manner of election and the qualifications of members of each body.
Representatives must be at least 25 years old, be a citizen of the United States for seven years,
and live in the state they represent. Senators must be at least 30 years old, be a citizen for nine
years, and live in the state they represent.
Article I, Section 8 enumerates the powers delegated to the legislature. Financially,
Congress has the power to tax, borrow, pay debt and provide for the common defense and the
general welfare; to regulate commerce, bankruptcies, and coin money. To regulate internal
affairs, it has the power to regulate and govern military forces and militias, suppress
insurrections and repel invasions. It is to provide for naturalization, standards of weights and
measures, post offices and roads, and patents; to directly govern the federal district and
cessions of land by the states for forts and arsenals. Internationally, Congress has the power to
define and punish piracies and offenses against the Law of Nations, to declare war and make
rules of war. The final Necessary and Proper Clause, also known as the Elastic Clause,
expressly confers incidental powers upon Congress without the Articles' requirement for express
delegation for each and every power. Article I, Section 9 lists eight specific limits on
congressional power.
The Supreme Court has sometimes broadly interpreted the Commerce Clause and the
Necessary and Proper Clause in Article One to allow Congress to enact legislation that is
neither expressly allowed by the enumerated powers nor expressly denied in the limitations on
Congress. In McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), the Supreme Court read the Necessary and Proper
Clause to permit the federal government to take action that would "enable [it] to perform the
high duties assigned to it [by the Constitution] in the manner most beneficial to the people",
even if that action is not itself within the enumerated powers. Chief Justice Marshall clarified:
"Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the Constitution, and all means which are
appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the
letter and spirit of the Constitution, are Constitutional."
Article Two
Article Two describes the office, qualifications, and duties of the President of the United
States and the Vice President. The President is head of the executive branch of the federal
government, as well as the nation's head of state and head of government.
Article two is modified by the 12th Amendment which tacitly acknowledges political
parties, and the 25th Amendment relating to office succession. The president is to receive only
one compensation from the federal government. The inaugural oath is specified to preserve,
protect and defend the Constitution.
The president is the Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces and state
militias when they are mobilized. He or she makes treaties with the advice and consent of a two-
thirds quorum of the Senate. To administer the federal government, the president commissions
all the offices of the federal government as Congress directs; he or she may require the
opinions of its principal officers and make "recess appointments" for vacancies that may happen
during the recess of the Senate. The president is to see that the laws are faithfully executed,
though he or she may grant reprieves and pardons except regarding Congressional
impeachment of himself or other federal officers. The president reports to Congress on the State
of the Union, and by the Recommendation Clause, recommends "necessary and expedient"
national measures. The president may convene and adjourn Congress under special
circumstances.
Section 4 provides for the removal of the president and other federal officers. The
president is removed on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high
crimes and misdemeanors.
Article Three
Article Three describes the court system (the judicial branch), including the Supreme
Court. There shall be one court called the Supreme Court. The article describes the kinds of
cases the court takes as original jurisdiction. Congress can create lower courts and an appeals
process. Congress enacts law defining crimes and providing for punishment. Article Three also
protects the right to trial by jury in all criminal cases, and defines the crime of treason.
Section 1 vests the judicial power of the United States in federal courts, and with it, the
authority to interpret and apply the law to a particular case. Also included is the power to punish,
sentence, and direct future action to resolve conflicts. The Constitution outlines the U.S. judicial
system. In the Judiciary Act of 1789, Congress began to fill in details. Currently, Title 28 of the
U.S. Code describes judicial powers and administration.
As of the First Congress, the Supreme Court justices rode circuit to sit as panels to hear
appeals from the district courts. In 1891, Congress enacted a new system. District courts would
have original jurisdiction. Intermediate appellate courts (circuit courts) with exclusive jurisdiction
heard regional appeals before consideration by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court holds
discretionary jurisdiction, meaning that it does not have to hear every case that is brought to it. ]
To enforce judicial decisions, the Constitution grants federal courts both criminal contempt
and civil contempt powers. The court's summary punishment for contempt immediately
overrides all other punishments applicable to the subject party. Other implied powers include
injunctive relief and the habeas corpus remedy. The Court may imprison for contumacy, bad-
faith litigation, and failure to obey a writ of mandamus. Judicial power includes that granted by
Acts of Congress for rules of law and punishment. Judicial power also extends to areas not
covered by statute. Generally, federal courts cannot interrupt state court proceedings.
Clause 1 of Section 2 authorizes the federal courts to hear actual cases and controversies
only. Their judicial power does not extend to cases that are hypothetical, or which are
proscribed due to standing, mootness, or ripeness issues. Generally, a case or controversy
requires the presence of adverse parties who have some interest genuinely at stake in the case.
Clause 2 of Section 2 provides that the Supreme Court has original jurisdiction in cases
involving ambassadors, ministers, and consuls, for all cases respecting foreign nation-states,
and also in those controversies which are subject to federal judicial power because at least one
state is a party. Cases arising under the laws of the United States and its treaties come under
the jurisdiction of federal courts. Cases under international maritime law and conflicting land
grants of different states come under federal courts. Cases between U.S. citizens in different
states, and cases between U.S. citizens and foreign states and their citizens, come under
federal jurisdiction. The trials will be in the state where the crime was committed.
No part of the Constitution expressly authorizes judicial review, but the Framers did
contemplate the idea. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land. Precedent has since
established that the courts could exercise judicial review over the actions of Congress or the
executive branch. Two conflicting federal laws are under "pendent" jurisdiction if one presents a
strict constitutional issue. Federal court jurisdiction is rare when a state legislature enacts
something as under federal jurisdiction. To establish a federal system of national law,
considerable effort goes into developing a spirit of comity between federal government and
states. By the doctrine of 'Res judicata', federal courts give "full faith and credit" to State Courts.
The Supreme Court will decide Constitutional issues of state law only on a case-by-case basis,
and only by strict Constitutional necessity, independent of state legislators' motives, their policy
outcomes or its national wisdom.]
Section 3 bars Congress from changing or modifying Federal law on treason by simple
majority statute. This section also defines treason, as an overt act of making war or materially
helping those at war with the United States. Accusations must be corroborated by at least two
witnesses. Congress is a political body and political disagreements routinely encountered
should never be considered as treason. This allows for nonviolent resistance to the government
because opposition is not a life or death proposition. However, Congress does provide for other
lesser subversive crimes such as conspiracy.
Article Four
Article Four outlines the relations among the states and between each state and the
federal government. In addition, it provides for such matters as admitting new states and border
changes between the states. For instance, it requires states to give "full faith and credit" to the
public acts, records, and court proceedings of the other states. Congress is permitted to
regulate the manner in which proof of such acts may be admitted. The "privileges and
immunities" clause prohibits state governments from discriminating against citizens of other
states in favor of resident citizens. For instance, in criminal sentencing, a state may not increase
a penalty on the grounds that the convicted person is a non-resident.
It also establishes extradition between the states, as well as laying down a legal basis for
freedom of movement and travel amongst the states. Today, this provision is sometimes taken
for granted, but in the days of the Articles of Confederation, crossing state lines was often
arduous and costly. The Territorial Clause gives Congress the power to make rules for
disposing of federal property and governing non-state territories of the United States. Finally,
the fourth section of Article Four requires the United States to guarantee to each state a
republican form of government, and to protect them from invasion and violence.
Article Five
Article Five outlines the process for amending the Constitution. Eight state constitutions in
effect in 1787 included an amendment mechanism. Amendment making power rested with the
legislature in three of the states and in the other five it was given to specially elected
conventions. The Articles of Confederation provided that amendments were to be proposed by
Congress and ratified by the unanimous vote of all thirteen state legislatures. This proved to be
a major flaw in the Articles, as it created an insurmountable obstacle to constitutional reform.
The amendment process crafted during the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention was,
according to The Federalist No. 43, designed to establish a balance between pliancy and
rigidity:]
It guards equally against that extreme facility which would render the Constitution too
mutable; and that extreme difficulty which might perpetuate its discovered faults. It moreover
equally enables the General and the State Governments to originate the amendment of errors,
as they may be pointed out by the experience on one side, or on the other.
There are two steps in the amendment process. Proposals to amend the Constitution
must be properly adopted and ratified before they change the Constitution. First, there are two
procedures for adopting the language of a proposed amendment, either by (a) Congress, by
two-thirds majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, or (b) national
convention (which shall take place whenever two-thirds of the state legislatures collectively call
for one). Second, there are two procedures for ratifying the proposed amendment, which
requires three-fourths of the states' (presently 38 of 50) approval: (a) consent of the state
legislatures, or (b) consent of state ratifying conventions. The ratification method is chosen by
Congress for each amendment. State ratifying conventions were used only once, for the
Twenty-first Amendment.
Presently, the Archivist of the United States is charged with responsibility for
administering the ratification process under the provisions of 1 U.S. Code § 106b. The Archivist
submits the proposed amendment to the states for their consideration by sending a letter of
notification to each Governor. Each Governor then formally submits the amendment to their
state's legislature. When a state ratifies a proposed amendment, it sends the Archivist an
original or certified copy of the state's action. Ratification documents are examined by the Office
of the Federal Register for facial legal sufficiency and an authenticating signature.
Article Five ends by shielding certain clauses in the new frame of government from being
amended. Article One, Section 9, Clauses 1 prevents Congress from passing any law that
would restrict the importation of slaves into the United States prior to 1808, plus the fourth
clause from that same section, which reiterates the Constitutional rule that direct taxes must be
apportioned according to state populations. These clauses were explicitly shielded from
Constitutional amendment prior to 1808. On January 1, 1808, the first day it was permitted to do
so, Congress approved legislation prohibiting the importation of slaves into the country. On
February 3, 1913, with ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, Congress gained the authority
to levy an income tax without apportioning it among the states or basing it on the United States
Census. The third textually entrenched provision is Article One, Section 3, Clauses 1, which
provides for equal representation of the states in the Senate. The shield protecting this clause
from the amendment process is less absolute – "no state, without its consent, shall be deprived
of its equal Suffrage in the Senate" – but permanent.
Article Six
Article Six establishes the Constitution, and all federal laws and treaties of the United
States made according to it, to be the supreme law of the land, and that "the judges in every
state shall be bound thereby, any thing in the laws or constitutions of any state notwithstanding."
It validates national debt created under the Articles of Confederation and requires that all federal
and state legislators, officers, and judges take oaths or affirmations to support the Constitution.
This means that the states' constitutions and laws should not conflict with the laws of the federal
constitution and that in case of a conflict, state judges are legally bound to honor the federal
laws and constitution over those of any state. Article Six also states "no religious Test shall ever
be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."
Article Seven
Article Seven describes the process for establishing the proposed new frame of
government. Anticipating that the influence of many state politicians would be Antifederalist,
delegates to the Philadelphia Convention provided for ratification of the Constitution by
popularly elected ratifying conventions in each state. The convention method also made it
possible that judges, ministers and others ineligible to serve in state legislatures, could be
elected to a convention. Suspecting that Rhode Island, at least, might not ratify, delegates
decided that the Constitution would go into effect as soon as nine states (two-thirds rounded up)
ratified. Once ratified by this minimum number of states, it was anticipated that the proposed
Constitution would become this Constitution between the nine or more that signed. It would not
cover the four or fewer states that might not have signed.
1. What is a constitution?
2. What make(s) the US Constitution a democratic one?
3. How does the US Constitution guarantee the separation of powers?
4. What was the primary aim of the framers of the Constitution in creating that document? Why
did they think it was necessary? What did they hope to accomplish? What did they hope to
avoid?
5. Do you think the framers of the Constitution were successful? Why or why not?
6. Should the people be in charge of their own government?
7. Should there be any limits on what government can and cannot do?
8. Should government powers be kept separate?
9. Should government powers check and balance each other?
10. Should the president have absolute power?
11. Should the Supreme Court function as a “super-legislature”?
CLASS MEETING No 5:
Objective: Review the Bill of Rights and the remaining amendments
to the Federal Constitution and explain how they further consolidate
American democracy.
Text to be studied to highlight the basis of American democracy and
its emphasis on individual freedom and rights
The Constitution of the United States/ Amendments (pp. 155-161)
V – Classic lecture note on the Constitution’s Amendments

Amending the Constitution
Since the Constitution came into force in 1789, it has been amended
27 times, including one amendment that repealed a previous one, in order
to meet the needs of a nation that has profoundly changed since the
eighteenth century. In general, the first ten amendments, known
collectively as the Bill of Rights, offer specific protections of individual
liberty and justice and place restrictions on the powers of government.
The majority of the seventeen later amendments expand individual civil
rights protections. Others address issues related to federal authority or
modify government processes and procedures. Amendments to the United
States Constitution, unlike ones made to many constitutions worldwide,
are appended to the document.
The procedure for amending the Constitution is outlined in Article
Five. The process is overseen by the archivist of the United States.
Between 1949 and 1985 it was overseen by the administrator of General
Services, and before that by the secretary of state.
Under Article Five, a proposal for an amendment must be adopted
either by Congress or by a national convention, but as of 2020 all
amendments have gone through Congress. The proposal must receive
two-thirds of the votes of both houses to proceed. It is passed as a joint
resolution, but is not presented to the president, who plays no part in the
process. Instead, it is passed to the Office of the Federal Register, which
copies it in slip law format and submits it to the states. Congress decides
whether the proposal is to be ratified in the state legislature or by a state
ratifying convention. To date all amendments have been ratified by the
state legislatures except one, the Twenty-first Amendment.
A proposed amendment becomes an operative part of the
Constitution as soon as it is ratified by three-fourths of the States
(currently 38 of the 50 states). There is no further step. The text requires
no additional action by Congress or anyone else after ratification by the
required number of states. Thus, when the Office of the Federal Register
verifies that it has received the required number of authenticated
ratification documents, it drafts a formal proclamation for the Archivist to
certify that the amendment is valid and has become part of the nation's
frame of government. This certification is published in the Federal Register
and United States Statutes at Large and serves as official notice to
Congress and to the nation that the ratification process has been
successfully completed.
1
Ratified amendments
The Constitution has twenty-seven amendments. Structurally, the
Constitution's original text and all prior amendments remain untouched.
The precedent for this practice was set in 1789, when Congress
considered and proposed the first several Constitutional amendments.
Among these, Amendments 1–10 are collectively known as the Bill of
Rights, and Amendments 13–15 are known as the Reconstruction
Amendments. Excluding the Twenty-seventh Amendment, which was
pending before the states for 202 years, 225 days, the longest pending
amendment that was successfully ratified was the Twenty-second
Amendment, which took 3 years, 343 days. The Twenty-sixth Amendment
was ratified in the shortest time, 100 days. The average ratification time
for the first twenty-six amendments was 1 year, 252 days; for all twenty-
seven, 9 years, 48 days.
Safeguards of liberty (Amendments 1, 2, and 3)
The First Amendment (1791) prohibits Congress from obstructing the
exercise of certain individual freedoms: freedom of religion, freedom of
speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and right to petition.
Its Free Exercise Clause guarantees a person's right to hold whatever
religious beliefs he or she wants, and to freely exercise that belief, and its
Establishment Clause prevents the federal government from creating an
official national church or favoring one set of religious beliefs over
another. The amendment guarantees an individual's right to express and
to be exposed to a wide range of opinions and views. It was intended to
ensure a free exchange of ideas, even unpopular ones. It also guarantees
an individual's right to physically gather or associate with others in groups
for economic, political or religious purposes. Additionally, it guarantees an
individual's right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
The Second Amendment (1791) protects the right of individuals to
keep and bear arms. Although the Supreme Court has ruled that this right
applies to individuals, not merely to collective militias, it has also held that
the government may regulate or place some limits on the manufacture,
ownership and sale of firearms or other weapons. Requested by several
states during the Constitutional ratification debates, the amendment
reflected the lingering resentment over the widespread efforts of the
British to confiscate the colonists' firearms at the outbreak of the
Revolutionary War. Patrick Henry had rhetorically asked, shall we be
stronger, "when we are totally disarmed, and when a British Guard shall
be stationed in every house?"
The Third Amendment (1791) prohibits the federal government from
forcing individuals to provide lodging to soldiers in their homes during
peacetime without their consent. Requested by several states during the
Constitutional ratification debates, the amendment reflected the lingering
resentment over the Quartering Acts passed by the British Parliament
during the Revolutionary War, which had allowed British soldiers to take
over private homes for their own use.
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Safeguards of justice (Amendments 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8)
The Fourth Amendment (1791) protects people against unreasonable
searches and seizures of either self or property by government officials. A
search can mean everything from a frisking by a police officer or to a
demand for a blood test to a search of an individual's home or car. A
seizure occurs when the government takes control of an individual or
something in his or her possession. Items that are seized often are used
as evidence when the individual is charged with a crime. It also imposes
certain limitations on police investigating a crime and prevents the use of
illegally obtained evidence at trial.
The Fifth Amendment (1791) establishes the requirement that a trial
for a major crime may commence only after an indictment has been
handed down by a grand jury; protects individuals from double jeopardy,
being tried and put in danger of being punished more than once for the
same criminal act; prohibits punishment without due process of law, thus
protecting individuals from being imprisoned without fair procedures; and
provides that an accused person may not be compelled to reveal to the
police, prosecutor, judge, or jury any information that might incriminate
or be used against him or her in a court of law. Additionally, the Fifth
Amendment also prohibits government from taking private property for
public use without "just compensation", the basis of eminent domain in
the United States.
The Sixth Amendment (1791) provides several protections and rights
to an individual accused of a crime. The accused has the right to a fair and
speedy trial by a local and impartial jury. Likewise, a person has the right
to a public trial. This right protects defendants from secret proceedings
that might encourage abuse of the justice system, and serves to keep the
public informed. This amendment also guarantees a right to legal counsel
if accused of a crime, guarantees that the accused may require witnesses
to attend the trial and testify in the presence of the accused, and
guarantees the accused a right to know the charges against them. In
1966, the Supreme Court ruled that, with the Fifth Amendment, this
amendment requires what has become known as the Miranda warning.
The Seventh Amendment (1791) extends the right to a jury trial to
federal civil cases, and inhibits courts from overturning a jury's findings of
fact. Although the Seventh Amendment itself says that it is limited to
"suits at common law", meaning cases that triggered the right to a jury
under English law, the amendment has been found to apply in lawsuits
that are similar to the old common law cases. For example, the right to a
jury trial applies to cases brought under federal statutes that prohibit race
or gender discrimination in housing or employment. Importantly, this
amendment guarantees the right to a jury trial only in federal court, not in
state court.
The Eighth Amendment (1791) protects people from having bail or
fines set at an amount so high that it would be impossible for all but the
richest defendants to pay and also protects people from being subjected
to cruel and unusual punishment. Although this phrase originally was
intended to outlaw certain gruesome methods of punishment, it has been
3
broadened over the years to protect against punishments that are grossly
disproportionate to or too harsh for the particular crime. This provision
has also been used to challenge prison conditions such as extremely
unsanitary cells, overcrowding, insufficient medical care and deliberate
failure by officials to protect inmates from one another.
Unenumerated rights and reserved powers (Amendments 9

