George Washington and the Problem of Slavery

2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-301
Author(s):  
KENNETH MORGAN
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Agricultural Practice ◽  
United States Census ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
The North

Slavery was not the most important issue for which George Washington is remembered; nor were his views on the institution as revealing as those of some of his fellow Founding Fathers. But Washington was a slaveowner for all of his adult life and he lived in Virginia, which was dominated by tobacco plantations based on slave labour. Slavery was central to the socio-economic life of the Old Dominion: after 1750 40 per cent of the North American slave population lived there and the first United States census of 1790 showed 300,000 slaves in Virginia. The tobacco they produced was the most valuable staple crop grown in North America. At his home Mount Vernon, situated on the upper Potomac river overlooking the Maryland shore, Washington created an estate, based on the latest agricultural practice, that was also a set of plantation farms centred around the work of enslaved Africans. Slavery, then, was clearly a persistent part of Washington's life and career. Because of this and his pre-eminent position in American public life, Washington's use of slave labour and his views on an important paradox of American history in the revolutionary era – the coexistence of slavery and liberty – deserve close attention. One man's dilemma in dealing with the morality of his own slaveholding was mirrored in the broader context of what the United States could or would do about the problem of slavery.

scholarly journals THE GENESIS OF THE US FOREIGN POLICY: THE ORIGIN OF THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE TOPIC, 1610–1820S

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (73) (2) ◽  
pp. 81-93
Author(s):  
D. V. Dorofeev
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
International Relations ◽  
North American ◽  
Alternative Hypothesis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Us Foreign Policy ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
The North ◽  
The Us

The research is devoted to the study of the origin of the historiography of the topic of the genesis of the US foreign policy. The key thesis of the work challenges the established position in the scientific literature about the fundamental role of the work of T. Lyman, Jr. «The diplomacy of the United States: being an account of the foreign relations of the country, from the first treaty with France, in 1778, to the Treaty of Ghent in 1814, with Great Britain», published in 1826. The article puts forward an alternative hypothesis: the emergence of the historiography of the genesis of the foreign policy of the United States occurred before the beginning of the second quarter of the XIX century – during the colonial period and the first fifty years of the North American state. A study of the works of thirty-five authors who worked during the 1610s and 1820s showed that amater historians expressed a common opinion about North America’s belonging to the Eurocentric system of international relations; they were sure that both the colonists and the founding fathers perceived international processes on the basis of raison d’être. The conceptualization of the intellectual heritage of non-professional historians allowed us to distinguish three interpretations of the origin of the United States foreign policy: «Autochthonous» – focused on purely North American reasons; «Atlantic» – postulated the borrowing of European practice of international relations by means of the system of relations that developed in the Atlantic in the XVII–XVIII centuries; «Imperial» – stated the adaptation of the British experience. The obtained data refute the provisions of scientific thought of the XX–XXI centuries and create new guidelines for further study of the topic.

1. Words, images, meanings

2015 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
R. B. Bernstein
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Constitution ◽  
Benjamin Franklin ◽  
Alexander Hamilton ◽  
James Madison ◽  
George Washington ◽  
John Adams ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Continental Congress

The phrase “founding fathers” is central to how Americans talk about politics, and “Words, images, meanings” describes when the phrase was first coined, what it really means, and how artists have depicted the “founding fathers”—those who helped to found the United States as a nation and a political experiment. This group has two subsets. First are the Signers, delegates to the Second Continental Congress, who in July 1776 declared American independence and signed the Declaration of Independence. Second are the Framers, the delegates to the Federal Convention who in 1787 framed the United States Constitution. They include Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton.

Mathematics and Our Founding Fathers

1976 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 301-307
Author(s):  
H. Howard Frisinger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Early Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Benjamin Franklin ◽  
George Washington ◽  
John Adams ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
Founding Fathers

On july 4, 1776, fifty-six men signed the Declaration of Independence. This paper will discuss the contributions to mathematics or the interest in mathematics of four of these men. Two of these four, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, made significant contributions to the early development of mathematics in the United States. In addition to the mathematical contributions of Franklin and Jefferson, we shall briefly consider the mathematical interests of George Washington and John Adams.

James Iredell

2019 ◽  
pp. 178-196
Author(s):  
Willis P. Whichard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
United States Supreme Court ◽  
Federal Court ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Supreme ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
The Public

This essay examines the public career of James Iredell, who was probably Revolutionary-era North Carolina’s most influential propagandist. His first published essay, which appeared in September 1773, defended the jurisdiction of colonial courts in the foreign attachment controversy, and he was one of the first Whig writers to reject the sovereignty of Parliament in America. During the Revolution, Iredell continued to write on behalf of the American cause, but financial woes limited his political activities. During the debate over the ratification of the Constitution, however, Iredell emerged as one of North Carolina’s most energetic Federalists, and George Washington rewarded him with an appointment to the United States Supreme Court. Like many southern Federalists, Iredell supported the new government, but was wary of pushing federal power too far, and in his best known opinion, a dissent in Chisholm v. Georgia (1793), he argued that a state could not be sued in federal court without its consent.

