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87-550: Hoosier most commonly refers to a person from the U.S. state of Indiana, known as The Hoosier State . Hoosier may also refer to: Hoosier "Hoosier" is used in the names of numerous Indiana-based businesses and organizations. "Hoosiers" is also the name of the Indiana University athletic teams . As there is no accepted embodiment of a Hoosier, the IU schools are represented through their letters and colors alone. The term

174-511: A slave catcher during the war, and at its end he pressed the British to return the slaves to their masters. With the British certificates of freedom in their belongings, the black loyalists, including Washington's slave Harry, sailed with their white counterparts out of New York harbor to Nova Scotia . More than 3,000 were resettled in Nova Scotia, where they were eventually granted land and formed

261-653: A committee, of which he was chair, to investigate "the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race". Their report, first delivered to the Medical Association in an address, was published in their journal in 1851, and then reprinted in part in the widely circulated DeBow's Review . Whether slavery was to be limited to the Southern states that already had it, or whether it was to be permitted in new states made from

348-692: A connection to the Methodist minister Rev . Harry Hosier ( c.  1750 –May 1806), who evangelized the American frontier at the beginning of the 19th century as part of the Second Great Awakening . "Black Harry" had been born a slave in North Carolina and sold north to Baltimore , Maryland , before gaining his freedom and beginning his ministry around the end of the American Revolution . He

435-525: A famous speech in the Senate in 1837, declared that slavery was "instead of an evil, a good – a positive good". Calhoun supported his view with the following reasoning: in every civilized society one portion of the community must live on the labor of another; learning, science, and the arts are built upon leisure; the African slave, kindly treated by his master and mistress and looked after in his old age,

522-538: A future date, sometimes with an intermediary status of unpaid indentured servant. Abolition was in many cases a gradual process. Some slaveowners, primarily in the Upper South , freed their slaves, and charitable groups bought and freed others. The Atlantic slave trade was outlawed by individual states beginning during the American Revolution. The import trade was banned by Congress in 1808 , although smuggling

609-473: A handful, freed their slaves by personal decision, often providing for manumission in wills but sometimes filing deeds or court papers to free individuals. Numerous slaveholders who freed their slaves cited revolutionary ideals in their documents; others freed slaves as a promised reward for service. From 1790 to 1810, the proportion of blacks free in the United States increased from 8 to 13.5 percent, and in

696-567: A hundred thousand (nearly one in five black slaves) left their homes ... betting on British victory", but Cassandra Pybus states that between 20,000 and 30,000 is a more realistic number of slaves who defected to the British side during the war. Many slaves took advantage of the disruption of war to escape from their plantations to British lines or to fade into the general population. Upon their first sight of British vessels, thousands of slaves in Maryland and Virginia fled from their owners. Throughout

783-422: A public question from there forward". After the new country's independence was secure, slavery was a topic of contention at the 1787 Constitutional Convention . Many of Founding Fathers of the United States were plantation owners who owned large numbers of enslaved laborers; the original Constitution preserved their right to own slaves, and they further gained a political advantage in owning slaves. Although

870-533: A punishment for crime is still legal in the United States. By the time of the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), the status of enslaved people had been institutionalized as a racial caste associated with African ancestry. During and immediately following the Revolution, abolitionist laws were passed in most Northern states and a movement developed to abolish slavery. The role of slavery under

957-477: A significantly higher number and proportion of enslaved people in the population overall, as its commodity crops were labor-intensive. Early on, enslaved people in the South worked primarily on farms and plantations growing indigo , rice and tobacco ( cotton did not become a major crop until after the 1790s). In 1720, about 65 percent of South Carolina's population was enslaved. Planters (defined by historians in

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1044-405: A stronger. 4. The happiness of the governed is in no sense its object. 5. The temporal improvement or the eternal well-being of the governed is in no sense its object. The object of it has been distinctly stated in one sentence by Judge Ruffin ,— "The end is the profit of the master, his security, and the public safety." Slavery, then, is absolute despotism, of the most unmitigated form. In

