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Author: Timothy Messer-Kruse Publisher: LSU Press ISBN: 0807183156 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
Slavery’s Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution unearths a long-hidden factor that led to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. While historians have generally acknowledged that patriot leaders assembled in response to postwar economic chaos, the threat of popular insurgencies, and the inability of the states to agree on how to fund the national government, Timothy Messer-Kruse suggests that scholars have discounted Americans’ desire to compel Britain to return fugitives from slavery as a driving force behind the convention. During the Revolutionary War, British governors offered freedom to enslaved Americans who joined the king’s army. Thousands responded by fleeing to English camps. After the British defeat at Yorktown, American diplomats demanded the surrender of fugitive slaves. When British generals refused, several states confiscated Loyalist estates and blocked payment of English creditors, hoping to apply enough pressure on the Crown to hand over the runaways. State laws conflicting with the 1783 Treaty of Paris violated the Articles of Confederation—the young nation’s first constitution—but Congress, lacking an executive branch or a federal judiciary, had no means to obligate states to comply. The standoff over the escaped slaves quickly escalated following the Revolution as Britain failed to abandon the western forts it occupied and took steps to curtail American commerce. More than any other single matter, the impasse over the return of enslaved Americans threatened to hamper the nation’s ability to expand westward, develop its commercial economy, and establish itself as a power among the courts of Europe. Messer-Kruse argues that the issue encouraged the founders to consider the prospect of scrapping the Articles of Confederation and drafting a superseding document that would dramatically increase federal authority—the Constitution.
Author: Timothy Messer-Kruse Publisher: LSU Press ISBN: 0807183156 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
Slavery’s Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution unearths a long-hidden factor that led to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. While historians have generally acknowledged that patriot leaders assembled in response to postwar economic chaos, the threat of popular insurgencies, and the inability of the states to agree on how to fund the national government, Timothy Messer-Kruse suggests that scholars have discounted Americans’ desire to compel Britain to return fugitives from slavery as a driving force behind the convention. During the Revolutionary War, British governors offered freedom to enslaved Americans who joined the king’s army. Thousands responded by fleeing to English camps. After the British defeat at Yorktown, American diplomats demanded the surrender of fugitive slaves. When British generals refused, several states confiscated Loyalist estates and blocked payment of English creditors, hoping to apply enough pressure on the Crown to hand over the runaways. State laws conflicting with the 1783 Treaty of Paris violated the Articles of Confederation—the young nation’s first constitution—but Congress, lacking an executive branch or a federal judiciary, had no means to obligate states to comply. The standoff over the escaped slaves quickly escalated following the Revolution as Britain failed to abandon the western forts it occupied and took steps to curtail American commerce. More than any other single matter, the impasse over the return of enslaved Americans threatened to hamper the nation’s ability to expand westward, develop its commercial economy, and establish itself as a power among the courts of Europe. Messer-Kruse argues that the issue encouraged the founders to consider the prospect of scrapping the Articles of Confederation and drafting a superseding document that would dramatically increase federal authority—the Constitution.
Author: James Tagg Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN: 1512807699 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 448
Book Description
This is the first modern biography of Benjamin Franklin Bache, the grandson of Benjamin Franklin. Between the turbulent years of 1793 and 1798, Bache was the young nation's leading political journalist and a sharp critic of the Federalists and their policies. As editor of the most important radical newspaper of the 1790s, he lived at the center of most of the political storms of that decade. He defended the Democratic Societies as the earliest vehicles of public opinion; he strenuously opposed the ratification of the Jay Treaty, the central political event of the decade; he led and orchestrated the attack on George Washington in an attempt to curb growing executive authority; and his defense of French policies contributed to the sedition crisis of 1798. A primary target of the Federalist-sponsored Sedition Act, he was indicted for federal common law seditious libel before that act took effect. In 1798, at the height of the political hysteria, Bache died of yellow fever at the age of twenty-nine. Like Thomas Paine, to whom Bache was personally and ideologically connected, Bache was not a product of Whig Oppositionist or classical republican ideology. Yet neither was he an inheritor of a more thoroughly modem liberal ideal. Committed to rational self -interest, he promoted a civic vision and only partially embraced the newer world of nascent capitalism. James Tagg establishes the ideological and psychological framework of Bache's later radicalism by carefully examining Bache's childhood at Passy with his grandfather, his education in Geneva, and his adolescence in Philadelphia. Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Philadelphia Aurora will interest scholars and students of American history.
Author: Michael Allen Gillespie Publisher: ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 440
Book Description
How the United States Constitution was ratified by Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Virginia, New York State, North Carolina, Rhode Island.
Author: Timothy Messer-Kruse
Author: Timothy Messer-Kruse
Author: Benjamin Franklin
Author: American Philosophical Society
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Author: Benjamin Franklin
Author: 
Author: Pennsylvania. Supreme Executive Council
Author: James Tagg
Author: Pennsylvania (Colony).
Author: Michael Allen Gillespie