Some members of the Constitutional Convention feverishly clung to the hope that enslaved labor would soon prove unprofitable, which might mean that the practice would die away. Their Preamble promised the “blessings of liberty” to “We the People of the United States”, but their Constitution went on to classify every enslaved person as 3/5ths of a human being, counting each as a resident of each state and so increasing the size of the slave states’ delegations in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College. Constitution in Philadelphia in 1787 therefore felt they had to make fateful compromises. Many southern states, however, held fiercely to their “peculiar institution”. As the new nation won independence, many northern states adopted gradual emancipation statutes to end chattel slavery over the next generation. Some northern colonies that were not so dependent on enslaved labor countered with similar promises, and more Americans began to argue that their revolutionary commitment to human liberty was inconsistent with human enslavement. In the course of the American Revolution, British authorities offered enslaved African Americans freedom if they would join the British side, and many did. In that same city the year before, the Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as the Quakers, organized the first American society devoted to a different form of independence: liberation of Africans from enslavement. In Philadelphia in 1776, angry dissidents representing 13 colonies proclaimed their independence and began a war to make it a fact. The taxation and regulations were bitterly resented in the “New World”. Cities such as Bristol, Glasgow, and Liverpool, in addition to many parts of London’s docklands, expanded and prospered from the income generated through the slave trade and enslaved labor in the colonies. The southern British colonies particularly came to depend on enslaved labor to plant and harvest tobacco, rice, and indigo.Īs the colonies became more prosperous, the British imperial authorities began taxing and regulating them more extensively to pay the costs of empire and to guarantee that spoils of colonialism enriched the British Isles. By 1700, the practice of African American enslavement was present throughout most of British North America, defended by most preachers, political leaders, and popular opinion among the colonists, even though some also said it was unjust. That worked out better for the colonists, because though the Africans also resisted, they could not get home. The English colonists started importing Africans to serve as forced laborers in 1619. To grow crops in their Virginia colony, the English experimented with enslaving Native American tribespeople, but this initiative proved abortive because the Native Americans not only resisted violently, but also could and did escape home. Although early relations with Native Americans were complex and occasionally included collaboration over common areas (Greer 2017), the dominant trend quickly became one of land dispossession and resultant conflict (Frymer 2017). But as many scholars have shown, especially the pioneering African American historian John Hope Franklin, America’s racial contests have deep roots that date back well before the nation itself (Franklin and Higginbotham 2010).Īfter the English established plantations in Ireland in the fifteenth century, their next overseas colonies came in North America, in Nova Scotia and Virginia in the early 1600 s. The United States today is undergoing a significant transformation in its racial politics of such a scale that it has brought the nation to a critical juncture. Preface: the origins and structures of American racial politics
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