Revolutionary Ideas

Unit 3 Summative Prompt

So far this year we've examined the following prompts: "What is Freedom?" "Where does the
idea/concept come from?" & "When do you fight for your rights?"

Now, as we've been examining the birth (Revolution & creation of the Constitution) and early
growth (creation of political parties, expansionism/growth and conflicts) of the United States,
we've started to witness how the nation might start to develop different ideas of what freedom is.

So this is our new summative prompt:

"How might the people of a nation look at freedom differently?"

Type your response here and submit this google doc

The definition of freedom means different things to every individual that walks this Earth.

Some have a more warped vision of freedom than others. In today’s day and age, some believe

that freedom means that anybody, no matter what they look like, can do anything that they

please as long as it does not harm anybody else. Others believe that freedom means only a

very specific group of people may have those rights– Most of the time, those people are white,

cisgender, and heterosexual. Some also believe that these people have to be male. In most of

America, everybody can live how they choose to live, despite what they look like or how they

were born. However, the nation was not always this way. The definition of freedom by law has

come a long way since the beginning of the nation in the late 1770s, but there are some beliefs

of freedom today that have remained the same. From a 2022 viewpoint, the beliefs of freedom

in 1776 were not progressive at all. However, in the devil's advocate, most of the beliefs from

that time are very overlooked, one simple word casting a shadow over them. That word, as

many know, is slavery. Bold, italicized, underlined. When asked about freedom in the 1770s,

most respond that it was not truly freedom. That without freedom for all people of color, nobody

was ever truly free. But what about the other beliefs that live in the shadows behind slavery?

There are so many that were never truly brought to life at the time that can be analyzed looking
back. Despite this, slavery was still a very prominent part of that time and needs to be discussed

to its full extent. There are others factors that are a big part of what freedom looked like in

America, for example, the differences between political parties. Federalists, who wanted more

government control opposed to state or individual control, Democratic-Republicans, who

believed that the people should have more say in what goes on in their country, and all of the

other parties that branched out from these two. The most overlooked part of that time period

was that freedom was not truly reached for anybody after the American Revolution. Britain still

had control over many parts of the country, and even the privileged rich men did not have true

freedom.

Slavery is a very big part of the early years of America. The American Revolution was

fought to ensure freedom for the American people, however, only white American people. While

freedom by definition was won, a very large percentage of American people were enslaved.

Why was this? Because they were not considered American citizens at the time. They only

counted legally as ⅗’s of a person overall. Until January 31st, 1865, slavery was a very

prominent part of our country. Many influential people in that time owned slaves (Thomas

Jefferson owned over 600 slaves). There were also many slave plantations, for example, the

Whitney Plantation, located in Lousiana. In 1819, thirty eight years after the Battle of Yorktown

and seven years after the Battle of New Orleans, there were sixty one enslaved people at the

Whitney Plantation. Twenty one were women, forty were men. Many of these slaves were called

“Creoles”, meaning that they were born in Louisiana, and most of them were born in the

plantation itself. Between 1819 and 1863, thirty nine children died on this plantation. Six of them

did not even reach the age of five. Many of them died in very tragic ways, such as succumbing

to a disease, drowning, being burned alive or struck by lightning. This is only one of the many

plantations where millions of enslaved people worked their lives away. All the while, rich white

men (mostly in the south) were not even paying mind to this fact, and were certain that they had

reached the epitome of what freedom looked like. People in that time did not see any person of
color as a person deserving of freedom. The northern part of America disagreed with the idea of

slavery more than the southern part did, and fought to block slavery as a political move. The

north wanted to abolish slavery altogether, and the south wanted to keep slavery going forever.

In 1820, as a way of twisted compromise, congress passed a law allowing Missouri as a slave

state, and any state above the Missouri line was not allowed to own slaves. Maine was carved

out of Massachusetts as a free state as a way to keep balance between the slave states and the

free states. This was the way of order until slavery was finally abolished in 1865. Whether they

were legally a person or not at the time, people of color had feelings and issues just like white

people do, and they absolutely viewed freedom in a different sense than most rich white men

did, because they didn’t have it. Slavery is a big part of American history, and always will be.

