US Slave

Carolina Planters on the Alabama Frontiers

2013-05-18T20:17:00.003-07:00

Carolina Planters on the Alabama Frontiers

Edward Pattillo's book Carolina Planters on the Alabama Frontier: The Spencer-Robeson-McKenzie Family Papers collects the papers of Elihu Spencer, a fourth-generation New Englander, and his family and Southern decedents, to form a history of the American nation from the point of view of planters and those they held in slavery. The documents in this volume are accounts of a privileged world that was afflicted by constant loss and despair. The papers together form a dramatic narrative of early Americans from the mid-eighteenth century to the harsh years after the Civil War. They created their new society with courage, imagination and tenacity, while never recognizing their own moral blind spot regarding the holding of human beings in slavery. (source: South Carolina ETV)

As reported in the Alabama Media Group, "Southern Bound: 'Carolina Planters on the Alabama Frontier'," by John Sledge, on 19 April 2012 -- MOBILE, Ala. -- There’s a certain kind of Southern boy that relishes his slightly batty older relatives and their long, colorful family stories. He will sit for hours hanging on every word, hands politely folded in his lap, and nod solemnly when regaled endlessly about which silver spoon belonged to which long-departed cousin or how a particular chest of drawers ended up in the master bedroom. He never tires of hearing about his forebears’ Indian-fighting days or Civil War exploits, and he admires the fragile artifacts of those days. He knows his way around the endlessly convoluted branches of his family tree as well as a corporate accountant knows a spreadsheet, and the past is as vivid as the present in his imagination. By the time he reaches his majority, he realizes that everything signifies, and no matter how far he travels, he will always be secure in who and what he has become.

Edward McKenzie Pattillo was such a youth, and in his magnificent new book, “Carolina Planters on the Alabama Frontier: The Spencer-Robeson-McKenzie Family Papers” (NewSouth, $50), he shares the saga of his extended family and their peregrinations from 17th-century New England to 18th-century South Carolina to 19th-century Alabama. It would be a fair question to ask why Pattillo’s particular ancestors should hold any interest for the average reader, and the answer would be because they were so beautifully expressive in their writings and so immersed in the issues of their day that their story is not only entertaining and instructive, but nothing less than a history of the antebellum South in genealogical microcosm. The book is further strengthened by Pattillo’s considerable skills as a historian and gifted prose style. I cannot emphasize this last point strongly enough. Pattillo writes so well and so gracefully and weaves in his documentary selections – letters, wills, diaries, photographs, property inventories – so seamlessly that the book is pure pleasure to anyone who loves the past.

Today Pattillo is a historic preservation consultant and property appraiser in Montgomery, Ala., and this familiarity with material culture and its importance deeply informs “Carolina Planters on the Alabama Frontier.” Family homes are accurately described, many illustrated by attractive drawings, and numerous portraits and pieces of furniture are pictured with nary a mystery as to their provenance or current locale. The city of Mobile figures considerably, both as a constant source of reference among family members once they moved to northeast Alabama and as the domicile of Edward Hall, an early Mobile mayor who married one of the Spencer granddaughters, Mary Ann Powe. Their house still stands at 165 St. Emanuel Street and is now the Fort Conde Inn.

Conscientious historian that he is, Pattillo does what he can to tease out the less-celebrated and often difficult story of the family’s slaves. He long ago discarded the older relatives’ version, namely that the slaves were “beautifully cared for and happy as a lark,” and he judges his ancestors’ steadfast refusal to recognize slavery as a wrong their “moral blind spot.” “It destroyed their world, and for a century afterward their families still refused to comprehend their guilt,” he writes. Where and when he can, he includes “every scrap” about the slaves that he can find, “not only in an attempt to give back to them some of their own lost history, but also in hope that their descendents might find clues to their ancestry here.”

If this book has a fault, it is the lack of any lineage charts, which would greatly enhance the reader’s ability to follow the various lines. Pattillo knows this material so thoroughly that it is clearly effortless for him, but the rest of us could use a little more help. Otherwise, “Carolina Planters on the Alabama Frontier” is a thoroughly grounded labor of love that manages to be unblinking in both its admiration and its criticism. This is no mean accomplishment, and an object lesson in how to be at once both proud and realistic about one’s Southern heritage. (source: Alabama Media Group)

Lost In History: Alexander Clark

2013-05-18T09:48:00.000-07:00

From Iowa Public Television, "Lost In History: Alexander Clark," -- In the 1860s, shortly after the Civil War, a black teenager from Muscatine, Iowa tried to enroll in the local high school. She was denied admission because of her color. Her father sued and won. And when the school board challenged the decision in the Iowa Supreme Court, he won again. Because of those actions, Iowa's schools were desegregated more than 85 years before the rest of the nation officially outlawed school segregation. Despite his historic court victory, his prominent anti-slavery role, his recruitment of black soldiers for the Union side in the Civil War and his appointment as the U.S. ambassador to Liberia, Alexander Clark has been all but lost from history. After a chance occurrence 35 years ago, another Muscatine man, a white man, launched a campaign to restore Clark's place in history. The cause came to consume his life. (source: Iowa PBS)

A Father Fights For Equal Rights -- On September 12, 1867, 12-year-old Susan Clark was denied admission to Muscatine's Second Ward Common School Number 2 because she was black. Her father, Alexander Clark, a determined businessman of Muscatine, acted to resist racism and the segregation of Iowa’s schools. How did he do that?

The World Was His School -- Alexander Clark was born in Pennsylvania in 1826. He was a good student and as a child learned the value of education. When he was 13 years old, Alexander went to live with an uncle in Cincinnati. There he learned to be a barber. In 1842 when he was just 16 he came to live in the town of Muscatine and set up a business as a barber. At this time Iowa was not yet a state. The area we now know as Iowa was part of a larger tract of land known as the Iowa Territory. As a businessman, Mr. Clark invested his money and became a property owner. His business grew as the young city of Muscatine developed.

In 1848, Alexander Clark married Catherine Griffin of Iowa City. They believed schooling was important and wanted their children to receive the best education possible. But many Iowa towns had separate schools for black students. Alexander and Catherine thought this was wrong. So in 1868, he retired from his barbering business and spent the rest of his life in public service. Much of his service involved resisting racism and segregation while fighting for equal rights.

Mr. Clark Fights for Equal Rights -- Alexander Clark became a leader in the equal rights movement in Iowa. Following the Civil War, he went with a group of people to Des Moines and talked with legislators about changing language in the Constitution of the State of Iowa. The group was successful, and in 1868 the word "white" was dropped from the Constitution, which meant that black men could vote.

Alexander and Catherine’s daughter Susan, attended the African Methodist Episcopal African School at this time. She was a good student, and when she was 12 years old Susan was ready for more advanced schooling. So Susan's father decided she should go to the public schools to continue her education. However, Susan was denied admission to the Muscatine Public Schools because she was black.

Alexander Clark acted quickly. He filed suit against the school board. The case went to the Iowa Supreme Court, which ruled that the school board, "cannot deny a youth admission to any particular school, because of ... color, nationality, religion or the like." Susan along with her sister Rebecca and their brother Alexander Jr., went on to graduate from Muscatine High School.

Alexander, Jr. continued his education and graduated from the University of Iowa Law School in 1880. His father, Alexander Clark decided to study law, as well. He graduated from the University of Iowa Law School in 1884, at the age of 58.

The President Calls on Mr. Clark -- For many years Alexander Clark had been active in politics fighting for equal rights. Now he spent more and more time working for the Republican Party. He became a highly respected member, and in 1890 President Benjamin Harrison appointed him Resident Minister and Consul General to Liberia. Mr. Clark traveled the long distance to Africa early in 1891. There he became ill with a fever and died.

They Led the Way -- Alexander Clark is remembered for his work in helping to desegregate Iowa’s schools. Although not until 1874 were all of Iowa’s schools desegregated, Alexander Clark and his daughter, Susan, led the way for this very important change.

Adapted from original article in The Goldfinch 2, No. 4 (April 1981). Iowa City: State Historical Society of Iowa. (source: PBS)

Slavery and The US Constitution': The Three-Fifths Compromise

2013-05-18T06:18:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times, on 27 February 2013, in an article entitled, "The Union Wasn’t Worth This Bargain," by Paul Finkelman, the President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law and Public Policy at Albany Law School. He is the author of "Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson.'' -- The three-fifths compromise was one of a number of proslavery provisions of the Constitution that antislavery Northerners could have resisted. The convention prohibited the end of the African slave trade until 1808 (allowing for the importation of more than 60,000 more Africans), but did not require it ever be ended. It adopted two clauses that guaranteed the federal government would suppress slave insurrections and one that required the return of fugitive slaves. Requiring a two-thirds vote in each house of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states to amend the Constitution essentially gave the slave states a perpetual veto over Constitutional change.

A separate Southern nation would have imported more slaves until the master class was overwhelmed by its bondsmen and destroyed by the very people it oppressed.

But by giving the South power disproportionate to its free population, the three-fifths clause set the stage for Southern control of the federal government and, in conjunction with a difficult amendment process, guaranteed a continuation of slavery. James Madison believed in the direct election of the president but created the Electoral College, which, with the three-fifths clause in place, gave the South great power in presidential elections. Without the three-fifths clause, Thomas Jefferson would have been defeated for the presidency in 1800.

Gouverneur Morris

Some Northerners opposed counting slaves for representation. Gouverneur Morris, a New Yorker who happened to represent Pennsylvania in the convention, declared that under the three-fifths clause “the inhabitant of Georgia and South Carolina who goes to the coast of Africa, and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondages, shall have more votes in a government instituted for protection of the rights of mankind, than the citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey who views with a laudable horror so nefarious a practice.”

Morris suggested that the nation should collectively buy all the slaves and free them. This was impractical. But Morris also suggested that “instead of attempting to blend incompatible things, let us at once take a friendly leave of each other. There can be no end of demands for security if every particular interest is to be entitled to it.” Pierce Butler of South Carolina responded that “the security the Southern states want is that their negroes may not be taken from them.”

Northerners might have stood their ground on liberty, and insisted on a stronger union, without counting slavery for representation, guaranteeing the slave trade or turning Northerners into slave catchers for Southern masters.

Without these proslavery provisions, the Southerners might have chosen to form their own nation, going it alone. The Southern nation would have been an agrarian, commodity-based country, with a slave majority in many places. Southerners would doubtless have imported more and more slaves until they were overwhelmed by their own bondsmen.

The Northern nation, free of bondage and southern hostility to internal improvements, would have used the national power to build canals, a national university system, banks, railroads and a powerful economic infrastructure. A great northern United States would have emerged, alongside a decadent slave-owning plantation culture economically dependent on its northern neighbor.

With no fugitive slave clause, bondage would be weakened in the upper South while slavery would be increasingly concentrated in the deep South.

There would have been no civil war between the United States and the slave states. Some 650,000 Americans would not have died to end slavery.

However, like their counterparts in Haiti, the southern masters might have eventually been destroyed by the very people they owned and oppressed. (source: The New York Times)

African Slavery In America by Thomas Paine (1774)

2013-05-17T23:15:00.003-07:00

Thomas Paine: African Slavery In America (1774)

To Americans:

That some desperate wretches should be willing to steal and enslave men by violence and murder for gain, is rather lamentable than strange. But that many civilized, nay, Christianized people should approve, and be concerned in the savage practice, is surprising; and still persist, though it has been so often proved contrary to the light of nature, to every principle of Justice and Humanity, and even good policy, by a succession of eminent men, and several late publications.

Our Traders in MEN (an unnatural commodity!) must know the wickedness of the SLAVE-TRADE, if they attend to reasoning, or the dictates of their own hearts: and such as shun and stiffle all these, willfully sacrifice Conscience, and the character of integrity to that golden idol.

The Managers the Trade themselves, and others testify, that many of these African nations inhabit fertile countries, are industrious farmers, enjoy plenty, and lived quietly, averse to war, before the Europeans debauched them with liquors, and bribing them against one another; and that these inoffensive people are brought into slavery, by stealing them, tempting Kings to sell subjects, which they can have no right to do, and hiring one tribe to war against another, in order to catch prisoners. By such wicked and inhuman ways the English are said to enslave towards one hundred thousand yearly; of which thirty thousand are supposed to die by barbarous treatment in the first year; besides all that are slain in the unnatural ways excited to take them. So much innocent blood have the managers and supporters of this inhuman trade to answer for to the common Lord of all!

Many of these were not prisoners of war, and redeemed from savage conquerors, as some plead; and they who were such prisoners, the English, who promote the war for that very end, are the guilty authors of their being so; and if they were redeemed, as is alleged, they would owe nothing to the redeemer but what he paid for them.

They show as little reason as conscience who put the matter by with saying — "Men, in some cases, are lawfully made slaves, and why may not these?" So men, in some cases, are lawfully put to death, deprived of their goods, without their consent; may any man, therefore, be treated so, without any conviction of desert? Nor is this plea mended by adding — "They are set forth to us as slaves, and we buy them without farther inquiry, let the sellers see to it." Such man may as well join with a known band of robbers, buy their ill-got goods, and help on the trade; ignorance is no more pleadable in one case than the other; the sellers plainly own how they obtain them. But none can lawfully buy without evidence that they are not concurring with Men-Stealers; and as the true owner has a right to reclaim his goods that were stolen, and sold; so the slave, who is proper owner of his freedom, has a right to reclaim it, however often sold.

Most shocking of all is alledging the sacred scriptures to favour this wicked practice. One would have thought none but infidel cavillers would endeavour to make them appear contrary to the plain dictates of natural light, and the conscience, in a matter of common Justice and Humanity; which they cannot be. Such worthy men, as referred to before, judged otherways; Mr. Baxter declared, the Slave-Traders should be called Devils, rather than Christians; and that it is a heinous crime to buy them. But some say, "the practice was permitted to the Jews." To which may be replied,

1. The example of the Jews, in many things, may not be imitated by us; they had not only orders to cut off several nations altogether, but if they were obliged to war with others, and conquered them, to cut off every male; they were suffered to use polygamy and divorces, and other things utterly unlawful to us under clearer light.

