Well, hey there and welcome back to Heimler's History. Now in this video, I'm going to teach you everything you need to know about Unit 3 of AP U.S. History. And this one's a right beast, so there's no time to waste. So if you're ready to get them brain cows milked, I'm ready to milk them.
Let's get to it. Now, before we get started, just so you know, this video is part of a larger Old View packet for AP U.S. History. It's got everything you need to get an A in your class and a 5 on your exam in May. So if you're interested in something like that...
Link in description below. So the major theme of this unit is how America was transformed into a collection of British colonies into a distinct, independent nation, and how we began to develop a distinct national identity. And just so you know, the time period covered in this video is 1754 to 1800. And the place we'll start is 1754 with the French and Indian War, which was part of a larger conflict called the Seven Years' War.
And the conflict began, at least on American soil, because British colonists were getting a little twitchy about French encroachment on their western border, specifically the Ohio River Valley. And if you had asked the French why they were getting a little too cozy in that region, they would have said they were getting a little twitchy about the British encroachment on their territory. So the conflict erupted and it went pretty bad for the British initially.
They kept losing battles to the French and their Indian allies. So in light of this, the British government called for a congress of representatives from several colonies to assemble a more organized response to frontier defense and trade and westward expansion. Now, I mention this because it was at this meeting that our good buddy Benjamin Franklin proposed his Albany Plan of Union, which called for a more centralized government for the colonies, which would in turn better enable them to mount a more coordinated effort for Western defense. But the taxation required for raising the troops for such a plan stunk powerfully in their colonial nostrils, and the plan was therefore rejected.
However, it was an important meeting and an important proposal because it laid the mold for the future Revolutionary Congress, of which more. later. Long story short, despite the early humiliation, the British won the French and Indian War and signed the Peace of Paris in 1763. And the results of this treaty were kind of mind boggling to the American colonists. First, the French were almost completely ousted from North America and the Louisiana Territory was given to Spain. Second, and perhaps most significant, is that the British more than doubled their land holdings on the North American continent, gaining all the land east of the Mississippi River.
Now remember, we're trying to figure out how the folks on this continent went from being a string of colonies to an independent nation. And it's at the end of the French and Indian War where the dominoes really start to fall. The first consequence of the war was that colonists hungry for land began to push westward into the Ohio River Valley, which, not surprisingly, intensified conflicts with the American Indians who lived there.
For example, when news of the new land arrangement reached the Ottawa leader Pontiac, he gathered up some folks and led raids on the encroaching colonists. And the colonists were dumbfounded at this blatant Indian aggression. What's your problem, man? We won this land.
From whom? The French. And from whom did they get it? Wait for it. There it is.
You know, that makes a lot of sense. You guys must feel entirely... Overlooked and taken advantage of. Said no colonist ever.
Anyway, the British government decided to put the kibosh on all this tension between the Indians and their British colonists. And they did this not only because they wanted to protect the lives of their colonists, but they also wanted to keep trade relations favorable. To that end, they issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which forbade colonists from taking land in the Ohio River Valley, which is to say, west of the Appalachian Mountains. Now this proclamation deeply frustrated the colonists who had fought in the war and therefore felt entitled to the spoils of war.
They felt they could improve their lot in life by moving westward, and moreover, they had shed their blood to gain this land. A second major consequence of this war was that it was expensive. Over the course of the war, British debt doubled and the cost of running the colonies increased five-fold.
And so what's the British Parliament to do? Taxes! And that leads us to the next part of our story, which we'll call Taxation Without Representation. And so in order to pay for the French and Indian War, the British decided to clamp down on the colonies and make them help shoulder the burden of it.
And that But to put it lightly, smelled like a grade A turd to the colonists. And part of the reason was this. Although Britain of course had always had political sovereignty over the colonies, they largely allowed the colonists to manage their own affairs mainly owing to the large distance between the colonies and the motherland.