and 10)
The Ninth Amendment (1791) declares that individuals have other
fundamental rights, in addition to those stated in the Constitution. During
the Constitutional ratification debates Anti-Federalists argued that a Bill of
Rights should be added. The Federalists opposed it on grounds that a list
would necessarily be incomplete but would be taken as explicit and
exhaustive, thus enlarging the power of the federal government by
implication. The Anti-Federalists persisted, and several state ratification
conventions refused to ratify the Constitution without a more specific list
of protections, so the First Congress added what became the Ninth
Amendment as a compromise. Because the rights protected by the Ninth
Amendment are not specified, they are referred to as "unenumerated".
The Supreme Court has found that unenumerated rights include such
important rights as the right to travel, the right to vote, the right to
privacy, and the right to make important decisions about one's health care
or body.
The Tenth Amendment (1791) was included in the Bill of Rights to
further define the balance of power between the federal government and
the states. The amendment states that the federal government has only
those powers specifically granted by the Constitution. These powers
include the power to declare war, to collect taxes, to regulate interstate
business activities and others that are listed in the articles or in
subsequent constitutional amendments. Any power not listed is, says the
Tenth Amendment, left to the states or the people. While there is no
specific list of what these "reserved powers" may be, the Supreme Court
has ruled that laws affecting family relations, commerce within a state's
own borders, and local law enforcement activities, are among those
specifically reserved to the states or the people.
Governmental authority (Amendments 11, 16, 18, and 21)

The Eleventh Amendment (1795) specifically prohibits federal courts
from hearing cases in which a state is sued by an individual from another
state or another country, thus extending to the states sovereign immunity
protection from certain types of legal liability. Article Three, Section 2,
Clause 1 has been affected by this amendment, which also overturned the
Supreme Court's decision in Chisholm v. Georgia.
The Sixteenth Amendment (1913) removed existing Constitutional
constraints that limited the power of Congress to lay and collect taxes on
income. Specifically, the apportionment constraints delineated in Article 1,
Section 9, Clause 4 have been removed by this amendment, which also
overturned an 1895 Supreme Court decision, in Pollock v. Farmers' Loan &
4
Trust Co., that declared an unapportioned federal income tax on rents,
dividends, and interest unconstitutional. This amendment has become the
basis for all subsequent federal income tax legislation and has greatly
expanded the scope of federal taxing and spending in the years since.
The Eighteenth Amendment (1919) prohibited the making,
transporting, and selling of alcoholic beverages nationwide. It also
authorized Congress to enact legislation enforcing this prohibition.
Adopted at the urging of a national temperance movement, proponents
believed that the use of alcohol was reckless and destructive and that
prohibition would reduce crime and corruption, solve social problems,
decrease the need for welfare and prisons, and improve the health of all
Americans. During prohibition, it is estimated that alcohol consumption
and alcohol related deaths declined dramatically. But prohibition had
other, more negative consequences. The amendment drove the lucrative
alcohol business underground, giving rise to a large and pervasive black
market. In addition, prohibition encouraged disrespect for the law and
strengthened organized crime. Prohibition came to an end in 1933, when
this amendment was repealed.
The Twenty-first Amendment (1933) repealed the Eighteenth
Amendment and returned the regulation of alcohol to the states. Each
state sets its own rules for the sale and importation of alcohol, including
the drinking age. Because a federal law provides federal funds to states
that prohibit the sale of alcohol to minors under the age of twenty-one, all
fifty states have set their drinking age there. Rules about how alcohol is
sold vary greatly from state to state.
Safeguards of civil rights (Amendments 13, 14, 15, 19, 23, 24,
and 26)
The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery and involuntary
servitude, except as punishment for a crime, and authorized Congress to
enforce abolition. Though millions of slaves had been declared free by the
1863 Emancipation Proclamation, their post Civil War status was unclear,
as was the status of other millions. Congress intended the Thirteenth
Amendment to be a proclamation of freedom for all slaves throughout the
nation and to take the question of emancipation away from politics. This
amendment rendered inoperative or moot several of the original parts of
the constitution.
The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) granted United States citizenship
to former slaves and to all persons "subject to U.S. jurisdiction". It also
contained three new limits on state power: a state shall not violate a
citizen's privileges or immunities; shall not deprive any person of life,
liberty, or property without due process of law; and must guarantee all
persons equal protection of the laws. These limitations dramatically
expanded the protections of the Constitution. This amendment, according
to the Supreme Court's Doctrine of Incorporation, makes most provisions
of the Bill of Rights applicable to state and local governments as well. It
superseded the mode of apportionment of representatives delineated in
5
Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3, and also overturned the Supreme Court's
decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford.
The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) prohibits the use of race, color, or
previous condition of servitude in determining which citizens may vote.
The last of three post Civil War Reconstruction Amendments, it sought to
abolish one of the key vestiges of slavery and to advance the civil rights
and liberties of former slaves.
The Nineteenth Amendment (1920) prohibits the government from
denying women the right to vote on the same terms as men. Prior to the
amendment's adoption, only a few states permitted women to vote and to
hold office.
The Twenty-third Amendment (1961) extends the right to vote in
presidential elections to citizens residing in the District of Columbia by
granting the District electors in the Electoral College, as if it were a state.
When first established as the nation's capital in 1800, the District of
Columbia's five thousand residents had neither a local government, nor
the right to vote in federal elections. By 1960 the population of the District
had grown to over 760,000 people.
The Twenty-fourth Amendment (1964) prohibits a poll tax for voting.
Although passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth
Amendments helped remove many of the discriminatory laws left over
from slavery, they did not eliminate all forms of discrimination. Along with
literacy tests and durational residency requirements, poll taxes were used
to keep low-income (primarily African American) citizens from
participating in elections. The Supreme Court has since struck down these
discriminatory measures, opening democratic participation to all.
The Twenty-sixth Amendment (1971) prohibits the government from
denying the right of United States citizens, eighteen years of age or older,
to vote on account of age. The drive to lower the voting age was driven in
large part by the broader student activism movement protesting the
Vietnam War. It gained strength following the Supreme Court's decision in
Oregon v. Mitchell.
Government processes and procedures (Amendments 12, 17,

20, 22, 25, and 27)
The Twelfth Amendment (1804) modifies the way the Electoral College
chooses the President and Vice President. It stipulates that each elector
must cast a distinct vote for President and Vice President, instead of two
votes for President. It also suggests that the President and Vice President
should not be from the same state. Article II, Section 1, Clause 3 is
superseded by this amendment, which also extends the eligibility
requirements to become President to the Vice President.
The Seventeenth Amendment (1913) modifies the way senators are
elected. It stipulates that senators are to be elected by direct popular
vote. The amendment supersedes Article 1, Section 2, Clauses 1 and 2,
under which the two senators from each state were elected by the state
6
legislature. It also allows state legislatures to permit their governors to
make temporary appointments until a special election can be held.
The Twentieth Amendment (1933) changes the date on which a new
President, Vice President and Congress take office, thus shortening the
time between Election Day and the beginning of Presidential, Vice
Presidential and Congressional terms. Originally, the Constitution provided
that the annual meeting was to be on the first Monday in December unless
otherwise provided by law. This meant that, when a new Congress was
elected in November, it did not come into office until the following March,
with a "lame duck" Congress convening in the interim. By moving the
beginning of the president's new term from March 4 to January 20 (and in
the case of Congress, to January 3), proponents hoped to put an end to
lame duck sessions, while allowing for a speedier transition for the new
administration and legislators.
The Twenty-second Amendment (1951) limits an elected president to
two terms in office, a total of eight years. However, under some
circumstances it is possible for an individual to serve more than eight
years. Although nothing in the original frame of government limited how
many presidential terms one could serve, the nation's first president,
George Washington, declined to run for a third term, suggesting that two
terms of four years were enough for any president. This precedent
remained an unwritten rule of the presidency until broken by Franklin D.
Roosevelt, who was elected to a third term as president 1940 and in 1944
to a fourth.
The Twenty-fifth Amendment (1967) clarifies what happens upon the
death, removal, or resignation of the President or Vice President and how
the Presidency is temporarily filled if the President becomes disabled and
cannot fulfill the responsibilities of the office. It supersedes the ambiguous
succession rule established in Article II, Section 1, Clause 6. A concrete
plan of succession has been needed on multiple occasions since 1789.
However, for nearly 20% of U.S. history, there has been no vice president
in office who can assume the presidency.
The Twenty-seventh Amendment (1992) prevents members of
Congress from granting themselves pay raises during the current session.
Rather, any raises that are adopted must take effect during the next
session of Congress. Its proponents believed that Federal legislators would
be more likely to be cautious about increasing congressional pay if they
have no personal stake in the vote. Article One, section 6, Clause 1 has
been affected by this amendment, which remained pending for over two
centuries as it contained no time limit for ratification.
Judicial review
The way the Constitution is understood is influenced by court
decisions, especially those of the Supreme Court. These decisions are
referred to as precedents. Judicial review is the power of the Court to
examine federal legislation, federal executive, and all state branches of
government, to decide their constitutionality, and to strike them down if
found unconstitutional.
7
Judicial review includes the power of the Court to explain the
meaning of the Constitution as it applies to particular cases. Over the
years, Court decisions on issues ranging from governmental regulation of
radio and television to the rights of the accused in criminal cases have
changed the way many constitutional clauses are interpreted, without
amendment to the actual text of the Constitution.
Legislation passed to implement the Constitution, or to adapt those
implementations to changing conditions, broadens and, in subtle ways,
changes the meanings given to the words of the Constitution. Up to a
point, the rules and regulations of the many federal executive agencies
have a similar effect. If an action of Congress or the agencies is
challenged, however, it is the court system that ultimately decides
whether these actions are permissible under the Constitution.
The Supreme Court has indicated that once the Constitution has been
extended to an area (by Congress or the Courts), its coverage is
irrevocable. To hold that the political branches may switch the
Constitution on or off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this
Court, say "what the law is".
Separation of powers
The Supreme Court balances several pressures to maintain its roles in
national government. It seeks to be a co-equal branch of government, but
its decrees must be enforceable. The Court seeks to minimize situations
where it asserts itself superior to either President or Congress, but federal
officers must be held accountable. The Supreme Court assumes power to
declare acts of Congress as unconstitutional but it self-limits its passing on
constitutional questions. But the Court's guidance on basic problems of life
and governance in a democracy is most effective when American political
life reinforce its rulings.
Civic religion
There is a viewpoint that some Americans have come to see the
documents of the Constitution, along with the Declaration of
Independence and the Bill of Rights, as being a cornerstone of a type of
civil religion. This is suggested by the prominent display of the
Constitution, along with the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of
Rights, in massive, bronze-framed, bulletproof, moisture-controlled glass
containers vacuum-sealed in a rotunda by day and in multi-ton bomb-
proof vaults by night at the National Archives Building.
The idea of displaying the documents struck one academic critic
looking from the point of view of the 1776 or 1789 America as "idolatrous,
and also curiously at odds with the values of the Revolution". By 1816,
Jefferson wrote that "[s]ome men look at constitutions with sanctimonious
reverence and deem them like the Ark of the Covenant, too sacred to be
touched". But he saw imperfections and imagined that there could
potentially be others, believing as he did that "institutions must advance
also".
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1. The First Amendment guarantees Americans freedom of speech, so
people can say what they want, even if it hurts another person. Where
does freedom of speech end and bullying begin?
2. What are your opinions on the right to bear arms, as guaranteed by
the Second Amendment? Do you think it is everyone's right to own a gun?
Why or why not?
3. The Fifth Amendment includes the famous clause, which allows you to
''plead the fifth'' and refuse to say anything incriminating about yourself in
court. Why do Americans think this right is important for people's
freedom?
4. Cruel and unusual punishment is forbidden by the Eighth Amendment
in the Bill of Rights. Think about the death penalty; does this fall into the
category of cruel and unusual punishment? Why or why not?
9
U.S. Voting Rights Timeline
1776 Only people who own land can vote

Declaration of Independence signed. Right to vote during the Colonial and
Revolutionary periods is restricted to property owners—most of whom are white male
Protestants over the age of 21.
1787 No federal voting standard—states decide who can vote

U.S. Constitution adopted. Because there is no agreement on a national standard for
voting rights, states are given the power to regulate their own voting laws. In most
cases, voting remains in the hands of white male landowners.
1789 George Washington elected president. Only 6% of the population can vote.
1790 Citizen=White
1790 Naturalization Law passed. It explicitly states that only “free white” immigrants
can become naturalized citizens.
1848 Activists for ending slavery and women’s rights join together
Women’s rights convention held in Seneca Falls, NY. Frederick Douglass, a
newspaper editor and former slave, attends the event and gives a speech supporting
universal voting rights. His speech helps convince the convention to adopt a
resolution calling for voting rights for women.
1848 Citizenship granted, but voting denied

The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo ends the Mexican-American War and guarantees
U.S. citizenship to Mexicans living in the territories conquered by the U.S. However,
English language requirements and violent intimidation limit access to voting rights.
1856 Vote expanded to all white men

North Carolina is the last state to remove property ownership as a requirement to
vote.
1866 Movements unite and divide

Two women’s rights activists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, form an
organization for white and black women and men dedicated to the goal of universal
voting rights. The organization later divides and regroups over disagreements in
strategies to gain the vote for women and African Americans.
1868 Former slaves granted citizenship

14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution passed. Citizenship is defined and granted
to former slaves. Voters, however, are explicitly defined as male. Although the
-1-
Northern California Citizenship Project
Mobilize the Immigrant Vote 2004 - Capacity Building Series
amendment forbids states from denying any rights of citizenship, voting regulation is
still left in the hands of the states.
1870 Vote cannot be denied because of race, explicitly –

so other discriminatory tactics used
15th Amendment passed. It states that the right to vote cannot be denied by the
federal or state governments based on race. However, soon after, some states begin to
enact measures such as voting taxes and literacy tests that restrict the actual ability of
African Americans to register to vote. Violence and other intimidation tactics are also
used.
1872 Women try to vote

Susan B. Anthony is arrested and brought to trial in Rochester, New York, for
attempting to vote in the presidential election. At the same time, Sojourner Truth, a
former slave and advocate for justice and equality, appears at a polling booth in Grand
Rapids, Michigan, demanding a ballot but she is turned away.
1876 Indigenous people cannot vote

The Supreme Court rules that Native Americans are not citizens as defined by the 14th
Amendment and, thus, cannot vote.
1882 The Chinese Exclusion Act bars people of Chinese ancestry from naturalizing to
become U.S. citizens.
1887 Assimilation=Right to Vote

Dawes Act passed. It grants citizenship to Native Americans who give up their tribal
affiliations
1890 Wyoming admitted to statehood and becomes first state to legislate voting for
women in its constitution.
1890 Indigenous people must apply for citizenship

The Indian Naturalization Act grants citizenship to Native Americans whose
applications are approved—similar to the process of immigrant naturalization.
1912-13 Women lead voting rights marches through New York and Washington, D.C.
1919 Military Service=Citizenship for Native Americans

Native Americans who served in the military during World War I are granted U.S.
citizenship.
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1920 Right to vote extended to women