2. The plea is, in a great measure, false; they had no permission to catch and enslave people who never injured them.

3. Such arguments ill become us, since the time of reformation came, under Gospel light. All distinctions of nations and privileges of one above others, are ceased; Christians are taught to account all men their neighbours; and love their neighbours as themselves; and do to all men as they would be done by; to do good to all men; and Man-stealing is ranked with enormous crimes. Is the barbarous enslaving our inoffensive neighbours, and treating them like wild beasts subdued by force, reconcilable with the Divine precepts! Is this doing to them as we would desire they should do to us? If they could carry off and enslave some thousands of us, would we think it just? — One would almost wish they could for once; it might convince more than reason, or the Bible.

As much in vain, perhaps, will they search ancient history for examples of the modern Slave-Trade. Too many nations enslaved the prisoners they took in war. But to go to nations with whom there is no war, who have no way provoked, without farther design of conquest, purely to catch inoffensive people, like wild beasts, for slaves, is an height of outrage against humanity and justice, that seems left by heathen nations to be practised by pretended Christian. How shameful are all attempts to colour and excuse it!

As these people are not convicted of forfeiting freedom, they have still a natural, perfect right to it; and the governments whenever they come should, in justice set them free, and punish those who hold them in slavery.

So monstrous is the making and keeping them slaves at all, abstracted from the barbarous usage they suffer, and the many evils attending the practice; as selling husbands away from wives, children from parents, and from each other, in violation of sacred and natural ties; and opening the way for adulteries, incests, and many shocking consequences, for all of which the guilty Masters must answer to the final Judge.

If the slavery of the parents be unjust, much more is their children's; if the parents were justly slaves, yet the children are born free; this is the natural, perfect right of all mankind; they are nothing but a just recompense to those who bring them up: And as much less is commonly spent on them than others, they have a right, in justice, to be proportionably sooner free.

Certainly, one may, with as much reason and decency, plead for murder, robbery, lewdness and barbarity, as for this practice. They are not more contrary to the natural dictates of conscience, and feeling of humanity; nay, they are all comprehended in it.

But the chief design of this paper is not to disprove it, which many have sufficiently done; but to entreat Americans to consider.

1. With what consistency, or decency they complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them, while they hold so many hundred thousands in slavery; and annually enslave many thousands more, without any pretence of authority, or claim upon them?

2. How just, how suitable to our crime is the punishment with which Providence threatens us? We have enslaved multitudes, and shed much innocent blood in doing it; and now are threatened with the same. And while other evils are confessed, and bewailed, why not this especially, and publicity; than which no other vice, if all others, has brought so much guilt on the land?

3. Whether, then, all ought not immediately to discontinue and renounce it, with grief and abhorrence? Should not every society bear testimony against it, and account obstinate persisters in it bad men, enemies to their country, and exclude them from fellowship; as they often do for much lesser faults?

4. The great Question may be — What should be done with those who are enslaved already? To turn the old and infirm free, would be injustice and cruelty; they who enjoyed the labours of the their better days should keep, and treat them humanely. As to the rest, let prudent men, with the assistance of legislatures, determine what is practicable for masters, and and best for them. Perhaps some could give them lands upon reasonable rent, some, employing them in their labour still, might give them some reasonable allowances for it; so as all may have some property, and fruits of their labours at the own disposal, and be encouraged to industry; the family may live together, and enjoy the natural satisfaction of exercising relative affections and duties, with civil protection, and other advantages, like fellow men. Perhaps they might sometime form useful barrier settlements on the frontiers. Thus they may become interested in the public welfare, and assist in promoting it; instead of being dangerous, as now they are, should any enemy promise them a better condition.

5. The past treatment of Africans must naturally fill them with abhorrence of Christians; lead them to think our religion would make them more inhuman savages, if they embraced it; thus the gain of that trade has been pursued in oppositions of the redeemer's cause, and the happiness of men. Are we not, therefore, bound in duty to him and to them to repair these injuries, as far as possible, by taking some proper measure to instruct, not only the slaves here, but the Africans in their own countries? Primitive Christians, laboured always to spread the divine religion; and this is equally our duty while there is an heathen nation: But what singular obligations are we under to these injured people! (source: The Constitution Society)

These are the sentiments of JUSTICE AND HUMANITY.

The Massacre at New Orleans

2013-05-14T19:05:00.002-07:00

The Massacre at New Orleans.

The state governments that came to power in the South in 1865 and 1866 passed harsh laws regulating the movement and conditions of work for newly freed slaves. Known as Black Codes, these laws sought to recreate slavery in all but name by preventing blacks from working outside of agriculture and domestic service, limiting their movement, and subjecting those without a contract for employment to arrest and forced labor. Local officials also gave tacit or overt support to intense racist violence. Rioting whites in Memphis killed forty-six African-Americans in May 1866. Two months later, thirty-four blacks and three white supporters were murdered by a white mob in New Orleans. In this picture, Thomas Nast gave his view of Andrew Johnson’s role in the July 1866 New Orleans riot

New England Slavery

2013-05-14T18:41:00.001-07:00

From PBS -- Traces of the Trade is unique and disturbing journey of discovery into the history and "living consequences" of one of the nation's most shameful episodes — slavery. In this bicentennial year of the U.S. abolition of the slave trade, one might think the tragedy of African slavery in the Americas has been exhaustively told. Katrina Browne thought the same, until she discovered that her slave-trading ancestors from Rhode Island were not an aberration. Rather, they were just the most prominent actors in the North's vast complicity in slavery, buried in myths of Northern innocence.

Browne — a direct descendant of Mark Anthony DeWolf, the first slaver in the family — took the unusual step of writing to 200 descendants, inviting them to journey with her from Rhode Island to Ghana to Cuba and back, recapitulating the Triangle Trade that made the DeWolfs the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. Nine relatives signed up. Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North is Browne's spellbinding account of the journey that resulted.

As the film recounts, the DeWolf name has been honored over the generations in the family's hometown of Bristol, R.I., and on the national stage. Family members have been prominent citizens: professors, writers, legislators, philanthropists, Episcopal priests and bishops. If the DeWolfs' slave trading was mentioned at all, it was in an offhand way, with reference to scoundrels and rapscallions.

Then Browne's grandmother opened the door a crack. She wrote a DeWolf history booklet with a brief but pointed reference to the slave trade, which caused Browne to look deeper. What Browne learned, and the journey she undertook with other DeWolf descendants, retracing early America's infamous trade in rum, slaves and sugar, revealed secrets hidden in plain sight. Archival documents — from logs and diaries to detailed business correspondence, cancelled checks and sales records detailing a global economy — unsettle not just a family but also a nation's assumptions about its not-so-distant history.

Most of the relatives Browne invited to join her never responded. Some were against the effort, including one who felt he had never done anything to anyone and saw no reason why he should be implicated in the DeWolf history. But when the 10 DeWolf descendants, ranging from siblings to seventh cousins, came together, they found they formed an answer to their relative's objection. Several in the group — and everyone's father — are Ivy League graduates, except Tom DeWolf, whose father went to night school. (Tom's book about the trip, "Inheriting the Trade," is published by Beacon Press). The family's preponderance of elite alma maters showed that its privilege endures. The DeWolf slave fortunes were plowed into other, legitimate businesses, a pattern matched in the larger U.S. economy.

From this extraordinary family angle, Traces of the Trade sets out to plumb contentious questions: What is the full story of the northern slave trade? What responsibility does white America bear for the past wrongs and contemporary legacy of slavery? Why is it so difficult for black and white Americans to have this conversation? Intrepid, candid, intellectually engaged and, for better or for worse, "unfailingly Protestant and polite," Browne and her relatives set out to face the facts — and themselves.

The family gathers in Bristol, where the DeWolf name is writ large as traders and rum distillers whose entrepreneurship built the city. Traces of the slave trade are few, but include the gravestone of Adjua, an African woman who had been enslaved as girl. In 1803, she and a young boy, Pauledore, had been "given" as Christmas gifts by James D'Wolf (the spelling at that time) to his wife. They are hauntingly remembered in a family nursery rhyme.

Browne and her relatives fly to Ghana, where the old slave forts bring home crushing realities. They receive discomfiting lessons in the vividness of slavery's cruelty and injustice from contemporary Africans and African Americans on their own homecoming pilgrimages. They also learn that Adjua, whose grave they had visited, might have been born on a Monday, according to the West African tribes' tradition of naming children for their day of birth.

In Havana, where the DeWolfs either farmed out enslaved Africans to the sugar plantations they owned (which supplied their Bristol distilleries) or sold the slaves for large profits on the open market, Browne's group is nearly overcome by frustration and a sense of helplessness. Worn down by travel, tension, the accumulating weight of slavery's detailed brutality — and more antagonism than their good intentions led them to expect — they confront the questions that have been haunting them: How has their experience affected their views of the black/white divide in America? If they accept some responsibility for the "living consequences" of their ancestors' crimes, what can they do to make amends?

One "secret" excavated by Traces of the Trade is that the DeWolfs were not just participants in the slave trade — they were the largest slave traders in American history. This one family, whose name adorns the stained glass windows they donated to Bristol's St. Michael's Episcopal Church, brought over 10,000 African slaves to the Americas. Up to half a million of these Africans' descendants are alive today. Moreover, the DeWolfs conducted the trade over three generations, beginning in 1769, and well after it had been banned in the United States in 1808.

Another fact obscured by post-Civil War mythologies is that the entire Northeastern seaboard was deeply implicated in the trade right up to the war. The DeWolfs may have been the biggest slavers in U.S. history, but there were many others involved. The Triangle Trade sustained the growing economies of Northern seaports like Bristol. Locals may have thought of the DeWolfs as distillers and traders that supported ship-building, warehousing, insurance and other trades and businesses, but it was common knowledge that the basis for all this was the cheap labor and huge profits reaped from trafficking in human beings.

The efforts of group members to answer these questions with action form the film's dramatic denouement — while landing the questions right back in the laps of all Americans. The family comes home and dives head-on into the debate about reparations for slavery, interviewing leading spokespeople who are for and against this remedy, and inviting viewers into the question of how to create "repair." The film asks us to consider this from political, economic and an internal viewpoint: What would it take to repair our relationships and to move beyond the guilt, defensiveness, anger or fear that can trip us up?

"In Traces of the Trade, we wanted ask this question: What is our responsibility?" says Browne. "I'm less concerned with understanding the extreme inhumanity of my ancestors than with understanding the mundane, ordinary complicity of the majority of New Englanders who participated in a slave-based economy. That had more parallels to me and my family today: well-intentioned white folks who are still part of systems that do harm. It's important to roll up our sleeves to deal with what we all inherited from our country's history."

Traces of the Trade is an important historical corrective to America's view of slavery and its consequences, and a probing essay into divergent versions of a history that continues to divide black and white in America, North and South. (source: PBS)

Slavery American Family Business in the North

The Fortunes of Four Slave Ships

2013-05-14T15:42:00.000-07:00

From The Port Cities Brisol, "The Fortunes of Four Ships, " -- The fortunes of four ships are looked at below, to give an idea of the risks of the slaving voyages. Making a profit through slaving voyages was a gamble. The investors could easily lose all the money put into the voyage if something went wrong.

The Prince of Orange

The slave ship the Prince of Orange was owned by Richard Farr & Co, of Bristol. The captain on the 1736 voyage was Japhet Bird. This was the second slaving voyage out of four made by the ship whilst she was owned by Richard Farr & Co. On the coast of West Africa, at least 273 slaves were bought and survived the voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to be sold in the Caribbean. This picture of the slave ship the Jason Privateer shows enslaved Africans being put into a smaller boat to be taken to the waiting ship. The slaves would have boarded the ship the Prince of Orange in the same way.

Some of the enslaved Africans preferred death to whatever awaited them at the end of their voyage. 100 of the African men on the Prince of Orange jumped overboard near the island of St Kitts, in the Caribbean, and 33 of them drowned. “… more of them were taken up almost drowned, some of them died since, but not the owners loss, they being sold before any discovery was made of the injury the salt water had done them.”

The voyage made by the ship the Prince of Orange probably made a profit but it was a small one. The captain sold 240 slaves, and those injured by nearly drowning died after they were sold. The cost and profit of 33 slaves at least were lost, and there was little sugar to buy for the last leg of the journey back to Bristol. The triangular trade needed a good cargo on each leg to make a good profit.

The Marlborough

The ship the Marlborough was owned by William Lougher & Co of Bristol, and was captained by Robert Codd. The ship sailed from Bristol in March 1752 for West Africa, calling at Anamaboe and Bonny on the West African coast. This was her fourth and final slaving voyage.

By October, 420 slaves had been purchased, and the captain set out across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. Three days after leaving Bonny off the coast of West Africa, the ship was taken over by the enslaved Africans on board.

The captain used 28 of the slaves from the Gold Coast of West Africa to help sail the ship. These slaves led a successful uprising, or rebellion, when all the slaves were brought up on deck for washing. Several of the crew were killed in the fighting, and the remainder were made to sail the ship back to Bonny, in West Africa, by the enslaved Africans. Then the slaves from the areas of Bonny and the Gold Coast fought amongst themselves about returning home, and several were killed. The slaves from Bonny were sent ashore at Bonny, and the remaining seven crew set off with the other slaves for the Gold Coast. The ship and the crew were never seen again.

One of the crew, John Harris, survived when he rowed the slaves from Bonny ashore, and wrote his father a detailed letter about the incident which was published in Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal for 31 March 1753.

This voyage resulted in a loss to the owners. The money invested in the ship, trade goods and slaves was lost. The slaves from Bonny were free (although some may have been enslaved again later). It is not known whether the Gold Coast slaves reached home and freedom.

Slave uprisings on ships were often recorded in local newspapers. The one pictured here is from the Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal.

The Slave Ship "Juba"

The ship the Juba, owned by James Rogers & Co, sailed from Bristol in 1787, to Old Calabar (now Nigeria, West Africa) under Captain John Kennedy. This was her third and last slaving voyage, having gone twice to Africa for her previous owners Thomas Coulson & Co.