1131-429: A tavern in the foothills of southern Indiana. One was cut and a third Frenchman walked in to see an ear on the dirt floor of the tavern, prompting him to slur out "Whosh ear?" Two related stories trace the origin of the term to gangs of workers from Indiana under the direction of a Mr. Hoosier. The account related by Dunn is that a Louisville contractor named Samuel Hoosier preferred to hire workers from communities on

1218-524: A variant spelling of his name (possibly influenced by the "yokel" slang ) during the decades after his ministry. According to Washington County newspaper reports of the time, Abraham Stover was Colonel of the Indiana Militia. He was a colorful figure in early Washington County history. Along with his son-in-law, John B. Brough, he was considered one of the two strongest men in Washington County. He

1305-450: Is a moral and political evil. It is idle to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it is a greater evil to the white than to the colored race. While my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more deeply engaged for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially. The painful discipline they are undergoing

1392-473: Is better off than the free laborers of Europe; and under the slave system conflicts between capital and labor are avoided. The advantages of slavery in this respect, he concluded, "will become more and more manifest, if left undisturbed by interference from without, as the country advances in wealth and numbers". South Carolina army officer, planter , and railroad executive James Gadsden called slavery "a social blessing" and abolitionists "the greatest curse of

1479-455: Is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things. How long their servitude may be necessary is known and ordered by a merciful Providence. However, as the abolitionist movement's agitation increased and the area developed for plantations expanded, apologies for slavery became more faint in the South. Leaders then described slavery as a beneficial scheme of labor management. John C. Calhoun , in

1566-617: Is universally accepted by residents of Indiana and, as of 2017, is also the official demonym used by the U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO), making it the only GPO-recommended demonym of any US state that is not directly formed from the state's name. Before 2017, the GPO-recommended demonym for the state was "Indianian". In addition to "The Hoosier's Nest," the term also appeared in the Indianapolis Journal 's "Carrier's Address" on January 1, 1833. There are many suggestions for

1653-800: The Confederacy . Shortly afterward, the Civil War began when Confederate forces attacked the U.S. Army's Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. During the war some jurisdictions abolished slavery and, due to Union measures such as the Confiscation Acts and the Emancipation Proclamation , the war effectively ended slavery in most places. After the Union victory, the Thirteenth Amendment to

1740-501: The French words for 'redness', rougeur , or 'red-faced', rougeaud . According to this hypothesis, the early pejorative use of the word Hoosier may have a link to the color red ("rouge" in French) which is associated with indigenous peoples , pejoratively called "red men" or " red-skins ", and also with poor white people by calling them " red-necks ". Humorous folk etymologies for

1827-594: The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 gave effect to the Fugitive Slave Clause. Salmon P. Chase considered the Fugitive Slave Acts unconstitutional because "The Fugitive Slave Clause was a compact among the states, not a grant of power to the federal government". In a section negotiated by James Madison of Virginia, Section   2 of Article   I designated "other persons" (slaves) to be added to

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1914-604: The Thirteen Colonies that formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property that could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until abolition in 1865, and issues concerning slavery seeped into every aspect of national politics, economics, and social custom. In the decades after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, many of slavery's economic and social functions were continued through segregation , sharecropping , and convict leasing . Involuntary servitude as

2001-600: The United States Congress acted on President Thomas Jefferson 's advice and, without controversy, made importing slaves from abroad a federal crime, effective the first day that the United States Constitution permitted this prohibition: January 1, 1808. During the Revolution and in the following years, all states north of Maryland ( the Mason–Dixon line ) took steps towards abolishing slavery. In 1777,

2088-565: The United States Constitution (1789) was the most contentious issue during its drafting. The Three-Fifths Clause of the Constitution gave slave states disproportionate political power, while the Fugitive Slave Clause ( Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 ) provided that, if a slave escaped to another state, the other state could not prevent the return of the slave to the person claiming to be his or her owner. All Northern states had abolished slavery to some degree by 1805, sometimes with completion at

2175-466: The Upper South from less than one to nearly ten percent as a result of these actions. Starting in 1777, the rebels outlawed the importation of slaves state by state. They all acted to end the international trade, but, after the war, it was reopened in North Carolina (opened until 1794) and Georgia (opened until 1798) and South Carolina (opened until 1787, and then reopened again in 1803.) In 1807,

