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When Thomas Jefferson took the oath of office for the presidency in 1801, America had just passed through twelve critical years, dominated by some of the towering figures of our history and by the challenge of having to do everything for the first time. George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Adams, and Jefferson himself each had a share in shaping that remarkable era. This book provides an analytical survey of this extraordinary period. Ranging over the widest variety of concerns—political, cultural, economic, diplomatic, and military—it provides a sweeping historical account of the problems the new nation faced as well as the particular individuals who tried to solve them. As it moves through the Federalist era, the book draws character sketches not only of the great figures—Washington and Jefferson, Talleyrand and Napoleon Bonaparte—but also of lesser ones, such as George Hammond, Britain's frustrated minister to the United States, James McHenry, Adams's hapless Secretary of War, the pre-Chief Justice version of John Marshall, and others.

Since the Herskovits‐Frazier debate of the 1940s, African diasporic research in the Americas has been marked not only by an uninterrupted focus on West Africa but also by an equally incessant neglect of the Akan. Accounting for 10 percent of the total number of African captives who embarked for the Americas, the Akan diaspora not only shaped and brought into sharp relief the diasporic themes of maroonage, resistance, and freedom but also complicated these themes in that the displaced Akan created their own social orders based on foundational cultural understandings. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Akan never constituted a majority among other Africans in the Americas, yet their leadership skills in warfare and political organization, medicinal knowledge of plant use and spiritual practice, and composite culture as archived in the musical traditions, language, and patterns of African diasporic life far surpassed what their actual numbers would suggest. The book argues that a composite culture calibrated between the Gold Coast (Ghana) littoral and the forest fringe made the contributions of the Akan diaspora possible. That argument calls attention to the historic formation of Akan culture in West Africa and its reach into the Americas, where the Akan experience in the former British, Danish, and Dutch colonies is explored. There, those early experiences foreground the contemporary movement of diasporic Africans and the Akan people between Ghana and North America. Indeed, the Akan experience provides for a better understanding of how the diasporic quilt came to be and is still becoming.

The first slaves imported to America did not see themselves as “African” but rather as Temne, Igbo, or Yoruban. This book reveals how an African identity emerged in the late 18th-century Atlantic world, tracing the development of “African” from a degrading term connoting savage people, to a word that was a source of pride and unity for the diverse victims of the Atlantic slave trade. The book first examines the work of black writers — such as Ignatius Sancho in England and Phillis Wheatley in America — who created a narrative of African identity that took its meaning from the diaspora, a narrative that began with enslavement and the experience of the Middle Passage, allowing people of various ethnic backgrounds to become “African” by virtue of sharing the oppression of slavery. It looks at political activists who worked within the emerging antislavery moment in England and North America in the 1780s and 1790s; it describes the rise of the African church movement in various cities — most notably, the establishment of the African Methodist Episcopal Church as an independent denomination — and the efforts of wealthy sea captain Paul Cuffe to initiate a black-controlled emigration movement that would forge ties between Sierra Leone and blacks in North America; and it examines in detail the efforts of blacks to emigrate to Africa, founding Sierra Leone and Liberia.

The tenth and youngest son of a poor Boston soapmaker, Benjamin Franklin would rise to become, in Thomas Jefferson's words, “the greatest man and ornament of his age”. This book offers a portrait of this towering colonial figure, illuminating Franklin's character and personality. Here is truly one of the most extraordinary lives imaginable, a man who, with only two years of formal education, became a printer, publisher, postmaster, philosopher, world-class scientist and inventor, statesman, musician, and abolitionist. The book presents a chronological account of all these accomplishments, delightfully spiced with quotations from Franklin's own extensive writings. The book describes how the hardworking Franklin became at age twenty-four the most successful printer in Pennsylvania and how by forty-two, with the help of Poor Richard's Almanack, he had amassed enough wealth to retire from business. The book then follows Franklin's next brilliant career, as an inventor and scientist, examining his pioneering work on electricity and his inventions of the Franklin Stove, the lightning rod, and bifocals, as well as his mapping of the Gulf Stream, a major contribution to navigation. Lastly, the book covers Franklin's role as America's leading statesman, ranging from his years in England before the Revolutionary War to his time in France thereafter, highlighting his many contributions to the cause of liberty. Along the way, the book sheds light on Franklin's personal life, including his troubled relationship with his illegitimate son William, who remained a Loyalist during the Revolution, and Franklin's thoughts on such topics as religion and morality.

