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This book reveals a little-known aspect of American history: English colonists in New England enslaved thousands of Indians. Massachusetts became the first English colony to legalize slavery in 1641, and the colonists' desire for slaves shaped the major New England Indian wars. When the wartime conquest of Indians ceased, New Englanders turned to the courts to get control of their labor, or imported Indians from Florida and the Carolinas, or simply claimed free Indians as slaves. This book recovers the slaves' own stories and shows how they influenced New England society. Some achieved freedom and power in this new colonial culture, but others experienced violence, surveillance, and family separations. The book also explains how slavery linked the fate of Africans and Indians. The trade in Indian captives connected New England to Caribbean and Atlantic slave economies. Indians labored on sugar plantations in Jamaica, tended fields in the Azores, and rowed English naval galleys in Tangier. Indian slaves outnumbered Africans within New England before 1700, but the balance soon shifted. Fearful of the growing African population, local governments stripped Indian and African servants and slaves of legal rights and personal freedoms. Nevertheless, because Indians remained a significant part of the slave population, the New England colonies did not adopt all of the rigid racial laws typical of slave societies in Virginia and Barbados. The book finds that second-and third-generation Indian slaves fought their enslavement and claimed citizenship in cases that had implications for all enslaved peoples in eighteenth-century America.

This book explores a series of extended public pronouncements that British North American colonial lawyers crafted from 1761 through 1776. Most, though not all, were composed outside of the courtroom and detached from ongoing litigation. Although these writings and speeches have been long studied as political theory, they are rarely viewed as the work product of active lawyers—this despite the fact that key protagonists in the story of American independence were members of the bar with extensive practices. This book is an attempt to broaden our understanding of the role that lawyering played in framing and resolving the revolutionary crisis.

By the time William Penn was planning the colony that would come to be called Pennsylvania, with Philadelphia at its heart, Europeans on both sides of the ocean had long experience with the hazards of city life, disease the most terrifying among them. Drawing from those experiences, colonists hoped to create new urban forms that combined the commercial advantages of a seaport with the health benefits of the country. This book details how early Americans struggled to preserve their collective health against both the strange new perils of the colonial environment and the familiar dangers of the traditional city, through a period of profound transformation in both politics and medicine. Philadelphia was the paramount example of this reforming tendency. Tracing the city's history from its founding on the banks of the Delaware River in 1682 to the yellow fever outbreak of 1793, the book emphasizes the importance of public health and population control in decisions made by the city's planners and leaders. It also shows that key figures in the city's history, including Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush, brought their keen interest in science and medicine into the political sphere. The book makes clear that medicine and politics were inextricably linked, and that both undergirded the debates over such crucial concerns as the city's location, its urban plan, its immigration policy, and its creation of institutions of public safety. In framing the history of Philadelphia through the imperatives of public health, the book offers a bold new vision of the urban history of colonial America.

This book reveals how wartime pressures nurtured a budding patriotism in the ethnically diverse revolutionary community of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. During the Revolutionary War, American revolutionaries held more than 13,000 prisoners in makeshift detention camps far from the fighting. As the Americans' principal site for incarcerating enemy prisoners of war, Lancaster stood at the nexus of two vastly different revolutionary worlds: one national, the other intensely local. Captives came under the control of local officials loosely supervised by state and national authorities. Concentrating the prisoners in the heart of their communities brought the revolutionaries' enemies to their doorstep, with residents now facing a daily war at home. Many prisoners openly defied their hosts, fleeing, plotting, and rebelling, often with the clandestine support of local loyalists. By early 1779, General George Washington, furious over the captives' ongoing attempts to subvert the American war effort, branded them “dangerous guests in the bowels of our Country.” The challenge of creating an autonomous national identity in the newly emerging United States was nowhere more evident than in Lancaster, where the establishment of a detention camp served as a flashpoint for new conflict in a community already unsettled by stark ethnic, linguistic, and religious differences. Many Lancaster residents soon sympathized with the Hessians detained in their town while the loyalist population considered the British detainees to be the true patriots of the war. The book demonstrates that in Lancaster, the notably local character of the war reinforced not only preoccupations with internal security but also novel commitments to cause and country.