2262-631: The Vermont Republic , which was still unrecognized by the United States, passed a state constitution prohibiting slavery . The Pennsylvania Abolition Society , led in part by Benjamin Franklin , was founded in 1775, and Pennsylvania began gradual abolition in 1780. In 1783, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled in Commonwealth v. Jennison that slavery was unconstitutional under

2349-629: The cotton industry in the Deep South after the invention of the cotton gin greatly increased demand for slave labor, and the Southern states continued as slave societies. The U.S., divided into slave and free states , became ever more polarized over the issue of slavery. Driven by labor demands from new cotton plantations in the Deep South , the Upper South sold more than a million slaves who were taken to

2436-544: The etymology of the word as applied to Indiana residents. Jacob Piatt Dunn , longtime secretary of the Indiana Historical Society , published The Word Hoosier , a similar attempt, in 1907. Both chronicled some of the popular and satirical etymologies circulating at the time and focused much of their attention on the use of the word in the Upland South to refer to woodsmen, yokels, and rough people. Dunn traced

2523-460: The 19th century, proponents of slavery often defended the institution as a "necessary evil". At that time, it was feared that emancipation of black slaves would have more harmful social and economic consequences than the continuation of slavery. On April 22, 1820, Thomas Jefferson , one of the Founding Fathers of the United States , wrote in a letter to John Holmes , that with slavery, We have

2610-751: The American Continental Army . Rhode Island started enlisting slaves in 1778, and promised compensation to owners whose slaves enlisted and survived to gain freedom. During the course of the war, about one-fifth of the Northern army was black. In 1781, Baron Closen, a German officer in the French Royal Deux-Ponts Regiment at the Battle of Yorktown , estimated the American army to be about one-quarter black. These men included both former slaves and free-born blacks. Thousands of free blacks in

2697-851: The British forces. Historians agree that the proclamation was chiefly designed for practical rather than moral reasons, and slaves owned by American Loyalists were unaffected by the proclamation. About 1,500 slaves owned by patriots escaped and joined Dunmore's forces. A total of 18 slaves fled George Washington 's plantation, one of whom, Harry, served in Dunmore's all-black loyalist regiment called "the Black Pioneers". Escapees who joined Dunmore had "Liberty to Slaves" stitched on to their jackets. Most died of disease before they could do any fighting, but three hundred of these freed slaves made it to freedom in Britain. Historian Jill Lepore writes that "between eighty and

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2784-434: The British war effort. Such proclamations were repeatedly issued over the course of the conflict, which resulted in up to 100,000 American slaves fleeing to British lines. Self-emancipated slaves who reached British lines were organized into a variety of military units, which served in all theaters of the war. Formerly enslaved women and children, in lieu of military service, worked instead as laborers and domestic servants. At

2871-577: The Deep South. The total slave population in the South eventually reached four million. As the U.S. expanded, the Southern states attempted to extend slavery into the new Western territories to allow proslavery forces to maintain power in Congress. The new territories acquired by the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican Cession were the subject of major political crises and compromises. Slavery

2958-500: The Indiana pioneers calling out "Who'sh 'ere?" as a general greeting and warning when hearing someone in the bushes and tall grass, to avoid shooting a relative or friend in error. The poet James Whitcomb Riley facetiously suggested that the fierce brawling that took place in Indiana involved enough biting that the expression "Whose ear?" became notable. This arose from or inspired the story of two 19th-century French immigrants brawling in

3045-549: The Indiana side of the Ohio River like New Albany rather than Kentuckians. During the excavation of the first canal around the Falls of the Ohio from 1826 to 1833, his employees became known as "Hoosier's men" and then simply "Hoosiers". The usage spread from these hard-working laborers to all of the Indiana boatmen in the area and then spread north with the settlement of the state. The story

3132-502: The North had to search for employment. George Fitzhugh used assumptions about white superiority to justify slavery, writing that, "the Negro is but a grown up child, and must be governed as a child." In The Universal Law of Slavery , Fitzhugh argues that slavery provides everything necessary for life and that the slave is unable to survive in a free world because he is lazy, and cannot compete with

