Primary Sources, September 25

We chose, for this week, primary sources that deal with the post-Revolution era and the early 19th century.

We found a great site entitled ourdocuments.gov. The authors of the site are A National Initiative on American History, Civics, and Service. The reason we find the site useful is because you can find numerous primary source documents all scanned so that you can see the actual hand writing. They have a scanned copy of the Lee resolution from 1776 all the way to the voting rights act of 1965. We chose to focus my attention on the Missouri Compromise. http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=22%20. You can move the cursor around to any part of the document to enlarge it.
The Missouri Compromise deals with weather or not Missouri would be admitted as a free or slave state. “This legislation admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a non-slave state at the same time, so as not to upset the balance between slave and free states in the nation. It also outlawed slavery above the 36º 30´ latitude line in the remainder of the Louisiana Territory.” [1].

Another website we recently discovered is devoted to Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/JefVirg.html The University of Virginia, appropriately enough, has put the entire book on the web, broken down chapter by chapter. The more interesting parts of the book have to deal with Jefferson’s views on race. In particular, Jefferson makes an argument as to why African Americans, even those who are free, cannot be allowed to stay in the country: “Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expence of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.” This is in the chapter entitled “Laws”, in which Jefferson argues that Africans are not even equal to whites, disparaging the poetry of Phyllis Wheatly. Ironically, years later he would sing the praises of Benjamin Banneker, an African American mathematician and astronomer.
The website is very reliable, due to the fact that it maintained by the University of Virginia. Such a source would be useful in showing some of the rationale for racism in late 18th century America, when people both north and south began to think seriously of ending slavery, yet not so seriously about treating blacks as equals.


[1] Citation: Conference committee report on the Missouri Compromise, March 1, 1820; Joint Committee of Conference on the Missouri Bill, 03/01/1820-03/06/1820; Record Group 128l; Records of Joint Committees of Congress, 1789-1989; National Archives.

Primary Docs September 18

While trying to look for sources for the short paper, I came across a website that has all the Charters from the original British-American colonies. There are even more primary source documents after the colonies became independent.  It is called the Avalon Project and it is set up by Yale, which leads to the websites credibility. Unlike the previous primary source document sit I came across last week this particular site does not have scanned documents, but it does seem to be very credible when you read what the Avalon Project is and why it was set up. 

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/avalon.htm 

There was another website discovered as well, that deals with the settlement of the Carolina Backcountry. It is a website created by the National Park Service, and gives basic information about the past of South Carolina's backcountry. 

http://www.nps.gov/seac/settle.htm

Primary Documents Sept. 11, 2008

This week, one of the primary documents that will be featured here is entitled "Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts", a sermon given by Bishop Secker of Oxford. In it, he argues that the time has come to aggressively spread the Christian faith among the colonies. What is most striking about his sermon is the fact that he doesn't just share his worry that Europeans in the colonies aren't getting enough of the faith. In fact, he wishes to also help African slaves and Native Americans to embrace the faith. What he proposes here is a radical alternative to what had been taking shape in the colonies from the late 17th century up until this point, especially in regard to African slaves. Bishop Secker worries for the souls of all of mankind, and hopes that in the American colonies there can be a larger presence for Christianity in everyone's lives. In order to do all of this, Secker wants to send more ministers to America from England to spread the faith, an unpopular position at the time.

I found the document doing a search for "primary documents of the Great Awakening". The website I found that contains this document, http://www.constitution.org/primarysources/primarysources.html#17, has many other primary documents relating to the founding of the United States, and could be very valuable for people doing research on that subject. The direct link to the piece that I read was http://www.constitution.org/primarysources/spg2.html.


Our second source deals with events closer to the Civil War. This source was by doing a word search by using the phrase “primary antebellum documents”. A link popped up that led to the website Territorial Kansas Online. The original source was created by Joseph Pomeroy Root, who will later on be elected as Kansas’s first state Lieutenant Governor. But, at the time was a prisoner who was present at the speech and wrote it down. The host site is sponsored by The University of Kansas and the Kansas State Historical Society. I believe that they are reliable sources, because they both have to rely on proven historical facts that have been well researched and documented.


The speech is given by David R. Atchison to the Pro-Slavery solders before they attacked the town of Lawrence; gives some very good incites to how strong and determinant they were to have Kansas as a slave state. The men that take part in the attack on Lawrence are known as Boarder Ruffians. Boarder Ruffians are men on the western boarder of Missouri who wanted Kansas as a slave state. But, men from all over the South, as far away as South Carolina, come to the call to fight for Kansas. Atchison tells the solders many times during the speech to destroy anything in there path that may hinder the pro-slavery movement. He also tells the men that they are all “true sons of the noble South” who are fighting under one flag that symbolizes “Southern Right”, and are joining together for a righteous cause. The pro-slavery supporters believe that the Northern Abolitionists have no right to be in Kansas and will suffer the consequences of their actions

http://www.territorialkansasonline.org

September 4, 2008 Primary Documents

I was able to find as a primary document A True and Historical Narrative of the Colony of Georgia, a pamphlet written to disprove all propaganda written about Georgia by the trustees of the colony.  The entire pamphlet is on this website as a part of “The Capital and the Bay” project, an endeavor by the Library of Congress to compile books and other published materials from the year 1600 to 1925 in an attempt to have a first person chronicle of the history of the Chesapeake region of the modern day United States.

 

There is, of course, a great deal of material to comb through on the website. What is perhaps one of the best features of the site, however, is its inclusion of images of the book in which the pamphlet was reprinted in 1839. This lends the site a great deal of credibility, as you can see where the information came from. Of course, having the Library of Congress stamp of approval also helps.  

 

 

http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/lhbcb:@field(DOCID+@lit(lhbcb7018adiv25))

I came across a primary document source with the name American Memory and it has extensive primary court documents involving slaves and the court system 1740-1860. This project to collect these documents was and still is being undertaken by the Library of Congress. I was able to pull up a primary court document on the trial of Thomas Sims. The description of the document is as follows; Trial of Thomas Sims, on an issue of personal liberty, on the claim of James Potter, of Georgia, against him, as an alleged fugitive from service : arguments of Robert Rantoul, Jr., and Charles G. Loring, with the decision of George T. Curtis, Boston, April 7-11, 1851 /. 
The website is great for these kinds of primary documents. It gives the information in great detail and allows you to read it in normal text as well as view a scanned version of the original document. 

http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llst&fileName=062/llst062.db&recNum=2&itemLink=r?