Abstract
On a cold January day in 1987 civil rights marchers moved in chanting columns toward the court house square in Forsyth county, Georgia, a place where, even in the mid-1980s, no black person could live, or even visit safely after dark. As the marchers reached the court house itself they were met by the jeers of counter-protesters, white supremacists shouting racial insults and carrying a sign which read, “The future of America, Red Necks and White Skins.”
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Notes
For an explanation of the colonial social hierarchy, see Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). John Saffin, A brief and Candid Answer to a Late Printed Sheet… (Boston, 1700), quoted in Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 7.
Bernard Bailyn and Barbara DeWolfe, Voyagers to the West (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 324. Although it may be true, as Gordon Wood argued in The Radicalism of the American Revolution that class consciousness based on occupation and wealth as we might define it today did not exist in eighteenth century colonial America, there was a sense of shared disadvantage among those at the bottom of American society. Likewise there was a shared feeling of advantage among those at the top.
For an extended version of this argument see, James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Roi Ottley and William J. Weatherby, eds., The Negro in New York: An Informal Social History, 1626–1940 (New York: New York Public Library, 1967).
Kenneth Scott, “The Slave Insurrection in New York in 1712,” New York Historical Society Quarterly 45 (1961): 43–74.
David Steven Cohen, “In Search of Carolus Africanus Rex: Afro-Dutch Folklore in New York and New Jersey,” Journal of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society 5, 3&4 (Fall & Winter, 1984): 147–162, 154.
Samuel E. Morrison, “A Poem on Election Day in Massachusetts about 1760,” Proceedings of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 18 (February, 1915): 54–61.
Absalom Aimwell, Pinkster Ode (Albany: Absalom Aimwell, Esq., 1803), quoted in Cohen, “In Search of Carolus Africanus Rex”: 154.
Robert Cottrol, The Afro-Yankee (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982),19; New York Weekly Journal, August 9, 1742, quotation in Edgar J. McManus, A History of Negro Slavery in New York (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1966), 87.
Gary Nash, Red, White, and Black: the Peoples of Early America (Inglewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1974), 285.
Howard Zinn, Twentieth Century: A People’s History (New York: Harper, 1998), 51; Nash, Urban Crucible, 134–136; Benjamin Colman to Mr. Samuel Holden, Boston, May 8, 1737, Colman Papers, unpublished papers, v. 2, Massachusetts Historical Society.
Jesse Lemisch, “Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America,” William and Mary Quarterly 25 (1968): 371–407; Zinn, People’s History, 51; Nash, Urban Crucible, 221–223.
Daniel Horsmanden, The New York Conspiracy, Thomas J. Davis, ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971). Also see Davis’ Rumor of Revolt: The Great Negro Plot in Colonial New York (New York: Free Press, 1985).
Ottley and Weatherby, eds., Negro in New York, 36–37.
Benjamin Thatcher, Traits of the Tea Party Being a Memoir of George R. T. Hewes (New York: 1835), 103–104; George Washington Williams, History of the Negro Race in America, 1619–1880 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1883, reprinted, New York: Arno Press, 1968), 332. See also William Cooper Nell, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (Boston: Robert F. Wallcut, 1855)
See the Boston Gazette, March 12, 1770 for an eye-witness account of this event.
Adams’ letter, which he signed “Crispus Attucks,” is included in Sidney Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, 1770–1800 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1973). I thank Anthony Hill for bringing this letter to my attention and for alerting me to the fact that it was not written by Attucks.
Although more than 5,000 African Americans served in the Continental Army and the southern colonies where slaveholding was largest, refused to enlist black troops. See Horton and Horton, In Hope of Liberty.
Letter “in behalf of our fellow slaves in this Province and by order of their committee,” April 20, 1773, New York Historical Society.
David Grimsted, “Anglo-American Racism and Phillis Wheatley’s ‘Sable Veil,’ ‘Length’ned Chain,’ and ‘Knitted Heart,’ ” in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, ed., Women in the Age of American Revolution (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, for the U.S. Capitol Historical Society, 1989), 443.
Linda K. Kerber, “The Meaning of Citizenship,” The Journal of American History (December 1997):833–854,841. Also see Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998).
Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992); also see Henretta, The Evolution of American Society, 1700–1815: An Interdisciplinary Analysis (Lexington: D.C. Heath Company, 1973).
Phyllis F. Field, The Politics of Race in New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982); Leonard P. Curry, The Free Black in Urban America 1800–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Paul Finkelman, “Prelude to the Fourteenth Amendment: Black Legal Rights in the Antebellum North,” Rutgers Law Journal 17, 3 & 4 (Spring and Summer, 1986): 415–482.
James Otis, The Rights of British Colonies Asserted and Proved (Boston: Edes & Gill, 1765), 37.
Phyllis F. Field, The Politics of Race in New York. Under New York’s first constitution, the property requirements for voting were a $50 freehold to vote for an congressmen, or a $250 freehold to vote for a senator or governor.
Robert V. Remini, The Revolutionary Age of Andrew Jackson (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1976), 15.
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© 2004 Joe Trotter, with Earl Lewis and Tera W. Hunter
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Horton, J.O. (2004). Urban Alliances: the Emergence of Race-Based Populism in the Age of Jackson. In: Trotter, J.W., Lewis, E., Hunter, T.W. (eds) African American Urban Experience: Perspectives from the Colonial Period to the Present. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403979162_2
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