3219-488: The North might well have lost. Slavery was a contentious issue in the writing and approval of the Constitution of the United States . The words "slave" and "slavery" did not appear in the Constitution as originally adopted, although several provisions clearly referred to slaves and slavery. Until the adoption of the 13th Amendment in 1865, the Constitution did not prohibit slavery. Section 9 of Article I forbade

3306-543: The Northern states fought in the state militias and Continental Army. In the South, both sides offered freedom to slaves who would perform military service. Roughly 20,000 slaves fought in the American Revolution. After the Revolutionary War broke out, the British realized they lacked the manpower necessary to prosecute the war. In response, British commanders began issuing proclamations to Patriot-owned slaves, offering freedom if they fled to British lines and assisted

3393-577: The Northern states had passed laws outlawing slavery, either immediately or over time. In New York, the last slaves were freed in 1827 (celebrated with a big July   5 parade). Indentured servitude , which had been widespread in the colonies (half the population of Philadelphia had once been indentured servants ), dropped dramatically, and disappeared by 1800. However, there were still forcibly indentured servants in New Jersey in 1860. No Southern state abolished slavery, but some individual owners, more than

3480-488: The South, losses of slaves were high, with many due to escapes. Slaves also escaped throughout New England and the mid-Atlantic, with many joining the British who had occupied New York. In the closing months of the war, the British evacuated freedmen and also removed slaves owned by loyalists. Around 15,000 black loyalists left with the British, most of them ending up as free people in England or its colonies. Washington hired

3567-570: The Union address), went into effect on January 1, 1808, the earliest date on which the importation of slaves could be prohibited under the Constitution. The delegates approved the Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution ( Article IV, section 2, clause 3 ), which prohibited states from freeing those "held to Service or Labour" (meaning slaves, indentures, and apprentices) who fled to them from another state and required that they be returned to their owners. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and

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3654-668: The United States The legal institution of human chattel slavery , comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans , was prevalent in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in the South . Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas . From 1526, during the early colonial period , it was practiced in what became Britain's colonies , including

3741-576: The United States Constitution was ratified on December 6, 1865, prohibiting "slavery [and] involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime." During most of the British colonial period, slavery existed in all the colonies. People enslaved in the North typically worked as house servants, artisans, laborers and craftsmen, with the greater number in cities. Many men worked on the docks and in shipping. In 1703, more than 42 percent of New York City households held enslaved people in bondage,

3828-483: The United States was a variable thing, in "constant flux, driven by the violent pursuit of ever-larger profits." According to demographic calculations by J. David Hacker of the University of Minnesota, approximately four out of five of all of the slaves who ever lived in the United States or the territory that became the United States (beginning in 1619 and including all colonies that were eventually acquired or conquered by

3915-532: The United States) were born in or imported to the United States in the 19th century. Slaves were the labor force of the South, but slave ownership was also the foundation upon which American white supremacy was constructed. Historian Walter Johnson argues that "one of the many miraculous things a slave could do was make a household white...", meaning that the value of whiteness in America was in some ways measured by

4002-465: The Upper South as those who held 20 or more slaves) used enslaved workers to cultivate commodity crops. They also worked in the artisanal trades on large plantations and in many Southern port cities. The later wave of settlers in the 18th century who settled along the Appalachian Mountains and backcountry were backwoods subsistence farmers , and they seldom held enslaved people. Beginning in

4089-399: The ability to purchase and maintain black slaves. Harriet Beecher Stowe described slavery in the United States in 1853: What, then, is American slavery, as we have seen it exhibited by law, and by the decision of Courts? Let us begin by stating what it is not: 1. It is not apprenticeship. 2. It is not guardianship. 3. It is in no sense a system for the education of a weaker race by

4176-453: The air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill." Hammond believed that in every class one group must accomplish all the menial duties, because without them the leaders in society could not progress. He argued that the hired laborers of the North were slaves too: "The difference   ... is, that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated; there is no starvation, no begging, no want of employment," while those in

4263-424: The assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it – when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell". Our new [Confederate] Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to