19th Amendment passed, giving women right to vote in both state and federal
elections.
1922 Asian≠White≠Citizen
Supreme Court rules that people of Japanese heritage are ineligible to become
naturalized citizens. In the next year, the Court finds that Asian Indians are also not
eligible to naturalize.
1924 Again, citizenship granted but voting denied

The Indian Citizenship Act grants citizenship to Native Americans, but many states
nonetheless make laws and policies which prohibit Native Americans from voting.
1925 Military Service=Citizenship for Filipinos

Congress bars Filipinos from U.S. citizenship unless they have served three years in the
Navy.
1926 State violence used to prevent people from exercising their right to vote
While attempting to register to vote in Birmingham, Alabama, a group of African
American women are beaten by election officials.
1947 Legal barriers to Native American voting removed

Miguel Trujillo, a Native American and former Marine, sues New Mexico for not
allowing him to vote. He wins and New Mexico and Arizona are required to give the
vote to all Native Americans.
1952 McCarran-Walter Act grants all people of Asian ancestry the right to become
citizens.
1961 23rd amendment passed. It gives citizens of Washington, D.C. the right to vote
for U.S. president. But to this day, the district’s residents—most of whom are
African American—still do not have voting representation in Congress.
1963-64 Voting rights as civil rights

Large-scale efforts in the South to register African Americans to vote are intensified.
However, state officials refuse to allow African Americans to register by using voting
taxes, literacy tests and violent intimidation. Among the efforts launched is Freedom
Summer, where close to a thousand civil rights workers of all races and backgrounds
converge on the South to support voting rights.
-3-
1964 No special tax to vote

24th Amendment passed. It guarantees that the right to vote in federal elections will
not be denied for failure to pay any tax.
1965 Grassroots movement forces change in law

Voting Rights Act passed. It forbids states from imposing discriminatory restrictions
on who can vote, and provides mechanisms for the federal government to enforce its
provisions. The legislation is passed largely under pressure from protests and marches
earlier that year challenging Alabama officials who injured and killed people during
African American voter registration efforts.
1966 After the legal change, struggle continues for social change
Civil rights activist James Meredith is wounded by a sniper during a solo “Walk
Against Fear” voter registration march between Tennessee and Mississippi. The next
day, nearly 4,000 African Americans register to vote. And other civil rights leaders such
as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Stokely Carmichael continue the march while Meredith
heals. Meredith rejoins March at its conclusion in Mississippi.
1971 Voting age lowered to 18

26th Amendment passed, granting voting rights to 18-year-olds. The amendment is
largely a result of Vietnam War-protests demanding a lowering of the voting age on
the premise that people who are old enough to fight are old enough to vote.
1975 Voting materials in various languages

Amendments to Voting Rights Act require that certain voting materials be printed in
languages besides English so that people who do not read English can participate in
the voting process.
1993 Making voter registration easier

National Voter Registration Act passed. Intends to increase the number of eligible
citizens who register to vote by making registration available at the Department of
Motor Vehicles, and public assistance and disabilities agencies.
2000 Residents of U.S. colonies are citizens, but cannot vote

A month prior to the presidential election, a federal court decides that Puerto Ricans
living in Puerto Rico, though U.S. citizens, cannot vote for U.S. president. Residents
of U.S. territories including Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin
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Islands—nearly 4.1 million people total—cannot vote in presidential elections and do

not have voting representation in the U.S Congress.
2001 Debate—Should voting rights be taken away from felons? For how long?
The National Commission on Federal Election Reform recommends that all states
allow felons to regain their right to vote after completing their criminal
sentences. Nearly 4 million US citizens cannot vote because of past felony
convictions. In California, felons are prohibited from voting while they are in prison
or on parole. But, in other states, especially in the South, a person with a felony
conviction is forever prohibited from voting in that state. These laws are a legacy of
post-Civil War attempts to prevent African Americans from voting. Ex-felons are
largely poor and of color.
2002 Trying to solve election inconsistency with more federal voting standards
Help America Vote Act (HAVA) passed in response to disputed 2000 presidential
election. Massive voting reform effort requires states comply with federal mandate
for provisional ballots, disability access, centralized, computerized voting lists,
electronic voting and requirement that first-time voters present identification before
voting.
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VI – Classic lecture note on the texts
1. Monroe Doctrine (December 2, 1823)

The Monroe Doctrine is the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy enunciated by President
James Monroe in his annual message to Congress. Declaring that the Old World and New
World had different systems and must remain distinct spheres, Monroe made four basic
points: (1) the United States would not interfere in the internal affairs of or the wars between
European powers; (2) the United States recognized and would not interfere with existing
colonies and dependencies in the Western Hemisphere; (3) the Western Hemisphere was
closed to future colonization; and (4) any attempt by a European power to oppress or control
any nation in the Western Hemisphere would be viewed as a hostile act against the United
States. Basically, then, the Monroe Doctrine decreed that the United States would handle the
affairs of the Western Hemisphere. Essentially, Monroe was telling Europe, 'You keep your
nose out of our business, and we'll keep our nose outta yours.'
The Monroe Doctrine, in asserting unilateral U.S. protection over the entire Western
Hemisphere, was a foreign policy that could not have been sustained militarily in 1823.
Monroe and Adams were well aware of the need for the British fleet to deter potential
aggressors in Latin America. Because the United States was not a major power at the time and
because the continental powers apparently had no serious intentions of recolonizing Latin
America, Monroe’s policy statement (it was not known as the “Monroe Doctrine” for nearly
30 years) was largely ignored outside the United States.
The United States did not invoke it nor oppose British occupation of the Falkland
Islands in 1833 or subsequent British encroachments in Latin America. In 1845 and again in
1848, however, Pres. James K. Polk reiterated Monroe’s principles in warning Britain and
Spain not to establish footholds in Oregon, California, or Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. At the
conclusion of the American Civil War, the United States massed troops on the Rio Grande in
support of a demand that France withdraw its puppet kingdom from Mexico. In 1867—partly
because of U.S. pressure—France withdrew.
After 1870 interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine became increasingly broad. As the
United States emerged as a world power, the Monroe Doctrine came to define a recognized
sphere of influence. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt added the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe
Doctrine in 1904, which stated that, in cases of flagrant and chronic wrongdoing by a Latin
1
American country, the United States could intervene in that country’s internal affairs.
Roosevelt’s assertion of hemispheric police power was designed to preclude violation of the
Monroe Doctrine by European countries seeking redress of grievances against unruly or
mismanaged Latin American states.
2. How Was the Monroe Doctrine Applied?

For all practical purposes, the United States didn't have a good way to enforce the
Monroe Doctrine. It had a very limited army and navy, and the European countries knew it. In
fact, Europe pretty much disregarded the Doctrine. The British Navy helped a bit with
enforcement but only when it suited Britain's purposes. Britain also felt free to violate the
Monroe Doctrine, as it did in 1829 when it tried to make Texas a British colony.
The Monroe Doctrine got its first real workout in 1845 when President James Polk used
it to legitimize America's westward expansion and enter into a territorial war with Mexico.
When the French interfered in Mexico in 1862, trying to set up a puppet government
controlled by France, the United States protested loudly. Embroiled in the Civil War,
however, the U.S. could do nothing but protest until 1865, when it was finally able to send
troops to help the Mexicans regain their independence.
To some extent, this Doctrine fashioned and shaped US imperialism, including its
internal (destruction of Indians) and external invasions. The remaining texts “Manifest
Destiny: Two Views;” “The Indian Removal Act;” “Indian Removal: An Indian View;” “”The
Trail of Tears: One State's Apology;” “Westward Migration: Settlement on The Frontier” and
“Immigration to the United States, 1820-1860” are concrete applications of this doctrine, both
internally and externally.
Lastly, “The Extension of Voting Rights” underscores one cardinal flaw in US
democratic practice. Democratic elections are inclusive. Under normal circumstances, the
definition of citizen and voter must be large enough to include a large proportion of the adult
population. A government chosen by a small, exclusive group is not a democracy – no matter
how democratic its internal workings may appear. One of the great dramas of US democracy
throughout history has been the struggle of excluded groups – whether racial, ethnic, or
religious minorities, or women – to win full citizenship, and with it the right to vote and hold
office. In the United States, for example, only white male property holders enjoyed the right
to elect and be elected when the Constitution was signed in 1787. The property qualification
disappeared by the early 19th century, and women won the right to vote in 1920. African
Americans, however, did not enjoy full voting rights in the southern United States until the
civil rights movement of the 1960s. And finally, in 1971, younger citizens were given the
right to vote when the United States lowered the voting age from 21 to 18.
3. “Manifest Destiny” doctrine

The phrase “Manifest Destiny” first appeared in 1845 when a magazine editor, John
O'Sullivan, used it for the first time. It was the belief that the US, and its institutions of
society and government, was destined to spread over all of North America. The idea of
Manifest Destiny was that it was the future destiny of the United States to spread out and
occupy the entire continent of North America.
William A. Williams and others have argued, the United States has relied on Providence
to carry out its domestic and overseas imperialism. O’Sullivan initially used the phrase
“manifest destiny” to advocate U.S. annexation of Texas, in July 1845. In an editorial in The
Democratic Review, O’Sullivan denounced foreign principalities that were allegedly
interfering with U. S. territorial expansion, because they were “checking the fulfillment of our
manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development
of our yearly multiplying millions.” Additionally, in December 1845, he wrote another
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editorial in the New York Morning News about Oregon. O’Sullivan portrayed the
United States as a unique political society glowing in the white light of manifest destiny,
claiming that God had given Oregon to the United States to further develop “the great
experiment of liberty and federated self-government” entrusted to Americans. This
evocation of manifest destiny sanctions U.S. expansion over the continent as a God-given
right. O’Sullivan’s “magical incantation,” as William A. Williams claims, spoke for all the
millions caught up in a mission to extend American civilization.
The concept of Manifest Destiny has shaped US domestic expansionism, fomented
an ideology of racial superiority and entitlement to land which called for driving out
Indians to extend the boundaries of a “chosen nation” and satisfy land-hungry populations.
This doctrine was an effective colonizing weapon; it targeted Indian nations that stood
in the way of American conquest and ultimately took away their legal, cultural,
economic, and political rights. It brushed the inherent sovereignty of pre-colonial Indian
nations. For instance, Indian nations had known governments of varying sophistication
and complexity prior to their invasion. They were sovereign and depended on no other
political power to legitimate their acts of government. European powers interacted with
these nations through official government-to-government channels to legitimate their
transactions. Moreover, at its inception, the United States honored Indian nations and
negotiated additional treaties of peace and friendship with them for its survival. The
ultimate occupation of the continent shows that the evocation of manifest destiny
transcends Texas and Oregon. The nineteenth-century marked the beginning of U.S.
expansion of its national borders from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast. Political scientist
Albert Weinberg notes that by the decade of the 1840s, the notion of continental expansion
and the concept of manifest destiny had become the dominant ideological constructs
Indian Removal Act
Indian Removal Act, (May 28, 1830), first major legislative departure from the U.S. policy
of officially respecting the legal and political rights of the American Indians. The act
authorized the president to grant Indian tribes unsettled western prairie land in exchange for
their desirable territories within state borders (especially in the Southeast), from which the
tribes would be removed. The rapid settlement of land east of the Mississippi River made it
clear by the mid-1820s that the white man would not tolerate the presence of even peaceful
Indians there. Pres. Andrew Jackson (1829–37) vigorously promoted this new policy, which
became incorporated in the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Although the bill provided only for
the negotiation with tribes east of the Mississippi on the basis of payment for their lands,
trouble arose when the United States resorted to force to gain the Indians’ compliance with its
demand that they accept the land exchange and move west.
A number of northern tribes were peacefully resettled in western lands considered undesirable
for the white man. The problem lay in the Southeast, where members of what were known as
the Five Civilized Tribes (Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole, Cherokee, and Creek) refused to
trade their cultivated farms for the promise of strange land in the Indian Territory with a so-
called permanent title to that land. Many of these Indians had homes, representative
government, children in missionary schools, and trades other than farming. Some 100,000
tribesmen were forced to march westward under U.S. military coercion in the 1830s; up to 25
percent of the Indians, many in manacles, perished en route. The trek of the Cherokee in
1838–39 became known as the infamous “Trail of Tears.” Even more reluctant to leave their
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native lands were the Florida Indians, who fought resettlement for seven years (1835–42) in
the second of the Seminole Wars.
The frontier began to be pushed aggressively westward in the years that followed, upsetting
the “guaranteed” titles of the displaced tribes and further reducing their relocated holdings.
Trail of Tears
Trail Of Tears c. 1830 - 1840

Location:
Indian Territory United States
Participants:
Cherokee Chickasaw Choctaw Creek Southeast Indian Eastern Woodlands Indians
Context:
Indian Removal Act Seminole Wars Proclamation of 1763
Key People:
Black Hawk John Ross Winfield Scott
Trail of Tears, in U.S. history, the forced relocation during the 1830s of Eastern Woodlands
Indians of the Southeast region of the United States (including Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw,
Choctaw, and Seminole, among other nations) to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi
River. Estimates based on tribal and military records suggest that approximately 100,000
indigenous people were forced from their homes during that period, which is sometimes
known as the removal era, and that some 15,000 died during the journey west. The term Trail
of Tears invokes the collective suffering those people experienced, although it is most
commonly used in reference to the removal experiences of the Southeast Indians generally
and the Cherokee nation specifically. The physical trail consisted of several overland routes
and one main water route and, by passage of the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act in
2009, stretched some 5,045 miles (about 8,120 km) across portions of nine states (Alabama,
Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Tennessee).
The roots of forced relocation lay in greed. The British Proclamation of 1763 designated the
region between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River as Indian Territory.
Although that region was to be protected for the exclusive use of indigenous peoples, large
numbers of Euro-American land speculators and settlers soon entered. For the most part, the
British and, later, U.S. governments ignored these acts of trespass.
In 1829 a gold rush occurred on Cherokee land in Georgia. Vast amounts of wealth were at
stake: at their peak, Georgia mines produced approximately 300 ounces of gold a day. Land
speculators soon demanded that the U.S. Congress devolve to the states the control of all real
property owned by tribes and their members. That position was supported by Pres. Andrew
Jackson, who was himself an avid speculator. Congress complied by passing the Indian
Removal Act (1830). The act entitled the president to negotiate with the eastern nations to
effect their removal to tracts of land west of the Mississippi and provided some $500,000 for
transportation and for compensation to native landowners. Jackson reiterated his support for
the act in various messages to Congress, notably “On Indian Removal” (1830) and “A
Permanent Habitation for the American Indians” (1835), which illuminated his political
justifications for removal and described some of the outcomes he expected would derive from
the relocation process.
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Indigenous reactions to the Indian Removal Act varied. The Southeast Indians were for the
most part tightly organized and heavily invested in agriculture. The farms of the most
populous tribes—the Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Cherokee—were
particularly coveted by outsiders because they were located in prime agricultural areas and
were very well developed. This meant that speculators who purchased such properties could
immediately turn a profit: fields had already been cleared, pastures fenced, barns and houses
built, and the like. Thus, the Southeast tribes approached federal negotiations with the goal of
either reimbursement for or protection of their members’ investments.
The Choctaw were the first polity to finalize negotiations: in 1830 they agreed to cede their
real property for western land, transportation for themselves and their goods, and logistical
support during and after the journey. However, the federal government had no experience in
transporting large numbers of civilians, let alone their household effects, farming equipment,
and livestock. Bureaucratic ineptitude and corruption caused many Choctaw to die from
exposure, malnutrition, exhaustion, and disease while traveling.
The Chickasaw signed an initial removal agreement as early as 1830, but negotiations were
not finalized until 1832. Skeptical of federal assurances regarding reimbursement for their
property, members of the Chickasaw nation sold their landholdings at a profit and financed
their own transportation. As a result, their journey, which took place in 1837, had fewer
problems than did those of the other Southeast tribes.
The Creek also finalized a removal agreement in 1832. However, Euro-American settlers and
speculators moved into the planned Creek cessions prematurely, causing conflicts, delays, and
fraudulent land sales that delayed the Creek journey until 1836. Federal authorities once again
proved incompetent and corrupt, and many Creek people died, often from the same
preventable causes that had killed Choctaw travelers.
A small group of Seminole leaders negotiated a removal agreement in 1832, but a majority of
the tribe protested that the signatories had no authority to represent them. The United States
insisted that the agreement should hold, instigating such fierce resistance to removal that the
ensuing conflict became known as the Second Seminole War (1835–42). Although many were
eventually captured and removed to the west, a substantial number of Seminole people
managed to elude the authorities and remain in Florida.
The Cherokee chose to use legal action to resist removal. Their lawsuits, notably Cherokee
Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832), reached the U.S. Supreme Court
but ultimately provided no relief. As with the Seminole, a few Cherokee leaders negotiated a
removal agreement that was subsequently rejected by the people as a whole. Although several
families moved west in the mid-1830s, most believed that their property rights would
ultimately be respected. This was not to be the case, and in 1838 the U.S. military began to
force Cherokee people from their homes, often at gunpoint. Held in miserable internment
camps for days or weeks before their journeys began, many became ill, and most were very
poorly equipped for the arduous trip. Those who took the river route were loaded onto boats
in which they traveled parts of the Tennessee, Ohio, Mississippi, and Arkansas rivers,
eventually arriving at Fort Gibson in Indian Territory. Not until then did the survivors receive
much-needed food and supplies. Perhaps 4,000 of the estimated 15,000 Cherokee died on the
journey, while some 1,000 avoided internment and built communities in North Carolina.
5
Traditionally, the Northeast Indian nations tended to be more mobile and less politically
unified than those of the Southeast. As a result, literally dozens of band-specific removal
agreements were negotiated with the peoples of that region between 1830 and 1840. Many of
the groups residing in the coniferous forests of the Upper Midwest, such as various bands of
Ojibwa and Ho-Chunk, agreed to cede particular tracts of land but retained in perpetuity the
right to hunt, fish, and gather wild plants and timber from such properties. Groups living in
the prairies and deciduous forests of the Lower Midwest, including bands of Sauk, Fox, Iowa,
Illinois, and Potawatomi, ceded their land with great reluctance and were moved west in small
parties, usually under pressure from speculators, settlers, and the U.S. military. A few groups
attempted armed resistance, most notably a band led by the Sauk leader Black Hawk in 1832.
Although their experiences are often overshadowed by those of the more-populous Southeast
nations, the peoples of the Northeast constituted perhaps one-third to one-half of those who
were subject to removal.
In 1987 the U.S. Congress designated the Trail of Tears as a National Historic Trail in
memory of those who had suffered and died during removal. As mentioned above, the
original trail was more than doubled in size in 2009 to reflect the addition of several newly
documented routes, as well as roundup and dispersion sites.

