The American Revolutionists and Their “Equality”
...ion, with the presence of 450,000 enslaved African Americans in the 13 colonies. Slavery was practiced in every colony in 1775, but it was crucial to the economy and social structure from the Chesapeake region south. Slave labor produced the major of export crops of the South, tobacco, rice and indigo. Bringing slaves from Africa and the West Indies had made settlement of the New World possible and highly profitable. The British governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, helped to create an opinion of the African‘s in the colonies. In November 1775, he issued a proclamation promising freedom to any slave of a rebel who could make it to the British lines. Dunmore organized an brigade of about 300 African Americans, who saw action at the Battle of Great Bridge (December 9, 1775). Dunmore and the British were soon expelled from Virginia, but the prospect of armed former slaves fighting alongside the British must have struck fear into plantation masters across the South. Let us not forget the ladies. During the post-Revolutionary period women remained subordinate to men, but after the turn of the century their subordination became constructed in a new way. Broadly speaking, the "Republican motherhood" of the immediate postwar period shaded into the "true womanhood" of the early nineteenth century. The roles are not sharply distinguished. Both, for example, attended to the domestic sphere and to matters moral and religious. The difference between them lay in the way they engaged the world beyond the home. Republican mothers would not be ignored. Inspired by the Revolution, they claimed a role in the civic philosophy of the new nation. “True women“, on the other hand, were more passive. Inspired by their religious and societal rolls, they focused on home and family. Women were considered weaker then men, and therefore did not do physical work. In the religious aspect, the women were viewed as lower beings, based mostly on Eve and the Garden of Eden, and her lack of reasoning a...