4350-607: The attitudes of white Southerners, and the concentration of the black population in the South, were bringing the white and black populations to a state of equilibrium, and were a danger to both races. Because of the racial differences between master and slave, he believed that the latter could not be emancipated. In a letter to his wife dated December 27, 1856, in reaction to a message from President Franklin Pierce , Robert E. Lee wrote, There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution

4437-514: The book Shanties from the Seven Seas by Stan Hugill, in reference to its former use to denote cotton -stowers, who would move bales of cotton to and from the holds of ships and force them in tightly by means of jackscrews . A Hoosier cabinet , often shortened to "hoosier", is a type of free-standing kitchen cabinet popular in the early decades of the twentieth century. Almost all of these cabinets were produced by companies located in Indiana and

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4524-470: The colonial era were unevenly distributed: 14,867 lived in New England , where they were three percent of the population; 34,679 lived in the mid-Atlantic colonies , where they were six percent of the population; and 347,378 in the five Southern Colonies , where they were 31 percent of the population. The South developed an agricultural economy dependent on commodity crops . Its planters rapidly acquired

4611-455: The community of the black Nova Scotians . In the first two decades after the American Revolution, state legislatures and individuals took actions to free slaves. Northern states passed new constitutions that contained language about equal rights or specifically abolished slavery; some states, such as New York and New Jersey, where slavery was more widespread, passed laws by the end of the 18th century to abolish slavery incrementally. By 1804, all

4698-467: The derivation of the word but none is universally accepted. In 1833 the Pittsburgh Statesman said the term had been in use for "some time past" and suggested it originated from census workers calling "Who's here?". Also in 1833, former Indiana Governor James B. Ray began publishing a newspaper titled The Hoosier . In 1900, Meredith Nicholson wrote The Hoosiers , an early attempt to study

4785-532: The differences between the Constitution of the Confederate States and the United States Constitution , laid out the cause for the American Civil War, as he saw it, and defended slavery: The new [Confederate] Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions – African slavery as it exists among us – the proper status of

4872-403: The early settlers had adopted the nickname self-mockingly and that it had lost its negative associations by the time of Finley's poem. Johnathan Clark Smith subsequently showed that Nicholson and Dunn's earliest sources within Indiana were mistaken. A letter by James Curtis cited by Dunn and others as the earliest known use of the term was actually written in 1846, not 1826. Similarly, the use of

4959-592: The end of the war, freed slaves in British lines either evacuated to other British colonies or to Britain itself, were re-enslaved by the victorious Americans, or fled into the countryside. In early 1775, the royal governor of Virginia , Lord Dunmore , wrote to the Earl of Dartmouth of his intention to free slaves owned by American Patriots in case they staged a rebellion. On November 7, 1775, Dunmore issued Dunmore's Proclamation , which promised freedom to any slaves of American patriots who would leave their masters and join

5046-457: The enslaved of the early Republic were considered sentient property, were not permitted to vote, and had no rights to speak of, they were to be enumerated in population censuses and counted as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of representation in the national legislature, the U.S. Congress . The rebels began to offer freedom as an incentive to motivate slaves to fight on their side. Washington authorized slaves to be freed who fought with

5133-465: The federal government from prohibiting the importation of slaves, described as "such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit", for twenty years after the Constitution's ratification (until January 1, 1808). The Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves of 1807 , passed by Congress and signed into law by President Thomas Jefferson (who had called for its enactment in his 1806 State of

5220-400: The historian James Oliver Horton noted, prominent slaveholder politicians and the commodity crops of the South had a strong influence on United States politics and economy. Horton said, in the 72 years between the election of George Washington and the election of Abraham Lincoln, 50 of those years [had] a slaveholder as president of the United States , and, for that whole period of time, there

5307-517: The intelligent European white race. He states that "The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and in some sense, the freest people in the world." Without the South, "He (slave) would become an insufferable burden to society" and "Society has the right to prevent this, and can only do so by subjecting him to domestic slavery." On March 21, 1861, Alexander Stephens , Vice President of the Confederacy, delivered his Cornerstone Speech . He explained

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5394-505: The leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away   ... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon

5481-632: The name derives from the largest of them, the Hoosier Manufacturing Co. of New Castle, Indiana . Other Indiana businesses include Hoosier Racing Tire and the Hoosier Bat Company, manufacturer of wooden baseball bats . The RCA Dome , former home of the Indianapolis Colts , was known as the "Hoosier Dome" before RCA purchased the naming rights in 1994. The RCA Dome was replaced by Lucas Oil Stadium in 2008. Slavery in

5568-421: The nation". Gadsden was in favor of South Carolina's secession in 1850, and was a leader in efforts to split California into two states, one slave and one free . Other Southern writers who also began to portray slavery as a positive good were James Henry Hammond and George Fitzhugh . They presented several arguments to defend the practice of slavery in the South. Hammond, like Calhoun, believed that slavery

5655-438: The negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of

5742-466: The political power of Southern states, as three-fifths of the (non-voting) slave population was counted for congressional apportionment and in the Electoral College , although it did not strengthen Southern states as much as it would have had the Constitution provided for counting all persons, whether slave or free, equally. In addition, many parts of the country were tied to the Southern economy. As

5829-489: The second half of the 18th century, a debate emerged over the continued importation of African slaves to the American colonies. Many in the colonies, including the Southern slavocracy , opposed further importation of slaves due to fears that it would destabilize colonies and lead to further slave rebellions . In 1772, prominent Virginians submitted a petition to the Crown , requesting that the slave trade to Virginia be abolished; it

5916-422: The second-highest proportion of any city in the colonies, behind only Charleston, South Carolina . Enslaved people were also used as agricultural workers in farm communities, especially in the South , but also in upstate New York and Long Island , Connecticut , and New Jersey . By 1770, there were 397,924 blacks out of a population of 2.17 million in what would soon become the United States. The slaves of

6003-401: The size of the United States, and it was established at the insistence of Cutler and Putnam as "free soil" – no slavery. This was to prove crucial a few decades later. Had those states been slave states, and their electoral votes gone to Abraham Lincoln's main opponent, Lincoln would not have become president. The Civil War would not have been fought. Even if it eventually had been,

6090-417: The state's new 1780 constitution . New Hampshire began gradual emancipation in 1783, while Connecticut and Rhode Island followed suit in 1784. The New York Manumission Society , which was led by John Jay , Alexander Hamilton , and Aaron Burr , was founded in 1785. New York state began gradual emancipation in 1799, and New Jersey did the same in 1804. Shortly after the Revolution, the Northwest Territory

6177-432: The story into the Congressional Record in 1975, and matches the timing and location of Smith's subsequent research. However, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been unable to find any record of a Hoosier or Hosier in surviving canal company records. The word "hoosier" has been used in Greater St. Louis as a pejorative for an unintelligent or uncultured person. The word is also encountered in sea shanties . In

6264-413: The superior race, is his natural and moral condition. This view of the "Negro race" was backed by pseudoscience . The leading researcher was Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright , a Southerner and the inventor of the mental illnesses of drapetomania (the desire of a slave to run away) and dysaesthesia aethiopica ("rascality"), both cured, according to him, by whipping. The Medical Association of Louisiana set up

6351-598: The term "hoosier" have a long history, as recounted by Dunn in The Word Hoosier . One account traces the word to the necessary caution of approaching houses on the frontier. In order to avoid being shot, a traveler would call out from afar to let themselves be known. The inhabitants of the cabin would then reply "Who's here?" which – in the Appalachian English of the early settlers – slurred into "Who'sh 'ere?" and thence into "Hoosier?" A variant of this account had

6438-484: The term in an 1859 newspaper item quoting an 1827 diary entry by Sandford Cox was more likely an editorial comment and not from the original diary. Smith's earliest sources led him to argue that the word originated as a term along the Ohio River for flatboatmen from Indiana and did not acquire its pejorative meanings until 1836, after Finley's poem. William Piersen, a history professor at Fisk University , argued for