1. What was the Monroe Doctrine? What principles of foreign policy did this Doctrine
establis
h?
2. What are 3 possible reasons for westward expansion? List 3 reasons and fully explain in
detail.
3. When was Manifest Destiny
completed?
4. What were the social reasons for Manifest Destiny?
5. In light of American treatments inflicted on Indians, it is fair to view the United States as a
true democracy? Why?
6
Classic lecture note on the texts
1. Henry David Thoreau’s "Civil Disobedience"
Thoreau's Civil Disobedience espouses the need to prioritize one's conscience over the
dictates of laws. It criticizes American social institutions and policies, most prominently
slavery and the Mexican-American War.
Thoreau begins his essay by arguing that government rarely proves itself useful and that
it derives its power from the majority because they are the strongest group, not because they
hold the most legitimate viewpoint. He contends that people's first obligation is to do what
they believe is right and not to follow the law dictated by the majority. When a government is
unjust, people should refuse to follow the law and distance themselves from the government
in general. A person is not obligated to devote his life to eliminating evils from the world, but
he is obligated not to participate in such evils. This includes not being a member of an unjust
institution (like the government). Thoreau further argues that the United States fits his criteria
for an unjust government, given its support of slavery and its practice of aggressive war.
Thoreau doubts the effectiveness of reform within the government, and he argues that
voting and petitioning for change achieves little. He presents his own experiences as a model
for how to relate to an unjust government: In protest of slavery, Thoreau refused to pay taxes
and spent a night in jail. But, more generally, he ideologically dissociated himself from the
government, "washing his hands" of it and refusing to participate in his institutions.
According to Thoreau, this form of protest was preferable to advocating for reform from
within government; he asserts that one cannot see government for what it is when one is
working within it.
2. The Seneca Falls Convention

The Seneca Falls Convention was the first women's rights convention in the United
States. Held in July 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, the meeting launched the women's
suffrage movement, which more than seven decades later ensured women the right to vote.
The Seneca Falls Convention was the first women's rights convention. It advertised
itself as "a convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of
woman". Held in the Wesleyan Chapel of the town of Seneca Falls, New York, it spanned two
days over July 19–20, 1848. Attracting widespread attention, it was soon followed by other
women's rights conventions, including the Rochester Women's Rights Convention in
Rochester, New York, two weeks later. In 1850 the first in a series of annual National
Women's Rights Conventions met in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Female Quakers local to the area organized the meeting along with Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, who was not a Quaker. They planned the event during a visit to the area by
Philadelphia-based Lucretia Mott. Mott, a Quaker, was famous for her oratorical ability,
which was rare for non-Quaker women during an era in which women were often not allowed
to speak in public.
The meeting comprised six sessions including a lecture on law, a humorous
presentation, and multiple discussions about the role of women in society. Stanton and the
Quaker women presented two prepared documents, the Declaration of Sentiments and an
accompanying list of resolutions, to be debated and modified before being put forward for
signatures. A heated debate sprang up regarding women's right to vote, with many – including
Mott – urging the removal of this concept, but Frederick Douglass, who was the convention's
sole African American attendee, argued eloquently for its inclusion, and the suffrage
resolution was retained. Exactly 100 of approximately 300 attendees signed the document,
mostly women.
The convention was seen by some of its contemporaries, including featured speaker
Mott, as one important step among many others in the continuing effort by women to gain for
1
themselves a greater proportion of social, civil and moral rights, while it was viewed by others
as a revolutionary beginning to the struggle by women for complete equality with men.
Stanton considered the Seneca Falls Convention to be the beginning of the women's rights
movement, an opinion that was echoed in the History of Woman Suffrage, which Stanton co-
wrote.
The convention's Declaration of Sentiments became "the single most important factor in
spreading news of the women's rights movement around the country in 1848 and into the
future", according to Judith Wellman, a historian of the convention. By the time of the
National Women's Rights Convention of 1851, the issue of women's right to vote had become
a central tenet of the United States women's rights movement. These conventions became
annual events until the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861.
Women's rights
In 1839 in Boston, Margaret Fuller began hosting conversations, akin to French salons,
among women interested in discussing the "great questions" facing their sex. Sophia Ripley
was one of the participants. In 1845, Fuller published The Great Lawsuit, asking women to
claim themselves as self-dependent.
In the 1840s, women in America were reaching out for greater control of their lives.
Husbands and fathers directed the lives of women, and many doors were closed to female
participation. State statutes and common law prohibited women from inheriting property,
signing contracts, serving on juries and voting in elections. Women's prospects in
employment were dim: they could expect only to gain a very few service-related jobs and
were paid about half of what men were paid for the same work. In Massachusetts, Brook
Farm was founded by Sophia Ripley and her husband George Ripley in 1841 as an attempt to
find a way in which men and women could work together, with women receiving the same
compensation as men. The experiment failed.
In the fall of 1841, Elizabeth Cady Stanton gave her first public speech, on the subject
of the Temperance movement, in front of 100 women in Seneca Falls. She wrote to her friend
Elizabeth J. Neal that she moved both the audience and herself to tears, saying "I infused into
my speech a Homeopathic dose of woman's rights, as I take good care to do in many private
conversations."
Lucretia Mott met with Elizabeth Cady Stanton in Boston in 1842, and discussed again
the possibility of a woman's rights convention. They talked once more in 1847, prior to
Stanton moving from Boston to Seneca Falls.
Women's groups led by Lucretia Mott and Paulina Wright Davis held public meetings in
Philadelphia beginning in 1846. A wide circle of abolitionists friendly to women's rights
began in 1847 to discuss the possibility of holding a convention wholly devoted to women's
rights. In October 1847, Lucy Stone gave her first public speech on the subject of women's
rights, entitled The Province of Women, at her brother Bowman Stone's church in Gardner,
Massachusetts.
In March 1848, Garrison, the Motts, Abby Kelley Foster, Stephen Symonds Foster and
others hosted an Anti-Sabbath meeting in Boston, to work toward the elimination of laws that
apply only to Sunday, and to gain for the laborer more time away from toil than just one day
of rest per week. Lucretia Mott and two other women were active within the executive
committee, and Mott spoke to the assemblage. Lucretia Mott raised questions about the
validity of blindly following religious and social tradition.
Declaration, grievances, resolutions

