From Eman To Present Flashcards
John jack
events in the 1770s prior to Frederick Douglas
Near the minute park, at a cemetery, his epitaph reads, “God wills us free. Man wills us slave. I will as God wills. God’s will be done.”
Born a free man and enslaved
raised enough money to buy himself through cobbler.
He secured his own emancipation through his hard work.
He acquires some land on the edge of town, a subsistence farm, nothing much more than that.
And then we discover that he drinks himself to death.
Between the time of his emancipation–his self-emancipation and his death–he tries to become a citizen of Concord.
He couldn’t do it. He was male, an important criteria. Check that one off. He owned property. Those were usually the two most important criteria. But because he had been enslaved, he couldn’t become a citizen.
Let’s think of the moment. We are on the cusp of the Revolutionary War, in Concord, Massachusetts, the start of the Revolutionary War. You have the citizens of Concord, the white, male property owners in Concord, complaining to the British crown about being treated as slaves. This is literally their language, that they were being treated as slaves, and this wasn’t right.
Somehow these people questing for freedom ignored those people they owned. The black African slaves in their midst, they were blind to their existence, apparently. John Jack, though, understood the
situation.
He saw what was happening all around him. He couldn’t help but, and who knows why he became an alcoholic, but that might be a good reason. Anyway, he’s drinking himself to death and knows it, and he hires an attorney to put his affairs in order. It’s his attorney who crafts the epitaph here.
Here’s where the story gets even more interesting, I think. The person John Jack hires to put his affairs in order is a British sympathizer, a Tory. John Jack got it. He was going to hire–almost like he’s thumbing his nose postmortem. He wasn’t going to be allowed to be a citizen, despite his freedom, in an area that’s fighting for freedom, claiming that they weren’t citizens, they were slaves in fact, and they certainly didn’t know slavery like he knew it. John Jack understood something fundamental about what would become the United States of America, pretty soon in fact. And the fundamental thing he unders
Minute man park
Site of the Revolutionary war
Frederick Douglas
Emancipated himself
An abolitionist/ public speaker
Was invited to talk about the meaning of freedom, the meaning of liberty, the meaning of this great country. These were his friends.
He refused to come on July 4th 1852 for the reasons that you certainly heard in this excerpt–and this is a three hour long speech, I spared you two hours and fifty- eight minutes of. It’s a brilliant speech. But he refused to come on July 4th, because to talk about independence and liberty to a person who emancipated himself was unkind at best, certainly blind. Was Cruel mockery. But he did come. He came on July 5th, t
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Poem: “Bury Me in a Free Land” [00:01:48] So I want to begin today’s lecture with a poem by the journalist, activist, underground railroad host to those slaves escaping towards freedom–She would open her doors to them. Woman’s rights activist, anti-lynching crusader, woman by the name of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. It’s a poem written in 1854, the same moment that Frederick Douglass is castigating his abolitionist friends about their understandings of freedom, and of liberty, and of slavery.
Missouri Compromise
Missouri Compromise, an attempt to balance the number of slave states and free states as early as 1820
The compromise of 1850
relating to territory gained in the Mexican-American War. What part of the United States is going to be free versus what part is going to be–or what states are going to allow slavery.
Kansas Nebraska act
Scott vs sanders case
Proclamation
Civil war
Civil war
Conscription acts