On the morning of August 9, 1757, British and colonial officers defending the besieged Fort William Henry surrendered to French forces, accepting the generous “parole of honor” offered by General Montcalm. As the column of British and colonials marched with their families and servants to Fort Edward some miles south, they were set upon by the Indian allies of the French. The resulting “massacre,” thought to be one of the bloodiest days of the French and Indian War, became forever ingrained in American myth by James Fenimore Cooper's classic novel The Last of the Mohicans. This book gives us the true story behind Cooper's famous book, bringing to life men such as British commander of Fort William Henry George Monro, English General Webb, his French counterpart Montcalm, and the wild frontier world of Natty Bumppo. The Battle of Lake George and the building of the fort marked the return of European military involvement in intercolonial wars, producing an explosive mixture of the contending martial values of Indians, colonials, and European regulars. The Americans and British who were attacked after surrendering, as well as French officers and their Indian allies, all felt deeply betrayed. Contemporary accounts of the victims—whose identities the book has reconstructed from newly discovered sources—helped to create a powerful, racist American folk memory that still resonates today. Survivors included men and women who were adopted into Indian tribes, sold to Canadians in a well-established white servant trade, or jailed in Canada or France as prisoners of war. Explaining the motives for the most notorious massacre of the colonial period, this book offers a tale of a fledgling America, one which places the tragic events of the Seven Years' War in a fresh historical context.

This book examines the extraordinary array of alliances and interactions among Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans during the first eighty years of permanent European colonization on the eastern seaboard. It argues that uneasy interdependence was a defining feature of life in 17th-century North America. Webs of alliances entangled all peoples in one form or another from Iroquoia to the Outer Banks. Despite fear, hatred, and widespread intercultural misunderstanding, communities throughout the eastern seaboard became entangled in relations with other cultures. Even when they wished to remain apart, they were invariably connected to intercultural alliance networks. In this period of early colonization, Native American interests and alliances fundamentally shaped the parameters of power in North America. Native alliances and Native American expectations of the meanings of alliance directed the outcome of events for many Europeans, and at times for entire European colonies. Europeans were sometimes clients and tributaries of more powerful Native American nations. Even when Europeans were stronger, they nonetheless had to take native networks into account. Moreover, Africans in North America also formed intercultural alliances and were able to negotiate significant aspects of life, despite the bonds of slavery.

This book restores Aaron Burr to his place as a central figure in the founding of the American Republic. Abolitionist, proto-feminist, friend to such Indian leaders as Joseph Brant, Burr was personally acquainted with a wider range of Americans, and of the American continent, than any other Founder except George Washington. He contested for power with Alexander Hamilton and then with Thomas Jefferson on a continental scale. The book does not sentimentalize any of its three protagonists, neither does it derogate their extraordinary qualities. They were all great men, all flawed, and all three failed to achieve their full aspirations. But their struggles make for an epic tale. Written from the perspective of a historian and administrator who, over nearly fifty years in public life, has served six presidents, this book penetrates into the personal qualities of its three central figures. In telling the tale of their shifting power relationships and their antipathies, it reassesses their policies and the consequences of their successes and failures. Fresh information about the careers of Hamilton and Burr is derived from newly-discovered sources, and a supporting cast of secondary figures emerges to give depth and irony to the principal narrative.

With the restoration of monarchy in 1660, English policy toward its North American empire began to assume some coherence. During Charles II's reign, various institutions of English government assumed an increasingly direct role in the administration of England's overseas territories. New York was conquered from the Dutch; Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey were carved out of it; and North and South Carolina were founded. Lawyers trained in England brought the common law to all these new colonies, quickly in most of them, but somewhat more slowly in New York. Although the legal systems of these post‐1660 colonies developed in distinctive directions as a result of different demographic and economic conditions and the diversity of reasons for which they were founded, the presence of common law did place limits on the extent to which divergence could occur. Issues that are central to all chapters involve the reception of common law pleading, the enforcement of criminal and regulatory law, the functioning of juries, the regulation of religion, and the degree of centralization of power.

