European Americans held race as an important element distinguishing one social group from another in the revolutionary and early national periods. Throughout this era, there were three major races identified in North America. There were European Americans or whites, Native Americans or Indians, and Aerican Americans or “Negroes.” Most European Americans assumed an attitude of racial superiority over the other two races and enforced their ideas through war and repression.
Ideas concerning Native Americans during the late colonial and early national periods reflected a mixture of nearly 200 years of contact and the ideals of the Enlightenment. On the one hand, years of conflict convinced many European Americans that Indians were savages who needed to be exterminated. On the other hand, based on the laws of nature and reason that emphasized different stages of cultural development, some European Americans believed that Native Americans were primitives who clung to a simpler form of life centered on hunting and gathering. Neither approach reflected the reality of the Native Americans living east of the Mississippi River. Those European Americans who emphasized the need to kill Indians as unregenerate heathens and obstacles to progress ignored the fact that the warring Native Americans were defending their land from invaders. They also turned a blind eye to the thousands of Indians who accommodated European-American society by accepting Christianity and adopting many European-American cultural traits. Those European Americans influenced by the Enlightenment were also wrong-headed because they persisted in looking upon Indians as some less civilized group and created a mythology that the Native American relied almost entirely upon hunting and gathering. Since women did most of the labor in agriculture, European Americans did not think that farming was important to Indians. This position led a few philanthropists to argue that the Indians should be either converted to the ways of “civilization” or removed for their own safety from contact with the European Americans. Ultimately these ideas led to the removal policies of the Jacksonian period.
European-American attitudes toward African Americans, although challenged in the period, were less mixed. In 1761 most African Americans were slaves. Rationales existed for enslaving Africans—running the gamut from the belief in racial inferiority to the idea that slaves were captives in war—but not many European Americans worried enough about explaining the institution of slavery to fully develop such ideas. The American Revolution changed the situation by emphasizing the ideal of liberty and leading to the freedom of tens of thousands of slaves. It now became necessary to articulate a more elaborate rationale for defending racial slavery. Although men such as Thomas Jeeeerson had held that Africans did not have the same intellectual capacities as European Americans, it was only in the early 19th century that white Americans, especially in the South, developed extensive scientific arguments for racial differences.
The Enlightenment also had an impact on ideas about race concerning African Americans. About the middle of the 18th century, following the new emphasis on science embedded in the Enlightenment, an increasing number of slaveholders began to accept the humanity of their African-American slaves. However, this insight did not inevitably lead to ideas of emancipation. Instead, European Americans began to talk about the burden of owning slaves, and slave owners came to rely increasingly on subtle manipulation of the humanity of African Americans to control their slaves. Simultaneously, this new recognition did begin to challenge slavery in two ways. First, an increasing number of European Americans came to recognize the inhumanity of the international slave trade, leading to its official termination in 1808. Second, some people began to argue for the equality of all mankind, black and white. In particular, free African Americans seized upon the rhetoric of the American Revolution and turned it against the racist ideas of European Americans. Some whites also began to speak of the equality of all humans.
Racial conflict between white and black Americans assumed a variety of forms. The institution of slavery represented a type of racial conflict, since European-American masters ultimately relied upon violence in order to subjugate slaves. African-American slaves turned to intermittent violence—destruction of property, physical attacks, and occasional rebellion—to resist slavery. However, even in northern states, where slavery was abolished or was in the process of being abolished, racism existed. White Americans occasionally used collective action to attack African Americans and their developing institutions.
See also Gabriel’s Rebellion; riots.
Further reading: Joyce E. Chaplin, An An:xious Pur-s-ai-t: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975); Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Gary B. Nash, Race and Revolution (Madison, Wisc.: Madison House, 1990); Bernard W. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975).