At Old Calabar, West Africa, 230 ‘prime slaves’ (that is, fit and healthy men and women) were purchased, plus 1½ tons of ivory, 28 barrels of oil made from palm nuts and 5 tons of redwood, a wood used to make dye.

The Middle Passage (the journey from Africa to the Caribbean) was very bad, taking 13 weeks instead of the usual 6. The ship’s surgeon accused the captain of beating and raping some of the women slaves. Despite this, the owner rehired the captain for other voyages. The 201 surviving slaves were sold on the Caribbean island of St Vincent. They were sold by George Baillie & Company who were acting as agents for the ship’s owners. The slaves were sold for an average of £33 6s 8d each. That would be about £1,650 today. Returning to Bristol, the ship and its goods sunk in the waters off Ireland.

The Juba’s bill of lading, an official record of the goods being carried on the ship, is pictured here. It tells us that the cargo loaded in Africa included ‘115 Males’ and ‘115 Females’, and ivory, oil made from palm nuts and wood used for making dye. Of the original 230 enslaved Africans, 201 survived the ‘Middle Passage’, between Africa and the Caribbean islands.

The owners made a profit, despite the deaths of 29 slaves and the loss of the ship. The costs for fitting out the ship were £4678 13s 3d (about £370,000 today). The proceeds of the sale of the slaves plus the insurance money for the ship and cargo came to £5835 13s 11d (about £450,000 today). This shows that even with such loses, slaving voyages could make the investors substantial profit.

The African Queen

The slaving ship the African Queen was another of Bristolian James Rogers’ ships. She left Bristol in 1792, with Samuel Stribling as captain, bound for Old Calabar (now Nigeria, West Africa).

According to one report, once there, the captain bought 255 enslaved Africans. Slaves were scarce and he spent months on the coast trying to buy enough to make the journey across the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean worthwhile.

At least 21 of the ship’s crew died during the 7 or 8 months spent at Old Calabar, waiting whilst the captain purchased slaves. One report says that of the 255 enslaved Africans on board, 28 died in this long wait at the coast, and 114 died in the Middle Passage from West Africa to the Caribbean. The crew and enslaved Africans would have become ill from spending so long onboard the ship, in cramped conditions where diseases spread quickly.

The ship arrived at Jamaica in the Caribbean in distress, and one agent refused to sell its cargo, because the slaves were in such bad condition. James Rogers’ ships had a much higher death rate amongst the slaves than other Bristol merchants. In 1793 Rogers went bankrupt. It is likely that this was in part due to his poor management of his voyages. The ship’s next slaving voyage, in 1794, was for new owners John Anderson & Co. (source: http://discoveringbristol.org.uk/slavery/routes/bristol-to-africa/shipping/four-ships-fortunes/)

The First Black Britons: The Slave Soldiers of the West India Regiments

2013-05-08T19:58:00.000-07:00

The First Black Britons

The First Black Britons is a British documentary film produced by Sweet Patootee which focuses on the hidden history of the British West Indies Regiment, and a unique act of parliament that established them as a new class of citizen - Black British.

The documentary originally aired in the UK on BBC2 on 27 October, 2005. It is an hour long.

The First Black Britons
The Response Crew (hisshadyness)(Caoimhin) | Myspace Video

The Value Of The Slave Trade

2013-05-08T10:01:00.004-07:00

From Port Cities Bristol [UK] -- European ships’ captains used the ‘trade ounce’, or ‘bar’, to buy slaves. The slave traders did not use pounds, shillings and pence. The cost of the trade goods in pounds was translated into a value in ‘bars’. The bar was an imaginary device for valuing the items. The bar itself had a certain value, which was based on the price of a bar of iron. So all the trade goods had a trade value in bars, as well as a real value in pounds, shillings and pence. A slave’s price would be agreed at so many bars. A mixture of trade goods whose value in bars was the same as the agreed value of the slave would be given in exchange. One Bristol captain in the 1780s paid a trader, who was known as ‘King Peppel’, 85 bars for one male slave, plus 50 bars as a ‘sweetener’ to get in the African trader’s good books. Payment was made in cloth, guns, gunpowder, brassware, iron and beads, which came to the value of 135 bars. This would have been equivalent to about £25 (about £1200 today). The accounts book for the first voyage of the ship the Africa in 1774 is pictured here. It lists some of the trade goods taken to Africa and their values. The guns, gunpowder, lead shot and gunflints are all listed. Their value is given in pounds (sterling) and in ‘bars’, the unit of currency used in the slave trade. The cargo was valued at £4,648 (about £232,000 today) or 24,220 bars.

The trade goods were often cheap, but African traders had definite ideas about what they required. European traders could be left with unsaleable cargoes and few slaves, if they had trade goods that the African traders did not want. Beads were a small part of a trade cargo. All the cargo had to be recorded and documented as it was loaded. The receipt shown here for three casks of beads records that they were loaded onto a ship “by God’s Grace bound for Africa”. Slavers usually carried many different types of bead, ranging from tiny ‘seed’ beads to big ‘chevrons’. They were not always quite the beads that the African traders wanted. The ship the Africa in 1774 was left with a large stock of unsold beads. The European traders could be caught out by a change in fashion, and find that the beads they had on board were not the right size or shape or colour.

Ships’ captains often gave African traders goods in advance for slaves. The African traders had to arrange to buy slaves with the goods, from further inland, away from the coast. Until they produced the slaves, they were forced to leave someone as hostage with the ship’s captain. The hostage was usually someone from the trader’s family or community. The captains demanded that a hostage be left, in case the African traders ran away with the goods without supplying any slaves in return. Trust between European captains and African traders was a fragile thing. Captain Joseph Williams of the Bristol ship the Ruby dealt with traders from Cameroon, West Africa in 1787. These traders were known to the Europeans as King George, King Peter, Quon and King Mason. Williams gave the traders goods with which to buy slaves. The Cameroon traders had to leave relatives on the ship as hostage for the goods they had. These hostages were known as “pawns‘. If the traders did not return with the slaves Williams would have taken the pawns as slaves.

This detail of a drawing of the slave ship the Southwell Frigate shows trade goods being brought ashore. The goods will then be exchanged, by the ships captain, with the African traders for slaves.

European and African traders had to have partnerships, as they relied on each other for their business. The European traders needed their African trading partner to bring them enslaved Africans. The slaves would be shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to the plantations in the Caribbean and Americas. The African traders exchanged enslaved people for goods such as beads and cloth, which they could then sell to fellow Africans, or use to enhance their own status and position. (source: Port Cities Bristol [UK])

Slavery And Thomas Jefferson

2013-05-07T03:18:00.000-07:00

As reviewed in the Wall Street Journal's Bookshelf, "Monticello's Slave-Driver: Whatever moral ambivalence Jefferson may have felt toward slavery he overcame when he sat down to do the numbers for his estate, by Fergus M. Bordewich, on 1 November 2012 -- Posterity justly reveres Thomas Jefferson as a president, political thinker, renaissance man and diplomat, but until recently little attention was paid to his practices as a slave master and man of business. Although he owned one of the largest estates in Virginia, his management of his labor force at Monticello has usually been treated as a sideshow at best. As a slave owner, Jefferson has generally gotten a pass even from liberals, who lionize him as the founder of the forerunner of the Democratic Party, as well as from historians who have been all too eager to describe him as a generous, enlightened and reluctant master. After all, hadn't he written the words that became a clarion call for the abolitionists of later generations: "All men are created equal?"

Jefferson's long honeymoon is now over. In 2008, Annette Gordon-Reed, in "The Hemingses of Monticello," plumbed the depths of Jefferson's complex relationship with his enslaved concubine, Sally Hemings, and her family. Henry Wiencek's indictment of Jefferson in "Master of the Mountain" is even more damning.

The strongest sections of the book track Mr. Wiencek's close reading of Jefferson's estate records, where he found a coldblooded taskmaster who ruthlessly exploited child labor and overworked his slaves as a matter of course. Jefferson sometimes countenanced brutal punishment, including the whipping of boys as young as 10 or 11 in his highly profitable nail factory, "whose profits paid the mansion's grocery bills," Mr. Wiencek writes. Despite Jefferson's occasional assertions that slavery would one day wither away, he never lifted a finger to weaken it as an institution, even when implored to do so by friends and allies who regarded slavery as an affront to the values for which patriots had fought the Revolutionary War.

In his youth, Jefferson did hold antislavery convictions. And in his earliest draft of the Declaration of Independence, he may well have had slaves in mind when he declared that all men were created equal.(Southerners were sufficiently worried that they tried unsuccessfully to have the word "men" changed to "freemen.") By 1784, however, in "Notes on the State of Virginia," he expressed in graceful but cringe-inducing prose a deep personal distaste for blacks, who, he asserted, smelled wrong, copulated with apes in Africa, and were incapable of intellectual achievement.

Master of the Mountain; By Henry Wiencek

Whatever moral ambivalence he may have felt toward the institution of slavery he overcame when he sat down and did the numbers for Monticello. In 1792, he calculated precisely what his slaves were worth. Mr. Wiencek writes: "What Jefferson set out clearly for the first time was that he was making a 4 percent profit every year on the birth of black children. The enslaved children were yielding him a bonanza, a perpetual human dividend at compound interest." To intimates, Jefferson described slavery matter-of-factly as a good investment strategy, advising one friend that if his family had cash to spare, "every farthing of it [should be] laid out in land and negroes."

When it comes to Jefferson the slave owner, Mr. Wiencek's judgment is unsparing. "His assets reliably compounding, his philosophy rendering him deaf to the appeals of humanity, he plowed through any contradiction," he writes. "He wielded a species of power that made its own reality." Mr. Wiencek notes that Jefferson deliberately presented visitors with an idyllic but artificial picture of slave life at his estate. He would point to a few exceptionally industrious slaves who in fact, Mr. Wiencek says, "were desperate to remain in the master's favor, to stay on the mountaintop"—that is, the part of the estate closest to the house—"and not be sent [to the plantations] below, where the overseers were in charge."

As a businessman, Jefferson was in tune with the evolving economy of the slavery-dependent South. By the eve of the Civil War, a generation after his death in 1826, slaves would collectively constitute the second most valuable capital asset in the United States, after land. Jefferson owned more than 600 over the course of his lifetime. At any given time, as many as 140 lived on the estate, some of them blood relatives of his deceased wife Martha, including Sally Hemings, Martha's mixed-blood sister, who apparently bore Jefferson several children.

Mr. Wiencek differs from Ms. Gordon-Reed on the significance of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship and devotes comparatively little space to it. Ms. Gordon-Reed concluded that, despite the inherent inequality of slave and master, a degree of mutual affection must have existed between two people who, she argued, remained intimate for more than 30 years. Mr. Wiencek is convinced that Jefferson felt little emotion for any of the people he owned and believes that the Jefferson-Hemings relationship was a mere "transaction" that lasted just a few years.

It seems sadly all too true that, as Mr. Wiencek puts it, "Jefferson constantly moved the boundaries on his moral map to make the horrific tolerable to him." He spoke about the practical impossibility of emancipation, but he knew several Virginians who had freed their slaves as a matter of principle. As Mr. Wiencek showed in "An Imperfect God" (2003), his fine study of George Washington and his slaves, one of these Virginians was the nation's first president, who liberated, in his will, all the bondsmen he held in his name. In this deeply provocative and crisply written journey into the dark heart of slavery at Monticello, Henry Wiencek brings into focus a side of Jefferson that Americans have largely failed—or not cared—to see. This book will change forever the way that we think about the author of the Declaration of Independence.

Mr. Bordewich's most recent book is "America's Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union." (source: The Wall Street Journal; Copyright 2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only.)

VFH Fellowship Series - Henry Wiencek from Charlottesville's TV10 on Vimeo.

THE CAPTIVE AFRICANS OF THE SLAVE SHIP "WILDFIRE"

2013-05-06T12:57:00.002-07:00

THE SLAVE DECK OF THE BARK "WILDFIRE," BROUGHT INTO KEY WEST ON APRIL 30, 1860 from HARPER'S WEEKLY [JUNE 2, 1860, page 344]

KEY WEST, FLORIDA, May 20, 1860. -- ON the morning of the 30th of April last, the United States steamer Mohawk, Lieutenant Craven commanding, came to anchor in the harbor of this place, having in tow a bark of the burden of about three hundred and thirty tons, supposed to be the bark Wildfire, lately owned in the city of New York. The bark had on board five hundred and ten native Africans, taken on board in the River Congo, on the west side of the continent of Africa. She had been captured a few days previously by Lieutenant Craven within sight of the northern coast of Cuba, as an American vessel employed in violating our laws against the slave-trade. She had left the Congo River thirty-six days before her capture.

Soon after the bark was anchored we repaired on board, and on passing over the side saw, on the deck of the vessel, about four hundred and fifty native Africans, in a state of entire nudity, in a sitting or squatting posture, the most of them having their knees elevated so as to form a resting, place for their heads and arms. They sat very close together, mostly on either side of the vessel, forward and aft, leaving a narrow open space along the line of the centre for the crew of the vessel to pass to and fro. About fifty of them were full-grown young men, and about four hundred were boys aged from ten to sixteen years. It is said by persons acquainted with the slave-trade and who saw them, that they were generally in a very good condition of health and flesh, as compared with other similar cargoes, owing to the fact that they had not been so much crowded together on board as is common in slave voyages, and had been better fed than usual. It is said that the bark is capable of carrying, and was prepared to carry, one thousand, but not being able without inconvenient delay to procure so many, she sailed with six hundred. Ninety and upward had died on the voyage. But this is considered as comparatively a small loss, showing that they had been better cared for than usual. Ten more have died since their arrival, and there are about forty more sick in the hospital. We saw on board about six or seven boys and men greatly emaciated, and diseased past recovery, and about a hundred that showed decided evidences of suffering from inanition, exhaustion, and disease. Dysentery was the principal disease. But notwithstanding their sufferings, we could not be otherwise than interested and amused at their strange looks, motions, and actions. The well ones looked happy and contented, and were ready at any moment to join in a song or a dance whenever they were directed to do so by "Jack"—a little fellow as black as ebony, about twelve years old, having a handsome and expressive face, an intelligent look, and a sparkling eye. The sailors on the voyage had dressed "Jack" in sailor costume, and had made him a great pet. When we were on board "Jack" carried about in his hand a short cord, not only as the emblem but also as the instrument of his brief delegated authority. He would make the men and boys stand up, sit down, sing, or dance just as he directed. When they sang " Jack" moved around among them as light as a cat, and beat the time by slapping his hands together, and if any refused to sing, or sang out of time, Jack's cord descended on their backs. Their singing was monotonous. The words we did not understand. We have rarely seen a more happy and merry-looking fellow than " Jack."