And so even when colonists flouted laws like the Navigation Acts which we looked at back in Unit 2, Britain largely just turned a blind eye to it. And if you want a term for that, and I know you do, it was salutary neglect. And the main effect of this salutary neglect was that it gave the colonists the sense that they were managing their own affairs without much involvement from parliament.
But now, in order to pay for this war, the era of salutary neglect was over. Immediately, Parliament enacted a much stricter enforcement of the Navigation Acts that already existed. This was not great for colonists who routinely avoided these laws by smuggling and setting their own terms for trade.
Also, Parliament passed the Quartering Act of 1765, which meant that even though the war was over, Imperial troops would remain in the American colonies in order to enforce all of these new rules. And to make matters worse, the law said that it was the colonists who were responsible for feeding and housing these soldiers if the quarters of the soldiers were inadequate. Also, there was the Sugar Act which imposed taxes on coffee and wine another look And you may rightly wonder why it's called the Sugar Act then.
Well, there was also an existing tax on molasses, which the British decided at this point they We're going to start enforcing. Perhaps most odious of all was the Stamp Act of 1765. It was a tax on all paper items like newspapers and playing cards and contracts, and it was especially threatening to the colonists because during this year they were experiencing declining wages and a rise in unemployment. And it was at this that the debate really heated up in the colonies about whether it was just to tax the colonists if they were not represented in Parliament. And British leaders countered this line of argument by saying that the colonists were in fact represented in Parliament by something called virtual representation.
The idea behind this was that members of Parliament represented all classes of British citizens, not necessarily every locality. So in that sense, they argued, the American colonists were represented. Not surprisingly, this argument wasn't very convincing to American colonists who had grown accustomed to more localized representation in their own representative bodies. And so groups like the Sons of Liberty and the Daughters of Liberty sprang up and dedicated themselves to the repeal of the Stamp Act. And as tension heated up, 27 delegates from nine colonies assembled in New York in what became known as the Stamp Act Congress.
The result of this meeting was a formal petition to the British Parliament to repeal the Stamp Act. And the chief reason they gave for such a request was that taxation without representation was tyranny. However, it's going to be very important for you to know that even as the Congress was rejecting the Stamp Act, they did so as loyal subjects to the British Crown and to their country. This was not a bid for independence. It was British subjects trying to have the full rights of...
British citizens applied to them. Now as it happened, Parliament actually listened and repealed both the Stamp Act and the Sugar Act the next year. And they did this probably in response to all the protests in the colonies, the destruction of property, and the threats to the lives of tax collectors.
However, at the same time that they passed those resolutions, they also passed the Declaratory Act which said that they had the right to pass any law that they wanted to in the colonies. It was just a little jab to make sure the colonists remembered who was in charge. Which to me just sounds like a little kid in a toy box who just got their toy taken away by a bully.
Whatever. I didn't even like that toy anyway. And the only reason you have it is because I let you have it.
So for the colonists, the repeal of those acts was a victory. But then in 1767, Parliament went ahead and passed the Townshend Acts, which levied new taxes on items imported to the colonies like paper and glass and tea. So once the colonists took that toy away from the kid in the sandbox, they felt emboldened to take another.
So in response to the passage of the Townshend Acts, there were highly organized protests. It wasn't just the elitists in the Stamp Act Congress, but members from all of American society. Their main plan of attack was to boycott many British goods.
And the colonists especially depended on women for this, since they were largely the ones purchasing the bulk of household items. And so these women, instead of buying manufactured textiles from Britain, spun their own cloth. Instead of drinking imported tea, learned to brew their own herbal tea.
Now all of this tension brewing between the colonies and the British government reached a boiling point in 1770 in an event called the Boston Massacre. As I mentioned before, imperial troops were stationed in the colonies in order to enforce British law. So one night a group of boys and young men began harassing a group of British soldiers in Boston. They hurled insults at the soldiers and resorted to throwing snowballs and stones.
