Founding Brothers

Oydna says we will be using Founding Brothers throughout the year, so you can use this page througout the year too.

Preface

 * Looking back, no event in American history seemed so impossible yet so destined to happen as the American Revolution
 * Many of the revolutionary generation believed that their revolution was inevitable and that America would turn into the next great world power
 * The revolution helped spark a wave of colonial revolutions across the world as well as begin the decline of monarchial rule
 * New emerging government: representative government based on voting and a capitalist style economy based on actions of individual people
 * The entire revolution was based off chance, luck, and specific military and political decisions made about various crises
 * The entire revolution was extremely improbable and unprecedented: the British had the most powerful military, most past representative governments hadn't lasted for long and hadn't tried to rule something as big as the 13 colonies, and the colonies were very divided
 * America's natural resources and isolation gave it potential to be a dominant world power
 * Constitutional Convention negatives: it went beyond it's purpose to revise the Articles of Confederation, it was conducted in secrecy, the delegates were the elite and did not represent the majority, southerners made deals to make sure slavery would last, and ratification of the Constitution didn't require the unanimous vote that the Articles had required
 * Compromises made: small vs. large states, federal vs. state power, slavery deals
 * "spirit of '76" opposed a strong federal government, which the Constitution established
 * Overall positives: an entire continent far away from Europe, a young population that was certain to grow fast, a lot of white property owners due to lots of land available, commitment to a republican government approved by the states, and a strong leader in George Washington
 * Overall negatives: republican government the size of the US had never been done before, the Revolution had set the tone for opposition to centralized political power, states were in no way united, and the huge number of slaves
 * Main achievements of the early years of the US were political and the most important people were the people who held power and played center role in the first decade of US existence
 * The shape of the government and way it was handled was determined by these political leaders who new each other, collaborated with each other, and argued with each other
 * Arguments between the revolutionaries was safely contained into the government and through political parties, which allowed the republic to remain intact
 * Fundamental disagreements over role of government, citizenship, and how to reach freedom and equality
 * 1790s poltics was full of arguments, rivalries, and overall craziness
 * GOVERNMENT WORKED BECAUSE: collective enterprise of diversity of personalities and ideologies, everyone knew each other personally, took slavery off the agenda, and they knew their historical significance
 * Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr's duel is the only time where political differences weren't handled peacefully

The Duel
The duel itself between Hamilton and Burr is simple: they both had disciples and Hamilton brought a doctor, Hamilton brought guns that weren't accurate and wasn't planning to shoot to kill, accepted theory is that Hamilton shot over Burr's head and hit a tree, and Burr waited a few seconds before firing and killing Hamilton, both followed the customary rules of dueling, Burr was exiled from public life, dueling became even more looked down upon as a way of settling arguments. Of course, everything I just said is probably unimportant. Here's more important stuff:
 * Dispute started when a newspaper ran that Hamilton had a poor opinion of Burr
 * Burr asked for explanation/apology, Hamilton instead threw more subtle insults at him
 * Hamilton later tried to say his criticism was only at politics and not anything personal about Burr, but Burr was too mad and demanded a full apology which Hamilton refused to give, and the overall argument escalated into a duel
 * In the days before the duel Hamilton began to regret the intensity of his political disagreements, as well as the fact that he had comitted libel against Burr
 * The Duel is famous because of the fame of its two participants, and symbolized the singular breakdown of nonviolent conflict between the revolutionaries
 * Burr was known to lack political principle: he switched political parties several times in order to offer his services to whoever needed him most, and seemed to work to serve his own purposes (all aspects of him that Hamilton despised and publicly criticized)
 * Hamilton feared that the young US was weak to someone who could manipulate politics as well as Burr did, and that Burr failed every test of morals he faced, showing his lack of care for the preservation of the US (all from Hamilton's perspective)
 * OVERALL LESSON: the young US government needed leaders with strong character, morals, and honor, as it did not have a strong backing and laws that would allow it to survive with corrupt/incompetent officials; the duel came because the two men needed to show they had the honor required to head the US

The Dinner
Simple stuff: Hamilton's plan of assumption was being blocked by Southern delegates, Jefferson suggests meeting between Madison and Hamilton, they agreed to support assumption in exchange for capital at Potomac River. Everything else:
 * Debate over assumption and location of capital had frozen the legislature, showing the failure of the new government officials to compromise; without action, the entire republic would fail
 * Madison disagreed with the way Hamilton wanted to recover public credit: paying off all government securities (bonds); Madison was suspicious of all of the speculators who had bought up securities from war veterans and in expectation of Hamilton's plan
 * Madison began to think the national government was falling into the hands of people more concerned with earning money than the well-being of the country
 * Madison opposed assumption because many southern states had payed off most of their debts, and if the debts were all taken in by the federal government and new taxes imposed on the states, some would have to pay extra
 * Assumption also showed federal government excercising economic authority over states
 * Overall fear in Virginians of "consolidation", where the states would be absorbed by the federal government, and reminded them of the taxes and laws imposed on them by the British
 * Hamilton wanted to clean up the mess of the United States economy and fix it with a restored public credit, and he did not care what those who opposed it thought
 * He refuted Madison's first point on securities that Madison had no right to talk about soldiers when he had not fought at all, and that the original securites holders had sold their securities freely
 * He also said Madison had previously supported assumption, and that trickier state debts could be worked out among friends
 * Madison and Jefferson believed in nallowing natural laws of economic recovery and growth to guide them, while Hamilton believed the conditions for growth needed to be created and overseen (based of England)
 * Hamilton also thought that concentrating political and economic power together to have a positive effect on economic growth, as he also believed in the urban elite (the rich) as the most important in American society
 * Virginians valued land over capital (money/investments), which created a conflict of elite planter class of the South vs. wealthy merchant class of the North
 * As a foreign minister, Jefferson knew America's foreign debts had to be paid and its credit restored before it could be taken seriously as an economic power in Europe, and thus supported the goals of Hamilton's plan
 * Madison's arguments for Potomac capital was boh crafty and driven by romantic illusions: he argued that the center of the US should be determined by population, and that the Potomac River could afford a direct water route to the Ohio Valley and to the Mississippi River
 * Many secret meetings were made concerning Hamilton's plan and the location of the capital, but the dinner at Jefferson's was the conclusion to all
 * Washington supervised the designing and building of the capital: the isolated location and fresh character of the capital helped assure people that the strong federal government was still in check and satisfied the rural nature of many southers who distrusted cities
 * Also, the Hamiltonian moneymen the Southerners hated could not be in power because the capital was so far from the commercial/banking powers of the US (New York and Philadelphia), which created a unique seperation of political and financial capitals
 * The Compromise of 1790 helped avert a political crisis that may have ended the nation, but also showed the opposing viewpoints of America's future in the various delegates; it did not resolve these conflicts, but mmerely prevented them from escalating into a much larger problem than the young government could handle
 * OVERALL LESSON: The revolutionary generation had a fundamental split in how they believed the federal government should be run and what kind of powers it would have, as well as various conflicts due to their geographical location and economical status; however, these disagreements were prevented from escalating due to key compromises that sated both sides and held the government together.

