Revolution & republic.

“It is important for us, my brothers, that we exterminate from our lands this nation which seeks only to destroy us. You see as well as I that we can no longer supply our needs from the English who have usurped our lands.” — Pontiac, Ottawa leader, 1763 (recorded through English colonial sources)

The Seven Years’ War is taught as an Anglo-French imperial contest, but for Indigenous nations it removed the French as a balancing power and left them facing British expansion alone. Pontiac’s 1763 uprising—a multi-nation coalition from the Great Lakes to the Ohio Valley—was the largest Indigenous military resistance to British expansion in North American history. It forced the Proclamation of 1763 that AP covers, yet its Indigenous architects are rarely named in the narrative that explains why the Proclamation existed. Read the source →

“I think it not hyperbolical to affirm that liberty is equally as precious to a Black man as it is to a white one, and that bondage is as insupportable to the one as it is to the other.” — Lemuel Haynes, Liberty Further Extended, 1776 (unpublished manuscript)

AP focuses on the Revolution as an elite-driven ideological movement, but ordinary people—including thousands of Black men who fought for both sides—had their own revolutionary stakes. Lemuel Haynes’s 1776 manuscript directly applied the Declaration’s principles to slavery, arguing that enslaved people held the same natural rights the Patriots claimed for themselves. His argument was not marginal; it was the Revolution’s central contradiction, visible to anyone who read the Declaration honestly and extended it past its authors’ intentions. Read the source →

“There is no declaration of rights… The executive and legislative are so dangerously blended as to give just cause of alarm, and every page carries the marks of a rigidly cautious government.” — Mercy Otis Warren, Observations on the New Constitution, 1788

AP treats the Constitution as a pragmatic compromise among Founders, but most of the country—women, enslaved people, and the landless poor—had no voice in writing or ratifying it. Mercy Otis Warren, the era’s most prominent political writer, published her Anti-Federalist critique under a pseudonym because women were excluded from formal political debate. Her objections—no Bill of Rights, executive overreach—were serious enough that Federalists had to promise amendments to secure ratification; the Bill of Rights exists partly because of the pressure she helped lead. Read the source →

“The Americans are now masters of this country. The time has come to make our peace with them.” — Little Turtle, Miami leader, after the Battle of Fallen Timbers, 1794

AP frames early U.S. foreign policy around European entanglement—Jay’s Treaty, the XYZ Affair, Washington’s Farewell Address—but for Indigenous nations the new republic’s most consequential foreign policy was westward expansion. The Treaty of Greenville (1795) forced twelve Indigenous nations to cede most of the Ohio Valley—a more immediate change for most North Americans than anything happening in Paris or London. Little Turtle’s defeat at Fallen Timbers closed off one of the last viable armed resistance strategies east of the Mississippi. Read the source →

“I freely and cheerfully acknowledge that I am of the African race, and it is a circumstance which I am most fully persuaded ought not to deprive me of any of those rights which are unalienable.” — Benjamin Banneker, letter to Thomas Jefferson, 1791

The Federalist-Republican divide organized white male political identity around competing visions of the republic, but who counted as a political actor was itself violently contested. Benjamin Banneker—a free Black mathematician and almanac writer—challenged Jefferson directly on the contradiction between his natural-rights philosophy and his enslavement of human beings. Jefferson replied but changed nothing, illustrating that the new party system’s political universe was defined by excluding the people to whom the republic’s promises were most clearly owed. Read the source →

“Now the white man has come and has taken our lands… You must not sell any more land to the white man.” — Handsome Lake, Seneca prophet, The Code of Handsome Lake, c. 1800

Republican Motherhood and the Market Revolution are standard AP content for this period, but the “new nation’s” society was also defined by land dispossession. Handsome Lake’s religious revival among the Haudenosaunee—blending traditional practice with selective adoption of U.S. norms—was a deliberate survival strategy under mounting settler pressure. Indigenous peoples were not passive recipients of U.S. expansion; they debated, adapted, and resisted in organized and sophisticated ways that AP narratives of the “new nation” rarely engage. Read the source →