6525-547: The total of the state's free population, at the rate of three-fifths of their total number, to establish the state's official population for the purposes of apportionment of congressional representation and federal taxation. The "Three-Fifths Compromise" was reached after a debate in which delegates from Southern (slaveholding) states argued that slaves should be counted in the census just as all other persons were while delegates from Northern (free) states countered that slaves should not be counted at all. The compromise strengthened

6612-530: The wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other. The French writer and traveler Alexis de Tocqueville , in his influential Democracy in America (1835), expressed opposition to slavery while observing its effects on American society. He felt that a multiracial society without slavery was untenable, as he believed that prejudice against blacks increased as they were granted more rights (for example, in Northern states). He believed that

6699-742: The word back to the Cumbrian hoozer , meaning anything unusually large, derived from the Old English hoo (as at Sutton Hoo ), meaning "high" and "hill". The importance of immigrants from northern England and southern Scotland was reflected in numerous placenames including the Cumberland Mountains , the Cumberland River , and the Cumberland Gap . Nicholson defended the people of Indiana against such an association, while Dunn concluded that

6786-526: Was a close associate and personal friend of Bishop Francis Asbury , the "Father of the American Methodist Church". Benjamin Rush said of him that "making allowances for his illiteracy, he was the greatest orator in America". His sermons called on Methodists to reject slavery and to champion the common working man. Piersen proposed that Methodist communities inspired by his example took or were given

6873-470: Was a legal practise and had become entrenched socially and economically in many societies. The ideals and principles promoted in the Enlightenment and the American Revolution helped to put slavery and the desire for its abolition on the political agenda. As historian Christopher L. Brown put it, slavery "had never been on the agenda in a serious way before", but the American Revolution "forced it to be

6960-522: Was always being challenged to prove his might, and seems to have won several fights over men half his age. After whipping six or eight men in a fist fight in Louisville, Kentucky, he cracked his fists and said, "Ain't I a husher", which was changed in the news to "Hoosier", and thus originated the name of Hoosier in connection with Indiana men. Jorge Santander Serrano, a PhD student from Indiana University , has also suggested that Hoosier might come from

7047-408: Was common thereafter, at which point the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service (Coast Guard) began enforcing the law on the high seas. It has been estimated that before 1820 a majority of serving congressmen owned slaves, and that about 30 percent of congressmen who were born before 1840 (some of whom served into the 20th century) at some time in their lives, were owners of slaves. The rapid expansion of

7134-556: Was defended in the South as a "positive good" , and the largest religious denominations split over the slavery issue into regional organizations of the North and South. By 1850, the newly rich, cotton-growing South threatened to secede from the Union . Bloody fighting broke out over slavery in the Kansas Territory . When Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election on a platform of halting the expansion of slavery, slave states seceded to form

7221-470: Was established, by Manasseh Cutler and Rufus Putnam (who had been George Washington's chief engineer). Both Cutler and Putnam came from Puritan New England. The Puritans strongly believed that slavery was morally wrong. Their influence on the issue of slavery was long-lasting, and this was provided significantly greater impetus by the Revolution. The Northwest Territory (which became Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota) doubled

7308-458: Was needed to build the rest of society. In a speech to the Senate on March 4, 1858, Hammond developed his "Mudsill Theory", defending his view on slavery by stating: "Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in

7395-490: Was never a person elected to a second term who was not a slaveholder. The power of Southern states in Congress lasted until the Civil War , affecting national policies, legislation, and appointments. One result was that most of the justices appointed to the Supreme Court were slave owners. The planter elite dominated the Southern congressional delegations and the United States presidency for nearly fifty years. Slavery in

7482-399: Was rejected. Rhode Island forbade the importation of slaves in 1774. The influential revolutionary Fairfax Resolves called for an end to the "wicked, cruel and unnatural" Atlantic slave trade. All of the colonies banned slave importations during the Revolutionary War. Slavery had existed for thousands of years, all around the world. In the United States and many parts of the world it

7569-400: Was told to Dunn in 1901 by a man who had heard it from a Hoosier relative while traveling in southern Tennessee . Dunn could not find any family of the given name in any directory in the region or anyone else in southern Tennessee who had heard the story and accounted himself dubious. This version was subsequently retold by Gov .  Evan Bayh and Sen .  Vance Hartke , who introduced

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