Skagway AP U.S. History

Wednesday, November 25, 2020

his question is based on the accompanying documents. The documents have been edited for the purpose of this exercise.

In your response, you will be assessed on the following.

Respond to the prompt with a historically defensible thesis or claim that establishes a line of reasoning.
Describe a broader historical context relevant to the prompt.
Support an argument in response to the prompt using all but one of the documents.
Use at least one additional piece of specific historical evidence (beyond that found in the documents) relevant to an argument about the prompt.
For at least three documents, explain how or why the document’s point of view, purpose, historical situation, and/or audience is relevant to an argument.
Use evidence to corroborate, qualify, or modify an argument that addresses the prompt.

Evaluate the extent to which the institution of slavery changed in the period from 1754 to 1850.

Document 1

Source: George Washington, advertisement placed in the Maryland Gazette, 1761.

Ran away from [my] Plantation . . . on Dogue Run in Fairfax [Virginia], on the 9th [of this month], the following Negroes. . . . Peros, . . . Jack, . . . Neptune, . . . [and] Cupid. . . .

As they went off without the least Suspicion, Provocation, or Difference with any Body, or the least angry Word or Abuse from their Overseers, tis supposed they will hardly lurk about in the Neighbourhood, but steer some direct Course . . . in Hopes of an Escape. . . .

Whoever apprehends the said Negroes, so that [I] may readily get them, shall have, if taken up in this County, Forty Shillings Reward, beside what the Law allows.

Document 2

Source: Petition from enslaved African Americans in Massachusetts to the British colonial governor, 1774.

[We] apprehend we have in common with all other men a natural right to our freedoms without Being deprived of them by our fellow men, as we are free-born People and have never forfeited this Blessing by any compact or agreement whatever. But we were unjustly dragged . . . and Brought hither to be made slaves for Life in a Christian land. . . .

We therefore Beg your Excellency and Honor . . . that you will accordingly cause an act of the legislature to be passed that we may obtain our Natural right[s], our freedoms, and our children be set at liberty.

Document 3

Source: An Act for the gradual abolition of slavery, passed by the New York state legislature, 1799.

Be it enacted by the people of the state of New York . . . , That any child born of a slave within this State after the fourth day of July next, shall be deemed . . . to be born free: Provided nevertheless that such Child shall be the servant of the legal [owner] of his or her mother until such servant if a male shall arrive at the age of twenty eight years, and if a female at the age of twenty five years.

Such [owner] . . . shall be entitled to the service of such child until he or she shall arrive to the age aforesaid, in the same manner as if such Child had been bound [required] to [be a servant].

Document 4

Source: An Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves, law passed by the United States Congress, 1807.

Be it enacted, That from and after the first day of January, [1808], it shall not be lawful to import or bring into the United States or the territories thereof from any foreign kingdom, place, or country, any negro, mulatto, or person of colour, as a slave, or to be held to service or labour.

Document 5

Source: Harriet Jacobs, formerly enslaved African American who escaped from North Carolina, describing in her autobiography events in 1831.

Not far from this time [in 1831] Nat Turner’s insurrection [in Virginia] broke out; and the news threw our town into great commotion. Strange that they [White slaveholders] should be alarmed, when their slaves were so “contented and happy”! . . .

It was a grand opportunity for the low whites, who had no negroes of their own. . . . They exulted [rejoiced] in such a chance to exercise a little brief authority, and show their subserviency to the slaveholders, not reflecting that the power which trampled on the colored people also kept themselves in poverty, ignorance, and moral degradation. . . . At night they formed themselves into patrol bands. . . . No two people that had the slightest tinge of color in their faces dared to be seen talking together.

Document 6

Source: Seal of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, an interracial abolitionist group founded in Pennsylvania in 1833.

The figure shows a cartoon of an African American woman kneeling with chains around her wrists. Her head and hands are raised up. A caption states, “Am I not a woman and a sister?”

“Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?,” Pennsylvania Abolition Society Papers [490], Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Document 7

Source: James Henry Hammond, United States Congressman from South Carolina, speech in the United States House of Representatives, 1836.

In northern latitudes, where no great agricultural staple is produced, . . . there is an accurate division of [workers’] labor; . . . in the higher departments a degree of skill must be attained, [for] which stronger stimulants are necessary than can be ordinarily applied to slaves. . . .

Slavery is said to be an evil. . . . But it is no evil. On the contrary, I believe it to be the greatest of all the great blessings which a kind Providence has bestowed upon our glorious region. For without it, our fertile soil and our [fruitful] climate would have been given to us in vain.

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

Link to a sample DBQ: https://apclassroom.collegeboard.org/1/question_bank/create?page=1&searchFor=keywords&searchTerm=DBQ

lpA true daughter of the confederacy has written what should be the last words on the monuments:

By Caroline Randall Williams
June 26, 2020

I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.

If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.

Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trumpand the Senate majority leader,Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective.

I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.

According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.

It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.

What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?

You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.

And here I’m called to say that there is much about the South that is precious to me. I do my best teaching and writing here. There is, however, a peculiar model of Southern pride that must now, at long last, be reckoned with.

This is not an ignorant pride but a defiant one. It is a pride that says, “Our history is rich, our causes are justified, our ancestors lie beyond reproach.” It is a pining for greatness, if you will, a wish again for a certain kind of American memory. A monument-worthy memory.

But here’s the thing: Our ancestors don’t deserve your unconditional pride. Yes, I am proud of every one of my black ancestors who survived slavery. They earned that pride, by any decent person’s reckoning. But I am not proud of the white ancestors whom I know, by virtue of my very existence, to be bad actors.

Among the apologists for the Southern cause and for its monuments, there are those who dismiss the hardships of the past. They imagine a world of benevolent masters, and speak with misty eyes of gentility and honor and the land. They deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred.

To those people it is my privilege to say, I am proof. I am proof that whatever else the South might have been, or might believe itself to be, it was and is a space whose prosperity and sense of romance and nostalgia were built upon the grievous exploitation of black life.

The dream version of the Old South never existed. Any manufactured monument to that time in that place tells half a truth at best. The ideas and ideals it purports to honor are not real. To those who have embraced these delusions: Now is the time to re-examine your position.

Either you have been blind to a truth that my body’s story forces you to see, or you really do mean to honor the oppressors at the expense of the oppressed, and you must at last acknowledge your emotional investment in a legacy of hate.

Either way, I say the monuments of stone and metal, the monuments of cloth and wood, all the man-made monuments, must come down. I defy any sentimental Southerner to defend our ancestors to me. I am quite literally made of the reasons to strip them of their laurels.

Caroline Randall Williams(@caroranwill) is the author of “Lucy Negro, Redux” and “Soul Food Love,” and a writer in residence at Vanderbilt University.