Early Republic and Antebellum United States

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Forret
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Southern United States ◽  
The South ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
The North ◽  
Slave Population

This article reviews scholarship on the history and historiography of slavery in the early republic and antebellum United States. During the colonial period, slavery was present in varying degrees throughout what would become the United States. In the wake of the American Revolution, however, slavery became the ‘peculiar institution’ of the South. In the North, where the slave population was small and less crucial to the functioning of the economy, states took the revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality to their logical conclusion, each passing either an immediate or gradual emancipation law by 1804. Further south, especially in the Chesapeake, slavery was weakened as revolutionary-era runaways and manumissions depleted the slave population. Yet, with the fading of the revolution's egalitarian rhetoric and the invention of the cotton gin that made it possible to extract safely and efficiently the delicate fibres from short-staple cotton, the institution of slavery would not only persevere but become entrenched and expand across the southern United States. The antebellum decades witnessed the movement of slaves south and west with the advance of the cotton frontier.

scholarly journals ‘‘The Council has been your Creation'': Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Paradigm of the American Foreign Policy Establishment?

2001 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-94
Author(s):  
PRISCILLA ROBERTS
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Policy Elite ◽  
Obituary Notice

He was born in 1893 in the New York brownstone house near Washington Square where he lived all his adult life, a member of Edith Wharton's settled, circumscribed world of ordered privilege whose affluent, well-travelled, and sophisticated men and women traced their lineage back to the Founding Fathers and their principles to the American Revolution. His father was an artist who served as Consul General to Italy, and Armstrong was brought up in a milieu which took for granted the fact that there existed a world outside the United States. He died in 1973, as the United States finally withdrew from the Vietnam War, a conflict which deeply distressed him and shattered the foreign policy elite and its controlling consensus, whose creation had been a major part of his life's work. In an obituary notice Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., described him as “a New York gentleman of a vanishing school,” who “treated every one, old or young, famous or unknown, with the same generous courtesy and concern.”

The United States and the Origins of NATO 1946–1949

1969 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence A. Kaplan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Relations ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Multinational Organizations ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
The Past ◽  
The North ◽  
The North Atlantic

Nato has been a phenomenon in international relations. It is unlike most multinational organizations of the past in that it has survived for a generation, and it has thereby fulfilled, at least, the minimal expectations of its founding fathers. Even more phenomenal for Americans has been the identification of the United States with an idea, a particular group of nations, and an organization which were all repugnant to a tradition that specifically isolated America from Europe. The origins of the North Atlantic Treaty are inextricably linked with the rediscovery of Europe by the United States.

Taking the Census by Francis William Edmonds, 1854

Public Voices ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Francis William Edmonds
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Political System ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
The United States ◽  
Main Character ◽  
United States Census ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Democratic Political System

The United States Census of 1850 was the first such survey in this country to require that heads of households provide information on their dependents. The process of interrogation caused a good deal of confusion and inspired numerous jokes. Francis William Edmonds's amusing portrayal features a father making a painstaking effort (counting on his fingers) to give the whitebearded census taker his family statistics, while his giggling children hide from sight. A reviewer who saw the picture at the national Academy of Design exhibition in 1854 described the main character as a "farmer, rough and awkward, reckoning in brown study the number of the boys and girls, evidently more at home in the use of the ox-gad, which lies on the floor, than in figuring." The small portrait print of George Washington just above the father's head evokes not only the genesis of the country's democratic political system but also the by then legendary admonition never to tell a lie. With its carefully delineated interior based on prototypes from Dutch genre scenes, the composition reveals Edmonds at his finest, taking a common moment from the daily life of middle-class Americans and turning it into a moralizing and socially critical tableau.Information taken from http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2006.457 on May 25, 2012

Alexander Hamilton and the Early Republic in Edwardian Imperial Thought

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick M. Kirkwood
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Alexander Hamilton ◽  
George Washington ◽  
American Federation ◽  
Treaty Of Versailles ◽  
The Federalist ◽  
The Federalist Papers

In the first decade of the twentieth century, a rising generation of British colonial administrators profoundly altered British usage of American history in imperial debates. In the process, they influenced both South African history and wider British imperial thought. Prior usage of the Revolution and Early Republic in such debates focused on the United States as a cautionary tale, warning against future ‘lost colonies’. Aided by the publication of F. S. Oliver's Alexander Hamilton (1906), administrators in South Africa used the figures of Hamilton and George Washington, the Federalist Papers, and the drafting of the Constitution as an Anglo-exceptionalist model of (modern) self-government. In doing so they applied the lessons of the Early Republic to South Africa, thereby contributing to the formation of the Union of 1910. They then brought their reconception of the United States, and their belief in the need for ‘imperial federation’, back to the metropole. There they fostered growing diplomatic ties with the US while recasting British political history in-light-of the example of American federation. This process of inter-imperial exchange culminated shortly after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles when the Boer Generals Botha and Smuts were publicly presented as Washington and Hamilton reborn.

“Christians Love the Jews!” The Development of American Philo-Semitism, 1790-1860

1996 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert K. Whalen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Early National Period ◽  
Early National ◽  
Social Views ◽  
British Research

Philo-Semitism is America's enduring contribution to the long, troubled, often murderous dealings of Christians with Jews. Its origins are English, and it drew continuously on two centuries of British research into biblical prophecy from the seventeenth Century onward. Philo-Semitism was, however, soon “domesticated” and adapted to the political and theological climate of America after independence. As a result, it changed as America changed. In the early national period, religious literature abounded that foresaw the conversion of the Jews and the restoration of Israel as the ordained task of the millennial nation—the United States. This scenario was, allowing for exceptions, socially and theologically optimistic and politically liberal, as befit the ethos of a revolutionary era. By the eve of Civil War, however, countless evangelicals cleaved to a darker vision of Christ's return in blood and upheaval. They disparaged liberal social views and remained loyal to an Augustinian theology that others modified or abandoned.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document