At their home in Waterloo on Sunday, July 16, the M'Clintocks hosted a smaller
planning session for the convention. Mary Ann M'Clintock and her eldest daughters,
2
Elizabeth and Mary Ann, Jr., discussed with Stanton the makeup of the resolutions that would
be presented to the convention for approval. Each woman made certain her concerns were
appropriately represented among the ten resolutions that they composed. Taken together, the
resolutions demanded that women should have equality in the family, education, jobs,
religion, and morals. One of the M'Clintock women selected the Declaration of Independence
from 1776 as a model for the declaration they wanted to make at their convention. The
Declaration of Sentiments was then drafted in the parlor on a round, three-legged, mahogany
tea table. Stanton changed a few words of the Declaration of Independence to make it
appropriate for a statement by women, replacing "The history of the present King of Great
Britain" with "The history of mankind" as the basis for "usurpations on the part of man toward
woman." The women added the phrase "and women" to make "... all men and women are
created equal ..." A list of grievances was composed to form the second part of the
Declaration.
Between July 16 and July 19, at home on her own writing desk, Stanton edited the
grievances and resolutions. Henry Brewster Stanton, a lawyer, politician and Stanton's
husband, helped substantiate the document by locating "extracts from laws bearing unjustly
against woman's property interests." On her own, Stanton added a more radical point to the
list of grievances and to the resolutions: the issue of women's voting rights. To the grievances,
she added "He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective
franchise", and to the Sentiments, she added a line about man depriving woman of "the
elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation ..."
Stanton then copied the Declaration and resolutions into final draft form for presentation at
the meeting. When he saw the addition of woman suffrage, Henry Stanton warned his wife
"you will turn the proceedings into a farce." He, like most men of his day, was not in favor of
women gaining voting rights. Because he intended to run for elective office, he left Seneca
Falls to avoid being connected with a convention promoting such an unpopular cause.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton asked her sister Harriet Cady Eaton to accompany her; Eaton brought
her young son Daniel.
On July 16, Lucretia Mott sent a note to Stanton apologizing in advance for James Mott
not being able to attend the first day, as he was feeling "quite unwell". Lucretia Mott wrote to
say she would bring her sister, Martha Wright, and that the two women would participate in
both days of the convention.
Stanton worked to enshrine the Declaration of Sentiments as a foundational treatise in a
number of ways, not the least of which was by imbuing the small, three-legged tea table upon
which the first draft of it was composed with an importance similar to that of Thomas
Jefferson's desk upon which he wrote the Declaration of Independence. The M'Clintocks gave
Stanton the table, then Stanton gave it to Susan B. Anthony on the occasion of her 80th
birthday, though Anthony had no part in the Seneca Falls meeting. In keeping with Stanton's
promotion of the table as an iconic relic, women's rights activists put it in a place of honor at
the head of the casket at the funeral of Susan B. Anthony on March 14, 1906. Subsequently, it
was displayed prominently on the stage at each of the most important suffrage meetings until
1920, even though the grievance and resolution about woman suffrage was not written on it.
The table is kept at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in
Washington, D.C.
Just as the dire neglect of basic rights in US democracy prompted Thoreau to resort to
civil disobedience to express his dissatisfaction with the US democratic system, the American
practice of democracy with its basic trust in economy/industry/and corporations has
fundamentally ignored the rights of other components of the social fabric. “The Lowell
Girls”; “Factory Regulations in Lowell;” “The Grimke Sisters on the Rights of Women;”
“East from China: The Origins of Chinese America;” and “Portland's Chinatown” are
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prominent examples of American exclusion of the so-called minority from its democratic life.
Under normal circumstances, democracy must protect the rights of all. Failure to do so
weakens US democracy.
3. The Lowell Girls
Samuel Slater’s construction of a water-powered spinning mill in Rhode Island in 1790 was
an early herald of the wave of manufacturing that swept across New England after the War of
1812. The process helped stimulate the transformation of the United States from the mostly
agrarian society Thomas Jefferson had envisioned to the dual agricultural and manufacturing
giant of which George Washington had dreamed. Although industrialization was a gradual
process, it profoundly affected the economy and society of the United States. One of the first
indications of change occurred in the 1830s and 1840s with the emergence of the factory
system and a new and vocal sector of working-class women in and around Lowell,
Massachusetts.
Women had actively participated in the U.S. workforce before industrialization. In 1820,
more than 90 percent of the population lived in the countryside or in villages of fewer than
2,500 inhabitants; more than 70 percent engaged in agriculture. But rural workers did not just
milk cows and till fields. As in Europe, women did most manufacturing in the pre-industrial
era inside their homes. Small Rhode Island spinning mills that followed Slater’s example
employed whole families on site (including children) but outsourced much of the final stages
of production to laborers who toiled at home. This was the so-called Rhode Island or outwork
system. Female domestic workers dominated this form of textile production at the beginning
of the nineteenth century, producing more than two-thirds of the clothing manufactured in the
United States.
Working conditions were hard. In addition to sewing, knitting, and weaving, women working
at home had to bear and raise children, prepare food, carry out domestic chores, and manage
many aspects of household finances. Nor did they get to enjoy the proceeds of their own labor
except in common with their families. Their legal rights, particularly in the ownership of
property, were severely limited. In such circumstances, opportunities to work outside the
home in the large, new textile factories arising in New England after 1814 looked attractive to
many young, single women.
Boston merchant Francis Cabot Lowell visited Great Britain just before the War of 1812
began, closely observing the new technologies at use in the growing factories there. Unable to
legally obtain printed specifications of these technologies, Lowell, like Samuel Slater, carried
them in his mind instead. In 1813, he and master mechanic Paul Moody succeeded in
replicating a British power loom. Afterward, Lowell partnered with other merchants to create
the Boston Manufacturing Company and build a large textile mill in Waltham, Massachusetts.
The old water-powered spinning mills produced yarn that workers finished at home on hand
looms. The power loom allowed all this work to be finished in one process. In addition to
being ten times larger than any of the Rhode Island mills, the Waltham plant efficiently
concentrated all the steps of the cotton manufacturing process at one location, an
organizational method called vertical integration. The creation of the plant itself encouraged
4
technological innovations to the spinning machines that improved productivity from year to
year. And the plant employed almost no children. Instead, Lowell and his colleagues chose to
recruit a workforce of young, single women.
The new process, later dubbed the factory system, was incredibly successful despite British
efforts to dump cheap textiles in the North American market after the end of the war in 1815.
From its founding until 1823, Boston Manufacturing Company’s sales increased from $3,000
annually to more than $300,000. In the 1820s, mills and mill settlements expanded along the
Merrimack River in Massachusetts. The most important of these settlements, the town of
Lowell, was named in honor of the company’s founder, who died in 1817. Its population
soared from six thousand in 1830 to thirty-three thousand in 1850, making it second in
population in Massachusetts only to Boston.
Control of almost all these mills was concentrated in the hands of a few magnates known as
the Boston Associates, who worked together on common policies for technology, which they
shared, and for labor, including wages and working conditions. Competition among the
Associates was frowned upon. They appointed an agent to represent them in Lowell, working
closely with him to ensure that every aspect of the factory system was managed efficiently.
Eighty to 90 percent of the mill workers were women, and they came to be known as the
Lowell Girls. Almost all were single and from rural or small-town families of modest means.
Evidence from testaments published in their own periodical, the Lowell Offering, suggests
they entered the factory system not under orders from their families or driven by want, but
because they wanted to better their own lives and earn money before they married. In
consequence, female mill workers tended to marry much later than other women. Their work
also exposed them to new experiences that made them less likely to retain their parents’
values. And when they left the mills, they tended to settle in large towns rather than returning
to farms.
The women made sacrifices, too. Unlike domestic industries, the factory environment was
highly regulated. Women worked six days a week for twelve hours per day, with only three
holidays and Sundays to rest. They had to work at least a year in any job and give two weeks’
notice before departure. If anyone violated these terms, the Lowell magnates made certain she
never worked in their factories again. The work was repetitive and could be dangerous.
Penny-pinching managers also regulated every moment of the work day to ensure maximum
productivity, essentially cutting laborers off from the outside world. Women rarely held
supervisory responsibilities and were employed in part because of the low wages they
accepted.
The Lowell manufacturers required their female workers to board together in brick company
housing, built in the 1830s to replace earlier ramshackle wooden structures. Up to forty
women lived in a typical boardinghouse, with up to eight per room and two per bed. The
houses were kept clean and reasonably comfortable, and the meals were adequate and regular.
However, the women were expected to adhere to strict rules designed to ensure moral living,
including regular church attendance. Boardinghouse keepers attempted to enforce these rules
but could not be everywhere at once.
Ultimately, the women developed their own community values. Through toiling and boarding
together in company housing, and by producing their own literature, they created a sense of
shared culture and experience. Although they did not fight the system as it stood, when the
5
Boston Associates colluded to reduce wages in 1834 and 1836, the women went on strike.
They did so in the context of a wider pattern of labor organization and unrest across the
country that occurred in conjunction with the rise of the factory system.
By the 1840s, labor activism among the Lowell Girls had become fairly constant. The Ten-
Hour Movement emerged during that decade as the women petitioned the state legislature
every year to reduce the working day by two hours, and the Lowell Female Labor Reform
Association (LFLRA) was formed in December 1844. This group, well organized and
eventually offering sickness insurance to members, became a fully integrated and active
component of larger New England labor organizations such as the New England
Workingmen’s Association (NEWA). The NEWA made the newspaper Voice of Industry its
organ in 1845, and the LFLRA’s president Sarah Bagley became a member of the paper’s
three-person committee. Workers did not always agree. Activists usually remained in the
minority, competing with conservatives who published their opinions in the Lowell Offering.
Still, the scale of this women’s labor movement was unprecedented, even though the Ten-
Hour Movement did not secure any meaningful concessions at this time.
Shrugging off labor agitation, the Boston Associates continued to grow, with output doubling
between 1850 and 1860. The social implications were tremendous. By 1860, approximately
41 percent of the U.S. workforce labored outside agriculture, and standardized production of
cotton textiles and footwear in the factory system had become the norm. In New England, the
creation of factories produced a shift to urban environments, with 36 percent of people in the
region living in cities or other large settlements by 1860. Approximately sixty thousand
women worked in large textile mills in New England by this time. The factory system also
fostered immigration; in the wake of the Irish famine of 1846-1852, thousands of Irish women
moved to Lowell. Irish men, women, and children worked in the factories but were not
provided the housing, churches, and other services. By 1860, they made up perhaps 50
percent of the Lowell factory workforce.
6
1. Is Thoreau's conception of civil disobedience compatible with democratic government?
2. Would civil order be transformed if each person always followed his or her conscience?
3. Under what circumstances should conscience outweigh the law?
4. Is there ever a valid reason to break a law?
5. Discuss the legacy of the Seneca Falls Convention.
6. Why do you think that participation in the abolition movement led women such as
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott to launch the women's rights movement?
7. Why do you think that many Americans in the 19th century (1800s) believed extending
basic political rights to women was a bad idea?
8 Does the American capitalism system treat humans fairly?
7
CLASS MEETING No 8:
Objective: Underscore slavery and the evil of segregation vis-a-vis African American
and American indigenous people/other ethnic groups in a democratic America and stress how
these practices weaken US claims of democracy. American slavery withers US democracy.
VIII –Classic lecture note on the texts: Slavery and antebellum South
The African American History Timeline (p. 46) documents slave life and exploitation for
economic gain and social uplift of white Americans.
By 1830 slavery was primarily located in the South, where it existed in many different
forms. African Americans were enslaved on small farms, large plantations, in cities and
towns, inside homes, out in the fields, and in industry and transportation.
Though slavery had such a wide variety of faces, the underlying concepts were always
the same. Slaves were considered property, and they were property because they were black.
Their status as property was enforced by violence -- actual or threatened. People, black and
white, lived together within these parameters, and their lives together took many forms.
Enslaved African Americans could never forget their status as property, no matter how well
their owners treated them. But it would be too simplistic to say that all masters and slaves
hated each other. Human beings who live and work together are bound to form relationships
of some kind, and some masters and slaves genuinely cared for each other. But the caring was
tempered and limited by the power imbalance under which it grew. Within the narrow
confines of slavery, human relationships ran the gamut from compassionate to contemptuous.
But the masters and slaves never approached equality.
The standard image of Southern slavery is that of a large plantation with hundreds of
slaves. In fact, such situations were rare. Fully 3/4 of Southern whites did not even own
slaves; of those who did, 88% owned twenty or fewer. Whites who did not own slaves were
primarily yeoman farmers. Practically speaking, the institution of slavery did not help these
people. And yet most non-slaveholding white Southerners identified with and defended the
institution of slavery. Though many resented the wealth and power of the large slaveholders,
they aspired to own slaves themselves and to join the privileged ranks. In addition, slavery
gave the farmers a group of people to feel superior to. They may have been poor, but they
were not slaves, and they were not black. They gained a sense of power simply by being
white.
In the lower South the majority of slaves lived and worked on cotton plantations. Most
of these plantations had fifty or fewer slaves, although the largest plantations have several
hundred. Cotton was by far the leading cash crop, but slaves also raised rice, corn, sugarcane,
and tobacco. Many plantations raised several different kinds of crops.
1
Besides planting and harvesting, there were numerous other types of labor required on
plantations and farms. Enslaved people had to clear new land, dig ditches, cut and haul
wood, slaughter livestock, and make repairs to buildings and tools. In many instances,
they worked as mechanics, blacksmiths, drivers, carpenters, and in other skilled trades.
Black women carried the additional burden of caring for their families by cooking and
taking care of the children, as well as spinning, weaving, and sewing.
Some slaves worked as domestics, providing services for the master's or overseer's
families. These people were designated as "house servants," and though their work
appeared to be easier than that of the "field slaves," in some ways it was not. They
were constantly under the scrutiny of their masters and mistresses, and could be called on
for service at any time. They had far less privacy than those who worked the fields.
Because they lived and worked in such close proximity, house servants and their
owners tended to form more complex relationships. Black and white children were
especially in a position to form bonds with each other. In most situations, young
children of both races played together on farms and plantations. Black children might also
become attached to white caretakers, such as the mistress, and white children to their black
nannies. Because they were so young, they would have no understanding of the system they
were born into. But as they grew older they would learn to adjust to it in whatever ways
they could.
The diets of enslaved people were inadequate or barely adequate to meet the demands
of their heavy workload. They lived in crude quarters that left them vulnerable to bad
weather and disease. Their clothing and bedding were minimal as well. Slaves who worked
as domestics sometimes fared better, getting the castoff clothing of their masters or having
easier access to food stores.
The heat and humidity of the South created health problems for everyone living there.
However, the health of plantation slaves was far worse than that of whites. Unsanitary
conditions, inadequate nutrition and unrelenting hard labor made slaves highly susceptible
to disease. Illnesses were generally not treated adequately, and slaves were often forced to
work even when sick. The rice plantations were the most deadly. Black people had to stand
in water for hours at a time in the sweltering sun. Malaria was rampant. Child mortality was
extremely high on these plantations, generally around 66% -- on one rice plantation it
was as high as
90%.
One of the worst conditions that enslaved people had to live under was the
constant threat of sale. Even if their master was "benevolent," slaves knew that a financial
loss or another personal crisis could lead them to the auction block. Also, slaves were
sometimes sold as a form of punishment. And although popular sentiment (as well as the
economic self- interest on the part of the owners) encouraged keeping mothers and children
and sometimes fathers together, these norms were not always followed. Immediate families
were often separated. If they were kept together, they were almost always sold away from
their extended families. Grandparents, sisters, brothers, and cousins could all find
themselves forcibly scattered, never to see each other again. Even if they or their loved
ones were never sold, slaves had to live with the constant threat that they could be.
African American women had to endure the threat and the practice of sexual
exploitation. There were no safeguards to protect them from being sexually stalked,
harassed, or raped, or to be used as long-term concubines by masters and overseers. The
abuse was widespread, as the men with authority took advantage of their situation. Even if
a woman seemed agreeable to the situation, in reality she had no choice. Slave men, for
their part, were often powerless to protect the women they loved.
2
The drivers, overseers, and masters were responsible for plantation discipline. Slaves
were punished for not working fast enough, for being late getting to the fields, for defying
authority, for running away, and for a number of other reasons. The punishments took
many forms, including whippings, torture, mutilation, imprisonment, and being sold away
from the plantation. Slaves were even sometimes murdered. Some masters were more
"benevolent" than others, and punished less often or severely. But with rare exceptions, the
authoritarian relationship remained firm even in those circumstances.
In addition to the authority practiced on individual plantations, slaves throughout the
South had to live under a set of laws called the Slave Codes. The codes varied slightly from
state to state, but the basic idea was the same: the slaves were considered property, not
people, and were treated as such. Slaves could not testify in court against a white, make
contracts, leave the plantation without permission, strike a white (even in self-defense), buy
and sell goods, own firearms, gather without a white present, possess any anti-slavery
literature, or visit the homes of whites or free blacks. The killing of a slave was almost
never regarded as murder, and the rape of slave women was treated as a form of trespassing.
Whenever there was a slave insurrection, or even the rumor of one, the laws
became even tighter. At all times, patrols were set up to enforce the codes. These patrols
were similar
to militias and were made up of white men who were obligated to serve for a set period.
The patrols apprehended slaves outside of plantations, and they raided homes and any type
of gathering, searching for anything that might lead to insurrection. During times of
insurrection
-- either real or rumored -- enraged whites formed vigilance committees that
terrorized, tortured, and killed blacks.
While most slaves were concentrated on the plantations, there were many slaves
living in urban areas or working in rural industry. Although over 90% of American slaves
lived in rural areas, slaves made up at least 20% of the populations of most Southern
cities. In Charleston, South Carolina, slaves and free blacks outnumbered whites. Many
slaves living in cities worked as domestics, but others worked as blacksmiths, carpenters,
shoemakers, bakers, or other tradespeople. Often, slaves were hired out by their masters,
for a day or up to several years. Sometimes slaves were allowed to hire themselves out.
Urban slaves had more freedom
of movement than plantation slaves and generally had greater opportunities for learning.
They also had increased contact with free black people, who often expanded their ways of
thinking about slavery.
Slaves resisted their treatment in innumerable ways. They slowed down their work
pace, disabled machinery, feigned sickness, destroyed crops. They argued and fought with
their masters and overseers. Many stole livestock, other food, or valuables. Some learned to
read and write, a practice forbidden by law. Some burned forests and buildings. Others
killed their masters outright -- some by using weapons, others by putting poison in
their food. Some slaves committed suicide or mutilated themselves to ruin their property
value. Subtly or overtly, enslaved African Americans found ways to sabotage the system in
which they lived.
Thousands of slaves ran away. Some left the plantation for days or weeks at a time
and lived in hiding. Others formed maroon communities in mountains, forests or swamps.
Many escaped to the North. There were also numerous instances of slave revolts
throughout the
history of the institution. (For one white interpretation of slave resistance, see Diseases and
Peculiarities of the Negro Race) Even when slaves acted in a subservient manner, they were
often practicing a type of resistance. By fooling the master or overseer with their
3
behavior, they resisted additional ill treatment.
Enslaved African Americans also resisted by forming community within the
plantation setting. This was a tremendous undertaking for people whose lives were ruled by
domination and forced labor. Slaves married, had children, and worked hard to keep
their families together. In their quarters they were able to let down the masks they had to
wear for whites. There, black men, women, and children developed an underground
culture through which they affirmed their humanity. They gathered in the evenings to
tell stories, sing, and make secret plans. House servants would come down from the "big
house" and give news of the master and mistress, or keep people laughing with their
imitations of the whites.
It was in their quarters that many enslaved people developed and passed down skills
which allowed them to supplement their poor diet and inadequate medical care with
hunting, fishing, gathering wild food, and herbal medicines. There, the adults taught their
children how to hide their feelings to escape punishment and to be skeptical of anything
a white person said. Many slave parents told their children that blacks were superior to
white people, who were lazy and incapable of running things properly.
Many slaves turned to religion for inspiration and solace. Some practiced
African religions, including Islam, others practiced Christianity. Many practiced a
brand of Christianity which included strong African elements. Most rejected the
Christianity of their masters, which justified slavery. The slaves held their own meetings in
secret, where they spoke of the New Testament promises of the day of reckoning and of
justice and a better life after death, as w
Economic Necessity Trumps Morality

Slave labor had become so entrenched in the Southern economy that nothing—not
even
the belief that all men were created equal—would dislodge it. When delegates to the
Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, they were split on
the moral question of human bondage and man’s inhumanity to man, but not on its
economic necessity. At the time, there were nearly 700,000 slaves living in the United
States, worth an estimated $210 million in today’s dollars. When the topic of slavery arose
during the deliberations over calculating political representation in Congress, the southern
states of Georgia and the Carolinas demanded that each slave be counted along with whites.
The northern states balked, saying it gave southern states an unfair advantage. Their
compromise? Delegates agreed that each slave would count as three-fifths of a person,
giving the South more representation, and that the slave trade would be banned 20 years
hence, in 1807, a concession to Northern states that had abolished slavery several years
earlier.
With cash crops of tobacco, cotton and sugar cane, America’s southern states became the
economic engine of the burgeoning nation. Their fuel of choice? Human slavery.
If the Confederacy had been a separate nation, it would have ranked as the fourth
richest in the world at the start of the Civil War. The slave economy had been very good to
American prosperity. By the start of the war, the South was producing 75 percent of the
world’s cotton and creating more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi River valley
than anywhere in the nation. Slaves represented Southern planters’ most significant
investment—and the bulk of their wealth.
With ideal climate and available land, property owners in the southern colonies began
establishing plantation farms for cash crops like rice, tobacco and sugar cane—enterprises
that required increasing amounts of labor. To meet the need, wealthy planters turned to
slave traders, who imported ever more human chattel to the colonies, the vast majority from
4
West Africa. As more slaves were imported and an upsurge in slave fertility rates expanded
the “inventory,” a new industry was born: the slave auction. These open markets where
humans were inspected like animals and bought and sold to the highest bidder proved an
increasingly lucrative enterprise. In the 17th century, slaves would fetch between five and
ten dollars. But by the mid-19th century, an able-bodied slave fetched an average price
between $1,200-
$1,5
00.

1. Was slavery a necessity in the U.S?
2. Can democracy and slavery collide/coexist?
3. Should economic necessity trump morality in a democratic society?
4. How can the ideals of democracy be reconciled with the system of slavery?
5. Describe the interactions between Blacks and Whites in early colonial America, before
chattel slavery.
6. Why did plantation farming shift from using indentured servants as labor to enslaved
African people?
5
CLASS MEETING No 9:
Objective: same as objective No 8 -- Underscore the evil of segregation vis-a-vis

African American and American indigenous people/other ethnic groups in a democratic
America and stress how these practices weaken US claims of democracy. American slavery
withers US democracy.
IX – Classic lecture note on the texts: American Slavery and Democracy