The statesman and political philosopher Edmund Burke (1729–1797) is a touchstone for modern conservatism in the United States, and his name and his writings have been invoked by figures ranging from the arch Federalist George Cabot to the twentieth-century political philosopher Leo Strauss. But Burke's legacy has neither been consistently associated with conservative thought nor has his political vision been fully appreciated by his American admirers or detractors. This book traces Burke's reception and reputation in the United States. The book is sensitive to the relationship between American opinions about Burke and the changing circumstances of American life. The dynamic tension between conservative and liberal attitudes in American society surfaced in debates over the French Revolution, Jacksonian democracy, Gilded Age values, Progressive reform, Cold War anticommunism, and post-1960s liberalism. The post-World War II rediscovery of Burke by New Conservatives and their adoption of him as the “father of conservatism” provided an intellectual foundation for the conservative ascendancy of the late twentieth century. Highlighting the Burkean influence on such influential writers as George Bancroft, E. L. Godkin, and Russell Kirk, the book also explores the underappreciated impact of Burke's thought on four U.S. presidents: John Adams and John Quincy Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. Through close and keen readings of political speeches, public lectures, and works of history and political theory and commentary, the book offers a sweeping account of the American political scene over two centuries.

Was there a conservative Enlightenment? Could a self-proclaimed man of learning and progressive science also have been an agent of monarchy and reaction? Cadwallader Colden (1688–1776), an educated Scottish emigrant and powerful colonial politician, was at the forefront of American intellectual culture in the mid-eighteenth century. While living in rural New York, he recruited family, friends, servants, and slaves into multiple scientific ventures and built a transatlantic network of contacts and correspondents that included Benjamin Franklin and Carl Linnaeus. Over several decades, Colden pioneered colonial botany, produced new theories of animal and human physiology, authored an influential history of the Iroquois, and developed bold new principles of physics and an engaging explanation of the cause of gravity. This book traces the life and ideas of this fascinating and controversial “gentleman-scholar.” It explores the overlapping ideological, social, and political worlds of this earliest of New York intellectuals. Colden and other learned colonials used intellectual practices to assert their gentility and establish their social and political superiority, but their elitist claims to cultural authority remained flimsy and open to widespread local derision. Although Colden, who governed New York as an unpopular Crown loyalist during the imperial crises of the 1760s and 1770s, was brutally lampooned by the New York press, his scientific work, which was published in Europe, raised the international profile of American intellectualism.

In the spring of 1789, within weeks of the establishment of the new federal government based on the U.S. Constitution, the Senate and House of Representatives fell into dispute regarding how to address the president. Congress, the press, and individuals debated more than thirty titles, many of which had royal associations and some of which were clearly monarchical. This book is a rich account of the title controversy and its meanings. The short, intense legislative phase and the prolonged, equally intense public phase animated and shaped the new nation's broadening political community. Rather than simply reflecting an obsession with etiquette, the question challenged Americans to find an acceptable balance between power and the people's sovereignty while assuring the country's place in the Atlantic world. The book argues that the resolution of the controversy in favor of the modest title of “President” established the importance of recognition of the people's views by the president and evidence of modesty in the presidency, an approach to leadership that fledged the presidency's power by not flaunting it. How the country titled the president reflected the views of everyday people, as well as the recognition by social and political elites of the irony that authority rested with acquiescence to egalitarian principles. The controversy's outcome affirmed the republican character of the country's new president and government, even as the conflict was the opening volley in increasingly partisan struggles over executive power. As such, the dispute is as relevant today as in 1789.

This book recreates the social and economic milieu of Maryland's Eastern Shore at a time when black slavery and black freedom existed side by side. It follows a generation of manumitted African Americans and their freeborn children and grandchildren through the process of inventing new identities, associations, and communities in the early nineteenth century. Free Africans and their descendants had lived in Maryland since the seventeenth century, but before the American Revolution they were always few in number and lacking in economic resources or political leverage. By contrast, manumitted and freeborn African Americans in the early republic refashioned the Eastern Shore's economy and society, earning their livings as wage laborers while establishing thriving African American communities. As free workers in a slave society, these African Americans contested the legitimacy of the slave system even while they remained dependent laborers. They limited white planters' authority over their time and labor by reuniting their families in autonomous households, settling into free black neighborhoods, negotiating labor contracts that suited the needs of their households, and worshipping in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Some moved to the cities, but many others migrated between employers as a strategy for meeting their needs and thwarting employers' control. They demonstrated that independent and free African American communities could thrive on their own terms. In all of these actions the free black workers of the Eastern Shore played a pivotal role in ongoing debates about the merits of a free labor system.

