As Founding Fathers of the United States met in Philadelphia to declare that “all men are created equal,” Thomas Craik Jr. was born into a family of people enslaved by Dr. James Craik on his Maryland plantations.[1] This was not unusual at the time; many of the colonial landed gentry relied upon slave labor to […]
BOOK REVIEW: Washington at the Plow: The Founding Father and the Question of Slavery by Bruce A. Ragsdale (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021) In Washington at the Plow: The Founding Father and the Question of Slavery, Bruce Ragsdale provides an in-depth examination of George Washington’s passion for agriculture and the way it changed his […]
It wasn’t really their fault, they said. Slavery, men of the founding generation liked to argue, was brought to the colonies by Britain. It came via Barbados and the other sugar islands of the Caribbean. Thomas Jefferson and Henry Laurens both blamed Britain and wished the colonies could free themselves of the practice. It was […]
On October 9, 1771, a ship arrived at the southwestern tip of England. The Earl of Halifax had spent twenty nine days crossing the Atlantic from New York, and now its captain and crew peered at the shore to find the entrance to Falmouth harbor. The sun was going down in the west, but the sails […]
The American Revolutionary War was fought largely by armies on the North American continent, however, like waves in a pond the conflict inevitably rippled out across the Atlantic world. The flow of people, supplies, and information was crucial to waging war across the Atlantic, and they were linked by who could control the sea. While […]
