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physicians Sarah Parker Redmond and Delany The 1830s saw a significant effort by white communities to
oppose black education, coinciding with the emergence of public schooling in American society. Public
schooling and citizenship were linked together, and because of the ambiguity that surrounded black
citizenship status, blacks were effectively excluded from public access to universal education. Paradoxically,
the free black community of Baltimore made more significant strides in increasing black access to education
than Boston and Hhaven. Free black males enjoyed wider employment opportunities than free black
females, who were largely confined to domestic occupations. While free black boys could become
apprentices to carpenters, coopers, barbers, and blacksmiths, girls' options were much more limited,
confined to domestic work such as being cooks, cleaning women, seamstresses, and child-nurturers.
Despite this, in certain areas, free black women could become prominent members of the free black
community, running households and constituting a significant portion of the free black paid labor force.
One of the most highly skilled jobs a woman could have was to be a teacher. Many free African-American
families in colonial North Carolina and Virginia became landowners and a few of them also became slave
owners. In some cases, this was in order to protect members of their own families, whom they purchased
from other owners. In other cases, they participated in the full slave economy. For example, a freedman
named Cyprian Richard purchased an estate in Louisiana that included 100 slaves free blacks drew up
petitions and joined the army during the American Revolution, motivated by the common hope of freedom.
This hope was bolstered by the 1775 proclamation by British official Lord Dunmore, who promised freedom
to any slave who fought on the side of the British during the war. Blacks also fought on the American side,
hoping to gain benefits of citizenship later on. During the Civil War, free blacks fought on the Confederate
and Union sides. Southern free blacks who fought on the Confederate side were hoping to gain a greater
degree of toleration and acceptance among their white neighbors. The hope of equality through the
military was realized over time, such as with the equalization of pay for black and white soldiers a month
before the end of the Civil War.
Black people, both slaves and free, also tried to get equal rights under the new Constitution. In 1777, Prince
Hall and eight other black men wrote a petition to the courts of Massachusetts saying, "that your Petitioners
apprehend that they have in Common with all other men a Natural and Unalienable Right to that freedom which
the Great Parent of the Universe that Bestowed equally on all men kind and which they have Never forfeited by
any Compact or agreement whatever." Some white men, like Henry Laurens of South Carolina, agreed that black
men were "as well entitled to freedom as themselves." James Otis called slavery "the most shocking violation of
the laws of nature."
Most of the northern states, beginning with Vermont, gradually ended slavery and black men gained the
right to vote in the northern states. In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson said
that among the other bad things that the King of England had done was that "he has waged cruel war against
human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people [the
Africans] who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur
miserable death in their transportation thither." But the other white men made him take that part out. The black
people didn't get their rights from the United States government. Instead, the rich white men writing the
Constitution agreed that only rich white men could vote, and they agreed that when the census takers were
counting the population of each state, a black man would count as only three-fifths as much as a white man. A lot
of men thought that slavery would soon die out on its own anyway, and it might have, except for the invention of
the
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