In: Economics
What were the social effects of republicanism on groups such as African Americans, Native Americans and women since the American Revolution. Your essay should cover the time period from the 1770s to the 1840s.
Justice, republicanism, and democracy are important triggers. The patriots claimed American rights tenaciously, and carried the revolution. The Revolution brought many repercussions for the social fabric of America. As in the French Revolution there was no reign of terror. As in revolutionary Russia, there has been no substitution of the working class by the workers' classes. The revolutionary spirit had affected nearly every part of American life in some way. From slavery to women's rights, from religious life to voting, it will change American attitudes forever.
Many improvements will be immediately felt. Within another hundred years, slavery would not be abolished but the Revolution saw the beginning of an organized abolitionist movement. Almost instantly English customs such as land-inheritance rules were swept down. In America the Anglican Church will no longer survive. After all, the British king was the true head of the Church of England. During the war, states experimented with constitutional ideas when writing their own constitutions. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Americans will experience all of the big changes.
The American Revolution set forth a new perspective for its people that would have long-term implications into the future. Groups excluded from immediate equality such as slaves and women would take influence from radical movements in their later years. Americans began to believe their fight for democracy was a global struggle. Potential regimes will be modeling their policies on our policies. There are few things, including the rise of the American patriotic cause, that will shake the world order.
In the late 18th century, Slavery became a central practice of American society, and was embraced by many white Americans as natural and celebrated as a good thing. Yet the widespread tolerance of slavery (which black Americans never committed to) started to be questioned in the Revolutionary Period. The challenge came from many directions, partly from Democratic values, partly from a new evangelical religious commitment that stressed the dignity of all Christians, and partly from a decline in tobacco productivity in Virginia's most significant slave area and neighboring states.
Also in the South, the effort to free some slaves was important. In states where the cultivation of tobacco no longer required a great number of slaves, the free black population grew rapidly. One third of the African American population in Maryland was free by 1810, and three to one in Delaware free blacks outnumbered African Americans enslaved by. Even in Virginia's strong slave state the free black population in the 1780s and 1790s grew faster than ever before. This vast new free black community has created for themselves a number of public institutions that generally use the word "African" to declare their distinctive pride and insistence on equality.