It was unclear how or why the first shot was fired, but the first shot went off and that led to more shooting. In the end, 11 colonists were wounded and 4 were dead. Now it's important for you to know that when these soldiers were put on trial, 6 out of 8 were acquitted for any wrongdoing. But the point is that that to the colonists, the massacre was a sure sign of increasing British tyranny. Now another very public act of resistance to the British clampdown was the Boston Tea Party.
This was a response to the passing of the Tea Act of 1773. Essentially, it gave the British East India Company exclusive rights to buy and ship tea in the colony. And again, this angered colonists who were used to dealing in smuggled tea from the Dutch. And so in December of that year, about 50 colonists disguised as American Indians boarded a merchant ship and dumped about 45 tons of British tea into the waters of the harbor.
In retaliation, Parliament passed the Coercive Acts, which closed down the Boston Harbor until all the tea was paid for. And also they approved a new Quartering Act to go along with it. Taken together, the colonists called these pieces of legislation the Intolerable Acts.
Now, news of these new tyrannies spread throughout the colonies. increasingly by folks who identified themselves as patriots. And as the news began to spread, colonists began to organize themselves into armed groups vowing to protect themselves against any further British tyranny. Now in addition to all that, leaders from the colonies gathered in the Continental Congress of 1774. And despite their differing views on what What ought to be done, everyone agreed that the colonies needed to resist further violations of their liberties at the hands of Parliament.
But even still, they did so as men who wanted to remain British subjects. Independence was not yet on the horizon. As they debated, it's going to be important for you to know some of the guiding principles that animated their thoughts, and perhaps one of the most significant influences was Enlightenment thought.
These men had come to believe deeply in the idea of natural rights, which is to say that all human beings are endowed with certain rights by God and not a government, and therefore a government can never take them away. Related to this, they were influenced by the idea of a social contract between the government and the people. The idea here is that the power to govern is in the hands of the people, and they willingly give over some of that power to create a government. government capable of protecting their natural rights. And on the flip side, if the government tramples upon the natural rights of its citizens, then it's their duty to overthrow that government.
They were also deeply influenced by the superiority of the Republican form of government, and especially the separation of powers in a government that enabled the various branches to check and balance the power of the others. Now by 1776 the Continental Congress was in its second meeting and they were still debating these things even as shooting had begun down in Lexington and Concord. But they came to a...
point where they decided that independence from Britain was the only way that their nation could survive and thrive. But remember, these were the elite thinky thinky people of the colonies, and even though they were convinced about independence, the majority of American colonists were not yet convinced. Enter Thomas Paine. Early in 1776 he published a little pamphlet called Common Sense, and in it he argued that the only rational way forward for America was independence from Britain. He did this with masterful allusions to the Bible and structured it with Enlightenment principles.
This pamphlet spread like fire through the colonies, and by the spring of 1776, the majority of colonists had been convinced independence was the only option. And so in that year, the Second Continental Congress tasked Thomas Jefferson with writing a formal Declaration of Independence. And it's going to be important for you to know that the Declaration of Independence is shot through with Enlightenment thought. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
There you have natural rights. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the government. That wherever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.
Okay, now there you have the social contract. And I could go on enumerating examples, but the point is you should know that this document is deeply influenced by Enlightenment thought. Now, the Declaration was presented to the Congress and a adopted on July 2nd, 1776. On July 4th, it was made public.
And baby, we got ourselves a Revolutionary War. Now, I'm aware that the way I've been presenting this, it kind of sounds like everybody in the colonies was on board with independence, but here's where I tell you, not so much. There was actually a sizable opposition to independence in a group called the Loyalists. They were called Loyalists because they did not want to separate from Britain.
They wanted to remain, you know, loyal. Regardless, we need to talk about the American Revolution itself. The Continental Congress approved the assembly of the Continental Army and named the venerable George Washington as its general.
Now, as a group, this army wasn't much to speak of. They were ill-equipped, ill-trained, ill-paid, and just generally ill. And as the fighting began the Americans suffered many humiliating defeats at the hands of the British. And that shouldn't surprise us. Britain possessed, of course, one of the most powerful militaries in the world and so the folks in the Continental Congress could see that America was sure to lose this battle if they didn't secure help from a foreign ally.