HARPER'S WEEKLY (June 2, 1860; page 345)

From the deck we descended into the cabin, where we saw sixty or seventy women and young girls, in Nature's dress, some silting on the floor and others on the lockers, and some sick ones lying in the berths. Four or five of them were a good deal tattooed on the back and arms, and we noticed that three had an arm branded with the figure " 7," which, we suppose, is the merchant's mark.

On the day of their arrival the sickest, about forty in all, were landed and carried to a building-on the public grounds belonging to Fort Taylor, and Doctors Whitehurst and Shrine employed as medical attendants. We visited them in the afternoon. The United States Marshal had procured for all of them shirts, and pants girls and women gowns. Six or eight were very sick ; the others did not appear to be in any immediate danger of dying. We were very much amused by a young lad about fifteen years old, not much sick, who had got on, probably for the first time in his life, a whole shirt, and who seemed to be delighted with every body and every thing he saw. He evidently thought the speech of the white man was very funny. When a few words were spoken to him he immediately repeated them with great glee. Pointing to Dr. Skrine, we said "Doctor." He said " Doctor." And then pointing to Dr. Whitehurst, we said "Doctor too." He said " Doctor too." The doctors had selected from the bark a woman about twenty-four years of age to assist the nurse in taking care of the sick. She had been dressed in a clean calico frock, and looked very respectably. About sundown they all lay down for the night upon a camp-bed, and were covered over with blankets. And now a scene took place which interested us very much, but which we did not understand and can not explain. The woman standing up slapped her hands together once or twice, and as soon as all were silent she commenced a sort of recitation, song, or prayer, in tone and manner much like a chanting of the Litany in Catholic churches, and every few moments the voices of ten or fifteen others were heard in the same tone, as if responding. This exercise continued about a minute. Now what could this be? It looked and sounded to us very much like Christians chanting together an evening prayer on retiring to rest. And yet we feel quite assured that none of these persons had ever heard of Christ, or had learned Christian practices, or possessed much, if any, knowledge of God as a Creator or Preserver of the world. We suspect that it was not understood by them as a religious exercise at all, but as something which they had been trained to go through at the barracoons in Africa or on board the ship.

THE ONLY BABY AMONG THE AFRICANS

In two days after the arrival of the bark the Marshal had completed a large, airy building at Whitehead's Point, a little out of the town, for the reception and accommodation of these people ; and after getting them clad as well as he could in so short a time, they were all landed on the fort wharf, and carried in carts to their quarters. On arriving there they all arranged themselves along the sides of the building, as they had been accustomed to do on the decks of the vessel, and squatted down in the same manner. It took the Marshal and his assistants some little time, and no small efforts, to give the Africans to understand that they were free to move about, to go out and come in at will. They learned this in the course of a few hours, however, and general merriment and hilarity prevailed. We visited them in the afternoon, and have done so several times since ; and we confess that we have been struck, as many others have been, with the expression of intelligence displayed in their faces, the beauty of their physical conformation, and the beauty of their teeth. We have been accustomed to think that the civilized negroes of our own country were superior, in point of intelligence and physical development, to the native Africans; but judging only by the eye, we think it would be difficult to find, any where in our own country, four hundred finer and handsomer-looking boys and girls than these are. To be sure you often saw the elongated occiput, the protruded jaws, and the receding forehead; but you also often saw a head

A number of these negroes—perhaps twelve or fifteen in all—have been more or less at and about Loando, a Portuguese town on the coast, and have learned to speak a little Portuguese. Through an interpreter we learned from them that some four or five—perhaps more, but probably not many—had been baptized at the Roman Catholic missionary station at Loando. Francisco, a young man, says he was baptized by a Franciscan friar in Loando; that he was a slave in Africa, and does not wish to return there. He says he had rather be a slave to the white man in this country. Salvador, a bright-looking, smart lad, has been baptized. Constantia says she was baptized in Loando. She does not remember her father ; she was stolen away when she was young, and was sold by her brother. Antonia and Amelia are both fine-looking young women, aged about twenty, and were both baptized at Loando. Madia, a pagan, unbaptized, aged about twenty, has obtained among the white people here who have visited the quarters the name of " The Princess," on account of her fine personal appearance and the deference that seemed to be paid to her by some of her companions. The persons we have here mentioned, including some eight or ten others, evidently do not belong to the same tribe that the rest do. Indeed the whole number is evidently taken from different tribes living in the interior of Africa, but the greater number are " Congos." The women we have named have cut or shaved the hair off the back part of their head, from a point on the crown to the back part of either ear. It is the fashion of their tribe. None of the other women are thus shorn. Many of the men, women, boys, and girls have filed their front teeth—some by sharpening them to a point, and others by cutting down the two upper front teeth. The persons above named have their teeth in a natural state. Perhaps fifty in all are tattooed more or less.

Travelers describe the natives of Congo as being small of stature, cheerful, good-humored, unreflecting, and possessed of little energy either of mind or body. Negro indolence is carried with them to the utmost excess. The little cultivation that exists, entirely carried on by the females, is nearly limited to the manioc root, which they are not very skillful in preparing. Their houses are put together of mats made from the fibre of the palm tree, and their clothes and bedding consist merely of matted grass.

The President, on receiving news of the capture of the Wildfire, sent a special message to Congress on the subject, from which we give an extract below. The subsequent capture of another slave ship with more Africans will probably lead to some enactment on the subject. The President says :

" The expenditure for the Africans captured on board the Wildfire will not be less than one hundred thousand dollars, and may considerably exceed that sum. But it will not be sufficient for Congress to limit the amount appropriated to the case of the Wildfire. It is probable, judging from the increased activity of the slave-trade and the vigilance of our cruisers, that several similar captures may be made before the end of the year. An appropriation ought, therefore, to be granted large enough to cover such contingencies. The period has arrived when it is indispensable to provide some specific legislation for the guidance of the Executive on this subject. With this view, I would suggest that Congress might authorize the President to enter into a general agreement with the Colonization Society, binding them to receive, on the coast of Africa from our agent there, all the captured Africans which may be delivered to him, and to maintain them for a limited period, upon such terms and conditions as may combine humanity toward these unfortunates with a just economy. This would obviate the necessity of making a new bargain with every new capture, and would prevent delay and avoid expense in the disposition of the captured. The law might then provide that, in all cases where this may be practicable, the captor should carry the negroes directly to Africa, and deliver them to the American agent there, afterward bringing the captured vessel to the United States for adjudication.

THE BARRACOON AT KEY WEST, WHERE THE AFRICANS ARE CONFINED

"The capturing officer, in case he should bring his prize directly to the United States, ought to be required to land the negroes in some one or more ports to be designated by Congress, where the prevailing health throughout the year is good. At these ports cheap but permanent accommodations might be provided for the negroes until they could be sent away, without incurring the expense of erecting such accommodations at every port where the capturing officer may think proper to enter. On the present occasion these negroes have been brought to Key West; and, according to the estimate presented by the Marshal of the Southern District of Florida to the Secretary of the Interior, the cost of providing temporary quarters for them will be $2500, and the aggregate expenses for the single month of May will amount to $12,000. But this is far from being the worst evil. Within a few weeks the yellow fever will most probably prevail at Key West ; and hence the Marshal urges their removal from their present quarters at an early day, which must be done in any event as soon as practicable. For these reasons I earnestly commend this subject to the immediate (source: HARPER'S WEEKLY [JUNE 2, 1860, page 344] from Son of the South)

Blood & Treasure by Ted Maris-Wolf

The Amistad Rebellion by Marcus Rediker

2013-05-05T15:31:00.003-07:00

As reported by Frank Reeves in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "'The Amistad Rebellion': The rest of the history," on 25 November 2012 -- For the past decade, Marcus Rediker, a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, has focused much of his research on one of the most shameful and horrific chapters in world history -- the Atlantic slave trade.

Over the course of more than two centuries, millions of Africans were captured and transported to North and South America where "the bondsman's 250 years of unrequited toil" -- to borrow Lincoln's phrase -- was used to exploit the New World's riches. The fruits of this labor -- notably the cultivation of cotton in the American South -- made slaveholding elites fabulously wealthy and was indispensable to the industrial development of Britain and later the United States.

"THE AMISTAD REBELLION: AN ATLANTIC ODYSSEY OF SLAVERY AND FREEDOM"

By Marcus Rediker. Viking Press.

In 2007, Mr. Rediker's "The Slave Ship: A Human History" was published. So graphic was his description of the Middle Passage and attendant horrors of the slave trade that Alice Walker, the author of "The Color Purple," confessed that she had to take to her bed for several days after reading it.

Now Mr. Rediker has written, what he himself has called, a more "hopeful" sequel to his earlier work: "The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom." In this his sixth book, Mr. Rediker retells the improbable tale of a group of recently enslaved Africans, who in July 1839 seized control of a slave ship en route from Havana to a sugar plantation in central Cuba. The ship with the ironic name "La Amistad" -- "Friendship" in Spanish -- found its way to the United States, where it was captured by a naval survey vessel off the coast of Long Island. The Amistad rebels eventually won their freedom and the right to return to Sierra Leone in West Africa, following a dramatic hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The story of the Amistad rebellion has been told before. "The popular memory of the Amistad rebellion has ebbed and flowed with the political tides," Mr. Rediker writes. "In its own day, it captured the popular imagination."

Days after the Africans were jailed in Connecticut for murder and piracy, accounts of the rebellion began to appear in newspapers. During their 19-month incarceration, the Amistad Africans were visited and later interviewed (once translators were found who understood their Mende language) by reporters.

When the Africans exercised on the green near the New Haven jail, many gawked at them, admiring their athletic prowess with little understanding of the deeper cultural significance of their acrobatics.

Artists flocked to the jail to sketch them and to create drawings depicting the uprising aboard the Amistad. Cinque, the leader of the rebellion, was a favorite subject. He was depicted as a swashbuckling pirate and, in a portrait by artist-abolitionist Nathaniel Joycelyn, in ways that suggested "a virtuous Roman republican citizen, or as Moses, staff in hand, having led his compatriots back to the Promised Land," Mr. Rediker writes.

But after the Civil War, fascination with the story quickly faded except among now aging former abolitionists and African-Americans.

In 1997 the movie "Amistad," produced by Steven Spielberg, brought the story of the rebellion to a nationwide audience. But as Mr. Rediker, among other historians, noted, the movie seemed to vindicate the U.S. justice system that, despite the Supreme Court's ruling in the Amistad case, was a bulwark of slavery in the United States. The high court in 1857, with some of the same justices still sitting on the bench, would issue its famous or infamous Dred Scott decision, denying Congress' power to bar slavery from the territories and declaring in words, which echo over the years, that blacks "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

But the movie was flawed in an even more significant ways: "[T]he history and movie have told only part of the story. The drama of the courtroom" -- in which former president John Quincy Adams was one of the lawyers for Amistad Africans -- "has eclipsed the original drama that transpired on deck of the slave schooner," Mr. Rediker writes.

In "The Amistad Rebellion," Mr. Rediker has sought to redress this by telling the tale from the perspective of the Amistad Africans, who, as he puts it, "turned the ship's wooden world upside down."

But how did they organize the rebellion? How did they overcome differences in ethnicity and language to achieve the necessary unity for a successful rebellion?

As he thought about these questions, Mr. Rediker developed a hypothesis: That the Poro, a secret society of men found among many West African peoples, might be a key to understanding the self-awareness of the Amistad Africans -- the basis for organizing and cooperation during the uprising. "All the adult men involved in the rebellion would have been members of the Poro in their native societies and therefore familiar with the type of self-government," he writes, "even if the rules and rituals varied from place to place and culture."

The great strength of this work -- aside from Mr. Rediker's vivid style as a writer and meticulous research -- is that he brings the Amistad Africans back to center stage where they have often been pushed to the side in a play, as it were, of their own making.

I must leave it to others with more knowledge of West African peoples and their societies to judge how successful Mr. Rediker's efforts have been. But he makes a convincing case. And I found it a pleasure to follow him as he put the pieces of evidence together into a compelling and inspiring narrative.

For much of his career as a scholar and a teacher, Marcus Rediker has written history "from below." He has tried to give voice to people whose stories have been ignored, but whose efforts have had far-reaching consequences. In the story of the Amistad rebels he has again found a fit subject for his efforts. (source: The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).

Ira Berlin: Many Thousands Gone

2013-05-05T11:46:00.001-07:00

Ira Berlin: Many Thousands gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America

As reviewed in the New York Times, by George M. Fredrickson, in an article entitled, "Of Human Bondage: In the 17th and 18th centuries, a historian says, the idea of slavery was not yet firmly defined," on 4 October 1998 -- The conventional image of a gang of slaves picking cotton under the watchful eye of a master or an overseer would be true to the experience of a large proportion of the Southern black population in the decades just before the Civil War. But it would be misleading to read it back into the two centuries of slavery between the arrival of the first blacks in Virginia in 1619 and the rise of the Cotton Kingdom in the early 19th century -- and not merely because the crops being grown were different. In this masterly work, Ira Berlin, a professor of history at the University of Maryland, has demonstrated that earlier North American slavery had many different forms and meanings that varied over time and from place to place. Slavery and race did not have a fixed character that endured for centuries but were constantly being constructed or reconstructed in response to changing historical circumstances. ''Many Thousands Gone'' illuminates the first 200 years of African-American history more effectively than any previous study.

