Race Relations in
the Early Republic

In the late eighteenth century, the United States was far from extending the promises of equality and democracy championed in the Revolutionary War to all Americans. African Americans and Indians in particular were denied most civil and political rights. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson (Document 8.5) and many others were uncertain about whether the two groups could be fully incorporated into white society. When Jefferson bought the Louisiana Territory in 1803, he acquired lands inhabited by numerous Indian communities. In Document 8.6, Meriwether Lewis describes his encounter with Indians in the region. Despite promises of aid, Indian nations in the West fared no better than those in the eastern United States as white settlers, backed by government force, gradually took over Indian lands.

The majority of African Americans in the early Republic era were enslaved, and eight of the first ten presidents were slaveholders. As cotton production expanded in the South, slavery did as well, and the slave population increased dramatically after 1790. With the end of the international slave trade in 1808, owners grew even more reluctant to free their slaves. As Andrew Jackson’s 1804 ad for a runaway slave demonstrates (Document 8.8), slavery was a brutal system. The English Quaker Robert Sutcliff noted this physical brutality in his travels to Virginia and Pennsylvania (Document 8.9). While slave revolts were rare, those that occurred involved extensive planning, as suggested by the confession of a slave involved in one plot (Document 8.7).

Even free blacks lacked political and civil rights and suffered severe discrimination. However, some free blacks managed to create vibrant communities, as in Philadelphia. There African Americans agitated publicly against racism despite being denied the formal rights of citizenship (Document 8.10). The following documents reveal popular white perceptions of African Americans and Indians. They also suggest how blacks and Indians sought to carve out a place for themselves in the early Republic.