Populating the Nation

Thomas Jefferson once said, “We want to populate the nation with a thousand generations of Americans.” The expansion westward is the reason why we are here today. It America what it is. All this land didn’t come free though. There were many lives ruined by war, disease, starvation, land disputes, and loss of culture. One of the groups that suffered for Anglo-Americans was the Indians. Indians had inhabited this land for thousands of years, the Spanish-Mexicans were expanding northward, Americans were pushing west and the British were at the north.

Indians were being pushed back further and further towards the coast. They were looked at by Americans as nuisances, that land did not belong them. With the history of moving west and taking over Indians land shows that it was not done all at once. It was done very gradually, day by day. It was done many different ways, all with thee same common goal, get the savages off the land. Whether there was a full scale war with a tribe, individual settlers destroying or convincing Indians off the land, multiple land acts or Indian removal acts, or the persuasion of Indians to become civilized. So Indians had two basic choices, die of convert. Indians were able to convert and become free Americans because they are “Formed in mind as well as in body on the same module with homo-sapiens euripus” (Powell).

Unlike their fellow homo-sapiens black Americans were not allowed or seen to be able to convert to healthy citizens. It was thought that they needed guidance throughout the day because they could not make good decisions on their own. “The improvement of the blacks in body and mind when they have mixed with whites proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life” (Powell.) Because of this racist way of thinking, blacks could only be seen as slaves, and if they were free they were still treated inhumanly.

So to sum up my blogging for history 120. The main ideas that I have got out of this class is that during from When Columbus landed in the Americas to when the United States conquered the west coast. it wasn’t just the joy of Americans finding new land and eventually industrializing. There were a lot of other things that went on all around the world. From the killing of Indian civilization to American companies putting sweatshops in third world countries to a sky rise construction worker feeling safe with his job, because he is in a union. You have to look at how on thing effected everyone.

Podcast: (Powell) http://webct.dvc.edu/SCRIPT/HIST120_5562_SU08/scripts/student/serve_page.pl?1151027847+content/html_pages/readings120%2Dsummer.htm+OFF+content/html_pages/readings120%2Dsummer.htm

Slave to free- Module 6

Fitzhugh states that The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world (Fitzhug). There is hard evidence that for the majority this is not true. The multiple slave rebellions and attempts at escaping prove that the slaves were not happy, and definitely not free. From Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass he states “I distingutly remember being, even then, most strongly impressed with the idea of being a free man someday. This cheering assurance was an inborn dream of my human nature” (Zinn)Even if they were treated like Fitzhug said; where they work nine hour days, the women do no physical labor, and they get great sleep, they still lack the thing that most would argue haunts every dream a person has. Than they are a slave. One thing that caught me though was the Quote by James Hammond "the poor ye always have with you;"(Hammond). This makes a great argument that weather slave or not, rich white men rule the country. So you could ask whether the slave blacks were better off in terms of eating everyday and having a roof over there head than free blacks would be.

When the blacks gained their freedom, they began asserting there independence of whites, forming their own churches, becoming politically active, strengthening family ties, and trying to educate their children (Zinn). They were trying hard to be truly free, and America was trying hard to keep them as slaves, even if they weren’t legally slaves. There were many things to keep the free black man in fear, like the Philadelphia riots between 1820 and 1859 where riots cost more than 1000 lives by 1860 (Faragher). It wasn’t just Individual whites and small groups, it was all of America joining together to keep the blacks in check. Andrew Jackson’s administration collaborated with the south to keep abolitionist literature out of the mails in the southern states. This seems like the way the government works today with poor minorities, sometimes they try to help, but they try harder too keep them in check.

So the transition from slave to free was a great moment for the Black nation, it got the slave demons out of their heads and they finally had the opportunity to be truly free. But the transition from free to slave was not only a bad time for the black nation, it was a bad moment for human history. We took free happy people from their native cultures and assimilated them into our society, is that ok to take advantage of material poor people? No? Then is our society right. We still do it.

