lOMoARcPSD 31101189 Chapter 7 Notes Chapter 7 Notes United States History Ii Northern Virginia Community College United States History Ii Northern Virginia Community College Studocu is not sponsored or endorsed by any college or university Studocu is not sponsored or endorsed by any college or university Downloaded by Arya Shah apancake99 gmail com lOMoARcPSD 31101189 Chapter 7 The Early Republic Introduction o Jefferson electoral victory over John Adams and the larger victory of the Republicans over the Federalists was but one of many changes in the early republic o Some like Jefferson s victory were accomplished peacefully and others violently o The wealthy and the powerful middling and poor whites Native Americans free and enslaved African Americas influential and poor women all demanded a voice in the nation that Thomas Pain called an Asylum for liberty Free and Enslaved Black Americans and the Challenge to Slavery o Gabriel s Rebellion Led by the slave Gabriel close to 1000 enslaved men planned to end slavery in Virginia by attacking Richmond in late August 1800 Some of the conspirators would set divisionary fires in the city s warehouse district Others would attack Richmond s white residents seize weapons and capture Virginia governor James Monroe On August 30 2 enslaved men revealed the plot to their masters who notified authorities Faced with bad weather Gabriel and other leaders postponed the attack until the next night giving Governor Monroe and the militia time to capture the conspirators After briefly escaping Gabriel was seized tried and hanged along with 25 others Their executions sent the message that others would be punished if they challenged slavery Subsequently the Virginia governor increased restrictions on free people of color Suggested that enslaved blacks were capable of preparing and carrying out a sophisticated and violent revolution undermining white supremacist assumptions about the inherent intellectual inferiority of blacks Demonstrated that white efforts to suppress news of other slave revolts had failed Not only did some literate slaves read accounts of the successful attack in Virginia s newspapers others heard about the rebellion firsthand when slaveholding refugees from Haiti arrived in Virginia with their slaves after July 1793 Inspired free and enslaved black Americans and terrified white Americans Port cities in the U S were flooded with news and refugees Free people of color embraced the revolution understanding it as a call for full abolition and the rights of citizenship denied in the United States Over the next several decades black Americans continually looked to Haiti as an inspiration in their struggle for freedom o Haitian Revolution Downloaded by Arya Shah apancake99 gmail com lOMoARcPSD 31101189 Haiti also proved that given equal opportunities people of color could achieve as much as whites Haiti and the activism it inspired sent the message that enslaved and free blacks could not be omitted from conversations about the meaning of liberty and equality o The black activism inspired by Haiti s revolution was so powerful that anxious white leaders scrambled to use the violence of the Haitian revolt to reinforce white supremacy and pro slavery views by limiting the social and political lives of people of color o White publications mocked black Americans as buffoons ridiculing calls for abolition o The most in famous of these the Bobalition broadsides published in the 18180s and equal rights crudely caricatured African Americans o Henry Moss A slave in Virginia became arguably the most famous black man of the day when white spots appeared on his body in 1792 turning him visibly white within 3 years As his skin changed he marketed himself as a great curiosity in Philadelphia soon earning enough money to buy his own freedom He met the great scientists of the era including Samuel Stanhope Smith and Dr Benjamin Rush who joyously deemed Moss to be living proof of their theory that the Black Color as it is called of the Negroes is derived from the leprosy o The first decades of the new American coincided with a radical shift in understandings of race o Politically and culturally Enlightenment thinking fostered beliefs in common humanity the possibility of societal progress the remaking of oneself and the importance of one s social and ecological environment a four pronged revolt against the hierarchies of the Old World o Division of Race Carolus Linnaeus Comte de Buffon Johan Friedrich Blumenbach and others created connections between race and place as they divided the racial types of the world according to skin color cranial measurement and hair They claimed that years under the hot sun and tropical climate of Africa darkened the skin and reconfigured the skulls of the African race whereas the cold northern latitudes of Europe molded and sustained the Caucasian race Jefferson thought Native Americans could improve and become civilized and he declared in his Notes on the State of Virginia 1784 that black people were incapable of mental improvement and that they might even have a separate ancestry a theory known as polygenesis or multiple creations This belief was to justify schemes for white America such as the plan to gradually send freed slaves back to Africa Downloaded by Arya Shah apancake99 gmail com lOMoARcPSD 31101189 Many Americans believed nature had made the white and black races too different to peacefully coexist and they viewed African colonization as the solution to America s racial problem o White Americans were forced to acknowledge that if the black population was indeed whitening it resulted from interracial sex and not the environment o The sense of inspiration and wonder that followed Henry Moss in the 1790 s would have been impossible just a generation later Jefferson Republicanism o Free and enslaved black Americans were not alone in pushing against political o Jefferson s election to the presidency in 1800 represented a victory for non elite white Americans in their bid to assume more direct control over the government o Elites had made no secret of their hostility toward the direct control of government hierarchies by the people o He desired to convince Americans and the world that a government that answered directly to the people would lead to lasting national union not anarchic division o He wanted to prove that free people could govern themselves democratically o Defined American union by the voluntary bonds of