DOCUMENT PROJECT 8

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. The majority of African Americans in the early Republic 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 8.2), slavery was a brutal system. The English Quaker Robert Sutcliff noted this physical brutality in his travels to Virginia and Pennsylvania (Document 8.3). While slave revolts were rare, those that occurred involved extensive planning, as suggested by the confession of a slave involved in one plot (Document 8.1).

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 8.4). In 1794, Richard Allen (Document 8.5) and other African Americans organized the St. Thomas African Methodist Episcopal Church of Philadelphia, the nation’s first independent black church.

As you read the following documents, think about what they reveal about popular white perceptions of African Americans and what they suggest about how blacks sought to carve out a place for themselves in the early Republic.