Opprotunity and the Expansion Westward- Module 5

When the revolution got under way the main idea was to get away from British rule and create our own ways of doing things. America and all of its children were given a voice, or given the opportunity to create a voice.
After the war women and minorities didn’t prosper right away. But they did gain enough rights to start to join together and share their knowledge. Or gather enough courage to speak up. Like when Abigail Adams wrote a letter to her husband John Adams telling him husbands need to be nice to their ladies, or they might rebel(Zinn 86). Its not much in terms of passing it as a law or creating a committee, but it is putting it in his head that something needs to be done because women had enough power to fight back and do something about it.
This same creation of opportunity goes for all American minorities. They had received enough freedom to create meetings and committees to rise up and fight their problems.
With the opportunity of minorities and poor people to speak up and have freedom, they were able to go off on their own and expand westward. The expanding American culture meant that the Indian culture would be slowly diminishing. Of course the Indians didn’t like that their land was being taken over. The Americans had to do something about this because they didn’t want the Indians to revolt, but they wanted their land. So laws like the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the Intercourse Act of 1790 (Faragher 219) were set forth. These laws made a poor attempt of trying to help the Indians out by not taking all of there land and setting up opportunity for trade. But the strength of Manifest Destiny overtook the weak laws and eventually led to Americans traveling all the way west, to the great Pacific Ocean, knocking out almost all the Indians in their path.

Module 4 The Revolution

The American people and in particular the upper class needed a revolution. The British were enforcing too many new taxes and limiting Americans too much. Americans got their revolution and made great changes, but the rest of the Indians, Blacks and low class whites were in the same situation that they started in. So how did the upper class convince the lower class that they needed to revolt. Patrick Henry contributed a great deal with his ability to make the British the bad guys. Another and probably the greatest contributor was Common Sense, an article by Thomas Paine. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now.” (Thomas Paine) even tough the lower classes did not get anything out of the revolution at the time, they did get opportunity. Opportunity to grow and get away from the old past that previously they were stuck at, with barley an room for growth. Zinn agrees that “what the revolution did was to create space and opportunity for blacks to begin making demands of white society.”
So who benefited from the revolution and the newly created documents? The upper class got their money. The lower class got their “freedom,” and the opportunity for growth because of the newly freed and money hungry upper class. And almost everyone got what they really wanted, a strong central government. As agreed by Zinn on pg 55.
All but the Indians got what really benefited from the revolution. The new laws set forth by the congress completely left out the Indian nation. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 which authorized President Andrew Jackson to move Indians residing east of the Mississippi to lands in the West. The Indian Removal Act set the stage for the Trail of Tears.(Locke) this was just one of the many different times the Americans pushed the Indians further west.
The revolution allowed us to grow and for the big businesses of America to start getting really big and compete against other big companies, which is the backbone of America.
Source of the Locke reader: Leslie H. Fishel and Benjamin Quarles, The Negro American: A Documentary History, (Glenview, Ill., 1967), p. 207.
Zinn, H. A People’s History of the United States. 1980.

Module 3

Module 3
When the Africans started to be imported to the Americas they had to be looked down upon. They were not seen as humans, but as commodities. They had certain values for their skills, just like everything in Americas beginning. Because it is hard to put a price on the human life and easier to put a price on the unknown.
In America during this time he masters took all the rights away from the slaves. To do this they had to put in laws so all the common people would agree that slavery is normal and just. As in the South Carolina Slave Code; “Be it enacted by the authority aforesaid, That no master, mistress, overseer, or other person whatsoever, that hath the care and charge of any negro or slave, shall give their negroes and other slaves leave, on Sundays, holidays, or any other time, to go out of their plantations.... Every slave hereafter out of his master's plantation, without a ticket, or leave in writing, from his master or mistress, or .... some white person in the company of such slave, to give an account of his business, shall be whipped” (Cooper). So what they are doing is taking all the rights away so the slave can be controlled. Also in the code is the master justifying his cruelty by making the slave as coming from “barbarous, wild, and savage natures“(Cooper).
Once the slaves started to outnumber the whites, they had to do something more than laws to keep the slaves in check. They had to make the American people truly believe that whites had better blood, and that the darker the skin, the more savage the person. This is racism and how it started in the U.S. The white people would soon begin to say and do things, even to free blacks that made them seem like they were worse just because of their color.
So the question that we have to ask is why. Why did they have to make these people seem like they weren’t fully human, even the ones that were free and had no impact on them? This is a question with many answers. One reason I think this happened is because it was easy to be mean. When a group of people can’t own guns, which is a symbol of power, then they are easy targets. Its just like nerds and bullys. When your muscles are bigger then the other guys, you beat him up and make him do your homework.
Thomas Cooper and David J. McCord, ed., Statutes at Large of South Carolina, (10 Vols., Columbia, 1836-1841) VII, pp. 352-356.