Political parties were also a very big part of the ideals surrounding freedom, just as they

are now. The two big political parties at the beginning of the nation were the Federalists, led by

Alexander Hamilton, and the Democratic-Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson and James

Madison. The Federalist party would be similar to republicans today, they shared similar ideas.

The main things the Federalist party stood for are as following: they wanted to fund the

Revolutionary War debt and assume state debts, they also wanted to create a central bank.

They recommended neutrality in most foreign affairs, the main being the revolution that broke

out between Britain and their French allies. The Federalists believed that as a new and

independent country, the American citizens should center their own country before jumping into

foreign affairs, such as the French Revolution. The Democratic-Republicans, however, had very

different believes that opposed everything the Federalists stood for. The

Democratic-Republicans, now would be the Democratic party, believed that the south should be

the foundation of the country’s economy, and that each state should pay off their own debts,

without worrying about other state’s debts. Thomas Jefferson in Virginia, who’s debts were paid,

did not want to worry about Alexander Hamilton or New York’s debt. The Federalists believed

that until the debt as a country was paid off, every person from every state should contribute
and pay some of their money, and that as a way to have more income, they could raise taxes on

goods such as whiskey. The Democratic-Republicans believed that this expectation was taking

away their freedom as Americans, and that they had just fought a war to rid Britain’s control over

their taxes. This way of thinking is comparable to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the people who

have been adamant on mask opposition since the beginning. These people have preached

since the beginning that being forced to wear a mask in public violates their rights as an

American, and that they shouldn’t have to worry about anybody’s health other than their own.

The Federalists and Democratic-Republicans, both American political parties, viewed freedom in

very different ways.

A very overlooked part of what freedom looked like in America is the war of 1812. Even

have taken history in high school, as most students do, a lot do not seem to realize that America

was not completely free after the revolution. Britain still kept their major army in New York, along

with a couple states along the Canadian border. A revolution is never as short as people are led

on to think. To secure true freedom, it takes decades, sometimes centuries before success. The

War of 1812 is comparable in many ways to the multiple different kinds of protests that occured

during the novelty of the COVID-19 pandemic. The two most prominent protests were about

justice for people of color, and for people in the LGBTQ+ community. People in both minorities

have dealt with discrimination at best, execution at worst for as long as the world has been

turning. Even when slavery was abolished in 1865, people of color still had to deal with the harm

or death that came from racists everywhere. When gay marriage was legalised in 2015, gay

people still had to deal with discrimination against them. Americans, in a way, went through the

same thing after the American Revolution. Though they won their independence by definition,

they were not truly free yet. They still had a lot of work to do to claim the entirety of their own

country. Britain still had some control over them, Mexico had claim over half of the country, so

did Spain. They had to fight for a lot longer for freedom than given credit for in the history books.
People in minorities are going through the same thing in current time, except that in some

states, they’re being erased from history altogether.

Freedom can be looked at in many different ways, as proven in the many different types

of freedom shown in the beginning stages of America. Freedom was barely regarded by people

of color, because it was not given to them. There were differences in opinion of what freedom

means in political parties, Federalists believed that it was rooted in being an independent

country and paying off debt as a country, and Democratic-Republicans believed that freedom

meant that they did not have to raise taxes on civilians items anymore. Freedom takes a lot

longer to reach than sometimes given credit for, freedom in textbooks is said to have been

earned for America in 1781, when it actually took many more years, going past 1812. Lastly,

lack of freedom is still a problem in some minorities today, because of people who are not

progressive, who’s minds are still stuck in 1776. Freedom is about progression, and it’s almost

300 years later. The definition of what America means to people is going to change day by day,

and we as a society are going to move forward, and we can only hope that we’re moving in the

right direction.