One basis of variation was geographical. According to Berlin, race-based slavery in North America before the antebellum period has four distinct regional histories -- in the North (the mid-Atlantic and New England colonies or states), in the Chesapeake (Virginia and Maryland), in the Carolina low country and in the lower Mississippi valley (principally Louisiana). Slavery in these areas differed markedly in how it originated, in what role it subsequently played in the economy and the society, and in the patterns of race relations that it engendered. Berlin also distinguishes among three basic slave experiences that correspond to successive historical periods. His distinction among ''charter,'' ''plantation'' and ''revolutionary'' generations applies in differing ways to each of his regions and provides an integrating device for what would otherwise be a collection of separate stories.

Berlin's account of the earliest, or charter, generations is perhaps the most original part of the book. The people of African origin who arrived before the late 17th century in English North America did not, for the most part, come directly from traditional African societies. Before the 1680's, the Atlantic slave trade was devoted almost exclusively to providing labor to tropical sugar-producing colonies in the Caribbean and Brazil. Blacks who were brought or found their way to North America were likely to be ''Atlantic Creoles,'' not purely African in culture and sometimes not even in ancestry.

Berlin describes vividly a 17th-century Atlantic rim in which races and cultures mixed to a surprising extent. The first wave of blacks to arrive in what is now the United States often came with Spanish or Portuguese surnames, knowledge of a European language and a previous exposure to Christianity. Many had spent time in the Caribbean or even in Europe. In the Northern colonies, in the Chesapeake until the late 17th century and for a relatively brief period in South Carolina, the charter generations lived in ''societies with slaves,'' as distinct from ''slave societies.'' What this meant was that the labor force was only marginally composed of black people who were owned by their masters. The bulk of the work was performed by indentured servants, most of whom were white. Although Berlin maintains that any person of African origin who arrived as cargo on a slave-trading ship was considered from the beginning to be subject to service for life rather than for a fixed term, a significant fraction of the charter generations became free. Historians have long been intrigued by the black freeholders who appear in the early records of Virginia as voters, as litigants in court cases involving whites and even as husbands of white women. Berlin places them in a broader context, one in which slavery itself remained ill defined and servants for life (which was indeed a status reserved for blacks) were much freer and more independent in their day-to-day activities than later slaves would be.

Because the Atlantic slave trade expanded enormously in the 18th century, the ''plantation generations'' were much more likely to come directly from societies in the African interior. The demand for African captives was fueled by the rise of plantations producing staple crops for export -- tobacco in the Chesapeake and rice and indigo in the low country. These regions developed into full-blown slave societies dominated by large planters, who imposed harsh discipline on their slaves and increasingly restricted the rights of free people of color. The North also imported a substantial number of slaves in the 18th century but did not evolve into a slave society. Crops suitable for plantation cultivation were lacking, and a mixed economy was developing that used slaves on farms, in households and in the industries of port cities. Since the new arrivals were mostly men from the African interior who lacked immunity to many diseases endemic to the Northern colonies, the combination of a high death rate and an unbalanced sex ratio checked and ultimately reversed the growth of the Northern black population.

Although both remained plantation zones, the Chesapeake and the low country diverged during the 18th century and beyond, because American-born or Creole slaves came to predominate in the former by midcentury, while substantial influxes of Africans, including 35,000 between 1803 and 1808, enabled the slaves of coastal South Carolina and Georgia to remain closer to their African roots. For a variety of cultural and economic reasons, slaves in the low country made a world of their own apart from whites to a much greater degree than those of the upper South. In Louisiana, meanwhile, abrupt shifts in the economic prospects of the colony and from French to Spanish to American rule made the experiences of slaves and free people of color vary and fluctuate to an extent that defies summary.

Berlin's contention that a distinctive revolutionary generation replaced the plantation generations around the beginning of the 19th century is suggestive but somewhat confusing. Certainly the American and French Revolutions created a new conception of freedom and equality that inspired black resistance to slavery. But the great upheavals had such diverse and contradictory effects on the circumstances and prospects of blacks in different regions that it is hard to think of them as a common experience. In the Northern states the result was gradual emancipation. In the upper South, no general emancipation was started but substantial numbers of slaves were manumitted voluntarily by their masters or were freed as a reward for military service. This upsurge in the free black population of Virginia and Maryland was partly the result of the reduced need for slaves in the more diversified economy that followed the decline of tobacco as a staple crop, but in at least some cases the principles of the American Revolution were being lived up to. In the lower South, however, attachment to plantation slavery was unshaken and very few manumissions took place. Most slaves who did gain their freedom were of mixed race, often the sons of their emancipators. This development, as Berlin shows, helped to create a three-caste racial hierarchy of white, brown and black, like that of the Caribbean. A similar race pattern existed in Louisiana as a legacy of French and Spanish occupation. This kind of status system contrasted with that of the upper South and the North, where the freed people could be of any pigmentation. It was north of the Carolinas that the peculiar American tradition of classifying people with any known African ancestry as ''black'' first took root.

For slaves in the lower South, the Revolutionary era simply tightened the chains of bondage. The invention of the cotton gin shortly after the American Revolution made the low country's form of slavery the model for the expanding plantation system of the 19th century. As planters moved west from South Carolina and Georgia, they brought with them a commitment to slavery that had survived the Declaration of Independence -- which they took to mean that all white men were created equal and that their pursuit of happiness might require the ownership of slaves. The militant form of the proslavery argument that was based squarely on racial differences originated in South Carolina very early in the 19th century and became the dominant credo of the Cotton Kingdom. For the majority of African Americans, therefore, most of the experiences that Berlin identifies with the plantation generations persisted until the Civil War. The Revolution had two forks, one that led to greater freedom and the other to more oppressive enslavement. (source: The New York Times)

Ira Berlin: Many Thousands gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America from The Gilder Lehrman Institute on Vimeo.

Slavery and the Supreme Court: Prigg v. Pennsylvania

2013-05-02T07:38:00.002-07:00

Prigg v. Pennsylvania: Slavery, the Supreme Court, and the Ambivalent Constitution
By H. Robert Baker

From the University Press of Kansas, "Prigg v. Pennsylvania: Slavery, the Supreme Court, and the Ambivalent Constitution, by H. Robert Baker," October 2012 -- Margaret Morgan was born in freedom’s shadow. Her parents were slaves of John Ashmore, a prosperous Maryland mill owner who freed many of his slaves in the last years of his life. Ashmore never laid claim to Margaret, who eventually married a free black man and moved to Pennsylvania. Then, John Ashmore’s widow sent Edward Prigg to Pennsylvania to claim Margaret as a runaway. Prigg seized Margaret and her children—one of them born in Pennsylvania—and forcibly removed them to Maryland in violation of Pennsylvania law. In the ensuing uproar, Prigg was indicted for kidnapping under Pennsylvania’s personal liberty law. Maryland, however, blocked his extradition, setting the stage for a remarkable Supreme Court case in 1842.

In Prigg v. Pennsylvania, the Supreme Court considered more than just the fate of a single slavecatcher. The Court’s majority struck down the free states’ personal liberty laws and reaffirmed federal supremacy in determining the procedures for fugitive slave rendition. H. Robert Baker has written the first and only book-length treatment of this landmark case that became a pivot point for antebellum politics and law some fifteen years before Dred Scott.

Baker addresses the Constitution’s ambivalence regarding slavery and freedom. At issue were the reach of slaveholders’ property rights into the free states, the rights of free blacks, and the relative powers of the federal and state governments. By announcing federal supremacy in regulating fugitive slave rendition, Prigg v. Pennsylvania was meant to bolster what slaveholders claimed as a constitutional right. But the decision cast into doubt the ability of free states to define freedom and to protect their free black populations from kidnapping.

Baker’s eye-opening account raises crucial questions about the place of slavery in the Constitution and the role of the courts in protecting it in antebellum America. More than that, it demonstrates how judges fashion conflicting constitutional interpretations from the same sources of law. Ultimately, it offers an instructive look at how constitutional interpretation that claims to be faithful to neutral legal principles and a definitive original meaning is nonetheless freighted with contemporary politics and morality. Prigg v. Pennsylvania is a sobering lesson for those concerned with today’s controversial issues, as states seek to supplement and preempt federal immigration law or to overturn Roe v. Wade.

“Prigg v. Pennsylvania is about much more than slavery. With crisp, engaging prose Baker reveals the critical connection between this landmark case and battles fought today over federalism, the ambiguity of the U.S. Constitution, and how important, though differing, regional priorities become embedded in the law.”—Sally Hadden, author of Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas

“Baker provides a model balance between the personal and legal stories and understands that, while the villains and heroes of his tale may seem obvious to modern readers, the issues were not so clear to antebellum jurists.”—Peter Charles Hoffer, author of The Great New York Conspiracy of 1741: Slavery, Crime, and Colonial Law (source: The University Press of Kansas)

Video streaming by Ustream

Racist New Deal Policies

2013-04-30T06:44:00.002-07:00

From the Washington Post, "New Deal, Raw Deal: How Aid Became Affirmative Action for Whites," by Ira Katznelson, 27 September 2005 -- Hurricane Katrina's violent winds and waters tore away the shrouds that ordinarily mask the country's racial pattern of poverty and neglect. Understandably, most commentators have focused on the woeful federal response. Others, taking a longer view, yearn for a burst of activism patterned on the New Deal. But that nostalgia requires a heavy dose of historical amnesia. It also misses the chance to come to terms with how the federal government in the 1930s and 1940s contributed to the persistence of two Americas.

It was during the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman that such great progressive policies as Social Security, protective labor laws and the GI Bill were adopted. But with them came something else that was quite destructive for the nation: what I have called "affirmative action for whites." During Jim Crow's last hurrah in the 1930s and 1940s, when southern members of Congress controlled the gateways to legislation, policy decisions dealing with welfare, work and war either excluded the vast majority of African Americans or treated them differently from others.

Between 1945 and 1955, the federal government transferred more than $100 billion to support retirement programs and fashion opportunities for job skills, education, homeownership and small-business formation. Together, these domestic programs dramatically reshaped the country's social structure by creating a modern, well-schooled, homeowning middle class. At no other time in American history had so much money and so many resources been targeted at the generation completing its education, entering the workforce and forming families.

But most blacks were left out of all this. Southern members of Congress used occupational exclusions and took advantage of American federalism to ensure that national policies would not disturb their region's racial order. Farmworkers and maids, the jobs held by most blacks in the South, were denied Social Security pensions and access to labor unions. Benefits for veterans were administered locally. The GI Bill adapted to "the southern way of life" by accommodating itself to segregation in higher education, to the job ceilings that local officials imposed on returning black soldiers and to a general unwillingness to offer loans to blacks even when such loans were insured by the federal government. Of the 3,229 GI Bill-guaranteed loans for homes, businesses and farms made in 1947 in Mississippi, for example, only two were offered to black veterans.

This is unsettling history, especially for those of us who keenly admire the New Deal and the Fair Deal. At the very moment a wide array of public policies were providing most white Americans with valuable tools to gain protection in their old age, good jobs, economic security, assets and middle-class status, black Americans were mainly left to fend for themselves. Ever since, American society has been confronted with the results of this twisted and unstated form of affirmative action.

A full generation of federal policy, lasting until the civil rights legislation and affirmative action of the 1960s, boosted whites into homes, suburbs, universities and skilled employment while denying the same or comparable benefits to black citizens. Despite the prosperity of postwar capitalism's golden age, an already immense gap between white and black Americans widened. Even today, after the great achievements of civil rights and affirmative action, wealth for the typical white family, mainly in homeownership, is 10 times the average net worth for blacks, and a majority of African American children in our cities subsist below the federal poverty line.

President Lyndon Johnson faced up to racial inequality in "To Fulfill These Rights," a far-reaching graduation speech he delivered at Howard University in June 1965. He noted that "freedom is not enough" because "you do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and they say, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe you have been completely fair." What is needed, he argued, is a set of new policies, a dramatic new type of affirmative action for "the poor, the unemployed, the uprooted, and the dispossessed." He had in mind the kind of comprehensive effort the GI Bill had provided to most returning soldiers, but without its exclusionary pattern of implementation.

This form of assertive, mass-oriented affirmative action never happened. By sustaining and advancing a growing African American middle class, the affirmative action we did get has done more to advance fair treatment across racial lines than any other recent public policy, and thus demands our respect and support. But as the scenes from New Orleans vividly displayed, so many who were left out before have been left out yet again.

Rather than yearn for New Deal policies that were tainted by racism, or even recall the civil rights and affirmative action successes of the 1960s and beyond, we would do better in present circumstances to return to the ambitious plans Johnson announced but never realized to close massive gaps between blacks and whites, and between more and less prosperous blacks.

Without an unsentimental historical understanding of the policy roots of black isolation and dispossession, and without an unremitting effort to cut the Gordian knot joining race and class, our national response to the disaster in the Gulf Coast states will remain no more than a gesture. (source: The Washington Post © 2005 The Washington Post Company)

Ira Katznelson, a professor of political science and history at Columbia University, is the author of "When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in America."

Toni Morrison: "Home"

2013-04-28T17:13:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times Sunday Book Review, "Point of Return: ‘Home,’ a Novel by Toni Morrison," by Leah Hager Cohen, on 17 May 2012 -- The first four words of Toni Morrison’s new book greet — or assail — us before the story even begins. They’re from the epigraph, which quotes a song cycle written by the author some 20 years ago and therefore, it seems safe to say, not originally intended for this book, but an indication, perhaps, of how long its themes have been haunting her. And “haunting” is a fitting word for the lyric itself, in which a speaker professes to lack both recognition of and accountability for the strange, shadowy, dissembling domicile in which he finds himself. The atmosphere of alienation makes the song’s final line even more uncanny: “Say, tell me, why does its lock fit my key?”

Thus the stage is set for “Home”: on the basis of its publisher’s description a novel, on the basis of its length a novella, and on the basis of its stripped-down, symbol-laden plot something of an allegory. It tells the story of Frank Money, a 24-year-old Korean War veteran, as he embarks on a reluctant journey home. But where — and what — is home? Frank is already back from the fighting when we meet him, a year after being discharged from an integrated Army into a segregated homeland. Since then, he has wandered the streets of Seattle, “not totally homeless, but close.” He has gambled his Army pay and lost it, worked odd jobs and lost them, lived with a girlfriend and lost her, and all the while struggled, none too successfully, against the prospect of losing his mind.