The four-volume series of which this book is the first volume shows how the legal systems of Britain's thirteen North American colonies, which were initially established in response to divergent political, economic, and religious initiatives, slowly converged until it became possible by the 1770s to imagine that all thirteen participated in a common American legal order, which diverged in its details but differed far more substantially from English common law. This book reveals how Virginians' zeal for profit led to the creation of a harsh legal order that efficiently squeezed payment out of debtors and labor out of servants. In comparison, Puritan law in early Massachusetts strove mainly to preserve the local autonomy and moral values of family-centered, subsistence farming communities. The law in the other New England colonies, although it was distinctive in some respects, gravitated toward the Massachusetts model, while Maryland's law, except during a brief interlude of Puritan rule, gravitated toward that of Virginia.

This study presents colonial American history as the story of three-way interactions among Indians, English colonists, and livestock. By situating domestic animals at the heart of the colonizing process in 17th-century New England and the Chesapeake region, the book restores contingency to a narrative too often dominated by human actors alone. Livestock were a central factor in the cultural clash between colonists and Indians as well as a driving force in expansion west. By bringing livestock across the Atlantic, colonists assumed that they provided the means to realize America's potential, a goal that Indians, lacking domestic animals, had failed to accomplish. They also assumed that Native Americans who learned to keep livestock would advance along the path toward civility and Christianity. But colonists failed to anticipate that their animals would generate friction with Indians as native peoples constantly encountered free-ranging livestock often trespassing in their cornfields. Moreover, concerned about feeding their growing populations and committed to a style of animal husbandry that required far more space than they had expected, colonists eventually saw no alternative but to displace Indians and appropriate their land. This created tensions that reached boiling point with King Philip's War and Bacon's Rebellion, and it established a pattern that would repeat time and again over the next two centuries.

Elite men and women in America over two hundred years ago formed loving, politically significant friendships. Abigail Adams called her friend Thomas Jefferson “one of the choice ones on earth,” while George Washington signed a letter to his friend Elizabeth Powel with the words “I am always Yours.” The emotionally rich language of this period is often mistaken for romance, but this book’s innovative analysis of letters, diaries, poetry, and novels in the past reveals that friendships between men and women were quite common. At a time when personal relationships were deeply political, these friendships embodied the core values of the new nation. These relationships epitomized the new republic’s values of freedom, equality and choice. This book offers a fresh and expansive look at how America’s founding generation of men and women defined and experienced friendship, love, gender, and power in the new nation.

From Empire to Humanity: The American Revolution and the Origins of Humanitarianism tells the story of a generation of American and British activists who transformed humanitarianism as they adjusted to being foreigners in the wake of the American Revolution. In the decades before the Revolution, Americans and Britons shared an imperial approach to charitable activity. Growing up in the increasingly integrated British Atlantic world, future activists from the British Isles, North America, and the Caribbean developed expansive outlooks and connections. For budding doctors, this was especially true. American independence put an end their common imperial humanitarianism but not their transatlantic ties, their far-reaching visions, or their belief that philanthropy was a tool of statecraft and reconciliation. In the postwar years, with doctor-activists at the forefront, they collaborated in medical philanthropy, antislavery, prison reform, poor relief, educational charities, and more. The nature of their cooperation, however, had changed. No longer members of the same polity, the erstwhile compatriots adopted a universal approach to their beneficence as they reimagined bonds with people who were now legal strangers. The basis of renewed cooperation, universal benevolence could also be a source of tension. With the new wars at the end of the century, activists’ optimistic cosmopolitanism waned while their practices endured.

