Free
After the Battle of Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781, Britain knew it could no longer hold on to its American colonies.
Fighting continued in isolated areas, but the war was over. Soldiers returned to their farms and businesses, and women went back to their traditional roles. Women’s lives had not changed radically as a result of the war. But many women now had different views of their capabilities. Their newfound confidence laid the groundwork for the equal rights fight that lay many years in the future.
▲ Most Native Americans had supported the British. Many of them also fled to Canada. But even the tribes that had supported the Patriots lost much of their land after the war as more and more settlers moved west. Within 50 years of the Revolution, the U.S. government adopted a policy of removing all Native Americans in the East to lands west of the Mississippi. During the winter of 1838–1839, 16,000 Cherokee men, women, and children were forced to travel the “Trail of Tears” from their eastern homes to what was called Indian Territory. Now it is called Oklahoma.
◀ In the new United States, some enslaved persons, inspired by the Declaration of Independence, filed suits in courts to get their freedom. The best known was Mum Bett, later called Elizabeth Freeman. She was granted freedom by a Massachusetts court order in 1781. Two years later, Massachusetts outlawed slavery. By 1804, most northern states had taken steps to free their enslaved persons.
Many male soldiers were given a pension (regular payment) for their war service. In 1792, Deborah Sampson asked the state of Massachusetts for a pension. It was finally granted in 1804, but in the meantime, she and her husband struggled to make ends meet. To earn money, Sampson lectured about her war experiences. At the end of each lecture, she dressed in her old uniform, marched around the stage, and fired her musket. She told audiences, “My achievements are a breach [break in custom] in the decorum [behavior] of my sex.... I must frankly confess I recollect them with a kind of satisfaction....” ▶
◀ By 1785, some 100,000 Loyalists had left the U.S. Some of them went to Britain, where they were criticized as quitters, while others took their enslaved persons with them and went to the British West Indies in the Caribbean. However, most Loyalists emigrated to eastern Canada, where their lives were not always easy, especially at the beginning. One girl recalled living in a tent until her family could build a home. Nevertheless, most were proud of their Loyalist heritage. Eventually, they proclaimed it by writing U.E.L. (United Empire Loyalist) after their names, and some of their descendants still do this.
▲ During the Revolution, New Jersey gave the right to vote to women who owned property, but the New Jersey legislature took away this right in 1807. It was assumed that married women, who had no property in their own names, would be represented by their husband’s vote. So only single women could vote in New Jersey. The vote was not made available to all women until 1920.
▲ The new nation realized that women had an important role to play in raising good citizens. To do this, women had to have some education. So, after the Revolution, there was more emphasis on education for girls. A 1789 Massachusetts law required every town to provide public education for boys and girls. But the law was, for the most part, ignored. In all the states, private academies offered teenage girls from wealthy families a secondary education. This emphasis on education contributed to the women’s rights movement that formally started with a convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 and is still going on.