The action begins with Frank literally out of action: wearing restraints in a hospital bed, faking sleep in order to avoid yet another deadening shot of morphine. Confined to the “nuthouse” by the police for an infraction he can’t remember, he plans and quickly executes his escape: first through the fire exit, thence to Zion — the A.M.E. Zion church, that is, whose sign he spotted earlier from the squad car. There he’s given shelter by Reverend Locke (the first in a succession of “locks” that, one way or another, fit Frank’s key), who helps him on his way. His destination is Lotus, Ga., which he’s been avoiding because it harbors hated childhood memories — and because he dreads facing the families of the two hometown friends whose deaths in Korea plague his dreams. What draws him back now is a letter informing him that his younger sister, Cee, is in trouble. “Come fast. She be dead if you tarry.”

But the very notion of home is bedeviled for Frank, as is the bitter running joke of his family name. Home has never offered much solace, and the Moneys have never had much dough. At age 4, Frank was forced on foot out of his first home in Bandera County, Tex., an exodus made with 14 other families under threat by men “both hooded and not” to leave within 24 hours or die. The Moneys wound up in Lotus, “the worst place in the world, worse than any battlefield,” according to Frank, to whom it appears, like its Greek counterpart, devoid of aspiration, cramped by suffocating indifference. There his parents worked 16-hour days picking cotton and planting crops, leaving Frank to protect Cee as best he could while subsisting on a daily brew of their grandparents’ cruelty and neglect. There his parents died young, one of lung disease, the other of a stroke. And there, it emerges, is where Frank must return, must deliver his ailing sister, “his original caring-for,” in hopes not only of saving her, but of saving himself: “Down deep inside her lived my secret picture of myself — a strong good me.”

What kind of selfhood is it possible to possess when we come from a spiritually impoverished home, one that fails to concede, let alone nourish, each inhabitant’s worth? This is the question Morrison asks, and while exploring it through the specific circumstances of Frank Money, she raises it in a broader sense. Threaded through the story are reminders of our country’s vicious inhospitality toward some of its own. On his way south, Frank makes use of a “Green Book,” part of the essential series of travelers’ guides for African-Americans during a more overtly racist era. On a train, he encounters fellow passengers who’ve been beaten and bloodied simply for trying to buy coffee from a white establishment. He meets a boy who, out playing with a cap gun, was shot by a policeman and lost the use of one arm. Frank is himself subjected to a random stop-and-frisk outside a shoe store. Even his lapses in sanity — what today we’d call symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder — are presented within the metaphor of race. He has frightening episodes of colorblindness, in which “the world became a black-and-white movie screen.”

Questions about Frank’s mental stability emerge at every level of the narrative. His ex-girlfriend thinks of him as a “tilted man.” We hear his own voice in short italicized chapters occasionally advising, correcting and rebuking the omniscient narrator. Are these signs that he’s regaining psychic integrity, a sense of self-authorship, or are they evidence of his further disintegration? Even as he begins to shed his hallucinations and shoulder responsibility, he worries that he may yet be rendered helpless, “imprisoned in his own strivings.” When self-preservation demands renouncing dreams, acting on behalf of one’s desire is inherently dangerous.

And then there’s that guy in the zoot suit. Small in stature, clad in pale blue balloon trousers, wide-brimmed hat, pointy shoes — the whole shebang — this silent fellow first turns up, to Frank’s amusement, sitting next to him on the train. Later, less amusingly, he appears at Frank’s bedside, then vanishes before his eyes. We assume he’s a manifestation of Frank’s precarious mental state, a symbol of his shaky grip on his own sense of manhood, as though Frank is compensating for his feelings of degradation by inventing a model of exaggerated visibility. We operate on this belief until the final pages, when the blue-clad man reappears with a twist I won’t give away, except to say that it recasts our assumptions and deftly underscores the book’s most powerful proposition: that there is no such thing as individual pathology.

At times, “Home” displays its meanings with all the subtlety of a zoot-suiter. We are told that Frank and Cee’s grandmother “was the wicked witch” to their “Hansel and Gretel.” Frank witnessed much carnage in Korea and, we learn, “It changed him.” The women who nurse Cee with root medicine, common sense and blackberry jam “took responsibility for their lives, and for whatever, whoever else needed them.” After Cee gains a measure of self-respect, her relationship with her brother changes: “She didn’t need him as she had before.” Such revelations read like in-text SparkNotes.

The book doesn’t need them. Part of Morrison’s longstanding greatness resides in her ability to animate specific stories about the black experience and simultaneously speak to all experience. It’s precisely by committing unreservedly to the first that she’s able to transcend the circumscribed audience it might imply. This work’s accomplishment lies in its considerable capacity to make us feel that we are each not only resident but co-owner of, and collectively accountable for, this land we call home. (source: New York Times)

Toni Morrison: "Home"

Zelda Wynn Valdes: Playboy Bunny Suit Designer

2013-04-26T11:04:00.000-07:00

From Ebony Magazine, "Fashionable Game-Changer: Zelda Wynn Valdes: She Was The Designer Behind The Original Playboy Bunny Costume, and So Much More," by Nichelle Gainer, on 26 March 2012 -- Before she created the original, legendary Playboy Bunny outfit and stage costumes for the Dance Theater of Harlem, Zelda Barbour Wynn Valdes reinvented us. Her unapologetically sexy, hip-hugging gowns were worn by celebrities and celebrity wives like Dorothy Dandridge, Josephine Baker, Ella Fitzgerald, Joyce Bryant, Maria (Mrs. Nat “King”) Cole, Edna (Mrs. Sugar Ray) Robinson and later superstars like Gladys Knight and opera diva Jessye Norman. She also designed dresses for legendary figures like Marlene Dietrich and Mae West.

In 1948, Ms. Wynn would open her own boutique in Manhattan in what is now Washington Heights on Broadway and West 158th Street. She would later move ‘Chez Zelda’ midtown to 57th street and her sister, Mary Barbour, assisted her and supervised the staff of the store that attracted celebrities and stylish women from all walks of life.

In 1949, the Pennsylvania-born designer who would later be known simply as Zelda Wynn, was president of the New York chapter of NAFAD, the National Association of Fashion and Accessory Designers, an organization of Black designers that was founded by none other than educator Mary McLeod Bethune. In the early 1950s, singer Joyce Bryant, was a huge star in the Black community who also had enough mainstream success to do a photo spread in LIFE magazine and be dubbed “the Black Marilyn Monroe” with constant mentions in Walter Winchell’s gossip column. Despite her undeniable soprano and four octave range, she was best known for her sexy image, which was jumpstarted by Ms. Wynn. In 1953, Our World, a premiere magazine for African-Americans at the time, noted that “Zelda’s gowns changed torch singer, Joyce Bryant’s career. When Zelda met Joyce, she was wearing bouffant, ‘sweet’ dresses and was singing ‘sweet’ songs which, as the designer noted she preferred because she was religious. However, Ms. Wynn convinced the singer that she was hiding her curves wasn’t doing her any favors. Once Ms. Bryant adapted the skin-tight, low-cut gowns by Zelda Wynn Valdes, her career took off.

In 1970, Arthur Mitchell asked Ms. Wynn to design costumes for his year-old dance company, and she stayed for thirty years and became the company’s matriarch until her death in 2001 at the age of 96.

"I just had a God-given talent for making people beautiful," she said in a 1994 interview and, she was being modest. Consider the story that she always told about Ella Fitzgerald: "Edna Robinson (Sugar Ray Robinson’s wife) recommended me to Ms. Fitzgerald when she was going to sing at the Apollo Theater in New York,” said Ms. Wynn. “I was able to measure her once, but thereafter she was so busy that she didn't have the time. She would order - always in a rush - and I would study photos of her and guess her increasing size. She always said they fit and she'd order more, always three at a time. I never had more than three to four days to finish the gowns. I am pleased to say that I never missed a delivery.” [source: Ebony Magazine: Nichelle Gainer is a beauty, fashion and lifestyle writer whose work has appeared in magazines and websites including GQ, InStyle, Glamour, Newsweek.com and Essence.com.]

Egalite for All: Toussaint L'ouverture and the Haitian Revolution

2013-04-18T18:26:00.002-07:00

From PBS; Douglas A. Egerton, Professor of History, Le Moyne College -- All of the American newspapers covered events in Saint Domingue, in a great deal of detail. All Americans understood what was happening there. It wasn't that the revolution in Saint Domingue taught mainland slaves to be rebellious or to resist their bondage. They had always done so, typically as individuals who stole themselves and ran away sometimes in small groups who tried to get to the frontier and build maroon colonies and rebuild African societies.

But the revolutionaries in Saint Domingue, led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, were not trying to pull down the power of their absentee masters, but join those masters on an equal footing in the Atlantic world. And the revolt in Haiti reminded American slaves, who were still enthusiastic about the promise of 1776, that not only could liberty be theirs if they were brave enough to try for it, but that equality with the master class might be theirs if they were brave enough to try. For black Americans, this was a terribly exciting moment, a moment of great inspiration. And for the southern planter class, it was a moment of enormous terror.

The planter class was scared of [L'Ouverture], but had no doubts that he knew exactly how to get what he wanted. His name, L'Ouverture, is a name that his soldiers applied to him. It meant this was a man who always found his opening. In the southern white mind, Toussaint L'Ouverture was a terrifying but very competent figure. He was often depicted in southern newspapers as sort of a black Napoleon, somebody who could always find his opening, somebody who would always be successful in battle. There was no doubt in the white mind that they were dealing with a very fierce and very dangerous foe.

Although it's quite clear that Toussaint was deeply inspired by events both in France and the United States, and some of his chief lieutenants had in fact been on the American mainland with the French army during the American Revolution, Jefferson was always the first to deny any sort of revolutionary heritage to people other than whites of European descent.

Jefferson was terrified of what was happening in Saint Domingue. He referred to Toussaint's army as cannibals. His fear was that black Americans, like Gabriel, would be inspired by what they saw taking place just off the shore of America. And he spent virtually his entire career trying to shut down any contact, and therefore any movement of information, between the American mainland and the Caribbean island.

He called upon Congress to abolish trade between the United States and what after 1804 was the independent country of Haiti. He argued that France believed it still owned the island. In short, he denied that Haitian revolutionaries had the same right to independence and autonomy that he claimed for American patriots. And consequently, in 1805 and finally in 1806, trade was formally shut down between the United States and Haiti, which decimated the already very weak Haitian economy. And of course, Jefferson then argued this was an example of what happens when Africans are allowed to govern themselves: economic devastation, caused in large part by his own economic policies. [source: PBS; Douglas A. Egerton, Professor of History, Le Moyne College]

Egalite for All. Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution (PBS)

West Virginia's Antebellum Slave Economy

2013-04-18T12:39:00.001-07:00

As reported in the West Virginia Gazette, "W.Va. historian to talk on pre-Civil War slave economy," by Douglas Imbrogno, on 9 April 2013 -- CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Ending slavery was a moral question that haunted early American history, but it was one inextricably tangled up in economics.

While West Virginia was a state born in 1863 out of the tumult over slavery and the political disputes that erupted in the Civil War, slavery long had a toehold in the Kanawha Valley. Consider the salt mining industry in this area, a slave-powered enterprise from the 1820s onward, said Greg Carroll.

"Here in the Kanawha Valley, we had upwards of 2,000 slaves working in the salt industry," said Carroll, a retired historian with the state's Archives and History Section.

Yet slaves were not just a subjugated labor force, but a commodity often even more valuable to their owners as property chips to be sold into other slave economies.

"Here in West Virginia, for instance, before the Civil War, you can see in the state archives newspapers advertising slaves to be sold down the river. These slaves were being sold into the cotton and sugar-producing areas of mainly Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas," Carroll said.

Before he retired last October, Carroll was a Culture and History staff historian for 23 years, mostly focusing on American Indians, black Americans and Civil War history. He'll combine a couple of those specialties in the free talk "Slavery in Virginia: 1619-1860," at 6 p.m. Thursday in the Archives and History Library in the Culture Center.

He'll describe the different slave economies across North and South America and the missed opportunities for ending slavery in the lead-up to the Civil War.

Consider, for instance, the slaves who worked Caribbean sugar plantations or in the rice fields of the Carolinas. Yellow fever, malaria and other hazards kept slave owners away from their plantations, Carroll said.

Yet in the tobacco plantations and farms of Virginia and farther south, slave owners lived closely with their slaves -- sometimes very closely.

"That also led to a paternalism that we see in the way Virginia slave owners referred to their slaves as 'their people.' Slaves became very valuable as the tobacco crop became valuable," he said.

The result was a stronger slave and family culture, one that was not as Afrocentric as Caribbean and South American slave societies with their constant infusions of new slaves, Carroll said. Yet the proximity of owner to slave had other implications.

"White slave owners took sexual advantage of their female slaves," Carroll said. "That produced a very mixed-race people that we see in the Virginia and North Carolina and Maryland slave cultures -- a lot of mixed-race people."

For a country whose founding documents included a Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence, the conundrum of slavery constantly intruded into American politics. The problem was that the South had staked all its political and economic bets on slaves, Carroll said.

"Think about how contradictory it is to have people talking about how all men are created equal and yet the southern colonies based their whole economic survival on slavery."

Yet the rise of a worldwide market for American cotton ensured that slavery was to become ever more a crutch upon which Southern power and wealth rested. It might have been different had the American South followed the lead of the rest of the world toward free labor, Carroll said.

"By 1860, almost the entire world was using free labor and the Southern states found themselves to be the only remaining slave societies, except for Brazil."

Objections to slavery took overt and covert forms. The most covert was the Underground Railroad, a blanket term for the secret trails and human networks for ferreting slaves to freedom out of slave states. The effort took place over a broad region, including the area that would become West Virginia.

"Unfortunately, the history of the Underground Railroad is very difficult to define because the secret operations of the Underground Railroad were kept secret then, before the war and after the war. Because people did not wish to have their history known for fear of continued reprisals from the white culture."

Carroll said he hopes his talk will attract white and black audiences both, as he strives to serve a more complete picture of America's slave era than normally taught in schoolbooks.