But what country is going to lend their resources to a little fledgling nation that seemed poor? poised to lose the battle. And that's when the decisive moment came in 1777. Against all odds, the Patriots dealt the British a crushing defeat at the Battle of Saratoga.
And I say this was a turning point because it was their victory here that convinced the French to ally with the Americans against the British. And this was due in no small part to Benjamin Franklin's diplomatic work in France. So the French, therefore, sent guns and ships and everybody's favorite fighting Frenchman. The Marquis de Lafayette.
Long story short, the British simply didn't have the resources to outlast their American enemies, and so after their defeat at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781, the British army surrendered. America, against all odds, was an independent nation. And what's even more astonishing is that the success of the American Revolution inspired similar revolutions in France and then later in Haiti.
Okay, now that we got ourselves our own nation, we're going to need ourselves a constitution and a government, and we got both in the Articles of Confederation. So before, during, and after the Revolution, states had assembled their own constitutions and governments. And in those states, they largely put the power for governance in the legislative body or the law-making body. And so when Congress convened to hammer out the Articles of Confederation, they largely borrowed from that model. By 1781, the states had ratified that document and it was now the Constitution of the new United States.
And it's going to be important for you to know some of the provisions made in this document for the new federal government. First, you should know that like the states, all power for the federal government was put into the legislative body. There was no executive office, which is to say a president. There was no judicial branch either. Additionally, there was no provision for a national military force.
And maybe most significant is the federal government under the articles had very limited power to attack. If they wanted revenue from the states, they just had to go knock on the door and ask nicely, and you can imagine how that went. Now, one of the more immediate problems that needed to be handled by this new government was the problem of westward migration.
Warfare between westward-pushing settlers and Indians continued to occur, and there were many folks going west and squatting on the land without any legal ownership. So in order to regulate this territory, Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, and this is arguably the best thing that the federal government did during its time under the Articles. Essentially this legislation accomplished two very important things.
First it provides... provided a plan for how unformed territories could be occupied and then applied to the Union for statehood. And second, an abolished statehood. slavery in the Northwest Territory. But even with this legislative win, the articles soon showed their weakness and this happened at the hands of a little event called Shays' Rebellion.
So economically, the US during this time was kind of a dumpster fire. Many farmers had fallen into debt while they were actually off fighting in the Revolutionary War. And when they returned, many of them were unable to pay their debts because of inflation and new taxes being imposed upon them.
And they made formal petitions to the federal government for relief, but to no avail. Now, Daniel Shays happened to be one of those farmers, and he lived in Massachusetts. He gathered a militia of about a thousand other angry farmers and headed to the town arsenal where they planned to arm themselves and wreak havoc. However, they were pretty quickly squashed by the local militia.
Now, that's not much of a story. Why is it important? Well the importance of Shays' Rebellion is this, it displayed the weakness of the Articles of Confederation.
Now how is that? Well this uprising actually alarmed state and national leaders who began to wonder how many other angry farmers could rise up and try to kill them. And when they realized that there was no president to call and there was no national army to come help them in this situation, the Articles of Confederation The Articles then seemed like a very flimsy document. And so, in light of all of this, a Constitutional Convention was called in 1787. Now the stated purpose of this convention was to revise the Articles and to shore up its weaknesses, but it soon became apparent to all who attended that what was really needed was a new Constitution altogether. And so debates began on the ideas of a new Constitution of the United States.
And almost immediately, two factions began to form. The Federalists were more urban folks with a commercial background and they wanted a the stronger central government, the anti-federalists on the other side. the other hand were more rural folks, and they liked the states having the power, and they opposed an increase in the federal government's power.
And of the many debates they had within that Congress, maybe the most heated one was over how the people would be represented in this new government. One idea was summarized in what was called the Virginia Plan, and this plan argued for representation by population. And it shouldn't surprise you, since Virginia was one of the most populous states. And think about it.