This book, originally published in 1727 and revised in 1747, is one of the most important intellectual works published in eighteenth-century British America. The author was among the most learned American men of his time, and his history of the Iroquois tribes makes fascinating reading. The book discusses the religion, manners, customs, laws, and forms of government of the confederacy of tribes composed of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas (and, later, the Tuscaroras), and gives accounts of battles, treaties, and trade with these Indians up to 1697. Since the book was first reprinted in 1958, it has served as an invaluable resource for scholars and students interested in Iroquois history and culture, Enlightenment attitudes toward Native Americans, early American intellectual life, and Anglo-French imperial contests over North America. This new edition features materials not previously included, such as the 1747 introduction, which contains rich and detailed descriptions of Iroquois culture, government, economy, and society. New chapters place the volume in a historical and cultural context and provide a balanced introduction to the historic culture of the Iroquois, as well as their relationship to other Native people.

This book examines the complex patterns of diplomatic, political, and social communication among the American Indian peoples of the Hudson Valley—including the Mahicans, Wappingers, and Esopus Indians—from the early seventeenth century through the American Revolutionary era. By focusing on how members of different Native groups interacted with one another, this book places Indians rather than Europeans on center stage. The book uncovers a vast and multifaceted Native American world that was largely hidden from the eyes of the Dutch and English colonists who gradually displaced the indigenous peoples of the Hudson Valley. The book establishes the surprising extent to which numerically small and militarily weak Indian groups continued to understand the world around them in their own terms, and as often engaged—sometimes violently, sometimes cooperatively—with neighboring peoples to the east (New England Indians) and west (the Iroquois) as with the Dutch and English colonizers. Even as they fell more and more under the domination of powerful outsiders—Iroquois as well as Dutch and English—the Hudson Valley Indians were resilient, maintaining or adapting features of their traditional diplomatic ties until the moment of their final dispossession during the American Revolutionary War.

This book argues that the idea that citizens' advancement should depend exclusively on merit, on qualities that deserve reward rather than on bloodlines or wire-pulling, was among the Founding ideals of the American republic. It contends that merit's history is best understood within the context of its often conflicting interaction with the other ideals of the Founding, equal rights and government by consent. The book traces merit's history over three centuries. It asserts that Americans have reconciled merit with other principles of the Founding in ways that have shaped their distinctive approach to the grading of public schools, report cards, the forging of workplace hierarchies, employee rating forms, merit systems in government, the selection of officers for the armed forces, and standardized testing for intelligence, character, and vocational interests. The Founding generation equated merit with an inner quality that accounted for their achievements that was best measured by their reputations among their peers. In a republic based on equal rights and consent of the people, it became important to establish that merit-based rewards were within the grasp of ordinary Americans. In response, Americans embraced institutional merit in the form of procedures focused on drawing small distinctions among average people. They also developed a penchant for increasing the number of winners in competitions—what the book calls “selection in” rather than “selection out”—in order to satisfy popular aspirations. The book argues that values rooted in the Founding of the republic continue to influence Americans' approach to controversies, including those surrounding affirmative action, which involve the ideal of merit.

