How was race defined and redefined in Jeffersonian America? How did people of color respond?: Free and Enslaved Black Americans and the Challenge to Slavery/Native American Power and the United States

Haitian Revolt

(1791-1804) inspired free and enslaved black Americans, and terrified white Americans. Free people of color embraced the revolution, understanding it as a call for full abolition and the rights of citizenship denied in the United States. Proved that, given equal opportunities, people of color could achieve as much as whites.

Northwest Indian War

A civil war between the Red Sticks and other Creeks due to a lack of allies in the spread of a pan-Indian movement in the Southeast

Battle of Tippecanoe (1811)

After the failures of pan-Indian unity and loss at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811, Tecumseh's confederation floundered.

"Racial Types" (Civilized and Primitive)

Enlightenment thinkers claimed that years under the hot sun and tropical climate of Africa darkened the skin and reconfigured the skulls of the African race, whereas the cold northern latitudes of Europe molded and sustained the "Caucasian" race. The environments endowed both races with respective characteristics, which accounted for differences in humankind tracing back to a common ancestry. A universal human nature, therefore, housed not fundamental differences but rather the "civilized" and the "primitive."

African Colonization

Gradually sending freed slaves to Africa and believed to be the solution to America's racial problem.

Gabriel's Rebellion

Led by the slave Gabriel, close to one thousand enslaved men planned to end slavery in Virginia by attacking Richmond in late August 1800. First, it suggested that enslaved blacks were capable of preparing and carrying out a sophisticated and violent revolution—undermining white supremacist assumptions about the inherent intellectual inferiority of blacks. Furthermore, it demonstrated that white efforts to suppress news of other slave revolts had failed.

Red Jacket (intermediaries)

Skilled orators who played a key role in negotiations such as Native rituals to reestablish relationships and open communication.

Play-off system

System used by the Indians to get the best deal on goods by playing the British and French against each other

Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa (ideas and beliefs)

Tecumseh and his brother, Tenskwatawa helped envision an alliance of North America's indigenous populations to halt the encroachments of the United States. They created pan-Indian towns in present-day Indiana, first at Greenville, then at Prophetstown, in defiance of the Treaty of Greenville (1795). Tecumseh traveled to many diverse Indian nations from Canada to Georgia, calling for unification, resistance, and the restoration of sacred power.

ignorant savages

The literal and figurative margins that white attitudes, words, and policies that Native peoples were frequently relegated as.

Bobalition broadsides

The most famous publication of whites mocking blacks as buffoons, published in Boston in the 1810s, and became the basis of racist ideas in the 19th century.

Henry Moss

a slave in Virginia, became arguably the most famous black man of the day when white spots appeared on his body in 1792, turning him visibly white within three years. As his skin changed, Moss marketed himself as "a great curiosity" in Philadelphia and soon earned enough money to buy his freedom.