Create a 3 page essay paper that discusses History 111 long assignment.This is clear when considering the period of the nation’s early development, from roughly 1600 to the mid-1800s. The story of f

Create a 3 page essay paper that discusses History 111 long assignment.

This is clear when considering the period of the nation’s early development, from roughly 1600 to the mid-1800s. The story of freedom’s expansion during this period was messy and conflict-ridden. In this brief paper, several of the most important conflicts between various groups for the right to claim expanding freedom will be reviewed and analyzed in order to comment on the nature of American freedom in the colonial and antebellum periods. The earliest settlers in the new colonies came to practice a way of life that was denied to them in their homeland. They wanted to experience religious freedom and the variety of political freedoms that were necessary in order to achieve their dream of living in community with each other without worry of persecution (Foner 47-50). This guiding principle, however, had inner conflicts such as the need to suppress certain kinds of dissent within their own communities, a system of life that was paternalistic in its treatment of women and even more importantly a need to survive the harsh life in the new environments they found themselves in (Foner 51-56). In attending to all of these needs, the colonialists met the native populations who were already here when they arrived with curiosity at first and later with a kind of malevolent manipulation. Their own need for land and safety drove them to treat the Native Americans as enemies and they began a process of slowly pushing the Native Americans out as they expanded their own territories westward (Foner 78-80). This process went on throughout the period, culminating in the Jacksonian era with an official government policy of “Indian removal” (Foner 151-155, 370-371). The drive to increase religious freedom and promote the establishment of economic independence therefore led to a horrible discrimination against another already established group in the new territory that would eventually make up the nation. The rights of Native Americans to their own independence autonomy were continually infringed upon even as the new colonists sought to increase their own freedoms. The tragic story of the treatment of native populations is equaled, perhaps, only by the story of the treatment of the black slave populations (Foner 130-132, 220-223, 400-408). When the Constitution was written, the question of the status of slaves was raised and dealt with through a “compromise” that treated each slave as three-fifths of a human being (Foner 253). This was done in order to allow the Southern planter society to achieve roughly equal representational proportions with the Northern industrial society. The issue of the extension of voting parity so that all free white men in the society would have roughly the same legal status within the political system was an important step toward a free and equal society, but it came at the cost of treating slaves as less than human (Foner 400-408). In both the legal realm and the cultural approach to slaves, the conflicts of expanding the rights of one group on the backs of another established a terrible legacy that continued through the Civil War which was fought eventually to right some of these wrongs, and into the Reconstruction period that brought the nation out of the war.