The Silence
Basics: Quaker and Pennsylvania Abolition Society petitions to end the slave trade/slavery (for the latter), and the latter was signed by Ben Franklin, Southerners immediately disputed legitimacy of these petitions. Here's what followed:


 * Specifically, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society petition claimed slavery and slave trade were incompatible for revolutionary values, and challenged the claim that the Constitution prohibited the ending of the slave trade
 * At the Constitutional Convention, slavery was deemed to be too important and controversial a subjet to be talked about publicly
 * Arguments against petition: Bible and christian minsters were proslavery, citizens' livelihoods depended on slave labor, framers of Constitution agreed to not interfere with property rights of southern states (an idea that southern states thought was guaranteed to them due to their ratification of the Constitution), African tribes also enslaved Africans, whites and blacks couldn't live together in peace, slave holders would have to be compensated, slaves had nowhere to go when freed
 * Arguments for slavery: Bible and Constiution did not endorse slavery, Declaration of Indepedence had denounced slavery, it was a moral obligation to free the slaves, if the petition was rejected the slaves would eventually hear about it and revolt
 * Declaration of Independence clearly supported abolition
 * During and after the revolution there a was sense that slavery was on the road to extinction: emancipation schemes were made during the revolution for manpower, Lafayette urged Washington to declare general emancipation in Virginia, and many northern states had declared slavery illegal or were in the process of doing so
 * Virginia allowed slave owners to free their slaves if they wanted to, Jeffrson had created a rough plan of how to free all slaves born after 1800, and Jefferson had a propoal to prohibit slavery in western territories that was nearly passed
 * The above positive points were merely a mirage: slavery was deeply imbedded into American society, and the conviction that slavery was meant to die off created a misguided sense of destiny that led to lack of action
 * Slavery was the main division in the Constitutional convention
 * Northern position: slavery was nonnegotiable, and now was the best time to begin the road to total abolition
 * Deep Sourthern position: open-ended access to AFrican imports and western lands w/ no federal restrictions, and Constiution would prohibit legilsation restricting property rights of slave owners, and secesssion threatened if these terms were not met
 * Constitution was ambiguous about fate of slavery, as leaning towards any one side would make ratification impossible
 * Virginia represents US as a whole on slavery: beneath the apparent commitment to abolition, Virginains didn't want to give up their control of slaves to the federal government
 * Three sides on slavery: northern abolition, southern proslavery, and a middleman Virginia
 * New proslavery argument: slavery was to be accepted as a permantue feature of the nation as well as a racial aspect in keeping slaves
 * Census of 1790: direct proportionality between ratio of blacks to whites and reluctance to consider abolition, Virginia had both a large slave and free black population which made it the key in any plan to end slavery, and the belief that the end of slavery was inevitable was false as the slave population was rapidly rising
 * Abolition racing against the clock: the longer it took, the less the revolutionary fires motivated people and the larger the slave population and the urge to keep the status quo grew
 * Chief argument of southerners was that it was extremely impractical to go through with abolition due to the population of slaves, the cost of compensation, and the difficulties in relocating them
 * Would gradual emancipation work? Here's how it would: emancipation would have to be gradual and extended over many years to minimize costs. Owners would be compensated with funds from a national tax and revenue from sold western lands. The freed slaves would be transported elsewhere (overseas, the American West, or the Caribbeans).
 * Any emancipation plan would be under a federal governmment that was empowered to act for the entire nation, which drew up fears of "consolidation" and screamed of sxcessive power of federal government
 * Franklin was the only revolutionary leader who directly opposed slavery: the others skirted around the debates and disapproved due to the fragility of the new government.
 * Madison exemplified Virginian position: while he vehemently disagreed with the proslavery arguments, he refused to take any stance of pro- or antislavery, and felt abolition was still premature and would lead to nothing positiive
 * Slavery was taboo because it exposed the inherent contradictions of the Virginian position and had the greatest potential to tear the union apart
 * A secret deal was struck, and the Quaker report was accepted in order to set a constitutional precedent that Congress could not make laws dealing with slaves
 * OVERALL LESSON: Slavery was the most explosive topic that the early American government had to deal with, as there was a clear split between proslavery and antislavery arguments that threatened to tear the nation apart; thus, it was decided that slavery was to be swept under the rug, and that the government would not meddle with at all, in order to preserve the union.