Chapter 4: Slavery, Freedom, and the Struggle for the Empire, 1750-1763

History 17

Atlantic Slave Trade

The systematic importation of African people from their native continent across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas, fueled largely by rising demand for sugar, rice, coffee, and tobacco.

Middle Passage

The hellish and often deadly middle leg of the transatlantic "triangular trade" in which European ships carried manufactured goods to Africa, then transported enslaved Africans to the Americas and the Caribbean, and finally conveyed American agricultural products back to Europe; from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, some 12 million Africans were transported via the Middle Passage, unknown millions more dying en route.

Yeoman Farmers

Small landowners (the majority of white families in the Old South) who farmed their own land and usually did not own slaves.

Stono Rebellion

An uprising by enslaved men in 1739 in South Carolina that led to a severe tightening of the slave code and the temporary imposition of a prohibitive tax on imported slaves.

Republicanism

Political theory in eighteenth-century England and America that celebrated active participation in public life by economically independent citizens as central to freedom.

Liberalism

Originally, political philosophy that emphasized the protection of liberty by limiting the power of government to interfere with the natural rights of citizens; in the twentieth century, belief in an activist government promoting greater social and economic equality.

Salutary Neglect

Informal British policy during the first half of the eighteenth century that allowed the American colonies considerable freedom to pursue their economic and political interests in exchange for colonial obedience.

Enlightenment

Revolution in thought in the eighteenth century that emphasized reason and science over the authority of traditional religion.

Deism

Enlightenment thought applied to religion; emphasized reason, morality, and natural law.

Great Awakening

Fervent religious revival movement in the 1720s through the 1740s that was spread in the colonies by ministers like New England Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards and English revivalist George Whitefield.

Father Junipero SerraSe

Missionary who began and directed the California mission system in the 1770s and 1780s. Serra presided over the conversion of many Indians to Christianity sometimes by force.

Seven Years’ War

The last—and most important—of four colonial wars fought between England and France for control of North America east of the Mississippi River.

French and Indian War

The last—and most important—of four colonial wars fought between England and France for control of North America east of the Mississippi River.

Neolin

A Delaware Indian (Lenape) religious prophet who, by preaching Native American unity and rejection of European technology and commerce, helped inspire Pontiac's War.

Pontiac’s War

A war inspired by the Delaware prophet Neolin in which allied Native American fighters from the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes successfully attacked British forts and settlements after France ceded to the British its territory east of the Mississippi River as part of the Treaty of Paris in 1763. It helped lead to the Proclamation of 1763.

Proclamation of 1763

Royal directive issued after the Seven Years' War and Pontiac's War prohibiting settlement, surveys, and land grants west of the Appalachian Mountains; caused considerable resentment among colonists hoping to move west.

Albany Plan of Union

A failed 1754 proposal by the seven northern British colonies in anticipation of the Seven Years' War, urging the unification of the colonies under one crown-appointed president.