Slavery and the Democratic Conscience.
Political Life in America is troubling to many as the above texts might suggest to
many.
Democracy and slavery collided in the early American republic, nowhere more so
than in the Democratic-Republican party, the political coalition that elected Thomas
Jefferson president in 1800 and governed the United States into the 1820s. Joining
southern slaveholders and northern advocates of democracy, the coalition facilitated a
dramatic expansion of American slavery and generated ideological conflict over
slaveholder power in national politics. Slavery was not an exception to the rise of American
democracy, but was instead central to the formation of democratic institutions and ideals.
This series of texts explains how northern men both confronted and accommodated
slavery in a democratic America.
The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. The Declaration of
Independence, approved on July 4, 1776, proclaims that “all men are created equal” and
“endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” But the white men who drafted
those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in
their midst. “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” did not apply to fully one-fifth of
the country. Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all,
black Americans believed fervently in the American creed. Through centuries of black
resistance and protest, they have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not
only for ourselves — black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle,
including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights.
Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black Americans,
US
democracy today would most likely look very different — it might not be a democracy at all.
The very first person to die for this country in the American Revolution was a
black man who himself was not free. Crispus Attucks was a fugitive from slavery, yet he
gave his life for a new nation in which his own people would not enjoy the liberties laid
out in the Declaration for another century. In every war this nation has waged since
that first one, African Americans have fought — today they are the most likely of all
racial groups to serve in the United States military.
In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson sat at his portable writing desk in a rented room in
Philadelphia and penned these words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all
men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” For the last 244
years, this fierce assertion of the fundamental and natural rights of humankind to freedom
and self-governance has defined U.S. global reputation as a land of liberty. As Jefferson
composed his inspiring words, however, a teenage boy who would enjoy none of those
rights and liberties waited nearby to serve at his master’s beck and call. His name was
Robert Hemings, and he was the half brother of Jefferson’s wife, born to Martha Jefferson’s
1
father and a woman he owned. It was common for white enslavers to keep their half-black
children in slavery. Jefferson had chosen Hemings, from among about 130 enslaved people
that worked on the forced-labor camp he called Monticello, to accompany him to
Philadelphia and ensure his every comfort as he drafted the text making the case for a
new democratic republic based on the individual rights of men.
At the time, one-fifth of the population within the 13 colonies struggled under a brutal
system of slavery unlike anything that had existed in the world before. Chattel slavery was
not conditional but racial. It was heritable and permanent, not temporary, meaning
generations of black people were born into it and passed their enslaved status onto their
children. Enslaved people were not recognized as human beings but as property that could
be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift and disposed of
violently. Jefferson’s fellow white colonists knew that black people were human beings,
but they created a network of laws and customs, astounding for both their precision and
cruelty, that ensured that enslaved people would never be treated as such. As the
abolitionist William Goodell wrote in 1853, “If any thing founded on falsehood might be
called a science, we might add the system of American slavery to the list of the strict
sciences.”
Enslaved people could not legally marry. They were barred from learning to read and
restricted from meeting privately in groups. They had no claim to their own children, who
could be bought, sold and traded away from them on auction blocks alongside furniture and
cattle or behind storefronts that advertised “Negroes for Sale.” Enslavers and the courts
did not honor kinship ties to mothers, siblings, cousins. In most courts, they had no legal
standing. Enslavers could rape or murder their property without legal consequence.
Enslaved people could own nothing, will nothing and inherit nothing. They were legally
tortured, including by those working for Jefferson himself. They could be worked to death,
and often were, in order to produce the highest profits for the white people who owned
them.
Yet in making the argument against Britain’s tyranny, one of the colonists’ favorite
rhetorical devices was to claim that they were the slaves — to Britain. For this duplicity,
they faced burning criticism both at home and abroad. As Samuel Johnson, an English
writer and Tory opposed to American independence, quipped, “How is it that we hear the
loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”
Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary
reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was
because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply
conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere.
In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended
the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South. The wealth and prominence
that allowed Jefferson, at just 33, and the other founding fathers to believe they could
successfully break off from one of the mightiest empires in the world came from the
dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery. In other words, Americans may never have
revolted against Britain if some of the founders had not understood that slavery empowered
them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to
ensure that slavery would continue. It is
not incidental that 10 of this nation’s first 12 presidents were enslavers, and some might
argue that the United Sates was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.
Jefferson and the other founders were keenly aware of this hypocrisy. And so in
Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence, he tried to argue that it
wasn’t the colonists’ fault. Instead, he blamed the king of England for forcing the
2
institution of slavery on the unwilling colonists and called the trafficking in human beings
a crime. Yet neither Jefferson nor most of the founders intended to abolish slavery, and in
the end, they struck the passage.
There is no mention of slavery in the final Declaration of Independence. Similarly,
11 years later, when it came time to draft the Constitution, the framers carefully constructed
a document that preserved and protected slavery without ever using the word. In the texts in
which they were making the case for freedom to the world, they did not want to explicitly
enshrine their hypocrisy, so they sought to hide it. The Constitution contains 84 clauses.
Six deal directly with the enslaved and their enslavement, as the historian David
Waldstreicher has written, and five more hold implications for slavery. The Constitution
protected the “property” of those who enslaved black people, prohibited the federal
government from intervening to end the importation of enslaved Africans for a term of 20
years, allowed Congress to mobilize the militia to put down insurrections by the enslaved
and forced states that had outlawed slavery to turn over enslaved people who had run
away seeking refuge. Like many others, the writer and abolitionist Samuel Bryan called out
the deceit, saying of the Constitution, “The words are dark and ambiguous; such as no plain
man of common sense would have used, [and] are evidently chosen to conceal from
Europe, that in this enlightened country, the practice of slavery has its advocates among
men in the highest stations.”
With independence, the founding fathers could no longer blame slavery on Britain.
The sin became this nation’s own, and so, too, the need to cleanse it. The shameful paradox
of continuing chattel slavery in a nation founded on individual freedom, scholars today
assert, led to a hardening of the racial caste system. This ideology, reinforced not just by
laws but by racist science and literature, maintained that black people were subhuman,
a belief that allowed white Americans to live with their betrayal.
The Supreme Court enshrined this thinking in the law in its 1857 Dred Scott decision,
ruling that black people, whether enslaved or free, came from a “slave” race. This made
them inferior to white people and, therefore, incompatible with American democracy.
Democracy was for citizens, and the “Negro race,” the court ruled, was “a separate
class of persons,” which the founders had “not regarded as a portion of the people
or citizens of the Government” and had “no rights which a white man was bound to
respect.” This belief, that black people were not merely enslaved but were a slave race,
became the root of the endemic racism that black people still cannot purge from this nation
to this day. If black people could not ever be citizens, if they were a caste apart from all
other humans, then they did not require the rights bestowed by the Constitution, and the
“we” in the “We the People” was not a lie.
For this fleeting moment known as Reconstruction, the majority in Congress seemed
to embrace the idea that out of the ashes of the Civil War, African Americans could create
the multiracial democracy that black Americans envisioned even if the founding fathers did
not. But it would not last. Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of the U.S., as does the
belief, so well articulated by Lincoln, that black people are the obstacle to national unity.
This ideology – that black people belonged to an inferior, subhuman race – did not
simply disappear once slavery ended. If the formerly enslaved and their descendants
became educated, if African Americans thrived in the jobs white people did, if they
excelled in the sciences and arts, then the entire justification for how this nation allowed
slavery would collapse. Free black people posed a danger to the country’s idea of itself as
exceptional; Americans held up the mirror in which the nation preferred not to
peer. And so the inhumanity visited on black people by every generation of white
America justified the inhumanity of the past.
3
1. How do the opponents of slavery understand it, exactly?

2. Is it only a moral wrong, or is it more complicated than that?
3. What are the justifications put forward by slavery’s defenders? Are these justifications
all compatible?
4. How do slavery’s defenders reconcile democracy with slavery?
5. What do these arguments imply about their understanding of democracy?
6. What are Stephen Douglas most forceful arguments in defense of slavery?
7. Is there anything surprising to you about the way that the opponents of slavery attack
the institution?
8. How ought we understand the relationship between the evil of slavery and John
Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry? Was he justified? Why or why not?
11. Why does Frederick Douglass believe that scorn will be an effective weapon in
abolishing slavery?
4
CLASS MEETING No 10:
Objective: Review the American Civil War and the Reconstruction Period to examine how
these troubling events and tumultuous times in American life have endangered US
democracy.
X –Classic lecture note on the

texts:
The unhealthy cohabitation between American Slavery and Democracy: Secession
and the Civil War
I. Secession
In the context of the United States, secession primarily refers to the
voluntary
withdrawal of one or more states from the Union that constitutes the United States; but may
loosely refer to leaving a state or territory to form a separate territory or new state, or to the
severing of an area from a city or county within a state. Advocates for secession are called
disunionists by their contemporaries in various historical documents.
Threats and aspirations to secede from the United States, or arguments justifying
secession, have been a feature of the country's politics almost since its birth. Some
have argued for secession as a constitutional right and others as from a natural right of
revolution. In Texas v. White, the United States Supreme Court ruled unilateral
secession unconstitutional, while commenting that revolution or consent of the states could
lead to a successful secession.
The most serious attempt at secession was advanced in the years 1860 and 1861
as eleven southern states each declared secession from the United States, and joined
together to form the Confederate States of America. This movement collapsed in 1865 with
the defeat of Confederate forces by Union armies in the American Civil War.
Secession, in US history, the withdrawal of 11 slave states (states in which
slaveholding was legal) from the Union during 1860–61 following the election of Abraham
Lincoln as president. Secession precipitated the American Civil War.
Secession, as it applies to the outbreak of the American Civil War, comprises the
series of events that began on December 20, 1860, and extended through June 8 of the
next year when eleven states in the Lower and Upper South severed their ties with the
Union. The first seven seceding states of the Lower South set up a provisional government
at Montgomery, Alabama. After hostilities began at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on
April 12, 1861, the border states of Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina
joined the new government, which then moved its capital to Richmond, Virginia.
The Union was thus divided approximately on geographic lines. Twenty-one northern and
border states retained the style and title of the United States, while the eleven slave states
adopted the nomenclature of the Confederate States of America.
The border slave states of Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri remained
with the Union, although they all contributed volunteers to the Confederacy. Fifty counties
of western Virginia were loyal to the Union government, and in 1863 this area was
constituted the separate state of West Virginia. Secession in practical terms meant that
about a third of the population with substantial material resources had withdrawn from what
had constituted a single nation and established a separate government.
The term secession had been used as early as 1776. South Carolina threatened
separation when the Continental Congress sought to tax all the colonies on the basis of a
total population count that would include slaves. Secession in this instance and throughout
1
the antebellum period came to mean the assertion of minority sectional interests against
what was perceived to be a hostile or indifferent majority. Secession had been a matter of
concern to some members of the Constitutional Convention that met at
Philadelphia in 1787.
Theoretically, secession was bound up closely with Whig thought, which claimed the right
of revolution against a despotic government. Algernon Sidney, John Locke, and the British
Commonwealth Men argued this theme, and it played a prominent role in the American
Revolution.
Any federal republic by its very nature invited challenge to central control, a danger
that James Madison recognized. He sought at the convention a clause that would
prohibit secession from the proposed union once the states had ratified the Constitution. In
debate over other points, Madison repeatedly warned that secession or “disunion” was a
major concern. The Constitution as framed and finally accepted by the states divided
the exercise of sovereign power between the states and the national government. By virtue
of the fact that it was a legal document and in most respects enumerated the powers of the
central government, the division was weighted toward the states. Yet much of the charter
was drawn up in general
terms and was susceptible to interpretation that might vary with time and
circumstance.
The very thing that Madison feared took on a concrete form during the party battles
of the Washington and Adams administrations. And paradoxically, Madison found himself
involved with those who seemed to threaten separation. In their reaction to the arbitrary
assumption of power in the Alien and Sedition Acts, Thomas Jefferson and Madison
argued for state annulment of this legislation. Jefferson’s response in the Kentucky
Resolution advanced the compact interpretation of the federal Constitution. Madison’s
Virginia Resolution was far more moderate, but both resolutions looked to state action
against what were deemed unconstitutional laws. The national judiciary, they felt, was
packed with their opponents. Neither resolution claimed original sovereignty for the states,
but both argued for a strict reading of enumerated powers. During the War of 1812, a
disaffected Federalist majority in New England advanced the compact theory and
considered secession from the Union.
As modernization began to take hold in the United States, differences between the
two major sections grew more pronounced: a plantation cotton culture worked by slave
labor became concentrated in the South and industrial development featuring free
labor in the North. A wave of reform activity in Europe and the United States made the
abolition or at least the restriction of slavery a significant goal in the free states. Since
abolition struck at the labor system as well as the social structure of the slave states, threats
of secession punctuated the political dialogue from 1819 through 1860.
John C. Calhoun, the leading spokesman of the slave states, charged frequently and
eloquently that the South and its way of life were under assault from an industrializing
North. Like other proponents of endangered minorities, he looked to the Virginia and
Kentucky Resolutions and their assertion of the federal compact for the basis of his
defense. He argued that a state or a group of states could nullify a federal law that
was felt to be against a particular interest. But Calhoun made a fundamental extension of
the Jeffersonian concept of states’ rights and claimed original undivided sovereignty for the
people acting through the states. Although always seeking an accommodation for the South
and its slave plantation system within the Union, Calhoun had hoped that nullification was a
proper, constitutional alternative to disunion. But he eventually invoked secession with
particular vehemence after the territorial acquisitions of the Mexican War and the
formation of the Free-Soil party in
2
1848. Nationalists like John Marshall, Joseph Story, and Daniel Webster countered the
Calhoun argument. They declared that the Constitution operated directly through the states
on the people, not upon the states as corporate bodies, and their view gained wide
acceptance in the free states.
Calhoun was instrumental in fostering southern unity on a sectional basis and in
formulating the call for a convention of delegates from the slave states to be held at
Nashville, Tennessee, in 1850. There is little doubt that had he lived, Calhoun would have
been a formidable force for secession as the ultimate weapon. His death and the working
out of a compromise that strengthened moderate opinion in both sections kept the
secessionist element at bay temporarily.
But the territorial issue flared up again, this time with renewed fury over the question
of whether Kansas should enter the Union as a free or slave state. By now antislavery
sentiment had grown significantly in the free states. And opinion leaders in the slave states
drew closer together in defense against what they saw as an impending attack on their
institutions. The Kansas question created the Republican party, a frankly sectional political
organization, and it nominated John C. Frémont for president on a Free-Soil platform in
1856. Although the Democrats, still functioning along national lines, managed to elect
James Buchanan president by a slim margin, the slave states threatened secession if the
Republicans should win the election in 1860.
The South was committed to an agrarian way of life. It was a land where profitable
and efficient plantations worked by slave labor produced cotton for the world market. It was
also a land where a majority of its white population was made up of subsistence farmers
who lived isolated lives on the edge of poverty and whose literacy rates were low
compared with those in the more densely populated North.
The South nevertheless was beginning to industrialize, a factor that added to the
social tensions surfacing during the 1850s between the haves–plantation owners and
professional groups in the few urban centers–and the have-nots–an increasingly restive
yeoman or small- farmer group. But the issue of black servitude provided cohesion for the
white bloc and contributed greatly to a patriarchal system wherein the masses of the whites
still looked to a planter-professional elite for political and social guidance. Although
the northern masses might also defer to the opinions of the powerful and living conditions
among the urban poor were precarious, educational levels were far higher than in the South.
The ethic of free capital
and free labor was deeply ingrained in the cities and in farm communities as well. It was
this ethic that formed the ideological basis for a broad antislavery movement.
Southern leaders were concerned over internal stresses in their society and were
increasingly aware of the moral and social repugnance the slave system engendered not
only in the North but also in Western Europe. Southern leadership, though surely not
unified in its response to a political victory of antislavery forces in 1860, began as early as
1858 to prepare its section for separation from the Union.
Even though the Republican platform of 1860 disavowed any move that would
interfere with slavery where the custom and the law of a given state upheld it, many of the
more extreme opinion makers in the South promoted the idea that a Republican victory
meant eventual emancipation and social and political equality for their black population. So
inflamed were the voters in South Carolina that before the election of Lincoln, they had
chosen a convention that was committed to secession on news of a Republican victory. The
situation of other states in the Deep South was more complicated. Elections were held
promptly, but the results showed considerable division on secession. Three factions
emerged: those for immediate secession, those who sought delay until the policy of
the new administration toward the slave states became clear, and those who believed they
3
could bargain with the new administration. All these groups, however, were united in
support of the doctrine of secession. With this idea as a basic commitment, the better
organized immediate secessionists were able to prevail.
The close connection between the right to revolution and separation from the
governing power in the spirit of 1776 was an early theme in the provisional Confederacy.
To be sure, the revolution was posited as a peaceful one. Separation from a Union perceived
to be under the control of a tyrannical power that would destroy southern institutions was
the objective.
Confederate leaders at this early date thought that the North would not fight to
preserve the Union. But the provisional government nevertheless began purchasing
arms and munitions, and seceded states started to equip and train their militias.
State and Confederate government authorities seized federal forts, arsenals, and other
national property within their jurisdiction. When Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated on
March
4, 1861, federal troops held only Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, Fort Pickens off
the
Florida coast, and one or two other outposts in the
South.
Concerned about the loyalty of the border states of Virginia, Maryland, Missouri, and
Kentucky, the new administration went so far as to offer the slave states an amendment to
the Constitution that would guarantee slavery where it legally existed. Lincoln himself in
his inaugural address pledged only to hold federal property that was in the possession
of the Union on March 4, 1861.
The provisional Confederacy likewise sought vigorously to stimulate secession
sentiment in the border states. Had all the border slave states thrown in their lot with one
or the other government, there might not have been a war, or conversely, separation might
well have become an accomplished fact. As it was, however, the prompt action of the
Lincoln administration after the bombardment and surrender of Fort Sumter secured
Maryland and Delaware for the Union. Kentucky proclaimed its neutrality but eventually
remained loyal to the Union. Missouri, too, though a major battleground for the contending
forces, contributed most of its resources in men and matériel to the Union.
Once the war was joined, waves of patriotic sentiment swept over North and South.
Vocal political opposition would exist on both sides, but it was never strong enough
to overthrow either government. Secession as revolution, an early theme in southern
rhetoric, was not emphasized after the formation of the Confederacy. Rather,
Jefferson’s compact theory was enshrined in its Constitution. A nation could not have been
formed, nor a war fought, if the states were wholly independent of any central authority.
Behind it all, of course, was the unity of a minority geographical section defending a
distinct set of institutions that were thought to be under attack. The original federal Union
that shared the exercise of power with the states strengthened the concept of secession. It
also supplied a pretext for southern leaders to seize the initiative and form a separate nation.
II. About the CIVIL WAR:

- The Civil War was fought in 1861 after decades of tensions between the southern and
northern states over slavery, westward expansion and state rights.
- The election of Abraham Lincoln as President caused eleven states to secede
from the Union beginning with South Carolina and form the Confederate States of America.
- - The Conflict ended in 1865 with the death of 620,000 soldiers of the 2.4
million who fought the war.
4
II. 1.Background
Throughout the 19th Century, the US experienced tremendous growth that amplified
the
difference between the north and the southern states. In the North was manufacturing and
industry with few small-scale farmers while the south had large-scale plantation farmers
who mostly depended on slave labor for cash crops, such as cotton and tobacco.
In 1854 Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act that provided that new territories
would, by popular sovereignty as opposed to the Congressional decision, determine their
individual policy regarding slavery. Kansas was flooded with pro-slavery and anti-slavery
advocates whose violent campaigns led to the term “Bleeding Kansas.” Bleeding Kansas
also led to the establishment of the Republican Party founded on the principle of opposition
to slavery.
In 1857, the Dred Scott decision confirmed the legality of slavery in the southern
states and the westward expansion, but the abolitionist movement convinced the southerners
that the north was bent on dismantling the institution of slavery. In the aftermath of the
second great awakening, abolitionists advocated for the emancipation of slaves, the
majority of whom were in the south with the underlying principle of equality of men before
God. In addition to the above, southern states perceived that the federal government did not
respect their rights due to the restrictions on slavery in the south and the westward
expansion. However, the election of President Lincoln, a Republican, in November 1860
who was openly opposed to slavery, caused some seven states, namely South Carolina,
Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas to cede from the Union to
form the Confederate States of America in
1861. The Civil
War
The North seemed to enjoy an advantage over the south where states economy
centred on manufacturing, including arms and railroad construction. However, the
Confederate army had a strong military tradition, and some of the best soldiers were in
the southern states. The first shot of the Civil War was fired by the Confederate army as
they successfully took control over Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. In response
to Fort Sumter, Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to join the military, as Virginia, North
Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas also ceded to join the Confederacy as the other
northern states heeded Lincoln’s call.
On 21 July 1861, the battle of Bull Run, the first official battle of the Civil War, was
fought when 35,000 Confederate soldiers near Manassas under the command of Thomas
Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson forced Union forces under the control of Brig. Gen. Irvin
McDowell to retreat towards Washington D.C., to the disappointment of the Union
who hoped for a quick victory. Consequently, both sides increased the number of men
available for the war, after it became clear that the war would continue for a while. The
President put Maj. Gen. George McClellan in command of the Union Army of the Potomac.
In 1862, he was defeated in seven-day battle after moving south to forge an attack at
Richmond via the Peninsula. The defeat led to the rise of Gen. Robert E. Lee of the
Confederate army, who after his win in Manassas, began to move north in Maryland. In
September Lee began the first Confederate invasion of the North in Maryland and met with
McClellan who engaged against Lincoln orders, forcing Lee to retreat to a defensive
position in Antietam Creek, near Sharpsburg.
Three days later, Lee, who was reinforced by Jackson, was attacked by the Army of
the Potomac at Antietam leading to the bloodiest single day war of the Civil War.
The Confederate suffered 13, 724 casualties out of 52,000 troops while the Union suffered
12, 410 out of 69,000 soldiers. The Union won forcing Lee to retreat to Virginia.
5
Lincoln was, owever not happy with McClellan, who though beloved by his troops, was
slow in pursuit of the Confederate army and sent in Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside.
II. 2. The Emancipation Proclamation