If states are represented in the government by population, who is the most powerful? Well, it's the big states. And so the small states heard this and were like, wellllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll equal votes, two votes per state.
Now another contentious issue they had to debate with respect to representation was how to account for the large enslaved population in America, especially in the South. Southerners wanted all their enslaved laborers to be counted because that would boost their power in the House. But Northerners, who had relatively few slaves, opposed this. So the compromise they reached was known as the Three-Fifths Compromise. Essentially, it just said that for purposes of representation, they would just count up all the enslaved people in a particular state, take three-fifths of that number, and then that's how many seats would be added to their House representation.
And so a new constitution was drawn up that provided for a more robust central government, but at the same time, it took pains to check and balance the power of that government by splitting it into three branches. The Legislative, the executive, and the judicial. And once it was done, the new Constitution went to the states for ratification, which just means they had to agree to submit themselves to its authority. Federalists took to the newspapers and wrote persuasive essays at a dizzying pace.
Federalists Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison wrote these essays in order to convince the American public of the merits of the Constitution. And these essays together became known as the Federalist Papers. The Anti-Federalists began to argue against the ratification of the Constitution because it lacked a Bill of Rights which would enumerate individual liberties and protections of the individual against the federal government. And in the end, the Federalists prevailed, partly because they were very persuasive, but partly because they agreed to add a Bill of Rights as soon as the Constitution was ratified. And so in March of 1789, the Constitution of the United States went into effect.
into effect. Now I'll talk more in a moment about how that new government played itself out, but first we need to pause here and talk about the distinctive American culture that was growing up during this time. There was a desire to define a distinct American culture soon after the Revolution was won.
To this end, state and national leaders proposed ambitious plans for public education. Also, artists devoted attention to painting historical themes. Notable among them were Charles Wilson Peale and Samuel Jennings.
And we're going to need to talk about the role of the ladies during this time. Certainly they were not yet societally equal to men, but the development of the Republican motherhood assigned to them a new purpose. According to this this idea women could best influence political realities not by voting, let's not get crazy now, but by raising virtuous sons instructed in the principles of liberty. Alright, let's get back to politics. The first government under this new constitution was one that set all kinds of precedents.
George Washington was elected President and John Adams Vice President. To bring order to his administration, Washington established the departments of the Treasury and State and War and justice. He appointed Alexander Hamilton as the first Secretary of the Treasury, and he's important because of the many sweeping policies he introduced. First, he drew up a plan for the federal government to assume the state's Revolutionary War debts.
Consolidating these debts, he argued, would bind the nation together while simultaneously improving the credit of the nation. Hamilton also proposed the creation of a national bank, the Bank of the United States. Critics of this idea, and there were many, argued that the Constitution made no provision for a bank. But Hamilton invoked the Elastic Clause of the Constitution, which says that Congress has the right to make any law that is...
necessary and proper in order to carry out its other responsibilities. And so Hamilton argued that since Congress was responsible for taxation and the regulation of interstate commerce, that a bank was necessary and proper. And despite the resistance, the National Bank and the Debt Plan passed, and they largely had the effects that Hamilton said they would. Now it was policies like these that fired up the opposition. Now Washington and Hamilton were Federalists and these policies that strengthened the central government made all the sense in the world to them.
It also made sense to them to remain neutral during the French Revolution of 1789. And it also made sense to them to do what they did in the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. And let me tell you that story. One of Hamilton's policies included a tax on whiskey, which was made and consumed mainly by poor frontier farmers. And these farmers, in their anger, attacked and assaulted these tax collectors who tried to collect revenue from them.
Now, remember back to Shays' Rebellion. Under the Articles of Confederation, there was no national army and they had to hastily cobble together a militia to put it down. But now Washington went ahead and federalized four state militias and sent them in to crush this rebellion. And these policies taken together enraged those who opposed the Federalists, namely the Democratic Republicans.
