Phineas Bond
Phineas Bond

Author: Joanne Loewe Neel

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2016-11-11

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1512804827

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Seven years of war forced a reluctant mother country to recognize the independence of the thirteen American colonies. With the signing of the treaty at Paris on the 3rd of September 1783, the rebellion came to a formal end, and a new state entered the family of nations. But the resulting peace stopped short of men's minds and spirits. There was no binding up of wounds nor forgetting of past injuries. On the contrary, hatred persisted and, if anything, intensified. On both sides of the Atlantic a nurturing of grievances, of suspicions, and of jealousies continued. For over thirty years Britons and Americans viewed one another with a jaundiced eye until a second peace treaty—this time at Ghent in 1814—brought to a formal close a second Anglo-American war. In the midst of this long, drawn-out conflict moved Phineas Bond, Esq. He reached the age of reason in Philadelphia before the outbreak of the War for Independence and was politically active in Pennsylvania from the beginning of what he called, "the Time of Troubles." He played a role as an American Tory, albeit a brief one, in the Revolution itself and with thousands of other Loyalists sought asylum in England. During a seemingly endless exile he became one of the most trusted attorneys of those British merchants in the Atlantic trade to whom Americans owed vast sums of money. Three years after the Peace of Paris, Bond returned to Philadelphia as His Britannic Majesty's consul to the middle states and as a representative of the merchants. There he remained, serving king and traders, until the eve of the War of 1812. Although occupying comparatively minor posts, Bond became a microcosm of his time. His thoughts and work, his dreams and hopes, his experiences and convictions point up the era between the two wars for American independence.

Slavery’s Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution
Slavery’s Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution

Author: Timothy Messer-Kruse

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2024-10-31

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0807183156

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Slavery’s Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution unearths a long-hidden factor that led to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. While historians have generally acknowledged that patriot leaders assembled in response to postwar economic chaos, the threat of popular insurgencies, and the inability of the states to agree on how to fund the national government, Timothy Messer-Kruse suggests that scholars have discounted Americans’ desire to compel Britain to return fugitives from slavery as a driving force behind the convention. During the Revolutionary War, British governors offered freedom to enslaved Americans who joined the king’s army. Thousands responded by fleeing to English camps. After the British defeat at Yorktown, American diplomats demanded the surrender of fugitive slaves. When British generals refused, several states confiscated Loyalist estates and blocked payment of English creditors, hoping to apply enough pressure on the Crown to hand over the runaways. State laws conflicting with the 1783 Treaty of Paris violated the Articles of Confederation—the young nation’s first constitution—but Congress, lacking an executive branch or a federal judiciary, had no means to obligate states to comply. The standoff over the escaped slaves quickly escalated following the Revolution as Britain failed to abandon the western forts it occupied and took steps to curtail American commerce. More than any other single matter, the impasse over the return of enslaved Americans threatened to hamper the nation’s ability to expand westward, develop its commercial economy, and establish itself as a power among the courts of Europe. Messer-Kruse argues that the issue encouraged the founders to consider the prospect of scrapping the Articles of Confederation and drafting a superseding document that would dramatically increase federal authority—the Constitution.

Citizen Sailors
Citizen Sailors

Author: Nathan Perl-Rosenthal

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2015-10-12

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 0674915550

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In the decades after the United States formally declared its independence in 1776, Americans struggled to gain recognition of their new republic and their rights as citizens. None had to fight harder than the nation’s seamen, whose labor took them far from home and deep into the Atlantic world. Citizen Sailors tells the story of how their efforts to become American at sea in the midst of war and revolution created the first national, racially inclusive model of United States citizenship. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal immerses us in sailors’ pursuit of safe passage through the ocean world during the turbulent age of revolution. Challenged by British press-gangs and French privateersmen, who considered them Britons and rejected their citizenship claims, American seamen demanded that the U.S. government take action to protect them. In response, federal leaders created a system of national identification documents for sailors and issued them to tens of thousands of mariners of all races—nearly a century before such credentials came into wider use. Citizenship for American sailors was strikingly ahead of its time: it marked the federal government’s most extensive foray into defining the boundaries of national belonging until the Civil War era, and the government’s most explicit recognition of black Americans’ equal membership as well. This remarkable system succeeded in safeguarding seafarers, but it fell victim to rising racism and nativism after 1815. Not until the twentieth century would the United States again embrace such an inclusive vision of American nationhood.

The Scots Revised Reports
The Scots Revised Reports

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 1898

Total Pages: 1014

ISBN-13:

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Contents--I. Robertson's Appeals and Paton's Appeals, vols. I, II and III. 1707-1797.--II. Paton's Appeals, vols. IV, V and VII. 1797-1821.--III. Dow's Appeals, vols. I to VI, and Bligh's Appeals, vols. I to III. 1813-1821.--IV. Shaw's Appeals, 2 vols. and Wilson & Shaw's Appeals, vols. III to V. 1828-1831.--VI. Wilson & Shaw's Appeals, vols. VI and VII, Shaw & Maclean's Appeals, vols. I and II. 1832-1837.--VII. Shaw & Maclean's Appeals, vol. III, Maclean & Robinson's Appeals, Robinson's Appeals, vols. I and II. 1838-1841.--VIII. Bell's Appeals, vols. I to VI. 1842-1849.--IX. Bell's Appeals, vol. VII, Macqueen's Appeals, vols. I and II. 1850-1857.--X. Macqueen's Appeals, vols. III and IV. 1857-1865.

Patriot-improvers: 1743-1768
Patriot-improvers: 1743-1768

Author: Whitfield J. Bell (Jr.)

Publisher: American Philosophical Society

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 562

ISBN-13: 9780871692269

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When Benjamin Franklin adopted John Bartram's 1739 idea of bringing together the "virtuosi" of the colonies to promote inquiries into "natural secrets, arts and syances," the result was, in 1743, the founding of the American Philosophical Society. Bell records the early years of the Society through sketches of its first members, those elected between 1743 and 1769. This volume includes biographies of some of the Society's best known members such as Franklin, David Rittenhouse, John Bartram, Benjamin Rush, John Dickinson, Thomas Hopkinson and many lesser known merchants, artisans, farmers, physicians, lawyers and clergymen with familiar surnames such as Biddle, Colden, and Morris. Illustrations.

Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic World
Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic World

Author: John McCusker

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2005-08-15

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1134703406

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Written by one of the leading authorities on trade and finance in the early modern Atlantic world, these fourteen essays, revised and integrated for this volume, share as their common theme the development of the Atlantic economy, especially British America and the Caribbean. Topics treated range from early attempts in medieval England to measure the carrying capacity of ships, through the advent in Renaissance Italy and England of business newspapers that reported on the traffic of ships, cargoes and market prices, to the state of the economy of France over the two hundred years before the French Revolution and of the British West Indies between 1760 and 1790. Included is the story of Thomas Irving who challenged and thwarted the likes of John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.