"I hope that African-American people can get a chance to come and hear this speech. Black citizens of our state need to harness their own history more. They need to realize that at the state archives and in various state agencies there's a lot of family history and a lot of African-American cultural history there at their fingertips." (source: the West Virginia Gazette)

Haiti and The White Curse by Eduardo Galeano

2013-04-17T20:58:00.001-07:00

The Progressive magazine, June 2004, "The White Curse [Haiti]" by Eduardo Galeano -- On the first day of his year, freedom in this world turned 200. But no one noticed, or almost no one. A few days later, the country where this birth occurred, Haiti, found itself in the media spotlight, not for the anniversary of universal freedom but for the ouster of President Aristide.

Haiti was the first country to abolish slavery. However, the most widely read encyclopedias and almost all educational textbooks attribute this honorable deed to England. It is true that one fine day the empire that had been the champion in the slave trade changed its mind about it. But abolition in Britain took place in 1807, three years after the Haitian revolution, and it was so unconvincing that in 1832 Britain had to ban slavery again.

There is nothing new about this slight of Haiti. For two centuries it has suffered scorn and punishment. Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner and champion of liberty at the same time, warned that Haiti had created a bad example and argued it was necessary to "confine the plague to the island." His country heeded him. It was sixty years before the U.S. granted diplomatic recognition to this freest of nations. Meanwhile in Brazil disorder and violence came to be called "Haitianism." Slave owners there were saved from this fury until 1888 when Brazil abolished slavery-the last country in the world to do so.

And Haiti went back to being an invisible nation-until the next bloodbath. During its brief sojourn on TV screens and front pages earlier this year, the media showed confusion and violence and confirmed that Haitians were born to do evil well and do good badly. Since its revolution, Haiti has been capable only of mounting tragedies. Once a happy and prosperous colony, it is now the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.

Revolutions, certain specialists have concluded, lead straight to the abyss; others have suggested, if not stated outright, that the Haitian tendency to fratricide derives from its savage African heredity. The rule of the ancestors. The black curse that engenders crime and chaos.

Of the white curse, nothing was said.

The French revolution had abolished slavery, but Napoleon revived it.

"Which regime was most prosperous for the colonies?"

"The previous one."

"Then reinstate it."

To reinstate slavery in Haiti, France sent more than fifty shiploads of soldiers. The country's blacks rose up and defeated France and won national independence and freedom for the slaves. In 1804, they inherited a land that had been razed to grow sugarcane and a land consumed by the conflagrations of a fierce civil war. And they inherited "the French debt." France made Haiti pay dearly for the humiliation it inflicted on Napoleon Bonaparte. The newly born nation had to commit to pay a gigantic indemnification for the damage it had caused in winning its freedom. This expiation of the sin of freedom would cost Haiti 150 million gold francs.

The new country was born with a rope wrapped tightly around its neck: the equivalent of $21.7 billion in today's dollars, or forty-four times Haiti's current yearly budget.

In exchange for this fortune, France officially recognized the new nation. No other countries did so. Haiti was born condemned to solitude.

Not even Simon Bolivar recognized Haiti, though he owed it everything. In 1816, it was Haiti that furnished Bolivar with boats, arms, and soldiers when he showed up on the island defeated and asking for shelter and help.

Haiti gave him everything with only one condition: that he free the slaves-an idea that had not occurred to him until then. The great man triumphed in his war of independence and showed his gratitude by sending a sword as a gift to Port-au-Prince. Of recognition he made no mention.

In 1915, the Marines landed in Haiti. They stayed nineteen years. The first thing they did was occupy the customs house and . duty collection facilities. The occupying army suspended the salary of the Haitian president until he agreed to sign off on the liquidation of the Bank of the Nation, which became a branch of City Bank of New York. The president and other blacks were barred entry into the private hotels, restaurants, and clubs of the foreign occupying power. The occupiers didn't dare reestablish slavery, but they did impose forced labor for the building of public works. And they killed a lot of people. It wasn't easy to quell the fires of resistance.

The guerrilla chief, Charlemagne Peralte, was exhibited in the public square, crucified on a door to teach the people a lesson.

This civilizing mission ended in 1934. The occupiers withdrew, leaving a National Guard, which they had created, in their place to exterminate any possible trace of democracy. They did the same in the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua. A short time afterwards, Duvalier became the Haitian equivalent of Trujillo and Somoza.

And so, from dictator to dictator, from promise to betrayal, one misfortune followed another.

Aristide, the rebel priest, became president in 1991. He lasted a few months before the U.S. government helped to oust him, brought him to the United States, subjected him to Washington's treatment, and then sent him back a few years later, in the arms of Marines, to resume his post. Then once again, in 2004, the U.S. helped to remove him from power, and yet again there was killing. And yet again the Marines came back, as they always seem to, like the flu.

But the international experts are far more destructive than invading troops. Placed under strict orders from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, Haiti obeyed every instruction, without cheating. The government paid what it was told to even if it meant there would be neither bread nor salt. Its credit was frozen despite the fact that the state had been dismantled and the subsidies and tariffs that had protected national production had been eliminated. Rice farmers, once the majority, soon became beggars or boat people. Many have ended in the depths of the Caribbean, and more are following them to the bottom, only these shipwreck victims aren't Cuban so their plight never makes the papers.

Today Haiti imports its rice from the United States, where international experts, who are rather distracted people, forgot to prohibit tariffs and subsidies to protect national production.

On the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, there is a large sign that reads: Road to Ruin.

Down that road, everyone is a sculptor. Haitians have the habit of collecting tin cans and scrap metal that they cut and shape and hammer with old-world mastery, creating marvels that are sold in the street markets.

Haiti is a country that has been thrown away, as an eternal punishment of its dignity. There it lies, like scrap metal. It awaits the hands of its people. [source: The Third World Traveler; Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan journalist, is the author of "The Open Veins of Latin America," "Memory of Fire," and "Soccer in Sun and Shadow. " This article is published with permission of IPS Columnist Service.]

Bolivar: American Liberator

2013-04-17T19:17:00.000-07:00

As reviewed in the Washington Post Book review: "‘Bolivar: American Liberator’ by Marie Arana," By Joseph J. Ellis, on 5 April 2013 -- In the elegiac correspondence of their twilight years, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson liked to debate the legacy of the American Revolution they had fought and wrought. Jefferson, anticipating Alexis de Tocqueville, claimed that the core legacy was democracy, which he regarded as a universal principle destined to spread throughout the world.

Adams preferred to call the legacy republicanism, and he did not believe that it was easily transportable. As an example, he cited Latin America, which was burdened with three centuries of Spanish oppression that left no residue of representative government; a toxic mixture of races — European, Creole, African, Indian; and the entrenched hierarchical values of the Catholic Church.

The career of Simon Bolivar suggests that Jefferson and Adams were at least partly correct. With a combination of Jeffersonian felicity and Napoleonic audacity, Bolivar was almost single-handedly responsible for ending the Spanish Empire in South America. Six new nations — Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Bolivia and Peru — owe their existence to Bolivar the Liberator, who also did more to end slavery than any North American founder.

But his vision for what he called New Columbia was hijacked by an endless parade of dictators, warlords and petty tyrants, all products of the hostile conditions that Adams had so accurately described. The arc of Bolivar’s life, then, is truly Shakespearean, from its glorious ascent to its tragic end, when he was reviled and slandered in every republic he had liberated. Unlike Adams and Jefferson, who could look back on their achievement with patriarchal serenity, Bolivar warned his followers that “eventually you’ll find that life is impossible here, with so many sons of bitches.”

The Library of Congress houses more than 2,500 books and manuscripts about Bolivar, but almost all of them, for obvious reasons, are in Spanish. Although the legend of Bolivar has been appropriated by Latin American leaders of every political persuasion, the latest having been Hugo Chavez, and a nation has been named after him, in the United States his reputation is vague, almost invisible.

Most North American historians, including me, have mentioned him only in passing, usually making “the George Washington of Latin America” reference, as though his life merits attention only when viewed through a North American prism. The hemispheric condescension inherent in that conception obviously needed correction in the form of a comprehensive biography that makes Bolivar’s life accessible to a large readership in the United States. “Bolivar” is unquestionably that book.

At least in retrospect, Marie Arana was providentially prepared to write “Bolivar.” Of Peruvian ancestry, Arana has written a critically acclaimed memoir and two well-reviewed novels. She is also a former editor of The Washington Post’s Book World. As befits its subject, “Bolivar” is magisterial in scope, written with flair and an almost cinematic sense of history happening. Here are three samples of her narrative style:

“For all his physical slightness — five foot six inches and a scant 130 pounds — there was an undeniable intensity to the man. His eyes were a piercing black, his gaze unrelenting. His forehead was deeply lined, his cheekbones high, his teeth even and white, his smile surprising and radiant. Official portraits relay a less than imposing man: the meager chest, the impossibly thin legs, the hands as small and beautiful as a woman’s. But when Bolivar entered a room, his power was palpable.”

Second, her account of his periodic brutality: “Bolivar could not afford to lose . . . the capital; worse he had no troops to spare. He responded swiftly and decisively. . . . His words were simple and to the point. ‘Without delay and without exception, you will put to the sword every Spaniard in dungeon or hospital. . . .’ With no questions asked and no due process of law, [the commandant] and his minions marched more than one thousand Spanish prisoners out into the sunlight and, over the course of four days, beheaded them all.”

“Bolivar: American Liberator” by Marie Arana.

Third, on the recovery of his reputation in the century after his death: “Leaders who followed seemed wanting in comparison, dwarfed by the shadow of a colossus. . . . In marble or bronze, Bolivar’s flesh took on a serenity it never had in life. The restless, fevered Liberator was now the benevolent father, devoted teacher, good shepherd striving to build a better flock. Astride a horse, galloping into an eternal void, the enduring image was complete: Here was a vigorous life, lived in a single trajectory, aiming to form a people, a continent.”

We might call Arana’s style Bolivarian — colorful, passionate, daring, verging on novelistic. This latter quality sometimes gives me pause, as this is Arana’s first venture into biography, and it seemed as though she was sometimes straddling the divide between fiction and nonfiction in a worrisome way. How can she know the color of the sky the morning Bolivar crossed the crest of the Andes, or the way he curled his lip during a particular argument? Well, there are nearly 100 pages of endnotes for anyone who wants to check her documentation. Latin American specialists with a vested interest in fixing Bolivar’s place in the region’s history will surely do the fact checking. As for me, I’m prepared to give Arana the benefit of the doubt, mostly because doing so allows me to levitate above the inevitable scholarly squabbles and relish the ride provided by a truly masterful storyteller.

The traditional comparison between Bolivar and Washington strikes me as misguided, and as a biographer of Washington, I can claim competence in a way I can’t on the Latin American sources. They were totally different personalities facing fundamentally different challenges. But as a military leader, Bolivar wins the competition hands down.

He remained on horseback in combat against the Spanish army three times longer than Washington against the British. (His troops called Bolivar “Iron Ass.”) His theater of operations was seven times the size of Washington’s and infinitely more lethal, filled with malaria-infested jungles, rivers loaded with snakes and crocodiles, and the highest mountain range in the hemisphere. If Washington can justifiably be remembered for staying the course against the British leviathan, Bolivar’s perseverance defies rational calculation. And his battlefield decisions often displayed the kind of intuitive genius more associated with Napoleon than with Washington.

“Bolivar” is a monumental achievement destined to win some major literary prizes. Like most recent books on the North American founders, it assumes that all icons are also flawed creatures. All of Bolivar’s flaws are on display here — his inveterate womanizing, periodic bouts of arrogance, flirtation with Napoleonic versions of omnipotence. But if Jefferson is eventually proved right, and democracy does come to Latin America in full form, the man so brilliantly recovered in these pages will be shouting hosannas from the heavens. (source: Washington Post Book review: Joseph J. Ellis is a lecturer in history at the Commonwealth Honors College, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His new book, “Revolutionary Summer,” is due out in June.)

Convicts Sent to Work on Plantations

2013-04-16T21:53:00.002-07:00

Convicts Sent to Work on Plantations

In December of 1900, the Board of Control of the Louisiana State Penitentiary held a meeting in which they decided to set aside two immense plantations in West Feliciana and Iberia Parish for convicts to work. Cotton would be grown on the West Feliciana plantation, while sugar would be grown on the one in Iberia Parish. Approximately five hundred workers were expected to work on these plantations, which is roughly half of the amount of convicts in the state. All of the crops produced from these plantations would end up going to the state, helping to pay for road construction and the like. The program was expected to enact extensive prison reforms after the convict lease system had been abolished.

Convicts working on plantations in Louisiana were characteristic of a productive penalty system that had been taking place in the South for the past 40 years. After the emancipation of slaves in the thirteenth amendment in 1863, farmers, businessmen, and anybody who had used slave labor in their homes needed to find other people to take their place and keep their lives in order. At the same time, many state penitentiaries realized that they could use their prisoners, who were generally black males, to their benefit - having them work for the state. The Convict Lease System, which was put into place throughout the South quickly after slavery had been abolished, was a method of aiding previous slave owners in maintaining their pre-abolition lifestyle and helping the state pay off the cost of prison administration. Farmers and businessmen needed to find replacements for their lacking labor force and convicts were the perfect solution. People using convict labor would then pay the state for their work. This example of convict leasing is especially unique because the state set aside plantations of its own for the prisoners to work, as opposed to leasing them out to private owners. The convict leasing system proved to be very profitable for the government and any business owners who utilized it. Revenues from the program contributed to over 300% of the costs of prison administration. Not only would convicts work on plantations, they would also repair roads, maintain farms, and do other work similar to that of a slave's. However, states slowly phased out of this method of penalty. The system was frequently abused because the convicts, who were mostly African American and male, were readily available and treated inhumanely, similar to the way slaves had been treated before emancipation. Southern states slowly phased out of using this system and it was finally dismantled in 1928.