It was folks like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison who represented this position and they thought that the debt plan and the national Bank and the response to the Whiskey Rebellion was clear evidence of federal overreach. Now, after two four-year terms as President, George Washington decided not to run for a third term, which shocked everyone. But in his parting, he gave the nation some hard-earned advice. In Washington's farewell address, he cautioned the nation against the formation of political parties and their divisive effects.
He also cautioned America against getting entangled in foreign, especially European, alliances. And after he was done speaking, America wiped a tear off its collective face and went ahead and got involved in both. Alright, so John Adams became the second president and to say the least, his presidency was a little rocky. Almost immediately, war broke out between Britain and France, and even though Adams insisted that America would remain neutral in the conflict, the French had a nasty habit of seizing American trade ships that were going to Britain.
So Adams sent a delegation to France to negotiate some kind of settlement, but the three Frenchmen who met them on behalf of the French government demanded a bribe before they would even sit down at the table. And when this report was made public to the U.S., the three French diplomats were only identified as ex- Y and Z, and thus it became known as the XYZ Affair. And the outrage against this affair was shared among the Federalists and the Democratic Republicans.
But Adams was about to push through a new set of laws that would poo poo all over any newfound unity between the factions. You see, Adams feared dissent both at home and abroad, and so the Federalists dominated Congress past the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Alien Acts made it legal and easy to deport any non-citizen of the United States, and it was chiefly aimed at the growing Irish and Scottish immigrants who opposed the Federalist sympathies for Britain. The Sedition Acts made it illegal to criticize the government publicly. And it's probably not going to surprise you to find out that the Democratic-Republicans were incensed at this clear example of federal overreach.
And their response to the Alien and Sedition Acts was formed in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. And in these resolutions, the Democratic-Republicans argued that any law passed by the federal government that is blatantly unconstitutional can, with good conscience. be nullified by the states.
Needless to say, John Adams was not elected to a second term in 1800. That mantle passed to Thomas Jefferson. Now we'll pick up with Jefferson's administration in Unit 4, but for Unit 3 we still have two other things we need to talk about. First, the relationship between the newly formed United States, Britain, Spain, and the American Indians, and then second, the legacy of slavery.
Alright, first, the relationship between the US, Britain, Spain and the American Indians. Now there was a common concern among political elites stretching all the way back to the Washington administration about these three entities and their threat to US political sovereignty. And in order to deal with the increasing conflict with Indians and Americans who were migrating west, Congress passed the Indian Trade and Intercourse Act.
And this law regulated the relationships among settlers and Indians and made provisions for fair dealings. But settlers be settlers and they largely ignored this. And so as westward migration increased, so too did conflicts with the American Indians and the British who supported them. And then there's Spain. Also due to westward migration, there was tension with Spain on the southern frontier border of the United States.
And so to tidy that up, we got the Pinckney Treaty. And this decided once and for all where the border was between the US and Spain. And just in case you're wondering, the border was established at the 31st parallel.
And finally, let's deal with the legacy of slavery in this newly formed nation. As we settled into independence, distinct regional attitudes towards slavery began to emerge. In northern states, there was a rapid population growth of free blacks.
Some states, like New Jersey, actually granted free blacks who owned property the right to vote. Additionally, in Philadelphia, blacks formed the first African American church denomination in the United States, which was known as the African Methodist Episcopal Church. But in the South, it was a different story. There, the black population was mostly enslaved, and that enslaved population was growing rapidly. Additionally, new legislation made it almost impossible to free slaves.
And as slaveholders began to migrate into the western territory, they brought their enslaved people with them and established the institution in places where it had never existed. Now, that's gonna cause all sorts of problems for the next half century, but that's where we're gonna leave it for Unit 3. Alright, that's what you need to know for Unit 3, the AP US History Curriculum. If you want all the review materials of which this video is one small part, then click here and grab my Ultimate Review Packet. It'll help you get an A in your class and a 5 in your exam in May.
If you liked this video then go ahead and subscribe over here because that tells me you want me to keep making them. Thanks for coming along! Heimler out.