This book is a cultural history of the Seven Years’ War in French-claimed North America, focused on the meanings of wartime violence and the impact of the encounter between Canadian, Indian, and French cultures of war and diplomacy. The book highlights the relationship between events in France and events in America and frames them dialogically, as the actors themselves experienced them at the time. It examines how codes of martial valor were enacted and challenged by metropolitan and colonial leaders to consider how those acts affected French–Indian relations, the culture of French military elites, ideas of male valor, and the trajectory of French colonial enterprises afterwards, in the second half of the eighteenth century. The book shows the period of the Seven Years’ War to be one of decisive transformation for all American communities. Ultimately the augmented strife between metropolitan and colonial elites over the aims and means of warfare, raised questions about the meaning and cost of empire not just in North America but in the French Atlantic and, later, resonated in France’s approach to empire-building around the globe. The book shows how the lessons of New France were assimilated and new colonial enterprises were constructed based on a heightened jealousy of French honor and a corresponding fear of its loss in engagement with Native enemies and allies.

Revolutionary America was fertile ground for religious upheaval, as self-proclaimed visionaries and prophets established new religious sects. Among these figures was Jemima Wilkinson. Born in 1752 and raised in a Quaker household in Cumberland, Rhode Island, Wilkinson began her ministry in 1776 when, in the midst of an illness, she announced her own death and reincarnation as the Public Universal Friend, a heaven-sent prophet who was neither female nor male. This book tells the story of Wilkinson and her church, the Society of Universal Friends. Wilkinson's message was simple: humankind stood on the brink of the Apocalypse, but salvation was available to all who accepted God's grace and the authority of his prophet: the Public Universal Friend. She preached widely in southern New England and Pennsylvania, attracted hundreds of devoted followers, formed them into a religious sect, and, by the late 1780s they had established a religious community near present-day Penn Yan, New York. Disputes from within and without dogged the sect, and many disciples drifted away or turned against the Friend. After Wilkinson's “second” and final death in 1819, the Society rapidly fell into decline and, by the mid-nineteenth century, ceased to exist. The prophet's ministry spanned the American Revolution and shaped the nation's religious landscape during the unquiet interlude between the first and second Great Awakenings. This book offers important insights about changes to religious life, gender, and society during this formative period, and is a comprehensive history of an important and too little known figure in the spiritual landscape of early America.

This book offers a bold genealogy that shows how gender came to determine the right of access to the Anglo-American public sphere by the middle of the eighteenth century. Earlier, high-status men and women alike had been recognized as appropriate political actors. By contrast, when the first ordinary English women to claim a political voice directed group petitions to Parliament during the Civil War of the 1640s, men relentlessly criticized and parodied their efforts. Even so, as late as 1690, Anglo-American women's political interests and opinions were publicly acknowledged. The book traces the profound shift in attitudes toward women's participation in public affairs to the age's cultural arbiters, including John Dunton, editor of the Athenian Mercury, a popular 1690s periodical that promoted women's links to husband, family, and household. Fittingly, Dunton was the first author known to apply the word “private” to women and their domestic lives. Subsequently, the immensely influential authors Richard Steele and Joseph Addison advanced the notion that women's participation in politics—even in political dialogues—was absurd. They and many imitators on both sides of the Atlantic argued that women should confine themselves to home and family, a position that American women themselves had adopted by the 1760s. Colonial women incorporated the novel ideas into their self-conceptions; during such “private” activities as sitting around a table drinking tea, they worked to define their own lives. On the cusp of the American Revolution, the book concludes, a newly gendered public–private division was firmly in place.

This book argues that the high-ranking gentlemen who figure so prominently in most accounts of New York City's evolution from 1664, when the English captured the small Dutch outpost of New Amsterdam, to the eve of American independence in 1776 were far from invincible and that the degree of cultural power they held has been exaggerated. The urban elite experienced challenges to its cultural authority at different times, from different groups, and in a variety of settings. The book illuminates the conflicts that pitted the privileged few against the socially anonymous many who mobilized their modest resources to creatively resist domination. Critics of orthodox religious practice took to heart the message of spiritual rebirth brought to New York City by the famed evangelist George Whitefield and were empowered to make independent religious choices. Wives deserted husbands and took charge of their own futures. Indentured servants complained or simply ran away. Enslaved women and men carved out spaces where they could control their own lives and salvage their dignity. Impoverished individuals, including prostitutes, chose not to bow to the dictates of the elite, even though it meant being cut off from the sources of charity. Among those who confronted the elite were descendants of the early Dutch settlers; by clinging to their native language and traditional faith they preserved a crucial sense of autonomy.