This chapter introduces readers to the formative ideas and debates of nineteenth-century African American political thought. This period covers the era of antislavery activism before the US Civil War (1861–65), which abolished slavery, to the immediate aftermath of that period, known as Reconstruction (1865–77). It was in this latter period in which the US federal government intervened militarily and economically in the US South to ensure newly emancipated Black citizens would have their freedoms protected. Through figures such as David Walker, Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, Frances Harper, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Delany, readers will learn how Black thinkers confronted slavery, racial hierarchy, and gender oppression while generating some of the most influential theories of freedom and equality in American history.

A central learning objective of this chapter is to show how political theory emerges not only from institutions but also from lived experience, moral outrage, and collective struggle. By the end of the chapter, readers will be able to explain how African American political thought identified the contradictions at the heart of American democracy and articulated powerful visions for racial justice and human liberation.

Phillis’s brief life coincided with one of the most consequential periods in American – indeed world – history, spanning the years between the accession of George III and the establishment of the United States. She survived the Middle Passage. The vessel that brought her from Africa to America became her namesake when John and Susanna Wheatley purchased her. Phillis arrived in Boston at the beginning of the reign of George III and during the transatlantic evangelical Christian movement known as the Great Awakening. Susanna Wheatley felt obligated her to enable Phillis to read the Bible and to become an evangelist herself. Colonial demands during the American Revolution for liberty from tyranny, based on natural rights, were often expressed as calls for freedom from political enslavement. Challenges to metaphorical enslavement inevitably led to questions about whether colonial enslavers could justify the actual chattel enslavement of people of African descent.

Describes uses of pardons and offers of pardon by British and American sides in American Revolution to attract adherents of the other side. Also details the pardon powers of the original state governments of the United States and describes the use of those powers during and after the Revolution for ordinary crimes and crimes of allegiance.

My prologue introduces the main arguments and arc of the book. As I explain, Revolutionary Ink traces two interrelated but ultimately opposing currents. Beginning in 1693, it shows how New York’s printing presses initially inspired fealty to the British Commonwealth. It then registers a seismic shift at the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 when loyalty to the “ancient” liberties of all Freeborn Englishmen became paramount, a process of “Americanization” spurred by colonial presses up and down the Atlantic seaboard. I also point out that the work is neither a triumphant Whig narrative nor a teleologically inevitable one. More accurately, sheets printed in ink are transformative agents of change, with largely unforeseen consequences across changing historical and interpretive contexts. Drawing on a large body of scholarship across disciplines, Revolutionary Ink seeks to identify some of these changes in a distinct and crucial setting, unveiling a history of a city of divergent ideas, people, and institutions evolving over time, both influenced by print media and influencing it.

The American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the smaller conflicts in between helped to define who Americans became. They pursued Indian lands and freedom from impressment and British trade restrictions. These wars altered political boundaries, brought social hierarchies into sharp relief, and disoriented people’s sense of identity. Their wartime experiences shaped fighting men as well as civilians. New scholarship on war and society during the Revolutionary Era takes the actions of marginalized groups seriously, attempting to understand the experiences and allegiances of women, Black people, and Indigenous people as well as internal conflicts among whites. Recent work also explores the harshness of wartime conduct, from destruction of homes to the treatment of prisoners and civilians. These wars transformed society by forcing questions of national inclusion, cultural interaction, and racial exclusion; gendered violence and gendered upheavals; the ennobling and degradation of rank-and-file soldiers, deserters, and prisoners of war. Unmistakably an era of brutality, dispossession, and enslavement, these wars etched enduring patterns for the future of the United States.

This chapter introduces the U.S. Constitution by exploring its purposes, functions, and significance as a written document, contrasting it with Britain’s unwritten constitutional system. It argues that a written constitution limits governmental power, including legislative authority, unlike the British system of parliamentary supremacy. The chapter traces the American shift in the 1760s toward viewing constitutions as superior laws fixed by the people’s consent and enforceable against the legislature. It outlines the settlement functions of constitutions – establishing government structures, ensuring stability, and channeling disputes – emphasizing how written constitutions enhance these functions. The chapter further examines the ends of free government, balancing liberty and order through democratic self-governance and the protection of natural rights, as articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution’s preamble. It introduces the Constitution’s structural features – separation of powers, federalism, checks and balances – while addressing critiques of its alleged undemocratic nature and introducing the Founders’ intent to create republican remedies for the diseases most incident to republican government.

Phillis Wheatley Peters’s America was both a place and an idea, a reality and an aspiration. Through her writings she transformed herself from being a victim in the actual America into a voice for the America she envisioned. Wheatley Peters’ works should be considered diachronically, recognizing the significance of when she wrote what and to whom, rather than synchronically, as if her positions were unchanging over time. Anyone who attempts to identify her political beliefs must consider how free she was to express them, as well as whether the voice we hear is that of the author, rather than that of a persona she has created. Her image of America evolved radically during the 1770s, as did her vision of her place and role in it. The many ways in which Wheatley Peters subtly and indirectly confronted the issues of racism, sexism, and slavery are increasingly appreciated. Her ambition to be recognized as America’s unofficial poet laureate should be undisputed. Considered a remarkable curiosity during her lifetime, Wheatley Peters is now recognized as a major historical, literary, and political figure, whose significance transcends her ethnic, gender, and national identities.