Future History analyzes English and American writings that imagine England on a global stage well before England became an empire or the United States became a global power. Through close readings, historical contextualization, application of archival theory, and careful speculation, the book traces the ways that English and American writers imagined the East Indies and the West Indies as interconnected. The book argues that the earliest expressions of an American or English worldview were born colonial, conceived at the margins of a rising empire, not in its metropolis, and that a wider variety of agents than we have previously understood—Algonquian converts, “reformed” Catholics, enslaved women in the spice trade, Protestant dissidents, West Indian maroons—helped shape that worldview. In order to recover these voices and experiences, so often overwritten or ignored, the book combines more traditional methodologies of literary analysis and historicization with an interrogation of the structures of the archives in which early writings have been preserved. The chapters taken together describe a particular global (East Indies–West Indies) literary history, while the codas, taken as a separate sequence, demonstrate how a “slant” view on literary history that is asynchronous and at times anachronistic affords a new and more inclusive view of the worlding of the English imagination in the seventeenth century.

This book advances a new interpretation of the origins of the American Revolution by looking at how conceptions of Europe and Europeanness shaped British-American political culture. It reconstructs colonial debates about the European states system and European civilization, and Britain’s position within both. From this basis, it shows how these concerns informed colonial attitudes towards American identity and America’s place inside—and, ultimately, outside—the emerging British Empire. The book explores the way in which colonists inherited and adapted Anglo-British traditions of thinking about international politics, how they navigated imperial politics during the European wars of 1740–63, and how the burgeoning patriot movement negotiated the dual crisis of Europe and Empire in the period between 1763 and 1775. In the process, it sheds new light on the development of public politics in colonial America, the anglicization/Americanization debate, the political economy of empire, the place of art and poetry in political culture, the interplay of history and prophecy with identity, eighteenth-century geopolitical thinking, and the relationship between international affairs and revolution. What emerges from this story is an imperial crisis and an American Revolution that seem both decidedly arcane and strikingly relevant to the political challenges of the twenty-first century.

This book tells the gripping story of American Indians’ attempts to wrestle with the ongoing realities of colonialism between the 1660s and 1820. By tracing the religious and cultural engagement of American Indians in Connecticut, Rhode Island, western Massachusetts, and Long Island, New York, this narrative pulls back the curtain on the often overlooked, dynamic interactions between Natives and whites. Native individuals and communities actively tapped into transatlantic structures of power to protect their land rights, welcomed educational opportunities for their children, and even joined local white churches during the First Great Awakening (1740s). Although these Native groups had successfully resisted evangelization in the seventeenth century, by the eighteenth century they showed an increasing interest in education and religion. Their sporadic participation in the First Great Awakening marked a continuation of prior forms of cultural engagement. More surprising, however, in the decades after the Awakening, Native individuals and subgroups asserted their religious and cultural autonomy to even greater degrees by leaving English churches and forming their own Indian Separate churches. In the realm of education, too, Natives increasingly took control, preferring local reservation schools and demanding Indian teachers whenever possible. In the 1780s, two small groups of Christian Indians moved to New York and founded new Christian Indian settlements, called Brothertown and New Stockbridge. But the majority of New England Natives—even those who affiliated with Christianity—chose to remain in New England, continuing to assert their own autonomous existence through leasing out land, farming, and working on and off the reservations.

The year 2000 marked the 30th anniversary of the publication of this title. The study examines the family in the context of the colony founded by the Pilgrims who came over on the Mayflower. Basing his work on physical artifacts, wills, estate inventories, and a variety of legal and official enactments, the author portrays the family as a structure of roles and relationships, emphasizing those of husband and wife, parent and child, and master and servant. The book's most startling insights come from a reconsideration of commonly held views of American Puritans and of the ways in which they dealt with one another. The author concludes that Puritan “repression” was not as strongly directed against sexuality as against the expression of hostile and aggressive impulses, and he shows how this pattern reflected prevalent modes of family life and child rearing. The result is an in-depth study of the ordinary life of a colonial community, located in the broader environment of seventeenth-century America. This second edition includes a new foreword and a list of further reading.