Lincoln, following the victory at Antietam, issued the Proclamation of Emancipation
for
the slaves in the seceded states and not the border states that were still loyal to the Union.
The proclamation ensured some 186,000 black soldiers joined the Union army of whom
38,000 died by the time that war ended.
Gen Ambrose was defeated at Fredericksburg and was replaced by Maj. Gen. Joseph
Hooker who was defeated by Lee at Chancellorsville, Virginia. The Confederate
army suffered 13,000 casualties which were approximately 22 per cent of their troops while
the Union lost 15 per cent during the battle. Lee moved forward to launch another offensive
near Gettysburg, southern Pennsylvania against General George Meade on 1
June. The Confederate army suffered another loss.
The Union did not launch a counter-attack and Lee, and his army fled back to
Virginia. The Union army was reconstituted and Maj. Gen. John Pope was made
commander. The commander was successful in removing another band of the Confederate
army from the Mississippi River together with Brig. Gen Ulysses S. Grant in May 1863
after Grant’s success in the siege of Vicksburg. Earlier in Feb, Gen Ulysses had
captured Forts Henry and Donelson. He had also defeated the Confederate army at Shiloh
and Stone River, both in Tennessee and led the campaign that captured New Orleans. The
Confederates were again defeated in their attempts to capture Kentucky and defeated
again in November in Chattanooga by the Union army under the leadership of Grant.
In March 1864 Grant was placed in charge of all the Union armies following his
consecutive victories. He left William T. Sherman and went west to pursue the Confederate
army in northern Virginia. He suffered heavy casualties in the Battle of the Wilderness and
Spotsylvania (both May 1864) and at Cold Harbor (early June) but still managed to secure
Petersburg.
On the other hand, Sherman sized Atlanta by September and gathered some
60,000
Union troops in what has been labelled the “March to the Sea” capturing Georgia and
Savannah by 21 December. By Mid-February 1865 Sherman has captured Columbia and
Charleston South Carolina and North Carolina by mid-April.
On 9 April Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House. On April 14 John
Wilkes Booth assassinated President Lincoln at Ford’s theatre while another band of the
Confederate army surrendered on April 26, bringing the Civil War to an end.
The various texts on schedule cast a specific insight into some peculiar aspects of
the
War that has Americans
forever.
The Significance of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation for America

What were Lincoln’s motives in deciding for general emancipation?
Before the start of the American Civil War, many people and leaders of the North had
been primarily concerned merely with stopping the extension of slavery into western
territories that would eventually achieve statehood within the Union. With the secession of
the Southern states and the consequent start of the Civil War, however, the continued
tolerance of Southern slavery by Northerners seemed no longer to serve any constructive
political purpose. Emancipation thus quickly changed from a distant possibility to an
6
imminent and feasible eventuality. Lincoln had declared that he meant to save the Union as
best he could—by preserving slavery, by destroying it, or by destroying part and preserving
part. Just after the Battle of Antietam (September 17, 1862) he issued his proclamation
calling on the revolted states to return to their allegiance before the next year,
otherwise their slaves would be declared free men. No state returned, and the threatened
declaration was issued on January 1,
1863.
As president, Lincoln could issue no such declaration; as commander in chief of the
armies and navies of the United States he could issue directions only as to the territory
within his lines; but the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to territory outside of
his lines. It has therefore been debated whether the proclamation was in reality of any
force. It may fairly be taken as an announcement of the policy that was to guide the army
and as a declaration of freedom taking effect as the lines advanced. At all events, this was
its exact effect.
Its international importance was far greater. The locking up of the world’s source of
cotton supply had been a general calamity, and the Confederate government and people
had steadily expected that the English and French governments would intervene in the war.
The conversion of the struggle into a crusade against slavery made European intervention
impossible.
The Emancipation Proclamation did more than lift the war to the level of a crusade for
human freedom. It brought some substantial practical results, because it allowed the Union
to recruit black soldiers. To this invitation to join the army the blacks responded in
considerable numbers, nearly 180,000 of them enlisting during the remainder of the war.
By August 26, 1863, Lincoln could report, in a letter to James C. Conkling, that “the
emancipation policy and the use of colored troops constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to
the rebellion.”
Two months before the war ended—in February 1865—Lincoln told portrait painter
Francis B. Carpenter that the Emancipation Proclamation was “the central act of my
administration, and the greatest event of the nineteenth century.” To Lincoln and to his
countrymen it had become evident that the proclamation had dealt a deathblow to slavery
in the United States, a fate that was officially sealed by the ratification of the Thirteenth
Amendment in December 1865.
The emancipation itself changed the nature of the war. It reflected a fundamental
change in Lincoln’s own thinking about the relationship of slavery to the war as well as the
future place of blacks in American life. The point is not that Lincoln freed four million
slaves with a stroke of the pen, but that the Proclamation was a key moment in the complex
and prolonged historical process that led to the end of slavery in the United States, with
consequences to the present.
Discussion and Writing

Questions
1. What did the Civil War accomplish?

2. What characterized the buildup to the Civil War?
3. Why did some Southern states secede immediately after Lincoln’s election in 1860?
7
CLASS MEETING No 11:
Objective: same as objective No 10 – Review the American Civil War and the
Reconstruction Period to examine how these troubling events and tumultuous times in
American life have endangered US democracy.
X – Classic lecture note on the texts:

Reconstruction and the New South: Challenging Reconstruction Efforts. Definition
The Reconstruction era was the period after the American Civil War from 1865 to 1877,
during which the United States grappled with the challenges of reintegrating into the Union
the states that had seceded and determining the legal status of African Americans.
The process of reconstructing the Union began in 1863, two years before the
Confederacy formally surrendered. After major Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg,
Abraham Lincoln issued the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction in which he
outlined his Ten-Percent Plan. The plan stipulated that each secessionist state had to redraft its
constitution and could reenter the Union only after 10 percent of its eligible voters pledged an
oath of allegiance to the United States.
The Wade-Davis Bill and the Freedmen’s Bureau

Many Radical Republicans believed that Lincoln’s plan was too lenient: they wanted to
punish the South for secession from the Union, transform southern society, and safeguard the
rights of former slaves. As an alternative to the Ten-Percent Plan, Radical Republicans and
their moderate Republican allies passed the Wade-Davis Bill in 1864. Under the bill, states
could be readmitted to the Union only after 50 percent of voters took an oath of allegiance to
the Union. Lincoln pocket-vetoed the bill, however, effectively killing it by refusing to sign it
before Congress went into recess. Congress did successfully create the Freedmen’s Bureau,
which helped distribute food, supplies, and land to the new population of freed slaves.
Presidential Reconstruction
On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre
in Washington, D.C., and Vice President Andrew Johnson became president.
Presidential Reconstruction under Johnson readmitted the southern states using Lincoln’s
Ten-Percent Plan and granted all southerners full pardons, including thousands of wealthy
planters and former Confederate officials. Johnson also ordered the Freedmen’s Bureau to
return all confiscated lands to their original owners. While Congress was in recess, Johnson
approved new state constitutions for secessionist states—many written by ex-Confederate
officials— and declared Reconstruction complete in December 1865.
Progressive Legislation for Blacks

Although Johnson vetoed Congress’s attempt to renew the charter of the Freedmen’s
Bureau in 1866, Congress was successful in overriding Johnson’s veto on its second try,
and the bureau’s charter was renewed. They also passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which
granted newly emancipated blacks the right to sue, the right to serve on juries, and several
other legal rights. Although Johnson vetoed this bill as well, Congress was able to muster
enough votes to override it. The Radical Republicans also passed the Thirteenth Amendment,
which abolished slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which made freed slaves U.S.
citizens.
Johnson’s “Swing Around the Circle”
1
Many southerners reacted violently to the passage by Congress of the Civil Rights Act
of 1866 and the two amendments. White supremacists in Tennessee formed the Ku
Klux Klan, a secret organization meant to terrorize southern blacks and “keep them in their
place.” Race riots and mass murders of former slaves occurred in Memphis and New Orleans
that same year.
Johnson blamed Congress for the violence and went on what he called a “Swing Around
the Circle,” touring the country to speak out against Republicans and encourage voters to elect
Democrats to Congress. However, many of Johnson’s speeches were so abrasive—and even
racist—that he ended up convincing more people to vote against his party in the midterm
elections of 1866.
Radical Reconstruction
The Congress that convened in 1867, which was far more radical than the previous one,
wasted no time executing its own plan for the Radical Reconstruction of the South. The First
Reconstruction Act in 1867 divided the South into five conquered districts, each of which
would be governed by the U.S. military until a new government was established. Republicans
also specified that states would have to enfranchise former slaves before readmission to the
Union. To enforce this order, Congress passed the Second Reconstruction Act, putting the
military in charge of southern voter registration. They also passed the Fifteenth Amendment,
giving all American men—including former slaves—the right to vote.
Johnson’s Impeachment
In an effort to limit Johnson’s executive powers, Congress passed the Tenure of Office
Act in 1867, which required the president to consult with the House and Senate before
removing any congressionally appointed cabinet members. Radicals took this measure in an
attempt to protect Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, a carryover from Lincoln’s cabinet
and a crucial figure in military Reconstruction. When Johnson ignored the Tenure of Office
Act and fired Stanton, Republicans in the House impeached him by a vote of 126–47. After a
tense trial, the Senate voted to acquit the president by a margin of only one vote.
The Black Codes and Ku Klux Klan

Despite sweeping rights legislation by Radical Republicans in Congress, southern
whites did everything in their power to limit the rights of their former slaves.
During Presidential Reconstruction, white supremacist Congressmen passed a series of
laws called the black codes, which denied blacks the right to make contracts, testify against
whites, marry white women, be unemployed, and even loiter in public places. Violence by the
Ku Klux Klan became so common that Congress had to pass the Ku Klux Klan Act in 1871 to
authorize military protection for blacks.
Carpetbaggers, Scalawags, and Sharecroppers

Countless carpetbaggers (northerners who moved to the South after the war)and
scalawags (white Unionists and Republicans in the South) flocked to the South during
Reconstruction and exerted significant influence there. Although in many respects they
achieved their goals of modernizing and Republicanizing the South, they eventually were
driven out by Democratic state politicians in the mid-1870s.
Most former slaves in the South, meanwhile, became sharecroppers during the
Reconstruction period, leasing plots of land from their former masters in exchange for a
percentage of the crop yield. By 1880, more than 80 percent of southern blacks had become
sharecroppers.
2
Grant’s Presidency
To the Radicals’ delight, Johnson finally left the White House in 1868,
when Republican Ulysses S. Grant was elected president. Grant’s inexperience, however,
proved to be a liability that ultimately ended Radical Reconstruction. Because Grant had
difficulty saying no, many of his cabinet posts and appointments ended up being filled by
corrupt, incompetent men who were no more than spoils-seekers.
As a result, scandal after scandal rocked Grant’s administration and damaged his
reputation. In 1869, reporters uncovered a scheme by millionaires Jim Fisk and Jay Gould to
corner the gold market by artificially inflating gold prices. Schuyler Colfax, vice president at
the time, was forced to resign for his complicity in the Crédit Mobilier scandal in 1872. The
president lost even more credibility during his second term, when his personal secretary
helped embezzle millions of dollars from the U.S. Treasury as a member of the
Whiskey Ring.
Liberal Republicans and the Election of 1872

The discovery of new scandals split the Republican Party in 1872, as reform-minded
Liberal Republicans broke from the ranks of moderates and radicals. The Liberal
Republicans wanted to institute reform, downsize the federal government, and bring a swift
end to Reconstruction. They nominated New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley as their
party’s presidential candidate (he agreed to run on the Democratic Party’s ticket as well).
Though already marred by scandal, Grant easily defeated Greeley by more than 200
electoral votes and 700,000 popular votes.
The Depression of 1873

In 1873, the postwar economic bubble in the United States finally burst.
Overspeculation in the railroad industry, manufacturing, and a flood of Americans
taking out bad bank loans slid the economy into the worst depression in American history.
Millions lost their jobs, and unemployment climbed as high as 15 percent. Many blacks,
landless whites, and immigrants from both North and South suffered greatly, demanding
relief from the federal government. Republicans, refusing to give in to demands to print
more paper money, instead withdrew money from the economy by passing the Resumption
Act of 1875 to curb skyrocketing inflation. This power play by Republicans prompted
northerners to vote Democrat in the midterm elections of 1876, effectively ending Radical
Reconstruction.
Striking Down Radical Reconstruction
By the mid-1870s, Democrats had retaken the South, reseating themselves in
southern legislatures by driving blacks and white Unionists away from the polls and
employing violence and other unethical tactics to win state elections. Most northerners looked
the other way during this period, consumed by their own economic hardships.
In the late 1870s and early 1880s, a conservative Supreme Court also struck down much
of the civil rights legislation that Radical Republicans had passed. In the 1873 Slaughterhouse
Cases, the Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment safeguarded a person’s rights only at a
federal level, not at a state level (in rulings ten years later, the court further stipulated that the
Fourteenth Amendment prohibited racial discrimination only by the U.S. government, not by
individuals). In 1876, the Court ruled in United States v. Cruikshank that only states and their
courts—not the federal government—could prosecute Ku Klux Klan members under the Ku
Klux Klan Act of 1871.
3
The Disputed Election of 1876
As the election of 1876 approached, Democrats nominated Samuel J. Tilden, a lawyer
famous for busting corrupt New York City politician William “Boss” Tweed in 1871. Tilden
campaigned for restoration of the Union and an end to government corruption. The
Republican Party, on the other hand, chose the virtually unknown Rutherford B. Hayes.
Many Northern voters, tired of Reconstruction and hoping for more federal relief because of
the depression, voted Democrat. Ultimately, Tilden received 250,000 more popular votes than
Hayes, and 184 of the 185 electoral votes needed to become president.
The Compromise of 1877

With the election result hanging in the balance, Congress passed the Electoral Count
Act in early 1877, creating a fifteen-man commission—eight Republicans and seven
Democrats—to recount disputed votes in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida. Not
surprisingly, the commission determined by an eight-to-seven vote that Republican
Rutherford B. Hayes had carried all three states. Resentment and political deadlock threatened
to divide the country, but both parties were able to avoid division and strike a deal with the
Compromise of 1877. Democrats agreed to concede the presidency to the Republicans in
exchange for the complete withdrawal of federal troops from the South. Hayes became
president, withdrew the troops, and ended Reconstruction.
Reconstruction under Abraham Lincoln

The original Northern objective in the Civil War was the preservation of the Union—a
war aim with which virtually everybody in the free states agreed. As the fighting progressed,
the Lincoln government concluded that emancipation of the slaves was necessary in order to
secure military victory; and thereafter freedom became a second war aim for the members of
the Republican Party. The more radical members of that party—men like Charles Sumner and
Thaddeus Stevens—believed that emancipation would prove a sham unless the government
guaranteed the civil and political rights of the freedmen; thus, equality of all citizens before
the law became a third war aim for this powerful faction. The fierce controversies of the
Reconstruction era raged over which of these objectives should be insisted upon and how
these goals should be secured.
Lincoln’s plan
Lincoln himself had a flexible and pragmatic approach to Reconstruction, insisting only
that the Southerners, when defeated, pledge future loyalty to the Union and emancipate their
slaves. As the Southern states were subdued, he appointed military governors to supervise
their restoration. The most vigorous and effective of these appointees was Andrew Johnson, a
War Democrat whose success in reconstituting a loyal government in Tennessee led to his
nomination as vice president on the Republican ticket with Lincoln in 1864. In December
1863 Lincoln announced a general plan for the orderly Reconstruction of the Southern
states, promising to recognize the government of any state that pledged to support the
Constitution and the Union and to emancipate the slaves if it was backed by at least 10
percent of the number of voters in the 1860 presidential election. In Louisiana, Arkansas,
and Tennessee loyal governments were formed under Lincoln’s plan; and they sought
readmission to the Union with the seating of their senators and representatives in Congress.
The Radicals’ plan
4
Radical Republicans were outraged at these procedures, which savoured of
executive usurpation of congressional powers, which required only minimal changes in the
Southern social system, and which left political power essentially in the hands of the same
Southerners who had led their states out of the Union. The Radicals put forth their own plan
of Reconstruction in the Wade–Davis Bill, which Congress passed on July 2, 1864; it
required not 10 percent but a majority of the white male citizens in each Southern state to
participate in the reconstruction process, and it insisted upon an oath of past, not just of future,
loyalty. Finding the bill too rigorous and inflexible, Lincoln pocket vetoed it; and the Radicals
bitterly denounced him. During the 1864–65 session of Congress, they in turn defeated the
president’s proposal to recognize the Louisiana government organized under his 10 percent
plan. At the time of Lincoln’s assassination, therefore, the president and the Congress were at
loggerheads over Reconstruction.
Reconstruction under Andrew Johnson

