Slavery and Constitutionalism

2021 ◽  
pp. 100-125
Author(s):  
Gordon S. Wood
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Natural Death ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
The Revolution

One of the major problems faced by Americans in the Revolutionary era was slavery, and they had made it a problem. Slavery had existed in the colonies for generations without substantial criticism until the Revolution. Abolishing slavery became one of the major reforms undertaken by the Revolutionaries. In the northern states they were reasonably successful, putting an end to slavery by 1804. Virginia was crucial, and there the effort failed. Virginians and others consoled themselves with the illusion that slavery was dying a natural death. But the desire of South Carolina and Georgia for twenty more years of slave importation should have exposed the illusions. The Deep South’s commitment to slavery required protective clauses in the new Constitution that eventually became sources of sectional division.

‘Second-Hand Superiority’: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and the English

2002 ◽  
Vol 19 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 109-123
Author(s):  
Ward W. Briggs
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
War Of 1812 ◽  
Research Institutions ◽  
Classical Scholar ◽  
Artistic Creativity ◽  
American Research ◽  
Long Life ◽  
German System ◽  
The Revolution

The attitude of the American classical scholar Basil L. Gildersleeve toward the English may be taken as typical of Americans over the period of his long life. A native of Charleston, South Carolina, a city with deep economic and cultural ties to England, he found his youthful admiration for British scholarship offset by the sufferings of his ancestors in the Revolution and the War of 1812. At mid-century the allegiance of many American intellectuals had switched from England to Germany, viewed idealistically as a place of pure intellectual discovery and artistic creativity. British amateurism held little interest for those who were building the first American research institutions in the 1880s, but as the FirstWorldWar approached, the deficiencies of the German system and the exciting work being done by those around Jane Harrison and Gilbert Murray brought Gildersleeve back to the respect for humane British scholarship that he had learned in his youth in Charleston.

The Disorders of War: The Revolution in South Carolina

1983 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 635
Author(s):  
Jeffrey J. Crow ◽  
Jerome J. Nadelhaft
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
The Revolution

The History of South Carolina in the Revolution, 1775-1780.

1902 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 160
Author(s):  
Wm. A. Schaper ◽  
Edward McCrady
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Revolution

The History of South Carolina in the Revolution, 1780-1783.

1903 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 335
Author(s):  
John S. Bassett ◽  
Edward McCrady
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Revolution

The American Revolution as a Social Movement Revisited

1986 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Bonwick
Keyword(s):  
American Revolution ◽  
Major Elements ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Long Term Effects ◽  
Revolutionary Change ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
American Society ◽  
Growth Economic ◽  
The Revolution

Discussion of the American Revolution began at the beginning. Contemporaries identified two interactive, though not interlocked, major elements by boasting of the attainment of independence and the founding of a new republic; as Enos Hitchcock insisted in 1788, “A revolution can never be considered as complete till government is firmly established — and without this independency would be a curse instead of a blessing. — These jointly were the great object of the American Revolution.” A third component of the Revolutionary experience was a network of social changes that affected many aspects of American life. Some processes — demographic growth, economic expansion, and western settlement, all of which contributed materially to the context of Revolutionary change — were essentially secular and developmental in effect. Others, such as the emancipation of blacks and women, had barely begun during the Revolutionary era; a few, for example, the disestablishment of religion, were largely complete by the end of the century. Among these many social processes was one that interacted with both other components of the Revolution, was central in function, and had both immediate and long-term effects. Elites were forced to share their power.By 1800 a critical change had taken place in the fabric of American society. The Revolution had transformed ideological expectations, behaviour patterns and social relationships as well as institutions, and had drastically altered the basis on which social and political authority could be exercised in a manner that transcended the departure of British officials and Loyalist exiles.

The Art of Concealment

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Van Horn
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
York City ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Unique Relationship ◽  
The Revolution

As Americans created a new political republic in the years after the Revolution, they questioned whether women could be trusted to bear republican responsibilities or whether they were too duplicitous. A set of elaborate dressing tables and dressing chests produced for elite women’s use in New York City and Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1790s implicate elite women’s toilette rituals in debates over authenticity and deception. As women applied cosmetics before their mirrors they improved their faces and enhanced their civility, drawing comparison to portrait painters who similarly altered public personas. Women enjoyed a unique relationship with their dressing furniture, and pieces became a kind of body double for elite users, even being dressed in similar costume. Dressing tables and chests deceived viewers by hiding cosmetics inside concealed drawers and allowing women to keep secret their use of makeup. Even as dressing furniture anchored women’s attempts to move into new roles in the republic, it compromised their characters through fears of social counterfeit.

Liberty, Virtue, and Republicanism: 1776–1787

1977 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 473-504 ◽  
Author(s):  
John T. Agresto
Keyword(s):  
Civic Virtue ◽  
Moral Character ◽  
The Political ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Absolute Necessity ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Modern Republicanism ◽  
Made In ◽  
The Revolution

In recent years two ideas concerning America's republicanism have gained fairly general currency. First, there is now a growing recognition that a shift in understanding occurred in the decade after the revolution over the nature of republicanism and the political, social, and moral prerequisites necessary for establishing such a government. In particular, the notion of the absolute necessity of “virtue” or “public spiritedness” as the operative principle of republicanism became, for most American political thinkers, not only problematic but nearly indefensible. Second, there is a growing body of literature, journalistic and popular as well as scholarly, calling upon us to reopen the question of civic virtue and to reexamine anew its connection with republican health. After briefly reviewing the theoretical and practical connections made in the revolutionary era between virtue and self-government, this article will attempt to trace the causes for the early declension of the necessity of virtue in America's understanding of the foundations of republicanism. This accomplished, concerned citizens might then be able to evaluate more carefully the contemporary rediscovery of the links between moral character and modern republicanism by contemporary scholars and public men.

Bélisaire in South Carolina, 1768

1970 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-38
Author(s):  
John Renwick
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
The Revolution

It has often been debated whether French opinion and enlightened philosophy could have influenced the Colonies between 1760 and 1773. Many students of eighteenth-century France accept the possibility. Many American historians have denied it, either because of their obsession with the purely economic causes of the Revolution or because of a semi-chauvinistic desire to ascribe the whole credit for the insurrection to the colonists alone. Mercantile dissatisfaction and national merit, though doubtless important as, respectively, a precipitant and a guarantee of ultimate victory, will hardly suffice to explain what was, after all, just as fundamentally a moral phenomenon.

The History of the Department of State

1907 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 867-890
Author(s):  
Gaillard Hunt
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
New Jersey ◽  
New Hampshire ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Benjamin Franklin ◽  
Department Of State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Member Of Parliament ◽  
The Revolution

The first Congress of the Revolution assembled in Carpenter's Hall, Philadelphia, September 5, 1774. An address to the king of England was adopted and transmitted to the agents of several of the colonies in London, with instructions to present it to the king. They were to ask the aid of such Englishmen as they might have reason to believe were “friends to American Liberty.” The instructions were drafted October 26, 1774, by John Jay and Richard Henry Lee, and were sent to Paul Wentworth, who represented New Hampshire, Charles Garth, a member of Parliament, the agent of South Carolina; William Bollan, agent of the Massachusetts Council; Thomas Life, the agent of Connecticut; Edmund Burke, who had been chosen agent of New York in 1771; Arthur Lee, who held an appointment to succeed Benjamin Franklin as agent of the Massachusetts Assembly; and Franklin himself, who had been appointed in 1765 agent of Pennsylvania, in 1768 of Georiga, in the same year of New Jersey, and in 1770 of the Massachusetts Assembly.

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