This book reimagines New England’s literary history by tracing seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century epidemics alongside the era of early colonial expansion, the Antinomian controversy, the evolution of the halfway covenant and jeremiad, and Boston’s 1721 inoculation controversy. Moving beyond familiar histories of New World epidemics (often referred to as the “virgin soil” model), the book identifies epidemiology as a generic category with specialized forms and conventions, and considers how regional and generational patterns of illness reposition our understanding of the relation between immunology and ideology in the formation of communal identity. Epidemiology functions as subject and method of analysis in the book: it describes those narratives that represent modes of infection, population distribution, and immunity, but, more germane to the field of literary criticism, it also describes a set of analytical practices for theorizing the translation of epidemic events into narrative and generic terms. Without denying epidemiology’s usefulness in combating contemporary epidemics, the book affirms its power to transform colonial spaces, and thus to reshape inquiries into the nature of community and identity; it offers critics new trajectories for analyzing late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first century epidemiology, and for rethinking illness and infection in terms of the geopolitics of medicine.

One Small Candle tells how the religious values of the Pilgrims prompted their settlement of the Plymouth Colony and how those values influenced the political, intellectual, and cultural aspect of New England life a hundred and fifty years before the American Revolution. It begins in early seventeenth-century England with their persecution for challenging the established national church, and their struggles as refugees in the Netherlands in the 1610s. It then examines the challenges they faced in planting a colony in America, including relations with the Native population. The book emphasizes the religious dimension of the story, which has been neglected in most recent works. In particular it focuses on how this particular group of puritan Congregationalists was driven by the belief that ordinary men and women should play the determinative role in governing church affairs. Their commitment to lay empowerment is illustrated by attention to the life of William Brewster, who helped organize the congregation in its early years and served as the colony’s spiritual guide for its first decade. The participatory democracy that was reflected in congregational church covenants played a greater role in the shaping of Massachusetts churches than has previously been accepted. This outlook also influenced the earliest political forms of the region, including the Mayflower Compact and local New England town meetings. Their rejection of individual greed and focus on community was an early form of an American social gospel.

Political Community in Revolutionary Pennsylvania challenges the ways we understand popular sovereignty in the American Revolution, demonstrating how ordinary citizens wielded significant political power. Previous histories place undue focus on either elite political thought or class analysis; on the contrary, citizens cared most about the establishment of a representative, publicly legitimate political process. Popular activism constrained leaders, creating a system through which governmental actions were made more representative of the will of the community. This book analyzes developments in Pennsylvania from 1774, and the passage of the Intolerable Acts, through to 1800 and the election of Thomas Jefferson. It examines the animating philosophy of the Pennsylvania state constitution of 1776, a “radical manifesto” espousing a vision of popular sovereignty in which government was devolved from the people only where necessary. The legitimacy of governmental institutions rested on their demonstration that they operated through popular consent, expressed in a variety of forms of popular mobilization. This book examines how early Americans interacted with the power structures shaping the world in which they lived, recasting the nature of the American Revolution and illuminating the origins of modern American political practice. It investigates how political mobilization operated inside and outside formal channels of government. Mechanisms of popular mobilization helped a diverse population mediate with governmental institutions, providing the foundation of early American power. Histories that ignore this relationship miss one of the most significant founding characteristics of the United States—the importance of popular politics and democratic practice in the establishment of American government.

The early Supreme Court justices wrestled with how much free press and speech is protected by the First Amendment, and with whether the Sedition Act of 1798 violated freedoms of press and speech. This book discusses the Supreme Court justices before John Marshall, their views of liberties of press and speech, and the Sedition Act prosecutions over which some of them presided. The book presents the views of the pre-Marshall justices about freedoms of press and speech, before the struggle of 1798–1801. It finds that their views were strikingly more expansive than the narrow definition of Sir William Blackstone that is usually assumed to have dominated the period. Not one justice adopted that narrow definition before 1798. The book reassesses the conclusions of the early Supreme Court justices about the Sedition Act of 1798 and its constitutionality. It finds that they divided almost evenly over that issue, rather than unanimously supporting the Act as is generally assumed. The book similarly reassesses the Federalist Party itself, and finds that it also divided over the constitutionality of the Sedition Act and over the narrow Blackstone approach during 1798–1801, and that the states did as well in considering the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. In addition, it summarizes the recognized fourteen prosecutions of newspaper editors and others under the Sedition Act of 1798, and adds to those by identifying and confirming twenty-two additional Sedition Act prosecutions. All of this challenges existing histories of the early republic and of the early Supreme Court justices.