Randolph, Edmund (1753-1813) Constitutional Convention delegate, attorney general, secretary of state Edmund Randolph was born into a wealthy Virginia planter family and became an important leader in the American Revolution. Randolph studied at the College of William and Mary. When the Revolutionary War (1775-83) broke out, father and son were torn apart by their opposing political views concerning the future of the colonies. Edmund’s father, John Randolph, remained loyal to the Crown and followed the royal governor, John Murray, lord Dunmore, to England in 1776. But his son Edmund embraced the revolutionary cause and served as an aide-de-camp to General George Washington. Only 23 years old, Randolph became the youngest delegate in Virginia, and he emerged as an ardent supporter of the adoption of Virginia’s first state constitution in 1776 (see also constitutions, state).
During the war Randolph continued to pursue an ambitious political career. He first became mayor of Williamsburg and then Virginia’s attorney general. In 1779 he attended the Second Continental Congress and was elected governor of Virginia in 1785. His great moment in U. S. history came when Randolph, the leader of the Virginia delegation, submitted the so-called Virginia Plan to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. This bold plan called for the annulment of the Articles of Coneederation and the creation of an entirely new constitution. The Virginia Plan proposed a strong central government with separate legislative, executive, and judicial branches. The plan also called for a bicameral Congress with the lower house (House of Representatives) elected by the people and an upper house (Senate) chosen by the lower house from nominees proposed by the state legislatures. After three days of furious debate and revision, the Virginia Plan became the basis of the United States Constitution.
By the time the Constitution was adopted, Randolph ironically declined to sign it because he worried about the increased power of the presidential office, which he saw as a “foetus of monarchy.” When the Constitution was submitted to the Virginia convention, Randolph, however, urged the delegates to approve the document to prevent a breakup of the United States into a loose confederation. Under President Washington, Edmund Randolph became the attorney general of the United States, and he succeeded Thomas Jeeeerson as secretary of state in 1794. The next year, the British minister to the United States released French diplomatic papers that falsely accused Randolph of seeking bribes from foreign diplomats for giving secret information. The compromised Randolph resigned from public office the same year and his political career never recovered from this denunciation. He resumed his law practice but returned once again to the public arena when he became Aaron Burr’s major legal counsel in his trial for treason in 1807. Randolph’s name was completely cleared after his death in 1813.
Further reading: Melvin E. Bradford, Edmund Randolph: Lawyer Political Leader of Virginia, and American Statesman (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1994); John J. Reardon, Edmund Randolph: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1975).
—Dirk Voss
Randolph, John (1773-1833) representative, senator John Randolph was an independent-minded member of the Democratic-Republican Party. He was born on June 2, 1773, in Prince George County, Virginia. His formal education was sporadic, including stints at Princeton, Columbia, and William and Mary, none of which produced a completed degree. With the death of his mother in 1787, and his brothers in the 1790s (Randolph’s father died in 1775), he settled down to manage the family estate. By 1799 he entered politics as a Democratic-Republican and a supporter of Thomas Jeeeerson.
With Jefferson’s election in 1800, Randolph exercised considerable power in Congress. He served as chair of the important Ways and Means Committee. He set aside his growing concern over centralized federal power to help Jefferson accomplish the Louisiana Purchase (1803).
Randolph believed in a strict constructionist, states’ rights interpretation of the United States Constitution. He distrusted the modernizing democracy of early 19th-century America. He once said, “I am an aristocrat.
. . . I love liberty; I hate equality.” Randolph’s political inflexibility would characterize his political career. Paradoxically, he grew to oppose Jefferson the man, while espousing what he believed were the true, and betrayed, Jeffersonian principles.
Yet Randolph did not limit his opposition to Jefferson. He challenged James Madison and James Monroe, even as he attacked the Federalist Party. Speaking before Congress in 1806, Randolph declared himself a tertiwm quid, which is to say someone who cannot be defined. He led a failed attempt to impeach Justice Samuel Chase; the bungled case caused lasting damage to Randolph’s reputation. He opposed the Democratic-Republican administration’s position on the Yazoo claims and the purchase of Florida.
Randolph had been plagued by health problems his whole life, but in his later years heavy drinking and opium use accelerated the physical decline. He died on May 24, 1833. Even in death, Randolph proved defiant of convention. He was buried facing west, purportedly so he could “keep an eye on Henry Clay.”
Further reading: Robert Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979).
—Jay R. Dew
World History