At first it seemed that Johnson might be able to work more cooperatively with Congress
in the process of Reconstruction. A former representative and a former senator, he understood
congressmen. A loyal Unionist who had stood by his country even at the risk of his life when
Tennessee seceded, he was certain not to compromise with secession; and his experience as
military governor of that state showed him to be politically shrewd and tough toward the
slaveholders. “Johnson, we have faith in you,” Radical Benjamin F. Wade assured the new
president on the day he took the oath of office. “By the gods, there will be no trouble running
the government.”
Johnson’s policy
Such Radical trust in Johnson proved misplaced. The new president was, first of all,
himself a Southerner. He was a Democrat who looked for the restoration of his old
party partly as a step toward his own reelection to the presidency in 1868. Most important of
all, Johnson shared the white Southerners’ attitude toward African Americans, considering
black men innately inferior and unready for equal civil or political rights. On May 29,
1865, Johnson made his policy clear when he issued a general proclamation of pardon and
amnesty for most Confederates and authorized the provisional governor of North Carolina to
proceed with the reorganization of that state. Shortly afterward he issued similar
proclamations for the other former Confederate states. In each case a state constitutional
convention was to be chosen by the voters who pledged future loyalty to the U.S.
Constitution. The conventions were expected to repeal the ordinances of secession, to
repudiate the Confederate debt, and to accept the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery.
The president did not, however, require them to enfranchise African Americans.
“Black Codes”
5
Given little guidance from Washington, Southern whites turned to the traditional
political leaders of their section for guidance in reorganizing their governments; and the new
regimes in the South were suspiciously like those of the antebellum period. To be
sure, slavery was abolished; but each reconstructed Southern state government proceeded to
adopt a “Black Code,” regulating the rights and privileges of freedmen. Varying from state to
state, these codes in general treated African Americans as inferiors, relegated to a secondary
and subordinate position in society. Their right to own land was restricted, they could not
bear arms, and they might be bound out in servitude for vagrancy and other offenses. The
conduct of white Southerners indicated that they were not prepared to guarantee even
minimal protection of African American rights. In riots in Memphis (May 1866) and
New Orleans (July 1866), African Americans were brutally assaulted and promiscuously
killed.
Civil rights legislation

Watching these developments with fearful apprehension, Northern Republicans
during the congressional session of 1865–66 inevitably drifted into conflict with the
president. Congress attempted to protect the rights of African Americans by extending the
life of the Freedmen’s Bureau, a welfare agency established in March 1865 to ease the
transition from slavery to freedom; but Johnson vetoed the bill. An act to define and
guarantee African Americans’ basic civil rights met a similar fate, but Republicans succeeded
in passing it over the president’s veto. While the president, from the porch of the White
House, denounced the leaders of the Republican Party as “traitors,” Republicans in Congress
tried to formulate their own plan to reconstruct the South. Their first effort was the passage
of the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed the basic civil rights of all citizens,
regardless of color, and which tried to persuade the Southern states to enfranchise African
Americans by threatening to reduce their representation in Congress.
The president, the Northern Democrats, and the Southern whites spurned this
Republican plan of Reconstruction. Johnson tried to organize his own political party in the
National Union Convention, which met in Philadelphia in August 1866; and in August and
September he visited many Northern and Western cities in order to defend his policies and to
attack the Republican leaders. At the president’s urging, every Southern state except
Tennessee overwhelmingly rejected the Fourteenth Amendment.
Victorious in the fall elections, congressional Republicans moved during the 1866–67
session to devise a second, more stringent program for reconstructing the South. After long
and acrimonious quarrels between Radical and moderate Republicans, the party leaders
finally produced a compromise plan in the First Reconstruction Act of 1867. Expanded and
clarified in three supplementary Reconstruction acts, this legislation swept away the regimes
the president had set up in the South, put the former Confederacy back under military control,
called for the election of new constitutional conventions, and required the constitutions
adopted by these bodies to include both African American suffrage and the disqualification
of former Confederate leaders from officeholding. Under this legislation, new governments
were established in all the former Confederate states (except Tennessee, which had already
been readmitted); and by July 1868 Congress agreed to seat senators and representatives from
Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina. By July 1870 the
remaining Southern states had been similarly reorganized and readmitted.
6
Suspicious of Andrew Johnson, Republicans in Congress did not trust the president to
enforce the Reconstruction legislation they passed over his repeated vetoes, and they tried to
deprive him of as much power as possible. Congress limited the president’s control over the
army by requiring that all his military orders be issued through the general of the army,
Ulysses S. Grant, who was believed loyal to the Radical cause; and in the Tenure of Office
Act (1867) they limited the president’s right to remove appointive officers. When Johnson
continued to do all he could to block the enforcement of Radical legislation in the South, the
more extreme members of the Republican Party demanded his impeachment. The president’s
decision in February 1868 to remove the Radical secretary of war Edwin M. Stanton from
the Cabinet, in apparent defiance of the Tenure of Office Act, provided a pretext for
impeachment proceedings. The House of Representatives voted to impeach the president, and
after a protracted trial the Senate acquitted him by the margin of only one vote.
The South during Reconstruction

In the South the Reconstruction period was a time of readjustment accompanied by
disorder. Southern whites wished to keep African Americans in a condition of quasi-
servitude, extending few civil rights and firmly rejecting social equality. African Americans,
on the other hand, wanted full freedom and, above all, land of their own. Inevitably, there
were frequent clashes. Some erupted into race riots, but acts of terrorism against individual
African American leaders were more common.
During this turmoil, Southern whites and blacks began to work out ways of getting their
farms back into operation and of making a living. Indeed, the most important developments of
the Reconstruction era were not the highly publicized political contests but the slow, almost
imperceptible changes that occurred in Southern society. African Americans could now
legally marry, and they set up conventional and usually stable family units; they quietly
seceded from the white churches and formed their own religious organizations, which became
centers for the African American community. Without land or money, most freedmen had to
continue working for white masters; but they were now unwilling to labor in gangs or to live
in the old slave quarters under the eye of the plantation owner.
Sharecropping gradually became the accepted labor system in most of the South—
planters, short of capital, favoured the system because it did not require them to pay cash
wages; African Americans preferred it because they could live in individual cabins on the
tracts they rented and because they had a degree of independence in choosing what to plant
and how to cultivate. The section as a whole, however, was desperately poor throughout the
Reconstruction era; and a series of disastrously bad crops in the late 1860s, followed by the
general agricultural depression of the 1870s, hurt both whites and blacks.
The governments set up in the Southern states under the congressional program of
Reconstruction were, contrary to traditional clichés, fairly honest and effective. Though the
period has sometimes been labeled “Black Reconstruction,” the Radical governments in the
South were never dominated by African Americans. There were no black governors, only two
black senators and a handful of congressmen, and only one legislature controlled by blacks.
Those African Americans who did hold office appear to have been similar in competence and
honesty to the whites. It is true that these Radical governments were expensive, but large
state expenditures were necessary to rebuild after the war and to establish—for the first
time in most Southern states—a system of common schools. Corruption there certainly was,
though nowhere on the scale of the Tweed Ring, which at that time was busily looting
New York City; but it is not possible to show that Republicans were more guilty than
Democrats, or blacks than whites, in the scandals that did occur.
7
Though some Southern whites in the mountainous regions and some planters in the rich
bottomlands were willing to cooperate with the African Americans and their Northern-born
“carpetbagger” allies in these new governments, there were relatively few such “scalawags”;
the mass of Southern whites remained fiercely opposed to African American political, civil,
and social equality. Sometimes their hostility was expressed through such terrorist
organizations as the Ku Klux Klan, which sought to punish so-called “uppity Negroes” and to
drive their white collaborators from the South. More frequently it was manifested through
support of the Democratic Party, which gradually regained its strength in the South and
waited for the time when the North would tire of supporting the Radical regimes and would
withdraw federal troops from the South.
The Ulysses S. Grant administrations, 1869–77

During the two administrations of President Grant there was a gradual attrition of
Republican strength. As a politician the president was passive, exhibiting none of the
brilliance he had shown on the battlefield. His administration was tarnished by the dishonesty
of his subordinates, whom he loyally defended. As the older Radical leaders—men like
Sumner, Wade, and Stevens—died, leadership in the Republican Party fell into the hands of
technicians like Roscoe Conkling and James G. Blaine, men devoid of the idealistic fervour
that had marked the early Republicans. At the same time, many Northerners were growing
tired of the whole Reconstruction issue and were weary of the annual outbreaks of violence in
the South that required repeated use of federal force.
Efforts to shore up the Radical regimes in the South grew increasingly unsuccessful.
The adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment (1870), prohibiting discrimination in voting on
account of race, had little effect in the South, where terrorist organizations and economic
pressure from planters kept African Americans from the polls. Nor were three Force Acts
passed by the Republicans (1870-71), giving the president the power to suspend the writ of
habeas corpus and imposing heavy penalties upon terroristic organizations, in the long run
more successful. If they succeeded in dispersing the Ku Klux Klan as an organization, they
also drove its members, and their tactics, more than ever into the Democratic camp.
Growing Northern disillusionment with Radical Reconstruction and with the Grant
administration became evident in the Liberal Republican movement of 1872, which resulted
in the nomination of the erratic Horace Greeley for president. Though Grant was
overwhelmingly reelected, the true temper of the country was demonstrated in the
congressional elections of 1874, which gave the Democrats control of the House of
Representatives for the first time since the outbreak of the Civil War. Despite Grant’s hope
for a third term in office, most Republicans recognized by 1876 that it was time to change
both the candidate and his Reconstruction program, and the nomination of Rutherford B.
Hayes of Ohio, a moderate Republican of high principles and of deep sympathy for the South,
marked the end of the Radical domination of the Republican Party.
8
The circumstances surrounding the disputed election of 1876 strengthened Hayes’s
intention to work with the Southern whites, even if it meant abandoning the few Radical
regimes that remained in the South. In an election marked by widespread fraud and many
irregularities, the Democratic candidate, Samuel J. Tilden, received the majority of the
popular vote; but the vote in the electoral college was long in doubt. In order to resolve the
impasse, Hayes’s lieutenants had to enter into agreement with Southern Democratic
congressmen, promising to withdraw the remaining federal troops from the South, to share the
Southern patronage with Democrats, and to favour that section’s demands for federal
subsidies in the building of levees and railroads. Hayes’s inauguration marked, for practical
purposes, the restoration of “home rule” for the South—i.e., that the North would no longer
interfere in Southern elections to protect African Americans and that the Southern whites
would again take control of their state governments.
The New South, 1877–90

The era of conservative domination, 1877–90
The Republican regimes in the Southern states began to fall as early as 1870; by 1877
they had all collapsed. For the next 13 years the South was under the leadership of white
Democrats whom their critics called Bourbons because, like the French royal family, they
supposedly had learned nothing and forgotten nothing from the revolution they had
experienced. For the South as a whole, the characterization is neither quite accurate nor quite
fair. In most Southern states the new political leaders represented not only the planters but
also the rising Southern business community, interested in railroads, cotton textiles, and urban
land speculation.
Even on racial questions the new Southern political leaders were not so reactionary as
the label Bourbon might suggest. Though whites were in the majority in all but two of the
Southern states, the conservative regimes did not attempt to disfranchise African Americans.
Partly their restraint was caused by fear of further federal intervention; chiefly, however, it
stemmed from a conviction on the part of conservative leaders that they could control African
American voters, whether through fraud, intimidation, or manipulation.
Indeed, African American votes were sometimes of great value to these regimes, which
favoured the businessmen and planters of the South at the expense of the small white farmers.
These “Redeemer” governments sharply reduced or even eliminated the programs of the state
governments that benefited poor people. The public school system was starved for money; in
1890 the per capita expenditure in the South for public education was only 97 cents, as
compared with $2.24 in the country as a whole. The care of state prisoners, the insane, and the
blind was also neglected; and measures to safeguard the public health were rejected. At the
same time these conservative regimes were often astonishingly corrupt, and embezzlement
and defalcation on the part of public officials were even greater than during the
Reconstruction years.
9
The small white farmers resentful of planter dominance, residents of the hill country
outvoted by Black Belt constituencies, and politicians excluded from the ruling cabals tried
repeatedly to overthrow the conservative regimes in the South. During the 1870s they
supported Independent or Greenback Labor candidates, but without notable success. In 1879
the Readjuster Party in Virginia—so named because its supporters sought to readjust the huge
funded debt of that state so as to lessen the tax burden on small farmers—gained control of
the legislature and secured in 1880 the election of its leader, Gen. William Mahone, to
the U.S. Senate. Not until 1890, however, when the powerful Farmers’ Alliance, hitherto
devoted exclusively to the promotion of agricultural reforms, dropped its ban on politics, was
there an effective challenge to conservative hegemony. In that year, with Alliance backing,
Benjamin R. Tillman was chosen governor of South Carolina and James S. Hogg was
elected governor of Texas; the heyday of Southern populism was at hand.
1. What did the Southern white elite accomplish by passing the black codes?
2. What was the economic impact of emancipation on the South?
3. Summarize the achievements of the Reconstruction Era. Do you agree that
Reconstruction had “the potential to seriously undermine, if not completely eradicate, the
racial caste system in the South”?
4. What is the significance of the Emancipation Proclamation?
10

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ANG 221 : La Civilisation Américaine.

LES ENSEIGNANTS DE LA MATIERE :

Établissement : FACULTE DES LETTRES, LANGUES ET ARTS (FLLA)

Durée apprenant Modalité spatiale Modalité Modalité Type d'activité

- Objectifs spécifiques : A la fin de l’UE, les étudiants seront capables de :

Que faire pour bien suivre ce cours ?

4. FAIRE LES EXERCICES/ACTIVITES proposés pour chaque semaine.

Activité apprenant Activité formateur

The Mayflower Compact, 1620 (pp. 61-65) Écouter les audios/vidéos

• Afagla, Highlights of American History, 2ème édition,

Activité apprenant Activité formateur

Activité apprenant Activité formateur

Matériel pédagogique Préparer les questions sur la Constitution

• Les vidéos/audios relatifs aux Articles de la Matériel pédagogique

Activité apprenant Activité formateur

Matériel pédagogique Préparer des exercices pour tester la

Durée apprenant Modalité spatiale Modalité Modalité Type d'activité

Activité apprenant Activité formateur

Faire des exercices relatifs aux textes

Activité apprenant Activité formateur

Faire des exercices relatifs aux textes

Activité apprenant Activité formateur

African American History Timeline (pp. 46-52)

Répondre aux questions relatives aux textes/ vidéos et

Activité apprenant Activité formateur

Faire des exercices de compréhension du concept de

Durée apprenant Modalité spatiale Modalité Modalité Type d'activité

Activité apprenant Activité formateur

Écouter les audios relatifs à la Guerre Civile et à la

Activité apprenant Activité formateur

Écouter les audios relatifs à la Guerre Civile et à la

General Review/Course evaluation.

Activité apprenant Activité formateur

II – Classic lecture note on the texts: Inaugurating Democracy in America:

Self-Government Takes Root under the Mayflower Compact

II. 2. The Declaration of Independence

II.3. – “George Washington: the Democrat” and “George Washington Resigns”

Discussion and Writing Questions

The distinction between confederation and federation—words synonymous in their

Strengths and Accomplishments

IV – Classic lecture note on the Constitution

Discussion and Writing Questions

V – Classic lecture note on the Constitution’s Amendments

Unenumerated rights and reserved powers (Amendments 9

Governmental authority (Amendments 11, 16, 18, and 21)

Government processes and procedures (Amendments 12, 17,

1776 Only people who own land can vote

1787 No federal voting standard—states decide who can vote

1848 Citizenship granted, but voting denied

1856 Vote expanded to all white men

1866 Movements unite and divide

1868 Former slaves granted citizenship

1870 Vote cannot be denied because of race, explicitly –

1872 Women try to vote

1876 Indigenous people cannot vote

1887 Assimilation=Right to Vote

1890 Indigenous people must apply for citizenship

1919 Military Service=Citizenship for Native Americans

1920 Right to vote extended to women

1924 Again, citizenship granted but voting denied

1925 Military Service=Citizenship for Filipinos

1947 Legal barriers to Native American voting removed

1963-64 Voting rights as civil rights