AH Challenge: Minority Founding Fathers.

Ok, as we all know The Founding Fathers (of the United States of America) were all White, Male, and Protestant Christian. However, how is it possible for there to have been a number of minorities in The Continental Congress, and/or to sign The Declaration of Independence/Constitution?

By Minorities I mean African Americans, Women, Jewish, Catholic Christian and/or Native Americans.
 
Ok, as we all know The Founding Fathers (of the United States of America) were all White, Male, and Protestant Christian. However, how is it possible for there to have been a number of minorities in The Continental Congress, and/or to sign The Declaration of Independence/Constitution?

By Minorities I mean African Americans, Women, Jewish, Catholic Christian and/or Native Americans.

Well, one of the "Founding Fathers" of the Confederacy, Judah Benjamin was a Jew.

But given the timer period, African American? No. A Woman? No. Jews and Catholics, while a handicap, isn't a complete deal-breaker. And the Native Americans tended to side with the British. :rolleyes:
 
Well, one of the "Founding Fathers" of the Confederacy, Judah Benjamin was a Jew.

But given the timer period, African American? No. A Woman? No. Jews and Catholics, while a handicap, isn't a complete deal-breaker. And the Native Americans tended to side with the British. :rolleyes:

Well John Adams took plenty of Political advise from his wife, is it possible for her to have been involved?

And there were a few Freed Slaves in The North, they MIGHT have a shot.

I agree on the whole Jews/Catholics idea.

However, weren't the Native Americans split? Some tribes for Britian, some for America?
 
I think most of Washington's troops in one of the battles near Boston were Catholic Irishmen.

You could probably work an Irish Catholic in there somewhere.

I think there was a Jewish merchant named Benjamin Solomon who gave his entire fortune to the Revolutionary cause, so he could count as an OTL example or simply amplify his role somewhat.
 
Well John Adams took plenty of Political advise from his wife, is it possible for her to have been involved?

And there were a few Freed Slaves in The North, they MIGHT have a shot.

I agree on the whole Jews/Catholics idea.

However, weren't the Native Americans split? Some tribes for Britian, some for America?

As a whole the British treated the Native Americans much better than we ever did. Our dealing with them is probably as ugly an episode as slavery... and one we never really made ammends for so we don't look too closely at it as a whole.
 
At least some of Maryland's reps were probably Catholic, considering the whole point of Maryland was that people living there were English Catholics running from persecution on the Home Islands.
 
As a whole the British treated the Native Americans much better than we ever did. Our dealing with them is probably as ugly an episode as slavery... and one we never really made ammends for so we don't look too closely at it as a whole.

The British treated the Natives just as bad as we did when they got the opportunity, it's just that they were much further away so they had to deal with them less. Why invade and genocide when you have no reason and making a treaty is cheaper? When there was a reason the British would do many of the same things American settlers would do.
 
Ok, as we all know The Founding Fathers (of the United States of America) were all White, Male, and Protestant Christian. However, how is it possible for there to have been a number of minorities in The Continental Congress, and/or to sign The Declaration of Independence/Constitution?

By Minorities I mean African Americans, Women, Jewish, Catholic Christian and/or Native Americans.
There were Catholics at the Continental Congress - three of them. I forget what their names were, though.
 
The (part AH, part cultural fantasy, pure gold) Ill Bethisad world features a situation where certain Native American nations actually joined the confederation set up by the colonials. It's Asbishly optimistic, but it results in a fun world. Anyway, the key moderator there was Chief White Eyes of the Delaware tribe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Eyes. He would indeed be a good choice of person to bridge the differences between the peoples. His description in IB: http://ib.frath.net/w/Henry_White_Eyes

For something that I actually wrote, Black Hawk gets a similar treatment.

Really? My teacher stressed how all the founders (except for the few Deist) were all protestant.

Probably the major ones were. "Founder" is such a general term, anyhow.
 
It all depends how broadly youy define "Founding Fathers". If you limit the term to only those men who signed the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, they are almost all White Male Protestants (including Deists like Washington and Jefferson). However, if you broaden the term to include the leaders and "middle managers" of the Revolution and the Early Republic you have Catholics such as Lafayette and Dupont, Jews such as Haym Salomon and David Franks, Quakers such as the Brown Brothers of Providence and even an odd atheist or two such as Tom Paine.
I think the moral of the story is that at the time of the Revolution and the Early Republic, the U.S. was an overwhelmingly Anglo Saxon Protestant country. However, compared to Europe and the European colonies in South America there was more willingness of the Anglo Saxon elite to allow participation by "outsiders" in political and economic life. It was far from being an open or what we would now call a "diverse" system but it was better than most other places and it provided a basis for further improvement.
 

Skokie

Banned
Two signers of the Constitution and one signer of the Declaration were Catholic. If les Canadiens had joined the Revolution, there would have been a few more.

There were also some Quaker signers.
 
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