This chapter focuses on the American Revolution of 1775–1783, which often appears as the first cause célèbre in the subsequent literature on the law of civil war. Studying closely the legal documents and case law during the revolution, it argues that the revolution of the thirteen colonies displayed a typical structure of transatlantic civil wars that was common with the early modern civil wars of Chapter 1 as well as the subsequent transatlantic revolutions. Its key features include the early emergence of an insurgent prize jurisdiction, the diplomatic disputes caused by the imperial counter-revolutionary responses, the question of foreign intervention, and ultimately the connection between sovereignty and state responsibility. It also links these phenomena with the rise of international arbitration as an essential technique of post-revolutionary settlements in the classical law of nations.

This chapter surveys almost 170 years of historical practice of and writings on irregular warfare to stress several points. It provides an empirical basis for assessing current and future irregular warfare based on codified doctrine, including best practices and observations. From the American Revolutionary War to the Second World War, several key themes emerge, including the necessity of force, the counterproductive nature of brute force and the value of objective as opposed to subjective assessments of contextual conditions. In doing so, this chapter seeks to deflate some of the influence of ‘presentism’, a bias that suggests recent experiences are unique and indicative of the future of irregular warfare. In stressing historical continuity, it acknowledges continuous elements in irregular warfare while recognising context differences.

Between 1774 and 1787, greater condemnation of the slave trade occurred from mainly Christian individuals and groups, notably Quakers, than was the case before the American War of Independence. The humanitarian arguments made, however, did not translate into coordinated campaigning against continuance of the slave trade. Both Continental Congresses banned slave importations as part of a wider package of non-importation measures on British goods, but neither had any authority to impose enforcement measures. Jefferson’s attempt to insert a clause into the Declaration of Independence to prohibit slave importations backfired as he penned words stretching far beyond the required remit of such a clause and was forced to withdraw his statement. The Confederation Congress under the Articles of Confederation lacked the political authority to deal with slave imports. Yet positive activity occurred at state level. Delaware and Vermont banned the slave trade in their state constitutions of 1776 and 1777 respectively. The Bill of Rights included in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 proscribed slave imports. The New Hampshire state constitution of 1783 also banned slave imports. In 1778 Virginia passed a statute to end slave importations to the state. The Pennsylvania gradual abolition of slavery law in 1780 incorporated a bill in the same state from the previous year that banned slave imports. Abolitionist views spread widely as a result of efforts by Anthony Benezet and other Quakers, but there was no national campaign against the slave trade. South Carolina was the state where the most acrimonious arguments occurred over the slave trade. The state legislature reopened Charleston to slave importations in 1783 and over the next four years thousands of Africans were imported. Divisions underscored the reality that proscribing the entire slave trade to the United States could only happen under the aegis of national political authority and that was absent in 1787.

This chapter explores how the Patriots deployed law in order to mobilize fellow citizens towards rebellion. In the decade before the Revolution, Patriots fashioned law in innovative ways as a language that could cross geographical and social borders in order to rally citizens to a cause. What made their appeals effective? First, the chapter asks how the settlers’ growing competence in formulating constitutional argument favored the Whigs. Second, a look at early nineteenth-century Spanish American independence movements helps explain how and why the Whigs could plausibly believe one of their core ideas – that a colony was a polity representing the rights of an underlying people. Finally, attention to the vernacular legal culture of the streets and taverns shows how Patriot legal appeals could be appropriated by ordinary people. The remarkable capacity of Whig law to bridge social and geographical distances helped make it a powerful instrument of revolutionary mobilization.

In 1798, the town of Dedham, Massachusetts became divided over the raising of a liberty pole, a political symbol first used by Patriots in the American Revolution, protesting the Sedition Law. Town residents disagreed, as their countrymen did elsewhere, over the legitimacy of popular critique of government now that Americans had transitioned from a monarchy to a republic. The Ames brothers, Fisher and Nathaniel, embodied this conflict. Fisher, a prominent Federalist, argued that to undermine the will of the majority constituted anarchy and treason. But Nathaniel, a Republican, supported the people’s right to criticize their leaders and check government power. The story of the Ames brothers and the Dedham liberty pole provides a microcosm of larger partisan debates happening throughout the United States over liberty poles, the meaning of the Revolution, and the political role of the citizenry in the new nation.

Privateers plied the waters of the Atlantic world during the American Revolution. In privately owned vessels commissioned by the Continental Congress, these seafarers brought the war to the British in the early years of the war as the Continental Navy struggled to get off the docks. The court case of Cabot v. The Nuestra Senora de Merced sheds light on this oft-overlooked aspect of the American Revolution. While sailing the waters of the Atlantic, the privateer vessel Pilgrim captured the Nuestra Senora de Merced. The privateer sent its capture into port, but these mariners would only receive payment if the Admiralty Court judged the seized ship as a lawful prize and that is where the true struggle began. Privateers were effective combatants during the war, but the means by which they achieved their ends and their public struggles for prizes colored their legacy and left them forgotten and dismissed in the Revolution’s legacy.

What was the American Revolution? More importantly, what wasn’t it? In the years following the independence of the United States, Americans thought through these questions alongside contemporary events shaking the foundations of the global imperial order. As revolutions gripped Ireland, France, Saint-Domingue, Poland, and elsewhere in the late eighteenth century, Americans began to wonder whether their own revolution was one among many radical attacks on global tyranny or if it was an unusually orderly event that deviated from other revolutions’ drift toward anarchy and terror. By the end of the 1790s, white Americans largely recognized that the American Revolution was fundamentally unlike the Haitian or French Revolutions. Yet for many decades to come, Black Americans held on to a more radical, expansive vision of the American Revolution that tied it to the legacy of the radical revolutions of the late eighteenth century.