So I’m like super busy, but I have a minor correction to make on my previous long post, things did not change until the mid 1700s, not the mid 1600s. Short version is England lost some wars and needed money, and taxing citizens on the island was unpopular, but taxing colonists an ocean away that didn’t have any representation in the government? Easy peasy. So they started taxing America’s exports going to England. And since America was a british colony, they weren’t allowed to trade with anyone else unless England said so. This pissed a lot of people off, but they bore it. Then England added more taxes until it got to the point in 1763 that you had a pay a tax for the stamp that went onto your tax documents (the Stamp Tax). That was it. That was the breaking point where you got stuff like the Boston Tea Party.
In fact, when the Continental Congress got together to talk about the english problem, they were not talking about independence at first, they wanted “pre-1763 conditions”. It would be a few more years until writers like Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin would point out that America by itself had more people than Britain and a larger potential economy, but we would never be more than farmland for the brits if we didn’t break away. So when it became clear that negotiating for lower taxes wasn’t going over well, and that even if America was granted representation in parliament it would be one or two seats that couldn’t really control anything, that was when independence started to look like the better option.
The revolutionary war was a thing. Wasn’t taught that much about it, has more to do with military history than overall history. What you need to know is England could have won that war, but they couldn’t really afford to win the war - remember money problems are what landed them in this situation in the first place. France helped us, becoming our first ally. Not really that important, but you can drop that shit at trivia night.
After America gained independence, it will be important to look at how the constitution gets ratified, because that sets up 80 years of conflict that will lead to the Civil War.
The short short version is that by this point the North has industrialized and they don’t need slaves to be economically competitive anymore. Take the economic need away and slavery just starts to look like a shitty thing. The South, however, is still farming for the most part, and they need slaves to make their cash crops happen. The North doesn’t want slaves, the South feels they need slaves. So, like any two sides in politics, they compromise. There will be no slavery in the North, and South can have slaves. However, there will be no slave trade in Washington DC (even though it’s technically in the South) and after 1820, the South cannot import any new slaves, only use existing ones. You can tell by the way this is written that it was a compromise to get the South on board, that the North knew this was wrong, and they were trying to keep it out of sight of any visiting foreign politicians by keeping it out of the capital and trying to write in an expiration date to give the South some time to get its shit together and “grow up”. However, it would turn out that the next 80 years would continue to try to kick the can down the road and not tell the South “no”. Without a doubt, this is the original sin of the country, the one mistake in our founding. We should have stopped it then and there at whatever cost, because things would only get worse from here.
I mentioned earlier that racism would come from slavery. It would start to become an argument in the early 1800s for why slaves couldn’t be freed. When people from the North would ask the South why they even needed slaves, when we were all industrializing and machines were clearly going to be able to do the job soon enough, the South would respond that it was their moral imperative to take in these savages and teach them the righteous ways of the white man, as much as they could. It started to be said that the blacks were naturally lazier and dumber than the whites, hence their need to be enslaved so they could make something of themselves. Who could argue with a law of nature like that? It would be insane to let all those people loose at once with nothing to do.
I’m serious, if you go and research this, before american independence slavery is just an economic convenience, it doesn’t morph into a racist thing until after independence when slavery is under threat of being made illegal that the south weaves it into their culture and makes it a moral/religious/ethnic thing, specifically to make it harder to get rid of.
That’s one of the key takeaways to american history for me, that in trying to compromise on slavery at our founding, I think we made things worse in the long run. About the first 3rd of our history as a nation is dominated by keeping the number of slave states equal to free states to maintain political balance as we expand west. All becuase of a few lines in the Constitution.
