Using Primary Sources in African American Studies of the Early Republic

History is a dialogue with the past. To achieve an accurate dialogue with those who experienced life in the new republic, it is necessary to study their exact words and get the feelings and observations of the time. Thanks to the work of computer experts with historical interests, many web sites now provide online access to these sources. To be sure, there are still many great books to utilize, but the World Wide Web offers documents that are immediately accessible in a form ready to use in the classroom.

In order to become better acquainted with this historical area, I read Race and Revolution, by Gary Nash, and Keepers of the Revolution, by Paul Gilje and Howard Rock. These books brought into focus an important change in American thinking: in the years after independence many Americans shifted from a belief that perhaps African Americans deserved better, to a general conviction that their inferior status was a fact of life to be either enjoyed or tolerated.

Armed with this background, I developed an Internet assignment in which I asked students to perform their own searches and find three primary sources from the time period 1776 to 1800 that dealt with African Americans in the U.S. For each document I asked the students to complete three tasks:

1. Copy each document
2. Include a bibliography
3. Answer the following questions:
   1. What was the purpose of the item?
   2. What did the writer of the document believe about the topic discussed in the document?
   3. What can one learn from the document?
   4. What does this document reveal about the early republic?

I was amazed at the wide variety of materials my students were able to locate. Inspired by my students’ success I surfed the web to find the sources of their material and found some great documents on my own. One problem I found, however, was that many of the sites the students had located were no longer available. But since the Internet is ever changing, this is only to be expected. If some sites have been removed, others are added, guaranteeing that students meet with success in their searches.

If your students have limited access to the Internet, or if they have limited Internet skills, you can collect online documents and printed sources yourself, then present a selection to class members, and have them answer questions in groups of three or four. Below are a few questions that could be used with packets of primary sources from books and the World Wide Web.

1. How did African Americans challenge stereotypes that European Americans had about them?
2. What opinions did the founders offer about the institution of slavery? (Writings by George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson are easily available.)
3. What opinions did African Americans give about their treatment by European Americans?
4. What evidence of revolutionary fervor do these readings provide?

In the process of writing this article I was exposed to the hypocrisy surrounding the way African Americans were treated in the early republic. The contributions they made both to the Revolution and in building the republic were also evident. I encourage both instructors and students to take at least a passing look at these types of documents.

Selected Resources

Web Sites
Excerpts from Slave Narratives: <http://vi.uh.edu/pages/mintz/primary.htm>. Edited by Steve Mintz. Accessed 20 March 1999. My students located this University of Houston site which offers primary materials and quotations from a variety of individuals. The size of the entries make them very usable in the classroom.

From Revolution to Reconstruction: A WWW Project in Collective Writing: <http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/>. Department of Alfa Information of the University of Groningen, Netherlands. Accessed 20 March 1999. What a great spot! I’m not sure why someone in the Netherlands did all this work, but it is an amazing historical resource. Instructors will find more than enough for a few days of classroom analysis.

Electronic Text Center: <http://www.vsla.edu/public/education/documents.html>. University of Virginia Library. Accessed 20 March 1999. Once again credit goes to my students for this location. This site is a major historical archive with primary source material for many areas of American history. I encourage instructors to check out the selection of WPA slave narratives.

Secondary Sources

Blassingame, John W., ed. Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977. This volume includes letters to Thomas Jefferson from his slaves discussing the continued maintenance of his estate. This is now of particular interest, since one of the corresponding slave’s name is Hemings.

Gilje, Paul A. and Howard B. Rock, eds. Keepers of the Revolution: New Yorkers at Work in the Early Republic. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. This book contains a chapter on African American life in New York after the Revolution. It provides other details of early American life not easily found in books on this era, as well as drawings that most classroom teachers will not have seen before.

Nash, Gary B. Race and Revolution. Madison, WI: Madison House, 1990. Nash gives a comprehensive analysis of the role of African Americans in the Revolution and post-revolutionary era. Instructors will find this book helpful in familiarizing themselves with the topic. The second half of the book contains primary documents; however, these tend to be somewhat lengthy and do not lend themselves to classroom use.

Nash, Gary B. and Jean R. Soderlund. Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and its Aftermath. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. This volume includes a plan for “Improving the Condition of The Free Blacks, 1790,” which brings into focus the initial attempts at dealing with the contradictory nature of the early republic.

Piersen, William D. Black Legacy: America’s Hidden Heritage. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. This text, like many of the web sites, includes more material than can be used in the average survey course of American history. For my class I used a song in the Gullah dialect that students seldom encounter.

Whiteman, Maxwell, ed. Afro-American History Series. 10 vols. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1985. This series is a marvelous in-depth collection of African American writers in early America. In Volume One my student found a copy of Benjamin Banneker’s almanac from 1791. There are many other little known pieces throughout this series, including publicity on the formation of churches as well as anti-slavery essays and speeches.

Evaluating Online Sources:
Resources for Students

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Or, Why it’s a Good Idea to Evaluate Web Sources: <http://lib.nmsu.edu/staff/susabeck/evalcrit.html>. New Mexico State University’s library web site discusses accuracy, authority, objectivity, currency, and coverage in relation to online material.

Evaluating Online Resources Notebook: <http://www.uis.edu/~schroede/valid.htm>. The Office of Technology-Enhanced Learning at the University of Illinois at Springfield’s web site lists basic principles of evaluation, provides a link to an online tutorial, and has a section devoted to online resources for evaluation methods.

Guide to Library Research Tutorial: <http://www.indiana.edu/~libinstr/tools.html>. Indiana University’s library web site includes an online research tutorial for students. The “WWW and Library Research” and “Evaluating Information Sources” sections of the site are particularly helpful.

Ten C’s For Evaluating Internet Sources: <http://www.uwec.edu/Admin/Library/Guides/tencs.html>. The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire’s library web site lists ten criteria for determining a source’s worth: content, credibility, critical thinking, copyright, citation, continuity, censorship, connectivity, comparability, and context.

Ann Crocker has taught in the Norman (Oklahoma) Public Schools for thirteen years. She teaches ninth and tenth grade social studies and the A.P. United States history course. She has a Master’s degree from the University of Oklahoma.