[http://historyengine.richmond.edu/episodes/view/3634]

Britain's Massive Debt to Slavery

2013-04-16T17:13:00.003-07:00

As reported in the UK Guardian, "Britain's massive debt to slavery: Today the records that detail just how much the trade in humans benefited the UK will be made public, by Catherine Hall, on 26 February 2013 -- Forgetting the violence, pain and shame that is an inevitable part of any country's historical record is a critical aspect of a nation's history. This disavowal of the past is an active process: forgetting Mau Mau, for example, and the brutality of the British response to it was done deliberately by occluding the archival record; it was only revealed by the patient work of determined survivors and dedicated historians.

Forgetting Britain's role in the slave trade began as soon as the trade was abolished in 1807. The abolitionist Thomas Clarkson's celebrated history of the campaign to end slavery focused on the work of white humanitarian men and their role in building a successful movement. He neglected not only the activism of black and female abolitionists but also the horrors of the trade itself, which he knew intimately.

A similar process took place in relation to emancipation in 1833. As soon as chattel slavery was abolished in the British West Indies, Mauritius and the Cape, the British began to congratulate themselves on their generosity. Abolition was redefined as a demonstration of Britain's commitment to liberty and freedom, and its claim to be the most progressive and civilised nation in the world.

In the language of the day, abolition was to wash away the sins of the nation. Yet the freedom that was granted by the imperial parliament to enslaved men and women was a relative one. They were to be "apprenticed" for four to six years – to work unpaid on the plantations for their former masters – while they "learned to labour". It took five more years of resistance in the Caribbean and campaigning "at home" to achieve "full freedom" in 1838.

What is more, £20m (equivalent to 40% of state expenditure in 1834) was paid in compensation by the British government to the slave owners to secure their agreement to the loss of "their" property – despite the fact that the moral basis of the campaign against slavery was that it was wrong to hold property in people. The "value" of the enslaved was judged according to the levels of their skill and the productivity of the colonies where they lived. An enslaved man in British Guiana was thus worth more than one in Jamaica, where productivity had declined; and men were worth more than women. This was yet another moment in the commodification of human beings – not now sold in the slave market but their price determined by colonial officials and settled in government offices.

Detailed records were kept of all those who claimed for compensation and those archives, never systematically studied before, throw new light on how the slavery business contributed in significant ways to Britain becoming the first industrial nation. Today, the encyclopedia that we have created using these archives goes online with free public access. It records the 46,000 individual claims which were made for compensation together with the information we have collected on the 3,000 or so Britons who lived in Britain but had property in people. These men and women (and there were a considerable number of women who lived off slave-ownership) were anxious that their identities as slave owners be forgotten. And until now they had been very successful.

Some of the direct descendants of slave owners are well-known: George Orwell, Graham Greene and Quintin Hogg – not to speak of the banks and legal firms built on slavery's profits. In focusing on slave owners, our purpose is not to name and shame. We seek to undo the forgetting: to re-remember, as Toni Morrison put it; to recognise the ways in which the fruits of slavery are part of our collective history – embedded in our country and town houses, the philanthropic institutions, the art collections, the merchant banks and legal firms, the railways, and the ways we continue to think about race. Slave owners were actively involved in reconfiguring race after slavery, popularising new legitimations for inequality that remain part of the legacy of Britain's colonial past. Captain Marryat, the son of a leading slave owner, and one of the most popular writers of naval fiction and children's stories, systematically racialised "others", creating hierarchies in which white Anglo Saxons were always at the top.

Across the Caribbean a movement is building for forms of restitution for the gross inequalities and underdevelopment that have persisted since the days of slavery. Their focus is on the state and governmental responsibility. In demonstrating Britain's debt to slavery, one of the ways in which modern Britain has benefited from and been disfigured by its colonial past, we hope we are contributing to a richer, more honest understanding of the connected histories of empire than is to be found in the parochialism and obsfuscations of Michael Gove's "island story". (source: UK Guardian)

Medieval Manors vs. Colonial Plantations

2013-04-15T20:48:00.001-07:00

Medieval Manors vs. Colonial Plantations

When we think of the Middle Ages, images of knights and lords and ladies (who did not wear pointy hats!) come to mind. Theirs was a feudal social system, meaning that a sort of contractual arrangement existed between the lords and the peasants. The peasants toiled and farmed the land and did all the artisanal crafts. In return for a percentage of their product (or, later, cash payments), the lords promised protection to the peasants in times of strife. In addition, the peasants owed a fixed amount of days per month and per year to the lord to plant, tend, and harvest his crops, repair his fences, and generally keep his estate in order. Finally, the peasants at least nominally owed military duty if the lord should call them to arms to defend their homes or, less popularly, to go invade someone else’s lands. Completing this social system was the Church, which also demanded a tithe (or “tenth” of the peasant’s crops or profit) for spiritual protection. This system endured for a millennium, from the fall of the Roman Empire into the early modern period.

So what happened when the colonists arrived in America? First, and foremost, there were no kings or earls or lords nearby, even if they technically could still demand a percentage of the colonists’ profits. Even in places like the Middle Atlantic colonies of Maryland and Virginia, which were set up as giant feudal estates, the living was at first so marginal and the landowners typically absentee, enforcing feudal-style rents was largely either impossible or moot. But more importantly, many of the early colonial ventures, like the Jamestown settlement and the Plymouth Bay colony, were not extensions of lordly control, but rather joint stock companies or "adventurers" already outside feudal control. In addition, although the colonists brought their religion with them as a cornerstone of their voyage (whether Puritans escaping religious prosecution or devout Anglicans merely settling the land), they did not bring with them the whole Church hierarchy of bishops, archbishops, or, in the case of Catholics in New France, the Pope. Consequently, in the Americas where colonists spoke English, French, German, or Dutch, the institutions of the feudal system never took root.

And yet the medieval manor and colonial plantation shared a great deal in common. Some of America's most beloved sites, such as Monticello and Mount Vernon, functioned essentially as had their medieval manorial antecedents for hundred of years. In fact, the American plantations were actually more medieval than their contemporary farms back in Europe because of their isolation. One of the reasons for the rise of the manorial system in medieval Europe was wealthy landowners and merchants leaving the decaying cities of post-Roman Europe for the relative safety of their latifundia (the Latin term for "spacious estate"). Thus, one of the key features of medieval manors was their relative self-sufficiency. By the seventeenth century in Europe, however, most manors were tightly interwoven in a web of commerce and trade. But, the colonial plantation did not have this network and in a sense reverted to its medieval predecessor's style of self-sufficiency (although there was certainly plenty of trade and commerce going on).

What, then, became of the lords of the manor? They did not go away – the landowners and industrialists became the lords. Many agricultural landowners had hundreds if not thousands of acres and worked them with a combination of hired hands, indentured servants, and slaves. Even industrial iron plantations smelting iron replicated the medieval manor. For example, in the late 1750s, the Pennsylvania iron industry was booming, and (along with the colony’s policy of religious toleration) it attracted a wide range of investors and ironmasters, especially and not surprisingly, from Germany. William Henry Seigel formed a partnership with other Philadelphia and Lancaster Co. businessmen, bought numerous furnaces and expanded them into a county-wide iron empire. Seigel himself lived like a baron in a sumptuously furnished mansion in Manheim, PA. The only real difference is that by this time everything was operating on a cash economy, rather than the labor or in-kind payments typical of feudalism. Jefferson and Washington, too, were in fact very much like medieval lords. They owned the land. They owned the laborers (medieval serfdom, a sort of virtual slavery, was of course replaced by outright slavery in the New World). They were the men in control of most commerce and primary production. They were the men in charge of government. And they were the ones who wrote the laws.

So when we think of Thomas Jefferson penning the Declaration of Independence, he was indeed charting out the course of a new nation, but he was also fulfilling the role his forbears had filled for centuries before him. It is no mistake that there is a strong parallel between the Magna Carta, the basic charter of liberties for England forced upon King John in 1215, and the Declaration of Independence as well as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights "forced" upon King George III in 1776-83. (source: http://www.engr.psu.edu/mtah/essays/mannors_plantations.htm)

The Confederacy's Salt Famine: by Andrew F. Smith

2013-04-15T20:23:00.000-07:00

The Salt Famine

A book excerpt from the Denver Post, "Starving the South: How the North Won the Civil War" by Andrew F. Smith, posted on 5 June 2011 -- Prior to the Civil War, Southerners used an estimated 450 million pounds of salt annually. Very little salt was produced in the antebellum South; most of it came from Wales on ships, which carried salt as ballast when they sailed to Southern ports to pick up cotton. In the nineteenth century, salt was used for commercial purposes, such as tanning leather for use in making harnesses and shoes. Salt’s most important use, however, was as a preservative. In an age without refrigeration, virtually all pork and beef that was not cooked and served immediately after slaughter was preserved in brine. Salt was used to preserve fish, and other foods, such as butter, had to be salted. Salt was also used in cooking and was added as a condiment at the table. At the time, Americans consumed more salt than any other nation in the world, and more salt was used in the South than in any other region of the United States.

Once the blockade was declared, ships no longer brought salt into Southern ports. New Orleans had large stockpiles of salt, but this accumulation had shrunk to nothing by the fall of 1861. The price for salt surged so high that many farmers who raised hogs were unable to preserve them because they had no salt. One farmer wrote to the governor of Mississippi: “With a great many now, the deepest anxiety prevails to keep our families from suffering for want of salted provisions. Meat is now ready to be slaughtered.”

The shortage of imported salt was only one reason for its rising price; another cause was speculation. An editor of a Mississippi newspaper reported in November 1861 that “all the salt in New Orleans and elsewhere is now in the hands of speculators.… Something must be done in the matter, and be done quickly. We are willing that speculators should reap a rich profit, but we are not willing for them to suck the very life blood out of the people, if we can avoid it.”

The salt famine became severe in 1862. In March of that year an Alabama official reported that speculators were using “every artifice and fraud” to acquire salt. In May 1862 the editor of Atlanta’s Southern Confederacy announced that “we will be in a dreadful condition unless we get salt.” In December twenty women from Greenville, Alabama, became fed up with the salt famine. They marched on the local railroad station shouting “Salt or Blood,” and forced an agent to give up the contents of a large sack of salt.

Facing severe shortages, Southern leaders encouraged domestic salt production. States offered rewards for locating salt deposits and bonuses for its production. Southerners began to manufacture salt from salt lakes, saline artesian wells, and seawater. While such domestic production helped families and small farmers, these sources did not produce enough salt to meet the military and civilian needs of the Confederacy. Only five areas in the South had sufficient concentrations of salt to produce the large quantities needed to replace imported salt. These were the Great Kanawha River, near Charleston, then in Virginia; Goose Creek near Manchester, Kentucky; the salt wells in Clarke, Washington, and Mobile counties in Alabama; the saline wells near New Iberia in northern Louisiana; and the great saline artesian wells in the extreme southwest corner of Virginia, near Saltville. In addition, large-scale operations to convert ocean water to salt emerged in Florida. These operations produced enough salt for military, industrial, and civilian needs, but it was difficult to transport due to the lack of railroads in Florida.

When the price of salt skyrocketed in early 1862, Daniel D. Avery and his son-in-law, Edmund McIlhenny, began working the salt springs on Avery Island, not far from New Iberia, about 140 miles west of New Orleans. By accident, Avery discovered a source of dry, pure rock salt a mere fifteen to twenty feet below the surface. Avery and McIlhenny began to quarry this salt in May 1862. A Confederate agent sent out to evaluate the site claimed that the mine could supply “the Confederacy if properly managed.” As the Union forces controlled New Orleans, salt from Avery’s Island had to be shipped by a circuitous route overland to the Red River, and to the Mississippi, where it could then be distributed throughout the eastern Confederacy.

Union forces were well aware of the importance of salt to the Confederacy, and they targeted salt production facilities. The salt manufacturing areas around Kanawha Valley in Virginia and Goose Creek in Kentucky were taken or destroyed by the North early in the war. In Louisiana, Union forces seized New Iberia and took control of Avery Island in 1863. Saltville, Virginia, was regularly targeted, but it wasn’t finally captured until December 1864. Meanwhile, the Union navy conducted continuous amphibious efforts to disrupt salt manufacturing in North Carolina and repeatedly assaulted saltworks and plantations along Florida’s Gulf Coast. Many plantation owners took their slaves inland, where, often, both master and slave became subsistence farmers.

Another solution to the salt famine was for Southerners to curtail their use of salt. Those living near the coast cooked rice, grits, and hominy in seawater. Civilians were encouraged to eat tinned corned beef, which didn’t need salt added at the table. Southern newspapers, journals, and books published dozens of recipes made with little salt. Salt conservation and even salt recycling became common practices. Southerners collected and reused loose salt grains from cured meat. Troughs and barrels used for brining meat were dried and the salt recaptured for future use. The floorboards in salt houses were ripped out and soaked in water, which was then boiled down to produce a little salt. People even dug up the soil under old smokehouses and recovered salt, which was fed to cattle and horses. In addition to conservation and recycling efforts, Southerners experimented with numerous methods for curing meat with little or no salt, but the meat often spoiled. Experimenters also produced a substance that tasted somewhat like salt, according to Varina Davis, the wife of Jefferson Davis; however, this had no preservative property.

Without salt, Southerners frequently went without meat, and as time went on, things only got worse. After the occupation of Avery Island and New Iberia by Union forces in 1863, a resident of the area told the Confederate Congress that those living in “Louisiana lying east of the Mississippi River are starving for the want of salt and salt meat.” Southern governors spoke of “salt famines” and established programs for citizens to buy salt cheaply, yet the price continued to rise.27 Despite these efforts, the salt famine meant shortages of pork that would previously have been preserved. The beef supply also dwindled because salt was essential to the diet of cattle, and without it, the animals did not fatten up. Likewise, cavalry and artillery horses sickened from the absence of salt (a necessary electrolyte for animals kept hard at work) in their diet. By the end of the war, Confederate leaders were offering exorbitant fees for blockaders to bring in salt and salted meat. Had the South just figured out a better way to tap the natural salt deposits that they had, imports would have been unnecessary. Then there was the transportation problem. (source: The Denver Post -- A book excerpt from the Denver Post, "Starving the South: How the North Won the Civil War" by Andrew F. Smith, posted on 5 June 2011)