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.